|
|
Blog Feeds
Anti-Empire
The SakerA bird's eye view of the vineyard
Public InquiryInterested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
Human Rights in IrelandPromoting Human Rights in Ireland |
Who are the Palestinian People? national |
miscellaneous |
news report
 Sunday January 12, 2003 04:07 by Paula Davidson - A zionist, racist, colonist sympathiser
 Palestinians doubt Blair can deliver," announces the BBC. "Four Palestinians die in West Bank," reports CNN. "Many Palestinian families divided," says NBC. The modern media is filled with stories about the Palestinians, their plight, their dilemmas and their struggles. All aspects of their lives seem to have been put under the microscope. Only one question never seems to be addressed: Who are the Palestinians? Who are these people who claim the Holy Land as their own? What is their history? Where did they come from? And how did they arrive at the country they call Palestine? Now that both U.S. President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (in direct opposition to the platform he was elected on) have come out in favor of a Palestinian state, it would be prudent to seek answers to these questions. After all, for all we know, Palestine could be as real as Disneyland. The general impression given in the media is that Palestinians have lived in the Holy Land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But curiously, when it comes to giving the history of this "ancient" people most news outlets find it harder to go back more than the early nineteen hundreds. CNN, a news outlet which has devoted countless hours of airtime to the "plight" of the Palestinians, has a website which features a special section on the Middle East conflict called "Struggle For Peace". In it, is included a promising sounding section entitled "Lands Through The Ages" which assures us it will detail the history of the region using maps. But strangely, it turns out, the maps displayed start no earlier than the ancient date of 1917. The CBS News website has a background section called 'A Struggle For Middle East Peace.'' Its history timeline starts no earlier than 1897. The NBC News background section called ''Searching for Peace'' has a timeline which starts in 1916. BBC's timeline starts in 1948. But the clincher must certainly be the Palestinian National Authority's own website. While it is top heavy on such phrases as "Israeli occupation" and "Israeli human rights violations" the site offers practically nothing on the history of the so-called Palestinian people. The only article on the site with any historical content is called "Palestinian History - 20th Century Milestones" which seems only to confirm that prior to 1900 there was no such concept as a Palestinian people. While the modern media maybe short on information about the history of the "Palestinian people" the historical record is not. Books, such as "Battleground" by Samuel Katz and "From Time Immemorial by" Joan Peters long ago detailed the history of the region. Far from being settled by Palestinians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the Land of Israel, according to dozens of visitors to the land, was, until the beginning of the last century, practically empty. Alphonse de Lamartine visited the land in 1835. In his book, "Recollections of the East," he writes "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw no living object, heard no living sound…." None other than the famous American author Mark Twain, who visited the Land of Israel in 1867, confirms this. In his book "The Innocents Abroad" he writes, "A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely…. We never saw a human being on the whole journey." Even the British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857, "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population…" In fact, according to official Ottoman Turk census figures, in 1882, in the entire Land of Israel, there were only 141 000 Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab. This number was to skyrocket to 650 000 Arabs by 1922, a 450% increase in only 40 years. By 1938 that number would become over 1 million or an 800% increase in only 56 years. Population growth was especially high in areas where Jews lived. Where did all these Arabs come from? According to the Arabs the huge increase in their numbers was due to natural childbirth. In 1944, for example, they alleged that the natural increase (births minus deaths) of Arabs in the Land of Israel was the astounding figure of 334 per 1000. That would make it roughly three times the corresponding rate for the same year of Lebanon and Syria and almost four times that of Egypt, considered amongst the highest in the world. Unlikely, to say the least. But if the massive increase was not due to natural births, then were did all these Arabs come from? All the evidence points to the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In 1922 the British Governor of the Sinai noted that "illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria." In 1930 the British Mandate sponsored Hope-Simpson Report noted that "unemployment lists are being swollen by immigrants from Trans-Jordania" and "illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material". Indeed the Arabs themselves bare witness to this trend. For example, the governor of the Syrian district of Hauran, Tewfik Bey el Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period of only a few months over 30 000 Syrians from Hauran had moved to the Land of Israel. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted the Arab influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British mandate in the Land of Israel, noted in 1939 that "far from being persecuted the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied." Far from displacing the Arabs, as they claimed, the Jews were the very reason the Arabs chose to settle in the Land of Israel. Jobs provided by newly established Zionist industry and agriculture lured them there just as Israeli construction and industry provides most Land of Israel Arabs with their main source of income today. Malcolm MacDonald, one of the principal authors of the British White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel admitted (conservatively) that were it not for a Jewish presence the Arab population would have been little more than half of what it actually was. Today, when due to the latest "Intifada", Arabs from the territories under 35 are no longer allowed into pre-1967 Israel to work, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 40% and most rely on European aid packages to survive. But not only pre-state Arabs lied about being indigenous. Even today, many prominent so-called Palestinians, it turns out, are foreign born. Edward Said, an Ivy League Professor of Literature and a major Palestinian propagandist, long claimed to have been raised in Jerusalem. But in an article in the September 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine, Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a fact which Said himself was later forced to admit to. But why bother with Said? PLO chief Yasser Arafat himself, and self-declared "leader of the Palestinian people", has always claimed to have been born and raised in "Palestine". In fact, according to his official biographer Richard Hart as well as the BBC, Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 and that's where he grew up. To maintain the charade of being an indigenous population, Arab propagandists have had to do more than a little rewriting of history. A major part of this rewriting involves the renaming of geography. For two thousand years the central mountainous region of Israel was known as Judea and Samaria, as any medieval map of the area testifies. But ever since Jordan occupied the area in 1948 they renamed it the West Bank. This is a funny name for a region which actually lies in the eastern portion of the land and can only be called "West" in reference to Jordan. This does not seem to bother the majority of news outlets, which cover the region and universally refer to the region by its recent Jordanian name. The term "Palestinian" is itself a masterful twisting of history. To portray themselves as indigenous, Arab settlers adopted the name of an ancient Canaanite tribe, the Philistines, that died out over almost 3000 years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is nil. But who is to know the difference? Given the absence of any historical record, one begins to understand why Yasser Arafat claims that Jesus Christ, a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, was a Palestinian. Every year at Christmas time Arafat goes to Bethlehem and tells worshippers that Jesus was in fact "the first Palestinian." In spite of the historical evidence, the media has succeeded in implanting the idea that there is a people called the Palestinians. No wonder then that a recent poll of French citizens shows that the majority believe (falsely) that prior to the establishment of the State of Israel an independent Arab Palestinian state existed in its place. In fact, no independent Arab state ever existed in the geographic area Arabs call Palestine. Nor was there ever, throughout human history, a country called Palestine. The last independent state to exist in the region, prior to the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, was the ancient Jewish State of Judea 2000 years ago. If the Palestinians are indeed a myth, then the real question becomes "Why?" Why invent an imaginary people? The answer is, the myth of the Palestinian people serves as the justification for the Arab occupation of the Land of Israel. While the Arabs already possess 21 sovereign countries of their own (more than any other people on earth) and control a land mass 800 times the size of the Land of Israel, this is apparently not enough for them. They therefore feel the need to rob the Jews of their one and only country, one of the smallest on the planet. Unfortunately, many people ignorant of the history of the region, including much of the world media, are only too willing to help.
|
printable version
Digg this
del.icio.us
Furl
Reddit
Technorati
Facebook
Gab
Twitter
|
View Comments Titles Only
save preference
Comments (13 of 13)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13Not much to say here.
Just that the Joan Peters book which is the basis for the previous ignorant post has been totally discredited. Professor Norman Finkelstein, among others, has exhaustatively disproved its lies. He also points out that the important thing isn't that someone says such a stupid lie - the Palestinians didn't really exist - but that so many people are ready to believe it.
Little points though.
A. The Zionist settlements excluded Palestinian workers and tried to destroy the native economy, so their presence was hardly an incentive for more arabs to move into the region.
B. 'The land is a desert' argument is a classic colonial statement. Ireland was repeatedly described as a desert by the English colonisers in the 16th and 17th century.
C. The ideological 'These people never really existed' attitude is meant to be mother to the deed. In other words, it's justification for ethnic cleansing.
That's it.
David
a) Early settlements didn't employ Palestinians.
UNFAIR -- because they didn't employ ANYBODY. I am assuming that you must be referring to those settlements that didn't employ Arab labor. But the only ones that didn't were the kibbutzim (communes). They didn't employ ANY outside labor becasue that would have been "exploitation of workers".
b) The word "desert" has changed it's English meaning between the 16th-17th centuries and now. Back then it did NOT mean "a dry uninhabited place" but one which was not intensively built up with farms. Thus the same writers would have described the East Coast of the US (the other colonies). Back then Ireland still had forests with wolves roaming them -- "desert" in the 16th century meaning of the word.
c) By no means justification for ethnic cleansing. However please note that you are seeing a lot of material being presented claiming that all these Palestinians were there "ab iniito" and all these Jews recent immigrants who aren't even descendents of people who once lived there. The Turkish census figures don't bear that out.
As for "why can't these folks manage to live peacefully together without boundaries" -- well pray tell us how well you've managed that feat on your own island. Instead of TELLING the Israelis how they should be able to live at peace with the Palestinians in a single country why don't you show them by example.
The situation with the Jews and the Palistines is so confusing, that most people don't understand it. In U.S. the pictures we see in the media are of Israelis shooting little kids throwing rocks at tanks. We all know why the Jews are in Israel, the history is documented in the Bible. But the media has made it so confusing that we can't understand.
Professer Joan Peters writer of From Time Immemorial had no agenda. She was asked to write the book given and advance by a publishing company and given 2 years to write the book.
Professor Joan Peters returned the advance as 2 years was not long enough to complete the research on her book From Time Immorial. She spent nearly 10 years doing the research. The book is full of facts backed up with documented evidence. Any one who is not biased should read it!
Norman Finelstein is just another left wing delusionist as is Noam Chomensky, Robert Fisk and the rest of the Arab propagandists.
The reason people who are neutral so confused is they have been bombarded with Arab propaganda and lies supported by the signed on Euro main stream media, that it is no wonder the neutral observer is confused. My advice to neutral interested observers is to read books that are historical records of the conflict and not the propagandists from both sides.
The stuff you read on this site and in the Main stream Newspapers are based on Arab propaganda.
SO Keith reckons:-
" The stuff you read on this site and in the Main stream Newspapers are based on Arab propaganda."
It baffles me how only the Arab side has effective proaganda.
With all the Israeli money, and the backing and available expertise of the incredibly powerful American lobby.
Looks like a trans-ethnic David has done it again.
Next we'll hear Israelis on about "The slings amd arrows of outrageous fortune"
David W. (a one-time admirer of Israel.)
Even though Irgun Zvai Leumi acted like Hamas.
Thinks!
If "Immitation is the most sincere form of flattery!"
Then, Israel must feel very flattered, by Hammas.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~#
But to current news.
If Arafat is not allowed to "test" his case on the World stage, i.e at the London Summit, against World Leaders, then, how can we advance on this running disaster.
Or is Sharon afraid the logic will go against his "stance"
David W
Israeli Money, Jewish lobby
The usual anti semitic rubbish. It is pretty amazing ho wthe Jewish lobby can get 98% support in US congress. Oh yes its the world Jewsish conspiracy.
The stern gang had less than 100 operatives and were aggressively opposed by Ben Gurion in cooperation with the British. Arafat and the PA supports the terror.
Get your facts right, Arab terrorists were murdering jews long before the Stern Gang was ever formed. Why did Arabs Murder Gangs murder 67 Jews in Hebron in August 1929. Was it because of Israel's occupation in 1967.
You anti jews do not have a clue what you are talking about. You have no incling of the facts. Your just plain Jew haters.
Hmmm - the original post quoted Churchill as if this monster was going to give an accurate picture of the Middle East. It was Churchill who was quoted as saying in the 1920's that ``we reserve the right to bomb the niggers''- by which he meant peoples of Persia, now Iraq.
It was also Churchill who presided over a great period of persecution of Palestinians, when he engineered the refusal of entry for widespread Jewish migration into England, and happily ensured they had the surplus WW2 military arms to take Palestine from its people.
It's interesting the way that Indymedia comments are swinging back into pro-Israeli propaganda, after the anti-Israeli upsurge in the summer. It seems that though general interest has died, the Zionists are still out there, frenetically posting.
Perhaps the rest of Indymedia readers are doing what I should do and just ignoring these posts; I wonder is there a way to show how much these posts are read?
Well anyway, 'desert' had the same programmatic meaning for English colonisers in Ireland as for Jewish ones in Israel - a way of denying that indigenous settled culture existed, and stating the land was sparsely populated by savages. It's the old 'A land without people for a people without land' nonsense.
It's been pointed out by deluded left-wingers such as Edward Said that Israelis have less of a problem accepting the obvious fact of continual Palestinian settlement than Zionists outside Israel do. Possibly because its harder for Israelis to deny the physical facts right in front of them.
Unfortunately this is topical, due to the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Israel (According to the Jerusalem Post, about 80,000 plus Palestinians fled last year). Stating that non-Jews have no historical link with Israel/Palestine, while not really believed in Israel, gives the ethnic cleansers their fig leaf of intellectual justification for outside consumption.
Last thing: Forgot to give a reference for the Norman Finkelstein book which gives a chapter to destroying Joan Peters' arguments. It is Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, and deals with various historical lies that Zionists use. It's pretty good, if that's what you're after
When discussing the conflict let's take yesterday's news as an example. First thing I see in the news is 4 Palestinians Killed. No mention of the 2 Israeli's that were savagely murdered.
Going back to the double suicide bombing about 10 days ago I read that 22 were murdered in 2 separate attacks...most of them foreign workers.
As it turned out 15 were Israeli's.
I watch listen and hear all the negativity about the Israeli occupation, but my question is who attacked who in 1967? Who is sending suicide bombers and who is intentionally murdering women and children?
I have a suggestion for peace, for the Palestinians who want a good life for their children and want an end to this vicious cycle of violence, and who genuinely want to earn a living...WHY do they not speak up..the problem is they all live in fear of being killed or tortured.
I feel sorry for the average Palestinian who wants to have a good life but unless someone in the Palestinian community takes a stand nothing in my opinion will happen for years.
Who are the Palestinians? they are the people who were ethnically cleansed from their own country in 1948. The crime was accompanied by murder, rape and looting. The “book” mentioned in the post has the same degree of connection to reality as the Zionist statement re “a land without people for a people without land”; many years ago Golda Meir made the comment that there were no Palestinians. It must have been extremely difficult to ethnically cleanse non-existent people. It is ironic in the extreme that the Zionists who claim to be the successors of the victims of the fascist “final solution” implement policies in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank which closely resemble those of the Nazis. Ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, tattooing of prisoners, and large-scale atrocities against civilians. Lidice = Sabra Shatila, the Nazis used collaborators to murder Jews; the Zionists used the Lebanese phalange and Haddad militia to murder Palestinians and Lebanese. During the recent attacks against Palestinian camps on the West Bank, one Zionist officer even commented on the need to study the methods the fascists used to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. Such a comment is a gross insult to the memory of the ghetto fighters who displayed great courage and showed the fascists that Jewish people were capable and willing to fight back. Said comment also gives a very clear indication of the nature of the Zionist regime.
I am very impressed and touched by the articalWay did the Arbs/ Palestinians, massacare 67 Jewsin one day in 1929?
that nailed the "Palestinian fraud"right on the head,based on accurate historic facts. (sorry David you need to do your home work before commenting!)
I would like to quote Ariel Ben Attar
"Dear world,consider the reaction of a normalJew
from Israelin 1920,1921 and 1929,there were noterritories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews & Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish state to upset antbody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed & repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa
Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967?
Were 510 Jewish men women & children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39?
Was it because Arabs were upset over 67?
And when the world proposed a UN Partition Plan in 47 that would have created a "Palestinian state" alongside a tiny Israel & the Arabs cried "no"& went to war & killed 6,000 Jews. Was that "upset" caused by the aggression of 67?
The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives & Firebombs &stones are part of the same people who, when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state, attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate. The same cry "itbach-al-yahud"(Massacre the Jew!) that we hear & see today.
What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we would not "repress" them.
Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust & you stood by in 48 as seven Arab states launched war. Mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if israel were facing extinction.And since we know that the Arabs/Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everytihnig possible to remain alive in our own land.If that bothers you dear wworld, well.think of how many times in the past you botherd us,In any event, dear world, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less."
Worryingly, it appears that the pro-Israeli spammers have stepped up from simply posting articles to actually posting replies.
Several posts above are lies, distortions of truth and all the usual tactics in any ideological conflict; not going to go through it all to point them out. Very briefly, outside "historical"/"ideological"/"political" analysis, Israel is a state with a high dependence on outside (US) aid and much policy flows from this situation.
Suffice to say, read widely and sceptically, be aware of the possible motives behind what is being said, and you might start to get an idea of what's going on.
Every time a zionist sympathizer posts something and backs up their response with facts they are called liers.
None of the so called rights of the Palestinians is ever justified by historical facts backing up their rights by the so called know it alls and name callers.
In 1921 the area known as Palestine which included the whole of Jordan and a small part of South Western Syria. Under the Mandate of the league of Nations Great Britain was given the right to administer the whole territory and to set up the territory for a Jewish Homeland including all of what is now Jordon. Chaim Weitzman and King Feizal of Iraq made an agreement in writing to recognize the Jewish people right to Palestine as a Jewish State, according to the League of Nations endorsement of the Balfour Declaration which superceded any other promises or other declarations.
The British government in violation of their mandate and international law carved out three quarters of the mandated territory allocated for a Jewish State and gave it to King Abdullah to appease Arab threats and terror. The same way Neville Chamberlain gave away Czechoslavkia.
The whole idea was to allow Jews to immigrate to Palestine to build the insititutions of government. What happened is the British in order to win favor and appease the Emirs and dictators denied the rights of Jews to immigrate under Arab protest from the most evil anti semite the Grand Mufti Al Husseini, who actively supported Hitler and was culpable in the murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews.
Great Britian allowed hundreds of thousands of Arab migrates to settle in Eastern Palestine illegally and agian contrary to the League of Natons Mandate.
The reason Arabs settled in Eastern Palestine was because of the better economic conditions the Jews had created. The Arabs benifited from them and the Jews were denied entry in the land that was meant to be reserved for them.
There is overwhelming documentary evidence to support this arguement. From documents of the British, from letters between key administrators and blatant anti semitic views of important British Statesman.
The Arabs and the Indy leftys accuse Israel and the Jews of the very crime they are guilty of which is robbing the land of israel from the Jewish people.
There are no documented historical facts to support an Arab State in Western or even Eastern Palestine for that matter.
The Palestinian refugees are the only refugees in the world that have been kept refugees for 50 years. Israel has absorber over 800,000 Arab Jews who were expelled and all their property stolen from them. What compensation should they receive from the world. So far none! Let the Arabs take care of their own and the Jews take care of their own. Problem solved. No, the Arabs want it all. How could they allow the dhemmi jew to dominate and live as a free people, never. The supprier will of Allah would not allow such a thing. My friends this is what is all about, simple Jew hatred, nothing more nothing less.