Let's Talk About Palestine
Please
This is a picture of a Jewish storefront that was vandalized. It reads in english: “Palestine is calling. The Jews are no longer tolerated in Norway.” This happened in 1941 in Oslo.
In Nazi Germany, among the many horrific slogans that the Nazis would direct at the Jews, ‘Jews, go back to Palestine’ was one of them.
Why is that the case?
Because it was common knowledge back then, even among Jew-haters, that British Mandate Palestine (or simply Palestine for short) was not an Arabic creation, nor is it an Arabic word. A ‘Palestinian’ was not an ethnic marker, but simply a geographical one. From Israel’s ancient kingdom to now, Jews have always had a presence in the land. By 1939, Arabs and Jews were living together. The Arabs came from Jordan and other Arab countries. Some of the Jews immigrated from Europe and South America. Others were always in the Middle East and can trace their ancestry back to the Israelites exiled to ancient Babylon and Persia.
These people were called ‘the Jews of Palestine,’ or ‘the Arabs of Palestine,’ or ‘Palestinian Jews.’ This term was no more an ethnic identity than me saying I’m from California. It just denoted an area where they resided.
The name ‘Palestine’ came from the Romans in 132 AD. The Romans defeated the Judeans (or ‘Jews’) in a bloody battle, carted off some, kept others as slaves, and renamed the area ‘Syria Palestina’ after Israel’s ancient enemies. The word was not an identification for Arabs. Arabs originated from Arabia, and their presence in British Mandate Palestine, as well as the areas surrounding what is now Israel is a result of imperialism, slavery, and slaughter.
(But that’s a conversation for another day)
So if ‘Palestine’ was not an ethnic marker for Arabs, why is it now?
In 1967, Israel was faced with a war between several Arab nations, and won in a short amount of time, which is why the 1967 war also has the name ‘Six-Day War.’
It was not long after this war, that Yasser Arafat, in his drafting of the Palestinian National Charter in 1968, that he begins to reshape Palestinian identity. The charter is still available on the Yasser Arafat foundation website. The very first article states that
“Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the greater Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”
This is quite strange, as nothing even resembling this had ever been uttered before this charter. Almost as if the goal was to obfuscate basic truths and paint Jews as colonizers of Arab land; which not only is not true, the Arabs are the ones further colonizing by continuing their conquest that goes all the way back to the 7th century.
Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The Arabs are the invaders, which is what the word ‘Palestine’ actually means, by the way. The Philistines were invaders, and that is what their name meant in Hebrew. If there is a colonial project, it is not Zionism, but Pan-Arabism. If there is an occupying force, it is the Arabs in North Africa, not Jews in Judea/Samaria (what many erroneously call the ‘West Bank’). If there is an aggressive expansionist entity, it is Islam, not Judaism.
In fact, before 1968, Arab nationals like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937, Haj Amin al-Husseini, believed in conquering British Mandate Palestine from the British and making it into a Greater Syria, thus furthering the centuries-long Arab conquest. Not only was this his goal, but he had a relationship with Hitler and the Nazi party of Germany. Their shared goal was to annihilate the Jews, both in Europe, and in the Middle East.
Not only was ‘Palestine’ not considered an ethnic marker for Arabs, culturally, the average person associated the word ‘Palestine’ with Jews. It is why many Arab leaders, including Huseinni, and Arab politician Awni Abd al-Hadi rejected the very name ‘Palestine.’ al-Hadi was even on record saying:
“There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a term invented by the Zionists.”
You can learn more about that fun fact down below.
Is this article meant to tell a whole group of people they aren’t real? Absolutely not. I don’t care for being contrary for contrary’s sake. I do care about forward movement, however, and we cannot move forward if truth is not our north star.
Peace must be built on truth. No matter how uncomfortable the truth may make us, no matter how angry it may make others, and no matter how afraid we may be to speak it. Without truth, there can be no resolution to any of this.
Here are a couple of more very interesting newspapers from 1947/48 after Arabs declared war on Israel in what we now call Israel’s War of Independence.
What do you notice?
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