Palestinians
'Peoplehood' Based on a Big Lie Eli E. Hertz
The Palestinians claim that they are an ancient and indigenous
people fails to stand up to historic scrutiny. Most Palestinian
Arabs were newcomers to British Mandate Palestine. Until the
1967 Six-Day War made it expedient for Arabs to create a
Palestinian peoplehood, local Arabs simply considered themselves
part of the 'great Arab nation' or 'southern Syrians.'

"Repeat a lie often enough and people will begin to believe it."
-- Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels

"All [that Palestinians] can agree on as a community is what they
want to destroy, not what they want to build."
-- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

There is no age-old Palestinian people. Most so-called
Palestinians are relative newcomers to the Land of Israel

Like a mantra, Arabs repeatedly claim that the Palestinians are
a native people. The concept of a 'Stateless Palestinian people'
is not based on fact. It is a fabrication.

Palestinian Arabs cast themselves as a native people in
"Palestine" -- like the Aborigines in Australia or Native
Americans in America. They portray the Jews as European
imperialists and colonizers. This is simply untrue.

Until the Jews began returning to the Land of Israel in
increasing numbers from the late 19th century to the turn of the
20th, the area called Palestine was a God-forsaken backwash that
belonged to the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey.

The land's fragile ecology had been laid waste in the wake of
the Arabs' 7th-century conquest. In 1799, the population was at
it lowest and estimated to be no more than 250,000 to 300,000
inhabitants in all the land.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Arab population west of the
Jordan River (today, Israel and the West Bank) was about half a
million inhabitants and east of the Jordan River perhaps
200,000.

The collapse of the agricultural system with the influx of
nomadic tribes after the Arab conquest that created malarial
swamps and denuded the ancient terrace system eroding the soil,
was coupled by a tyrannous regime, a crippling tax system and
absentee landowners that further decimated the population. Much
of the indigenous population had long since migrated or
disappeared. Very few Jews or Arabs lived in the region before
the arrival of the first Zionists in the 1880s and most of those
that did lived in abject poverty.

Most Arabs living west of the Jordan River in Israel, the West
Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are newcomers who came from
surrounding Arab lands after the turn of the 20th century
because they were attracted to the relative economic prosperity
brought about by the Zionist Movement and the British in the
1920s and 1930s.

This is substantiated by eyewitness reports of a deserted
country -- including 18th-century reports from the British
archaeologist Thomas Shaw, French author and historian Count
Constantine Volney (Travels through Syria and Egypt, 1798); the
mid-19th-century writings of Alphonse de Lamartine
(Recollections of the East, 1835); Mark Twain (Innocents Abroad,
1867); and reports from the British Consul in Jerusalem (1857)
that were sent back to London.

The Ottoman Turks' census (1882) recorded only 141,000 Muslims
in the Land of Israel. The real number is probably closer to
350,000 to 425,000, since many hid to avoid taxes. The British
census in 1922 reported 650,000 Muslims.

Aerial photographs taken by German aviators during World War I
show an underdeveloped country composed mainly of primitive
hamlets. Ashdod, for instance, was a cluster of mud dwellings,
Haifa a fishing village. In 1934 alone, 30,000 Syrian Arabs from
the Hauran moved across the northern frontier into Mandate
Palestine, attracted by work in and around the newly built
British port and the construction of other infrastructure
projects. They even dubbed Haifa Um el-Amal ('the city of
work').

The fallacy of Arab claims that most Palestinians were
indigenous to Palestine -- not newcomers - is also bolstered by a
1909 vintage photograph of Nablus, today an Arab city on the
West Bank with over 121,000 residents. Based on the number of
buildings in the photo taken from the base of Mount Gerizim, the
population in 1909 -- Muslim Arabs and Jewish Samaritans --
could not have been greater than 2,000 residents.

Family names of many Palestinians attest to their
non-Palestinian origins. Just as Jews bear names like Berliner,
Warsaw and Toledano, modern phone books in the Territories are
filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian),
Mugrabi (North Africa). Even George Habash -- the arch-terrorist
and head of Black September -- bears a name with origins in
Abyssinia or Ethiopia, Habash in both Arabic and Hebrew.

Palestinian nationality is an entity defined by its opposition
to Zionism, and not its national aspirations.

What unites Palestinians has been their opposition to Jewish
nationalism and the desire to stamp it out, not aspirations for
their own state. Local patriotic feelings are generated only
when a non-Islamic entity takes charge -- such as Israel did
after the 1967 Six-Day War. It dissipates under Arab rule, no
matter how distant or despotic.

A Palestinian identity did not exist until an opposing force
created it -- primarily anti-Zionism. Opposition to a non-Muslim
nationalism on what local Arabs, and the entire Arab world, view
as their own turf, was the only expression of 'Palestinian
peoplehood.'

The Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a charismatic religious
leader and radical anti-Zionist was the moving force behind
opposition to Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 1930s. The
two-pronged approach of the "Diplomacy of Rejection" (of
Zionism) and the violence the Mufti incited occurred at the same
time Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq became countries in the
post-Ottoman reshuffling of territories established by the
British and the French under the League of Nation's mandate
system.

The tiny educated class among the Arabs of Palestine was more
politically aware than the rest of Arab society, with the
inklings of a separate national identity. However, for decades,
the primary frame of reference for most local Arabs was the clan
or tribe, religion and sect, and village of origin. If Arabs in
Palestine defined themselves politically, it was as "southern
Syrians." Under Ottoman rule, Syria referred to a region much
larger than the Syrian Arab Republic of today, with borders
established by France and England in 1920.

In his book Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition, Daniel
Pipes explains:

"Syria was a region that stretched from the borders of Anatolia
to those of Egypt, from the edge of Iraq to the Mediterranean
Sea. In terms of today's states, the Syria of old comprised
Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, plus the Gaza Strip and
Alexandria."

Syrian maps in the 21st century still co-opt most of Greater
Syria, including Israel.

The Grand Mufti Al-Husseini' s aspirations slowly shifted from
pan-Arabism -- the dream of uniting all Arabs into one polity,
whereby Arabs in Palestine would unite with their brethren in
Syria - to winning a separate Palestinian entity, with himself
at the helm. Al-Husseini was the moving force behind the 1929
riots against the Jews and the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt against two
non-Muslim entities in Palestine -- the British and the Jews. He
gathered a large following by playing on fears that the Jews had
come to dispossess, or at least dominate the Arabs.

Much like Yasser Arafat, the Grand Mufti's ingrained
all-or-nothing extremism, fanaticism and even an inability to
cooperate with his own compatriots made him totally ineffective.
He led the Palestinian Arabs nowhere.

The 'Palestinian' cause became a key rallying point for Arab
nationalism throughout the Middle East, according to Oxford
historian Avi Shlaim. The countries the British and French
created in 1918-1922 were based largely on meridians on the map,
as is evident in the borders that delineate the Arab states
today. Because these states lack ethnic logic or a sense of
community, their opposition to the national aspirations of the
Jews has come to fuel that fires Arab nationalism as the 'glue'
of national identity.

From the 1920s, rejection of Jewish nationalism, attempts to
prevent the establishment of a Jewish homeland by violence, and
rejection of any form of Jewish political power, including any
plans to share stewardship with Arabs, crystallized into the
expression of Palestinianism. No other positive definition of an
Arab-Palestinian people has surfaced. This point is admirably
illustrated in the following historic incident:

"In 1926, Lord Plumer was appointed as the second High
Commissioner of Palestine. The Arabs within the Mandate were
infuriated when Plumer stood up for the Zionists' national
anthem Hatikva during ceremonies held in his honor when Plumer
first visited Tel Aviv. When a delegation of Palestinian Arabs
protested Plumer's 'Zionist bias,' the High Commissioner asked
the Arabs if he remained seated when their national anthem was
played, 'wouldn't you regard my behavior as most unmannerly?'
Met by silence, Plumer asked: 'By the way, have you got a
national anthem?' When the delegation replied with chagrin that
they did not, he snapped back, "I think you had better get one
as soon as possible."

But it took the Palestinians more than 60 years to heed Plumer's
advice, adopting Anthem of the Intifada two decades after Israel
took over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 -- at the beginning of
the 1987 Intifada.

Under the Mandate, local Arabs also refused to establish an
'Arab Agency' to develop the Arab sector, parallel to the Jewish
Agency that directed development of the Jewish sector.

In fact, the so-called patriotism of indigenous Muslims has
flourished only when non-Muslim entities (the Crusaders, the
British, the Jews) have taken charge of the Holy Land. When
political control returns to Muslim hands, the ardent patriotism
of the Arabs of Palestine magically wanes, no matter how distant
or how despotic the government. One Turkish pasha who ruled Acco
(Acre) between 1775 and 1804 was labeled Al Jazzar, The Butcher,
by locals.

Why hasn't Arab representative government ever been established
in Palestine, either in 1948 or during the next 19 years of Arab
rule? Because other Arabs co-opted the Palestinian cause as a
rallying point that would advance the concept that the territory
was up for grabs. "The Arab invasion of Palestine was not a
means for achieving an independent Palestine, but rather the
result of a lack of consensus on the part of the Arab states
regarding such independence, " summed up one historian. Adherents
to a separate Palestinian identity were a mute minority on the
West Bank and Gaza during the 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian
rule - until Israel took control from the Jordanians and the
Egyptians in 1967. Suddenly a separate Palestinian peoplehood
appeared and claimed it deserved nationhood - and 21 other Arab
states went along with it.

Palestinianism in and of itself lacks any substance of its own.
Arab society on the West Bank and Gaza suffers from deep social
cleavages created by a host of rivalries based on divergent
geographic, historical, geographical, sociological and familial
allegiances. What glues Palestinians together is a carefully
nurtured hatred of Israel and the rejection of Jewish
nationhood.

This article was published March 31, 2008 on the Myths and Facts
website and is archived at
www.mythsand facts.com/ article_view. asp?articleID= 53
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