"palestinian" Arabs are Also Bosnians, Circassians, Turks, Egyptians. . .

The Pro-Arab Mythmakers have been working overtime on persuading the world that there is such a thing as a "palestinian people" that has been inhabiting "palestine" [read: Land of Israel] since the Stone Age. The idea is to totally delegitimize Israel and the Jews' rights to their ancient homeland by replacing the Jews with a "palestinian people." The very notion of a "palestinian people" was meant from the beginning to prevent peace between the Arabs and Israel, as well as to persuade the world that the Arab war on Israel is justified.

The mythmakers, both Arabs and their Western and Communist supporters, claim that the "palestinian people" goes back to prehistory. However, this big lie is contradicted by a huge mass of information and documents. Here below Laurence Oliphant tells of some of the non-Arab Muslims who were settled in the country by the Ottoman Empire or by Muhammad Ali of Egypt. Oliphant was a writer and British Christian Zionist. While living on Mount Carmel in the late 19th century, he hired Naftali Hertz Imber to work for him. Imber was a Hebrew poet and his poem that he wrote in Israel, HaTiqvah --when set to music-- became the Zionist and Israeli national anthem. He wrote the account below after the Congress of Berlin [1878] assigned Bosnia as a protectorate to the Austro-Hungarian [Habsburg] Empire. When the rulers over Bosnia changed, many Bosnian Muslims decided to continue to live under Muslim rule and left Bosnia for the remaining Ottoman territory, following an old Muslim rule that Muslims are not to live under infidel control [on this see historian Kamal Karpat, etc.]. The Ottoman Empire assigned the Bosnian Muslims lands in various parts of the empire, including Israel.

. . . it is a singular fact that the strip of coast from Haifa to Caesarea seems to have become a center of influx of colonists and strangers of the most diverse races. The new immigrants to Caesarea are Slavs. Some of them speak a little Turkish. Arabic is an unknown tongue to them, which they are learning. Their own language is a Slav dialect. When the troubles in the [Ottoman] provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina first broke out [1875], which led to Russo-Turkish war, a howl of indignation went up from the philanthropists. . . When it [the agrarian question] was settled by handing over the provinces to Austria, the Slav-Moslem aristocracy, finding themselves in their turn persecuted by their former peasants and the Christian power which protected them, migrated to the more congenial rule of the sultan. So the curious spectacle of a Slav population migrating from Austrian rule to Asia, in order to be under a Moslem government.

Close beside the new Bosnian colony there are planted in the plain of Sharon two or three colonies of Circassians. These are the people who committed the Bulgarian atrocities. The irony of fate has now placed them within three or four miles of colonists belonging to the very race that they massacred. They, too, fleeing from government by Christians [Austria], have sought refuge under the sheltering wing of the sultan, where, I regret to say, as I described in a former letter, they still indulge in their predatory propensities. In the immediate proximity to them are the black tents of a tribe of Turcomans. They belong to the old Seljuk stock, and the cradle of their tribe gave birth to the present rulers of the Turkish Empire. They have been here for about three hundred years, and have forgotten the Turkish language, but a few months ago a new migration arrived from the mountains of Mesopotamia. These nomads spoke nothing but Turkish, and hoped to find a warm welcome from their old tribesmen on the plain of Sharon. In this they were disappointed, and they have now, to my disgust, pitched their tents on some of the spurs of Carmel, where their great hairy camels and their own baggy breeches, contrast curiously with the camels and costumes of the Bedouins with whom we are familiar.
[Lawrence Oliphant, Haifa, pp 238-39; quoted in Bat Yeor, The Dhimmi (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1985), pp 385-388]

In this passage, Oliphant points to three distinct Muslim peoples who settled in Israel in the 19th century who WERE NOT Arabs, but were Bosnians, Circassians, and Turkomans. Arabs too from outside the country came to settle in Israel. Such Arabs came from Egypt and Algeria. Our earlier post quoting from the 17th century Turkish traveler, Evliya Chelebi, mentions Kurds living in Safed near the Jews there. Consider some of the family names fairly common among Arabs in Israel which indicate an origin outside the country: Busnachi [Bosnian], Turk and Turki, Akrad [Kurdish], Masri and Masrawi [Egyptian], Halabi [from Haleb = Aleppo]. Note that some of these groups came from Europe or the Caucasus. The Muslims in the country did not mind them since they too were Muslims. Today's mythmakers somehow forget to mention the very mixed ancestral background of their dear "palestinians."
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Coming: Mark Twain on Israel, Jews in Jerusalem, General Glubb Pasha's follies, etc.