Inventing a History for a "palestinian people" that never existed in history

David Bukay describes and explains the PLO/PA strategy of erasing the Jews, erasing Israel, from the history of the Land of Israel and replacing them with a concocted "palestinian history."

Bukay writes:
"Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel by erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history is a central goal of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and something that the early generations of Palestinian leaders, including the notorious Hajj Amin Husseini, who led the Palestinian Arabs to their 1948 defeat, dared not do. This fictitious history, which ignores all historical documentation and established historical methods, is based on systematic distortions of both ancient and modern history with the aim of denying Israel's right to exist. . . ."

Click on link for rest of article:
Founding National Myths

I comment on some of the points that Bukay makes:

1-- The PLO/PA claims that the Canaanites were Arabs. This lie is also found in certain anti-Zionist British writers active years before the rise of the State of Israel in 1948. In fact, far from speaking Arabic, the Canaanites spoke a language extremely close to Hebrew. Indeed, linguists sometimes consider Hebrew as a Canaanite dialect. Otherwise, linguists say that Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite family of languages. The Prophet Isaiah calls the language spoken by the Jews to be Canaanite [Isa. 19:18]. Josephus Flavius says that the Jews speak a Phoenician tongue [Against Apion]. But the Phoenicians were of course Canaanites too, not Arabs. Besides Hebrew and Phoenician, the Canaanite family of languages encompassed Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite. Our post here shows some of the linguistic similarities between Hebrew and Ammonite and Moabite.

2- Bukay refers to verses in the Quran that agree with Jewish/Israelite rightful ownership of the Land of Israel, called Holy Land and other names in the Quran. See here.

3- Jund Filastin which Bukay mentions was the name of a military district set up by the Arab conquerors in the seventh century. Its borders were about the same as those of Palaestina Prima, a Late Roman subdivision of the country which encompassed, roughly speaking, the south of the country, up to about the middle of Samaria and on the coast reaching up to near Haifa. Jund Filastin did not include the Galilee or the Golan Heights or northern Samaria which the Romans had, grosso modo, called Palaestina Secunda whereas the Arabs included those areas within Jund Urdunn, the Jordan military district.

4- On the Arab denial of Jewish history also see the manic efforts of Nadia Abu el-Haj here & here. When I visited the old Shim`on haTsadiq Quarter in Jerusalem, I ran into the leader of an Arab protest there, a Mr Hijazi, who likewise denied the Jewish history of that area of Jerusalem. The name Hijazi by the way refers to the Hijaz, the northwestern region of Arabia where Mecca and Medina are located. This indicates that Mr Hijazi's forefathers were migrants to the Land of Israel.

5- The ancient Jews did not call the Land of Israel "palestine," nor did the Romans call it that. The Romans called the whole country Judea [IVDAEA] until the Jewish defeat in the Bar Kokhba war in 135 CE, whereas the Jews called the country the Land of Israel. The Emperor Hadrian introduced "palestine" as the new name for the land of the defeated Jews. More exactly Hadrian called the land "Syria Palaestina" [= palestinian Syria; Palaestina is an adjective] as if it were to be considered from then on a mere section of Syria. Even after the Romans under Hadrian had officially changed the name of the country, the Jews continued to call it the Land of Israel.

6- The Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun confirms that the Land of Israel was Jewish and ruled by Jews. See here.