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.

The "Peace Process" Is a War Process -- Daniel Pipes Realizes

UPDATING 4-19-2010 see at bottom

The "peace process" means peace of mind for antisemites.

Daniel Pipes made some quite correct observations about the "peace process" in a recent column.
They should be obvious to everyone but are not. Pipes makes these observations while writing about the "silver lining" of the present Israel-USA contretemps.

First, the "peace process" is in actuality a "war process." Diplomatic negotiations through the 1990s led to a parade of Israeli retreats that had the perverse effect of turning the middling-bad situation of 1993 into the awful one of 2000. Painful Israeli concessions, we now know, stimulate not reciprocal Palestinian goodwill but rather irredentism, ambition, fury, and violence.
. . . .
Fourth, U.S.-Israel tensions increase Palestinian intransigence and demands. Israel in bad standing empowers their leaders; and if the tensions arise from U.S. pressure for concessions to the Palestinians, the latter sit back and enjoy the show. This happened in mid-2009, when Mahmoud Abbas instructed Americans what to extract from Jerusalem. . . [here]

As a Jerusalemite, I can confirm Pipes' observation that the peace process is a war process. The more "peace processing" going on, the more Arab terrorism. More Israeli withdrawals or concessions of territory lead to rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. We live in an Orwellian world.

And of course, Washington hostility to Israel just encourages the intransigence of Arabs who have no desire to make peace with Israel and are inspired by Washington's hostility to Israel. Indeed, hostility to Jews is deeply embedded in the Muslim religion since Muhammad. Likewise the belief in perpetual war against the infidels is embedded in Islam --with truces, to be sure, when the infidels are stronger. The Quran does not make peace a supreme principle but rather war to subdue and humiliate the infidels and make them pay tribute. This is enunciated in Quran 9:29 in regard to Jews and Christians specifically.

Of course, some Arabs prefer peace to war. But an Arab leader/ruler has to justify peace --needs an excuse for peace-- by pointing to the greater strength of the infidel, in this case Israel. By weakening Israel strategically through territorial concessions of strategic areas needed for defense (such as the Jordan Valley and the north-south Judea-Samaria mountain ridge), Israel becomes obviously weaker. In this case, leaders/rulers who prefer peace would lose their excuse for peace because Israel would seem obviously weaker.

And all of the above does not deal with the issue of denying the human and civil rights of Jews by, for example, forbidding them to live in parts of Jerusalem. Yet Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority population since the mid-19th century, since 1853 at least, according to the French historian and diplomat of that time, Cesar Famin, whose figures were published by Karl Marx in an article in the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley's paper, on 15 April 1854. Furthermore, Arab forces began driving Jews out of parts of Jerusalem in December 1947. These parts became parts of what was the Judenrein "Arab East Jerusalem" for 19 years between 1948 and 1967, a sector of the city occupied by the Arab Legion of Jordan. This is in addition to the importance of Jerusalem to the world, especially to Christians and Muslims, being due to its ancient role in Jewish history and religion.

Obama's anti-Israel policy, his favoring of a racist anti-Jewish apartheid policy is dangerous, threatening and repugnant. However, as Pipes says, it may have its silver lining.
- - - - - - - - -
UPDATING 4-19-2010 Lebanese blogger Tony Badran writes about how Syrian thug-in-chief, Bashar Assad, views peace and war:
"Assad’s mantra is that 'peace and resistance are two sides of the same coin.' As he sees things, it’s not either peace or resistance. For him the two are simultaneous tools of attrition, with peace talks providing Syria with impunity as Assad pursues “resistance.” In his conceptual framework, the peace process is just warfare by other means." [here]
Veteran "peace processor", Aaron David Miller, looks at the "process" and at Washington's ME policy more skeptically now. He compares it to a dogmatic religion [here]. Rick Richman comments on Miller's comments [here]
Youssef Ibrahim of the NYSun, formerly ME correspondent for the NY Times, quotes from and comments on A D Miller's article [here]. Ibrahim shows that the so-called "palestinian" issue is not the main concern of several important Arab govts. Yet the Obama gang keeps on hawking that issue's supposed centrality to Arab and Middle Eastern concerns like a huckster in the marketplace, although nobody's buying.