Who Are the Palestinians?
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"Palestinian" today typically applies to Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to those who fled what became Israel in 1948 and their descendants. Often it also covers the Palestinian majority in Jordan, and sometimes even Israeli Arabs. Essentially, these are 20th century usages, like the adjectives Soviet and Yugoslav.
Although a distinct Palestinian nationalism is taken for granted internationally today, the notion of a Palestinian people separate and distinct from neighboring Arabs is relatively recent. Indeed, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee, told the Dutch newspaper Trau on March 31, 1977:
The Palestinian people does not exist . . . . The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.
In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.
Muhsein emphasized a point often made. The First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations in Jerusalem in 1919, called to choose delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, declared:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographic bonds.
In 1947, the United Nations was considering the second partition of British Mandatory Palestine (Transjordannow Jordan and 77.5 percent of the total areahad been separated in 1921 and Jews forbidden to settle there). The Arab Higher Committee informed the General Assembly that "Palestine was part of the province of Syria" and "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political identity."
Early in the century a few Christian Arabs did promote the idea of Palestinian Arab nationalism to secure the social-political equality that pan-Islamic movements might deny them. But generally, after the collapse of Ottoman Turkish rule in World War I and subsequent British ascendancy, "Palestinian" referred to Jews. The Palestine Post, Palestine Land Development Company, Palestine Philharmonic and other similarly named institutions, all were Jewish enterprises, manifestations of the Zionist effort to renew Jewish sovereignty in eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.
The PLO Charter, as rewritten in 1968, varies the definition of Palestinian in three separate articles. Article One declares that "... the people of Palestine is part of the Arab nation" while Article Five claims "the Palestinians are the Arab nationals who were living permanently in Palestine until 1947 ... [or] anyone born of a Palestinian father after that, whether within Palestine or outside it ...." Article Six allows that Jews at least some of them could be Palestinians too: "Jews who were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinian."
In fact, today's Palestinians, especially the large majority who are Sunni Muslims, have no significant religious, linguistic, cultural, or national differences from their brethren in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and even Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
This is not surprising since many of their ancestors migrated from those areas in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Egyptians arrived with Mehmet Ali's conquest in the 1830s and stayed. Hence the common Palestinian family or clan name, "al-Masri," meaning "the Egyptian." Later in the 19th century, Turkish overlords imported non-Arab Muslims from Sudan and the Balkans to western Palestine. Arabs from the Arabian peninsula settled in the Hebron Hills.
As Zionist Jews built the foundation for a national home, economic and health conditions improved in western Palestine.
Many Arabs migrated, often illegally, from Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and internally from the West Bank and Gaza Strip into what would become Israel to take advantage of the higher standards. Between 1922 and 1947, for example, the non-Jewish populations in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Jaffa grew many times faster than accounted for by natural increase alone.
The related claim that Palestinian Arabs are not only an historically distinct people but also an ancient one are questionable as well. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) implicitly recognized evidence to the contrary when, after 1948, it granted refugee status to any Arab who had resided in what was now Israel for a minimum of two years.
Biblical Philistines
Historically, the biblical Philistines were not Arabs but rather Mediterranean sea people, whose culture was influenced by that of Crete. Landing in southwestern Canaan about 1200 BCE (Before the Common Era), they battled intermittently with the Israelites of the Judean and Samarian hill country until finally being erased from history by Babylonian conquerors late in the seventh century.
The substitution of "Palestine" for Judea, land of the Jews, was an early psychological warfare maneuver. After the second Jewish revolt, 132 - 135 CE (Common Era),
Rome dispersed many of the survivors andto erase their connection to the landrenamed Judea "Palaestina." Hence the derivation of the Arabic word Filastin, although Arabs did not settle west of the Jordan River in large numbers until the Muslim conquest 500 years later in the seventh century C.E.
"Palestine," referring to an independent state supposedly limited to the West Bank and Gaza, became widespread only well after 1967 as a reaction to Israel's conquest of those Jordanian and Egyptian occupied territories in a war of self-defense. If Israel and the Palestinian Authority eventually negotiate a settlement that realizes President Bush's vision of "two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, side-by-side and at peace," the citizens of the latter will be able to claim something newan actualized separate Palestinian national identity.
International Terrorists
And what of Klocek's other apparently taboo statement, that while not all Muslims are terrorists, all international terrorists are Muslims? Exaggerated, but resting on fact. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But from the World Trade Center to nightclubs in Bali and the Underground in London, from Israeli buses to Spanish trains, a school in Beslan to a synagogue in Tunisia, throughout Algeria, Iraq, in Sudan, Pakistan and elsewhere, the perpetrators of most contemporary terrorist massacresincluding those with Muslim victims have been Muslims. [/COLOR]
