Palestine and Palestinians have a long history
EuroYankee | Jan 14 2024
Growing up as I did in the USA, I was force-fed a lot of pro-Zionist propaganda, or what the Israelis call hasbara.
As former Israel Prime Minister Shimon Peres once said, “The country [Palestine] was mostly an empty desert, with only a few islands of Arab settlement; and Israel’s [cultivated] land today was indeed redeemed from swamp and wilderness.”
I remember as a child hearing the familiar refrain: “A land without a people for a people without a land”.
This slogan led us in the West to believe that no one was living in Palestine; that the place was deserted, and it was easy for the Jews to “peacefully” move in and settle in the “wilderness” that was Palestine.
The wilderness motif was further enforced when we were told over and over again that the brave, resourceful, hard-working Israelis “made the desert bloom”.
More hogwash. The Palestinian people had been cultivating that land for millennia.
“No such thing as a Palestinian”
Golda Meir, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, was the first to assert that “There was no such thing as Palestinians” before the Zionist Israelis showed up. According to Wikipedia, Meir coined this narrative in an interview with The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969. In an interview the following year, she repeated her claim:
“There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians. There were Jews and Arabs“.
Meir also stated that she herself was a Palestinian. “I am a Palestinian”, she told Thames TV. “From 1921 to 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport”.
Moreover, the great irony that seems to have been lost on Meir is that, prior to 1948, there was no Israeli state and there were no Israelis.
Meir’s dismissal of the Palestinian people was reiterated in March of this year by the far-right Likudnik and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-proclaimed Jewish supremacist who favors genocide of the Palestinians in order to re-establish Greater Israel (Eretz-Israel).
Smotrich, speaking at an event in March, maintained that the notion of a Palestinian people was artificial:
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language,” he said…The lectern was adorned with what appeared to be an image showing the map of Israel that included the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Jordan.
Zionists are constantly trying to convince us that the Palestinians don’t really exist as a people. Palestinian jurist Henry Cattan explains the larger narrative promulgated by Zionists in his book, The Palestine Question:
Zionist apologists have reached a new stage in deceit by suggesting that not only the Palestinians did not exist in Palestine, but that Palestine was essentially ‘uninhabited’ by Arabs before the Zionist movement began towards the end of the nineteenth century, and that the Arabs came in large numbers after that, from nearby countries, drawn by the economic benefits of Jewish settlements.
Contrary to the Zionist narrative, Palestinians have a long and rich history, which included living in peace with their Jewish and Christian neighbours. To say there was no Palestinian identity is simply a lie, a supporting narrative that is part of the overall Zionist campaign of genocide toward the Palestinian people.
In fact, Wikipedia shows that Palestine was mentioned in ancient Egyptian texts from the 12th century BC, and the region was specifically called Palestine in the Histories of Herodotus in 5th century BCE.
Today, there are 14.3 million Palestinians in the world, of which 5.3 million live in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The rest have been scattered to various countries as a result of the Nakba and other Zionist pogroms.
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Also see: Deprogramming News & Views
