Palestinian identity ?

[JoelT1]

Joseph Farah: Myths of palestine & palestinians Myths of the Middle East

The " palestinians" are arab outcast from surrounding arab countries...

The Middle East and Orwellian Historical Arguments
When lies are the foundation of policies.
October 16, 2015
Bruce Thornton

Many of our policy debates and conflicts both domestic and foreign call on history to validate their positions. At home, crimes from the past like slavery and legal segregation are used to justify present policies ranging from racial set asides to housing regulations long after those institutions have been dismantled. Abroad, our jihadist enemies continually evoke the Crusades, “colonialism,” and “imperialism” as justifications for their violence. Yet the “history” used in such fashion is usually one-sided, simplistic, or downright false. Nor is the reason hard to find: as we read in 1984, “Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Bad history is a powerful instrument for gaining political power.

Nowhere is the abuse of history more rampant than in the Middle East. Since World War II all the problems whose origins lie in dysfunctional tribal and religious beliefs and behaviors have been laid at the feet of “colonialism” and “imperialism.” Western leftists––besotted both by a marxiste hatred of liberal democracy, and by juvenile noble-savage Third-Worldism–– have legitimized this specious pretext, which now for many has become historical fact.

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Everything about this narrative is false. There is no such thing as a “Palestinian” people, an idea that arose only after the Six Day War of 1967. The bulk of the people mistakenly called “Palestinians” are ethnically, religiously, and linguistically indistinguishable from Arab Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria. Numerous comments by Arab leaders before 1967 emphasized this fact. For example, Zouhair Muhsin, a member of the Executive Council of the PLO, said, “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity… Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”

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Finally, the charge of an “illegal occupation” of the “occupied West Bank” is a canard. Those territories, comprising the heartland of the ancient Jewish nations of Judea and Samaria, are disputed, their final disposition awaiting a peace treaty. There are no “borders” thought to define the mythical Palestinian nation. Those lines on the map are armistice lines, created after Israel defeated the armies of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in 1967. By all rights as the victor, Israel could have incorporated the so-called West Bank into the state of Israel, on the same eternal wages of war that led to the American Southwest being incorporated into the U.S. after the 1846-48 war with Mexico, or of Prussian Germany into Poland after World War II. Indeed, since the territory in question was for thousands of years the homeland of the Jewish people, Israel would have had a better case for restoring Judea and Samaria to Israel. Instead, in the Orwellian history created by Muslims and accepted by the West, the indigenous peoples are considered the “occupiers” of their own lands, and conquerors, invaders, and colonizers considered the disenfranchised victims.

The recent suicide-murders of random Israelis by Palestinians have been analyzed in terms that perpetuate this false history. Our intellectually challenged Secretary of State, John Kerry, referred to this false history when he said at Harvard, “There’s been a massive increase in settlement over the course of the last years and there’s an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing,” he said. “Settlements” is nothing more than a mindless mantra, like “cycle of violence” or “checkpoints” or the “sanctity of the al-Aqsa mosque,” for the pusillanimous West, while for Muslims they are the pretexts for practicing their traditional Jew-hatred and sacralized violence.

The history this reporting on the Temple Mount ignores is the great forbearance, and to be sure tactical pragmatism, of the Israelis in leaving the Temple Mount under the management of the Arabs; while a mosque created as a triumphalist boast over conquered Christians and Jews, in a city never mentioned in the Koran, is respected more by the West than its own empty cathedrals. Meanwhile the travails of Muslim immigrants are hyped and agonized over more than the crucifixions, torture, rape, and murder of Christians in the greatest mass persecution of Christians in history.

These are the wages of historical ignorance and the acceptance of a history made up by an adversary who can “thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened,” as Orwell says of the Party in 1984. Our foreign policy has often been predicated on these lies, and the outcome has been predictable when lies are the foundation of policies––the abject failure we are witnessing in the region today.


The Middle East and Orwellian Historical Arguments