The "Chauvinist Arab version of history," then--so important to the current claim of "Palestinian" rights to "Arab Palestine," which Arab Palestinians
PURPORTEDLY inhabited for "Thousands of years" --omits several relevant, situation-altering facts.
History did not begin with the Arab conquest in the seventh century.
The people whose nation was destroyed by the Romans were the Jews. There were no Arab Palestinians then -- not until 700 years later would an Arab rule prevail, and then Briefly.
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From the time the Arabians, along with their non-Arabian recruits, entered Palestine and Syria, they found and themselves added to what was "ethnologically a Chaos of all the possible human combinations to which, when Palestine became a land of pilgrimage, a new admixture was added."1 Among the peoples who have been counted as "indigenous Palestinian Arabs" are Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, and Tartars.
John of Wurzburg lists for the middle era of the kingdom, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Persian Nestorians, Indians,Egyptians, Copts, Maronites and natives from the Nile Delta. The list might be much extended, for it was the period of the great self-willed city-states in Europe, and Amalfi, Pisans, Genoese, Venetians, and Marseillais, who had quarters in all the bigger cities, owned villages, and had trading rights, would, in all probability, have submitted to any of the above designations, only under pressure. Besides all these, Norsemen, Danes, Frisians, Tartars, Jews, Arabs, Russians, Nubians, and Samaritans, can be safely added to the greatest human agglomeration drawn together in one small area of the globe."2
Greeks fled the Muslim rule in Greece, and landed in Palestine.
By the mid-17 century, the Greeks lived everywhere in the Holy Land--constituting about 20% of the population-and their authority dominated the villages.3 ..... "In some cases villages [in Palestine] are populated wholly by settlers from other portions of the Turkish Empire within the 19th century. There are villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians," one historian has reported. 5
...Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911)... finds
the "population" of Palestine composed of so "widely differing" a group of "inhabitants" -- whose "ethnological affinities" create "early in the 20th century a list of no less than 50 languages" (see below) -- that "it is therefore no easy task to write concisely ... on the ethnology of Palestine."
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The Disparate peoples recently assumed and purported to be "settled Arab indigenes, for a Thousand years" were in fact a "Heterogeneous" community with No "Palestinian" identity, and according to an official British historical analysis in 1920, NO Arab identity either:
"The people west of the Jordan are Not Arabs, but Only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin.... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most Mixed race." 8
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