"...The actual Armistice Agreements might mention Palestine as the name of an unincorporated territory. Don't get caught into his philosophical traps."
Yeppers... it's a philosophical trap, alright, even though it's embarrassingly obvious one, and easy to avoid, once you're aware of its existence. Frankly, word games like this are all that the Palestinians and their sympathizers have to go on; not much; something I recently likened to holding a pair of deuces at the Big Boys' poker table.
The paternal side of my family comes from a collective of five (5) tiny villages (Somborn, Neuses, Bernbach, Horbach and Altenmittlau) 15-20km to the east of Hanau, Germany; all within easy walking distance of each other.
They have been collectively known as 'Freigericht' (Free Court) since the late 1100s, when, legend has it, the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa granted the peasants and burghers of those villages the right to hold their own justice-court (
as opposed to relying upon the Imperial court in Fulda for everything) as a reward for coming to his aid when he and a traveling party were ambushed by a local warlord nearby.
Those five villages were thusly defined as a 'region' known as 'Freigericht', and they even had some trappings of collaborative administration - their Free Court (which lasted for some centuries after the grant) - but each village governed itself. There was no such self-governing and autonomous polity known as 'Freigericht'.
In 1970, some 800 (-ish) years after the decree by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, those five villages finally banded together into a municipal polity roughly akin to an American 'township' model - consolidating down to one Village Hall and one Police Department, one Fire Department, one school district, one taxing authority, and one set of bureaucrats, etc. - actually becoming an incorporated, chartered polity.
And, if any of those five villages did not wish to participate in that polity, they had that option, and could have broken away at any time during the chartering process and struck out on their own.
There are similarities (on a different scale) with Old Palestine.
The region has been known as 'Palestine' ever since the Romans knocked-over the last of the Jewish puppet-state kinglets that had governed in the name of Rome.
There may even have been occasional glimmers of 'home rule' here and there, scattered across the centuries, but nothing substantive and durable or even noteworthy, other than local magistrates and an occasional and odd home-grown governor or administrator here and there.
But nothing even remotely resembling a Nation or a Distinct People ever existed, nor were even attempted until after the Jews of Old Palestine had broken away in 1948 and struck out on their own; the Palestinians declaring 4-5 months later, and again in 1988, a day late and a dollar short - the usual outcome of incompetent Palestinian political activism.
You can't declare a State and a People RETROACTIVELY - not in the Real World, amongst practical men and women.
And that's what the foolish Palestinians and their sympathizers are trying to do here; declare a State and a People retroactively; conjuring-up all sorts of erzatz and humorous rationale for our amusement and dining pleasure... dinner AND a show!
Rather like the old 1960s movie, Cool Hand Luke...
Coming at the world with a handfulla nuthin...
Sometimes, nuthin can be a real cool hand...
Sometimes, not... as is the case here.
They keep hammering away at this Retroactive Nation and People idea, to no purpose...
And keep whining about ancient legalities and spin-doctored legal interpretations, as if that actually means anything in the Real World of today...
They do it because it's all they've got...
A handfulla nuthin...
A pair of deuces - one showin', one in the hole - with one card left to draw - at the Big Boys' poker table - and they've been 'called' and 'bumped'...
No wonder they're losing their shirt...
The fools don't know when to fold...