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Wednesday, November 27, 2013

So this is what "historic Palestine" looked like

I mentioned last night about the Chatham University photo archive that is online.

One of their photos, from between 1880 and 1900, is not a photo at all, but a map - a map of Palestine:



But Mahmoud Abbas and countless so-called supporters of Palestinians tell us that "historic Palestine" looked like this (graphic created by the PLO:)


Isn't that strange? Why do Palestinian Arabs choose a map with borders created by Western imperialists less than a hundred years ago to define the "historic homeland" that they claim they have lived in for thousands of years?

Are they saying that the people who lived across the Jordan river in 1890 were not Palestinian  -even though they lived in what was known then as eastern Palestine?

Just a wild thought, but perhaps this is related to the fact that the PLO's 1964 charter - before "occupation" explicitly excluded the West Bank and Gaza from the areas it claimed for a homeland.

For fun, just imagine if the Jews had been defeated in 1948 and the land was divided up between Jordan and Egypt. Would there be any Palestinian Arab nationalism today?

And if you answer "yes," then why don't they claim the areas of today's Jordan that were indeed part of historic Palestine?

UPDATE: My Right Word beat me to this.