When I asked him whether he believed the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland, he said: “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.”Salman did not explicitly say that the Jewish people have the right to live in their own land, but that Israelis do.
Still, the comment was enough to really upset Palestinians.
In an editorial, Ma'an's editor Nasser Al-Laham can't even mention Crown Prince Salman's name, only calling him an "Arab leader," but he writes, "The Jews are not a people and they are not a nation. "
He is quite adamant about this, and later on he says why he believes that: "If we say that the Jews are a people, then there is no place for the Palestinian people on the land of Palestine."
In other words, the Palestinian position is that they must deny Jewish peoplehood in order for them to claim to be a people themselves, since people are attached to a land.
Meaning that the antisemitic position that there is no such thing as a Jewish people is an essential part of the belief in Palestinianism. The propaganda of a Palestinian people - a people wholly invented in the past century - is inherently antisemitic.
This is not the first time that Palestinians have made this position clear. In the Palestine Papers, this point is also made:
Recognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination. Those who assert this right also assert that the territory historically associated with this right of self-determination (i.e., the self-determination unit) is all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.Historic fact is not of interest. Palestinians cannot admit there is a Jewish people because it can negate their own claim to peoplehood and their own claim to rights to the land. Therefore, they must claim that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.
I wrote about the Palestine Papers for NewsRealBlog back in 2011 and the site is now defunct, so here is what I wrote then:
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When The Guardian and Al Jazeera released “The Palestine Papers,” they chose to write articles about a very small percentage of them — and then they twisted what the papers actually said to advance their agenda.
In fact, the papers have a lot of information that is quite newsworthy that the Guardian decided against publicizing — precisely because it makes the Palestinian Arab leaders look like fools, liars or both.
Here’s just one example out of many.
One paper is called “Talking Points on Recogntion [sic] of Jewish State,” where the PLO details its reasons for not accepting Israel as a Jewish state.
The paper includes an annex that discusses the implications of such recognition. One of them is:
Recognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination. Those who assert this right also assert that the territory historically associated with this right of self-determination (i.e., the self-determination unit) is all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.
There is no controversy over the existence of the Jewish people. The Jews have been recognized as a nation by the entire world for some 3000 years. (Here’s an example from 1850, and an anti-Semitic example from 1743.) The Koran seems to say it as well. It is simply a fact.
Which means that the official PLO position is to deny an undeniable fact because that fact may makes their negotiating position weaker!
Also, note that while they use as their reason for denying Jewish peoplehood the possibility that it might be used against them in negotiations over the Green Line, that same denial can be (and is) used by Palestinian Arabs to deny the Jewish right to self-determination anywhere.
Yasser Arafat and other senior PLO officials used to tell everyone that there was never a Temple in Jerusalem. The official Palestinian Authority Ministry of Information website had an article last year that denied that there was any Jewish connection to the Western Wall, a claim that was repeated in official PA media.
The fact is that any recognition that Jews have historical ties to the land of Israel is threatening to a “people” who have only sprung up in the last century. The very existence of a Jewish people is a natural extension of that fear.
As a result, the Palestinian Arab leaders must go to great lengths to ensure that they can lie consistently about the non-existence of the Jewish nation. After all, if self-determination is a human right, then the Jews have that right as well — but only if the Jews are a people.
Here we can see that the Palestinian Arabs know that their proposition is absurd, but they willingly choose to lie about a historical fact because the truth is uncomfortable to them.
Why should we believe them about anything else?