For example, many now claim to be Jebusites, because the Hebrew Scripture says the Jebusites controlled Jerusalem before King David. There is no evidence of the Jebusite people outside the Jewish Tanach, and that same Tanach says that King David purchased the Temple Mount from them.
Many Palestinians tell Westerners nowadays that they are Canaanites. I've even seen some point to the Kanaan family as proof. Too bad that family traces its origins to...Syria. (The Kanani family name has nothing to do with Canaan and comes from Saudi Arabia.)
Back in 1947, though, the famed Syrian diplomat (and later prime minister) Faris Khoury gave what was considered the history of the Palestinian people to the UN.
And he said that they were Philistines.
During the First Special Session of the GA, exactly one year before Israel was reborn, he told the UN General Assembly:
Let us see who the Palestinians are who are now called the Arabs of Palestine. It is a fact which so of you may or may not know.
The Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of the same inhabitants of that country of forty centuries ago who fought in the first campaign which the Jews waged against Palestine in the fifteenth century before Christ. In the Bible, they are called the Philistines. After about the thirteenth century, they adopted the Arabic language, which was later replaced by the Syrian language, a language closely related to the former. These people have not changed. They are the same people who were living there then. They have been there for forty centuries—since prehistoric times.....The Jews remained for a very short time in Palestine. They occupied the eastern portion of it. The western portion of Palestine—and the best part of it—was still occupied and held by the Philistines, the remote fathers of the present people of Palestine.
In 1947, the most convenient origin story for Palestinian Arabs (note that Khoury never called them "Palestinians") was not that they were Canaanites, but Philistines. This was attractive for two reasons: one is that the Philistines fought the invading Jews, and the other is that the Philistines were not completely defeated by the Jews. (Being defeated by the Assyrians and Egyptians is not nearly as offensive.)
When a people change their own origin story to whatever is politically convenient, it indicates that all the origin stories are fiction.
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