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Thursday, June 26, 2025

An Arabic-language tweet by @bararit saying that there was never a Palestinian state is roiling the Arab world

Idit Bar, a researcher on the Arab world, made a video that mentions the well-known facts that there was never an independent Palestinian state - no flag, no leader, no passports, no currency.

But  she did it in Arabic. And this is upsetting a lot of people.



They tell you since you were young that the Jews stole our land, the Jews occupied Palestine, okay let me understand just how can land be stolen from someone who didn’t even have a state.. A Palestinian state? In what year? Give me just one year, who was its president? What was the name of the currency? What was the color of the passport? No, it’s just a slogan they invented in the sixties like a clothing brand but without the clothes, like the funkoush from Adel Emam’s movie..

These are the harsh facts. Palestine? Palestine was a temporary British administrative name, not a country, not Arab, and not an independent entity. There were always Jews there, from the time of the Romans, through the Turkish colonization, up until the British. Despite the restrictions, the expulsion, and the massacres, the Jews continued to exist, not as guests of the indigenous population. You want the truth, or its cousin?

Let me shock you, the Zionists tried to avoid war and agreed to the partition plan in 1947, and the Arabs refused and sent five armies to wipe out the new state, and Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha promised to exterminate the Jews of Palestine, and what happened? Whoever is crying 'Nakba' today forgets who started the war. As the saying goes: 'He who opens the door to the wind has no one to blame but himself.' In short, we did not steal the land, we returned to our land. If this hurts you, then the fault lies not with history, but with the big lie that you believed.

Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris called on prominent Arab historians to respond to this video, saying,  “I hope that distinguished Arab historians will prepare a documented response that does not contradict any facts, if it is fair, because this point of view, although it contains some facts, also neglects and avoids historical facts.” He  added: “I myself saw a currency bearing the name Palestine and a travel document bearing the name Palestine.”

Of course, the currency and passport he saw was British and included Hebrew.


Sawiris' response is having a boomerang effect - it has given Bar's video far more views than it would have had otherwise.

The video has half a million views so far, and Arabs are distraught - but cannot find arguments against it, instead posting photos of British Mandate currency, or talking about how the name Palestine is older (of course it is - but that is not a nation) or that Palestinian Arab nationalism pre-dates 1948 (yes, by merely a few decades, but only in response to Zionism, not as a true independence movement.) 

CNN Arabic is reporting on this, as well as major Egyptian media




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