A Palestinian op-ed published yesterday by Shehab News Agency is titled "I Am Not Canaanite," and its argument is more revealing than its author intends.
The writer scolds fellow Palestinians who claim descent from the ancient Canaanites as a way to trump the Jewish historical claim. His objection: that move concedes too much. If the Middle East belongs to Canaanites, Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Akkadians, then it belongs to a pre-Islamic, pre-Arab world — and Jews are simply one more ancient people with a legitimate claim. He prefers a different history, one that begins with the Islamic conquests and ends with Arab Muslims as the rightful and permanent owners of the land.
The irony writes itself. The author is perfectly willing to invoke Islamic conquest as the foundation of Arab title to the lands — the armies that swept out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century and subjugated the entire region. Conquest, in his framework, is a legitimate way to claim land.
But only when Arabs do it.
The problem with Zionism, by this same logic, is simply that the wrong people won.
If military conquest confers title, Israel's claim is stronger than anyone's. Israel won its independence in 1948 against the combined armies of five Arab states that had just declared their intention to destroy the nascent state. It won the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 in a defensive war launched after Egypt blockaded Israeli shipping and massed troops on the border. The doctrine that military victory in defensive war creates illegitimate possession is a rule that appeared, conveniently, the moment Jews started winning.
This is the same logic exposed in the Palestine Papers, the leaked PLO negotiation documents from 2011. Palestinian negotiators refused to acknowledge the existence of the Jewish people as a people. They didn't have any historic proofs or any real academic theory of ethnogenesis. The "moderate" PLO negotiators stated their reasons explicitly: acknowledging Jewish peoplehood would immediately generate Jewish claims to self-determination and historical connection to the land. The conclusion had to be reached first; the history was reverse-engineered to support it.
The pattern is consistent enough to function as a rule: whatever historical framework makes Jews look like they don't belong, adopt it. If Khazar theory serves the purpose, use it. If denying Jewish peoplehood serves the purpose, use that. If Canaanite ancestry seems useful, claim it — until someone points out that it validates pre-Islamic identities across the whole region, at which point write an op-ed explaining why you were never Canaanite after all. A few decades ago Palestinians claimed to be descended from Philistines until they realized that argument didn't work well in the West where the word is a epithet; they then switched to pretend to be Jebusites, a tribe that no one has any record of outside of Jewish scripture - but if the Jebusites controlled Jerusalem before Jews, then Palestinians must be them.
The author of the piece freely admits that his roots might lie in Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, or North Africa — that Palestinians are "results of Islamic history that extended from the land of Sind to the land of Andalusia." This is the most honest paragraph in the piece. He is describing an empire built by conquest, whose legacy he is happy to claim when it suits him and to discard when it doesn't. He is saying what every honest historian and most Palestinian families say about themselves — they are proudly descended from elsewhere.
But they never say this in English.
Against this selective history, the Jewish case rests on three independent foundations, each sufficient on its own. The historical claim is one of the oldest continuous documented connections any living people has to any territory on earth — archaeological, linguistic, genetic, and literary, running unbroken from the Bronze Age through the present. The legal claim derives from the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration and made the establishment of a Jewish national home a binding obligation of international law — the same international legal order that created Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. The military claim is the record of wars fought and won in self-defense against opponents whose stated goal was annihilation.
The Shehab author is right that history matters. He and other Palestinians just want people to choose a retrograde history that fit their political aims at the moment.
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