Palestinians are Philistines, Canaanites, Jebusites, Arabs, and now Philistines again!

Ibrahim Abrash, writing in Palestinian news site Amad, says that Bezalel Smotrich is ignoring the Jewish Scripture when he says there were no such thing as the Palestinian people. 

Because look at the many times that the Torah mentions Philistines and the Land of the Philistines!

It's been a while since Palestinians claimed to be Philistines. It was a common claim at the UN in the 1940s, when the Syrian representative stated, "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."

(Note his backhanded way of saying that Palestine is really a part of Greater Syria.)

The claim that Palestinians were Syrians became less popular as the term "philistine" in English is equated with narrow-mindedness and being uncultured. 

The obvious next move was for Palestinians to claim to be Canaanites, because that way they can say that the Jews ethically cleansed them twice, and Canaanites were definitely in the bulk of the Land of Israel before the Jews.

But when Jerusalem became an issue, Palestinians suddenly became Jebusites, a people who have no independent known history outside the Torah. But they lived around Jerusalem, so therefore Palestinians must have been Jebusites.

Of course, the same Bible that says Jebusites existed says that they legally sold Jerusalem to King David.

Notice that there is never the slightest bit of historical, scientific, linguistic or cultural evidence for these contradictory and supposedly unbroken histories of Palestinians.

So now we are back to Philistines, since that is the most convenient lie for the current threat. 

Any lie will do, as long as they counter Jews' claims. 

Which reminds me of a recent comic of mine:

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Smotrich is right - there were no Arabs who identified as Palestinian a century ago (update: few)

From Times of Israel:

Far-right lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday that the Palestinian people were “an invention” from the past century and that people like himself and his grandparents were the “real Palestinians.”

Speaking in Paris... Smotrich said there was “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people,” a comment that was met with applause and cheers from attendees, as seen in a video from the event posted online.

“Do you know who are the Palestinians?” asked the head of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party and Israel’s finance minister. “I’m Palestinian,” he said, also mentioning his grandmother who was born in the northern Israeli town of Metula 100 years ago, and his grandfather, a 13th-generation Jerusalemite as the “real Palestinians.”

We've discussed this topic many times before, and Smotrich is correct. Palestinian identity is a response to Zionism. Palestinian "culture" is a modern invention, and one that is explicitly political. 

Here's an Ottoman map of the region from a 1913 work "Jughrafiya-i Osmani" that doesn't even say Palestine. 

Even though there was no subdistrict of the Ottoman Empire known as "Palestine," one would expect every map to at least mention it if it was so important. 

But there is another piece of evidence that shows that there was no historic Palestinian people - and that is their surnames.

Even among Palestinians, you can see lots of surnames that show where they originated - al-Masri from Egypt, al-Sham from Syria, al-Hindi from India, al-Mughrabi from Morocco, al-Turki, al-Yamani, and dozens of others.

Have you ever heard of anyone with the name al-Filastini? 

I think I may have seen it once or twice, but it is exceedingly rare. Looking through Facebook, I see lots of people who claim that name but they all seem to be pseudonyms - I couldn't find one who listed a relative with the same name. I certainly cannot find anyone with that name in old newspapers or books. 

This indicates that even as Arabs would happily take on the names of the cities or even regions they were from (like al-Haurani from the Hauran region of Syria) essentially no one ever thought of themselves as "Palestinian." Nabulsi from Nablus, sure - but Filastini? Essentially no one. 

No one can rewrite the history of their family surnames. And when we see so many Arabic surnames that proudly describe where they came from, and practically none say "Filastini," you know that nearly none identified as Palestinian. 

UPDATE: I should say "few." Zachary Foster has traced the beginnings of the term Palestinians to refer to the Arabs of Palestine in Arabic and he finds they began at the turn of the twentieth century, largely but not only as a response to Zionism.  (h/.t Yoel)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More