In 1969, Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, said, “There was no such thing as Palestinians. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.”
So, is Palestine a legitimate nation containing a population with common customs, culture, tradition, history, and language? No it is not. More appropriately, the Palestinian refugees should be considered displaced Arabs who are pawns in a political game enacted by Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization and supported by the Arab and other Islamic Nations as a protest of Israeli sovereignty.
The term Palestine is actually derived from the name of the Philistines, a people of uncertain origins, possibly Aegean, who, in the 12th century BC, settled along the southern Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip and disappeared several centuries later. After crushing Bar Kokhba’s revolt, the Romans Latinized the hitherto seldom-used Greek name Palaestina and applied it to the entire region that had formerly included Iudaea Province (which combined Judea, Samaria, and Idumea). To Jews, the name had connotations of past conflicts. This was done to send a message to any remaining Jewish rebels that they were no longer the owners of the land. The Arabic toponym Filastin is derived from this name.
In historical contexts, especially predating the establishment of the State of Israel, Palestine was mostly a geographical term, particularly used in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and other languages taking their geographical vocabulary from them; it comprised the Roman sub-province of Syria Palaestina, roughly equivalent to ancient Canaan (including the Biblical kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Moab, Ammon, and Philistia) and thus included much of the land on either side of the Jordan River although with further political sub-divisions along the River Jordan valley .
Canaanites are considered to be among the the earliest inhabitants of the region today known as Palestine/Israel, Canaan being its earliest known denomination. Some of the Canaanites are believed to have migrated in the 3rd millennium BC from the inner Arabian Peninsula. Later, Hebrews (Israelites), Philistines, Romans, Arab Nabateans, Arab Ghassanids, Arabs, Crusaders, and other people have all settled in the region and some intermarried.
It wasn’t until the British Mandate of Palestine, that ultimately resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel, that a people known as Palestinian were even suggested.
Between 1922 and 1948, the term Palestine referred to the portion of the British Mandate of Palestine lying to the west of the Jordan River; that is, all of what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. It was used by both Arabs and Jews without any ethnic connotations. For example, the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli newspaper, was known as the Palestine Post from its founding in 1932 until 1950.
The rise of Zionism, a political movement started in Europe and Russia in the 19th century seeking to create a Jews homeland in Palestine, increased the trend of Jewish immigration. By 1920, the Jewish population of Palestine had reached 11% of the population.
In World War I, Turkey sided with Germany. As a result, it was embroiled in a conflict with Great Britain, leading to the British capture of Palestine. At the subsequent 1919 Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles, Turkey’s loss of its Middle East empire was formalized. The British had in the interim made two agreements. In the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence there was an undertaking to form an Arab state in exchange for the Great Arab Revolt and in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to “favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while respecting the rights of the indigeneous majority.
McMahon’s promises are seen by Arab nationalists as a pledge of immediate Arab independence, an undertaking violated by the region’s subsequent partition into British and French League of Nations mandates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 which became the real cornerstone of the geopolitics structuring the entire region. Prior to the conference Emir Faisal, British ally and son of the king of the Hijaz, had agreed in the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement to support the immigration of Jews into Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, while creating a large Arab state based in Syria. When the conference did not produce that Arab state, Faisal called instead for Palestine to become part of his new Arab Syrian kingdom.
In 1920 the Allied Supreme Council meeting at San Remo offered a Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain, but the borders and terms under which the mandate was to be held were not finalised until September 1922. Article 25 of the mandate specified that the eastern area (then known as Transjordan or Transjordania) did not have to be subject to all parts of the Mandate, notably the provisions regarding a Jewish national home. This was used by the British as one rationale to establish an Arab state, which it saw as at least partially fulfilling the undertakings in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. On April 11, 1921 the British passed administration of the eastern region to the Hashemite Arab dynasty from the Hejaz what later became part of Saudi Arabia as the Emirate of Transjordan and on 15 May 1923 recognized it as a state.
Under the Mandate, Jewish immigration to Cisjordan Palestine increased substantially with a rise in Jewish nationalism, which encouraged Zionism, a return to the ancient land of the Jews. Between 1922 and 1946, Jews went from less than 11% to 33% of the rapidly expanding population, due in part to an influx of Jewish refugees from Nazism in Europe and the refusal of the USA, France, Britain and other countries to allow Jewish immigration.
Palestinian Arab leaders strongly opposed the immigration. In 1936 the British Peel Commission advised that the western part of Palestine be divided between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs then launched the Great Uprising against British rule in an effort to end the immigration. The Jews, for their part, organized militia groups like the Irgun and Lehi to fight the British and the Haganah and Palmach to fight the Arabs. By the time order was restored in March of 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Britons were killed.
Conflict between Palestinian nationalists and various types of pan-Arabists continued during the British Mandate, but the latter became increasingly marginalised. The most prominent leader of the Palestinain nationalists was Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By 1937, only one of the many Arab political parties in Palestine (the Istiqlal party) promoted political absorption into a greater Arab nation as its main agenda. During World War II, al-Husayni maintained close relations with Nazi officials seeking German support for an independent Palestine. However, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War resulted in those parts of Palestine which were not part of Israel being occupied by Egypt and Jordan.
The idea of an independent nationality for Palestinian Arabs was greatly boosted by the 1967 Six Day War in which these lands were conquered by Israel; instead of being ruled by different Arab states encouraging them to think of themselves as Jordanians or Egyptians, those in the West Bank and Gaza were now ruled by a state with no desire to make them think of themselves as Israelis, and an active interest in discouraging them from regarding themselves as Egyptians, Jordanians, or Syrians. Moreover, the natives of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip now shared many interests and problems in common with each other that they did not share with the neighboring countries.
During the few decades after the State of Israel came into existence, Palestinian expressions of pan-Arabism could be heard from time to time, but usually under outside influence. This was particularly true in Syria under the influence of the Baath party. For example, Zuhayr Muhsin, the leader of the Syrian-funded as-Sa’iqa Palestinian faction and its representative on the PLO Executive Committee, told a Dutch newspaper in 1977 that “There is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. It is for political reasons only that we carefully emphasize our Palestinian identity.”
Golda Meir was right.
Today the existence of a unique Palestinian nationality is generally recognized. This is due to the gradualness of the creation of a unique Palestinian national identity (as opposed to a regional Arab identity). A result of the mechanizations of morally corrupt Arab and other religiously-blinded Islamic leaders for reasons of political convenience. These leaders don’t care about the displaced Arabs living in the contested region and likely would not welcome them into their own country. We caudal them at our own peril.
References
“Palestinian.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 2007. Answers.com 03 Jun. 2007. http://www.answers.com/topic/palestinian-3
“Definitions of Palestine and Palestinian.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 2007. Answers.com 03 Jun. 2007. http://www.answers.com/topic/
definitions-of-palestine-and-palestinian
(photo by Caleb Simpson/US Presswire)
Photo: Rolando Villazón and Anna Netrebko in L’Elisir d’Amore.
First, a statement on Korean artists, “To succeed in music, it is important to have qualities that burn, an aggressive and competitive fire.” Koreans have this character. I see it in their appreciation of beauty…not just of music, but of art in general and even nature. I’m reminded of the a reed field I visited outside of Gunsan. There was a path that meandered through this huge reed field and every once in a while there was a post of carved wood with a poem or thought in Korean etched upon it. 
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