Who are the Palestinians? 

The following was sent to me by a supporter of the Jews. You might like to peruse it.

One thing I always make clear but which is always avoided. The following refers to the real Jews and not those who were converted to Judaism and had no blood ties to Israel and are now the dominant force in Israel. The Semetic Jews constitute anything between 10 and 20% of the population and I believe have very little say in Jewish affairs.

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By Hal Lindsey
WorldNetDaily
July 10, 2003

One of the most misunderstood issues today is the question of "Who are the Palestinians"?  The truth about this matter has been so deliberately obscured that even to raise the question will seem strange to most readers.

In my book, " The Everlasting Hatred, the Roots of Jihad ," I trace the history of the people now being called the "Palestinians."  The land of Israel became known as Palestine after the Roman destruction of Israel in A.D. 70.  It was ruled by many different invaders for the following 19 centuries.

In the 7th century, the Muslims took control of Palestine for the first time.  From A.D. 635 until 1917, the Muslims ruled it, with only a few interruptions by the European Crusaders.  During that span of time, the land was reduced to total desolation.  Many people who traveled the land in the 19th century remarked on the fact that Palestine was as desolate as the moon and very few people lived there.

In 1867, Mark Twain remarked about his visit to the Holy Land in his book, "The Innocents Abroad."  He lamented, "Stirring scenes occur in the valley [of Jezreel] no more.  There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent  not for 30 miles in either direction.  There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation.  One may ride 10 miles hereabouts and not see 10 human beings."

By all eyewitness accounts of that era, Palestine was a total desolation.  There were virtually no trees and no people.  Because of lack of trees, the weather changed and it rarely ever rained.  The irrigation systems of the once fertile valleys were all destroyed, rendering most areas into malaria-ridden swamps.  The terraces of the mountainsides were torn down, causing terrible erosion that left only barren rocks.  This was the condition of Palestine by the beginning of the 19th century.

It was at this time that Jews began to flee severe persecutions in Russia and Eastern Europe.  In the mid-1800s, some Jews came to Palestine and, with the generous aid of some successful Jews like the Rothschilds, began to buy property from Muslim Ottoman Turks.  The Muslims thought the land was worthless anyway, so they sold it to the "dumb Jews" for extremely inflated prices.

To everyone's amazement, the Jews were very successful at reclaiming the land.  Many of them died from malaria and the rigorous life the work demanded, but they performed an agricultural miracle that made the land very productive again.  As a result of their success, poor migrant workers from the surrounding Muslim countries began to flood in to work for the Jews.  The Jews literally became victims of their own success  almost all of the people calling themselves "Palestinians" today are the descendants of those migrant workers.

Much more is said and documented on this subject in my book.  But the main point is this: The Muslims have repeatedly shown they understand these things.  Since they know that the so-called "Palestinians" are not a homogeneous people, but rather a mixed conglomerate of workers with no cohesive organizational or political skills, they have repeatedly not given them a state.

When the Hashemite Tribe, who were rulers over Mecca and Medina for centuries, were driven out by the Saudis, the British gave them control over the vastly greater numbers of "migrant workers" in Trans Jordan.  The British said this would be, in effect, "The State of Palestine."  Instead, the Hashemites, who make up only about 20 percent of the population, turned it into their own kingdom and called it the Kingdom of Jordan.

When the Jordanians and Egyptians controlled the so-called West Bank and the Gaza Strip for 19 years (1948 to 1967), there was never a thought of giving the disorganized mass of "migrant workers" a state.  Why?  Because they knew there was no cohesive, homogeneous people known as "Palestinians."

The current efforts of Jordan and Egypt (and all the rest of the Muslim Middle East nations) to give these same people a state is clearly a ploy to get a foothold inside Israel.  It is a strategic accommodation to establish a base from which the final assault against Israel can be made.  What they couldn't do militarily is now being facilitated through the United States and the E.U.

Muslims will never accept a permanent presence of infidels in what they claim is sacred Islamic soil.  Especially Jewish infidels for which the Koran reserves its most vehement condemnations.  In their minds, the Koran and Allah will not let them accept Jews in what they view as their third holiest site.

The United States had better learn these things, or we will find ourselves guilty of facilitating the destruction of God's people, to whom the Word of God says the land belongs forever.  God will not let that happen, but He will certainly judge those who have any part in trying to do it.

God warned: "Therefore thus says the Lord God: 'Surely I have spoken in My burning jealousy against the rest of the nations and against all Edom [Arabs], who took MY LAND to themselves as a possession, with whole-hearted joy and spiteful minds, in order to plunder its open country ... But you, O mountains of Israel, you shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit to MY PEOPLE ISRAEL, for they are about to come.'" (Ezekiel 36: 5, 8 NKJ)

Hal Lindsey is the best-selling author of 20 books, including "Late Great Planet Earth." He writes this weekly column exclusively for WorldNetDaily.

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A little bit of history to help your education:
 
A FEW UNFASHIONABLE FACTS WORTH KNOWING ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST
The Arabs Stole Palestine from the Jews, and not the other way around!

By Steven Plaut

1. Nationhood and Jerusalem. Israel became a nation-state in 1312 B.C, 2,000 years before the rise of Islam, and was a nation before that.

2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C., the Jews have had dominion over the land for 1,000 years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

4. The Arabs conquered Palestine in 635 AD, stealing it from its legitimate Jewish rulers, who had evicted the Byzantines while being led by a woman general, one Hefzibah, who then restored Jewish sovereignty. Palestine was stolen from the Jews by the Arabs and not the other way around. Arab sovereignty over Palestine ended in 1071 when the area was conquered by Seljuk Turks. Palestinian Arabs never held sovereignty over and cannot even pronounce the name of their supposed homeland.

5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Qur'an (Koran).

7. King David founded the Jewish city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.

8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.

9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.

10. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.

11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be between 400,000 and 630,000, many of whom in fact were allowed to return after the Israeli war of Independence ended.. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands was much larger.

12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, the Arabs are the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country smaller than the state of New Jersey.

13. The Arab - Israeli Conflict: The Arabs are represented by 22 independent states, not including what Israel has offered the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended herself each time and won.

14. The PLO's Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. In the 1990s Israel gave the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them with weapons.

15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

16. The United Nations (U.N.) Record on Israel and the Arabs: Of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.

17. Of the 690 U.N. General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.

18. The U.N. was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians. Kind of like its silence over the massacres of Algerians or Sudanese by Arab fascists.

19. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

20. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting their holy sites at the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Similar discrimination against Jews has continued under Israeli rule.



Brief background to the region of what today is called Iraq:

Modern Iraq is basically the area of ancient Mesopotamia of the Old Testament, the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates and inhabited by 6000BC mainly by migrants from the Turkish and Iranian highlands. Sumer is the ancient name of southern Mesopotamia populated by a mixture of ethnic and linguistic groups – hence the Sumerians. As a result of the volatility of the two rivers the Sumerians evolved a system of collective management to prevent flooding and a process of urbanisation evolved into the Sumerian Civilisation. As a result, Sumerian legacies include writing, irrigation, the wheel, astronomy, and literature. The Sumerians created cuneiform and were hence able to record agricultural techniques and literature such as the epic of Gilgamesh, who was king of the city-state of Uruk in approximately 2700 B.C. This is a story of the King’s deep sorrow at the death of his friend and of his consequent search for immortality.

The precariousness of existence led to a highly developed sense of religion. Cult centres such as Eridu, dating back to 5000 B.C., served as important centres of pilgrimage and devotion even before the rise of Sumer. Many of the most important Mesopotamian cities emerged in areas surrounding the pre-Sumerian cult centers, thus reinforcing the close relationship between religion and government.
The Sumerians were pantheistic; their gods personified local elements and natural forces with security and prosperity gained by sacrifice and ritual. Property belonged to the gods so political decisions were also governed by priests who ruled from temples called ziggurats, which were mounds of sun baked brick with external stairs leading to a shrine on top of the mound. The priests were also involved in science with the number 60 being their basic unit of calculation, evolving concepts such as the minutes of an hour and degrees of a circle. Such development led to the growth of large cities which included Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, where the development of bricks facilitated the building of the large ziggurat of Ur. The Sumerians developed war technology such as the wheeled chariot and by the third millennium BC discovered that tin and copper when smelted together produced bronze, a more durable metal for the manufacture of weapons.

In about 859 BC the region was controlled by the Assyrians who had reached the Mediterranean and by 612 BC the Chaldeans ruled the entire region including Syria and Palestine. King Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 B.C.) conquered the kingdom of Judah, and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C. The Chaldeans sought to reestablish Babylon as the most magnificent city of the Near East and created the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Because of an estrangement of the priesthood from the king, however, the monarchy was severely weakened, and it was unable to withstand the rising power of Achaemenid Iran. In 539 B.C., Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great (550-530 B.C.). In addition to incorporating Babylon into the Iranian empire, Cyrus the Great released the Jews who had been held in captivity there. During this Iranian rule management and trade diminished and the region known as the ninth satrapy of the Persian Empire became impoverished. The demography was altered and Aramaic became the official language. The Iranian forces in Babylon surrendered to Alexander the Great of Macedon in 331 B.C. marking the beginning of Greek period following which Babylon lost its importance as the centre of the civilized world when political and economic activity shifted to the Mediterranean, where it was destined to remain for many centuries.

In 126 B.C., the Parthians (or Arsacids), a nomadic people from the steppes of Turkestan to northeastern Iran, having previously conquered Iran captured the Tigris-Euphrates river valley and the controlled all trade between the East and the Greco-Roman world. The population of Mesopotamia was enlarged, chiefly by Arabs, Iranians, and Aramaeans. With the exception of the Roman occupation under Trajan (A.D. 98- 117) and Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), the Arsacids ruled until a new force of native Iranian rulers, the Sassanids, conquered the region in A.D. 227. The Sassanids neglected Mesopotamia and its empire fell to Muslim Arab warriors. The Sumero-Akkadian civilization was entirely extinguished and Mesopotamia was in ruins.

The start if Islam:

In the sixth century A.D. Muhammad, a member of the Hashimiteclan of the powerful Quraysh tribe of Mecca (same background as the current king of Jordan), claimed prophethood and began gathering adherents for the monotheistic faith of Islam. The conversion of Arabia proved to be the most difficult of the Islamic conquests because of entrenched tribalism. Within one year of Muhammad's death in 632AD, Arabia was secure enough for Muhammad's successor, Abu Bakr (632-634 AD), his first caliph and the father-in-law, to begin the campaign against the Byzantine and Sassanid Empire.

Abu Bakr’s general ordered the peoples of Mesopotamia (Iraqi’s who were mostly Christian) to: "Accept the faith (Islam) and you are safe; otherwise pay tribute (jizya – a safety tax paid by non Muslims living in Muslims areas). If you refuse to do either, you have only yourself to blame. A people is already upon you, loving death as you love life." Arabic replaced Persian as the official language, and slowly filtered into common usage. Iraqis intermarried with Arabs and converted to Islam.

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So now you have heard of that the very foundation of Islam is death to Infidels, note that the very first were not Jews! This is just a sample of the very beginnings of Islam. Perhaps you ought to read more widely rather than simply taking on board the sound-bites of a potted history spread by the ill informed media.

You can also see that the origins of the Moslems is not in ancient Israel. Indeed Palestinians under the British Mandate rule which spread over a region that today is known of as Israel, Jordan and the so called "occupied territories" comprised all the citizens of that region which included Arabs (both Moslem and Christian), Jews, non Arab Christians, Bahai, Armenian and a few others. All of these people were known of as Palestinian and not only the Arabs who since 1967 claimed that name for themselves.

On partition the Arab state was to be the region today known of as Jordan (population 80% of what today are called Palestinian, 20% Hashemite, descendants of the ancient Mohammedans) and the Jewish state of Israel. In 1948 The West Bank was a part of Jordan and Gaza was a part of Egypt and the populations of those regions had been made Judenfrei comprising mostly then of very poor Arabs, kept poor by their own governments as a tool with which to whip Israel. After 1967 when Israel took control of those regions, those poor Arabs found their lot improving by the second because for the first time Israel installed sewers, electricity, roads, schools, hospitals and gave their population work. It is a fact that many ordinary Arabs in those regions would rather have Israeli passports than any future Palestinian citizenship. They know where they are better off far more than you do.
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Leo Pinsker spoke of the need for the "autoemancipation" of the Jews, the perpetual, unwanted guest--never host--ghost people, even before the harsh realities of a supposedly enlightened France opened Theodore Herzl's eyes. The Dreyfus Affair would soon lead Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, to write Der Judenstat...The Jewish State. Jabotinsky, likewise, understood all of this as well when he spoke of the Jewish condition both during the pre-and mandatory period for Palestine.

That Arabs would want to make Palestine their 6th, 7th, or 8th state (today #22 or #23) made perfect sense to Jabotinsky. But Jews didn't have this luxury. For them, the familiar pattern of millennial existence-- most lately and violently manifested in the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia and hints of what was yet to come in Germany--added desperation and necessity to the quest for the rebirth of their own sole state. And while the frightened mellahs of dhimmi Jewish existence in the Arab/Muslim world experienced no "Holocaust" per se, their experience over the ages was also not without memories of massacres, forced conversions, subjugation, humiliation, and existence as kilab yahud "Jew dogs" of their neighbors.

While it is true that the suicide/homicide bomber who today deliberately kills innocents also does this out of "passion" and "desperation," Jabotinsky saw the difference...something that too many others today still don't--or won't-- see. There was no need for this situation to have arisen among the Arabs.

There are those today who like to make the argument, "if Jews can have a state, why not Palestinians?" For some, this is simply an honest slip of ignorance. But for far too many others--academics included--it represents something far worse, for they know better. While I won't get into an argument over whether a distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism exists today, it certainly didn't exist before the rise of modern political Zionism. In fact, the former arose specifically to negate the latter. There's volumes of evidence to support this. Virtually all the writings of politically conscious Arabs on the eve of the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire spoke of a greater Syrian Arab or Pan Arab identity. The "Palestinians" were the Jews.

When the Middle East and North Africa were being divided after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the hopes and dreams of many diverse subject peoples were once again reawakened. Britain's Sir Mark Sykes, America's President Woodrow Wilson, and others fueled the fires with talk of self determination for those populations. Arabs made out very well in the long term aftermath. Unfortunately, they refused to grant anyone else even the right to think in such terms in what they declared to be "purely Arab patrimony"... be they Kurd, Jew, Berber, black African Sudanese, or whomever..

Since Muhammad and successor imperial Arab armies had also once conquered much of the region (occupying and settling much of it), they saw themselves as the sole legitimate heirs to the Turks. We're still living with the results of this mindset today. The majority Berbers' language and culture have been largely "outlawed" in North Africa. A reading of the Kurdish nationalist Ismet Cherif Vanly's book, The Syrian 'Mein Kampf' Against the Kurds (Amsterdam 1968), is instructive as well. Two million Black African Sudanese have been killed, maimed, enslaved, and such resisting this forced Arabization; and nothing further needs to be said regarding similar attitudes Arabs have had regarding the mere thought of kilab yahud Jews--half of whom were refugees themselves from Arab/Muslim lands--having any such political rights in the Dar al-Islam.

None other than the eminent Arab historian, Philip Hitti, had this to say about the matter in his History of the Arabs: "This bipartite (Arab) division of the world into an abode of peace and an abode of war finds parallel in the communistic theory of Soviet Russia."

When, in 1922, the British divided the original land of the Mandate for Palestine they received on April 25, 1920 so that all of the territory east of the Jordan River was excluded from the Jews (an act Emir Abdullah attributed to Allah in his memoirs) -- 80% of the total area-- a story has it that Jabotinsky remained silent. Many, including the British, expected "otherwise," to say the least. Later, when he was asked why he did not speak up after Colonial Secretary Churchill's machinations, he explained that he wanted to prove the same point that Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David and Taba seventy-eight years later did: It didn't matter to Arabs how big a Jewish State was. Any Israel, regardless of size, would not be tolerated. Arabs refused a much-truncated Jewish State after their acquisition of Transjordan in 1922 the same way Arafat insisted that a 9-mile wide Israel, left in peace, was still too much to ask for. Abbas and his fellow Arafatians offer, instead, in their own videotaped words, an updated version of the "peace of the Quraysh," the pagan tribe the Muslim Prophet, Muhammad, made a temporary truce--a hudna-- with until he gained the strength to deal the final blow.

While it's been stated over and over a thousand times, it needs to be said yet again. The passion of the Arab homicide bomber was born because Arabs used their own people as pawns in a political game to deny Jews a tiny sliver of the rights so fervently demanded for themselves. It's not a matter of Jews wanting to deny "stateless Palestinians" a nation, yet that is often how Israel's detractors portray the situation. In their attempt to create their additional state--on the ashes of Israel, not along side it--Arabs came to realize that it would make better press to speak in terms of creating a state for "stateless Palestinians" than calling for the creation of a 22nd or 23rd Arab state at the expense of the one of the Jews.

Listen to Zuheir Mohsein, official with the PLO's military wing and Executive Council, in his interview with the Dutch newspaper, Trouw, on 3/31/77:

"There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, etc...It is only for political reasons that we now carefully underline Palestinian identity....this serves only a tactical purpose...a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."

In contrast, the passion of the Jew grew out of millennia of exile, massacres, forced conversions, demonetization, dehumanization, ghettoization, expulsions, inquisitions, blood libels, existence as kilab yahud and/or "deicide people," the Holocaust, and--as Pinsker eloquently put it in the late 19th century--his status as perpetual stranger in someone else's land.

Hundreds of millions of people became refugees over the last two centuries....many resulting from the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India at the same time a similar partition was planned for Arabs and Jews in Palestine. There would have been no Arab refugees had they accepted the 1947 U.N. partition of the 20% of the land left into a Jewish and another Arab state, the latter having already received the lion's share of the land with the creation of Transjordan in 1922.

Arabs rejected the partition and invaded a newborn, minuscule Israel instead from the surrounding countries...hence the Arab refugees. Before this, Arabs came pouring into Palestine--due to the economic development by the Jews--from all over the Arab world, but especially from Egypt and Syria...Arab settlers building Arab settlements in the land. Scores of thousands were recorded, in just a brief period of time, by the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, coming in from Syria alone.

Regarding the one half of Israel's Jewish population who were refugees themselves from Arab/Muslim lands, here's what Sabri Jiryis, Palestinian Arab researcher at the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut, had to say about this in the publication, Al-Nahar, on 5/15/75:

"This is hardly the place to describe how the Jews of Arab states were driven out...how they were shamefully deported to Israel after their property had been confiscated...actually, therefore, what happened was only a kind of 'population and property exchange,' and each party must bear the consequences."

President Bush, in his official April 2004 response to Prime Minister Sharon's Gaza Plan, addressed the refugee issue nicely: Israel would not be required to commit national suicide by absorbing the descendants of real or alleged Arab refugees.

Now, if the State Department doesn't muddy the waters with Foggy doublespeak in an attempt to emasculate the potential for good Mr. Bush's earlier statement can bring about by requiring the Arabs to dismiss their pipedream of Israel being delivered up to them on a silver platter a la Czechoslovakia 1938, real progress towards peace might actually become possible.

Unfortunately, Arafat's "moderate " successor, Mahmoud Abbas, while dressed in a coat and tie and a practitioner of the sugar-coated word, still has such ultimate plans in mind and openly ran for office on a platform calling for Israel's destruction...but "by other means." His recent deployment of police in Gaza to ward off a major Israeli offensive in response to the latest Arab atrocity--committed under his watch--must thus be understood within this broader context as well.

Arabs could have had their additional state decades ago. The sad reality, however, is that poll after poll taken amongst them still show that even if Israel caved in to virtually all of their demands regarding the disputed territories, as in Jabotinsky's day, it still would not make a difference in terms of their acceptance of the sole Jewish State. It would simply turn Arafat's "peace of the Quraysh" into reality.