Michael #fundie

Michael #fundie aish.com

It's almost funny if it were not so tragic. There is no such thing and never has been a Palestinian people. The so-called Palestinians of today were manufactured back in the late 1960's and early 1970's, weaponized with one goal in mind-the destruction of Israel and the eradication of its Jewish and Christian population.

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old comment by Hasan Prishtina

It is true that, until the 1950s and 1960s, the Arabs who lived in Palestine usually called themselves Syrians. There is nothing odd about this: people throughout what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel/Palestine traditionally thought of themselves as Syrian. It is also true that in the 1930s and 1940s, the people called "Palestinians" were mostly Jewish.

However, that does not mean that new national identities cannot emerge and Palestinian national identity is manufactured because all national identity is manufactured. The Palestinian people are real, no more or less real that the Israeli people, and you had better get used to it.

old comment by checkmate

The so-called Palestinians of today were manufactured back in the late 1960's and early 1970's

What is true is that many of the States in the Middle East didn't exist as such with formal boundries, formal state names etc. They were indeed formed by the British (and others) as part of end of the Ottoman Empire. Remember "Lawrence of Arabia"?

This goes for Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, etc.

However, the peoples of those regions did exist. Where on Earth do you think the British came up with the name "Palestine"? Out of the blue? No, those states existed as tribes, peoples, cultures, etc., just not in the formalized Western sense.

Take a look at any map of the Near East. Does anybody really believe those perfectly straight borders are ancient? No, they were created with pencils on maps by the French and the Britsh. Many of the present conflicts in the Near East are based on the phoney borders, lopping up people together in sates that were fabricated from the outside. Iraq and Syria are perfect examples.

But, the Palestinians as a people are very ancient. And they have the same right to the area called "Israel" today as do the Jews.

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

@ checkmate

1) It wasn't the British that came up with the name 'Palestine.' It was used by the Romans to describe the province of their empire there. The use of Roman names of provinces to describe modern countries is not limited to the Middle East: Belgium, Spain and the commonly used name of Switzerland - Helvetia - are all based on Roman names rather than the peoples who live there.
2) Syria does have a strong regional identity that traditionally covered all of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel/Palestine. This is nothing to do with lines drawn in the sand but more to do with Damascus being the major political and economic center of a region without those line. Indeed, all the area was part of the Ottoman vilayet of Damascus.
3) There are a lot of contemporary accounts, travel writings, histories and Ottoman documents from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that cover the area, yet none of them mention any distinct Arab peoples besides the Syrians, the Bedouin and the Druze.
4) Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian ideas of being distinct are much more recent. Lebanese identity grew after the French split the area off from Syria, Jordanian identity after the British split Transjordan off from Palestine. Palestinian identity grew not just in reaction to Zionism but especially with Jordan's loss of the West Bank in 1967 and the war between Jordan and the PLO in 1970.
5) The Israeli people did not exist before 1948; as I said earlier, the people now called Israelis were called 'the Palestinians' before independence. There is no shame in having a national identity of recent origin; that is true for most of the world's peoples. Indeed, there are hardly any national identities that are over 500 years old: in 1515, there was no real French or German or Italian or British identity, and even in 1905, the Japanese government had to teach its soldiers to feel Japanese before they were sent off to fight the Russians. The fact is that national identity is largely a product of the modern age.

Michael #fundie aish.com

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