discuss

For starters we’ll break the issue into several simple components: When did the “Palestinian people” emerge? Which ancient chronicles preserved first mentions of it? Where the thesaurus of the “Palestinian language” can be purchased? Where can “Palestinian folktales” be read? “Palestinian songs” be heard, “Palestinian folkdances” be enjoyed? What city was once upon a time the capital of the “Palestinian state”? And if an issue of the “liberation of Palestine” occurred, who and when seized it? And what were the borders of this “state” as of the moment of the “aggression” and “occupation”?

These are very simple questions. What is complex and inexplicable to me personally is why educated and apparently decent people for years on end repeat and multiply a clear and in substance inciting stupidity?

Palestine (a strip of land, 60-80 km-wide, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River) is a geographic concept. Same as Balkans, Scandinavia or the Caucasus. A word combination “Palestinian people” is as wild a nonsense as a “person of the Caucasus nationality”, the “Scandinavian language” or the “Mosque of the Notre Dame of Paris”. A hundred thousand Slavs, former USSR citizens, who resettled to Israel together with their Jewish husbands and wives, have exactly the same reason to call themselves “Palestinians” as the Circassians, Druses, Bosnians and Greeks… Even the very word “Palestine” has nothing to do with the Semites (Jews and Arabs). The Romans who conquered this region in the beginning of the Common Era called their new province after the Philistines (“Plishtim” in Hebrew), ancient and by that time extinct people of seafarers and merchants.

There is no, and had never been any “Palestinian language”. As for the Arabs residing west of the Jordan River, they speak the same Arabic dialect (called “Syrian” by the philologists) as the Arabs east of the Jordan River, in the Kingdom of Jordan and the Arabs of Syria and Lebanon. Even natives of Kostroma and Belgorod have greater differences in the pronunciation than the so-called “Palestinians” and the other Arabs in the region. There has never been an Arab “Palestinian state” separate from the other Arab states. Since the times the Arab vanquishers came to the Middle East (VIIth century of the Common Era) and up through the conquest of the region by the Seljuk Turks (1071) the territories of the present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel were parts of a huge Arab Caliphate with the capital in Damascus and later (since 762) in Baghdad. If we do not dive so deep in the bottomless expanses of the centuries we may briefly state that during the recent four hundred years (1517 through 1917) the Palestinian territory was part of the mighty Osman (Turkish) Empire. There was no Arab state there for quite a long time.