Several foundational myths construct the theory of “Palestinianism,” a term I have been pushing these past two decades.
I first coined the term Palestinianism back in 2006 and described its essential purpose as being the negation of Zionism and the undermining of Jewish nationalism. In other words, it really had little to do with an actual Palestine or a Palestinian people. Its purpose was to serve as a cover for antisemitism, since being pro-Palestine is a more acceptable form of Jew hatred.
Later, I added another element and asserted that the animosity to and the onslaught against Jewish nationalism and the concept of a Jewish state in any geographical or political configuration is what drives Palestinianism. Again, its purpose was to deny Jews our national identity and to erase our history, especially our links to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
Palestinianism and its need to be recognized necessitates a process of inventivity. That is, it creates ‘facts’ which, simply put, are untruths regarding Jews, Jewish history, and Zionist history.
Among these non-facts are: “Zionism is European,” that there was no continuum of a Jewish presence throughout the last 18 centuries in the Land of Israel, that in the land, Jews created literature, culture, and language, or that Jews all over the world consistently supported those living there financially.
claims of ‘historic Palestine’
Moreover, that inventivity also works in another way. Not only has a Palestinian Arab national identity been created where none existed before, but it also seeks to use imagined claims that the current Arab population of “historic Palestine” has existed from time immemorial, that Jews stole Arab lands, among the hundreds that have been pushed to erase Jewish nationalism.
The most elemental aspect of a people’s national identity is its homeland. Yet those Arabs who assert their Palestinian identity refer to their supposed homeland in its foreign Latin name, and as they have no ‘P’ sound in Arabic, the best they can do is Filastin.
In 2018, the Institute for Palestine Studies published the Encyclopedia: Palestine, Our Homeland (Biladuna Filastin), written by Mustapha Murad al-Dabbagh with an introduction by Walid Khalidi. Over 11 volumes, it details the history of “Semitic and Arian (sic) peoples” who lived in the territory, “as well as the arrival of Jews there” and the “Arab tribes before Islam.”
This geopolitical framing serves to one-up Arabs in a competition of historical cognizance of whose land this was. As a result of the conquest of Byzantine Palaestina, which encompassed three districts, in 638, Filastin became one of the four military districts of Bilad al-Sham. It was but a province of another entity.
Tellingly, when it became known to the local Arabs that the British, with French and American approval, were intending to reconstitute the historic Jewish homeland, their immediate reaction was to demand that Syria continue to rule Palestine as Southern Syria. In fact, the 1920 pre-riot demonstrations in Jerusalem demanded that Palestine not be separated from Syria.
Even earlier, in Brooklyn, on November 8, 1918, an anti-Zionist protest rally was held, and Arab Americans worked to influence the American State Department in the name of a “New Syria National League.” They lobbied to establish a Greater Syria under American protection, reaching from Sinai to the Euphrates.
As Lord Lamington told the British Parliament on June 21, 1922, the King-Crane Commission that visited the area in 1919 was informed by the local Arab inhabitants and their representatives that “Syria was wholly indivisible” and that “Syria should not be cut up into what we term Syria and into Palestine” as “geographically and ethnographically, those two countries are one.”
As late as 1937, those Syrian nationalists in the United States had issued a manifesto that called for the “complete independence of the Syrian nation as a united, coherent political unit within the natural geographic borders of Natural Syria.”
The term ‘Natural Syria’ not only includes the territory of the modern state of Syria, but also that of Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Hani Bawardi’s book, The Making of Arab Americans, published in 2014, is very informative on this aspect of Palestine and Syria.
Mikhail Naimy wrote in 1915, as Edmund Ghareeb and Jenab Tutunji, writing in the Arab Studies Quarterly in 2016, record, “Why should we blame England if it chooses to sell Palestine, not having heard a single word of protest and complaint from the people who call Palestine their home and their land.” As Ghareeb and Tutunji admit, “Many Arab Americans… tended to identify with the issue of Palestine, which they considered to be ‘southern Syria.’”
On the other hand, even the Quran had a more correct narrative regarding the current Arabs’ imaginations.
As we know, besides the non-mention of Jerusalem, the specific Arabic word Filastin (Palestine) does not appear in the Quran. In Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:21, the Quran acknowledges Moses commanding his people: “O my people! Enter the Holy Land which Allah has destined for you to enter, and do not turn back or else you will become losers.”
In addition, in Surah Al-Isra 17:104, the Quran refers to the land as a promise and tells the Children of Israel: “And We said thereafter to the Children of Israel, ‘Dwell securely in the land.’ But when the promise of the [hereafter] arrival comes, We will gather you in congregation.”
What should be apparent is that, theologically, geographically, and historically, Muslim proponents of the idea of a “Palestine” know that the right of the Jewish nation to live in its land is undeniable. Hence, their convoluted Palestinianism.
The core of Palestinianism is to eradicate Jewish national identity through a Palestinian inventivity and a “disinventivity.” That is to be expected of our enemies.
What is dishearteningly tragic is the helping hand provided by the pro-Palestine forces by Jews, whether they be assimilationists, internationalists, Neturei Karta adherents, or progressives.
They promote a fiction to cover their own fictitious existence.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.
Source:
www.jpost.com
