I’m only going to write this post once, so pay attention.
I use the word “Palestinian” a lot. It refers to those Arabs who call themselves that. It does not refer to Jews, who do not live in Palestine, because Palestine ceased to exist with the end of the British Mandate, and despite the wishes of the Arabs, there is no such place today.
Every so often somebody criticizes me for using the word, and thus granting the Palestinians an identity. So I decided to explain what I mean by it.
It does not imply that the Palestinians are a people that have existed for millennia, as idiots like Saeb Erekat like to say. The truth is that the Palestinians are Arabs with multiple origins who at some time came to live in the land that we call Eretz Yisrael. Maybe some of them say they can trace their origins back to the Arab conquest in the 7th century, but I doubt it. Most of them are descended from migrants that came in the latter part of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
But whenever their ancestors arrived, they are here now; and yes, they are a people now.
I hear the roar of outrage. But as I said, pay attention. They are not an ancient people with their own language, culture, and religion (unless their hatred and sense of victimhood counts as a religion), like the Jewish people. Their self-identification as a people goes back perhaps to the mid-1960s, when they were encouraged by the Arab nations and their Soviet mentors to think of themselves as such. They shared one fundamental experience and one aspiration for the future: the experience of dispossession and dishonor, and the aspiration to regain what they believe was taken from them.
I am not doing them a special favor by granting them peoplehood. I am simply recognizing a fact. They behave like Amalek, but we don’t insist that the Amalekites weren’t a “real people.”
The Palestinians became a people when they accepted the Palestinian narrative, just as the Jewish people accepted the Torah at Sinai. Who knows, maybe in another thousand years they will have their own language and religion. They already have a whole collection of holidays marking days on which something bad happened to them. Nakba Day can be their Tisha B’Av.
They have a culture that is unique among Arabs. It is all about their historic sense of injustice, their alcoholic-like obsessive certainty that all of their misfortunes are somebody else’s (usually our) fault, and their endless creative pursuit of strategies, tactics, and weapons that they hope will finally bring them to their judenrein promised land.
Look what they have contributed to the world: they popularized airline hijacking, suicide bombing, attacks on children, “popular resistance” in which every Palestinian is a possible stabber or car rammer, the Qassam rocket, the terror tunnel, and now the flaming kite. That is Palestinian culture, and they are proud of it, all of it.
Most importantly, although they are an indigenous culture – the Palestinian narrative was created here, in Eretz Yisrael – they cannot be compared to the oldest extant culture that is tied to this land, the one people that practically is the paradigm case for understanding what a “people” is, the one truly native culture that possesses aboriginal rights to the land, the Jewish people.
You can’t understand something if you can’t name it, and you can’t fight what you don’t understand. So I’ll continue to use the word “Palestinian,” even if the right-wing version of political correctness forbids it.
@ adamdalgliesh:
I’m not concerned about whether the “General Public” knows what I’m talking about or not. They don’t contact me, nor read my writings. I think that Victor is wrong, and that you also are……… “not right”….. (see…great writers never use the same words in close conjunction, also I’m being “politically polite” and kidding a little).
As far as I am concerned there is no confusion in my mind-at least about what to call those sneaking, infiltrating, illegitimate bastardy, murdering obscenities. I’ve detailed above how I address them, but also add here the easiest, and in my mind the one that could be used by all…… “LOCAL ARABS”. My reference to “local” takes in their present surroundings, and also refers to the areas from which they or their grandfathers came, to benefit from the work that was brought to Israel by the British Mandatory, and the returning Jews who were setting up considerable enterprises that needed manpower to build.
On another point Adam, they don’t need to “let down their guard”. It was freely declared by many of their leaders in the 40s 50s 60s and 70s that “Palestine” was a hoax, purely to pressure the Jews, and in reality they were Southern Syrians, just a part of the whole Arab Nation.
And also, about the “Rightist-Zionist-Fundamentalists”……I’ve always understood that they REJECTED the name “Palestine” as having been a foreign appellation from Hadrian after Bar Cocheba’s defeat, and the real name was Eretz Yisrael. In my youth I was a member of several of these Community organised clubs like Bnei Akiva, Habonim, Hashomer Hatzair, and etc, and we always referred only to Eretz Yisrael.
And today they refer to Yehuda VeShomron, or the acronym YESHA.
From time to time, in a discussion, after the local Arabs dubbed themselves “Palestinians” , there would be someone mentioning that the only and real Palestinians would have been Jews. This would have referred mainly to Jews of the Mandatory Period, because the Arabs then did not refer to themselves as anything in particular other than “Arabs”. Of course they were all descended from Sheiks, or Caliphs, or other major historical figures, and they even believed their own lies and mythologies. quoting spurious family trees back before the Crusades. The Hashemites claim they are descended directly from Muhammed. (which might (or might not) be so, as he must have had and discarded hundreds of “wives” and captured concubines) And who is there to dispute them. They were all doing it then.
Something like those poor misbegotten British-Israelites, who can present you with .a beautifully scripted genealogy showing the British Royal Family going straight back to Moses, or is it Abraham, maybe to Adam, or someone’s son, can’t recall. I have one myself, proudly bestowed on me by my then accountant who was perfectly sane in all other matters.
@ Edgar G.:
Edgar, please read my little exposition below. You have to talk about a group of people who have developed some sort of collective identity, however artificial self-contradictory, confused and ill-defined, when they are (bad) actors in a war. And the name for them that everybody else uses, and that they use for themselves, is the only one you can use to enable the general public to know who you are talking about. No, the “Palestinians” are not a “people” in the true sense, but they are politically and militarily created “group of people” of some undetermined kind, and so we must use the name that they have been given.
Bravo abu-Yehuda. Those rightist-Zionist “fundamentalists” who insist that “there are no Palestinians” also imply that the right name for the Land of Israel is “Palestine” and that Israelis are really “Palestinians.” Also, you can’t claim (truthfully) that people have been committing aggression against you for a hundred years, have genocidal intentions toward you, etc. without giving them some kind of name, and the name they use for themselves, however recent, is the most convenient name to use. On the other hand, calling the Palestinians a “people” is dubious because if you read their documents carefully, they don’t claim to be a people. The PLO-affiliated groups claim to be part of the “Arab people,” not a separate people. The Hamasnik’s claim that the Palestinians are justmembers of the “umma,” or Muslim people. Their special role, according to the Hamas charter, is to regain “Palestine” as a “sacred trust” for all Muslims. Also, if you read the Palestinian literature carefully, “Palestine” is not really a separate and distinct country at all, but rather part of a larger country that includes “Lebanon, “Syria,” and “Jordan,” and whose proper name (found in the Quaran) is “Al-Shams,” an Arab word whose English equivalent is “The North.” It is sometimes mistranslated into English as “Greater Syria.” When Palestinians let down their guard a little, they will tell you that there is really no difference at all between Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, that they are really all one country artificially divided by European colonialists through the “Sykes-Picot” process. As a result, they have a very confused and self-contradictory sense of identity. It is thus very difficult to say precisely what the Palestinians are, except that they are a group of people with a politically created but ill-defined identity . Yes, it makes it difficult to talk about them whether is no name that has yet been devised to describe what kind of group of people they are.They are not a nation or nationality in the true sense, or even an ethnic group in the true sense. But still, we have no choice but to admit that they exist as some sort of politically created collective entity, and so we have to talk about them when discussing their terrorism and aggression.
They have existed for millennia . They I believe they are mentioned in the Torah. They are the generations of the sodomites. And sodomy is their culture.
It must be emphasized that the name itself has a meaning which ironically is quite appropriate “invaders”.
Continue to use it as you will, but complaints about it will not cease, and the assertion that you will only write this explanation one time, makes it certain that it will always be a thorn in the flesh of those who object. They may BDS you by refusing to read your nearly always excellent articles. I do not include this above as being one of them nor even being an article at all, but a feeble and illogical (in the circumstances) wimp-out..
{I’m reminded here of the stubborn sailorman who sang “He Played The Ukulele As The Ship Went Down”..stubborn to the last.}
Your real articles are always very long, but fascinating enough for even the sluggard who normally glances only at headlines, to read them to the end. Perhaps even comment on them, if they can have any energy left.
I will leave you with the knowledge that this reader will ALWAYS object to the self dubbed Arab “Palestinians” (in inverted commas,) used as a national description for a non-existing people of an imaginary country..
An alternative reference I sometimes use is “Palestinians, so-called”, but most of all, use “squatter Arabs” or/and “itinerant squatter Arabs”. So….sorry….not convinced.!
When you say something contradictory it’s best only said once.
I shall continue to refer to them as Arabs because if Palestine ceased to exist after the British Mandate then there can actually be no Palestinian people, especially when most of them came either from other Arab countries or were born outside of the now, non-existent, Palestine. It’s a matter of choice I suppose but I would rather not add credence to this particular scam.