According to Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinians arrived in the Holy Land after the Ottoman Turks. This makes one ponder, are the Palestinians a modern invention?
By Rachel Avraham
According to Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and veteran terrorist Salim Al-Zre’I recently proclaimed: “Believe me, [the Israelis] will necessarily disappear from Palestine and not one of them will remain on this land. The Crusaders were here for 200 years, the [Ottoman] Turks for 400 years, and they all left, and then the Palestinian people arrived.”
Palestinian Media Watch then claimed, “The Ottoman Empire’s rule over Israel ended in 1917 during World War I. If the Palestinians only arrived after that time according to Al-Zre’i, it follows that he unwittingly acknowledged the historical fact that “Palestinian peoplehood” is a modern invention.” So the question remains, are the Palestinian people a modern invention or not?
According to American archeologist Eric Cline, “Although some would disagree, historians and archeologists have generally concluded that most, if not all, modern Palestinians are probably more closely related to the Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, and other countries than they are to the ancient Jebusites, Canaanites, or Philistines. The major movements of those Arabs into the region occurred after 600 CE, more than 1,600 years after David and the Israelites had vanquished the original inhabitants of the land.”
The late American archeologist, William F. Albright, concurred with Cline, rejecting outright any continuity between the “modern peasants and nomads” of Palestine and “pre-Arab times.” Even Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once stated that today there is a tendency to “read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern. Among the manifestations of this outlook are a predilection for seeing in peoples such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Philistines the lineal ancestors of modern Palestinians.” Thus, as Hebrew University geographer Yehoshua Ben-Arieh concluded; the insistence by certain scholars that the Palestinians are “direct descendants of Canaanites is driven by a political objective” that has nothing to do with historical reality.
Caliph Umar conquered the Holy Land in its entirety between 640 and 642 CE. Arab rule over the Holy Land lasted until 1099, when the crusaders invaded the Holy Land. The Muslims did not begin the process of re-conquering the Holy Land until 1187, when Saladin captured Jerusalem, but it is important to note that Saladin was not an Arab: he was Kurdish, as was his dynasty. The Mamluk Empire, who replaced Ayyubid rule in Israel starting around 1260, would also not be of Arab origin: they were Turks, as was the Ottoman Empire that succeeded the Mamluk Empire in 1517. Indeed, with the sole exception of a brief nine year period between 1831 and 1840, when an Egyptian by the name of Muhammad Ali conquered the Holy Land, Arabs have not ruled Israel in its entirety since 1099. In sum, Arab rule over the Holy Land lasted in its entirety from around 640 CE till 1099. If one adds the nine years of Egyptian rule between 1831 and 1841, Arab rule over the Holy Land only adds up to about 368 years. It is also important to note that none of the Arab empires that controlled Eretz Yisrael for these 368 years of Arab rule had their capital city in Israel or even ran Palestine as a separate distinct administrative district. In fact, after the Arab conquest of the area in the seventh century, Palestine was treated merely as a part of Syria.
Considering these facts, one has to wonder, when did a distinct Palestinian Arab identity emerge? Haim Gerber claimed that even though “Palestine was administratively subsumed under the province of Greater Syria, it also stood apart and was known as Jund Filastin, or the district of Palestine.” As a result of this fact, Gerber cited an Arab Jerusalemite named Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi who wrote a book in 1490 where he used the term “Filastin” to describe the Holy Land. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal stated that the roots of Palestinian identity can be found in 1834, when the Arabs of the Holy Land rebelled against Mohammed Ali’s conquest. Yehoshua Porath argued that Palestinian identity emerged in 1911, when the term Palestine was published in the newspaper Filastin.
Famous Israeli historian Benny Morris asserted that Palestinian identity was commenced in early April 1920, when “the failure of a rumored anti-British revolt to materialize; the flight of Amin Al-Husseini; the endorsement of the British mandate at San Remo; the installation, in July, of a civilian administration, in part in consequence of the rioting; and the ouster that month of Faisal’s government in Damascus by the French” all contributed to helping the Arabs of the Holy Land “accept the country’s separate destiny.”
Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, while recognizing that Arabs of the Holy Land in the late Ottoman period identified with “the Ottoman Empire, their religion, Arabism, their homeland Palestine, their city or region, and their family, without feeling any contradiction or sense of conflicting loyalties,” Khalidi also noted that “by the late 1920s and early 1930s, the way in which such individuals or others like them related to these foci of identity had changed greatly. The Ottoman Empire had disappeared, Arab nationalism and its association with Syria had suffered defeats at the hands of the French (whose troops had driven an Arab nationalist government out of Damascus in 1920), and Britain had received a mandate for Palestine with fixed frontiers.” In other words, although there were Arabs in the Holy Land prior to that period, they did not identify as Palestinian until relatively recently. And Yezid Sayigh even argued that the rise of Palestinian proto-nationalism only became inevitable after 1948 as the direct result of “social and political marginality” that Palestinians experienced.
Yet regardless of whether Palestinian identity emerged in 1490, 1834, 1920, the late 1920s and early 1930s, or after 1948, the fact remains that Palestinian identity came into existence long after Jewish identity, Arab existence in the land of Israel is not ancient like Jewish roots in Eretz Yisrael are, and the Arabs of the Holy land are descended from “societies […] that have spread out […] from centers of empire.”
According to Irwin Mansdorf, the term colonialism “can assume validity only if it is assumed that the settlers have no indigenous roots and rights in the area.” Given this fact, I believe that it is of utmost importance to review Jewish history in the land of Israel, in order to establish the fact that the Jewish nation is the closest thing to an indigenous people as far as the land of Israel is concerned. Note, “the communities, clans, nations, and tribes we call indigenous peoples are just that: indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with […] societies […] that have spread out […] from centers of empire.” Indigenous peoples are “peoples and nations” that have “a historical continuity with pre-invasion […] societies that developed on their territories.”
With the sole exception of ancient peoples like the Jebusites, Amorites, and Canaanites, which don’t exist today, the Jewish nation has the oldest claim to the land of Israel and archeology can prove this historic fact. One of the oldest archeological proofs for the existence of the Jewish nation in the land of Israel can be found in Egypt, where “a victory monument of Pharaoh Merneptah claims that the Egyptians defeated a people called Israel who were living in the land of Canaan by about the year 1207 BCE.” In 1993 and 1994, archeologists excavating at Tel Dan in northern Israel discovered an inscription that commemorates a military campaign in Israel by Hazael of Aram about the year 841 BCE and that mentions the House of David. Thus, as a result of this excavation at Tel Dan, Tel Aviv University ancient historian Nadav Na’aman has stated that, in his opinion, the facts “strongly support the biblical claims a) that David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital and b) that he founded the royal dynasty of Jerusalem.”
According to American archeologist Eric Cline, “few would seriously challenge the belief that most modern Jews are descended from the ancient Hebrews.” Cline is backed up by a study that was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics and conducted by Gil Atzmon and Edward Burns of Yeshiva University, and Harry Ostrer of New York University. After doing a detailed study entitled “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” Burns, Atzmon, and Ostrer came to the conclusion that Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews; Italian, Greek, and Turkish Sephardic Jews; and Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian Mizrahi Jews not only share a common religious and national heritage but “all have common genetic links derived in the ancient Middle East despite their dispersion.”
These results were compared to the genes from the non-Jewish communities from where these Jews originated from, and it was concluded that “Jews from the different regions of the world were found to share many genetic traits that are distinct from other groups and that date back to ancient times.” Given this, I guess one can suppose that compared to Jewish identity, Palestinian nationalism is a modern invention.
Photo from Palestinian Media Watch: https://palwatch.org/page/37161
