Are the Palestinians native to the land where Israel now exists?
ANSWER
"The fact is that today's Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today's Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. The civil and tribal wars between Yemmenites (from Yemen) and Kessites (from Banu Kais of Saudi Arabia) ... are well known among Palestinians. "My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to 30,000 inhabitants." - Walid, a Palestinian Arab defector, talking about the recent immigration of Arabs to Palestine. quoted from "Answering Islam" The current PLO and Arab claim (and mainstream media regurgitation of it) is indeed a very distorted version of `recorded history' and can only qualify as pure Orwellian propaganda. In fact, putting aside all the myths and propaganda, the only area that would qualify historically as truly Arab land, is the Arabian desert peninsula. Unfortunately, it seems that Goebbels was correct in stating that if a lie were repeated often enough, it would come to be "perceived" as truth. No doubt, some Arabs have lived in the area of the Mandate of Palestine for many centuries, but not as many of them as had the Jews. What is more, Jews had lived in Arab lands since times preceding Islam itself. And yet, these Jews in Arab lands were never regarded as citizens of the Arab lands they lived in and were unceremoniously expelled in the years subsequent to Israel's establishment. In other words, residency alone did not confer national rights on those who inhabited an area. Nor did it make a people out of congeries of Arabs and other nationalities that had come to the area of the Mandate of Palestine while the Jewish people were restricted. The nations of the world recognized this after World War I when the League of Nations determined that the geographical area called Palestine was to become a homeland for the Jewish people, the people that had been continuously associated with this land since ancient times when it was known as Judea and Samaria. - David Basch
QUSTION
So why did so many Arabs end up in Palestine?
ANSWER
During the British Mandate, even well into the 1940s, Arabs were allowed into "Palestine" in huge numbers without visa or passport, especially from the Hauran District of Syria, while the British continued to do everything possible to prevent Jews from entering, even down to the last minute when all attempts were made to deny entry to thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Only in 1948 were Jewish refugees allowed free entry to their homeland, and that was because Israel had, once again, become an independent nation. [The Arabs of Ottoman Palestine may have] had certain attachments to the fields they were cultivating but at the same time they were destroying the Land. Parkes stated that "in the wars between villages it was far too common a practice to cut down fruit trees and olives and to destroy crops, and this in the end caused as much loss of life through hunger as was caused by the actual casualties of fighting". He concluded that "in spite of the immense fertility of the soil, it is probable that in the first half of the nineteenth century the population sank to the lowest level it had ever known in historic times". Palestinian leaders claim that Israel is built on Arab land, when the truth is that eyewitnesses such as Mark Twain and Rev. Manning of England who visited the Holy Land in the last century wrote that the land was barren and empty. The population then was less that 5% of today's population. In fact Joan Peters in her book "From Time Immemorial" tells us that the return of the Jews in 1800's and early 1900's created jobs and Arabs from impoverished areas were drawn into the Holy Land for work. Peters also tells us that in 1948 so many Arabs were new to the area and could not qualify for the UN requirement for refugee status (people forced to leave "permanent" or "habitual" homes) that they added a clause permitting refugee status for Arabs who had been there as little as two years. Thus the Zionist slogan "The Land without a people for the people without a land" was absolutely correct. The slogan did not mean that there were no inhabitants at all in Palestine, it just indicated that the non-Jewish population constituted a conglomeration of dozens of heterogeneous groups of residents having very little in common, i.e. not constituting a single nation, a people. These residents were not united by any specific national idea. Parkes wrote that the Balfour declaration for the first time established a "unit called Palestine on a political map. ...There was no such thing historically as a 'Palestinian Arab', and there was no feeling of unity among 'the Arabs' of this newly defined area".
QUESTION
So before the creation of the State of Israel, who were the Palestinians?
ANSWER
Until 1950, the name of the Jerusalem Post was THE PALESTINE POST; the journal of the Zionist Organization of America was NEW PALESTINE; Bank Leumi was the ANGLO-PALESTINE BANK; the Israel Electric Company was the PALESTINE ELECTRIC COMPANY; there was the PALESTINE FOUNDATION FUND and the PALESTINE PHILHARMONIC. All these were Jewish organizations. In America, Zionist youngsters sang "PALESTINE, MY PALESTINE", "PALESTINE SCOUT SONG" and "PALESTINE SPRING SONG" In general, the terms Palestine and Palestinian referred to the region of Palestine as it was. Thus "Palestinian Jew" and "Palestinian Arab" are straightforward expressions. "Palestine Post" and "Palestine Philharmonic" refer to these bodies as they existed in a place then known as Palestine. The adoption of a Palestinian identity by the Arabs of Palestine is a recent phenomenon. Until the establishment of the State of Israel, and for another decade or so, the term Palestinian applied almost exclusively to the Jews.
