President Biden on Friday endorsed an independent Palestinian state, although he conceded that such a historic development was “far away” and acknowledged the despair of the Palestinian people long frustrated in their fight for equal rights.
“Even if the ground is not ripe at this moment to restart negotiations, the United States and my administration will not give up on bringing the Palestinians and the Israelis, both sides, closer together,” Biden said during a joint appearance with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem.
“I know that the goal of the two states seems so far away while indignities like restrictions on movement and travel or the daily worry of your children’s safety are real and they are immediate,” Biden added. “The Palestinian people are hurting now. You can just feel it. Your grief and frustration. In the United States, we can feel it.” (Courtesy LATimes.com)
The term “Palestine” (Falastin in Arabic) was an ancient name for the general geographic region that is more or less today’s Israel. The name derives from the Philistines, who originated from the eastern Mediterranean, and invaded the region in the 11th and 12th centuries B.C. The Philistines were apparently either from Greece, Crete, the Aegean Islands, and/or Ionia. They seem to be related to the Bronze Age Greeks, and they spoke a language akin to Mycenaean Greek. Their descendents, still living on the shores of the Mediterranean, greeted Roman invaders a thousand years later. The Romans corrupted the name to “Palestina,” and the area under the sovereignty of their city-states became known as “Philistia.” Six-hundred years later, the Arab invaders called the region “Falastin.”
Throughout subsequent history, the name remained only a vague geographical entity. There was never a nation of “Palestine,” never a people known as the “Palestinians,” nor any notion of “historic Palestine.” The region never enjoyed any sovereign autonomy, remaining instead under successive foreign sovereign domains from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Fatimids, Ottomans, and British.
During the centuries of Ottoman rule, no Arabs under Turkish rule made any attempt to formulate an ideology of national identity, least of all the impoverished Arab peasantry in the region today known as Israel.
The term “Palestinian,” ironically, was used during the British Mandate period (1922-1948) to identify the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs of the area were known as “Arabs,” and their own designation of the region was balad esh-Sham (the province of Damascus). While some Arab nationalist writers, and coffee-shop intellectuals in Cairo or Beirut, developed the concept of Arab nationalism in large part as a response to Zionism, the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were used in their traditional sense as geographic designations, not as national identities.
In early 1947, in fact, when the UN was exploring the possibility of the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, various Arab political and academic spokespersons spoke out vociferously against such a division because, they argued, the region was really a part of southern Syria, no such people or nation as “Palestinians” had ever existed, and it would be an injustice to Syria to create a state ex nihilo at the expense of Syrian sovereign territory.
During the 19 years from Israel’s victory in 1948 to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, all that remained of the UN’s partitioned territory to the “Arabs” of British Mandatory Palestine were the West Bank, under illegal Jordanian sovereignty, and the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian rule. Never during these 19 years did any Arab leader anywhere in the world argue for the right of national self-determination for the Arabs of these territories. A “Palestinian” nation and “Palestinian” people had not yet been invented.
Article 24 of the PLO’s [Palestine Liberation Organization] original founding document, the PLO Covenant, states: “This Organization (the PLO) does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area.” For Arafat before the Six-Day War, Palestine was Israel. It was not the West Bank or the Gaza Strip — because the West Bank and the Gaza Strip belonged to other Arab states, and the inhabitants of these areas were not numbered among the Palestinians whose “homeland” Arafat sought to “liberate.” The only “homeland” for the PLO in 1964 was the State of Israel. However, in response to the Six Day War, the PLO revised its Covenant on July 17, 1968, to remove the operative language of Article 24, thereby newly asserting a “Palestinian” claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This ploy was revealed, perhaps inadvertently, to the West in a public interview with Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a March 31, 1977, interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
[Yasser] Arafat himself said the same thing, on many occasions. In his authorized biography (Terrorist or Peace Maker, by Alan Hart), he is quoted saying: “[T]he Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.” (Courtesy DiscoverTheNetworks.org)
Biden and the Democrat Elite want somehow to force Israel to give half of their land to the Palestinians, reducing the size of their country back to the size it was before the 1967 war.
Biden and the Democrat Elite are hell-bent on appeasing the Radical Muslims of Hamas in the same manner in which they appeased the Taliban in Afghanistan, leading to the shameful pullout of our troops from that country, now a haven for Islamic Terrorists.
If the Biden Administration is allowed to finance the Palestinians, governed by Radical Islamic Terrorists, they will be putting a gun in the mouth of Lady Liberty and opening the door for an even bigger foreign policy embarrassment than Afghanistan.
Biden is already seen by World Leaders as a weak, vacillating, demented old fool.
Our enemies around the world are licking their chops while waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack us.
Biden and his clueless Foreign Policy Team continue to embrace our enemies while alienating our allies.
I don’t care whether you are a Republican or a Democrat…that should scare the wits out of you.
Israel has been our greatest ally for decades now.
For Biden, his handlers, and the Democrat Elite to follow the path of certain destruction which they are referring to as their “Middle Eastern Policy”, is a strategy of self-annihilation not seen since the Japanese Kamikazes descended from the skies above the Pacific Ocean in World War II
Just like his pursuit of a Nuclear Bomb Deal with the Mad Mullahs of Iran, Biden and his Co-conspirators are not only sowing the seeds of their own destruction…they are placing America and the rest of the Free World in danger as well.
Walk away from the Islamic Terrorists of “Palestine”, #DemintiaJoe.
Aren’t your fellow Democrats stabbing you in the back enough?
Until He Comes,
KJ