|
One city block from our office, across from the UTC campus, is a small deli
that serves delicious sub sandwiches. It is owned and operated by two
Palestinian’ brothers who do not speak Palestinian, there is no such
language, they speak Arabic. The newspapers they receive from home and their
return correspondence to family is not in Palestinian script, there is no
such thing, but with Arabic letters and numbers. The religion they embrace
is Islam, not Palestinian (95% of Palestinians are Muslim). A commonality I
have with these brothers is an affection for a land I call Israel, but a
state they call Palestine.
What and where is Palestine? The name ‘Palestine’
is somewhat bogus, for the ‘Palestinians’ have never had a Palestinian state
nor capital, not even when the Arabic people squatted in the territory of
the pre-1948 British mandate. There is nothing historically in the land of
Israel that is Palestinian. There is no Palestinian culture, no Palestinian
heritage, not even the Koran (the holy book of Islam) mentions Jerusalem as
one of its holy sites, and would you believe it, there is no “p” sound in
Arabic. These are Arabs, Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese Arabs who
read, write, add, subtract, speak, think, worship, and live Arabic.
The name
‘Palestine’ was drudged up from history by Hadrian, the Roman Emperor, 135
AD, to remove completely all Jewish identity from the Jewish land he had
conquered. His spite was due to the rebellions the Jews had inflicted upon
the Roman legions. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered, others
taken captive, and still others escaping in exile. With the Jews removed
from the land he attached the non-Jewish term, Palestine, a derivative from
Philistine, those “sea peoples” who lived on the coast of Israel as
antagonist. The name stuck! When Islam conquered the Middle East (7th
century), and took the land from the Christian Byzantine Empire (640AD) they
called the land, Falastin. The Ottoman Turks conquered the land then later
the British with the name remaining intact. Eventually and prophetically,
the Jews returned to the biblical land, and the survivors of the Holocaust
and other Zionist ‘redeemed’ (“to buy back”) the name.
The land came to be
called biblical ‘Israel,’ in Yiddish and Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael. Today’s
Arabs are not the posterity of the Plest or ancient ‘sea peoples’ any more
than today’s Chattanoogans are all descendants of the Cherokee (Chattanooga
is a Cherokee word). Today’s Arabs are the posterity of Mizrahim, Ishmael,
Esau, Nahor, and the six sons of Keturah, and for the most part eternal
antagonist of the Jewish people...
|
