The Arabic for Hebron is a translation of the Hebrew. The same goes for Bethlehem. Ah but what about Nablus? The Jews may call it Shechem, but the Arabs have a unique name for it. Surely Nablus is part of the great and ancient Palestinian heritage. Not a chance. Nablus isn’t Arabic, it’s the Arabic mispronunciation of Neapolis, which if you happen to know Latin means “New City”.
Nablus has the same relationship to Neapolis, as Filistin does to Palestine, it’s the Arabic mispronunciation of the Latin. The name “Nablus” is every bit as regionally authentic as Naples, in Italy or Florida, which has the same meaning.
But what of the “Occupied Territories”? The Jews call them Judea and Samaria. The Arabs call them ad-difa’a al-gharbiya or the West Bank. Nothing says ancient history like bluntly descriptive names. But what of Ramallah, capital of the Palestinian Authority, that at least is an Arabic name. And that’s true. It is an Arabic name. A name almost as ancient as the city which dates back to the 16th century when a group of Christian Arabs crossed over from what is today Jordan fleeing Muslim persecution. Under Jordanian rule, Ramallah was overrun by Muslims and today it has a Muslim majority.
When the capital of your ancient people was founded by Christians from the other side of the river in the 16th century, and it wasn’t actually your capital until the bygone days of the 1990′s, and it only became your capital because you drove off its residents in the 1950′s, then your ancient civilization has a problem. It doesn’t actually exist.
The Arabs are not indigenous, they are colonizers who overran the land in tribal groups. There is no Palestinian people. For that matter there isn’t a Jordanian people or an Egyptian people. Just clans living behind one set of colonial borders drawn by European mapmakers in the 20th century. Those clans moved back and forth. Prosperous families lived like feudal lords. There was no common culture or national identity.
The Al-Husayni clan, who dominate Palestinian Arab nationalist politics, were a bunch of immigrants from what is today Saudi Arabia, and settled in the region. Clan members include Yasir Arafat, the Mufti of Jerusalem, along with a raft of modern officials, including the Chief of Staff of the PA and the head of the Waqf, the Muslim religious authority. The Al-Husayni clan was out for itself, it is still out for itself. It is not a people, it is not a part of a people, it is one of many Arab clans in the Middle-East whose only priority is power for the family.
The Al-Husaynis are no different than the House of Saud or the Al-Thanis of Qatar, they are ruling clans pretending to be a nation. The Palestinian Authority is for the most part a coalition of prominent clans, some of the same clans who refused to deal with the Jewish inhabitants and tried to drive them out instead.
If the Palestinian Authority was willing to be honest, it would call itself Husseinstin instead of Filistin, but since its entire claim to the land derives from a supposed ancient history, in which time they did not get around to thinking of a name for themselves, or creating a single government until the ancient days of the 1990′s, calling themselves the Husseinstinians wouldn’t have worked.
The Hashemite ruling family, also Saudi expats, may call their country the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, but they keep the “Jordan” part in there all the same, because it creates the illusion of antiquity. But Jordan is at least the river. What is Palestine? It’s the foreign name for a region that was meant to be a subsidiary of Syria. And the PLO began life as a Syrian front group, with its original chairman, who had represented Syrian in the UN, asserting that there was no such place as Palestine.
This bloody circus has been going on for way too long. Enough that the Arab states and the local clan leaders have managed to turn out generations of children committed to killing in the name of a mythical identity for a state that they don’t really want. The call for a Palestinian state was a cynical ploy for destroying Israel.
It’s why the negotiations never go anywhere, they’re not meant to go anywhere. The players aren’t free agents, they answer to their masters, and they can’t function without them. Hamas is running around like a chicken without a head, because it’s afraid of losing its Syrian backing. The Fatah leaders of the PA are even more incoherent, their ploy to threaten to unilaterally create a state has fizzled, and now they’re threatening to turn over rule to Israel if they don’t get what they want.
Self-government was the baseline for the American Revolution, but the Palestinian Authority can’t even manage that. Its budget consists of foreign aid. Its entire economy runs on money given to it by the rest of the world. It has an entire UN agency to cater to it. And despite being the biggest welfare state on the planet, it’s still completely incapable of taking care of itself.
Gingrich is right that the “Palestinians” are an invented people, but they’re a badly invented people. The Big Lie technique has turned their existence into an established fact, but the only basis for it is the repetition of the same lie. Orwell said that “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Gingrich’s statement was a revolutionary act and no matter how the media might pillory him for it, as long as people continue to challenge the universal deceit of the press, then the revolution can continue.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.