There Are No Palestinians

At one point, there were no Americans, either, and no Canadians, and no Australians.

 

Thanks for posting, N. Carolyne! Great article. Expect to be rebutted any time you bring up truth around here, though.

Even though posted many times, some still won't accept the original plans that were never completed back in 1948 and have brought us to the current mess.

Anti-Semitism takes many forms, but really consists of just being different branches of the same tree.

 

Is that continued slander toward your brothers and sisters in Christ who are not dispensational premillennialists, or are we off the hook with you?

 

Slander? Wasn't intended to be slander, sorry you're so touchy!

Again? You're bringing the premill dispy thingy up again? Will you ever let it be? Ever? Or will you bring this up forever & ever?

Or shall I retort by saying that postmill undispy thingy? That's it! Thanks!

 

Here's a quote from the article:

I find it fascinating that the writer completely misses the implications of his own words.

He says there is no such thing as a "Palestinian" yet immediately affirms that the land now known as Israel was known as Palestine for 2000 years.

If one were to actually think about that sentence, you would realize that the people who lived in the land called "Palestine" for 2000 years could properly be called Palestinians - regardless of the political changes that occured while they were living there.

My mother's family is Austrian and lived in Sarajevo for well over 150 years, but the political realities for Sarajevo have changed dramatically for the region. My grandfather was born in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary but he and his father had to apply for citizenship after World War I when the new nation of Yugoslavia was created. (They had not moved nor changed ethnicities during the war.)

In a similar way, Palestinians lived in the land for 2000 years even though political realities changed around them.

 

Again? You're bringing the premill dispy thingy up again? Will you ever let it be? Ever? Or will you bring this up forever & ever?

Will you ever let the "anti-semetic" charges against everyone who doesn't see escatology from your point of view end?

 

Sure. I'll make a deal. If dispensational premillennialists will quit calling their Bible-believing, blood-bought brothers and sisters in Christ anti-Semitic merely because they do not agree with them in eschatology, then I'll quit bringing up the past false accusations by dispensational premellennialists toward their brothers and sisters in Christ.

How's that?

 

Yowsa! You don't answer to me, brother Ken, but to the Lord God Jehovah. Hallelujah!

So we have a deal.

 

I find it fascinating that the writer completely misses the implications of his own words.

He says there is no such thing as a "Palestinian" yet immediately affirms that the land now known as Israel was known as Palestine for 2000 years.

If one were to actually think about that sentence, you would realize that the people who lived in the land called "Palestine" for 2000 years could properly be called Palestinians - regardless of the political changes that occured while they were living there....</font>[/QUOTE]The answer to this point is not all that difficult. The word "Palestine" is from the Greek through Latin into English. The Greeks called the Philistines by that name because the Philistines came from the Aegean Sea area, and the Greeks recognized them. The Romans changed the name of Israel when they destroyed it about 70 AD. Israel never called herself by that name. England at one time advocated the establishment of modernday Israel as an empty land.

 

That does not change the fact that there were people living in the land for 1900 years until they were displaced by modern Israel. The etymology of the word "Palestine" is not really the issue here.

 

Now you have to produce a census of the people living in the land in order to back up your statement. I just pointed out to you that the British termed it an empty land in the 19th century. What people do you have information on?

 

There are no Americans!! The British termed this an empty land in the 17th century; of course there were people here, but they didn't really count, and in any case they weren't Americans (i.e. Vespucciites)! When they were in an expansive mood (as they were throughout the 19th century), the British were often unreliable folks to ask about the emptiness of other people's countries.

Haruo

 

About the end of 1946, there were about 1,269,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews living within what was called Mandate Palestine.

 

And even those figures were a sort of lie, weren't they? First you discredit the British and then you quote them. What is a boy to believe? The British slogan was a land without people for a people without land. The British are responsible for a lot of the blood and death today.

 

The figures are reliable to the best of my knowledge.

I think you are getting confused. I have not said anything about the British.

 

Your ally mentioned the British. And where did you get the figures that you posted, Ken?

 

www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/un-partition-plan-pal-isr.html

 

Here is an Israeli point of view:

'An interim report from July 1921 states that, "There are now in the whole of Palestine hardly 700,000 people...Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians...The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000." It can be read in full at: http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/349b02280a930813052565e90048ed1c!OpenDocument

'I'm not sure on the basis of what census or estimate this report cited those figures, but I imagine they are roughly accurate. Minus Jews and non-Arabic speaking Christians, I venture that the author would say there were about 600,000 Arabic speakers in Palestine in 1921. Mind you, eastern Palestine had not been truncated yet, so it is quite likely that the author was referring to Greater Palestine. In any case, clearly, even 600,000 could not have doubled to 1.2 million in 1947 without immigration given that era's health standards, even though that kind of growth was precisely what the British census of 1931 and the abstracted census in 1945 claimed, presumably because the British wanted to cover up the fact that they were avoiding a confrontation with the Arab world by not reporting Arab immigration into the Holy Land, and also in order to brag about the great job they were doing as administers of the Mandate by improving health conditions and reducing infant deaths.

'It's also interesting to note that the author of the report distinguishes between Arabic speaking peoples and true Arabs. In the author's estimation, and I would say correct estimation, the local Arabic speakers were indeed of "mix-raced", i.e. immigrants from various lands around the Middle East, plus Turkey -- especially from Syria where the settlement of Syrian Arabs is documented in some cases. That's particularly interesting because DNA studies in the past couple of years have shown that the Palestinian Arabs are most related to the Syrian Arabs, though I imagine that Gazan Arabs are more related to Egyptians - I'm still waiting for someone to do a thorough DNA study on the current Palestinian Arabs by region of current residence....'

 

Church Mouse Guy, you asked for statistics, well here you are (from an earlier post of mine):-

" Whilst I accept that there have always been some Jews who have managed to 'hang on' in the area since the Diaspora post 70AD, there have also always been non-Jews living there, starting with the Philistines (hence Palestine) and Canaanites, who lived side by side with the Israelites in OT times. Many of these became Christians in the first few centuries AD although most converted to Islam after the Arab invasions of the 7th century. Since then they have largely regarded themselves as Arab.

I also accept that there has been a massive increase in the Palestinian population in the last 70 years or so, aided no doubt by a degree of immigration. But the Arab population of Palestine ws by no means insubstantial before that: a Turkish census on the eve of the First World War estimated it at 630,000 and a British census at the end of 1922 put it at around 670,000 plus 71,000 bedouin(source: memorandum to Lord Curzon, UK Public Record Office, FO 371/4183); a second British census in 1931 showed an increase to 850,000, which increased by 1947 to 1,300,000 (partly because of the immigration to which you refer). Most were Sunni Muslim but a sizeable minority, initially around 10% but now more like 7% were Christian (the 1944 British estimate was 135,000). Some Christians are descended from converts of the 3rd and 4th centuries, or even from the time of Jesus - the Atalla family, for example, lived in Jerusalem on the same plot of land for 15 centuries and the Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem can trace his family's Christian ancestry back to the generation of the apostles - some are descendants of tribes who fought with the Islamic armies against the Byzantines in the 7th century, some are descendants of Western Christian converts either from the Crusades or more recently 19th and 20th century missionaries.

Palestine also contained a large number of other minorities, some indigenous, others having arrived from elsewhere. My interest in this is to a degree personal: my great-great-great grandfather, William Burckhardt Barker, was an orientalist and a diplomat based in what is now Syria, and he made an extensive study of this region, as did compatriots like Laurence Oliphant who found 9 distinct racial groupings near Haifa in the 1880s - including Bosnian Muslims who didn't like Austrian rule, Circassians, a Jewish settlement at Zimmarin, a nomadic tribe of Seljuk Turks and even a colony of German Knights Templar."

Granted, these people did not begin to be called 'Palestinian' until largely after the Six Day War, there is no doubt that they constituted a distinct 'ethnos' prior to that; similarly, Great Britain did not exist as a name until 1603 or 1707 depending on your interpretation of history, but there is no denying that there is such a thing as 'British', nor that the various people groups that came to be called British existed for hundreds of years before that.

So don't be misled by the Christian Zionist Darbyite agenda!

Yours in Christ

Matt