As one observer remarked earlier this year, the war in Gaza attracts a great deal of passionately ignorant commentary from Israel’s haters. Berkeley academic
Ron E Hassner reports that of his hundreds of students, the vast majority, who claim to ‘care deeply’ about ‘the occupation of Palestinian territories’, can’t even find them on a map.
The average student in my class could barely answer two questions out of six correctly and the students who expressed the strongest interest in the Palestinian issue did just as badly, even when answering questions that related directly to the conflict they claimed to care most about. Students who felt most strongly about the Palestinian issue knew less about it than their more moderate peers […]
More tellingly, the students with the strongest feelings about the Palestinian issue were also the most overconfident. They were the least likely to leave their answers blank and the most likely to offer a wild guess. 25% of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. The class average for this blunder was 14%.
This pattern of brash ignorance recurred across all questions related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Most especially one of the most egregious lies of the ‘pro-Palestinian’ fanatics: that Israelis are ‘colonisers’. This ridiculous calumny is repeated, ad nauseum, even by Australian parliamentarians like Pakistani-born Mehreen Faruqi. As a Muslim, Faruqi might want to think twice before accusing anyone else of ‘colonisation’.
Most people who claim to be ethnic Palestinians also identify as Arabs, and Arabs did not originate in Palestine. They invaded from Arabia.
Arab Muslims outdid the Romans, Greeks and Alexander the Great in the colonising stakes.
It’s common for the anti-Semitic supporters of ‘Palestine’ to claim ‘genetic studies prove’ that Israelis are ‘Europeans’, and that ‘Palestinians’ are indigenous. The first is claim a gross distortion of the scientific evidence and there is scant evidence to support the second. As geneticist Shai Carmi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told me:
Palestinians and other Arabs from the Levant have genetic ancestry that’s nearly entirely Middle-Eastern (there’s also a very tiny African ancestry at variable proportions across groups). There’s no [genetic] data yet on where they have deep roots in the Levant itself or whether they have migrated from other places in the Middle East.
What is certain is that ethnic Jews can legitimately claim to be the indigenes of Israel.
Genealogical evidence today confirms most people who claim to be Palestinian are in fact of Arab background. Some can trace genetic links to the original Canaanite settlers of Israel and some converted to Islam after the Arab conquest. But all ethnic Jews, including Jewish families who fled Europe after World War II, can trace genetic heritage to the Canaanites.
The original Jews, who settled in ancient Israel and Judea, were a Canaanite clan.
Pro-Palestinians try to argue that the fact that, first the Romans, then later conquerors referred to the area as ‘Palestine’ is proof of the ‘indigeneity’ of ‘Palestinians’. If so, the Arab colonisers were apparently unaware for millennia.
Only in the 1960s, after the formation of Yasser Arafat’s PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), did the area’s Arabs start referring to themselves as Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the Jews have multiple ancient ties to the land that ‘Palestinians’ do not.
Jews speak and write Hebrew, the only surviving Canaanite language still used today. ‘Palestinians’ speak Arabic, a language unknown in the area until the Muslim invasion and conquest in the seventh century.
As for the term ‘Palestine’, it was first applied by the triumphant Romans who, wanting to rub salt in the wounds of the suppressed Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century, consequently renamed Israel ‘Syria Palestina’: ‘Syria of the Philistines’. The Philistines, as anyone who’s heard the story of David and Goliath ought to know, were historic enemies of the Jews. The word Palestine comes from the Hebrew, Anglicised as ‘P’lishtim’, or ‘Paleshet’, meaning ‘invader’, or ‘enemy’.
Palestinian activists rely on resettlement of Jews from post-Holocaust Europe to claim Israel is a settler colony without any apparent awareness that 400,000 Arabs moved to the area under the British Mandate between the late 19th century and 1930.
Even the vicious anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, admitted in 1929 that the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built over two Jewish temples. The site, he conceded, “is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps prehistoric) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This too is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built an altar to the Lord.”
Even on the UN’s own definition of ‘indigeneity’, Israel Jews tick off every single one. Not least, the third: ‘a strong link to territorial and natural resources’.
Jewish practice and culture are inextricably linked to the physical land of Israel […]
Jews still pray at the same sacred sites they prayed at thousands of years ago: what’s left of the temple in Jerusalem and the tombs of the matriarchs and patriarchs in Hebron, among others.
Hebrew place names today are the same as those used by the ancient Israelites. Even the Jordan River comes from the Hebrew word “Yarden”, meaning to descend.
As for the anti-Semitic code word (for the left and Muslims) Zionist: these clowns are obviously completely unaware that Zion is a hill in Jerusalem. Its name comes from the Hebrew Tsiyon. It has been called the ‘City of David’, the centre of Jewish life and worship, for nearly 3,000 years. For at least 1500 years before Islam was even founded.
Only the sort of passionately ignorant cretin who’d misplace Gaza in the middle of the sea could seriously argue that Jews are ‘colonisers’ in their own ancestral lands.
