If you can stomach (trying to) talk to the average Pallywanker, you’d best be prepared for an avalanche of spittle-flecked gibberish. As one expert remarked to Douglas Murray in the early stages of the Gaza war, the ‘pro-Palestinian’ movement was characterised by “passionate ignorance”. Few people since the demise of Nazi Germany have ever been so absolutely certain about such demonstrably lunatic nonsense as your average ‘pro-Palestinian’.
One of the most deranged takes is that Jews are somehow ‘colonisers’ in their own indigenous homelands. Which requires, among other things, ignoring some 5,000 years and more of archaeological evidence of Jewish inhabitation of what is now Israel. The identification of the region as Israel dates to at least over 3,000 years ago on an Egyptian stele.
Undeterred by such footling stuff as archaeological evidence, your putative Pallywanker (no doubt by now shouting) will almost certainly launch into a spittle-flecked diatribe that ‘Palestinians were there first!’ No doubt followed by the assertion that ‘Palestinians’ are descended from the ancient Philistines.
Not only is this a spectacular own goal – the very word philistine is derived from the Hebrew word for ‘invaders’ – it’s also utter camel dookey.
Still, doesn’t it sound plausible? I mean: Palestine, Philistine? Nope: call the whole thing off.
Let us first establish who the Ancient Philistines really were. They were a nation that lived on the Mediterranean coast of the land of Canaan. Their territory essentially started from Egypt’s border and stretched partway to the border of Phoenicia. Inland from them were the Israelites.
The Israelites dubbed them plishtim: ‘invaders’, ‘intruders’, ‘trespassers’. Because that’s what they were.
The Philistines appear to have emerged from two waves of migration. From around 2000 BCE, there is evidence of extensive Aegean expansion towards the Levant. The Minoans from Crete appear to have established colonies in this area. Perhaps these started off as trading colonies, but in any case, they became the Philistines known by the Biblical patriarchs.
Centuries later, during the time of the Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt, another wave of migration came from the Aegean. This occurred in the twelfth century BCE. These new arrivals may well be the Cherethites mentioned in the Bible as a Philistine tribe.
So, what happened to the Philistines? In the Bible, Ezekiel prophecies their destruction. This turns out to have been not so much a prophecy as an observation. Ezekiel was writing during the Jews’ exile in Babylon. The same Babylonian king who dragged the Jews into exile, Nebuchadnezzar, appears to have wiped out the Philistines while he was at it. Once Alexander the Great conquered the same area a century later, all trace of them had disappeared from the historical and archaeological record.
Since the Philistines were completely destroyed during the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, it is clear that no modern nation comes from them, including the Palestinians. So where did the Palestinians come from?
First, the etymology of Palestine. Borrowing a word directly from the name of the Philistines they had finally wiped off the map, Greeks began calling the entire region between Egypt and Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon) Palestine. The reason they used such a term was because the sea-trading Greeks were more familiar with the coastal region (the Philistines) than inland (the Israelites).
Centuries later, when the Romans put down the Hebrew revolts, they metaphorically put down the uppity Hebrews as well, destroying their temple and insultingly renaming the land ‘Syria Palaestina’. Roman hegemony, plus the forced diaspora of a large part of the Jewish population, meant that the name Palestine stuck for centuries onward. So, anyone who lived in the region (including the remaining Jews) was ‘Palestinian’.
But where did the ‘Palestinians’, qua ‘Palestinians’, of today come from. Simple: they’re Arab colonisers.
The Romans and their Byzantine successors were briefly displaced in ‘Palestine’ by the Sassanid Persians, but, just a couple of decades later, the conquering armies of Islam swept in. Over the next centuries, the population of the region entered drastic decline, dropping two-thirds over the next millennium. Arabs displaced many of the original inhabitants: ‘settler-colonisers’, to use Marxist terminology.
In conclusion, the modern-day Palestinians did not emerge directly from the Ancient Philistines of Biblical times. Rather, the term ‘Palestinians’ describes the population of modern Palestine. It is a population primarily comprised of Arabs. This population arrived in the area principally during the Islamic conquests of the Levant.
Many more arrived in only the last century or so. When the British conquered the Ottoman province of Palestine, they brought with them a European rule of law, along with higher wages and standard of living. This became a magnet for Arabs from the surrounding region. Within a few years, a region whose population had languished at around 300,000 had boomed, with nearly half a million Arabs alone. Less than 20 years later, the Arab population had reached over a million.
Clearly, natural increase cannot begin to account for such a population increase. Indeed, what genetic studies of Jewish people in Israel that have touched on ‘Palestinian’ ancestry – no complete, independent study of the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs’ genome exists, no matter what the Pallywankers insist – have found is that ‘Palestinians’ are genetically related to Bedouins, Jordanians and Saudi Arabians, “consistent with a common origin in the Arabian Peninsula”.
To sum in a single sentence: ‘Palestinians’ are not remotely indigenous to Israel – they are the colonisers.
