In December, 2011, Republican runner for President of the United States, Newt Gingrich stated in an TV interview,

“Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community.”[1]

Gingrich’s statements resulted of course in an immediate reaction of furious condemnation from the Arab world. But Gingrich refused to back down and stood his ground. Later in a debate in Iowa, he clarified,

“Is what I said factually true? Yes. Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth…It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’”[2]

In another TV interview he stated, “This is a propaganda war in which our side refuses to engage and we refuse to tell the truth when the other side lies.”[3]

What Is the Truth?

Are the Palestinians an invented people as Gingrich says? Here is a list of ten statements straight from Arabic and Palestinian leaders that answer the question.

1. “Arab leader and educator Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi told the British Peel Commission in 1937: ‘There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.’”[4]

2. “The first Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations in the area met in February 1919 to consider the future of the territory formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, which dissolved after World War I. The Congress declared: ‘We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic, and geographical bonds.’”[5]

3. “The celebrated scholar Philip Hitti, testifying before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, stated there was no such thing as Palestine in history, ‘absolutely not.’”[6]

4. “Palestinian spokesperson Ahmad Shuqeiri told the UN Security Council in 1956 that Palestine was nothing more than southern Syria.”[7]

5. Former Arab Israeli Knesset member Azmi Bishara, who deserted Israel wanted for charges of passing classified information to Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, said in 1994, “I think there is an Arab nation. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation. I think it’s a colonialist invention… When were there any Palestinians? …until the 19th century Palestine was the south of greater Syria.”[8]

6. The clearest declaration of all, however, comes straight from the head of the Military Operations Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Zuheir Muhsein, who declared on March 31, 1977, “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity…Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem.”[9]

7. “The PLO, in its own Charter or amended Basic Law (article 1), states that Palestine is part of the Arab nation. That ‘Arab nation’ never included a state known as ‘Palestine.’”[10]

8. Article 24 in the 1964 version of the PLO Charter excluded any claim by the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza, the very areas where they now want the world to recognize their “historic rights” to a state of their own.

9. At the Arab League meeting in Amman in November 1987, Jordan’s king Hussein said: “The appearance of the Palestinian national personality comes as an answer to Israel’s claim that Palestine is Jewish.”[11]

10. “Throughout his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: terrorist or peace maker) Arafat asserts at least a dozen times: ‘The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.’”[12]

Mr Arafat did a remarkable job. But his statement reveals, first of all, that the Palestinian national identity is a very recent invention. Secondly, the Palestinian identity is primarily based on the struggle to destroy another state, rather than to build its own.

All of the ten statements above by Arabic leaders clearly show that the Palestinians national identity has no historical roots, but is a very recent invention.

Seven Important Historic Truths About Palestine

Below are listed seven important factual historic truths about Palestine.

1. “The first official naming of “Palestine” as a distinct, defined territorial area came with the decision of the League of Nations, dealing with areas of the former Ottoman Empire, to create a Mandate for Palestine.”[13]

2. “Ironically, the name [Palestinian] was used not by Arabs but only by Jews in the area, as in The Palestinian (now the Jerusalem) Post, and the Palestine Symphony (now Israel Philharmonic) Orchestra. Only after the State of Israel was established in May 1948 did the term ‘Palestinian’ become exclusively used in referring to Arabs in the area.”[14]

3. The San Remo Conference in 1920, where both Jewish and Arabic leaders and organizations were represented, gathered on behalf of the League of Nations to decide the future of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. This conference “recognized the historic rights of the Jewish people to reconstitute their national home” in Palestine.[15] Notice carefully the words used. The conference did not create any new right. They recognized an already existing historic right! The San Remo Declaration, together with Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and Article 80 in the Charter of the United Nations, are still applicable today and binding under International Law. Forcing Israel to go back to 1967 lines and dividing Jerusalem is therefore a serious breach of International Law.

4. “No independent Palestinian state has ever been established, nor was there a single administrative or cultural unit of Palestinians. Arabs in the area were not different in any way from other Arabs in the Middle East.”[16]

5. “One can scour thousands of Arab books and newspapers written before 1964 and you will find no mention of an Arab/Muslim Palestinian state, or a reference to Arabs as Palestinians.”[17]

6. There has never in all of human history, before the Jewish immigration began, been any Palestinian king, sultan or monarch, no Palestinian capitol in Jerusalem, no Palestinian poet, author or intellectual promoting a specific Palestinian culture. And there has of course never existed any Palestinian language.

7. The Jewish people did not take over the land from the Arabs (or Palestinians) but from the Turks. The Arabs did not own it, the Turks did.

Summary: There has never been any trace of Arab Palestinian national identity in history until the Jewish national aspirations began in the 20^th century. Only after the creation of Israel in 1948 and specifically after the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 have the Palestinian Arabs with the help of media successfully invented the Palestinian narrative. This is why Newt Gingrich said,

“The fact is, the Palestinian claim to a right of return is based on a historically false story. Somebody ought to have the courage to go all the way back to the 1921 League of Nations mandate for a Jewish homeland, point out the context in which Israel came into existence. ‘Palestinian’ did not become a common term until after 1977. This is a propaganda war in which our side refuses to engage. And we refuse to tell the truth when the other side lies. And you’re not gonna win the long run if you’re afraid to stand firm and stand for the truth.”[18]

The propaganda war has, however, been successfully waged by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since its creation by the KGB in 1964.

“In 1948, Palestine meant a homeland for Jews. In 2011, Palestine means an oppressed, occupied, homeless Arab refugee subgroup being subjugated by those same Jews. What a brilliant marketing ploy. And when you couple the brand with other powerful buzzwords like Apartheid, Nazi like, abuse, mistreat, persecute, conquer, etc., you create a powerful circumstance for undeserved compassion.”[19]

Five Often Repeated Lies About Palestine

If you base your story on lies you have to continue to build it on lies. Here are a few of the historical, geographical, religious and ethnical lies that the Palestinians officially promote in their charter, education and media in order to prove their identity.

1. “The Jewish people have no trace of history whatsoever in Palestine.”

This statement makes most of the Bible from cover to cover a complete lie, not to speak of a large part of universally, accepted historical, geographical and religious research.

2. “The Jewish people, the only people in the world that God specifically calls his own chosen people, is not a people, but a religion. They therefore have no rights to a land of their own and specifically not in Palestine.”

This makes God a liar. Israel, referring both to a people as well as to a land, is mentioned about 2,300 times in the Bible. God’s promise to give the people of Israel the land of Canaan as an everlasting inheritance is the most often repeated promise in the entire Bible!

3. “Yeshua, Jesus, the one who was born king of the Jews, was a Palestinian, born by Palestinian parents. Virgin Mary was a Palestinian and Jesus was the first Palestinian martyr.”[20]

This makes the gospel a complete lie. The Apostolic Writings (NT) begins with the words, “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.” (Mt 1:1) and ends, “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.” (Rev 22:16) You cannot become more Jewish than being the son of David and Abraham. Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, wrote, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel.” (2 Tim 2:8) If Jesus is not the son of David, he is a false Messiah.

4. “There has never been any Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.”

This means that, not only are both the Old and New Testament lying documents, it makes our Master and Savior a liar as well when he spoke about the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, calling it his Father’s house. On top of that it makes the science of archeology a big lie. The area around the Temple Mount is the most excavated area in the entire world. All the professional archeologists who have excavated there for the past hundred years are then deceived.

5. “The Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Philistines and the Jebusites, as well as being a Semitic people as part of the Arab nation descending from Abraham through Ishmael.” Yasser Arafat used to say that as an Arab and therefore a Semite he could by definition not be anti-Semitic.

All of these contradictory claims make both the Bible and accepted historical and ethnological research a lie. The Jebusites as well as the Philistines, were non-Semitic peoples descending from Ham (Gen 10:14). Both disappeared from history long before the Common Era began.

These are just a few of the lies. There are countless of others. For the Palestinians anything goes if it robs the Jewish people of their heritage. And if you repeat the lies enough times, most people will eventually believe in them. The Nazis proved that. And if you on top of that enforce all the lies through violence and terror like the Palestinians have, it works even better. Finally, the revenue in the Arab world from all the oil has been able to finance the agenda.

The lie that Yasser Arafat successfully sold to the world was this: Give Palestine to the Palestinians! On the surface, who can argue with such a self-given statement? The only problem is that before 1948 that statement mainly meant: Give Palestine to the Jews! The famous UN vote in 1947 was over dividing Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, not a Jewish and a Palestinian state like it has become today. That would not have made any sense in 1947. When the Jews finally got their state they renamed it Israel,[21] more in line with their ancient heritage and the Bible[22] (which is of course another reason why many people today hate Israel, Jn 17:14).

The Arabs eventually took over the name Palestine, made it their own and successfully sold their invented story to an ignorant world in order to get their sympathy. But it is a false sympathy. The Arabs already have 22 states. One of these states is a Palestinian Arab state called Jordan. A second Palestinian state at the expense of the only Jewish state in the world is a clear violation of basic human rights as well as International Law through previously established agreements.

This is important to understand: the driving force behind the entire conflict and all of the false Palestinian claims is the bottomless hatred for the Jewish people that is an integral part of the religion of Islam. Islam has officially declared a total genocide war on the Jewish people to the end as the ancient Hadith goes, “The time [Day of Judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”[23] Moslems preach and believe these exact words just as much as Christians believe the Bible. The Druze people are an Arab minority group in Israel, which has prospered and fared very well under Israeli rule. Why? Because hatred for Jews is not part of their religion. That is why they have no problem living in a Jewish state.

Lies have no future. They are built on sinking sand. Daniel Pipes has stated: “…the fact that this [Palestinian] identity is of such recent and expedient origins suggests that…. it could eventually come to an end, perhaps as quickly as it got started.”[24]

Despite centuries of persecution and exile, the Jewish people have continued as an identifiable nation for three thousand five hundred years. That is an indisputable, historic fact. Why have they against all odds survived as a people? Because they are founded on an eternal, unconditional covenant made by the Maker of heaven and earth with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (not Ishmael and not Esau!). And as a people they have always throughout their long history of dispersion always regarded, what used to be called Palestine, as their homeland. They have mentioned it more than twenty times every day in their daily prayers for thousands of years! If any people on the face of the earth is worthy of their own state it is the Jewish people.

One thing is certain: you cannot accept the Palestinian historical narrative and also believe in the Bible. The two are mutually exclusive.

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