Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 07:13:04 -0400
From: bobhunt@erols.com
Subject: [libs4peace] RE: Under siege: what it's like living in Israel
To: libs4peace@yahoogroups.com ("Libertarians 4Peace"), Individual-Sovereignty@yahoogroups.com, American_Liberty@yahoogroups.com
I have never doubted Scott before.
Is there any reason to start?
bob hunt
On Wed, 17 Apr 2002 20:30:07 -0700, "Scott Jordan"
<scott_c_jordan@yahoo.com> wrote:
Further:
http://www.tzemach.org/fyi/docs/nopal.htm
What Does "Palestine" Mean?
It has never been the name of a nation or state. It is a geographical
term, used to designate the region at those times in history when there
is no nation or state there.
The word itself derives from "Peleshet", a name that appears frequently
in the Bible and has come into English as "Philistine". The name began
to be used in the Thirteenth Century BCE, for a wave of migrant "Sea
Peoples" who came from the area of the Aegean Sea and the Greek Islands
and settled on the southern coast of the land of Canaan. There they
established five independent city-states (including Gaza) on a narrow
strip of land known as Philistia. The Greeks and Romans called it
"Palastina".
The Philistines were not Arabs, they were not Semites. They had no
connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs. The
name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine" is not an Arabic
name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Greco-Roman "Palastina"
derived from the Peleshet.
How Did the Land of Israel Become "Palestine"?
In the First Century CE, the Romans crushed the independent kingdom of
Judea. After the failed rebellion of Bar Kokhba in the Second Century
CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe out the identity of
Israel-Judah-Judea. Therefore, he took the name Palastina and imposed it
on all the Land of Israel. At the same time, he changed the name of
Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.
The Romans killed many Jews and sold many more in slavery. Some of those
who survived still alive and free left the devastated country, but there
was never a complete abandonment of the Land. There was never a time
when there were not Jews and Jewish communities, though the size and
conditions of those communities fluctuated greatly.
The History of Palestine
Thousands of years before the Romans invented "Palastina" the land had
been known as "Canaan". The Canaanites had many tiny city-states, each
one at times independent and at times a vassal of an Egyptian or Hittite
king. The Canaanites never unite into a state.
After the Exodus from Egypt - probably in the Thirteenth Century BCE but
perhaps earlier - the Children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan.
There they formed first a tribal confederation, and then the Biblical
kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the post-Biblical kingdom of Judea.
From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has the
only united, independent, sovereign nation-state that ever existed in
"Palestine" west of the Jordan River. (In Biblical times, Ammon, Moab
and Edom as well as Israel had land east of the Jordan, but they
disappeared in antiquity and no other nation took their place until the
British invented Trans-Jordan in the 1920s.)
After the Roman conquest of Judea, "Palastina" became a province of the
pagan Roman Empire and then of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and very
briefly of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. In 638 CE, an Arab-Muslim
Caliph took Palastina away from the Byzantine Empire and made it part of
an Arab-Muslim Empire. The Arabs, who had no name of their own for this
region, adopted the Greco-Roman name Palastina, that they pronounced
"Falastin".
In that period, much of the mixed population of Palastina converted to
Islam and adopted the Arabic language. They were subjects of a distant
Caliph who ruled them from his capital, that was first in Damascus and
later in Baghdad. They did not become a nation or an independent state,
or develop a distinct society or culture.
In 1099, Christian Crusaders from Europe conquered Palestina-Falastin.
After 1099, it was never again under Arab rule. The Christian Crusader
kingdom was politically independent, but never developed a national
identity. It remained a military outpost of Christian Europe, and lasted
less than 100 years. Thereafter, Palestine was joined to Syria as a
subject province first of the Mameluks, ethnically mixed slave-warriors
whose center was in Egypt, and then of the Ottoman Turks, whose capital
was in Istanbul.
During the First World War, the British took Palestine from the Otoman
Turks. At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its
subject provinces "Palestine" was assigned to the British, to govern
temporarily as a mandate from the League of Nations.
.....
Who Is A Palestinian?
During the period of the Mandate, it was the Jewish population that was
known as "Palestinians" including those who served in the British Army
in World War II.
British policy was to curtail their numbers and progressively limit
Jewish immigration. By 1939, the White Paper virtually put an end to
admission of Jews to Palestine. This policy was imposed the most
stringently at the very time this Home was most desperately needed -
after the rise of Nazi power in Europe. Jews who might have developed
the empty lands of Palestine and left progeny there, instead died in the
gas chambers of Europe or in the seas they were trying to cross to the
Promised Land.
At the same time that the British slammed the gates on Jews, they
permitted or ignored massive illegal immigration into Western Palestine
from Arab countries Jordan, Syria, Egypt, North Africa. In 1939, Winston
Churchill noted that "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have
crowded into the country and multiplied . . . ." Exact population
statistics may be problematic, but it seems that by 1947 the number of
Arabs west of the Jordan River was approximately triple of what it had
been in 1900.
The current myth is that these Arabs were long established in Palestine,
until the Jews came and "displaced" them. The fact is, that recent Arab
immigration into Palestine "displaced" the Jews. That the massive
increase in Arab population was very recent is attested by the ruling of
the United Nations: That any Arab who had lived in Palestine for two
years and then left in 1948 qualifies as a "Palestinian refugees".
Casual use of population statistics for Jews and Arabs in Palestine
rarely consider how the proportions came to be. One factor was the
British policy of keeping out Jews while bringing in Arabs. Another
factor was the violence used to kill or drive out Jews even where they
had been long established.
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