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Fabricating Palestinian History

(Middle East Quarterly) Alexander H. Joffe - Mahmoud Abbas' personal representative told a 2011 "Nakba Day" event in Gaza: When Netanyahu "claims that they [Jews] have a historical right dating back to 3000 years BCE - we say that the nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7,000-year history BCE." In fact, archaeologists have only the dimmest notion of prevailing ethnic concepts in 7000 BCE. Writing would not be invented for almost another 4,000 years and would only reach the Levant a thousand years after that. The Plst - a Mediterranean group known to the Egyptians as one of the "Sea Peoples" and who gave their name to the biblical Philistines - arrived around 1200 BCE. Arabs are known in Mesopotamian texts as residents of the Arabian Peninsula from around 900 BCE. The concept of a "nation" emerged with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and their neighbors sometime after 900 BCE. For Abbas, as it was for PLO leader Yasser Arafat before him, there is a reflex that simply cannot accept the antiquity of Jews. Arafat famously told then-U.S. president Bill Clinton that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem, causing the usually unflappable Clinton to nearly explode.
2012-06-15 00:00:00
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