The cornerstone was laid Thursday for a new museum north of Ramallah to show off 200 years of the culture of “Palestinians,” another Arab effort to invent a past that has no future.
It is a lot easier to convince the world that Israel is “occupying its land” if Arabs can show that the “Palestinians” existed 200 years ago and were not invented by Yasser Arafat. If you want to be particular, a case can be made that the term “Palestinian” was used in 1921 at the Syrian-Palestinian Congress, but then it must be taken in context at the time that Palestine is part of Syria.
“Palestine” used to be one of the two names of the land under the British Mandate — Palestina-Eretz Israel. The re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 all of a sudden reminded some Arabs that maybe they are Palestinians, but it was the Six-Day War in 1967 that gave Arafat the opportunity to fire up the concept.
All that was missing was a past, and the Palestinian Authority has become the master of inventing history.
Since Arafat, it has been popular to rewind the tape and define “Arabs in Palestine” as Palestinians, with a nation and culture of its own.
Rather than be open to the charge that the idea of a “Palestinian people” was invented only as a reaction to the Six-Day War, this Arab museum’s sponsors start with the fiction that such a people existed 200 years ago.
The bigger lie is the 3,500-year Palestinian history, dating back to the Bible, which, as everyone knows, incorrectly states that the forefather Abraham bound his son Isaac (Yitzchak) for a sacrifice to God.
Everyone knows just as well as Arab clerics that the Bible really speaks of the Binding of Ishmael, Abraham’s son conceived through the non-Jewish handmaid Hagar. The Jews, of course, changed the original version. That’s what happens when someone controls the media.
And everyone knows that Jesus was a Palestinian.
And everyone knows that Rachel’s Tomb is actually the Bilal ibn Rabah mosque, dating back more than 2,000 years before Islam was founded.
The Palestinian Authority first made that claim in 1996, but obviously it did not so earlier because of fears of Israeli retaliation, or more likely, because the whole world would have fallen over laughing since at that time the Palestinian Authority was far away from using the peace process to disguise itself as a terrorist organization under the guise of a peace process. Just don’t tell the State Department because no one there has a sense of humor.
Still, 200 years of history is not a bad lie, and one good lie breeds a another, through the courtesy of international media that insidiously indoctrinates the public
“The organizers hope the museum will lead to partnerships in other territories where Palestinians live. There are refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, along with Palestinian communities in the West, particularly in Chile,” reported the Associated Press Thursday.
Palestinian communities in the West? Are second, third and fourth-generation Italians in the United States called Italians?
Are third-generation Chinese in Canada called Chinese? Not a chance.
But how about the fourth generation of Arabs who once lived in Israel? An Arab in Israel in 1948 was an Arab, or was considered an Arab from Palestine.
All of this was changed by the United Nations, everyone’s favorite NGO for dis-uniting nations. It helped reinvent history and created an empire for itself not only by classifying descendants, wherever they live, as Palestinians, but also calling every generation “refugees,” in contradiction of its own policy that the status of a refugee starts and ends with the generation that has fled its host country.
Now, with all the lies in place, the Palestinian Authority can set out to use the museum to manufacture a culture that was Arab in Palestine and now is re-termed “Palestine” and go back as far as it wants to create a “Palestinian” history.
Of course, no good Arab museum in Judea and Samaria can exist without focusing on the Nakba – catastrophe – of the establishment of Israel on part of the land of what was termed Palestine by the British.
But Jews also lived in the British Mandate’s “Palestine” and are no less Palestinian than Arabs, but let’s not the truth get in anyone’s way. It might disturb the peace process.