"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..." - top PLO official Zuheir Muhsein
Several dozen radical left professors and others are accused of siding with the enemy in planning a ceremony this afternoon at which they will ‘declare” a Palestinian state.
The ceremony is to be held on Rothschild Blvd. in Tel Aviv at 2 PM, near the building in which David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence in May 1948. The participants will invite the public to join them in signing a proclamation that begins, “In the Land of Israel arose the Jewish Nation, where its character was formed. In Palestine arose the Palestinian nation, where its character was formed.”
The first sentence thereof is a quote from Israel’s Declaration of Independence, using the traditional Jewish Biblical name for the land; Israel was the name G-d gave to the Patriarch Jacob, and the land He promised to his descendants was called the Land of Israel, as in Samuel I 13:19 and elsewhere for thousands of years.
Palestine, on the other hand, is a name given the land by Roman conquerors 2,000 years ago when they wished to erase all vestiges of Jewish independence from the area.
The Romans did not go so far as to create a “Palestinian” nation, however. No such entity existed, in fact, until recent decades when Arabs from various countries – most of whom had arrived in the wake of the successful Jewish Zionist revival and flowering of the land – gathered together to oppose the Jewish return and made a strategic decision to do so as a “people.” For a thorough documenting of this Arab immigration, see the book "From Time Immemorial" by Dr.Joan Peters of Harvard University.
A top PLO official said as much nearly 35 years ago. Zuheir Muhsein, the late PLO Military Department head and PLO Executive Council member, told the Dutch daily Trouw in March 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... to oppose Zionism."
Numerous testimonies from the 1800's prove that the number of Arabs living in the Land of Israel was minuscule. American writer Mark Twain, for instance, who visited in 1867, wrote about the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee, "There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent - not for 30 miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation... To find solitude, come to Galilee for that... these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness... We never saw a human being on the whole route [to Tabor]... Nazareth [today a teeming Israeli-Arab city of 73,000 people - ed.] is forlorn... Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin..."
Among the public figures slated to take part in today's PLO state ceremony are former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, Sefi Rechelvsky, Prof. Yehuda Bauer, Prof. Ze’ev Shternhal, and more.
MK Danny Danon (Likud) said in response, “The radical and hallucinatory left-wing continues its drive to join up with our enemies, and is losing all public support. The Israeli centrist sector understands that a Palestinian state means the establishment of a terrorist state.”
MK Yaakov Katz, head of the National Union party, said, “The left-wing Ashkenazi elite, which represents less than 1% of the Jewish nation, comprises 95% of the Supreme Court justices, senior State Prosecution personnel, newspaper editors, and Israel Prize winners. They nourish each other, fund each other, interview each other and grant each other prizes… This transitory group is apparently post-Zionist, long willing to give up on the entire [Jewish] state. On this Holiday of Freedom [Passover], the healthy Jewish People defeated, defeat and will defeat those who hate Israel and those who encourage Arab throat-slitters to succeed.”