Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer and contributing editor for several leading websites. He is also a published author of seven books including the acclaimed four volume work titled, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denying head of Terror, Inc, aka the Palestinian Authority, the same brute who glories in his ‘Pay to Slay’ abomination in which he rewards Palestinian Arab thugs for murdering Jews, once upped his erstwhile mentor and arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, by spewing another Arabian Nights hallucinatory diatribe while at the United Nations Security Council. It went as follows:
“We are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago and continuously remained there to this day.”
We should remember that the grisly, blood-soaked Arafat had falsely and ludicrously claimed that the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, were also descended from the Philistines. But then the followers of the ‘religion of peace’ will tell you that even Adam was a Muslim. Loony tunes for loony people!
But let’s come back to reality and deconstruct the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. The present-day so-called ‘Palestinians’ are Arab people sharing an overwhelmingly Muslim Arab culture, ethnicity and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions. They are primarily the descendants of those itinerant Arabs who illegally flooded British Mandatory Palestine from stagnant Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). They were attracted during the late 19th and early 20th century by new employment opportunities created by the Jewish pioneers whose heroic efforts were turning the land green again and restoring centuries of neglect which the ancestral Jewish homeland had endured under a succession of alien occupations.
Britain, during its Mandate over the territory, turned a blind eye to the flood of illegal Arab aliens entering, while at the same time often arbitrarily limiting Jewish immigration into their ancestral Biblical land. This was a betrayal of the Mandate given to Britain to facilitate a Jewish Homeland in the geographical territory then known as Palestine.
Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian born arch-terrorist, was fond of creating the absurd myth that Palestinian Arabs were descended from the Canaanites and/or Philistines. Canaanites, without doubt, were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel before the first Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, settled there, and before Moses brought their descendants back to the Promised Land during the Exodus from Egypt.
The Canaanite tribes lived both along the coastal plain and in the mountain regions, which run like a spine down the biblical Jewish territory of Samaria and Judea. Their language was similar to Hebrew and their territory stretched north into present day Lebanon and included the present-day Golan Heights. The Canaanites were finally subdued and no longer existed as a distinguishable people. The Philistines were a non-Semitic people who had entered the land from their homes throughout the Aegean Islands in general and from Crete in particular, in two waves. They arrived in Southern Canaan and along the Egyptian coastline and were known as ‘Pelestim and Keretim’ by the Hebrew tribes.
It appears that their first settlement may have been Gaza, which was then, as now, the partial territory and inheritance of the Biblical Jewish tribe of Judah. Later they settled in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gat and Ekron: the Pentapolis. The territory was primarily along the coastal Mediterranean and they attempted at different times to invade Judah but were turned back by the various Jewish Biblical heroes, and later defeated by King David. From that time onward, they were diminished as a threat and as a separate people, finally disappearing from history. Any claim to this lineage by the Arabs who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ is as absurd as that of links with the early Canaanites.
Moving fast forward to 73 CE, the first attempt of the Jews to reclaim their independence from the repressive yoke of Roman occupation ended when Jewish warriors and their families fled to the fortress of Masada from Jerusalem. The Romans had conquered the Jewish capital city, Jerusalem, and destroyed the Second Jewish Temple.
Masada is where the heroic last stand took place and where the surviving warriors and their families took their own lives rather than be sent as slaves throughout the mighty Roman Empire. The Land where these stirring and epochal events took place was in the Biblical Jewish homeland then known as the province of Judea. Later, in 135 CE, a second Jewish uprising against ever more intolerable Roman excesses took place which resulted in three years of Jewish national freedom under the charismatic warrior, Bar Kochba, known as the Son of a Star. The Roman legions sent by the Emperor Hadrian were, however, too powerful and finally crushed the uprising which ended in enormous slaughter of the Jewish inhabitants.
There is absolutely no mention of any place called ‘Palestine’ before that time. After the suppression of the Second Jewish Revolt, the Emperor Hadrian replaced the name of Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew from which the name Yehudim, Jews, originates) with Syria-Palæstina after the ‘Philistines’ who were the ancient enemies of the Israelites. Hadrian did this to insult the Jewish survivors with the name of their hated ancient enemy.
No such name as Palestine occurs in any ancient document. It is not written in the Bible, neither in the Hebrew Scriptures nor in the Christian Testament, not even in Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Seleucian or other Greek sources. There is no ‘Palestinian’ people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans who invented the term.
Yet, here again, the fantasist, Abbas, who ranted in the UNSC, claimed Jesus was a ‘Palestinian.’
Why does every historic document mention the Jews as the native and aboriginal inhabitants, and the Greeks, Romans and others as foreigners dwelling in Judea while there is no mention of a ‘Palestinian’ people, neither as native or as foreigner? What is more, there is no reference to any ‘Palestinian’ people in the Koran, although Muslims claim that their prophet once visited al-Aksa (meaning the farthest place) which Muslims, for political purposes, later chose to identify as Jerusalem.
Saladin, a Kurd, whose people had fought alongside the Jewish warriors against the Romans, knew the Jews and invited them to resettle in Jerusalem. He had no trouble in recognizing Jerusalem as their capital city and the territory as their rightful Homeland. But he did not know any so-called Palestinians and to claim that Palestinians are the original people of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is not only counter to secular history but is also opposed to Islamic history.
The so-called ‘Palestinians’ who claim Jerusalem want it so that they can take it away from the Jews for whom Jerusalem, known also as Zion, is the eternal, 3,000-year-old Jewish capital. Perhaps what links the modern day Arabs who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ with the ancient Philistines is that both are invaders. The Philistines wanted to take from the Israelites the Holy Ark of the Covenant, while today’s so-called ‘Palestinian Arabs’ want to take from the Jewish people both the Holy City of the Covenant, Jerusalem, and the very God given Land of Israel.
So let me close, beginning with the words of a Christian Arab, Joseph Farah, in Myths of the Middle East. Mr. Farah has made his home here in America and knows of what he writes:
“There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. “Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of one per cent of the landmass. But that’s too much for the Muslim Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the Muslim Arab Hamas terrorism in Israel is about today….No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make from their tiny homeland, it will never be enough.”
Pre 1967:
In Their own Words.
1937. Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi to the Peel Commission. “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.”
1946. Professor Philip Hitti,Arab historian, “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria. There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history -absolutely not.”
May 1947. Representative of the Arab Higher Committee at the United Nations issued a statement that, “Palestine was part of the Province of Syria” and that politically the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.” A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, then chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”
1956. Saudi Arabia Representative at the United Nations, “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria.”
Post 1967:
Zuhair Muhsin, military commander of the PLO and member of the PLO Executive Council. “Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. We are an integral part of the Syrian people. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity . . . yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”
Hafez Assad, Syrian Dictator, to the arch terrorist and PLO leader, Yasser Arafat. “You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. The fact is that today’s ‘Palestinians’ are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today’s Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. You are an integral part of the Syrian people; Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore, it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”
Reports from travelers to the Holy Land before its restoration by Jewish returnees.
Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”, 1867.
“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilee); not for thirty miles in either direction….One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee….Nazareth is forlorn….Jericho lies a mouldering ruin….Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation….untenanted by any living creature “… A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds….a silent, mournful expanse, a desolation…. We never saw a human being on the whole route.”
In 1590.A simple English visitor to Jerusalem wrote: “Nothing there is to be seen but a little of the old walls, which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds much like to a piece of rank or moist ground.”
Thomas Shaw, British archaeologist, mid-1700s. “Palestine is a ruined and desolate land.”
Count Constantine François Volney,18th century French author and historian. “The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it.”
James Finn, British Consul in 1857. “The country has remained ‘The Holy Land’ in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people.”
And now, for some conclusions:
That the world has fallen hook, line and sinker for duplicitous Arab propaganda speaks to the success of one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated. And students at American Universities of lower learning, with minds now filled with poisonous Marxist and Islamist propaganda, riot in support of Muslim Hamas monsters who took turns raping young women until they died from their ghastly wounds.
These were the same Arabs who beheaded babies, who baked babies alive in ovens, who delighted in raping women while videotaping them in their agony on that terrible day of October 7, 2023. Then they gleefully sent the pictures and videos back to their celebrating Muslim Arab families in Gaza; those same Arab ghouls who call themselves Palestinians.
And now in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, we hear empty headed American students tragically joining with the Muslim students, those here on visas, chanting Death to America and screaming foul anti-Jewish tropes. One wonders if these students will ever feel shame.