Newt is "historically accurate" BUT...

First, a flashback:

(BtB) Wednesday, 24 May 2006: "And in the beginning ..."

Ocean Guy has a great post about Palestinian war efforts in the media department. Going back to 1970, he quotes a terrorist in conversation with an American:

'We are Palestinian. From Palestine. You know, the country that is now occupied by Israel.'

But he didn't know. He had obviously never heard of Palestine.

We will just have to go on hijacking until every American in the world has heard of it, I thought.

 

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Now fast forward some forty years to this week, the week that Newt Gingrich drove everyone a little crazy by stating that the palistinians are an "invented" people.

First, we had Charles Krauthammer saying that the assertion was historically accurate, and yes, yes, they really are just miscellaneous Arabs left over from the Ottoman Empire, "BUT,"  he shook his head, that train left the station long ago (I'm paraphrasing, but it's very close).

Not to cast any aspersion on Mr. Krauthammer, but this is rather too accepting for comfort of Adolf Hitler's axiom (from volume 1, chapter 6 of Mein Kampf: 'War Propaganda") that:

"... the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success."

In other words, a lie repeated often enough becomes a virtual truth. Or, once the train has left the station, it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle or the cat back in the bag.  

I have no doubt that Mr. Krauthammer would ultimately agree, however, that "truth is sacred." Is it not? 

At contentions, Max Boot took a different tack: yes, yes, it's historically accurate, BUT "hardly unique" :

.... All national identity is to some extent invented. Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the United States: all are artificial entities that had to be forged over time. The process of state formation in the last three was relatively recent—the U.S. did not come into existence until 1776 and was arguably not a truly unified nation until 1865; Italy and Germany were created at roughly the same time. Britain and France are older, but they still had to be forged out of regional identities—the process of turning “Burgundians” and “Normans” into Frenchmen took centuries.

For better or worse, however, national identity is fairly well entrenched in all those states now—as the European Union is now discovering in the case of Britain, in particular. So, too, the Palestinians have forged a national identity over the past few decades, in no small measure through the terrorism of the PLO, the PFLP, Hamas and other groups, which sparked a backlash from Israel and helped consolidate a Palestinian sense of grievance and hence identity.

There is little point at this stage, I would argue, in disputing whether the Palestinians are a “nation”; they think of themselves as a nation, so they have become one...

Boot goes on to say that the question is not whether the palistians make a valid people or nation, nor even whether their putative nation should have a state ("there seems close to universal agreement on that score, now") -- but only "at what pace and on what terms." Therefore, Gingrich "should stick to the real issue at hand: whether Israel should trade more land for ephemeral promises of 'peace.' "

 

On the third hand, then, we have our friend Rick Richman, who argues the point that Identities Have Consequences.  Certainly this has been true for the Jewish people... for the last several thousand years.

He writes:

The “Palestinians” have not been invented so much as renamed; not so much renamed as repurposed; not so much repurposed as redefined as “refugees” .... Their refugee status is fundamental to their identity; it is the reason they reject offers of a state again and again and again: a two-state solution would require their acceptance of a Jewish state, but acceptance of such a state would require them to give up their identity.

It's what we used to call a "Catch-22." 

The Palestinians continue to assert they will never recognize a Jewish state. They can’t – it is inconsistent with their identity, and the purpose for which the Palestinian identity was forged. From the Palestinian standpoint, the “peace process” is not about peace, or even about a state, but about reversing history: they seek a state ... to return to the time before the wars the Arabs started and lost, and before there was a Jewish state. The real barrier to Palestinian statehood is the identity the Palestinians have invented.

 

I have only one thing to add, and it applies to both Palestinian identity and those "ephemeral promises of peace" mentioned earlier. From Oriana Fallaci's 1970s interview with the founding father of the poorpalistinianpeople, Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat yimach sh'mo v'zichro:

Arafat: “We won’t accept [a peaceful agreement]! Never! We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. The issues of this struggle, whether our [Arab] friends like it or not, will always remain fixed by the principles we enumerated in 1965 with the creation of Al Fatah. First: revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers; second: the purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism in all its political, economic and military forms, and to drive it out of Palestine forever; third: our revolutionary action must be independent of any control by party or state; fourth; this action will be of long duration. We know the intentions of certain Arab leaders: to resolve the conflict with a peaceful agreement. When this happens, we will oppose it.

Fallaci: Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.

Arafat:  No! We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary. Generations.

 

 

Comments

[Rick Richman]

Arafat is gone, replaced by his deputy, who ran essentially unopposed six weeks after Arafat's death, who repeatedly pledges he will never recognize a Jewish state, or allow a single Jew in a Palestinian one, and who presides over a society steeped in anti-Semitism -- the "president" of a Potemkin polity unable and unwilling to accept a state, no matter how many times it is offered, if it means accepting a Jewish one too. Perhaps the Palestinians have a national identity, but a state is not the main thing they want.

[Mannie Sherberg]

It seems to me this issue has been too long mired in confusion because we insist on discussing it in Western terminology when Arabs think in quite a different terminology. As good Muslims, the Palestinians or the Arabs or whatever they call themselves for Western consumption, aren't interested in states at all; they are interested in the ummah -- the worldwide rule of every land under the sun by a caliph (who will, of course, be Muslim). From the very beginning of the Muslim conquests, Islamic armies have fought not for states but for land -- territory (and of course booty). The conquering Muslims frequently adopted existing state structures from the people they conquered, but the acquisition or founding of states was never what Islam was all about -- and it isn't today. If the Palestinians were to wipe out Israel, they'd temporarily set up something called a Palestinian state, but this would in reality be nothing more than an enlargement of the ummah -- and a step to further acquisitions of land that would also -- ultimately -- be incorporated into the ummah. In the end, the world that the Muslims envision will not be a world of sovereign units named Iraq and Egypt and Palestine and so on, but a Muslim ummah spanning the globe and run by history's most powerful man -- the caliph. Everything else -- despite the opportunistic propaganda spewing forth from the people who call themselves Palestinians and their Arab buddies -- is nothing more then a prelude to an empire that encompasses all of Planet Earth. When that happens, the word "state" will vanish -- and the Palestinians will go back to being what they always have been: Muslims.

[YOSEF22ADAR]

For the "dead" links you can use this: http://www.archive.org/ For example: http://web.archive.org/web/20070502014746/http://www.oceanguy.us/archives/001579.php

[Yael]

Yosef, that's awesome. I had no idea this was available. Todah rabah!