Who Are The Palestinians?

"Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called al-Masri, ["Masri" translates as "Egyptian" in Arabic] whose roots are Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the north, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians; we are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are part of you. Egyptians! Personally, half my family is Egyptian -- and the other half are Saudis."
"Half of the Palestinians are Egyptian."
Fathi Hammad, Hamas Minister of the Interior and National Security (2012)

 

Oh, how events conspire to complicate the future! When the Ottoman Empire fell apart in the first quarter of the 20th Century and Britain and France stepped into the Middle East to take up their obligations as colonial powers which ended when they finally withdrew, but not before drawing up boundaries and creating 'countries' that never before existed where the European powers felt they should, the groundwork for ethnic and sectarian and ideological politics was weighted in favour of future mayhem.

Egypt stepped in to administer the area of what was then called Palestine in Gaza and whose historical residents were then Jewish Palestinians co-mingling with 19th and 20th Century latecomers from Egypt, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (another European geographical and national construct split off from Syria) moved to administer what we now call the West Bank, comprised yet again of those Jewish ancestors of biblical Hebrews living in Zion as Jewish Palestinians, among Jordanian Arabs.

Both Egypt and Jordan had every intention of holding on to these protectorates and absorbing them into their geographies, each never considering for a moment to allow the Arab Palestinians to believe that they would agree to permit them to consider the land their own, as Palestine a land for the Arab Palestinians of Egyptian and Jordanian origin (apart from the ruling Hashemite Jordanians who had originally migrated there from what was to be later called Saudi Arabia; another European construct).

By some strange alchemy of human character degradation, or however it can be classified, Palestinians turned out to be a cranky lot, exhibiting a mass culture of character traits not wholly appreciated by Arabs of other cultures of other Middle East countries who preferred to maintain a safe distance from them. And these are the people whom Palestinian Jews, now Jewish Israelis, must contend with, in insisting that their state of Israel is real, permanent and nothing will dislodge it from the geography.

Palestinian Arabs, surprise, are not truly indigenous to Palestine. When they migrated there from other parts of the Arab world, Palestine was a vast open no man's land when Mark Twain famously wrote his disappointment in viewing it not as he anticipated it might be in a reflection of antiquity, but as he saw it:

Stirring scenes ... occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent-not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. 

He wrote of the Bedouin raiders who had been 'shipped from Jerusalem' by the Arabs who guarded the pilgrim routes: They met together in full view of the pilgrims, after the battle, and took lunch, divided the baksheesh extorted in the season of danger and then accompanied the cavalcade home to the city! The nuisance of an Arab guard is one which is created by the sheikhs and the Bedouins together, for mutual profit... 

To find "...solitude to make one dreary": Come to Galilee for that... these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms.... We reached Tabor safely .... We never saw a human being on the whole route.  Nazareth is forlorn .... Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago: Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Savior's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, "Peace on earth, good will to men," is untenanted by any living creature... Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Savior's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes."Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.... desolate and unlovely.. . Twain wrote, it is dreamland."

Yasser Arafat, who infamously created the symbol of 'resistance' against the presence of a state devoted to a haven for world-wide Jews returning to their heritage and their cultural/religious homeland, accustomed the world as well to consider the Palestinians as humble 'refugees' yearning to return to Palestine just as Jews yearned to return to Zion. Where Jews returned to Zion after millennia of suffering the slings and arrows and gas chambers of the world to rebuild their ancient homeland, Palestinians strove to drive them out by violent confrontation and reclaim what they insist is theirs.

Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization icon, was himself born and raised in Egypt, where he studied at University of Cairo and served in the Egyptian military. In his official biography, he stated: "If there is any such thing as a Palestinian people, it is I, Yasser Arafat, who created them." And so he did. And he led the PLO into a series of atrocities against the Jewish invaders to the holy land, unsettling the Palestinian Arabs' complacency of ownership.

After the 1967 Six Day War when the assembled Arab armies discovered that Israel would not be dislodged and Jews would never again be mass victims of carnage, both Egypt and Jordan saw it in their best interests to sign peace treaties with Israel. But they were never Islamist jihadists as societies, and they never presented as terrorists, other than one nation going to war to destroy another; reason of a sort did prevail, eventually.

To believe that reason ever compels fanatical Islamists is a fallacy that only the European Union, those same imperialist nations that colonized and oppressed other, lesser-advanced countries of the world wants to believe. And in their belief, because they're sick and tired of Israel and the constant conflict between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, they are prepared to jettison any support they may once have been prepared to deliver to Israel and its Jews when their conscience was stricken over European complicity in the Holocaust.