Somewhere clearly has been.
Over to Canada to offer to take in the entire population of Gaza and house them along the border with the United States. Western politicians and media persons are discussing the war crime of forcible transfer as if it were perfectly normal. Donald Trump is in his second term. He wants Gaza as real estate, and he wants its gas field.
And Gaza was Philistia. It was never in any Biblical Land of Israel, and the only possible Israeli claim to it is that, although they have never had it, the Israelites were promised all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. By God. In Whom the founders of Zionism did not believe, and in Whom Benjamin Netanyahu has little apparent interest.
Is such a position extreme? Well, yes, but then we have just seen Alastair Campbell, who is immensely influential on the present British Government, and Rory Stewart, who is a Privy Counsellor, wend their way to Syria to broadcast their fawning over a member of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, which on 12 December COBRA had rightly decided not to remove from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations.
"Gaza was Philistia"
ReplyDeleteIndeed. It's always fascinating to read the strange evolution of the term "Palestinian" (originating from the Philistines) which had fallen out of popular use for over 1,000 years until Arthur Balfour, a student of Greco-Roman history, brought it back into usage in the Balfour Declaration which pledged "‘establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people’."
Between 1922 and 1948 the term 'Palestinian' meant any inhabitant of the Palestine Mandate, including Jews. At that time, for instance, the principal English-language newspaper published in Jerusalem was 'The Palestine Post', which is now 'the Jerusalem Post'.
You are on the right lines, but it had not fallen into disuse. It is in Herodotus, and Saint Jerome, and Saint John Chrysostom, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and Shakespeare (twice, and Holinshed before him), and the Douay-Rheims Bible, and the King James Bible, and Sir Isaac Newton, and Voltaire, and Diderot, and every map for at least 1878 years until 1948. No one called it anything else.
DeleteTrump is merely acknowledging reality-Israel's destruction of Gaza has left it uninhabitable. As Norman Finkelstein said "Gaza is no more."
ReplyDeleteThat is not up to either of them.
Delete“but it had not fallen into disuse”
ReplyDeleteIt had fallen into disuse in the relevant region. Shakespeare, John Foxe, Voltaire, Isaac Newton and Diderot had never been there let alone lived there.
Local Arabs up until the latter half of the 20th century saw themselves as either part of a future pan-Arab federation (as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wanted) or just had loyalty to their local tribal clans like the Bedouins. None of them called themselves “Palestinians”, a term used by the British after 1922 to refer to all its subjects in Mandate Palestine including Jews.
They called it Palestine. They thought of it as part of a Greater Syria, but again, so did everyone else.
DeleteThe Arabs did not call it Palestine (or call themselves “Palestinian”) only the British called it that at the time and they also called the Jews Palestinians-hence you cannot find any Arab leaders of the time who used that term (Shakespeare indeed!).
ReplyDeleteRashid Khalidi is the best Arab historian of the modern Middle East and has always accepted there was no collective “Palestinian” Arab identity in the early 20th century. Nobody serious argues there was.
Where to begin, darling? Where to begin?
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ReplyDelete“That is not up to either of them“
It’s a fact. It would take 10-15 years just to clear the rubble and bombs let alone rebuild it. And nothing can grow there now it’s farmland is all destroyed.
Donald Trump obviously does not agree with you.
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