ISRAEL DELETES PALESTINE

generated with AI

At this moment, Israel must imagine it is at the pinnacle of its power. An artificially created state in 1948 from people of disparate origins, it is now a powerful figure on the world stage. To all intents and purposes, it has control of the US political system, a loyal US partner in its military adventures against its enemies, and limitless US arms, funding and political protection. The Middle East region is subjugated to its will, and its critics are bludgeoned into impotence.

As it fights with the US to destroy the last of its regional enemies, Iran, Israel estimates it will have succeeded in dispatching all that stands in the way of its total domination of the Middle East – having attacked Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, with Egypt and Jordan disabled by peace treaties with Israel.

But spoiling this triumphalism is Israel’s one unvanquished, and arguably its most important, foe: the Palestinian people and their cause. For Israel, Palestinians are a living reminder of everything it has tried to conceal: its fraudulent origins, pretend history and shaky legitimacy. While Israel bamboozled the western Christian world into accepting its claim to the Holy Land on the basis of a fake connection between modern European settlers and the ancient Israelites in Palestine, the story would never have washed with indigenous Palestinians.

Israel could have ignored that and been satisfied with its physical takeover of the Palestinians’ country, their wealth and resources. The western powers which helped create and sustain Israel would never have opposed its theft of Palestine. They never defended Palestinian rights or helped the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. On the contrary, the west wholeheartedly supported the new Jewish state from its inception to this day.

By 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, even the Palestinian leadership gave way to Israel, ceding 78% of Palestine to Israeli control.

But that Palestinian surrender was not enough. From its beginnings, Israel has been on a quest for legitimacy and needed to disguise its origins as an artificially created, violently-imposed entity. At pains to pretend it was a natural part of the Middle East, it produced a fake version of history to support the claim. According to this, Jews are Palestine’s indigenous people, not Palestinian Arabs, who are said to be wandering Bedouin tribes drifting into the country at various times.

If Israel could erase the Palestinian presence, their history and culture, then it could pretend it had never been. In this endeavour, every aspect of Palestinian history is called into question, contradicted, or denied. Most glaringly in this disinformation campaign, Palestinians are said not to have been expelled from their towns and villages by Zionist militias in the Nakba of 1948; but rather that they ran away in response to their leaders’ orders to leave.

The Zionists have now turned their attention towards deleting the very name, Palestine, from the historical record. Last December, the Open University was pressured into removing ‘Ancient Palestine’ from its humanities teaching module. The Zionist group called UK Lawyers for Israel, which forced the amendment, claimed that using the name, ‘ancient Palestine’, created a ‘hostile or offensive’ learning environment for Jewish and Israeli students.

infoly image

UK Lawyers for Israel has also been active in pressuring the British Museum to do the same, citing the need for what they termed ‘historical accuracy’. In February the Museum reportedly reduced references to ‘Palestine’ in its Middle East and Egypt galleries, replacing them with terms like, ‘The Levant’, or ‘Canaan’, for the period 2000-300 BC. The Museum’s director explained that the name, Palestine, was no longer ‘historically neutral’.

Much as the Zionists wish it, the name of Palestine has endured for 4,000 years and cannot be deleted at the whim of charlatans for political ends. I devote a specific section to the name, Palestine, in my forthcoming book, ‘A Short History of Palestine’ (Verso). This is a quote from Section I, chapter 1:

“A variety of ancient names for Palestine eventually gave way to the Philistine designation after the 12th century BC, from which time Palestine was the only name for the country. The Arabic rendering of ‘filastin’, in use until today, makes the linguistic association with the Philistines clear. The Philistines were not outsiders, as is commonly supposed, but an indigenous population in Palestine, who with time emerged as the predominant group there; which would explain the name of the country and its native inhabitants, that have survived until today.

By the 5th century BC, the Greek historian, Herodotus, had established the use of the name ‘Palestine’, referring to a land in Syria. According to his description, Palestine occupied a large area extending from the coastal region of Gaza to Egypt. It included the Judean hills, and the Jordanian Rift Valley. Greek merchants called the costal area Syria, divided into Syria ‘of the Phoenicians’ and Syria of the ‘Palestinians’.”

If we had had at our disposal histories of Palestine, Zionist disinformation would easily have been refuted. But they are few and far between. Mine is one, and Nur Masalha’s Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (Zed, 2018) is another, but hardly any more exist in English today.

I remember growing up in England after 1948, when the name of Palestine vanished and was eclipsed by ‘Israel’. Slowly we re-emerged in the 1970s as Palestinians from Palestine. We will not be deleted again.