http://indymedia.org.il
Myths they are, along with all the others
author: Dr. Landen Spiegelhaus
I am sorry, but you are blinding yourself for ideological purposes.
The fact that the populations that make up the present Palestinian people existed on this land for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, does not have anything to do with the status of their presently existing self-perception as a organic community concieved of as a nation.
This self-perception of nation is a cultural artefact of recent lineage.
Your problem is that you have accepted the parameters which equate national self-perception and modern ideas of territory as the main criterion which legitimizes rights and recognition on the international statge.
The legitimacy of these rights should have nothing to with self-perception of organic community or certain notions of territoriality. There are many cultures around the world which never had theses notions of either community or territory.
However, the legitimacy of their claims over the land they and their ancestors lived upon and their right to control their own destinies is not diminished in any way by this fact.
So desist from your rejecting for ideological purposes what is by now common knowledge, that all nations are artefacts of recent lineage.
Palestine was never a homogenous population. There was always movement of populations into and out of the region.
Plus, the various communities of Palestine did not percieve themselves as one people with a common history or destiny.
The Philistines were sea-farers most likely originating around Anatolia.
Bediouns came into the region with the Arab invasions after the demise of the Nabatean populations in the Negev (around the 7th century C.E).
During the Roman period, Mediterreanan traders, Roman citizens from lands to the East and West mixed with the local populations.
The Druse are a Shi'a break off, coming from Egypt to the highlands of the Galilee to avoid opression.
During many periods of Muslim rule, especially during the late Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, the local 'Palestinian' elite were actually not Arab at all, but 'Turkish' military slaves from Transoxania and the Caucasus.
At different periods, there was movement from all over the areas of Dar al-Islam. Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Arabs from further east, North Africans, etc. moved into the region and intermarried with the local population.
Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, the Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem from the Crusaders was a Kurd.
The Palestinians are made up of a mixture from all of these origins, and it is most likely as specious to say that Palestinians are the direct descendents of the indegenous population (Canaanite, Am Yisrael, etc.) as it is to say that the Jewish Diaspora are the direct descendents of the local indegenous population.
Nationalism is built on the ideological projection of a unified mythological idea of historical community onto the present.
This is equally as true of the Palestinians as it is of the Israelis.
Both nationalisms are built on fiction and both populations are made up in large part of non-indegenous populations who at some point migrated either as the conquerors themselves or on the heels of the conquerors.