OPINION:
There has never been a place called Palestine, nor a people called the Palestinians (“Wartime Palestinian poll shows surge in Hamas support, close to 90% want U.S.-backed Abbas to resign,” Web, Dec. 13).
There was the Roman province of Syria Palaestina from the early second to the late fourth century AD. It was so named to obscure the Jewish nature of the region. Its capital was Caesarea Maritima in Judea.
Following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the victors set up mandates to be governed by Britain and France until Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan could be self-sustaining. Palestine was to be a homeland for Jews, Lebanon one for Christians and all the others would be Muslim.
During the mandate, the Arab population doubled by immigration from neighboring countries. Jewish migration was hampered by the British and local Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini. The British gave him the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but his heart was in Berlin. He was a Nazi.
Al-Husseini launched pogroms against Middle Eastern Jews from the 1920s to the 1940s. He spent World War II in Germany, where he personally intervened to send 4,000 Jewish Hungarian children to the gas chambers. He had Hitler’s permission to extend the Holocaust into the Middle East as soon as Rommel’s armies cleared out the British, but Rommel was defeated at El Alamein, just west of Cairo.
From the 1920s on, only Jews were called Palestinians. Arabs identified with their families, tribes or place of origin.
In 1964, the Soviet Union engineered a masterful propaganda campaign to diminish the Big Satan’s influence. They created the Palestine Liberation Organization. They simply renamed Israel “Palestine” and renamed all the Arabs living there “Palestinians.” Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian, became a Palestinian and chairman of the PLO.
It should have been inconceivable for Israel to agree to the 1993-1995 Oslo accords with the PLO. Israel and the West believed the Jewish state could get peace if the PLO got some land to call their own. But Arafat assured his supporters the agreement with Israel was like the Prophet’s treachery against the Quraysh Jews. There was never going to be peace.
If the people we now call Palestinians are to ever have a state, it will be at the generosity of Israel. What Oct. 7 taught Israel is that its borders must never be insecure. And the world-wide Islamist demonstrations should be a warning to Western nations that they are being targeted, too.
LEN BENNETT
Author, “Unfinished Work: Letters in Defense of Israel, the Jewish People and the Truth”
Deerfield Beach, Florida
