Some (More) Facts About Palestine

After you get your dose of humor for the day, you might want to check out some clarifications, as well as some supplementary facts:

• Palestine was called Palestine by the Roman empire after the "Plishtim" ("Phillistines"), who used to occupy a part of what today is the Gaza area, as punishment to the Jews for a number of bloody rebellions they staged during the Roman invasion. The Old Testament has a rather detailed account of the "Plishtim" society, including how they invaded the Jewish kingdom on multiple occasions, unprovoked. The familiar story of David and Goliath (modern English: Julius) tells about one such occasion. (David is the Jew; Goliath is the Palestinian.) You may have also heard about Samson and Dalaila; the story there being of a Jew who wasn't afraid to stand up to the Philistines, and the trickery of sending Dalaila (Hebrew: "Dlila," meaning mostly empty, or diluted [1]) to seduce him, and ultimately lead to his downfall (i.e., to "dilute" him).
• The modern "Palestinians" are neither genetically nor ethnically decended from the ancient "Plishtim" people (and don't even share linguistic roots with them), but rather came primarily from the Arab lands during the rise of the Muslim Empire. They weren't terribly attached to the land, as the UN itself freely admits that as of 1948, the vast majority of the Palestinians had their families in neighboring countries, and themselves had only been living in the area for half a year. (The UN had to make an exception to its normal "Refugee" definition of 2 years in order to be able to grant them "Refugee" status.) Muslim emperors had invited the Jews to settle and reestablish themselves on the land in the past, being unwilling to turn the desert into green again themselves. Jews of the period tended to consider a "return to Zion" before the "Mashiach" (Messiah) to be against their faith, so the vast majority of them refused. (It's rather funny how Zionism is now the norm among Jews.)
• It's interesting how the link above talks about the entire non-Jewish population of the British Mandate as "Palestinians," for purposes of population comparison. Most of the "Palestinians" counted there felt no real connection to the land, since after all, they had only come there as part of their large-scale expansion throughout Africa.
• The link goes on to note that relatively few Jews had been present on the land for more than a thousand years, without (a) clearly implying that the population of the land was almost entirely Jewish before that, or (b) giving credit where it's due, in this case, to the "Palestinians," for conquering the land of the "Infidel" from its previous invaders. In fact, it looks like the only modern people with a legitimate claim on the land are the Jews, since the Bible itself tells of how the father of the Jewish people settled there peacefully. (Yes, the father of the Jewish people is also the father of the Muslim people, according to them. A geneological connection is a bit harder to establish, though, between Yishmael ("Ismail") and Mohammed, and even harder to establish between Yishmael and the numerous people from all over the Muslim empire who were forcibly converted to Islam. Besides, Yishmael's own father banished him, since he was a bad influence on Abraham's other son (the only one he had with his wife, and his only heir, according to the Bible), so even if there is a blood connection between Yishmael and today's Palestinians, it does little for their land claim. Not only that, but it clearly shows why peace will never happen with them: we know that Abraham followed God's orders virtually to the letter, and even he was fooled at first into believing that Yishmael should be his heir, until God corrected him. Why would God tell him to nuke the guy, if peace were possible?
• The Jews never claimed to want an ethnically pure state in any of the UN talks, nor am I aware of any evidence that they secretly planned to engage in ethnic cleansing, especially so soon after they themselves had been victims of Hitler's (failed, due solely to his own emotion overpowering his reason) attempt at ethnic cleansing. In practice, the only "ethnic cleansing" ever performed against the Palestinians was by Jordan, Syria (then in charge of Lebanon), Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; only they called it "dealing with a Palestinian uprising."
• "The Great Jewish Land Grab of 1948" is a bit of a myth, to put it mildly. A "land grab" means grabbing land, right? Grabbing is clearly an offensive act. The only war that the fledgling state of Israel fought in 1948 was a defensive one, against all seven Muslim countries sharing a border with Israel. (One has to wonder, if these countries liked the Palestinians so much as to risk their own security invading the state of Israel to rescue them, why did they kill off their own Palestinian populations?)
• It's worth noting that if we take the UN resolutions giving the status quo a right to persist (basically, if you've lived in an area for at least two years continuously - or under the Palestinian exeption, half a year continuously - then you're entitled to stay there forever) at face value, the United States is in violation, as is the entire Muslim empire. The Romans should be paying reparations for invading the Jewish kingdom. Most modern Muslim countries in the Middle East should be making amends to their Jewish populations that no longer exist due to persecution (including much of my own family). The Palestinians certainly have no special claim on the land just because their ancestors ruthelessly invaded it a millenium ago and killed the real indigenous people, as chronicled in their own Koran. Clearly, taking the UN resolutions at face value makes very little sense.

Footnotes

[1] - Dalaila

As noted above, in the Hebrew version of the Old Testament, she's called "Dlila," which literally means emptyish or dilute. (In modern Hebrew, it can also mean "airhead.") The root is "Dal," or poor. Like many non-Jewish names in the Bible, it's quite likely that her name wasn't at all "Dlila" (a Hebrew word), but rather that she had some Philistine name instead, possibly some Philistine word with the same meaning. (For example, Moses is called Moses ("Moshe"), as the Bible explains, because Pharaoh's daughter pulled him out of the water. "Moshe" comes from the root "Masha," or the infinitive "Limshot," meaning to pull, or to extract. Pharaoh's daughter may not have even known Hebrew, and at any rate she was living in a rather anti-Semitic environment (leading up to the Ten Plagues), so it's highly doubtful that she would've named him with a Hebrew word, even if she knew Hebrew. Presumably, she called him with the Egyptian equivalent, which the Bible translated for our ease of understanding.)