What Is 'Palestine'?

By David Solway
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Palestinian narrative has also been promoted by the ignorance or duplicity of Western intellectuals, which helped fertilize the Palestinian identity in order to counter the historical thrust of Zionism, accomplishing its purpose by a cynical rewriting of history.

...as the Reverend James Parkes has pointed out in Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, “from the Arab conquest until the British Mandate, [Palestine] was a portion of some larger unit, whether Arab, Mamluk, or Turkish; and its people were never conscious of themselves as a national unit.” There was, he reiterates, “no such thing historically as a ‘Palestinian Arab,’ and there was no feeling of unity among ‘the Arabs’ of this newly defined area” until modern times. The fact is that “the Balfour Declaration for the first time established a unit called Palestine on the political map” while recognizing “that there existed already a historic Jewish right.”

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