Debunking some hasbara talking points on Palestine

Speaking as an ethnic Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity largely through the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Pawtucket, a significant part of which belongs to Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian Arabic (along with Armenian and Coptic) immigrant communities, I have grown a lot more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Having had Palestinian classmates and co-workers in grad school also helped significantly there – so Mazen, if you’re reading this, know that you helped change at least one person’s mind! I also have grown a lot less tolerant of transparently-phoney, cynical and, yes, stupid talking points that are put out by ultraconservative elements of the Israeli government and their backers in the United States. The following does not pretend to be an exhaustive debunking, but instead provides a sampling of answers to common talking points you will find on social media.

There is no letter ‘P’ in Arabic, therefore Palestine is not Arabic.

This particular linguistically-ignorant claim was made on the floor of the Knesset by Anat Barko, and has been adopted by a number of equally-illiterate conservative hasbara groups here in the US on social media. Well, about that. See this letter here: פ? It begins the word Palastiynah פלשתינה which is still used in Hebrew to refer to the gæographical region. It’s called ‘pe’ in manuals of Hebrew grammar, but (still today for most Hebrews) it actually signifies the phoneme /f/. That is to say, many Hebrews today pronounce it similarly to the way Arabs do: Falastiynah (or Arabic Falastîn).

Both the Hebrew letter pe פ and the Arabic letter fâ ف not only carry the same phonetic value (ooh, look, see that ‘p’ in ‘phonetic’ carrying the /f/ phoneme? whoops, there it is again!), but they actually historically descend from the same letter in the original Phœnician (sorry, Punic – I guess those damn Phœnicians didn’t exist either since the Romans couldn’t pronounce their name right) writing system: Pe or Fe. It’s the same damn letter. Heck, it actually even looks similar in both ‘child’ writing systems of Hebrew and Arabic. Etymologically-speaking, the two words Palastiynah and Falastîn are exact cognates with each other. We’ll get to some further linguistic and etymological fallacies a little bit later, though.

The Palestinian people did not exist before 1967 (or 1948, or 1918).

The infamous Golda Meir quote from 1969 sadly still has a life of its own among the American and Israeli right-wing today, and you’ll even hear it expressed among Democrats. Unfortunately, these people even get Golda Meir wrong, because her point was not that Palestinians did not exist, but that Palestinians did not have an independent country of their own prior to 1948, being subject either to Ottoman rule as a part of the province of Syria, or to British rule as a part of the Palestinian mandate. What Ms Meir is actually saying is still rather morally grotesque – she was deliberately trying to exculpate violent land thefts and expropriations by European Ashkenazim of Arabs’ land by pointing to prior imperial rule over said Arabs – but to take from her quote the idea that the Palestinians didn’t actually exist as a people prior to the creation of the State of Israel is a double distortion of historical fact.

In truth, Palestinian identity – though this is somewhat controversial – can be traced back to the failed revolt against Ibrahim Pasha’s rule in 1834, which brought the rural fallâhîn and Bedouin tribesmen of the Levantine countryside together with urban burghers in al-Quds, Nâblus, al-Khalîl and Safad. The Arabs in Palestine rebelled against Ibrahim Pasha for two reasons: on the one hand, they sought to avoid conscription, taxation and forced labour for the army; and second, they objected to the policies of cultural and religious assimilation that were being promoted by Ibrahim Pasha. The rebellion therefore involved a broad swathe of Levantine society – both nomadic Bedouins and settled fallâhîn, both rural and urban Arabs, both Christians and Muslims.

Even though the rebellion was brutally crushed and the events of 1834 generally forgotten, the revolt did inspire the inhabitants of Palestine to begin thinking of themselves as having a shared local identity that was not just Ottoman, not just Arab and not just associated with their millet. In this case, then, the Palestinians were very little different than the peoples of the Balkans, who likewise formed these groups of local interest which only later blossomed into nationalist sentiment. That sentiment formed, it cannot be stressed enough, among people who were already living there.

The term Syria Palæstina was invented by the Romans as a symbol of Judæan subjugation.

Uh, no. The history of the gæographical term Palæstina (or, more correctly, Παλαιστίνῃ) dates back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, who used it in his Histories to refer to the district of Syria then locally called ‘Canaan’. In this, because he was using primarily Ægyptian source material, he was borrowing the Ægyptian place-name for the region, which was Pelešet. Both of these facts are correctly accounted for in the Jewish virtual library. There is a seed of truth to this claim in that the Romans did merge Judæa with the surrounding territory in Syria, and they did rename the whole region Syria Palæstina in order to humiliate the Jews and quell further revolts. But the hasbara claim that the Romans invented the term ‘Palestine’ for that purpose is cynically ahistorical and misleading.

There were no Arabs living in the Holy Land in the 19^th century.

You’ll usually see various travelogue accounts used to bolster this claim, including that of Samuel Clemens, who claimed the Holy Land was ‘desolate and unlovely’, and ‘untenanted by any living creature’. Chalk that up for one more literary grudge I have against that guy, along with his summary dismissals of Walter Scott, Jane Austen and Alfred Russel Wallace. But what you won’t see in these carefully-curated hasbara versions of the Western travelogues are the reasons there was such poverty and desolation in the Holy Land – the fact that a rebellion had been put down there only about twenty years prior, and the reprisals had killed off twenty percent of the population. It’s like claiming that Europe was an uninhabited barren wasteland after the Thirty Years’ War, or after World War Two – which, in fact, many parts of it were. In 1800, the population of the Holy Land was 275,000 people, mostly Muslim. By 1881, the population of the Holy Land had grown again to around 500,000 people, of whom 87% were Muslim, 9% were Christian and 5% were Jews. Most of these indigenous Jews – the Mizrahim – had never left Palestine for millennia and were as much victims of displacement by the influx of Ashkenazim after 1948 as their Christian and Muslim neighbours. Palestine was hardly terra incognita prior to 1947.

The Bible is the Zionists’ deed to the land of Israel.

If I may directly quote the words of my Hebrew teacher, Dr Paul Tarazi:

The necessity for discussing the way the Bible looks at God’s alleged promise to secure out of Canaan an eternal deeded property to the Jews of all ages need not be justified. The bloodshed and misery caused by such a misreading of the Bible and carried out throughout the twentieth century into ours is, in itself, horrific. Linking it, directly or indirectly, to God’s Word and thus His will is, to say the least, blasphemous.

The covenantal understanding of God’s promise to Abraham and his progeny – among whom, it must be said, are the Arabs and the other Semitic peoples – in fact precludes any reading of the Bible as a ‘deed’ to the land. The only true deeded proprietor, the only true melek מלך in the Hebrew Scriptures, is God; the others – that’s us, by the way; Jews, Muslims and Christians! – are merely His tenants, merely His guests. Only the later, pernicious influence of modernist nineteenth-century nationalist ideology would attach to the Scriptural phrase ‘land of Israel’ or ’ereṣ Yisra’el ארץ ישראל, a fee-simple property claim by an entire national group. The Bible specifically enjoins peoples – but in particular God’s people – to practise hospitality and mutual aid to people who do not have even that level of claim upon property. ‘For you were strangers in Ægypt’ is not merely a polite reminder to the people of Moses; it is in fact a soteriological and eschatological claim, in fact: that if you do not treat strangers hospitably, then you are still in Ægypt and you are still a stranger to God. Again, Dr Paul Tarazi:

Throughout the Bible, God’s law summons its hearers to love and care for anyone in need living on His earth. It even asks them to behold God’s face, that is, His presence, in that of their presumed enemy, as Jacob was taught in his encounter with God and Esau. This divine commandment is pushed to its ultimate meaning in Jesus’ teaching about love, which is magisterially summed up in the words of John: ‘He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’

If you read George Antonius’s book The Arab awakening, you will realise how keenly Arab observers understood the religious issues, and also how hard that ideal was to put into practice for everyone involved. The imperialist European peoples are implicated as well – particularly the French, the Germans and the British – who did not exercise hospitality to the Jewish strangers in their own midst, but instead murdered them. And then, in seeking to expiate their sins without cost to themselves, they transplanted them into a land and a patrimony which was not theirs in the first place to give. As long as we living in the West do not come to understand our own fault in this, our own rôle in creating this misery (both ideologically and at the base level of political interests), the tragedy will continue to play out and the suffering of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples affected will not end.