Hanukkah
Never Happened.
That’s
what Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO’s chief representative to the United States, would no doubt say. In a recent op-ed
piece in the Washington Post Areikat makes the claim that the Palestinian
people have a rich and deep history, one that dates back as far as 10,000
B.C.E. He claims that Palestinians “have lived under the rule of a plethora of
empires: the Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Israelites, Persians, Greeks,
Romans, Crusaders, Mongols, Ottomans and, finally, the British.” (You can read Areikat’s piece in full here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/palestine-a-history-rich-and-deep/2011/12/21/gIQALJ6GLP_story.html)
Did
you notice the obscurity of one well - documented indigenous group? That’s right, the Jewish
people are left out of his narrative. After mentioning the Israelites in a chain of occupiers the Jewish people seemingly disappear from the scene. Palestinians don't encounter Jews in the land until we arrive from Europe. We're nothing more than carpet-baggers. This
is all part of the Palestinian attempt to eradicate the Jewish people's
historical claims and connection to the Land of Israel. Palestinian nationalism is a modern movement
born of the 20th century. It
evolved when Arabs living in Palestine (named by the Romans after the
Philistines) during the British Mandate realized that their Arab brethren (e.g.
Egyptians, Syrians, and the Hashemites) had abandoned them in the quest for
their own respective territorial interests.
But
that is neither here nor there. The
Palestinian people (once called Palestinian Arabs) exist as a political
reality. They have their own national
aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled by way of a two-state solution. As a people who yearned for 2,000 years for a
restoration to our national homeland, we understand those yearnings better than
anyone else. But Areikat’s revisionist
history is the sort of fiction that is both ironic and tragic. Ironic in that it’s yet another example of the
Palestinians proclivity to cry foul when others, like Newt Gingrich, call into
question their historicity as a people; a strategy they’ve been employing
against the Jewish people for decades. Tragic
in that it's the way the Palestinians teach their children history in
school. It's also the way they continue
to make their people ill prepared for a final resolution of their status with
Israel.
