Israel at War—palestinians

Regular readers may be wondering why they're seeing what they think is a repeating typo in my series of posts on "Israel at War."

You're making a mistake, they think, you have to capitalize the word "Palestinians." They're a people, after all.

I'm not making a mistake. The palestinians are not a people in the sense that Brazilians or Armenians or Russians are a people with a long (multiple centuries) history in a given place. They're a modern construct designed to rename the mostly-nomatic Arabs who lived in the region called Judea (Israel) and who never called themselves palestinians until long after Israel became a state. The term was cynically created to provide legitimacy to the claim that Jews "stole" the land from the Arabs of "Palestine"—a place that never existed in any historical context [see Update#5] except as a colony of the British Empire after the Ottoman empire was dismantled in the early 20th century.

It's for that reason that I do not capitalize palestinian. 

Roger Kimball provides additional information:

It’s so cute when politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, to say nothing of hysteric undergraduates and ill-informed lefties across the country, complain that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is illegitimately “occupying” the land West of the Jordan River from the Golan Heights down to the border of the Sinai Peninsula. 

Responding to the murderous attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, AOC decried “the occupation of Palestine” while Tlaib urged “ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system” that can “lead to resistance.”

... What does Tlaib mean by “resistance” here? Slaughtering innocent partygoers? Incinerating and beheading babies? Indiscriminately raping then murdering hostages? And what is the force of “lead to”? Is it meant to suggest that Israel is somehow to blame for such acts of “resistance” because — because why? Because the Jewish people occupy the place that was 1) their ancestral homeland and 2) with which they were reinvested by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, by the victorious Brits after World War One and and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, explicitly to provide a “national home for the Jewish people,” and 3) by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948?

What group of people do they think belongs there? 

The common answer, Kimball notes is "Palestinians." But it's worth examining just who or what they are. Again Kimball provides an answer:

The “Palestinians” that we know and love today were an invention of the KGB and their puppet Yasser Arafat, an educated, middle-class Arab of Egyptian origin who devoted his life to murderous anti-American mischief. (Among other things, he arranged for the murder of Cleo Noel, the US ambassador to Sudan.)

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former chief of Romanian intelligence, defected to the US and wrote about the links between Arafat and the KGB: “Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB,” Pacepa wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded antisemitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

Somehow, those details are omitted by the “pro-Palestinian” lobby in their pursuit of ecstatic antisemitism, as is the inconvenient fact that “prior to the PLO Charter being released in 1964, no one referred to Palestinians with the same intent as used today. There is a reason no mention exists prior to that moment. The KGB had not created the fictitious people until that time.”

Don’t believe it? How about this statement from Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, in 1977:  

The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.

... the idea that the Jews are illegitimately occupying territory that really belongs to “the Palestinians” is a politically-motivated historical falsehood that only an unhappy terrorist or a half-educated Western leftie, could believe. 

Everyone must believe the palestinians when they make pronouncements. Recently, when they falsely claimed that the Israelis bombed a Gaza hospital, every leftist mainstream media source (i.e, 95% of mainstream media sources) believed them and excitedly published headlines to that effect.

So ... if 'believing every palestinian' is yet another of the New Rules, I suppose it's really important to believe Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, when he stated: "The Palestinian people do not exist."

And that's why I don't capitalize "palestinians."