Before the Six-Day War, not a single Arab spokesman, at the U.N. or anywhere else, and not a single Arab document, referred to the local Arabs as the "Palestinian people." They appeared, as if by magic -- summoned by the public-relations advisors to Arafat -- only after that war made clear that the Arab dream of going in for the kill had been dashed, and that a different, long-term effort was necessary.
The intention of that effort was to persuade former supporters of Israel in the Western world that Israel had won territory to which it had no legal, moral, or historic claim. Since the area had been known in the West as "Palestine," then the local Arabs would become the "Palestinian people." As the older and better-educated generations died out, the young, the naive, the uninformed, would come to think something along the simple-minded lines of "well, there's a place called Palestine, and there's these people who are the Palestinian people, so of course they must be the ones whose land it is."
It was at that level that the “Palestinian people” was created -- a level that required an absence of any historic sense, any real and detailed knowledge of the history of that area, and of the Middle East, not merely in the 20th century, but during the 1300 years before.
No comments:
Post a Comment