The Palestinians: Myths and Martyrs

By Johannes Gerloff

Johannes Gerloff, born in 1963, is a professional journalist, a studied theologian and he is German. With all that carries with it in relation to Germany’s past history with the Jewish people – culminating in the Holocaust during the NA ZI regime in WWII – it is that much more significant that Johannes and his

• Language: English
• Publisher: Azar GbR
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9783944603117

Johannes Gerloff

Johannes Gerloff, born in 1963, was Middle East correspondent for the Christian Media Association KEP in Germany and the German language news platform www.israelnetz.com until mid 2016. He currently produces regular insightful commentaries for the German TV News program "Focus on Jerusalem" He grew up in the northern Black Forest in Germany, studied Theology in Tübingen/Germany, Vancouver B.C./Canada and Prague/Czech Republic. He is married to Krista, who grew up near Prague. They have been living with their five children in Jerusalem since 1994. The Gerloff family belongs to the Hebrew-speaking messianic Jewish fellowship "Melech HaMelachim" in Jerusalem. Johannes Gerloff writes on current affairs concerning Israel and the Middle East and speaks on theological issues relating to that part of the world for media in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic - including Biblical prophecy relative to current events. He has authored several books in the German language - This one, "The Palestinians" is the first one translated into English. Johannes Gerloff is a very popular speaker in the German, English and Hebrew-speaking worlds. His lectures include up-dates on the current situation in the Middle East, Biblical/historical perspectives concerning the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland, and historical insights into international law as it relates to the current Middle East situation.

Book preview

The_Palestinians_-_Cover.jpg

Johannes Gerloff

The

Palestinians

Myths and Martyrs

Azar GbR, Söldenhofstr. 10, 83308 Trostberg

www.azarnet.de

Quotations from the Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version

Quotations from the Quran are taken from www.theQuran.com

THE PALESTINIANS

Myths and Martyrs

JOHANNES GERLOFF

Originally published in German under the title:

Die Palästineser – Volk im Brennpunkt der Geschichte

by

SCM Hänssler

71088 Holzgerlingen

Copyright © 2011

All rights reserved.

Copyright for the English language version:

© 2016 Azar GbR

Söldenhofstr. 10

83308 Trostberg

Germany

ISBN 978-3-944603-11-7

Translated by Nicola Vollkommer

Layout: Ewald Sutter, Azar GbR Trostberg

Coverpicture: © Dudidoopic | Dreamstime.com – Boy And A Flag

The Dictate of Political Correctness

Or: Why I wrote this book in the first place

I never really wanted to write about the Palestinians. But if you‘re interested in Israel, you have to be interested in the Palestinians too. They themselves – and above all, their friends – demand this interest, sometimes very emphatically. The dictates of political correctness require this interest, and, above all, that favourite of all German maxims: balance, even-handedness.

I have bowed to these demands and met many interesting people in the process. I have talked to Palestinians in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Gaza, also in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, in Germany and the Czech Republic. With some of them, I have developed long-standing friendships, even though there are worlds between us and I don‘t know whether I will ever fully understand them.

I admire the determination with which these people pursue their goals, in defiance of any sense of political correctness. The Hamas Sheikh in Tulkarem, for example, comes to mind, who explained to me that true peace can only come when all Jews and Christians subject themselves to Islam. I recall too the blind woman from Beit Jallah, who called out to the Palestinian fighters during the nighttime fighting nights of 2001, if you shoot Jews, you are not fighting against men, you are fighting against God!

It‘s a token of the straightforwardness of the Palestinian people that they have never apologised for the election victory of Hamas in January 2006, although the free world has refused to acknowledge the will of the people in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to this very day. A sheikh who used to belong to the extremist Salafi is also a case in point where this characteristic is concerned. He has recognized in Jesus of Nazareth the saviour of the world and the King of Israel. He‘s busy telling other people about this, publically on the streets of his hometown, although it is clear that both his excitement about Jesus and his love for the Jewish people could cost him his life.

The Palestinians are highly intelligent people and, at least in the Middle East, belong to the ethnic groups with the highest number of academics per capita. Palestinian doctors practice in many hospitals the world over. When I take our daughter, who has diabetes, to Jerusalem‘s Hadassah hospital, we find ourselves in the company of a team of doctors who are leading experts worldwide in medical research. They include an orthodox Jew, a devout Muslim lady from Bethlehem with a scarf around her head, and an Israeli Arab. Sorry, I got that wrong. Political correctness requires me to call him a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship.

The chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce in Bethlehem complains that you can hardly find a plumber, carpenter or construction worker, because they have all studied and become engineers, doctors, lawyers or scientists. Any remaining skilled labourers work in Israel because the pay is better there. Palestinian theologians have a huge influence, not least in the spread of the worldwide Islamic Jihad.

In all of this the Palestinians reveal a shrewdness which makes their counterpart think to have reached his own conclusions without any outside influence. This not only applies to the bazaar in the Old City of Jerusalem, which hardly a tourist walks away from without the feeling that they have made a really good bargain, although in truth, they have been cheated to bits. This applies also to public opinion in Europe, where being pro-Palestinian is equated with being balanced. Any criticism against so much as a fragment of Palestinian society is abhorred as pro-Israeli – a term which has advanced to something akin to a swear word. But could it perhaps be that this state of affairs in Europe has less to do with the propagandist skills of the Palestinian people and more to do with European mentality?

I must make it clear before I go on that political correctness is what made me write this book. This political correctness will not, however, compel me to tell what it wants me to tell while sweeping under the carpet anything which goes against its grain. When I tell my personal stories of Palestine, it‘s important for me to report what I myself have seen, heard, read, observed and experienced. It‘s because of my affection for the people under the Palestinian Authority (PA), in Israel, and in the worldwide diaspora that I feel duty-bound to place my finger firmly on corruption, violence and hatred of the Jews.

It profoundly contradicts my sense of justice when men in pinstripe suits push Western millions into their pockets – millions which were intended for development – while just a stone‘s throw away people are forced to struggle at the poverty limit. The swanky villas in Ramallah surrounded by a totally neglected infrastructure, the ritzy limousines on the run-down streets of Nablus or the luxury hotels in Bethlehem right next to refugee camps: all these things speak a clear language.

I cannot keep quiet when women and young girls have to fear for their lives as soon as there is the least suspicion that they have behaved in an immodest way. It contradicts my personal values when people are condemned to death just because they have sold land to Jews, or when Islamic society threatens the death penalty for anyone who has turned their back on the one true religion. I will never erase from my memory pictures of devout Muslims being cruelly tortured by the Fatah. Or the image of the young Fatah men sitting in wheelchairs because Hamas had shot them in the knees after taking over power in the Gaza Strip.

I would like to tell my Arab friends openly and honestly about the fruit which has been produced by Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, and where you end up when you believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By saying this, I don‘t primarily mean the six million murdered Jews, but fifty million Europeans who lost their lives in World War II. I can only say this with credibility when I first face the fact that Hitler‘s legacy is openly sold as a standard work in the bookshops of Arab capitals. The conspiracy theories of the Elders of Zion are fervently believed right down to the remotest of Bedouin tents. Hitler is a hero in Palestine.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf for sale in downtown Beirut

Granted, I rarely had the courage to express these thoughts openly while standing in the ruins of Gaza or behind the walls of Bethlehem. But that doesn‘t change the fact that it brings nothing but harm to the Palestinian people when, in a knee-jerk reaction, the causes of all their grievances are attributed to the Jews. Neither does it help to call the Jews in English by their politically more correct name the Israeli occupiers – or even better, to make the whole thing feel more impersonal and abstract and to create less guilt by describing them as the Israeli settlement policy.

There are many good reasons for taking an interest in the Palestinian Arabs. If you want to have an understanding of the Jewish people and their State, there‘s no way you can sidestep the character, mentality and dealings of its Arab neighbours. After years of observing the situation, I can‘t help but conclude that many of the solutions and peace initiatives put forward in recent years in the Middle East were bound to fail because they neither took into account the mentality, desires or dreams of the people involved, nor the social and religious constraints in which individuals are living. If you want to make a constructive contribution to the political peace process between Israel and the PA, you must know who the Palestinians are.

And finally, a special word to those friends of Israel who understand on the basis of the Bible that the Jewish people have been chosen by God, and that events in and around the State of Israel must be understood as the dealings of a living Creator God. Even assuming that God deals with his people, that He speaks and that He keeps His promises, there is still the other side of the story. The Holy Scriptures portray this other side in amazing detail and in a thoroughly differentiated manner. God‘s plan with Israel is embedded in a salvation plan for the whole of humanity. Abraham‘s descendants had to leave the Promised Land because God had extended a time of grace to the Amorites (Genesis 15:16). Those infamous commands to annihilate were not an across-the-board policy, but need to be understood in the light of God‘s judgement on nations who had a relationship with the God of Israel and knew what He expected of them. Many of them were embraced into the nation of Israel, or lived side by side with them. But the Bible does not gloss over the fact that there was guilt on both sides.

Well into the time of Jesus, we find non-Jews in the land of Israel. It was with downright callous bluntness that Jesus spurned the Canaanite mother of a sick daughter: I have only been sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel – and then went on to fulfil her request after all, having seen her great faith (Matthew 15:28). Following his encounter with the Roman commander from Capernaum, he even declared, I haven‘t found such faith in Israel! (Luke 7:9).

There is this other side today too. It is as many-facetted and intriguing as it has always been. There are not only Palestinians who fight against Israel and in the process sacrifice their own well-being and that of their families and their people. There are also non-Jews who bind their future to that of the Jewish people. There are Palestinians who build Israeli settlements on disputed land and live in them. There have been Arabs in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ever since the founding of the State of Israel. Of course, there are also non-Jews who suffer because of Israel. It‘s important for Bible readers to realize that if you want to understand Israel, you can‘t ignore Israel‘s neighbours.

Well-meaning folk from all kinds of ideological turns of mind, political philosophies and religious convictions approach me in my capacity as a journalist and a Christian, wanting a serious talk. They tell me that I should stand up for peace and justice and defend the Palestinian cause, I should raise the banner for co-operation and co-existence, or – especially after the appalling genocide of the Jewish people by the Germans – the right of existence for Israel. The list of things I should take a stand for is endless. Every time a new crisis arises, every time there is a military showdown, and with every spectacular peace demonstration, the list gets longer.

In the fall of 2009, I made mention in an article of the pogrom which Arabs had committed against their Jewish neighbours 80 years previously. 3,000 years of Jewish life in Hebron had been destroyed in that incident. The way you have written this article will breed hatred against the Palestinians, a worried reader wrote to me. He continued, I always thought that Christians had the duty to work for peace, human rights and international justice.

A year before that, Israel celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state. I had the impression that I should show my readers the other side of this medal. So I painted a portrait of the Nakba, the catastrophe which unfolded for Arabs in and around Israel when Jews moved there from all over the world and the State of Israel was founded. Promptly the rumour made the rounds that I had fallen prey to Palestinian propaganda. People cancelled their subscriptions for newspapers in which my articles appeared.

Am I as a journalist really bound to act in the cause of peace, human rights, justice, co-existence, co-operation, international justice, or whatever other label the right way of seeing things bears? I hardly think so. A journalist should be neither a judge nor an activist. My job is to communicate faithfully what I have found to be reliable information. As I do so, I try not to lose sight of the historical context and causal connections involved. But I am also aware of my limitations. As a local reporter I don‘t often enjoy the luxury of the academic, of being able to rummage for months and years on end in libraries, in order to ensure that not a single aspect of a story gets overlooked.

The following collection of impressions and articles doesn‘t claim to know or prove everything, or to communicate the truth in every single aspect. I might have got it wrong here and there. Or when I am caught contradicting other reports, perhaps I have just seen the notorious and disputed other side of the medal. One thing is clear. The situation in the Holy Land isn‘t as one-dimensional and easy to comprehend as readers in the West would wish it to be. What I want to do, by all means, is to make people think and provide them with resources with which they can gain a better understanding of the situation in the Middle East.

In August 2003 I visited a colleague in his office in Ramallah. He had put aside his journalistic career for a period of time in order to become spokesman for the Palestinian Interior Minister, Muhammad Dahlan. As we drank the usual cup of strong Arabic coffee, we mused about the situation of political stalemate and its causes. Taking me completely by surprise, this Christian Palestinian, Arab journalist and political activist explained, what seems to me to this very day like a solid rock within the flood of stereotypes which rule the Middle East conflict: We have become victims of our own propaganda. Our problem is that we have begun to believe the very lies which we ourselves set in motion. I have never forgotten this statement. My desire is that this book would help us not to become victims of our own propaganda, regardless of which philosophy, ideology or religious conviction we hold.

By the way, propaganda begins with the way in which we choose and use our terms!

Genesis of a Name

The terms Palestinians and Palestine spring from our lips as naturally as if this land and its people, called by the same name, had always existed. Very few people are aware that the name Palestine is the result of a very interesting evolution.

According to modern sources, the term Palestine first emerged in the 12th century BCE. On the wall of a temple in Madinat Habu, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III boasted his victory over his Syrian neighbours. He mentioned the Philistines among the conquered enemies. As mention is otherwise made only of the Philistines, it is possible that this, by far most ancient notation of the name Palestine, was nothing but a copying error!¹

In the 5th century BCE the Greek traveller and historian Herodot of Halikarnassos used the term Palestine (II,104,3) but more often applied the definition Syrie he Palaistine (I,105,1), an indication that he saw the coastal area reaching to Egypt (VII,89,2) as part of Syria. He did not define the people living in the country as Philistines or Palestinians, but – for example in II,104,15 – Phoenicians and Syrians living in Palestine.

Until the 2nd century CE, ancient political writers only used the officially recognized state or province name Judea, or considered the coastal plain as part of Phoenicia. The Jewish Hellenist philosopher Philon of Alexandria noted that Judaea means ancient Canaan, which was by his time called Palestine or Palestine Syria (De Abrahamo 133: Vita Mosis 1,163).²

Following the second Jewish revolt under Shimon Bar Kochba in 135 CE., the Roman Emperor Hadrian tried to break the resistance of the Jewish people and their bond with the land of Israel.³ So he renamed the Province Judaea Syria Palaestina.⁴ The biblical town of Shechem was renamed Neapolis. Because the Arabs can‘t pronounce the letter p, they call the town to this very day Nablus. Jewish Jerusalem was turned into a Roman military colony with the name Aelia Capitolina. The later Arab name Ilia is a remnant of this. Jews were forbidden access on penalty of death. The stigma which the term Palestine bears of wanting to eradicate any Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael goes back to this time. This is probably one reason why the name "pelastinei (=Palaistine) only rarely appears in Rabbinic literature.⁵ In 333 CE the Pilgrim of Bordeaux asserted that there was a time when the Hebrews lived in Judaea which we call Palestine" (Praeparatio Evangelica 10,5).⁶

Travellers’ guides from the second half of the 19th century call the area between Egypt and Mesopotamia Palestine. At this time, Palestine was a purely geographical term – comparable with the names Black Forest, Alps or North German Plain – strictly speaking, part of Syria.

Nineteenth-century scholars, for example the German Professor of Theology Gustav Hermann Dalman, called themselves Palestine researchers. Dalman wrote books about Work and Customs in Palestine⁷ or the Palestinian Diwan. A Contribution to the Folklore of Palestina.⁸ He was Professor of Palestinian studies in Greifswald and publisher of the magazine The Palestine Year Book. The definitions on the maps in old Luther Bibles originate from this time: Palestine at the time of the New Testament, or Palestine from a bird‘s-eye perspective.⁹ Against this background, the Priviligierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt published a Palestine Picture Bible in Stuttgart in 1913. The 30-volume Hebrew/English edition of the Babylonian Talmud, which was published between 1960 and 1990 by the Soncino Press in London, doesn‘t translate the Hebrew term Eretz Israel with Land of Israel, but consistently with Palestine.

Interestingly enough, the term Palestinians in its current definition for a nation who lives in Palestine, does not appear anywhere in the travel guides of that time. An Arab who lived in the geographical area of Palestine, called himself a Muslim, Arab, Ottoman, or resident of his home town or of the village from which he came.¹⁰ The Arabs, according to Jesiaias Press in his New Palestine Handbook of 1934, "who originally come from the Arabian peninsula, make up about three quarters of the population and can be divided into Madain (townspeople), Fallachin (farmers) and Bedouins (desert dweller, nomads).¹¹

The nomadic Bedouins, he continues (and these were without doubt the most interesting of the groups for the Palestine researchers of the early 20th century), "have preserved the Arab character in its purest form. They call themselves el-Arab – that is, Arabs."¹² Outwardly, they are Muslims, but have an incomplete picture of what Islam is about, and for the most part, are not fanatic. They are ignorant, devious, greedy, thieving, and you have to be on your guard when they‘re around. This is how they are characterized in the travel guide Palestine and Syria, one of Meyer‘s travelling books dating from the year 1913. He concludes, they live in constant strife with each other, which is a fortunate thing for the government.¹³

The Arab villagers are called Fellacheen (from the Semitic word ‚falach‘ = ‚to work the soil‘), writes the Jewish travel guide Zeev Vilnay. The Fellacheen aren‘t pure Arabs. For generations they have been mixing with the left-overs of different people groups which had settled in Palestine, including Jewish elements. And his insight on the third group of Arab residents is, "the Arabs who live in the towns (Madaniye) aren‘t pure Arabs either. There are some respected family clans living in the big towns who consider themselves descendants of the Arabs who conquered the land."¹⁴

You need to do quite some searching in the travel documents of a century ago before you find the people who are commonly called the Palestinians today. The tourist guides of a century ago define the population of Palestine in the main part as Jews, divided into Sephardic Jews who speak a tainted Spanish and the Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe … Germany and Holland, who speak the familiar Jewish German.¹⁵ Then there are the Druze, Samaritans, Nosairians¹⁶, the Shiite Matawiles, who live in several of the villages in Upper Galilee¹⁷, Ismailis and Christians.

The Syrians are descendants of the oldest inhabitants of the land, writes Jesaias Press, they are on the whole, especially in South Palestine, so strongly Arabized that it‘s hardly possible to draw a clear boundary between them and the Arabs. They live in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jallah, Ramallah and its neighbouring villages, and in Lod and Gaza. They are particularly numerous in Galilee.¹⁸ He also mentions Turks, Turkmen, Kurds, Circassians, who have preserved their language, their ancient customs and even their Caucasian national dress.¹⁹ Then there are Berbers, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, and Nubians and Negros²⁰ from Africa. Other witnesses from that time write of Persian separatists, Armenians, Egyptian Coptics, Abyssinians, Greeks and Italians who have adopted Oriental customs, as well as Britons, Americans and above all Germans – mostly Swabians! – who lived in the Holy Land.

I then found the expression the Palestinian Arabs in the writings of the Jewish author Zeev Vilnay, of all people, whose descendants continue to have a considerable influence on society and politics in the State of Israel to this day. Vilnay informs us that the Palestinians during their thirteen centuries of residence in their Palestinian homeland were neither politically organized nor did they have any special aspirations which set them apart from the Arabs in bordering countries. Only after the British occupation did nationalist tendencies begin to emerge in Palestine too. The Arabs in the country began to organize themselves and form a special unit within the Muslim world. Muslims and Christians in the country joined forces in constituting an Arab Executive with the aim of representing Arab political interests in the land.²¹

On July 24, 1922, the League of Nations declared the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, to be part of the British Mandate.²² With reference to the so-called Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917,²³ the Mandate‘s goal was declared to be the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. It was to be clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

Article 9 emphasises that Respect for the personal status of the various peoples and communities and for their religious interests shall be fully guaranteed. Furthermore, "In particular, the control and administration of waqfs shall be exercised in accordance with religious law and the dispositions of the founders." Waqfs are religious foundations belonging to Islamic faith communities – in this connection, they clearly include lands and above all holy sites which belong to Muslims. Islamic Law, the sharia, defines all land which has ever been under Islamic rule, as waqf.

Article 15 declares that No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants of Palestine on the ground of race, religion or language. No person shall be excluded from Palestine on the sole ground of his religious belief. Moreover, each community has a right to maintain its own schools for the education of its own members in its own language. Article 22: English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine. Any statement or inscription in Arabic on stamps or money in Palestine shall be repeated in Hebrew and any statement or inscription in Hebrew shall be repeated in Arabic.

The Palestinian Mandate originally encompassed not only today‘s State of Israel and the PA, but also the whole territory belonging to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Thus, the Mandatory declaration of July 24, 1922, although speaking of the territory between the Jordan and the Eastern border of Palestine, obviously treated this separately from the West Bank between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. So when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) described Palestine as the area which the League of Nations entrusted to the British as a Mandate after World War I, this also included Transjordan, the East Bank or, in other words, today‘s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.²⁴

During the debate about the 1947 partition plan in the UN General Assembly, the Syrian delegate pointed out: Palestine used to be a Syrian province. Geographical, historical, racial and religious links exist there. There is no distinction whatever between the Palestinians and the Syrians and had it not been for the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the mandate, Palestine would now be a Syrian province, as it used to be.²⁵ During the time of the British Mandate until 1948, everyone with Palestinian citizenship was called a Palestinian, irrespective of ethnic or religious backgrounds. It was the identification of the Jews in Palestine as Israelis that left the adjective Palestinian unused and thus enabled Palestinian Arabs to claim it exclusively for themselves.²⁶

During Israel’s War of Independence – called the Nakba, or catastrophe by today‘s Palestinians – there were Arabs who fought against the Jewish State. Nobody talked about Palestinians in those days. In the 1950s it was the Fidaiyoun who penetrated Israel from the Gaza Strip, then occupied by the Egyptians, and from the West Bank, occupied by the Jordanians. There is no mention of Palestinians in the contemporary documentation of that time known to me. The term Palestinians described in retrospect by authors of the last decade of the 20th century, must be classed as an anachronism.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was founded in 1964 at the initiative of the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Its first Secretary General was Ahmad Shuqairi, who was born in 1907 as the son of an Arab father and a Turkish mother. From 1957 onwards, Shuqairi was Minister of State in Saudi-Arabia and represented his country in the United Nations too. The idea of a Palestinian people did not emerge until Yasser Arafat took over the leadership of the organisation in February 1969.²⁷

I don‘t want to upset anyone with these assertions. As far as I can see, this is all about historical facts. I‘m more than willing to adjust my statements on the basis of new sources of information. The UNRWA, at any rate, used the term Arab refugees and not Palestinians in the year 1948.²⁸ It is moreover a fact that before 1967, as long as the West Bank and East Jerusalem were under Jordanian occupation and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian administration, nobody demanded a Palestinian state, because the existence of a Palestinian nation was completely unknown to the world.²⁹

The term Palestinian signifying an ethnic entity or a nation does not appear in Europe until the final weeks of the year 1974. Only after Arafat‘s famous speech to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, did the German ambassador to the UN at the time, Rüdiger Freiherr von Wechmar, raise the question of the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people.³⁰

In Tulkarem refugee camp

All the same, Yasser Arafat himself, almost simultaneously with his appearance at the UN, answered the question What is Palestine? Whom does it belong to?: The borders don‘t interest us. Palestine is only a tiny drop in the huge Arab ocean. Our nation is the Arab nation, which stretches from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and beyond.³¹ In November 1992, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad declared in an interview with TIME Magazine: We Arabs share the same origins. Our language, our history, our hopes are one. If the President of Syria makes a mistake, Arab citizens in Algeria or Morocco behave as if they have the same right as Syrian citizens to hold him accountable.³²

To this very day, the term Palestinian cannot shake off the whiff of propaganda which hangs over it. Arabs, for example, who are Palestinians in the purely technical sense because they haven‘t had any other nationality since the Oslo Accords in 1993 and because they have their historical roots in Palestine, don‘t like calling themselves Palestinians if they personally have a good relationship to the Jewish State. The Bedouins, for example, who have served for decades in the IDF although they come from areas which Israel occupied in 1967. Non-Jewish Israeli politicians, like the Druze Ayoub Qara, would never call themselves Palestinians. On the other hand, Arabs who have Israeli citizenship but cannot come to terms with the existence of a Jewish State, have for some years now been emphasizing their Palestinian identity. They call themselves Palestinians with Israeli citizenship or, making their point even more clearly, Palestinians who were forced to become Israeli citizens.

In January 1994 American journalist Nancy Gibbs wrote: Golda Meir once argued that there was no such thing as a Palestinian; at the time, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Before Arafat began proselytizing, most of the Arabs from the territory of Palestine thought of themselves as members of an all-embracing Arab nation. It was Arafat who made the intellectual leap to a definition of the Palestinians as a distinct people: he articulated the cause, organized for it, fought for it and brought it to the world’s attention as no Kurd or Basque had ever managed.³³ The phenomenon Palestinian is indeed unthinkable without the revolutionary bearing his black and white head scarf and stubbly beard. The legitimate question, however, remains open: did Yasser Arafat himself initiate the wave of Palestinian national consciousness, or was he nothing more than a talented surfer who, for four decisive decades, led and influenced a movement whose beginnings can be found back in the 1920s?

---

1 Othmar Keel, Max Küchler, Christoph Uehlinger, Orte und Landschaften der Bibel. Ein Handbuch und Studien-Reiseführer zum Heiligen Land, Band 1: Geographisch-geschichtliche Landeskunde (Zürich, Einsiedeln, Köln: Benziger Verlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 277-278.

2 Ibidem, 279.

3 Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, Informationen zur politischen Bildung 140, Neudruck 1985, 14. Ebenso Lance Lambert, The Uniqueness of Israel (Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1980, reprint 1991), 88. Ludwig Schneider, Hanan Ashrawis Christsein, NAI 173 (Januar 1993): 15.

4 Keel/Küchler/Uehlinger, Orte und Landschaften, 280.

5 H.L. Strack und P.Billerbeck, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus erläutert aus Talmud und Midrasch, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch Band 1 (München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 9. Auflage 1986), 91.

6 Keel/Küchler/Uehlinger, Orte und Landschaften, 282.

7 Arbeit und Sitte in PalästinaBand I-VII, Berlin 1928-1942 (Nachdruck 1987), Band VIII (Fragment aus dem Nachlass), Berlin 2001, the main work of Dalman’s background studies.

8 Palästinensischer Diwan. Als Beitrag zur Volkskunde Palästinas gesammelt und mit Übersetzungen und Melodien herausgegeben, Leipzig 1901. (Sammlung volkstümlicher Lieder aus Palästina und Syrien).

9 For example in Die Bibel oder die ganze Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testaments nach der deutschen Übersetzung D. Martin Luthers, neu durchgesehen nach dem Deutschen Evangelischen Kirchenausschuß genehmigten Text. Mit Bildern von Rudolf Schäfer. Herausgegeben von der Sächsischen Bibelgesellschaft und der Privileg. Württembergischen Bibelanstalt. Stuttgart: Privileg. Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937.

10 Yehoshafat Harkabi, Das Palästinensische Manifest und seine Bedeutung, translated by Frank S. Rödiger (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1980), 37-38.

11 Jesaias Press, Neues Palästina-Handbuch. Führer durch Palästina. Unter Mitarbeit von Hugo Herrmann (Wien: Fiba-Verlag, März 1934), 75.

12 Sev Vilnay, Steimatzky’s Palästina-Führer. Unter Mitwirkung von Dr. A. Bonne (Jerusalem: Steimatzky Publishing Comp. Ltd., 1935), L.

13 Palästina und Syrien, Meyers Reisebücher (Leipzig und Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 5. Auflage, Februar 1913), 37.

14 Vilnay, Steimatzky’s Palästina-Führer, LI.

15 Palästina und Syrien, Meyers Reisebücher, 37.

16 called also Nussaire or Nussairians.

17 Jesaias Press, Neues Palästina-Handbuch, 82.

18 Ibidem, 80.

19 Ibidem, 82.

20 Ibidem, 82-83.

21 Vilnay, Steimatzky’s Palästina-Führer, LI.

22 The original text can be found for example under http://www.mideastweb.org/mandate.htm or on the Webseite of the Israeli Foreign Ministry http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/The%20Mandate%20for%20Palestine.

23 http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/The%20Balfour%20Declaration.

24 Yechiel M. Leiter, Reflections From The Heartland: The Future of the Jewish Communities in YESHA (Judea, Samaria & Gaza) In the Aftermath of the Labor Victory – Commentary and Plan of Action, edited by the Israel Community Development Foundation, 70 West 36th Str. Suite 503, New York, N.Y. 10018, 11.

25 Joshua Teitelbaum, Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: From the San Remo Conference (1920) to the Netanyahu-Abbas Talks, No. 579, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, September-October 2010: http://jcpa.org/article/israel-as-the-nation-state-of-the-jewish-people-from-the-san-remo-conference-1920-to-the-netanyahu-abbas-talks/: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: From the San Remo Conference (1920) to the with reference to Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2009), 38.

26 Harkabi, Das Palästinensische Manifest, 38.

27 Ibidem, 9 n.2.

28 Kamillo Landmann und Ernst-Eberhard Geipel, Die Geschichte des vierzigjährigen Krieges in Nahost (Frankfurt/Main: H.-A.Herchen Verlag, 2. Auflage 1992), 21.

29 Landmann/Geipel, Die Geschichte des vierzigjährigen Krieges in Nahost, 54.

30 The source of this statement is the research of my colleague Hartmut Petersohn in the German Foreign Ministry and the Berlin Orient Institute, the results of which he sent me in e-mails on May 21 and 28, 2010.

31 Report Tulsa World, November 19, 1974, quoted in Landmann/Geipel, Die Geschichte des vierzigjährigen Krieges in Nahost, 62.

32 Signals From Two Old Foes, TIME 48 (November 30, 1992): 33.

33 Nancy Gibbs, Yitzhak Rabin & Yasser Arafat, TIME 1 (January 3,