To a certain extent, all peoples are invented, including Canadians and Americans. However, if the Palestinians didn't exist as a people in 1960, they do today. They have a shared history and a shared narrative. At issue has always been why they don't have their own state.

I originally said this:

All nation states were at one time, invented. Including the US. (perhaps especially the US)
Genetically, and historically there is definitve proof that people now calling themselves Palestinian have resided in the region for thousands of years. They are largely descended from Levants and Chrstians and though Islam converted many, a significant minority are still Christian, Druze and Samaritans. Its fair to say that they are now an Arabic people, but probably have more credence as a nation than the "invented" nations of Iraq, for instance. Or Kuwait.
I fail to see what he intended to accomplish with this language, other than pandering to the core fundamental Christian right of his party

Which makes a case for the people called Palestinians as an indigenous people within the region.Whether they lived there under the Ottomans or not, they were there . The label Palestine is centuries old...
The British Mandate of 1920, which Kessler and you and I quoted from, is not a reaction to the holocaust. It is a reaction to resettlement by Jews, and the required accomodations in the area by indiginous peoples.
And as they are part of the 47 times mentioned Palestine, that would make them ....

Ricky, for the last time, at issue isn't the word "Palestine". At issue is the word Palestinian, and the meaning of that word. There is fierce debate about when that term started being used about a distinct people. Prior to 1948, the term referred to anyone who lived in the region, including Jews. Word meanings change; after 1948 Jews preferred to refer to themselves as Israelis.

Even if you can trace usage of the word Palestinian, that doesn't mean that the people thought of themselves as a distinct people. By the way, Palestine had included all of Jordan (and some of Iraq and Syria). However labeling Jordan as a Palestinian state is a very right wing statement which you would blast someone for saying. Words meanings change, and people identification changes as well.

There's also the issue of multiple identifications. At this time, most Palestinians identify themselves as Palestinians. That's why Gingrich's comment is unwelcome. But it hasn't always been so. At some point, most Palestinians identified themselves as Arabs. When that changed is something that scholars debate.

When you reference the usage of the word "Palestine" you cheapen the debate.

ray

Ricky, for the last time, at issue isn't the word "Palestine". At issue is the word Palestinian, and the meaning of that word. There is fierce debate about when that term started being used about a distinct people. Prior to 1948, the term referred to anyone who lived in the region, including Jews. Word meanings change; after 1948 Jews preferred to refer to themselves as Israelis

So, you're saying, the term wasn't "invented in 1977". It was used to describe the inhabitants of Palestine (which changed definition itself) prior to 1948. You'd also agree that if the term Palestine existed, the term Palestinian (belonging to Palestine) had to have equally existed?

Nationalism under the term Palestine may indeed have taken time to evolve. But it isn't a lie to say the term Palestinian was in common usage long before 1948, and from the document the Post quoted at least 1920.
What you seem uneasy about, and which Newt disputes through his distortion of history, is that acknowledgement of the term to describe the indigenous peoples gives them a right to say that that they have a right to claim that the land they lived on, should be theirs...
I get that. It seems to me for that for some, this to be fundamental to the justification for the establishment of Israel.That somehow the indigenous peoples hadn't really laid claim to the area because they hadn't established a nation state or even a national identity.
Echos of the treatment of the North American indigenous....It was okay to settle North America at the expense of those already there becasue the indigenous weren't really making use of it properly (Sarah Vowel; The Wordy Shipmates)
I frankly don't think its particularly honest to describe the .fact checking of the Washington Post, or my use of it, as a lie. Or as false. This parsing of the language, in order to substantiiate claims to the land strikes me as less than forth right.
I think you correctly point to the year 1948, with the establishment of Israel, as the period when the idea of nation states arose in Palestine. But it doesn't take the concept of a nation state to establish the identification of a people. Yeah, a lot of the indigenous in Palestine could be described as Arabs, but not all. And all could be described as Palestinians.
Including, before 1948, Israelis.
Newt is wrong, and you are, to say that Palestinians hadn't been invented, yet. What wasn't invented was the concept that the people had a coalesced around a sense of nation hood.
Am I parsing too finely or are you?
I say you, because to me the prior existence of Palestinians on land known as Palestine isn't integral to my view of politics in the land. I think it seems to mean much to you... I think that realities changed in the area, that readdressing the past can't be accomplished satisfactorily, and that both Palestinians and Israelis need to accept the reality and move on as partners rather than as enemies.
I don't think the comparison to the indigenous of North Amerrica is too far out of line in this. Only that, Plastinians do have a claim to a sustainable and substantial land upon which to build their nation state - and the Indians had to accomodate the reality that was the white nation.

If you take the time to edit your post into legitimate sentences and paragraphs, I'll take the time to respond.

Is the formatting of this ok, RJ (it is a bit long...)?

Ok, so, Ricky is digging in his hole and working from the wrong place. Proving that ‘Palestine’ existed as a known place does not prove that the concept of ‘Palestinians’ did. You need more. Perhaps a distinct dialect. Perhaps common ancestry. Perhaps more stuff going back further than the 1960s.

So, starting from the very sketchy base point of the wikipedia article Palestinian People, let’s see what we may be able to find.

Well, Arabs in Israel/Palestine do apparently speak a different dialect of Arabic. The difference is more marked in rural areas (which is probably more significant, as rural populations are less likely to have been influenced by external contact or recent trends). In the urban population it is more like the other Levantine dialects. This difference is not the same one as that for Israeli Arabs who (in addition to using the dialect) have come to borrow words from Hebrew over recent decades. I can’t see evidence that the Palestinian dialect is of a particular age, but it’s not usual for them to spring up in a very short space of time. Certainly there were studies into the dialect by German linguists around 80-90 years ago, as referenced at the start of the description of this more recent study: http://seeger.uni-hd.de/english/ramalla_e.htm

Secondly, on the common ancestry front, the Nebel study of 2000 showed considerable genetic overlap between Arabs living in Israel and Palestine, Askhenazim and Sephardim. Bedouins are more distinct, it would seem. This fits with the historical narrative of conversion of the local populace from Judaism, Christianity and other religions to Islam after the 7th Century conquest, rather than a population movement of Arabs from elsewhere.

And what else?

Well, it’s clear that all Arabic national identities are also bound up in pan-Arabism, which complicates the question of whether there was an identity before 1948. There is also a lot of debate among academics, with some suggesting that that the Mufti of 1670 was outlining social distinctions between ‘Filestin’ and al_Sham (Syria) in his religious edicts. The 1834 revolt in Palestine was against recent Egyptian conquerors of southern ‘Syria’ and led by supporters of the Ottomans, and so can’t really be seen as an expression of Palestinian identity. However, some (Baruch Kimmerling, Joel Migdal) suggest that it was influential in forming one afterwards. The Ottomans took the area back in the 1840s, but a couple of generations later, in the 1880s, they reorganised the subdivisions of Syria, with Lebanon and Jerusalem becoming more autonomous, and the leaderships more local in flavour.

While in the 1910s the wider Arab movement were attempting independence for all Arabia, there were also local movements in Palestine calling for national independence. Some were pan-Arabist in intent (others religious), but again the picture is complex. We have to remember that the area had many more Christians than most other Arab lands, and the Lebanese Christians and Druze had a distinct common identity that was already in place and which excluded their counterparts to the South. So whether or not there was a conscious identity, or if there was how widespread it may have been, there was certainly a difference about the people of the area to their neighbours.

We might look to someone like Daniel Pipes to support Gingrich. He’s the right wing academic and outspoken anti-liberal who wrote in an article for the Jerusalem Post 11 years ago, called “The Year the Arabs Discovered Palestine”. He argues that with a single year, the people of Palestine had, due to the facts on the ground, decided to work within that framework rather than a wider Arab one. What year was he talking about? It was not 1967, following the defeat of the Arabs. It was not 1948 when Israel was formed. It was not even 1936 when the British quelled a major revolt. The article was talking about 1920, the year of the Mandate.

Daniel Pipes wrote:In fact, the Palestinian identity goes back, not to antiquity, but precisely to 1920. No "Palestinian Arab people" existed at the start of 1920 but by December it took shape in a form recognizably similar to today's.

Can we say for definite that the Palestinian identity stretches back much more than a century? No. Can we say (as Gingrich did) that it only goes back about 50 years? No. The reality is probably somewhere in between. I’m reluctant to agree with Daniel Pipes, what with him being the kind of guy who calls for witch hunts on campus and issues dog-whistle warnings on immigration to Europe, but I would say that the case he makes for 1920 is likely to be more solid than the one Gingrich makes for a later year. And he's not really looking to give the Palestinians much credence, reading that article.

In this sense it is not much different from many of the asserted national identities of the many African nations that were formed from administrative subdivisions of late 19th Century empires and became independent in the post WWII period. We can argue that some (or many) of those countries are artificial and that the people in them are divided tribally (and often those divisions transcend national boundaries) or on religious lines. So in that small sense Gingrich is right. But that would suggest that Palestine as a nation has about the same legitimacy as, for example, Uganda or Niger. Which is to say more than he implies with his statement

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You see, it does not take much, just wandering about in wikipedia and (crucially) spot checking the references, to show that Newt is wrong to be so definite. As you have said, Ray Jay, he is also probably wrong to say things which will just wind people up in a tense location. It may, however, be politically beneficial for him domestically and in the short term, as it will play to the evangelist audience (who backed Perry and may be askance about his conversion to Catholicism and his track record on marriage) as well as winding up liberals who will by their very agitated state make great targets for the right.

Which is the source of my sadness. It’s bad enough that Israel/Palestine is a political football in Israel and Palestine and neighbouring countries. But it is now an issue that has become intertwined with the US domestic political scene, as if Jerusalem is a stop on the trail just like Iowa and New Hampshire. In that sense we can forgive Gingrich a little, because all he was doing is what venal politicians do – playing to a particular crowd in order to gain support.

I've also read through the Wikipedia pages on the topic. I think it is a healthy place to start and a fair summary.

My problem is with Ricky refusing to engage in a proper debate and Kessler claiming to be a fact checker when he is the opposite. Ricky has the (pick one: arrogance, jerkiness, dishonesty, ignorance) to write: "So, you're saying, the term wasn't 'invented in 1977'"" when has far as I can tell no one has written that the term didn't exist prior to 1977 at all. He is of the same vein as Kessler. He will pretend to be knowledgeable and a fact checker when clearly he is neither. To have to spend time figuring out what Ricky means by deciphering his particular brand of English when he refuses to engage in a proper debate throwing in unsubstantiated facts while regularly distorting my position is just not worth the time.

The interplay between the Palestinians, the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians is all very interesting. It shows how each has tried to own the Palestinians and subsume them and incorporate their land into theirs. Having been unsuccessful, they now use them as a proxy against the Israelis. The Israelis share some blame as well. The Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people are also responsible for their fate.

I agree on the Republican candidates. I don't know whether this is more about Jewish votes or evangelical votes. The early primary states have small Jewish populations, and most Jews are Democrats.

I recently read Abbas's speech to the UN on their declaring an independent Palestinian state. From one paragraph of his speech:

I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people ...

Many Israelis found this to be a particularly offensive part of his speech He can speak of the Holy Land in terms of Muhammad and Jesus, but cannot even mention a Jewish connection to the land. Are the Israeli's overreacting, or is his inability to acknowledge that there are a Jewish people with a narrative that ties them to this land important?

Ray Jay wrote:I've also read through the Wikipedia pages on the topic. I think it is a healthy place to start and a fair summary.

My problem is with Ricky refusing to engage in a proper debate[snip]

It's getting harder. I didn't think it was hard to tell what your objection was to his posts, tbh.

The interplay between the Palestinians, the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians is all very interesting. It shows how each has tried to own the Palestinians and subsume them and incorporate their land into theirs. Having been unsuccessful, they now use them as a proxy against the Israelis. The Israelis share some blame as well. The Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people are also responsible for their fate.

Well, quite. Perhaps that is part of what is now the Palestinian identity - as whipping boys of the region, used by all and sundry for their own purposes.

I agree on the Republican candidates. I don't know whether this is more about Jewish votes or evangelical votes. The early primary states have small Jewish populations, and most Jews are Democrats.

Oh, I think it's the evangelical and basic non-Jewish 'Zionist' vote they are after, added to the general anti-Muslim feeling that's around. Basically the right wing conservatives fighting for the 'Not-Mitt' primacy have a large number of people to convince who have some 'red-button' issues. Most are domestic (taxes and spending, social policies, immigration) but backing Israel in strident terms is up there.

Of course, in some swing states (well, Florida) the Jewish vote is key, but I think in general Democrat or Republican the US policy is likely to be more pro-Israel anyway, so it's not really fertile ground compared to other issues.

Ray Jay wrote:Many Israelis found this to be a particularly offensive part of his speech He can speak of the Holy Land in terms of Muhammad and Jesus, but cannot even mention a Jewish connection to the land. Are the Israeli's overreacting, or is his inability to acknowledge that there are a Jewish people with a narrative that ties them to this land important?

A little of both. Sins of omission are not always intentional and are oh so easy to spot. It may have been his intent that the more vague mentions of the Holy Land and of divine messages. It may have been that he was asserting that he represents not only the Muslim Arabs, but the Christian ones as well.

I think had he perhaps mentioned Abraham/Ibrahim and or other prophets who are common to the three religions (and thus are Jewish), that would be been less of a problem.

But if there's a section of the speech that should be looked at, it's this one:

I confirm, on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, which will remain so until the end of the conflict in all its aspects and until the resolution of all final status issues, the following:

1. The goal of the Palestinian people is the realization of their inalienable national rights in their independent State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the land of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the June 1967 war, in conformity with the resolutions of international legitimacy and with the achievement of a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194, as stipulated in the Arab Peace Initiative which presented the consensus Arab vision to resolve the core the Arab-Israeli conflict and to achieve a just and comprehensive peace. To this we adhere and this is what we are working to achieve. Achieving this desired peace also requires the release of political prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons without delay.

2. The PLO and the Palestinian people adhere to the renouncement of violence and rejection and condemning of terrorism in all its forms, especially State terrorism, and adhere to all agreements signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.

3. We adhere to the option of negotiating a lasting solution to the conflict in accordance with resolutions of international legitimacy. Here, I declare that the Palestine Liberation Organization is ready to return immediately to the negotiating table on the basis of the adopted terms of reference based on international legitimacy and a complete cessation of settlement activities.

4. Our people will continue their popular peaceful resistance to the Israeli occupation and its settlement and apartheid policies and its construction of the racist annexation Wall, and they receive support for their resistance, which is consistent with international humanitarian law and international conventions and has the support of peace activists from Israel and around the world, reflecting an impressive, inspiring and courageous example of the strength of this defenseless people, armed only with their dreams, courage, hope and slogans in the face of bullets, tanks, tear gas and bulldozers.

5. When we bring our plight and our case to this international podium, it is a confirmation of our reliance on the political and diplomatic option and is a confirmation that we do not undertake unilateral steps. Our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine. We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities and the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force, and we believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard.

I am here to say on behalf of the Palestinian people and the Palestine Liberation Organization: We extend our hands to the Israeli government and the Israeli people for peace-making. I say to them: Let us urgently build together a future for our children where they can enjoy freedom, security and prosperity. Let us build the bridges of dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation, and build cooperative relations based on parity and equity between two neighboring States - Palestine and Israel - instead of policies of occupation, settlement, war and eliminating the other.

Ok, so the statement commits to recognise Israel, to talk with it's government, for peace, without challenging it's legitimacy. I'm sure that there are parts that will rankle (such as continued resistance and opposition to 'occupation' likely including places that Israel thinks of as integral, like East Jerusalem), but I think it's pretty positive in the round.

It's a start ... there are definitely parts that rankle ... if I were the Israeli PM I would try to work with it ... I don't see how Israel can deal with millions of Palestinian refugees or why they should after these last 90 years of bad faith.

ray

"So, you're saying, the term wasn't 'invented in 1977'"" when has far as I can tell no one has written that the term didn't exist prior to 1977 at all.

You obviously have a problem with short term memory.

“The fact is, the Palestinian claim to a right of return is based on a historically false story. Somebody oughta have the courage to go all the way back to the 1921 League of Nations mandate for a Jewish homeland, point out the context in which Israel came into existence, and ‘Palestinian’ did not become a common term until after 1977.”

Newt Gingrich

And your entire thin skinned reaction was to Kessler's debunking of this claim by quoting the 1920 Memorandum of the British Mandate... Counting Palestinian once versus his twice....

If you have any problems with anything I said as factually wrong, have at it. I'm pretty sure I can find you a quote from Wikipedia.
And if you really want to consider the first stirrings of Palestinian nationalism you'd read about the Palestine riots in 1920, 23, 25...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_Palestine_riots

They were reactions by the indigenous people (who we now call Palestinians) to the increase in Jewish immigration and the actions of the governing bodies that the rioters claimed were unfair.

We can't undo history. But some people, like Newt, try to rewrite it...
And if some people find the actions of their forebears hard to acknowledge thats tough. I find your defence of Newt to directly stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge that Israel didn't come about without harm being done to the indigenous people.
And that not calling them Palestinian some how makes that notion real.

"Invented" is not the same word as "common term". The fact that you have confused those two again suggests that you are either stupid or dishonest. Which is it?

It's not only one vs. two references to the word Palestinian. It is the context of how that word was used.

I haven't defended Newt one bit.

I'm not going to waste any more time on your gibberish until you use sentences and paragraphs like a normal person.

RJ, I don't think you would vote for Newt if he was the Republican nominee.

Yeah, he's too pro-Palestinian for me.