No such people as Palestinians ever existed
Don Besosmart
"Some people would doubtless be amazed to learn that, some 10 centuries
before the birth of Christ and 17 centuries before the birth of Mohammed,
the city of Jerusalem was created by King David as the capital of the united
kingdom of Israel and Judea. The Jews were in fact the only people for whom
the land of Israel was ever actually their national home.
And the Arabs knew it. �Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?
� the then mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Khalidi, told the Chief Rabbi of France
in 1899: �God knows historically it is indeed your country��even though, he
added, the problem was that now there were others living there too.
Those others were only there, however, because of the extraordinary impulse
to conquer and possess this tiny piece of land�and above all, the prize of
prizes at its heart, Jerusalem. For after the Jews were finally driven out
by the Romans in 70 CE, a myriad of different peoples and dynasties piled in
to conquer it: Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Ummayads, Abbasids, Fatimids,
crusaders from all over Christendom, Seljuks, Kurds, Mamluks, Mongols,
Albanians, Ottomans and (in 1918) Britons. (The one name that does not
figure in this great procession is the Palestinians� for no such people ever
existed.)