Read any good books on ancient Palestine lately?

Edward C. Davenport, Drum Point

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“Read any good books on ancient Palestine lately? ‘Read any good books on ancient Palestine?’ I asked an Associate Pastor of my acquaintance. The Associate Pastor chuckled. He clearly understood the joke. Some of the most widely used textbooks in American schools make reference to a millenniums-old nation called Palestine.

To cite just a few examples: ‘Sometime during the years 8 to 4 B.C., a Jewish boy named Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a small town in ancient Palestine.’

(World Cultures and Geography: Eastern Hemisphere and Europe, teacher’s ed., McDougal Littell) ‘Many Jews resented Roman rule of Palestine’ (World Geography Today, Teacher’s ed., Austin Holt) Historically, ‘Palestine’ was the name of a region. It has never referred to a specific nation.

The name ‘Palestine’ was given by the Roman ruler Hadrian to what was the Land of Israel and Judea because he loathed the Jews and therefore re-named Judea after the Philistines, an ancient enemy of the Jews. Judea and Samaria were a region that was inhabited by the Jewish people since the conquest of the Canaanites, some 3,000 years ago.

Those identifying themselves as modern Palestinians sometimes make the spurious claim that they are descendants of the Canaanites, but the historic timeline disputes it.

Over 70% of the member states of the United Nations have recognized Palestine as a ‘state,’ notwithstanding the fact that no one can clearly delineate what its supposed borders were, name its monetary unit or identify a single leader before Yasser Arafat.

When former Senior KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin defected in 1992, he brought with him files chronicling the agency’s disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing the Middle East.

The files reflect that the Palestine Liberation Organization and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine were created with the KGB’s help to maintain conflict in the Middle East. The KGB originated the disgusting practice of drawing comparisons between Israel and the South African apartheid.

It is a practice that continues to this day with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. When the PLO was founded in 1964, the Soviets created the myth of a displaced people seeking the return of ‘their’ ancestral homeland, and the calls for Israel’s destruction were replaced with appeals for ‘Liberation.’

It is a lie promulgated on college campuses throughout the country by the Muslim Students’ Association and BDS organizers. By replacing Judea and Samaria with Palestine, textbook content writers delegitimize Israel’s historical ties to Jerusalem, while giving undeserved weight to the benign claims of BDS and other Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups.

PLO founder Ahmed Shukari admitted in 1956: ‘There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. There is no Palestinian entity.’ Arab-American journalist Joseph Farah offered the most candid assessment: ‘The truth is, Palestine is no more real than Never-Never Land.’”

Context added by this archive

The argument that Palestinians do not exist, made in a letters column in 2019 and printed in full. The archive holds it because the claim is part of the record it is collecting.

Cite this clipping

"Read any good books on ancient Palestine lately?," The Recorder, 22 November 2019, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2019-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2019-002

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