Free Stolen History: How the Palestinians and Their Allies Attack Israel's Right to Exist by Erasing Its Past by David Meir-Levi Page B

borders and national identity known as "Palestine" until 1922 when the League of Nations created "British Mandatory Palestine."
    The endless array of migrants and invaders of differing ethnic, linguistic and cultural origins who moved through the region from prehistoric times onward provides no genetic or cultural ancestry for today's Arabs of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. There is abundant evidence, in fact, that from the mid-19th century onward, during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods, hundreds of thousands of Arabs migrated into the area from surrounding lands in search of the better economic conditions that the British and the Zionists created. 4 The result of this migration was a near quadrupling of the Arab population of the Holy Land from an estimated 340,000 in 1855 to more than 1,300,000 in 1947. 5 This means that the majority of today's Arab population of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, can trace its Holy Land ancestry back for 150 years at best.
    Also thwarting Whitelam's arguments are the unsolicited statements by Arab scholars and political leaders in the years leading up to the UN partition plan in 1947, to the effect that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation or a Palestinian people. In fact, from the 1880's onward Arab nationalists actually protested against the use of the term "Palestine" because "Palestine," as they explained, was really Southern Syria (as-Suriyeh al-janubiyeh). Even the Grand Mufti Hajj Muhammad Amin el Husseini, the most vitriolic and vociferous Arab nationalist in Southern Syria, opposed the British Mandate because it created "Palestine" separate from Syria. Akhmed Shukairi, the PLO delegate to the UN, said in 1956, eight years after the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of "Palestinian refugees," that "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria." As late as 1974 Syria's President Hafez al-Assad asserted that "... Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of Southern Syria." 6
    Hence when the newly founded United Nations presented a plan for the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, with UN General Assembly Resolution # 181, on November 29, 1947, its plan was seen by some Arab leaders not as a rational way to end the escalating violence between Arabs and Jews, but rather as a historical and political injustice. 7
    And perhaps the most revealing of all in this connection is the statement by Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, on March 31, 1977, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw : 8 "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem."
    In short, Arab leaders committed to the destruction of Israel invented the concept "Palestinian people" in order to justify their interminable war against Israel.
    Even a cursory glance at Ancient Near East scholarship demonstrates that Whitelam's use of the terms such as "dismissed," "diminished," "minimized," or "silenced," to refer to the supposedly oppressive treatment of "Palestinian history" by modern Biblical scholars and archaeologists during the last 150 years, is pure fiction. Aside from his spurious and uncritiqued insinuation that "Palestinian history" is in fact the history of the ancient non-Israelite peoples