What Exactly Is "Palestine" Anyway?
The historical weakness of the "Palestinian" position
With war raging in Gaza, there’s a lot of confusion going on about the basic facts on the ground. In particular, there are a lot of people on the Left accusing Israel of war crimes, of genocidal intent, and of wanting to wipe out the so-called “Palestinian people” entirely. (In other words, of doing precisely what the “Palestinians” have been doing to them for decades now. Exactly as you’d expect.) So it’s worth taking some time to understand what’s going on and how we got into this mess.
Ancient History
The land of Israel was originally given to the people of Israel by God as a land of inheritance, a fulfillment of the promise to their ancestor Abraham that it would belong to his descendants forever. However, in the Law of Moses, the Lord made it clear that this promise was conditional upon their obedience. Deuteronomy 27 promises them many great blessings of prosperity if they live righteously, but terrible curses if they turn away from the Lord, culminating in the promise of conquest and foreign oppression:
48 Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.
49 The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand;
50 A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:
51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.
52 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy land, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.
Over the next few centuries, the people had their ups and downs, though sadly more downs than ups; the history of Ancient Israel is rife with tales of the people embracing the corrupt cultures of their neighbors and joining in their sins, particularly sexual sins, (any time you read of worship of Baal and Ashtaroth, or of “groves” being used in corrupt religious practices, it’s talking about pagan fertility-cults,) which are consistently described as being particularly abominable to God. And so they constantly struggled with their neighbors, from the Philistines to the Egyptians, to the Assyrians, to the Babylonians, suffering repeated military defeats and conquests. Along the way, most of the tribes of Israel were carried away captive and dispersed, leaving the tribe of Judah the last tribe standing in the ancestral homeland.
This long history eventually culminated in a non-neighbor from a distant land, famous for its system of swift transport for troops, who spoke a totally distinct language from anything they were familiar with, and whose symbol was the eagle, (see Deut. 27: 49, above) conquering and subjugating the Judah-ites, aka Jews. The Romans took over, and called the land Judea, “the land of the Jews.”
About 200 years later, after putting down a Jewish rebellion in the early second century AD, the Romans renamed the area to Palestina, “the land of the Philistines.” This can be understood as nothing other than a deliberate slap in the face to the Jews, give that the Philistines no longer existed, having been wiped out by the Assyrians and the Babylonians the better part of a millennium prior. This is where the modern-day term “Palestine” originates. Applying the name of an ancient enemy to the land properly known as Israel has been an act of explicit antisemitism from the very beginning.
Throughout centuries of Roman occupation, the Romans had been forcibly dispersing Jews to various parts of the Empire, and at this point they basically decided they’d had enough, and scattered the majority of the Jews left in Judea to the four winds. While the Jewish people were not completely driven out, they remained very much a minority in their own homeland for well over a millennium, particularly after the brutal conquest of the Holy Land by Muslim invaders a few centuries later.
More Recent History
By the early 19th century, Israel was a barren desert, a wasted district of the Ottoman Empire. Aside from Jerusalem and its religious significance, virtually no one wanted to live there; the population of the entire region, comprising the entirety of modern-day Israel and Jordan, was barely a quarter-million. When the Zionist movement began, it was illegal for Ottoman citizens to sell land to Jews. They sold it quite willingly anyway, and the authorities were generally willing to turn a blind eye to it, believing that they were ripping the Jews off, getting good money for worthless land. The Jews didn't care; it was their land, their ancestral homeland. The Lord had cursed their ancestors for their sins and scattered them, but He had also promised to gather them home again in His own due time, and many Jews throughout the world believed that the time was at hand, and that Jew-hatred (as it was called at the time) would never die, so they needed a place to call their own. Sadly, subsequent events have proven the latter point indisputably true.
By the 1940s, after several waves of Jewish immigrants to the area, Jews had become well-established in their ancient-and-new-again homeland, which was currently under British rule and known by the old Roman name of “Palestine.” Historical records show that there were any number of groups in the area called Palestinian-This Group and Palestinian-That Organization, etc, which were all-Jewish groups; the Arabs living there called themselves “Arabs,” not “Palestinians.” Jews had bought the land fair and square, and they were living on it. With the Ottoman Empire crumbling in the aftermath of World War I, and the local Arabs siding with the Axis and ending up on the losing side of World War II, the recognition of Israeli nationhood was largely an act of giving formal recognition to what was already the de facto state of affairs: this was Jewish land.
The Modern State of Israel
Of course, that formal recognition means a lot to some people. When the plan was unveiled, Muslim Arabs went berserk, unleashing riots and violence throughout Israel and in other areas, including in Great Britain, where the plans were being negotiated, and their terroristic ways managed to intimidate the British negotiators into handing over the entire Transjordan region — about 80% of Israel! — to Muslim Arab control, who promptly stole the land from the Jews living there and slaughtered or drove off the owners. (Today, this occupied region stolen from Israel is referred to simply as “Jordan.”)
But they've never been satisfied with just 80% of it, especially with Jewish industriousness reclaiming the barren desert, making it blossom as a rose and become a desirable place to live. Now the land was worth stealing, and they certainly tried, multiple times! In the 1948 war, Egypt briefly took control over the Gaza region of western Israel, and Jordan likewise annexed a small area of land on the west bank of the Jordan river. Despite the fact that the taking of territory by conquest has been a blatant violation of international law since the end of World War II, well… you can probably guess exactly what happened, can’t you?
Yup, that’s right. They stole the land from the Jews living there and moved their own people in. (Ever hear people accuse Israel of “settler colonialism?” Yeah…) Among other things, this led to the absurdity of Bethlehem, the City of David, ending up in the hands of the sworn enemies of the People of David. It remains under Arab occupation in the West Bank to this day.
About 7 years later, Egypt started trying to put Israel under siege, closing off vital waterways to Israeli shipping. This led to a series of minor conflicts over several years, culminating in the Six-Day War, in which, among other things, Israel took back the territory stolen from it in 1948. And in one of the biggest boneheaded blunders in the nation’s history, they let the invaders who had settled on the stolen land stay.
This is the origin of the modern-day “Palestinian” people: thieves and invaders with no legitimate claim to the land. (In the case of the West Bank inhabitants, doubly so, given that they came over from Jordan!) The only reason they were allowed to stick around is because Israel thought getting rid of them wouldn’t be worth the effort. Particularly since Egypt and Jordan refused to take them back, knowing full well the trouble they would cause their hated enemy if they stayed put. And meanwhile, they get to complain and claim that Israel violated international law in taking the territories back from them. But of course they never saw anything wrong with stealing this land from Israel in the first place!
(BTW if anyone ever wonders why conservatives have such strong opposition to illegal immigration, the horrifying object lesson of Israel provides one pretty good reason: this is what happens when you tolerate it! Let invaders settle in your country and it won’t be long before people start thinking they have more of a legitimate right to the land than your own citizens do!)
But of course, just as they weren’t satisfied with stealing Transjordan from Israel, the local Muslim population wasn’t satisfied with Gaza and the West Bank either. They wanted it all. They made that explicit in the Khartoum Resolution, calling for “no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel,” and later the Hamas charter, which explicitly calls for the conquest of the entirety of “Mandatory Palestine.” (AKA the British Palestine territory that was supposed to have gone to the Jews, but which they only got 20% of.) The common slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” is likewise explicitly genocidal in nature, given that between the [Jordan] river and the [Mediterranean] sea is the entirety of the modern-day state of Israel.
Ever since then, the “Palestinian” invaders have been agitating against the alleged “occupation” of their homes and using it as a pretext to launch unending waves of murderous attacks against Israel. (They are technically correct in calling it an occupation, of course; the land belongs to Israel by every right you can think of, and they are the ones illegally occupying it!)
The Current Conflict
Ever since Israel foolishly decided it would be too much trouble to get rid of the invaders, they’ve been bending over backwards to keep the violence down one way or another. Every attempt, including offering to give them everything they asked for in the two-state solution they allegedly wanted, has been rebuffed sooner or later. This is because, simply put, you can’t negotiate with evil maniacs who want you dead. They do not want a two-state solution; this is a lie they tell the rest of the world to try to make themselves look more reasonable. (The doctrine of taqiyya — a religious license to lie and deceive others in order to advance Islamic goals — in action!) Israel even went so far as to engage in the polite fiction that the two “Palestinian”-occupied regions had some degree of autonomy.
So what did they do? They put Hamas, a genocidal terror organization, in charge of Gaza and Hezbollah, another genocidal terror organization, in charge of the West Bank! And the rest is history. And last year, on October 7, 2023, that polite fiction ran its course and stopped being useful after Hamas terrorists spilled into Israel and raped, murdered, and otherwise brutalized over a thousand innocent civilians in a few short hours, while the “Palestinians” celebrated. The media has characterized the resulting military response as an “invasion of Gaza.” This is incorrect. What’s going on is far more akin to the American Civil War: they are pacifying a rebellious region of Israel, held by evil men bent on perpetrating atrocities.
In doing so, they have taken extraordinary measures to target only Hamas combatants, bending over backwards to avoid civilian casualties. Unfortunately that only goes so far when fighting monsters who hide among civilian populations, including hospitals, schools, and private houses, and Hamas has never shied away from playing up the casualties for all they’re worth. (Not to mention the way Islamic law rejects the “civilian/combatant” distinction entirely; if you support an army in any way, even simply by living a normal life and paying taxes which fund the army, under Islamic law you are considered a warrior yourself. There’s taqiyya at work again: they don’t believe in civilians, but they have no compunction against pretending they do in order to prey on the sympathies of those who genuinely do!) Despite all this, the current conflict is notable for having the lowest rate of civilian casualties of any war on record: around 1.5 for every Hamas soldier killed, which is extraordinarily low! If Hamas weren’t so insistent on provoking further civilian deaths for propaganda purposes, it would be even lower.
The first and most important thing to understand about the situation in Israel is that there is no such thing as “the Palestinian people.” They lack even the slightest shred of legitimacy. They are thieves living on stolen land, with a decades-long track record of attempting to steal more through murder and deceit. They are not “an ethnic or national group,” as the Gazans and the West Bank occupiers are two distinct groups of invaders, one from Jordan and one from Egypt, which belong to the larger ethnic and national groups of Arabs and Egyptians, and therefore the scurrilous charge of “genocide” against them is not only incorrect but impossible.
Disregarding their absurd and dishonest claims entirely was the key insight behind the Abraham Accords, the Trump Administration’s breakthrough foreign policy victory in the Middle East which has proven its value in the recent conflict: just look at the way Israel’s Muslim neighbors have, for the first time ever, refrained from joining in on the latest conflict and attempting to wipe Israel out. Look at the unprecedented cooperation from Saudi Arabia in the recent rocket-and-drone attack from Iran!
Modern history gives us a successful formula to turn genocidal maniacs into peaceful citizens of the world:
Crush them militarily.
Disarm them.
Spend decades occupying them and forcibly rooting out the evil teachings in their culture.
Teach them to be civilized instead.
Once they’ve finally learned, pull out and let them stand on their own two feet.
It worked for Germany. It worked for Japan. We can only hope, once Israel finishes with the eradication of Hamas, (step 1,) they will follow through with the process and it will work for the “Palestinians” as well.