December 23 , 2011
Newt Invents Palestine
Last week Newt Gingrich, who is leading the Republican primary field and is likely to be their nominee, declared that the Palestinians are “an invented people”, and therefore have no real standing or claim to Palestine. He said the problem was that they chose not to live elsewhere. “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century, Gingrich said. "I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic."
This bizarre statement has an agenda behind, to de-legitimize the entire basis for the Palestinian struggle, and to completely absolve Israel of any responsibility to construct a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is completely wrongheaded on several levels.
First, to suggest that there are no such thing as Palestinians is absurd. The term Palestine was used by the Romans, and also by the Ottomans to refer to that region. When Britain took control after World War One, it was called the Palestine Mandate. The native inhabitants are logically Palestinian, just as the native inhabitants of Texas are Texans, or of California are called Californians. It is a simple recognition of a basic geographic fact.
Newt goes on to imply that these Palestinians should be thought of as generic “Arabs”, and not have any distinct ethnic or cultural or linguistic or religious identity. That is also absurd.
A hundred years ago, the term “Arab” was meant to refer to the Bedouin inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, it was only in the 1950s under the influence of modern pan-Arab nationalism that the term was now meant to describe all the peoples from Morocco to Iraq that spoke Arabic. But everyone acknowledges that Egyptians are a distinct group, and that Palestinians cannot be considered Egyptians. Are they properly thought of as Lebanese or Syrian? Lebanon has a distinct patchwork of Shia and Christian and Druze communities that do not reflect Palestinian life. Damascus is far away and has never been a center of Palestinian life. And Jordan a hundred years ago was an extremely sparsely inhabited region of mostly Bedouin tribes. The Palestinians on the other hand were a mostly Sunni Muslim and Christian community made up of small farmers living in villages and some medium sized towns with an urban life. To suggest that Palestinians belonged to any of these other regions nearby is simply wrong.
The third implication of Newt’s argument is that because there has never been an independent Palestinian nation, the Palestinians have no current right to such a country. On the other hand, since there was an Israel there 2000 years ago, modern Jews have a claim on that land that trumps all. But the whole notion of “nation” is a modern cultural invention. Most people around the world live in nations that have never existed before the 20 th century. There has never been an “India” or “Pakistan”. There was never an independent “Slovenia” or “Panama”, and almost all the African nations are the residue of 19 th century European colonial boundaries. Most nations are made up of more than one ethnic group, the Scots and Welsh are part of Britain along with the English, Canada has French-speaking Quebec, and Pakistan has at least 7 or 8 major ethnic groups. There was never an Italy in the historical past, and when it was forcibly created in the 1860’s, one of its first tasks was to convince its inhabitants that they were in fact “Italian”. The same could be said of Germany.
The basic question is not whether the Palestinians had a highly developed sense of nationalism in 1880. They didn’t, and neither did the vast majority of humans alive at the time. The question is why now are they deprived of the fundamental human right to participate in the government that is sovereign over them, unlike any one else on the planet? Why are the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank the only people on Earth to be denied citizenship? The Kurds of Turkey are legally Turkish citizens, and the Tibetans of China are Chinese citizens. Israel is not trying to force the Palestinians to be Israeli citizens against their will, Israel instead is demanding that the Palestinians accept being citizens of nowhere in perpetuity. That is intolerable to any thinking moral person, and it is intolerable to the rest of the planet. Israel’s growing isolation stems from that basic fact, not from rampant anti-Semitism.
There is another larger and more fundamental question of the enduring injustice of the Naqba, in which 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948 to make Israel a viable state. This question does not trouble Newt, for him the issue is why didn’t the Palestinians just move to Morocco? He doesn’t bother to answer why Morocco should be obligated to deal with a human disaster whose proper solution was quite simply to allow civilians to return to their homes and private property.
If Newt were to be President, his Middle East policy would be a disaster. In the long run, he would do more harm to Israel than any other American President. For Israel’s own survival it must come to a reasonable and just two-state solution with the Palestinians. Continuing the current status quo is not an option, and yet that seems to be Newt’s only real suggestion. Unless he can convince Morocco to take in 5 million Palestinians, and can talk the Palestinians into leaving. Not much chance of that I think.
