60 Minutes on Israel/Palestine, have you seen it?

Palestine has never existed . . . as an autonomous entity. There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc.

The word itself derives from "Peleshet", a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into English as "Philistine". Philistines was migrant people from the Aegean Sea and the Greek Islands who settled on the southern coast of the land of Canaan. There they established five independent city-states (including Gaza) on a narrow strip of land known as Philistia. The Greeks and Romans called it "Palastina".

The Philistines were not Arabs, they were not Semites. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs. The name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine" is not an Arabic name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Greco-Roman "Palastina" derived from the Peleshet.

In the First Century CE, the Romans crushed the independent kingdom of Judea. After the failed rebellion of Bar Kokhba in the Second Century CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe out the identity of Israel-Judah-Judea. Therefore, he took the name Palastina and imposed it on all the Land of Israel. At the same time, he changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.

After the Roman conquest of Judea, "Palastina" became a province of the pagan Roman Empire and then of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and very briefly of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. In 638 CE, an Arab-Muslim Caliph took Palastina away from the Byzantine Empire and made it part of an Arab-Muslim Empire. The Arabs, who had no name of their own for this region, adopted the Greco-Roman name Palastina, that they pronounced "Falastin".

During the First World War, the British took Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its subject provinces "Palestine" was assigned to the British, to govern temporarily as a mandate from the League of Nations.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, confirmed by the League of Nations Mandate, commited the British Government to the principle that "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. . . . " It was specified both that this area be open to "close Jewish settlement" and that the rights of all inhabitants already in the country be preserved and protected.

During the period of the Mandate, it was the Jewish population that was known as "Palestinians" including those who served in the British Army in World War II.

The current myth is that these Arabs were long established in Palestine, until the Jews came and "displaced" them. The fact is, that recent Arab immigration into Palestine "displaced" the Jews. That the massive increase in Arab population was very recent is attested by the ruling of the United Nations: That any Arab who had lived in Palestine for two years and then left in 1948 qualifies as a "Palestinian refugees".

God Bless!

I watched it today and it is excellent! Anyone remotely interested in learning more about the Palestinian's beef against Israel should spend the 13 minutes to watch this.

Btw, as with all the corporate media's correspondents in the Middle East, Bob Simon is Jewish. It looks like he was pretty blown away by what is happening.

Palestinians were offered half of the Palestinian Mandate in 1948 but refused it; Arabs controlled the West Bank and Gaza from 1948 to 1967, yet no Palestinian political entity arose in either place, not even provisionally. Now Palestinians completely control Gaza, but rather than building a state there, they claim that they are under Israeli occupation.

The common explanation is that the Palestinians want a state encompassing the entire former Palestinian Mandate. But a more likely explanation is that the Palestinian national movement is not and has never been a national movement in the ordinary sense of the term. It was for a long time the vanguard of the Arab nationalist movement and is today the front line of aggressive Islamism. The establishment of a state is not the goal. The elimination of a state is not the goal. The elimination of a foreign, non-Arab, non-Muslim entity is the goal.

“We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” Golda Meir 1957, before the National Press Club in Washington

We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours. Golda Meir, to Anwar Saddat just before the peace talks. Israeli (Russian-born) politician (1898 - 1978)

Are Palestinians the first refugee population in history? Hardly. But they are surely the first refugees who, as a group, have categorically RESISTED RESETTLEMENT, instead living for decades as wards of the international community. Indeed, in Gaza today, years after Israel renounced any territorial claims, there continue to be refugee camps. Why? Why -- other than to serve as incubators for hatred that produce recruits bent on martyrdom and mayhem -- are there Palestinian refugee camps in Palestinian territory?

http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Nothin...

The trust deficit is exacerbated by the fact that after Israel quit the Gaza Strip in 2005, Palestinians, instead of building Singapore there, built Somalia and focused not on how to make microchips, but on how to make rockets to hit Israel. Thomas Friedman

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/opinion/04friedm...

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The part that really got me is when the soldiers come and go as they wish into a civilian home without the owners consent.

Mmmmm... no I haven't seen it. I am under the belief that there is no such thing as unbiased and balanced media. They all have their slants that is why I prefer to get my information from a variety of sources. I doubt watching one 60 minutes show would change my general opinion on that matter.