PALESTINIANS AND THE PASSION

Palestinians and The Passion. The most interesting thing, politically, about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, is all the Palestinians.

What’s that? There aren’t any Palestinians in the movie? Not one? Exactly. There are Romans, there are Jews – but 2,000 years ago there were no Palestinians.

1,300 years ago, Arabs conquered the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, seizing it from the people who lived there – Jews and Christians – forcing them to become either Moslems or Dhimmis (second-class citizens, like Blacks in the Jim Crow South).

Yet in all those 1,300 years since, not until 1964, did those Arabs call themselves Palestinians. The claim for a historical “Palestinian” identity is as phony as the recently-invented claim that they’re not really Arabs at all but descended from the Biblical Philistines, the Minoan Greeks who began migrating to the Levant after the eruption of Santorini (ca. 1640 BC).

“Philistine” comes from the Hebrew plesheth, rolling or migratory – that is, they came in migratory waves over several centuries. They were neither Arab nor even Semitic.

Roman Emperor Hadrian, after putting down the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 AD, renamed the province of Judaea to Syria-Palestina, after the Philistines as an insult to the Jews.

The name “Falestin” that the Arabs use is not an Arabic word, but merely their pronunciation of the Roman “Palestina.”