NEWT AND THE PALESTINIANS

For many, it was evidence Newt Gingrich is too reckless to be president of the United States.

Palestinians are an "invented people," Mr. Gingrich said in an interview with a Jewish cable network last Friday (12/9).

That was "the most racist remark I have ever seen," said one Palestinian leader.  The Arab League condemned his remarks as "irresponsible and dangerous."

Mr. Gingrich is a "bomb thrower," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said during the GOP presidential debate Saturday (12/10).  "We are not going to throw incendiary words into a place which is a boiling pot," he said.

Romney spokesman Eric Fernstrohm said Mr. Gingrich’s remarks were "tremendously destructive to a negotiated settlement."

Mr. Gingrich "comes across as the Foghorn Leghorn of politics," Mr. Fernstrohm said.  "Very loud, very brash, and very sure of himself — even when he’s wrong."

But Mr. Gingrich isn’t wrong about the Palestinians, Mr. Romney conceded.

"Palestine" is derived from the Philistines, an Indo-European people who settled on the coast of what is now Israel around 1,600 B.C.  After being conquered by Babylon 1,000 years later, they disappeared from history.

As part of their ethnic cleansing after the Jewish revolt of 70 A.D., the Romans renamed the land "Palaestina" after the by then long gone Philistines.  The Arabs kept the name when they conquered the region in 638 A.D., as did the Ottoman Turks when they conquered it in 1516.  See Jack Wheeler’s Philistines and Palestinians (December 2006) for the history.

Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire after World War I.  It was at this time that Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and the modern nation of Syria were born.

At that time, the only people in the British mandate of Palestine who called themselves "Palestinians" were Jews.  The more numerous Arabs called themselves "Arabs."  They were ethnically, religiously, culturally and linguistically identical to the Arabs living in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.  

And they sought no independent political identity.  Nationalism is a western concept.  Most Moslems, then and now, believe in the "umma" (community), a union of all Moslems under a single caliph.

The first time many Arabs referred to themselves as "Palestinians" was in 1948, to distinguish themselves from the Jews living in that portion of Palestine the United Nations set aside for a Jewish state.  They wanted to destroy Israel, but had no ambitions for a state of their own.  Had the Arabs strangled the Jewish state in its crib, their plan was to divide the land among Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.

Until the 1967 war, the "Palestinians" in the Gaza Strip were Egyptians; the "Palestinians" in the West Bank were Jordanians.

When it was formed in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization claimed for the "Palestinians" only land occupied by Israel.  Article 24 of the PLO’s original charter explicitly rejected any claim to the West Bank or Gaza.

The PLO’s first chairman, Yassir Arafat, was an Egyptian selected by Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser and the KGB, according to the highest ranking intelligence officer to defect from the Soviet bloc.

"I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s," said Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romanian intelligence.

By inventing the mythical Palestinians, Nasser and the Soviets — like the Romans before them — wanted to delegitimize Jewish claims to the land of their forefathers.  But Jews predated Moslems in the region by about 2,100 years.

An "invented" people can become real, if only because they otherwise would be orphans.  Jordan doesn’t want the West Bank back.  Egypt doesn’t want Gaza back.  Mr. Gingrich — like every other major American political figure — favors a "two state" solution.

So do the Israelis.  The only people who don’t are the Palestinians, who still seek the destruction of Israel.  This is a concession "for peace" Israelis, understandably, are unwilling to make.

There can be no peace in the Middle East until the Arabs recognize the right of Israel to exist, and stop launching terror attacks on it.  That day is still far off.  But straight talk is more likely than mealy mouthed temporizing to bring it closer.

Newt Gingrich spoke the truth.  To fudge it for fear our enemies will criticize us is far more "reckless" than anything he said.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.