It was only when modern-day Israel was established in 1948 that the Arabs began using the term “Palestine” as a way of attacking Israel’s legitimacy.
When former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Israel, appears at his Senate confirmation hearing, he’s sure to run into some harsh questions from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and other critics of Israel concerning some of his past comments about Palestinian Arab identity.
All Huckabee will need to do in response is quote the words of Golda Meir.
In 2008, Huckabee said: “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. You have Arabs and Persians. And there’s such complexity in that. But there’s really no such thing. That’s been a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”
And in 2015, he told The Washington Post: “The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true.”
None of which is any different from what one of Israel’s most famous and beloved prime ministers said, repeatedly.
Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel (and leader of its Socialist Labor Party) said in an interview with the London Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, that until very recently: “There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either Southern Syria, before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine, including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.”
That was not some one-off comment. Meir said it again and again. For example, here she is on the BBC’s “This Week” program in 1970 (the segment can be viewed on YouTube):
“What difference is there between Arabs who were on this side of the Jordan and the other side of the Jordan, Arabs in the east bank and the—west of the border of the west bank? I mean, when were Palestinians born? What was all this area before the First World War? When Britain got the mandate over Palestine, what was ‘Palestine’ then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqi border.”
The interviewer then cut in: “You say there is no such thing as a Palestinian—”
Meir: “No, east and west bank was Palestine. I’m a Palestinian. From ’21 until ’48, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as ‘Jews and Arabs, and Palestinians.’ There were Jews and Arabs.”
She continued: I don’t say there are no Palestinians. But I say there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people. Of all the Palestinians who live in Jordan, why have the Palestinians in the West Bank become more ‘Palestinians’ since the fifth of June ’67 than they were before? Why didn’t they set up a Palestinian country, in addition to Jordan? … They should have set up another, independent Palestine, and fought from there. They didn’t do that. They adopted the fact that they are in Jordan, they have adopted Jordanian citizens[hip]. They are the majority in Jordan, they are in parliament, they are in government. What has happened since then—why they have become more Palestinian-conscious since the war of ’67?”
The answer to the prime minister’s question (Why did Palestinian Arab identity suddenly emerge after 1967?) was answered succinctly by Huckabee: It was invented to serve as “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”
All serious historians and anthropologists know the truth. There is nothing about the Palestinian Arabs that genuinely distinguishes them from the Arabs in Jordan or Syria. They all speak the same language. They all have the same history and culture. Almost all of them have the same religion.
This is why, throughout history, they never demanded the creation of a separate “Palestinian” state. The region was occupied by fellow Muslims for many centuries—Turkish Muslims for 600 years, and Jordan and Egypt from 1949 to 1967. Yet these “Palestinians” never asked their fellow Muslims to set up a “Palestine.”
Meir alluded to the ironic fact that Jordan itself used to be called “Palestine”—that is, before the British arbitrarily sliced off the eastern 75% of the Palestine Mandate territory in 1922, barred Jews from the area and renamed it “Transjordan” (which was later shortened to “Jordan”). The people there were magically transformed from “Palestinians” to “Transjordanians” with one wave of a British wand. Isn’t it remarkable how today’s outspoken critics of colonialism have nothing to say about the British colonial decrees that arbitrarily redefined the meaning of Palestine and Palestinians?
It was only when modern-day Israel was established in 1948 that the Arabs began using the term “Palestine” as a way of attacking Israel’s legitimacy. And it was only in 1967 when Israel took over the areas where most of those Arabs reside that they began using the label “Palestinian” in earnest, actively trying to create out of thin air a distinct identity in the hope of delegitimizing and displacing Israel.
So Bernie Sanders better bring a large handkerchief with him to the hearings. He’s going to need it to wipe all the egg off his face when ambassador-designate Huckabee starts quoting Golda Meir to him.
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education group.
