The intensifying Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have caused opponents of a Palestinian state to revive former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir\u2019s 1969 canard that \u201cthere is no such thing as a Palestinian people.\u201d However, \u201cPalestine denial\u201d is less a debating point than a conversation- stopper: if there are no Palestinians, then there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and thus no need even to discuss West Bank policies. One problem: Palestinians do, in fact, exist.<\/p>\n
In December, Israeli diplomat Danny Ayalon posted a YouTube video entitled \u201cThe Real Truth About Palestine,\u201d in which he claimed that Palestine is a place, not a nation: \u201cLike Antarctica, the Amazons or Sahara, naming a place doesn\u2019t create a nation of Antarcticans or Saharans.\u201d And in a recent Front Page Magazine essay, Hoover Institution scholar Bruce Thornton referred to \u201cthe so-called Palestinians\u201d and stated that the very idea of a Palestinian nation is but \u201ca device for promoting the incremental war against Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2012, three U.S. Republican presidential candidates endorsed Palestine denial: Newt Gingrich called Palestinians \u201can invented people\u201d; Rick Santorum said \u201cthere are no Palestinians \u2026 all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis\u201d; and Herman Cain referred to \u201cthe so-called Palestinian people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Palestine denial, like Holocaust denial, is easily refuted. Most historians, since the publication of Benedict Anderson\u2019s book Imagined Communities three decades ago, have accepted that every people is invented, some very recently.<\/p>\n
Italian consciousness dates to 1764 and, until 1871, Italy wasn\u2019t a country. Earlier residents considered themselves Neapolitans or Venetians or Florentines, and their primary loyalties were to their religion or ruler. But \u201cItalian\u201d is not a timeless identity, nation, or people.<\/p>\n
Before a UCLA professor coined \u201cAsian American\u201d in 1968, Americans whose backgrounds were Chinese or Filipino or Japanese weren\u2019t really part of a unified ethnic group. Yet the government now applies census and voting-rights laws to Asian Americans as if they existed \u2013 which, today, they do.<\/p>\n
Czechoslovakia, carved from former Austro-Hungarian territory containing mostly Czechs but also Germans and Slovaks, lasted from 1918 to 1992. But the state was only partially successful in creating a unified Czechoslovakian identity out of those ethnicities. The joke among Jewish historians is that there were Czechs and Slovaks, but the only Czechoslovaks were the Jews of Prague.<\/p>\n
Being Jewish is itself an invented identity. Though Judaism is thousands of years old, it\u2019s not ageless. Ancient concepts of tribes and kingdoms differ greatly from today\u2019s nation idea. In fact, Hebrew has a different word for biblical peoplehood (am<\/i>) and modern nationhood (l\u2019om<\/i>). Jewish nationalism traces only to the late 1800s, when secular European Jews faced rising nationalist antisemitism in their countries of residence, as expressed in France\u2019s Dreyfus Affair and the Russian pogroms. The central Zionist myth of uninterrupted but dispersed Jewish nationhood with consistent identity tracing to biblical times and finally gathering in modern Israel is historically inaccurate.<\/p>\n
Palestinian identity and peoplehood started in the early 20th century, but intensified after the events of 1948 and 1967. The Palestinian nation then developed a strong sense of shared history and future, grievance and aspiration. It has a flag, a shared language (Palestinian Arabic), particular cuisine and a varied literary canon.<\/p>\n
Palestine denial is hackneyed and utterly predictable. Its followers boast of the following 1977 citation by Zuheir Muhsain of the Palestine Liberation Organization\u2019s pan-Arabist faction: \u201cThe Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel.\u201d The obsession over a hoary 35-year-old quote from a Palestinian with a minority viewpoint suggests no other textual evidence exists.<\/p>\n
Deniers also champion Mark Twain\u2019s 1867 Innocents Abroad,<\/i> always using the same passage, which describes Palestine in part as a \u201cdesolate country\u201d where Twain \u201cnever saw a human being on the whole route.\u201d But this 68-word mantra, presented as a single coherent opinion, selectively combines sentences and phrases from pages 488, 520 and 555 of the travelogue. Never mentioned are Twain\u2019s half-dozen anecdotes about encounters with Arabs in Palestine. Innocents Abroad<\/i> actually offers more support to the Palestinian narrative than the Zionist one.<\/p>\n
Finally, West Bank residents are purportedly just a motley collection of Arab economic migrants, not a unified nation. Of course, the United States was also populated by economic migrants, and everyone recognizes the American people.<\/p>\n
Denial rhetoric invalidates Palestinian rights by contradicting common sense and nearly all nationalism scholarship. It also leads to very strange questions. Are Italians a nation? Do Pakistanis (a 75-year-old identity) deserve a state? Should we tell a person who says she\u2019s Asian American, \u201cNo, you\u2019re not\u201d?<\/p>\n
Opponents of a Palestinian state can raise many legitimate points. But the \u201cmyth of Palestine\u201d is not one of them. The idea needs to be retired, so real discussions about the Israeli and Palestinian futures can start.<\/p>\n