Long past due to puncture the big lie of Palestinian identity - by Melanie Phillips

Their claim to be the rightful inheritors of the land represents one of the most successful, if fiendish, propaganda achievements ever to have been pulled off—to have persuaded millions of people that this ludicrous falsehood is an unchallengeable truth.

Melanie Phillips..
JNS.org..
29 August '19..

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, recently claimed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the Canaanites. “This land is for its people, its residents and the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago—and we are the Canaanites!” he declared, vowing that every Israeli stone and house “built on our land” would end up “in the garbage dump of history.”

Any Western Palestinian supporter might have been left somewhat perplexed. After all, it’s an article of faith among those hostile to Israel that the indigenous inhabitants of the land are Palestinian Arabs who have been supplanted by Jewish occupiers.

Since Canaanites were said to have been conquered by the Jews, Abbas is laying claim to Canaanite ancestry to give the Palestinians a prior right to the land of Israel. But if they were actually Canaanites, then they can’t be Arabs, who many centuries later came, as the name implies, from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Philistines, from whom in other moods the Palestinians also claim to have descended, came from Crete.

Abbas’s argument is, of course, ludicrous. The fact is that the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, several centuries before the creation of Islam.

The Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land. Palestinian identity was invented in the 1960s in order to destroy the Jews’ claim to Israel and airbrush them out of their own history.

From time to time, this inconvenient historical truth has been blurted out by Arabs themselves.

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Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy,” in 2018. Her work can be found at: www.melaniephillips.com.