The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #141076 Message #3245648
Posted By: Jim Carroll
27-Oct-11 - 01:37 PM
Thread Name: Palestine (continuation)
Subject: RE: Palestine
"They never were the rightful owners of the Jewish homeland"
This is the worst possible argument anyone could put up for the Israeli case in Palestine - that the Palesinians have no right to Palestine at all.
It confirms the worst suspicions of those who oppose Israeli behaviour; that the Arabs are expected to vacate an area that they have occupied for 2 and a half centuries largely on the basis of a myth to make way for a "chosen people" - a recipe for centuries of bloodbath which I doubt if anybody but the most extreme Zionists support.
Jim Carroll
Palestine
by Matt Giwer, © 2005 [Sep]
We know for a fact all of the common knowledge of the origin of Palestine is false. We also know the common knowledge has been deliberately falsified by redneck Christians and their murderous zionist brethren.
We do not know how long Palestine has existed. It first appears in the written record in the books Herodotus wrote of his travels in the region in the 5th c. BC. There he refers to the region as Palestine Syria seven times. And that is the spelling he used. All relationship of Palestine of the biblical Philistines is bible speculation and not based in fact. So far as anyone can tell the Philistines were as invented as the biblical Jews.
The name Palestine for the region ceased to be used for about one century under Roman rule when it was broken into several administrative regions. The name was restored for the single administrative region restored after the 134AD revolt in Judea. So Palestine and the Palestinians have existed for at least 2500 years.
It is noteworthy that Herodotus mentions no people in or around Palestine Syria which could be the Judeans or Israelites of the Old Testament. He also prepared lists of peoples who practiced circumcision and had related genital mutilation customs. There are no Old Testament people on this list either. There is no mention of Philistines either.
So at the time of Herodotus we know the Palestinians existed but have no evidence of the people of the Bible existing. This is consistent with the creation of the first "old testament" as the Septuagint some two centuries after Herodotus by Juda Macabe.
So lets say Herodotus happened to miss them. After all he was only one man and inventing his methods as he went along. After Alexander conquered the region and later all the way to the Indus valley, he had inventories made. They were to list the lands and peoples he ruled. There is no mention of any people who could have been the Jews or Judea on either inventory. Today we can more or less confirm the accuracy of the inventories but no Jews or Judeans.
Of course this is not something Zionists want to hear as their political ideology is based upon the fiction of the Old Testament. The Christian literalists are not interested in any allegorical reading of the bible. Even the moderate bible "scholars" are believers and have an interest in putting the date of the first writing of the Old Testament as far back as possible.
The so-called scholars are the most annoying of all. They make no credible attempt to actually date the creation of its books. There are facts of archaeology which must be shown false or accepted. They most uniformly hold it was created shortly after the most recent documented time they could not have been written. They have great scholarly debates over a few decades "shortly" after this time. They do not consider how late they could have been written nor when they were likely created.
We can date them by simply applying the rule of the oldest external mention of them. By that rule the original was the Greek Septuagint towards the end of the 3rd c. BC. The Septuagint also uses Palestine. Philistine comes from the Hebrew version of the Septuagint which is first mentioned at the beginning of the 1st c. BC. The first mention it is a translation is by Josephus towards the end of the 1st c. AD. In his claim he cites the forged letter of Aristeas which recounts a magical, inspired translation. Josephus is a priest of this religion. The best "evidence" he knows of is a forgery.
By all the physical evidence and by all the principles which apply to everything other than the Bible, the Palestinians long predate anyone calling themselves the people of the Old Testament.