Bezalel Smotrich is Right: There is No Such Thing as the Palestinian People By Hugh Fitzgerald

Robert Spencer : Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich dismissed the existence of a separate Palestinian people in a speech he delivered in Paris on Sunday. This has caused predictable outrage from the Arabs, from the EU’s Josep Borrell, and from the Bidenites, who found his remarks on this matter “unhelpful.” But is his statement false? A preliminary Jihad Watch report is here, and more on Smotrich’s speech can be found here: “Israel’s Smotrich: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” by Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2023:

“There is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” said Smotrich who heads the Religious Zionist Party.

“Who are the [real] Palestinians? I am Palestinian,” he said.

He recalled his family’s 13 generations in the Land of Israel, mentioning his grandmother who had been born in the northern border town of Metula over a hundred years ago before the creation of the state.

His ancestors and his grandmother were “Palestinians,” he said.

Before 1948, the territory that now encompasses the modern state of Israel had been called Palestine. The Romans used that term to refer to that territory after they conquered the ancient state of Israel. Smotrich might have added that the place name Syria Palaestina, which was then shortened to “Palestine,” was given to the Roman province of Judaea in the early 2nd century AD.

The renaming is often presented as having been performed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the wake of the 132-135 AD Bar Kokhba revolt. Scholars suggest it was enacted to “disassociate the Jewish people from their historical homeland.”

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