Obama, Biden and their Legacy
Upon entering office, Michael Owen wrote, “Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran,” [Politico]
“Israeli leaders typically received advance copies of major American policy statements on the Middle East and could submit their comments. But Mr. Obama delivered his Cairo speech, with its unprecedented support for the Palestinians and its recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear power, without consulting Israel,” Oren wrote. [Politico]
Center peace to the issue of the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict has always been the “Land of Israel.” Every Arab leader harped on this, even those favorable to Israel. Consequently, the identity of these so-called “Palestinians” is of great importance. Thus, the question” Who Were the Philistines, and Where Did They come from?
The very name adopted by Israel’s Arab inhabitants, “Palestinians” is misleading for the modern-day Palestinians since they do not descend from, and bear no relation to the ancient Philistines who dwelled along Israel’s coast in Biblical times. [Palestinians and Philistines by Rabbi Eli Mischel ]
Day after day, year after year, the Palestinians do everything in their power to torture the Jewish people. They will stop at nothing – including the murder of innocent men, women, and children—in their quest to prevent the Jewish people from achieving their destiny: sovereignty over the Land of Israel.
Perhaps Caleb Howells has furnished the most extensive response to the question, “Are the Palestinians Descendants of the Ancient Philistines?” Worded differently, he asks, “What happened to the Ancient Philistines? Throughout most of Biblical history, they were enemies of the Israelites. For this reason, the prophet Ezekiel declared that they would be destroyed.
In the years surrounding 600BCE, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon waged war against the Levant. Part of this campaign involved an attack against Philistia. During this attack, he devastated the Philistine nation. Some of their most important cities were utterly destroyed. Over the following decades, the Philistines limped on as a nation.
By the 5th century BCE, it appears that all historical and archaeological trace of them had disappeared. They may have survived as a group for some time thereafter, but Alexander the Great’s conquests in the following century certainly eliminated whatever trace of that nation was left.
Did the Palestinians come from the Philistines? Since the Philistines were completely destroyed during the 6th to 4th centuries BCE, it is clear that no modern nation comes from them, including the Palestinians. So where did the Palestinians come from? The term “Palestinian” refers to the people who historically lived in Palestine [originally including the Jews as well]. The Greeks began using the term “Palestine” to refer to the whole region between Egypt and Phoenicia. This term does come directly from “Philistine”. The Greeks used this for the whole region because they were obviously more familiar with the coastal nation [the Philistines] than the inland one [the Israelites].
Eventually, after the Jewish-Roman wars of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the Romans began using the term, “Syria Palestine” for the entire area formerly covered by Judea and Samaria. This term for the region remained popular, evolving into the “Palestine” of modern times. Gradually, in modern times, the people who lived there started identifying as Palestinians.
The present war with Hamas has once again raised the specter of an infamous “Two-state Solution”. The chair leader is no less than the named President of the US, Joe Biden. Professor Jerold Auerbach has provided an appropriate response through the Jewish Press entitled, “This Land is Whose Land” on Feb 18, 2024.
He commences his history treatise as follows. “A decade before the start of WW1, British Cabinet Member Winston Churchill indicated his support for the restoration of Jewish nationhood in Palestine, noting, ‘I am in full sympathy with the historical traditional aspirations of the Jews.’ During the war, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration issued by the British government proclaimed its support for the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, which then had a small Jewish population. Churchill subsequently declared that Jews, ‘based on their ancient historical connection, ‘had returned to Palestine as of right and not by sufferance.’
Following the end of the war, the League of Nations approved the mandate for Palestine, based on the declaration. In 1921, Churchill by then Secretary of State for the Colonies arrived in Palestine for his 1st and only visit. To assuage Emir Abdullah, the King of Transjordan’s concern, Churchill agreed that Jewish settlement east of the Jordan River would be prohibited, thereby excluding Jews from nearly three-quarters of historic Jewish Palestine.
Following Israel’s triumphant victory in the Six-Day War of 1967—- Jews finally returned to their ancient homeland in Biblical Judea and Samaria. More than 500,000 Israelis, who were widely, despised as intrusive and illegal ‘settlers’ inhabited the Land.
According to the fantasy of US President Joe Biden, among others, a new Palestinian state will be born in Gaza and the West Bank. But his limited intellect fails to recognize that there would need to be a 60-mile link between them, across Israeli territory.
It is Biden’s responsibility ‘to forge 2 states for 2 peoples in one land.’ Otherwise, in Thomas Friedman’s warped view, Israel will become ‘a global pariah’ or, at least a Friedman pariah.
It is, nearly a century after Churchill’s surrender of Palestinian land to king Abdullah, that the boundaries of the Jewish state remain a continuing source of contention. But, it is worth noting [especially by Friedman] that Jewish land ownership in the Promised Land, according to the biblical narrative, can be traced to Abraham’s purchase of a burial site for Sarah in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron, in what became the Land of Israel, and eventually, the modern-day State of Israel. It is unlikely to be surrendered!
The Ettinger Report: March 31, 2013: Who are the Palestinians? [List abbreviated]
[a] Contrary to political correctness, Palestinian Arabs have not been in the area west of the Jordan River from time immemorial; no Palestinian state ever existed, no Palestinian People was ever robbed of its land and there is no basis for the Palestinian ‘’claims of return.’
[b] Most Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the 1845-1947 Muslim migrants from the Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Bosnia, the Caucasus, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, India, Afghanistan and Baluchistan.
[c] As a result of the substantial 1880-1947 Arab immigration—and despite Arab emigration caused by domestic chaos and intra-Arab violence—the Arab population of Jaffa, Haifa and Ramla grew 17, 12 and 5 times.
[d] Many of the Arabs who fled in 1948, reunited with their families in Egypt and other neighboring countries.
The Arab attempt to gain moral high ground and to delegitimize the Jewish State—by employing the immoral reinvention of history and recreation of identity—was exposed by Arieh Avneri’s “The Claim of Dispossession” [Herzl Press, 1982] and Joan Peters’ “From Time Immemorial”[Harper & Row, 1986], which provide aforementioned—and much more—data.
POLITICO: x Ambassador Michael Oren: Obama Abandoned Israel by Nick Gass [06/16/2015]
Mr. Gass’s introduction speaks volumes. “President Barrack Obama deliberately damaged the relationship between the United States and Israel, according to Israel’s former ambassador to the US.
Israeli leaders typically received advance copies of major American policy statements on the Middle East and could submit their comments. But Mr. Obama delivered his Cairo speech, with its unprecedented support for the Palestinians and its recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear power, without consulting Israel, Oren wrote.
When reporters asked about the state of US-Israeli relations during his time as the Israeli envoy, Michael Oren says he gave the standard response of:”nobody has a monopoly on making mistakes.”
When Israel learned that the US was negotiating “with its deadliest enemy” — Iran — over its nuclear program, he wrote, the daylight “could not have been more blinding.”
“MIDA- Arab Historian Admits there is no Palestinian People” by Judith Bergman 09/11/2017
When the Ottoman rule ended, there was no Palestinian national identity or political borders. It was all made up later. Arabs themselves say so, but the West isn’t listening.
In 1917, says this Arab historian Abd Al-Ghani on official PA TV, there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. This statement amounts to saying that the whole narrative of an “indigenous Palestinian people” was made up at a later point in time.
As Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Faith Hammad speaking on Al-Hekma TV said in March 2012: “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! This may be from Alexandria from Cairo, from Dumietta from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians—-“
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that withered its fields and fettered its energies—Palestine id desolate and unlovely—It is a hopeless dreary, heartbroken land” wrote American author Mark Twain in his description of his visit in 1867.
Nevertheless, the Arab propaganda machine gets away with publishing fantastic falsehoods, such as this one on the Palestinian Authority’s tourism website: “With a history that envelops more than one million years, Palestine has played an important role in human civilization. The crucible of prehistoric cultures is where settled society, the alphabet, religion, and literature and ideas that shaped the world we know today.”
“Ally” authored by Ambassador Michael B. Oren, who was Israel’s ambassador to the US during President Obama’s 1st term reads as if it was written today.
At the beginning of his presidency, Obama called the Israeli-American alliance, “unbreakable”. But as Obama and Netanyahu began to constantly disagree, Oren realized that in order to succeed he “would have to learn the full meaning—and the limits—of that deceptively straightforward word, “ally”. While the book covers an extensive segment of important history, the Iran venture with a nuclear bomb readily engages one’s interest.
It resulted in PM Netanyahu addressing US Congress on March 3, 2015. It galvanized world attention and could readily fill a book. Some describe it as Churchillian. With Obama in mind, he stated that in the Middle East, “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy.” It is ironic that Netanyahu literally stood alone against Iran in those days and can now demonstrate that he was right in his assessment and is now facing a repatishen.