HISTORICAL
IGNORANCE ALLOWS HASBARA TO THRIVE
“He who controls the past controls the present; he who controls the present
controls the future.” G. Orwell famously wrote in his story 1984. It is of
course true. And ignorance of the past, fostered for this very reason, allows
“Israel’s” propaganda, it calls ‘hasbara‘ to thrive and take root in the minds of the
ignorant. One of the arguments that its hasbarists make in order to assert
their mythical ‘claim’ on Palestine, is that “Palestinians are neither
Canaanites nor Phoenicians. These don’t exist anymore and ‘Palestinians’ (in
scare/insult quotes) are merely ‘Arabs’ and therefore migrants from Arabia who
came to the area for economic reasons only after European Jews arrived and made
the desert bloom.” Of course maps and old photographs and history itself show
that this is patently false and base propaganda designed to deny peoplehood to
Palestinians and take advantage of myths the Jews wrote for themselves. So the
information conveyed here will dispel the silly myths and propaganda that Jews
use to bamboozle the ignorant whilst they are busy stealing ancient Palestine.
With the beginning of
the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic period) circa 12,000 BC, humans in Palestine
began to raise animals, to farm and produce handcrafts. Natufians were there in
10000 BC., then the Caananites joined to these people and became the dominant
race as they founded many cities like Jericho and Urushalim. The neolithic
inhabitants (c. 7000–c. 4000 BC) began settling in fixed towns and villages.
Around 7000 BC,
Jericho became the first place in Palestine where humans built dwellings for
themselves. Farming and animal breeding began there and stability
characterized the area for more than a thousand years before Mesopotamia-Sumer
(now Southern Iraq). The craft of pottery began in Jericho around 5000 BC, spreading
from there to the rest of Palestine and Syria. Then came the Early Bronze Age
(c. 3000–2000 BC). Recorded history in the area began in the Middle Bronze Age.
The existence of indigenous population in the land of Palestine is far beyond
any names because they were called many names through different eras by
different people. Canaan was referred to in an ancient Sumerian record dating
back to 3000 BC. Gaza is one of the oldest cities in the world, established by
Canaanites in 3000 BC.
While already inhabited by people before
recorded history, Palestine was subjected to a large influx of Semites from the
Arabian Peninsula in the beginning of the 3rd millennium. This was known as the
“Amorite Canaanite”, which increased around 2500 BC when the Amorites migrated
to Greater Syria, to its southeastern parts (Transjordan), and the Canaanites
to the coast, southwestern parts (Palestine). As such, the country was named
after them – the land of Canaan – which is the oldest name given to our
country, Palestine. The Canaanites ruled for nearly 1500 years. -webGaza.net
Canaan, referred to as
‘ca-na-na-um’, existed in 4000 BC fully developed and completely independently
of and long before Hebrew tribes ever even existed.
Etymology of Canaanite
is the Akkadian kinahhu. ‘Canaan’ is linked with ‘Phoenicia’,
both names referring to the red or purple dye from Murex snails and the
red-colored wool which was a key export of the region and for which the region
was famous. When the Greeks encountered the Canaanites, it may have been this
aspect of the term which they latched onto as they renamed the Canaanites the
Phoenikes or Phoenicians. Phoenicia is really a Classical
Greek term used to refer to the region of the major
Canaanite port towns, and does not correspond exactly to a cultural
identity that would have been recognised by the Phoenicians themselves. The
term in Greek means ‘land of purple’, again, a reference to the valuable
murex-shell dye they exported.
The Romans in turn
transcribed the Greek phoinix to poenus, thus calling
the descendants of the Canaanite emigres to Carthage ‘Punic’. However, while
both Phoenician and Canaanite refer to approximately the same culture,
archaeologists and historians commonly refer to the pre-1200 or 1000 BC
Levantines as Canaanites and their descendants, who left the bronze age for the
iron, as Phoenicians.
Obviously Canaan is
much older and had dealings with other cultures totally independent of Hebrew
tribes or what became the written Old Testament.
Palestine mentioned
outside Jewish book of myths
It’s clear that
Palestine existed long before Rome took over the
area as a district. It was not named Palestine after Jews were expelled from
Jerusalem/al Quds in 70 AD just to hurt Jews’ feelings,
as the hasbara claims. Let’s look at the instances in which Palestine was
mentioned in history outside the aegis of the book of myths compiled by Jews
that is commonly called the ‘Torah’ (not to be confused with the Talmud, which
they also call Torah) or Tanakh, and Christians know as the Old Testament.
There are numerous
artefacts proving the presence of a developed Canaanite culture and Phonecians
later on as well, for example:
1. Cananite inscription
at at Serabit el-Khadem in Sinai (1800 BC)
2. Egyptian records (1200
BC) the presence of Philistine precede any historical mention of Hebrew tribes,
now called Jews
3. Cananite inscription
at at Ugairit (1800 BC-1450 BC)
4. Amran letters (record
of correspondence between Egyptian and Palestinians) 1350 BC
5. Discovery in Meggido
and other places shows Palestinian presence is much older that their colonisers
and interlopers, Hebrews tribes, now called Jews
And even the Jewish
Tanakh admits that “Abraham was as a refugee in Philistine” (Gen. 21:34).
An inscription
recording Egyptian King Ramesses’ conflict with the Sea Peoples, is dated to
around 1175 and we meet the ‘Peleset’ (PLST), who must be the Philistines or
Palestinians.
c. 450 BC: Herodotus, The Histories:
(that would be about 400 years before Romans
arrived in the region)
Of the triremes the number proved to be one
thousand two hundred and seven, and these were they who furnished them:–the
Phoenicians, together with the Syrians who dwell in Palestine furnished
three hundred; and they were equipped thus, that is to say, they had about
their heads leathern caps made very nearly in the Hellenic fashion, and they
wore corslets of linen, and had shields without rims and javelins. These
Phenicians dwelt in ancient time, as they themselves report, upon the
Erythraian Sea, and thence they passed over and dwell in the country along the
sea coast of Syria; and this part of Syria and all as far as Egypt is called Palestine.
In 5th century BC
Herodotus wrote of a ‘district of Syria, called “Palestine” in The Histories, the first historical work clearly
defining the region, which included the Judean mountains and the Jordan Rift
Valley.
(Book 3): “The country
reaching from the city of Posideium to the borders of Egypt”
(Book 4): “the region I am describing skirts our sea, stretching from Phoenicia
along the coast of Palestine-Syria till
it comes to Egypt, where it terminates”
Approximately a
century later, Aristotle used a similar definition inMeteorology,
writing
“Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and
throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said.
They say that this lake is so bitter and salty that no fish live in it and that
if you soak clothes in it and shake them it cleans them,”
understood by scholars
to be a reference to the Dead Sea’
What do scholars say
of Palestinians?
‘Palestinians are the descendants of all the indigenous peoples who lived in Palestine over the
centuries; since the seventh century, they have been predominantly Muslim in
religion and almost completely Arab in language and culture.’
Dowty, Alan (2008). Israel/Palestine. London, UK: Polity. p. 221.
‘Palestinians are an indigenous people who either live in, or originate from,
historical Palestine. Although the Muslims guaranteed security and allowed
religious freedom to all inhabitants of the region, the majority converted to
Islam and adopte
d Arab culture.’
Bassam Abu-Libdeh, Peter D. Turnpenny, and Ahmed Teebi, ‘Genetic Disease in Palestine and Palestinians,’ in
Dhavendra Kuma (ed.) Genomics and Health in the Developing World, OUP 2012
pp.700-711, p.700.
“[being of] Canaanite origin, Palestinians
have priority; their descendants have continued to live there, which gives them
continuity; and (except for the 800,000 dispossessed refugees of 1948 – as
determined by Israeli officials at the time, not including the hundreds of
thousands subsequently expelled), they are still living there, which gives them
present possession. Thus we see that on purely statistical grounds they have a
proven legal right to their land.”
late Prof. Ilene
Beatty, highly renowned historian/anthropologist and specialist on the
“Holy Land” in Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan,
1957.
The Arab population of Palestine was native in
all the senses of the word, and their roots in Palestine can be traced back at least 40 centuries.
Professor Maxime
Rodinson, Professor of law at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Jewess. Israel and the Arabs, 1968.
As neither the Byzantines nor the Muslims
carried out any large-scale population resettlement projects, the Christians
were the offspring of the Jewish and Samaritan farmers who converted to
Christianity in the Byzantine period; while the Muslim fellaheen in Palestine
in modern times are descendants of those Christians who were the descendants of
Jews*, and had turned to Islam before the Crusaders’ conquest.
Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, Cambridge University Press. pp
634-1099. (* not counting or even addressing the majority Gentile population
that existed before descendants of ‘Abram’ arrived and afterwards through the
millennia until “Israel”was reconstituted in 1948. This author, being Jewish naturally highlights only the Jews who converted, ignoring the overwhelming majority of Gentiles.)
Most of the Arab
Palestinians were people deeply rooted in what Khayr al-Din al-Ramli
(1585-1671), an influential Islamic lawyer from Ramla, defined in the XVII
century “Filastin biladuna” (“Palestine our country”); the fact that it was not
a separate political and administrative entity did not make al-Ramli’s
“Filastin” less real. “State” was a Western concept.
But what about the Old
Testament?
The story is that the
primary patriarch, Abram (renamed ‘Abraham’ later) was born in “Ur of the Chaldees.” Ur was the capitol city of Sumer, present
day Southern Iraq.
Abraham migrated with
his father Terah to Harran, (Southern Turkey). His descendants in Harran, 400
years later, emigrated from Haran into Canaan. They had no unique identity, no
unique language or unique culture or unique religion. They had no experience
governing, nor had they any experience that set them apart from anyone else in
Harran; they were merely citizens who chose to emigrate.
The ancient Israelites
were for the most part pagan polytheists who worshipped many gods, only one of
them being Yahweh, who was one of the 70 sons of the great god El in Canaanite
lore. In fact, Yaweh, the jealous, rageaholic, pro-genocide and pro-rapine
deity of storms and agriculture was merely a minor household god of Saul’s
household. Most of the Old Testament is a story of how the cult of Yahweh sought to be the premier cult among
all others that shared the temple.
As for the Jewish
“Book of the Law,” no such book existed until it was conveniently “found”
hidden in the temple during the reign of King Josiah. Before that no one had
even heard of it, belying the fact that it didn’t exist until then, and was
written for political purposes. So before then there were none who kept the law
supposedly given to Moses, and therefore, no Jewish religion.
“Jewish” as a term is
best applied to the religion of the Israelites aftertheir
elites returned from Babylon (during “captivity” period in which the book of
myths known as the Old Testament was written) c. 539 BC. As priests and
rabbis subsequently developed this “reformed” religion, its followers could be
called Jewish. However, they were still genetically Canaanite, as were the
numerous Gentiles also living in the region.
·
1st Kingdom (Hebron) lasted from 1026 BC to 1009 BC (17 years)
·
2nd Kingdom lasted from 1009 BC to 722 BC (Conquered by
Assyrians) (287 years) 10 tribes disappeared at this point.
·
3rd Kingdom lasted from 933 BC to 586 BC (lost to
Mesopotamians) (347 years).
The northern,
10-tribal alliance, known as the 2nd kingdom of Israel, lasted until 722 BC
when it was politically obliterated by Assyrians, never to be resurrected. The
southern (3rd) kingdom of Judea nominally lasted from 933 BC to 586 BC (lost to
Mesopotamians) (347 years),
The elite of the
remaining 2 tribes were transferred to Babylon by the Persians, as was customary
in the region (it was not a cruel “captivity” as it is portrayed). Their
Pharisee scribes just out of Babylonian “captivity” asked permission to return
to Jerusalem. King Cyrus of Persia, in 536 BC, would allow them if they could prove in writing that they would
live by a Code of Ethics. They wouldn’t have a completed alphabet until 100 BC.
They wrote in Sumerian and later Greek. Nothing was written in Hebrew until
well after 100 BC.
So they read up on the
bricks of cuneiform clay of Sumerian history and Judaised:
·
Noah from King Ziusudra of 2900 BC.
·
Abraham also Sumerian, who brought anthropo-theism to the
Canaanites 500 years before the tribes entered Canaan. They never met Abraham.
This Sumerian name makes no sense in Hebrew.
·
The Deeds of Moses, namely the 10 commandments which he stole
from the book of the dead written in 1350 BC by the Egyptians.
·
They even took up the name of EL, the main deity of Abraham. (as
in IsraEL).
In their stupidity,
the dropped EL in Babylonia and took up Yahweh, a minor and personal family
deity of King Saul, who was one of the 70 children deities of EL. Yahweh was
the god of nature (Agriculture) Hence Abraham brought anthropo-theism notmonotheism to Canaan. The Egyptians had the Sun as
Monotheism.
Conjecturally Joshua
was the leader of the tribe of Ephraim.
He becomes leader of the Levi tribe after the death
of Moses. According to the writing of the Pharisees who worked so hard on
creating their “history” after freedom in Babylonia, they first began writing
their Tanakh in 536 BC. They got somewhat confused in picking Joshua because he predates Moses and dies when Moses is but a year old!
But still, he supposedly goes on to conquer Jericho under the command of no
other than Moses.
How could have
wandering nomads who didn’t enter Canaan until c. 1200 BC having spent 40 years
in the Sinai having no army, no food conquer Jericho? Besides Canaan had
allegiance with Egypt and Egypt was at the height of its power at that time,
with military garrisons/watchtowers stationed at intervals all along the one
road from Egypt to the Levant.
The majority of
Hebrews transferred to Babylon never returned. Five thousand did return in 456
BC (after 130 years) and allowed to continue as a client province of the
Persian empire. The descendants of Judeans lived as a tiny minority in
Palestine, they even dropped Hebrew in 200 BC for local and more widely known
Aramaic, and began migrating en masse to
Greece, later to Rome -of their own free will.
So until c. 70 AD,
during the entire time of the 3rd kingdom’s centuries-long nominal existence,
it was mostly subservient to other powers and certainly was no major power or
of importance to any surrounding kingdoms or cultures.
The Romans don’t
arrive until 63 BC. The Romans re-attached the name Palestine to this area, and
that name survived in various forms up to the present day. Consequently,
“Palestine” is the best historical designation for the region.
However, throughout
that entire history, which included population shifts, empires and dynasties
rising and falling, many people of original Canaanite stock endured to the
present day, whether Jews, or, far more numerously, Gentiles.
The European
Ashkenazi’s claim of “a land without people for a people without land” was always fraudulent. A core population has resided
in that region for thousands of years, as archaeology shows. But most of them
did not do so as “Jews” or even “Israelites.” Supplanting them with “white”
Ashkenazi Jews doesn’t change history for those who remember, or who are
willing to learn. And that, dear reader, is why you are here!
What about
archaeology?
There is
archaeological evidence for Canaanite habitation in the region for thousands of years. For example, the skull of
a dog, a picture of a bull carved into a bone and a sculpted piece of human
skull, all dating back to the Mesolithic period (c. 12,000 BC), were found
in the caves of Carmel.
In several Palestinian
cities, numerous artefacts from the Metallic Stone Age (c. 4000 BC) were found,
including in the city of Megiddo, where the oldest types of decorated pottery
were discovered. In Beisan, excavations in 1921 and 1922 at “Tel Al-Hesn” led
to the discovery of an accumulated series of ruins of ancient cities, mounting
to 18 layers, with the lower layers dating back to 4000 BC and the upper layers
to the Middle Ages.
The Jebusites, one of the Canaanite tribes,
built the city of Jebus [Uru-shalim, after the goddess of twilight,
Shalim.- ed]around 2000 BC, which
is the Canaanite Arab name for Jerusalem. The city was built on the
Southwestern mountain of today’s Jerusalem and is known today as Al-Nabi Daoud Mountain (Al-Nabi David). (Very recent
excavations showed that the city was built even earlier, around 3,000 BC, which
is more than two thousand years before the building of the Temple.).
-WebGaza.net
Honest Jewish
archaeologists admit there is no evidence for an “exodus” from Egypt, no
evidence for the claims of fantastic wealth of Solomon or mighty kingdoms that
were power-brokers and important in their day.
This is what archaeologists have learned from
their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt,
did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign
and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to
swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by
the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will
come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female
consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the
waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
Deconstructing
the Walls of Jericho, by Ze’ev Herzog, Ha’aretz Magazine, October 29, 1999.
A senior archaeologist
at Tel Aviv University has cast doubt on the alleged Jewish heritage of
Jerusalem. Israel Finkelstein’s claims have been made in the face of official
Israeli and biblical claims to the occupied city.
Professor Finkelstein,
who is known as “the father of biblical archaeology,” told the Jerusalem Post that Jewish archaeologists have found no historical or archaeological evidence to back the
biblical narrative on the Exodus, the Jews’ wandering in Sinai or Joshua’s
conquest of Canaan. On the alleged Temple of
Solomon, Finkelstein said that there is no archaeological evidence to prove it
really existed.
According to
Finkelstein’s university colleague, archaeology lecturer Rafi Greenberg, Israel
is supposed to find something if it digs for a period of six weeks. But,
Greenberg told the Jerusalem Post,
Israelis have been excavating the so-called City of David in the occupied
Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan for two years to no avail.
Professor Yoni
Mizrahi, an independent archaeologist who has worked with the International
Atomic Energy Agency, agreed with Israel Finkelstein. He said that the
right-wing Elad Association has not found anything “saying welcome to David’s
palace” although that was taken for granted by Elad, as the group depended on
scriptural texts to guide them in their work.
Books have been
written on the subject, which I highly recommend reading for more information
on this subject, namely:
The
Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early
Israel, by Finklestein &
Mazar
The
Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of
Its Sacred Texts, by Finklestein &
Silberman
Source:
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Please type your comment, Note that comments are monitored and no Zionists are allowed.