Palestinian State?


This has been mentioned before in other places, I seem to recall, but its worth mentioning again. We keep hearing calls for a Palestinian State in reference to the conflicts with Israel, as if such a thing ever existed. However, it never has. I've been reading a wonderful book entitled "Islamic Imperialism" . In it was the following passage:
The eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not." A similar view was voiced by the Jerusalem newspaper al-Wahda (Unity), mouthpiece of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective "government" of the Palestinian Arabs, which in the summer of 1947 advocated the incorporation of Palestine (and Transjordan) into "Greater Syria".

This, of course, doesn't answer the question of if there should be a Palestinian state, but the existence of one cannot be predicated on it ever having existed before. Much of the violence in Palestine is based on a desire of restoration to something that never was. In fact, as one reviews the history of the region, until relatively recently, most Arab interests envisioned incorporating the territory of Palestine in various pan-Arab constructs in an effort to re-establish an Islamic empire whose goal, as it has always been, is to establish the House of Islam across the entire globe.

Posted: Monday - September 04, 2006 at 02:55 PM          

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