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Institute for Contemporary Affairs, founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation Vol. 14, No. 8 March 23, 2014 ! Palestinian leaders are manipulating the history of geographic Palestine/Land of Israel. They have manufactured a curious claim, expressed recently by Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, that they are descended from Canaanites and are therefore the indigenous people of the area, present before the emergence of the Jewish people around the year 1500 BCE. ! Saeb Erekats family is Bedouin. According to Bedouin genealogy, the family is part of the Huweitat clan which originated in the Hejaz area of Saudi Arabia, arrived in Palestine from the south of Jordan, and settled in the village of Abu Dis in the early twentieth century. ! Several leading scholars of Middle Eastern studies and Islamic history have confirmed that the Palestinians do not have ancient roots in the
area and are trying to invent origins for themselves that predate the Jewish peoples presence. ! They explain that most of the Palestinians arrived as part of the waves of immigration that began in the nineteenth century at the time of the emergence of Zionism, attracted by employment opportunities and economic benefits. ! The historical presence of the Jewish people in the Holy Land is welldocumented, not only in the scriptures of all three monotheistic religions, and visible in extensive archeological remains, but also in historic writings by early Greek, Roman, pagan, and other visitors to the area. The fact that Christianity emanated from Judaism is further proof of the presence of a thriving Jewish community in the area.
of the ongoing negotiating process with the high-level involvement of senior U.S. and European politicians who are keen to show achievements; and, above all, on the wide and almost automatic inclination of the international community to criticize Israel and to buy into any artificial claim uttered by the Palestinian leadership.
The Erekat claim was immediately controverted by several authoritative sources who cited, among other things, Erekats own Facebook entry describing the origin of the Erekat clan to be from the Huweitat clan in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula.6
immediately insist that you respect the narrative. It doesnt matter one bit to them whether there is historical truth there. If we do not debunk this, it will be accepted as fact. If you repeat a lie thousands of times, it eventually becomes accepted as true, so we mustnt keep quiet.13 ! Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak, in her book Responding to Palestinian Rewriting of History How and When the Jewish Majority in the Land of Israel Was Eliminated and the Jewish Diaspora Was Created,14 states: Historically, no national Arab entity ever has established a national state in this country. The Land of Israel was conquered in 640 A.D. and occupied by Muslim-Arabs until 1071. A large percent of the Palestinians are descendants of Arabs and Muslims who immigrated to the Land of Israel a few generations ago illegally from Arab and Muslim countries. On the general question of the Arab conquest, Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak summarizes the chain of developments as follows: The Arab occupation of the Land of Israel lasted from 640 to 1071, roughly 400 years. The Seljuks, Muslim Turks, conquered the land from the Arabs, but on the eve of the First Crusade, they lost it to the Fatimid who ruled it until 1099, when the Crusaders took over. Saladin, who was not an Arab, but a Muslim Kurd from Iraq, defeated the Crusaders in 1187 and ruled until his death (1192). Following the Battle of Hattin and the conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187, he took over other parts of the country while the Crusaders maintained their hold over the rest. An agreement signed by his successors with the Crusaders returned the Galilee to them and they moved their capital to Acre. The Mamelukes, Muslim Turks, conquered the Land of Israel from the Crusaders in 1260 and ruled it until 1516, when it was taken over by the Ottoman Turks who ruled the Land of Israel for 400 years. The Muslim rule in the Land of Israel ended in 1918 and a Mandate over the country was given to the British.15 ! Dr. Shaul Bartal, a Middle Eastern scholar from Bar-Ilan University, says16 that while in many Palestinian history books, heavy emphasis is placed on the Arab conquest of Palestine in 638, a conquest that for 1,300 years made Palestine into Islamic territory, in fact, the waves of immigration from the Arabian Peninsula and the subsequent arrivals of Arabs from Transjordan and Syria are what led to the continued settlement of Arabs in this country. Even in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority,
the origins of Arab families are traced back to those who came here from Jordan in the late 15th century. A research study that Bartal co-authored with Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak shows that the four main clans that make up the population of Umm el-Fahm Makhagna, Jabrin, Mahamid, and Aghbariya trace their roots back to families who immigrated to Palestine in the seventeenth century onward from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Syria. It was only afterward, during the nineteenth century, when many families from Egypt and Transjordan joined them. The Palestinians are not the farmers who have lived in Palestine for generations, but rather immigrants who only arrived recently. It was only toward the latter stages of the nineteenth century that the country began to blossom thanks to the emergence of a new presence Zionism and the amazing results. In 1878, the population of the country numbered 141,000 Muslims who lived here permanently, with at least 25 percent of them considered to be newly arrived immigrants who came mostly from Egypt. Various studies done over a span of years by Moshe Brawer, Gideon Kressel, and other scholars clearly show that most Arab families who settled in the villages along the coastal plain and the area that would later become the State of Israel originated from Sudan, Libya, Egypt, and Jordan.Other studies show that the waves of immigrants came here in droves from Arab countries during the period of the British Mandate. The Arab immigrants were drawn to the land because Jewish settlement there brought on development of economic opportunities as well as improvement in sanitation and medicine. Attesting to the huge Muslim immigration into the area, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked in 1939 that the immigration of Arabs to Palestine since 1921 was outpacing the immigration of Jews during that same period. Winston Churchill commented on the massive waves of Arab immigration into the country during that time. Despite the fact that they were never persecuted, masses of Arabs poured into the country and multiplied until the Arab population grew more than what all of world Jewry could add to the Jewish population, he said. ! Dr. Arieh Perlman, in his book The Origin of Palestinian Arabs,17 records the entry into and conquest of the Holy Land since the
seventh century CE (636 to be exact) by various Arab, Muslim, and Christian elements, dynasties and tribes, including, among others, the Abbasid dynasty (750), the Egyptian Fatimid dynasty in 969, the Turks and Seleucids in the eleventh century, the Crusaders (1099) and then back to the Egyptian Fatimid dynasty, and then to the Muslims of Sallah-a-Din, Turks, Tatars (1260), Egyptian kingdom, Mongols, and Ottomans (1517), the occupation of Galilee by Shiekh Daher el-Omar in the mid-eighteenth century, and the occupation of the area by the Egyptian Ibrahim Pasha in the mid-nineteenth century. To the above may be added raids and movement by Bedouin tribes from the western desert since the late nineteenth and up to the mid-twentieth centuries, and the above-noted influx of Arab populations from Syria, Lebanon, TransJordan, Sudan, Morocco, Cyprus, Yemen, Spain, Albania and Australia and other North African countries, seeking to benefit from the relatively advanced development and modernization in the area instituted by the Jewish population, and concomitant chances of increased income. ! Prof. Gideon M. Kressel, Professor Emeritus of Cultural-Social Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and Dr. Reuven Aharoni, Dept. of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University, in their study Egyptian Emigres in the Levant of the 19th and 20th Centuries,18 recall a statement on March 23, 2012, by Hamas Interior and National Security Minister Fathi Hammad that half of the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half Saudis.19 ! Prof. Solomon Zeitlin of Dropsie College, in his monograph Jewish Rights in Palestine,20 observes: The Palestinian Arabs or the Arabs of Trans-Jordania never ruled Palestine. Palestine had been conquered by the Arabs who came from the South.The dynasties of the Omayyads and the Abbasids were not natives of Palestine. Certainly the Mamelukes and later the Turks not only were not Palestinian Arabs, but were an entirely different race; they were not even Semitic. Palestine up to 734 C.E. was never an Arabic country and was never so considered by geographers and historians. Josephus as well as the Roman geographer Strabo placed Arabia beyond the boundaries of Palestine, or as it was then called, Judaea. ! Dr. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and other experts view the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity and then to Islam as a contributing factor to the extensive rise in the Muslim population in the area in the early
nineteenth century.21 They trace a not insignificant percentage of Palestinian residents of the area to their Jewish forbears.
Conclusion
No one should take Saeb Erekats claims about Canaanite ancestry seriously. His attempt to inject a false narrative into Israeli-Palestinian relations undermines negotiations between the parties and is a diversion from the substantive issues that must be discussed. The historical presence and existence of the Jewish people in the Middle East generally, and the area of Palestine or the Holy Land, in particular, has continued from time immemorial up to the present day. It is welldocumented and proven, not only in the scriptures of all three monotheistic religions, and visible in extensive archeological remains, but is also borneout by empirical historic writings and records by early Greek, Roman, pagan and other visitors to the area. The fact that the sources of Christianity evolved and emanated from Judaism is, in and of itself, further proof of the presence of a thriving Jewish community in the area generally, and in the specific areas in which the Jews existed from biblical times, including Judea (from which the term Jew stems), Samaria, and the other neighboring tribal areas. Of all extant peoples, the Jewish people have the strongest claim to be indigenous to the Holy Land, where Judaism, the Hebrew language, and the Jewish people were born around 3,000 years ago. No one, Saeb Erekat included, can cast any doubt on this fact. * * Notes
* The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. 1. See Erekat on CNN making claims about the Jenin massacre in the video Who Else Is Being Injured by the Vilification of Israel? (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im7lVj9AE7M&list=PL1uUSrjSnB01hMKCu6 TZnq-pamjhX8UHl 2. Recent examples of Erekats threats, accusations and attacks include: rejection of Israel as a Jewish state http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-set-toaccept-kerrys-frameworkproposals/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=214 9ae0f1a-2014_02_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-2149ae0f1a54502869; threats to petition the international criminal court against Israel -
http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Erekat-Israeli-announcement-of-newsettlement-building-would-destroy-peace-process-336356; rejection of Israelis living in a Palestinian state http://www.timesofisrael.com/sources-in-pmo-slam-pa-for-saying-no-settlers-canstay-in-palestine/ http://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-threatens-to-rally-un-againstsettlement-cancer/; http://www.aawsat.net/2014/01/article55326673; http://www.aawsat.net/2014/01/article55326673; http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=662366; glorifying and praising terrorist leaders Al-Ayyam, Jan. 6 2014; threats to call for a global economic boycott of Israel http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L4490386,00.html; threat regarding the 1967 borders http://www.commentarymagazine.com/topic/saeb-erekat/; accusation that Israel propping up the Hamas administration in Gaza http://www.timesofisrael.com/erekat-israel-is-keeping-hamas-in-power/ 3. http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-set-to-accept-kerrys-frameworkproposals/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter. See also http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/02/02/pa-negotiator-saeb-erekat-claims-familywas-canaanite-in-israel-for-9000-years/. See also http://elderofziyon.blogspot.co.il/2014/02/erekats-latest-lie-my-family-wasin.html#.Uws_DjjNuM-, and see the Palestinian press at http://www.palpress.co.uk/arabic/?Action=Details&ID=106519. 4. http://www.mfs-theothernews.com/2014/02/video-antisemitic-remarks-byjordanian.html 5. http://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/.premium-1.2212485 6. See the Erekat family Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/notes/arekatfamily/%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%84%D8%A9%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%AA/255831057552 7. http://amayra.yoo7.com/t3-topic 8. Ibid., based on several genealogy books of the Arab tribes in the Levant. See also The Huweitat Clans, http://alahaywat.blogspot.ca/2013/12/blog-post_2522.html 9. https://www.facebook.com/hewitat.masr/posts/311737358840143 The close relationship between the Huweitat Sharifi clan and the Hashemite Sharifi clan explains the importance of the Huweitat clan as one of the pillars of the Arab revolt. 10. http://www.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=70192#.Uw23r8tWHhx 11. Ibid. 12. Reported by Nadav Shragai, in The Fabricated Palestinian History, Israel Hayom, February 7, 2014, based inter alia on an interview with Professor Israeli, http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=15323 13. Ibid. 14. http://rslissak.com/content/responding-palestinian-rewriting-history 15. Lissak, op. cit., at chapter 5. 16. Shragai, The Fabricated Palestinian History. 17. Arie Perlman, The Origin of Palestinian Arabs, (Hebrew), http://www.faz.co.il/story_2469. See also http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/The-lost-Palestinian-Jews, describing the research of historian Zvi Misinai.
18. http://jcpa.org/article/egyptian-emigres-in-the-levant-of-the-19th-and-20thcenturies/ February 11, 2013 19. Al-Hekma TV (Egypt) http://www.memritv.org/clipen/3389.htm 20. Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Oct. 1947), pp. 119-134, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/1453037 21. See Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, The Populations of our Land (1932) (Hebrew) Yesodot Library No. 14. See also Zvi Misinai, quoted in The Lost Palestinian Jews Jerusalem Post, August 20, 2009, http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/The-lostPalestinian-Jews. In a separate interview Misinai refers to the fact that the Erekat family from Abu Dis is well aware of its own Jewish roots see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs0-RGJ_CFA. Publication: Jerusalem Issue Briefs
Baker
Amb. Alan Baker, Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, participated in the negotiation and drafting of the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, as well as agreements and peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. He served as legal adviser and deputy director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as Israel's ambassador to Canada. - See more at: http://jcpa.org/article/changing-historical-narrative-saeberekats-new-spin/#sthash.NjoszSu8.dpuf!