Newt Gingrich''s comments may be startling to many in the States but it is not surprising for Israelis, especially those of us who have been advocating Israel''s arguments for years.
The Palestinians are constantly delegitimizing Israel yet were shocked by a voice from America, who is a leading candidate to be the next US President, saying that the Palestinian Arabs are an invented people.
The Palestinians are indeed an invented people. Even Arabs have said so. Azmi Bashara was an Arab Member of the Israeli Knesset who fled Israel when charged with treason against the State. In 1994 he said "I think there is an Arab nation. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation. I think it''s a colonialist invention. When were they any Palestinians? Until the 19th Century, Palestine was the south of greater Syria."
In my book ISRAEL - RECLAIMING THE NARRATIVE I quote the Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul Hadi who, in 1937, told the United Nations Peel Commission "There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented. Palestine is alien to us. Our land was, for hundreds of years, a part of Syria." So, there is the link between the Arabs of the 1930s and the Arabs as recently as 1994.
Allow me to quote other Arabs voices from my book that resonate in agreement with Newt Gingrich.
In 1946, Philip Hitti, Princeton''s Arab professor of Middle East history, told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, "It''s common knowledge that there is no such thing as Palestine in history."
In his testimony before the same committee, the Arab Professor Juhan Hazam said, "Before 1917, when Balfour made his declaration, there had never been a Palestinian question, and there was no Palestine as a political or geographical unit."
The founder of the PLO itself, Ahmed Shukari, declared at the podium of the United Nations in 1956 that "such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all." In 2011, it was the turn of Mahmoud Abbas to address the United Nations in an effort to have them declare statehood for a country that, fifty five years earlier, the UN members had been told did not exist.
When it came to delegitimizing Israel, the Arabs were prepared to denounce Palestine as having any political, nationalistic, relevance. Now, having lost seven Arab wars to annihilate the Jewish State, it became useful to invent a Palestinian identity beginning in the late 60s. As proof of that, Walid Shoebatt, who was a former PLO terrorist, acknowledged the lie he had been fighting for when he asked, "Why is it that on June 4th, 1967, I went to bed as a Jordanian and woke up as a Palestinian? We considered ourselves Jordanian until the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Then, all of a sudden, we were Palestinians."
Even Yasser Arafat, the so-called founding father of the Palestinian cause, admitted in 1970 to Italian journalist, Arianna Palazzi, that "The question of borders doesn''t interest us. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation. The PLO is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call Jordan is nothing more than Palestine."
His admission was correct. It was established by the British on 77% of the land promised to the Jewish people by the League of Nations in 1922, to be their National Homeland.
The "Palestinian People" is an anthropological fabrication, an invention. A deception, as described by Feisal Husseni after the 1993 Oslo Accords, as a "Trojan Horse" for conquering the land of Israel.
The object of this propaganda campaign is to blot out and forget the name and identity of the ancient biblical Eretz Israel, and to transform it into the land of "the Palestinian people", an invention fabricated by Arab propaganda and widely adopted by the international community who have pumped billions of dollars that have succeeded in turning Israel into the victim of the most unprecedented fraud in modern political history.