This is a politically charged question, but there is not a shred of truth to the claim that the Palestinian people are descendants of the ancient Canaanites, and if not for anti-Israel propaganda, it is hard to imagine that such a ridiculous claim would ever have been made.
To begin with, historically speaking, there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is true that there have been Arabs living in the land of Palestine for centuries (Israel was called Palestine by the Romans in the second century a.d.). And it is true that some of these families have lived in Palestine without interruption for many generations. But at no time before 1967 did these Arabs ever identify themselves as “Palestinians,” nor did they seek to achieve any kind of statehood there. There was no Palestinian nationalism and no attempt to develop the territory as a homeland for these Arabs, and in 1936, when the Palestine Orchestra was formed, it was a Jewish orchestra! In the oft-quoted words of the late Arab historian and Princeton University professor Phillip K. Hitti, “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history.”[139] (He was speaking in terms of Arabic, Palestinian history.)
In the early 1990s, I was invited to attend a fund-raising event for the Jerusalem Foundation that featured a discussion between former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and John Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami, a respected Lebanese scholar, mediated by Dan Rather. When the time for questions came, I asked Professor Ajami if there was such a thing as a Palestinian people. He answered quite candidly, saying that there was not. When I pressed him as to why the media does not tell us that, he said that the media never would.
Where, then, did this concept of the Palestinian people come from? There is no question that today there are several million people who identify themselves as Palestinians, and they are eager to have a homeland. There is also no question that these people have suffered great hardship in recent years and that some of their families lived in the land of Israel prior to 1948. Nonetheless, the concept of a Palestinian people is a recent invention, postdating the year 1967. As expressed by former terrorist Walid Shoebat, “Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?”[140] Moreover, the reality of a displaced Palestinian people is more of an internal Arab issue than a Jewish one.
Mitchell Bard explains:[141]
Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.[142]
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”[143]
Arieh L. Avneri pointed out that the estimated population of Muslims, Christians and Jews in Palestine grew from 205,000 in 1554 to just 275,000 in the year 1800. Where was the cry of “Palestine is our homeland” among the worldwide Arab population? It simply did not exist. At what point in time, then, did the Arab population in Palestine begin to rise dramatically? It was when Jews began to return to the land in larger numbers, especially after 1880, at which time the bulk of the more than 400,000 Arabs living in Palestine were themselves relatively recent immigrants.[144] Moving ahead to the mid-twentieth century, Michael Comay points out that in 1948, just before the British withdrawal from Palestine began, 9 percent of the land was owned by Jews, 3 percent by Arab national citizens living in the Land, “17 percent was abandoned Arab land and the remaining 71 percent was Crown or State Land vested in the Mandatory [British] Government and subsequently in the State of Israel.”[145]
Note also that the population of the so-called West Bank (actually, Judea and Samaria) and Gaza was only 450,000 in 1967. Today it is approaching 3.5 million, and many of these Palestinians have moved into the region in the last forty years. Add to this the fact that from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century, a large percentage of Arabs living in Palestine were themselves recent émigrés who moved there when the Jews began to develop the land, which had been swamp-infested and largely neglected for centuries. In this context, Mark Twain’s description of Palestine in his day has been quoted many times. It is, he writes, “a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse. . . . A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. . . . There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”[146] It is a well-known fact that many Jewish settlers in the twentieth century died of malaria while draining the swamps and developing the land. So, the idea of a numerous and ancient Palestinian people living in the land for multiplied centuries is simply a myth.[147]
What about the 650,000 Arabs who were displaced from Palestine when the Jews were given their statehood?[148] In reality, Israel accepted the United Nations’ proposed partitioning of the land into a Jewish and Arab state, but the Arab nations did not, declaring war. Still, the Israelis distributed literature to their Arab neighbors within Israel, telling them they were not their enemies and urging them to stay. They were told, however, by their Arab comrades that “a cannon cannot distinguish between a Jew and an Arab,” meaning, they could be innocent casualties of the war at the hands of their own people, and they were urged to leave the Land until the war was over and the Jews were wiped out, at which time they could return to their homeland. But the Jews were not wiped out.
Why then didn’t the surrounding Arab nations absorb these displaced peoples, just as Israel absorbed more than 800,000 Jews displaced from Arab lands during the war? In fact, the Jewish state, 640 times smaller than the Arab world and only one-fiftieth of its population, successfully absorbed most of its Jewish refugees. Why haven’t the Arab nations absorbed the Palestinians?[149] Sadly, it is because their homelessness served as a weapon to be used against Israel, and it has proved a massively effective weapon in the decades since. To this day, displaced Palestinians have been expelled from other Arab nations—including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War and, as of January 2007, Jordan and Syria have refused to take in 735 Arabs displaced by the war in Iraq and now living in refugee camps—because they have Palestinian pedigree.[150]
One more element needs to be factored in. In the words of King Hussein of Jordan in 1981, “The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.” Put another way—and I am not putting these words into the late king’s mouth—the Palestinians already have a homeland, and it is called Jordan. Indeed, more than half of Jordan’s population considers itself Palestinian.
I am fully aware that news reports present a terribly skewed picture of all this, and I don’t discount the genuine suffering experienced by many Arabs when the nation of Israel was rebirthed.[151] But facts are facts, and it is no secret that the so-called West Bank (part of the so-called Occupied Territories) and Gaza were under the control of Jordan and Egypt from 1948 to 1967. Yet neither country made any effort to form a Palestinian state for the refugees, and neither country ever spoke of these areas as “Palestine.” Yet today, Israel is accused of uprooting the Palestinian people from their ancestral homeland. This charge is patently untrue.
As to the claim of Canaanite descent, no national or ethnic group can trace itself back to the ancient Canaanites, since these nations were either wiped out or became totally assimilated into the surrounding nations millennia ago. The same can be said about the ancient Philistines, who were not even of Semitic stock. In fact, “the Philistines were not Arabs nor even Semites, they were most closely related to the Greeks originating from Asia Minor and Greek localities. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs.”[152] They ceased to exist as a distinguishable people more than two thousand years ago, and when the Romans decided to call the land of Israel “Palestine,” they did not do so because the Philistines owned or controlled or dominated the country. (Actually, these seafaring peoples only lived in the southwest portion of Israel before being completely assimilated.)
As for the name “Palestine,”
The name “Falastin” that Arabs today use for “Palestine” is not an Arabic name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Roman “Palaestina.” Quoting Golda Meir:
“The British chose to call the land they mandated Palestine, and the Arabs picked it up as their nation’s supposed ancient name, though they couldn’t even pronounce it correctly and turned it into Falastin, a fictional entity.”[153]
As for the Arabs who have lived in the land of Israel through the centuries, their origins as Arabic—not Canaanite!—peoples are well attested.
Having said this, and despite the anti-Israel slant that is so prevalent in the media, a slant that tends to demonize the Israelis, especially in the world press outside of America, those who identify themselves as Palestinians today are deserving of compassion, and should their leaders abandon all efforts to destroy the modern State of Israel, the vast majority of Israelis would gladly live side by side with them in peace. In truth, however, it seems clear from the Scriptures (see especially Zechariah 12–14; 1 Thessalonians 5:1–3; many also apply Ezekiel 38–39 to a future scenario) that there will be no lasting, true peace between Israel and their Arab neighbors before Yeshua returns, and He alone remains the only hope of the region.