[Music] In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir made headlines with this comment: "There is no such thing as the Palestinian people. It's not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.
" Golda's statement was controversial, but as it turned out, many Arab leaders and historians agreed with her. In 1937, Arab leader Ani Abdul Hadi made this statement to the British Peel Commission: "There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented.
There is no Palestine in the Bible. Palestine is alien to us. " Nearly a decade later, Arab historian Philip II agreed, in his testimony to the Anglo-American Committee: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history.
Absolutely not. " In 1956, a Saudi representative to the UN stated, "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria. " And more recently, Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad gave this lecture to PLO leader Yasser Arafat: "Never forget this one point, there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity.
Palestine is an integral part of Syria. " With the Peel Commission of 1936, the British government offered for the first time the partition of the land, the partition of Palestine into a Jewish Palestine and an Arab Palestine. We were all Palestinians because this was the nature of this administrative unit.
Palestina. Now, the Palestinians are owning this nationality as being the nation of Palestine, but this is not quite historically true. So, what is the historical truth?
Who are the Palestinians and what are their claims to the Land of Israel? Let's take a look. [Music] Many Palestinian Arabs, including Arafat, have claimed to be descendants of the ancient Canaanites, a convenient argument since the Canaanites were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel.
Even as recently as May of 2014, a PA spokesman stated that the Palestinians have been in the land for five thousand years. But history shows that there's no way the Palestinians could be related to the Canaanites because the Canaanites were almost completely obliterated by the Israelites in the 13th century BC. The few that remained were assimilated into Israelite culture.
Palestinians also claim that the ancient Philistines are their ancestors, and it's true that they take their name from the tribe of Goliath. But do they actually share DNA? The Philistines were a seafaring people who came from Crete, the largest of the Greek islands.
The Philistines got their name from the Hebrew word "plishtim," which actually means invaders. Palestine means invaded land. Why should we call it that, when the Philistines invaded Israel in the 12th century BC?
They stayed close to the Mediterranean coast. They never settled in Jerusalem, Hebron, or Jericho, all cities claimed today by the Palestinians. By the 7th century BC, the Philistines had been assimilated by the Assyrians, then conquered by the Babylonians.
From there, they disappeared from the pages of history, and experts say no one alive today could prove Philistine lineage. But if the Palestinians want to claim them, they would have to acknowledge that their real ancestral homeland is not Israel, but the Greek island of Crete. The Palestinians may not have gotten their DNA from the Philistines, but they did get their name when the Roman Emperor Hadrian conquered Jerusalem in AD 135.
He was determined to eradicate even the memory of the Jews and erased their connection to the land of Israel. So Hadrian renamed the region after their historical enemies, calling it Syria Palestina, the Latin translation for Philistine. So, if they're not Canaanites and they're not Philistines, who are the Palestinians?
Biologically, they share DNA with Saudis, Iraqis, Syrians, and Jordanians, simply put, they're Arabs. Never in history was there a Palestinian nation or a Palestinian state. At that time, nobody was thinking in lines of a Palestinian people, they were all Arabs.
Behind me is one of the most controversial pieces of real estate in the world. The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. Muslim tradition says that Muhammad traveled here to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on his famous night journey, and that tradition forms the basis for the Palestinians' claim to Jerusalem.
[Music] Arabs claim Jerusalem as the Islamic city of Al-Quds, but there's no record that the Prophet Muhammad had ever been there, and even his armies didn't arrive there until five years after his death. The city of Jerusalem isn't mentioned even once in the Quran, while the Hebrew Bible mentions it more than six hundred times. In Muhammad's lifetime, it was a fairly unimportant city in the Byzantine Empire.
It was a Christian city without a single mosque. When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, they chose to build their mosques on the Jewish Temple Mount, believing it to be a holy site. There, they built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa, those names copied from the story of the Night Journey in the Quran.
Several Muslim scholars place the construction of the mosque around 690, while Muhammad died in 632. So, how could Muhammad's famous night journey have taken him to a mosque in Jerusalem that wouldn't be built until after his death? The Quran doesn't mention Jerusalem, but says that Muhammad's dream flight took him to Al-Aqsa, which means the farthest place.
Early Islamic scholars interpreted that to mean a heavenly place or the courtyard of Allah. That all changed as Islam evolved into a political force. During the Crusades, the Muslim General Saladin changed Islamic tradition to strengthen the Muslim claim to Jerusalem.
He stated that Muhammad's flight took him not to heaven, but to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. And today, the Jewish Temple Mount is also the third holiest site in Islam, second only to the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina. Muslims believe that once they claim a piece of land, it belongs to Islam forever.
Still, at the. Beginning of the 20th century, Islamic leaders acknowledged the Temple Mount's Jewish history. In 1924, Jerusalem's Supreme Islamic council published this tourist pamphlet on the Temple Mount.
It says the site's identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot according to the universal belief on which David built there an altar unto the Lord. The pamphlet also describes the underground chamber the Crusaders called Solomon's stables.
It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon's Temple. In 1927, a strong earthquake damaged the mosque, and during renovations, archaeologists analyzed the structure. They found beams made from cedar of Lebanon and Cyprus dating as far back as the 9th century BC, around the time of King Solomon, who had used those very materials to build the first Jewish Temple.
The excavations also uncovered a Jewish ritual bath from the Second Temple and a mosaic believed to be part of a Byzantine church. Most historians agree the Jews were here first, but the Arabs will argue that they were here the longest, and the so-called right of return has been a constant theme at every Middle East peace summit since 1948. From the Crusades until the 19th century, the Arab population had only grown from around 200,000 to 300,000.
Arab growth was stagnant, and population experts say it would have stayed that way except for one thing: the arrival of the Jews. With waves of Jewish immigration starting in 1882, Arabs started flooding into Palestine from neighboring countries. They came for two reasons: one, to enjoy a higher standard of living in Palestine, and two, to fight the immigration of the Jews who made that standard of living possible.
By 1948, the Arab population of Palestine was 1. 3 million. The British governor of the Sinai once remarked, "It is very difficult to make a case for the misery of the Arabs if, at the same time, their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.
" Some experts say if the Palestinian Arabs want a legal return to their countries of origin, they would have to return to places like Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Syria, but not to Israel. Today, many world leaders call on Israel to return to its 1967 borders, but if you look at history, those borders aren't from 1967. In fact, they're not even real borders.
The borders of the West Bank are armistice lines which were created by the results of the war of 1948. At the end of the war, this is where the armies stood still. This is how the "border" of 1967 or of 1949 was created.
So, the 1967 armistice line served as a border between Israel and the state of Jordan. The state of Jordan also annexed the West Bank, and it became part of Jordan. When Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1949, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from both places.
At least 30 synagogues were destroyed, and Jews were banned from holy sites like the Western Wall, while Palestinian Arabs living there automatically became Jordanian citizens. Israel can't go back to the so-called 1967 borders for three reasons: one, before 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, not by the Palestinians, and Jordan's annexation of it violated international law. Two, the land was legally promised to the Jews by the British Mandate of 1922.
And three, there was no Palestinian state in 1967. Wherever, as Golda Meir once said, "How can we return the occupied territories? There is no one to return them to.
" The term "occupation" is when you possess something which is not yours or which is someone else's. This is not the case of the West Bank. When you talk about occupation, yes, there were many occupations over the West Bank, starting with the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, all the way to the Ottomans and to the Brits.
To call the Jews occupiers in their own home, this is really a unique travesty of history. The West Bank was never held by the Palestinians. They were never sovereigns.
In fact, there was no other sovereign over the West Bank than the Jewish people.
