Before the Hebrews first migrated there around 1800 B.C., the land of Canaan
was occupied by Canaanites.
"Between 3000 and 1100 B.C., Canaanite civilization covered what is today Israel,
the West Bank, Lebanon and much of Syria and Jordan...Those who remained in the
Jerusalem hills after the Romans expelled the Jews [in the second century A.D.] were
a potpourri: farmers and vineyard growers, pagans and converts to Christianity,
descendants of the Arabs, Persians, Samaritans, Greeks and old Canaanite tribes."
Marcia Kunstel and Joseph Albright, "Their Promised Land."
The present-day Palestinians' ancestral heritage
"But all these [different peoples who had come to Canaan] were additions, sprigs
grafted onto the parent tree...And that parent tree was Canaanite...[The Arab
invaders of the 7th century A.D.] made Moslem converts of the natives, settled down
as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely
Arabized that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin."
Illene Beatty, "Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan."
The Jewish kingdoms were only one of many periods in ancient Palestine
"The extended kingdoms of David and Solomon, on which the Zionists base their
territorial demands, endured for only about 73 years...Then it fell apart...[Even] if we
allow independence to the entire life of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, from David's
conquest of Canaan in 1000 B.C. to the wiping out of Judah in 586 B.C., we arrive
at [only] a 414 year Jewish rule." Illene Beatty, "Arab and Jew in the Land of
Canaan."
More on Canaanite civilization
"Recent archeological digs have provided evidence that Jerusalem was a big and
fortified city already in 1800 BCE...Findings show that the sophisticated water
system heretofor attributed to the conquering Israelites pre-dated them by eight
centuries and was even more sophisticated than imagined...Dr. Ronny Reich, who
directed the excavation along with Eli Shuikrun, said the entire system was built as a
single complex by Canaanites in the Middle Bronze Period, around 1800 BCE." The
Jewish Bulletin, July 31st, 1998.
How long has Palestine been a specifically Arab country?
"Palestine became a predominately Arab and Islamic country by the end of the
seventh century. Almost immediately thereafter its boundaries and its characteristics -
including its name in Arabic, Filastin - became known to the entire Islamic world, as
much for its fertility and beauty as for its religious significance...In 1516, Palestine
became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this made it no less fertile, no less
Arab or Islamic...Sixty percent of the population was in agriculture; the balance was
divided between townspeople and a relatively small nomadic group. All these people
believed themselves to belong in a land called Palestine, despite their feelings that
they were also members of a large Arab nation...Despite the steady arrival in
Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few
weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was
there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish
population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314." Edward Said, "The
Question of Palestine."
How did land ownership traditionally work in Palestine and when did it
change?
"[The Ottoman Land Code of 1858] required the registration in the name of
individual owners of agricultural land, most of which had never previously been
registered and which had formerly been treated according to traditional forms of land
tenure, in the hill areas of Palestine generally masha'a, or communal usufruct. The new
law meant that for the first time a peasant could be deprived not of title to his land,
which he had rarely held before, but rather of the right to live on it, cultivate it and
pass it on to his heirs, which had formerly been inalienable...Under the provisions of
the 1858 law, communal rights of tenure were often ignored...Instead, members of
the upper classes, adept at manipulating or circumventing the legal process, registered
large areas of land as theirs...The fellahin [peasants] naturally considered the land to
be theirs, and often discovered that they had ceased to be the legal owners only
when the land was sold to Jewish settlers by an absentee landlord...Not only was the
land being purchased; its Arab cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by
foreigners who had overt political objectives in Palestine." Rashid Khalidi, "Blaming
The Victims," ed. Said and Hitchens
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