Inventing History

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich holds a doctor’s degree in European history from Tulane University, and he taught history at West Georgia College before he was denied tenure.  So nowadays he feels called upon to give his presidential campaign audiences an occasional history lesson.  Last week, for example, he claimed that “We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.”

“For a variety of political reasons,” Gingrich continued, “we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.  Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth.  These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools.  They have textbooks that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?  We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.”

Gingrich certainly has “the guts” to speak up, but regrettably in the case of the Palestinians he lacks the accurate and unbiased knowledge. The Palestinians are no less an “invented people” than we Americans.  His sweeping denunciation of the textbooks in Palestinian schools, moreover, is a deplorable gross exaggeration.  Although Gingrich goes all out to appear as a devoted friend of Israel, David Harris, the chief executive of the National Jewish Democratic Council, had his doubts: “What he’s saying is far to the right of the democratically elected Likud leadership of the State of Israel, not to mention established U.S. policy for decades… This is as clear a demonstration as one needs that he’s not ready for prime time.”  Martin Indyk, an Australian-born Jew and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel told the New York Times that if Mr. Gingrich believed that Palestinians did not have a right to an independent state “as implied in his language, then he’s not pro-Israel at all."

Most experts on Middle East history, including Israeli scholars, are certain that the Palestinians have been living in the area known as Palestine since about 1200 before Christ.  That was roughly the same time when the Israelites entered this territory.  Romans and subsequent empires referred to the non-Jewish people along the coast as “Philistines,” people who occupy the land of Philistia.  As enemies of the Israelites, the Philistines and their strongman Goliath are mentioned in both the Old Testament (1 Samuel 17) and the 2nd chapter of the Qur’an.

Situated between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, Palestine has been totally or partially occupied over the centuries by Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Sunni and Shia Arab caliphates, Crusaders, Mameluks, Ottomans, British, Palestinians and, since 1948, Israelis.  After the second Israelite revolt in 135 A.D., most, but not all, Jews had left their Biblical homeland and dispersed all over the world, until in the 1880s Jews from Russia began to resettle there.

Between the Jewish exodus in the first and second century A.D. and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, non-Jewish peoples, such as the Palestinians, continued to live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in what became British territory in 1917.  After Jerusalem surrendered to the Muslim Caliph Umar in 639, Arabic became the dominant language of the region.  The idea of a Jewish and a Palestinian state only emerged after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

Gingrich’s rewriting of history undermines whatever trust Palestinians have in U.S. leadership in the Middle East now and for the future, particularly if Gingrich were elected President.  He was clearly pandering to the members and supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of his key constituencies in his drive to win his presidential bid.  His anti-Arab position stands in stark contrast to the official policies of the last seven U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democrat, and their search for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Wendy Chamberlin, formerly acting U.N. high commissioner of refugees and now president of the Middle East Institute, also condemned Gingrich for calling the Palestinians “invented people” and “terrorists.”  “Under normal circumstances, one would ignore Gingrich's comments as a flippant, ignorant, and insignificant remark that was made by an aging American politician with a reputation for causing controversy. But the problem is that Gingrich is currently leading the polls for the Republican primaries.  Thus, he could conceivably become the next U.S. president, if he wins the nomination; and if he wins the subsequent presidential election in 2012, he would be responsible for making war and peace as commander-in-chief.  This is why everyone is taking what Gingrich says about the Palestinians seriously.”