FWIW. Not much, I'd say.
Posted By: sm on 2009-01-03
In Reply to: On what authority? sm - m
This may come as a shock to you, but the Bible, Torah and Quran all tell different stories with many interpretations that would tend to muddle the certainty you are trying to assert.
Even your own words tend to confuse. According to you, Palestine has been trying to "take the land back" ever since. Wouldn't that imply that they were already there? Are you saying the Hebrews/Jews have occupied Palestine twice? Puh-leeze.
Let me just inject a couple of ideas from all 3 Holy books, whose followers all trace their religious roots to the Holy Land. You seem to be ignoring the part of the Bible where the angel appeared to Hegar, mother of Ishmael, Abraham's first son from Sarah's hand-maden. Sarah did not want Hegar's son to have share in Abraham's inheritance which she deemed to belong to her son and her son only. Sounds like a modern-day Israeli to me.
Anyway, Hegar and Ishmael were cast out into the wilderness of Paran, the geographic location of which is in question, although modern day maps place it about halfway between the Gulf of Aquaba and the Dead Sea in Southern Israel. When they ran out of water and food, the angel appeared to Hegar, showed Hegar a spring and asked her, "What is the matter, Hegar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lays there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand and I will make him into a great nation." Jewish and Islamic traditions deem Ishmael as the anceestor of the Northern Arab people.
Islam regards Ishmael as a prophet. Here's where things get pretty interesting. Abraham and Ishmael are said to have built the foundation of the Ka'aba in Jerusalem. In the Quran, the son who Abraham was commanded to sacrifice was not named. Moslem scholars as well as Bahai contend that Ishmael was that son.
As you can seen, it is not that easy to get folks to accept their version of somebody else's holy book. Trying to solve a 21st century problem by going back more than 3000 years is probably not the best approach to the problem.
I posted on this yesterday and am going to paste that post here for a little further response.
I hate to break this to you, but the Philistines showed up in the region around the same time that the Hebrews did, around the 12th century BC. The history of civilization did not ensue with the Biblical Hebrews and Palestinian presence predates your Moslem invasion era reference. In fact, since the habitation of the region predates recorded history by nearly a million years, there is no way you can gain any traction with that ridiculously juvenile line of thinking. There is no such thing as paleolithic, neolithic or chalcolithic squatters. So, you see, my view of history is not as short-sighted as yours, which does not go back quite far enough, unless you have some special license to begin it "whenever it suits your purpose."
In any case, that is why no viable debate can be had outside the context of modern (i.e., nationalist/political) times. Like I said before, please leave God out of the ungodly. The fact remains that the geographic regions populated by Philistines/Palestinians have stayed relatively intact under all sorts of invasions and occupations, including the Persians, Hellenistic, Hasmonean, Roman, Byzantine, Arab Caliphates, including Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid rule, the Crusades, Mamluk, Egyptian and Ottoman eras....all the way up until the Brits got their hands on it in 1917 and even beyond that for a few decades, until the Partition Plan was instituted. This represents approximately 3147 years of continuous residence. Your finder's keepers thingy applies to both the Hebrew Biblical era as well as modern day fascist Israel. Palestine does not belong to you. Never has. Never will.
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