June 28, 2023
On June 11, during an Irish Ryanair flight, Bologna-Tel-Aviv, a stewardess repeatedly referred over the PA system to their destination as “Palestine.”
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Of course, some Israelis on board did not like that and confronted her. Harsh words were exchanged, and Ryanair’s official, disgustingly dishonest apology—”It was an innocent mistake”—was characteristic of a people with the most antisemitic national assembly in the West.
The first gentile ever to call this land “Palestine” was the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who invented the idea. There had never been such a country with that name until then. For two centuries, Rome’s imperialists governed Eretz Yisrael as a colony and called it Judea. The Jews twice rose in violent rebellion; they had been the most obstreperous of the empire’s conquered peoples.
Indeed, many of the obscure empires that Rome had overrun were happy to be absorbed into the greatest power of the day. But not the Jews. They respected the Romans for their culture’s prowess in the arts, literature, and engineering, especially engineering. Jews built Roman roads, amphitheaters, sports stadiums, and homes with indoor plumbing.
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But when it came to Rome’s idea of entertainment—men fighting to the death, men being torn to pieces by animals—and their wanton sexuality, the Jews looked down on the Romans and their polytheistic, idolatrous pantheon of cruel, imaginary gods.
The Jews lost their first war with Rome. That war ended in the year 69 C.E. with the destruction of the Second Temple, a victory so important to Rome that there stands to this day the triumphal Arch of Titus right next to the Coliseum, boastfully depicting the looting of the Menorah from the Temple. How many of the peoples that resisted Rome and were defeated merited such a grand memorial? It is a monument as well, inadvertently, to the great fight the Jews had put up.
Image: The remains of the Second Temple by DGtal. CC BY-SA 4.0.
A half-century later, having recovered sufficiently, the Jews mounted another military bid for freedom and got clobbered again. For the trouble and expense of this second war, which ended in the year 135, including the loss of valuable trained soldiers, an angry Emperor Hadrian swore that not only would he finish off these rebels in their country, but even the remembrance of them.
Hadrian said no more would Rome call the land Judea. Instead, wit would be named after a people the Jews had defeated centuries in the past, the Philistines. Hadrian declared the new name to be Palaestina and renamed its capital Aelia Capitolina after his family name and the Triune Capitoline gods in Rome: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, who had their own temple on Rome’s Capitoline Hill.
For the next five hundred years, Aelia and Palaestina were used. In the seventh century, when the Muslims invaded and asked the name of the town, they were told “Aelia,” so for the next set of five centuries, the Arab Muslims called it Aelia too.
(Jerusalem is completely absent from the Koran, and for centuries it had little meaning to Muslims, given that all the important action in the Koran takes place in the Arabian Peninsula.)
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Only with the Crusades starting in 1096, with Christians coming to the rescue of Christians brutalized by Muslims, did the Muslims understand the propaganda power of identifying Aelia (i.e., Jerusalem) as an important religious site, as the Christians and the Jews did. That’s when they began to identify the city with the historic Jewish Temple that Solomon built—except that they said “Suleiman,” their labial corruption of the name Shlomo/Solomon. To that end, they called Jerusalem he place of Al-Bayit Al Maqdas; that is, the Holy House of Suleiman. In spoken Arabic today, it is known by its nickname, Al-Quds/the Holy, a corruption of the Hebrew word kodesh.
In 1291, Acre, the last of the Crusader cities, fell to the Muslim Mamlukes, which historians mark as the end of the Crusades. From then until the 20th century, various Muslim regimes came and went, but none called the country Filastin (Arabic has no “p”), which is what they call it now. It’s ironic that today’s Arab Muslims to be the ancient “Palestinians,” and “Filastin” their ancestral sod, but they still cannot pronounce its name properly.
Their purely geographic name for Judea and Samaria—”West Bank”— is more proof there never was an indigenous “Palestinian” people living there. Indigenous peoples commonly name their natural features—rivers, lakes, mountains—after some event, god, hero, or battle. “West Bank” is a no-name name, a sterile, topographical description that only became common after the Six-Day War of 1967.
Knowing all this reveals that “Palestine,” the Roman name given to ancient Judea, is the first word in history that is intrinsically antisemitic for its dishonesty. Hadrian invented a fictitious country so Rome could effectively steal the Promised Land and its history from the Jews.
The same is true today.
Last month, at the UN, diplomats suspended discussing a plan to combat the latest eruption of antisemitism because they could not agree on the definition of it. The definition preferred by Jews is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance text, with its thirty-seven words, though this writer prefers his own concise, three-word version: Antisemitism is lying about Jews. That’s all you need to know. All Jew hatred in history manifests as lies, myths, fantasies, and hallucinations about Jews doing evil things. These things are never true but sick-minded people use them to justify hating and murdering them.
In the 1920s, Adolph Hitler launched his political career by accusing Germany’s Juden, 1% of the population, of stabbing Deutschland in the back, which is why they lost the Great War/WWI. This led to WWII and the death of fifty million people. As fertile Judaism produced not only thousands of years of fascinating and rich Jewish history, Christian civilization, and Muslim culture, with their combined two billion-plus adherents today, so its opposite (call it Anti-Judaism) is no less a force of immense but destructive power.
Today, the “legitimate” way of hating the People of the Book and applauding their murderers is the lie that they stole Palestine from the “Palestinians” when, throughout history, there never was such a country or nation outside of Hadrian’s vicious imagination. Moreover, the Jews stole nothing. All the evidence of the Holy Land’s condition before the Zionist renaissance in the late 19th century shows a treeless, desolate landscape. Herman Melville made the pilgrimage in 1857 and described the country as a “caked, depopulated Hell.” Mark Twain, the other great 19th-century American author, came a decade later and wrote that the Holy Land “sits in sackcloth and ashes.” Neither said anything about meeting any “Palestinians” during their travels.
So here we are again, two millennia later, following in the footsteps of Hadrian who insisted this country be called Palaestina—as our contemporary anti-Jew Hibernian flight attendant insisted that the airliner they were all flying in was about to land in Palestine.
Plus ca change, say the French, plus c’est la meme chose.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa is the author of PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace and podcasts at phantom-nation.com
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