why evangelics love Israel

[Pressing-On]

Originally Posted by Amanah

Jews, Muslins, and Christians lived together peaceably during the Ottoman Empire, before WWI and the rise of Nationalism.

Palestinians and Jews considered themselves citizens of Palestine. The Ottoman Empire united many disparate communities. People applied for Ottoman citizenship.

Original Zionism was a cultural revolution just as there are various groups in the US that preserve their culture. The British used Zionism for Colonialization.

"The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 A.D. hardly lasted, as such, 22 years...," the Muslim chairman of the Syrian Delegation attested in his remarks to the Paris Peach Conference in February 1919. - Minutes of the Supreme Council, in D.H. Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris, 22 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. 14, p. 405.

The British Palestine Royal Commission reported in 1937 that "it is time, surely, that Palestinian 'citizenship'...should be recognized as what it is, as nothing but a legal formula devoid of moral meaning." Palestine Royal Commission Report, Command Paper #5479, 1937, p. 120, para. 14.

According to the Reverend James Parkes, "The Land was named Palestina by the Romans to eradicate all trace of its Jewish history..."

It may seem inappropriate to have devoted so much time to "a situation which passed away two thousand years ago." But it is only politically that the defeat by Rome, and the scattering of the Jewish population, made a decisive change in the history of The Land. That which had been created by more than a thousand years of Jewish history [a thousand years before A.D. 135] remained, as did that which was beginning to be created in the thoughts of the young Christian Church." James Parkes, Whose Land? (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 31.

Many authorities have addressed the misconceptions surrounding the word Palestine. The name derived from "other migrants from the northwest, the Philistines. Though the latest arrivals, and though they only exercised control over the whole country for a few uncertain decades, they had been the cause of its name of Palestine. These Philistines were an Aegean people, driven out of Greece and the Aegean islands around about 1300 B.C.E. They moved southward along the Asiatic coast and in about 1200 attempted to invade Egypt. Turned back, they settled in the maritime plain of southern 'Palestine', where they founded a series of city-states." Ibid., p. 17.

The official adoption of the name Palestine in Roman usage to designate the territories of the former Jewish principality of Judea seems to date from after the suppression of the great Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in the year 135 C.E...it would seem that the name Judea was abolished...and the country renamed Palestine or Syria Palestina, with the...intention of obliterating its historic Jewish identity. The earlier name did not entirely disappear, and as late as the 4th Century C.E., we still find a Christian author, Epiphanius, referring to "Palestine, that is, Judea."

As many, including Professor Lewis, have point out, "From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity." Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO, a Historical Approach,: Commentary, January 1975, p. 32-48.

In other words, it appears that Palestine never was an independent nation and the Arabs never named the land to which they now claim rights. Most Arabs do not admit so candidly that "Palestinian identity" is a maneuver "only for political reasons" as did Zuheir Muhsin. But the Arab world, until recently, itself frequently negated the validity of any claim of an "age-old Palestinian Arab" identity.

The Arbas in Judah-cum-Palestine were regarded either as members of a "pan-Arab nation," as a Muslim community, or, in a tactical ploy, as "Southern Syrians." Yehoshua Porath, "Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement," in Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, M. Milson, ed. (New York, 1973), pp. 101, 107, 119.

The beginning article of a 1919 Arab Covenant proposed by the Arab Congress in Jerusalem stated that "The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved nor recognized by the Arab nation." Marie Syrkin, "Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal,: in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Books, 1975), p 200. Syrkin found that Haj Amin al-Husseini-the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem himself - "originally opposed the Palestine Mandate because it separated Palestine from Syria." Ibid.

In the same year, the General Syrian Congress had the opposite view; it expressed eagerness to stress an exclusively Syrian identity: "We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine... Ibid. According to Nevile Mandel, Arabs and Zionism Before Word War I (Berkeley, 1976), p. 152, n. 49:
"After World War I, when the nature of an independent Arab state and its component parts were being discussed, the term 'Greater Syria' was advanced to embrace the Fertile Crescent and its desert hinterland, Palestine, as an integral part of that area, was dubbed 'Southern Syria'. But these terms were not in use in 1913 and 1914, when very few nationalists contemplated complete Arab independence."

The Arab historian George Antonius delineated Palestine in 1939 as part of "the whole of the country of that name [Syria] which is now split up into mandated territories..." George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (Philadelphia, New YOrk, Toronto: J.B. Lippincott, 1939), p. 15, n.1;

A scant five years later, a Saudi Arabian United Nations delegate in 1956 asserted that "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria." Ahmed Shukeiry, as head of the PLO, to Security Council on May 31, 1956, cited by Syrkin in "Nationalism", in Curtis et al., Palestinians, p. 201.

In 1974, Syria's President Assad, although a PLO suporter, incorporated both claims in a remarkable definition:
...Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of southern Syria." Palestine Royal Commission Report, Chapter 1, p. 6, para 11.