Palestine: A Phoneme Poor Concept

Publié par Dreuz Info le 26 juillet 2013

Henri-Michel Moyal, Ph.D,

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, July 22, 2013

On August 15, 2011, Deputy International Editor at TIME and former Baghdad bureau chief Bobby Ghosh contributed a Fond Farewell in remembrance of the recently deceased Shammi Kapoor (October 21, 1931 August 14, 2011). In his piece titled “How a Late Bollywood Icon Saved This Correspondent’s Life,” Ghosh recalled how “[i]n the summer of 2003, while reporting from a small village west of Baghdad, known to be a stronghold of Saddam loyalists who were fighting against U.S. troops…” he managed to have his life spared by his captor. With a gun pointed to his forehead, Ghosh kept rebuffing the “Colonel”’s insistent claims that he was an American. Under the “Colonel”’s relentless vociferations, Ghosh finally exploded “[m]ore out of panic than forethought” and “blurted out : I’m Indian … like Shammi Kaboor.” And that’s how his life was saved.

“You’re lucky you’re Indian,” the Colonel said as Ghosh climbed into the car that was to take him out of harm’s way. “Otherwise you would be dead by now. You should thank God.”

Ghosh also acknowledged early in his farewell how he’d learned during his time in Iraq “that the best way to break the ice with people [he] met in Iraq was to ask if they remembered “Shammi Kaboor,” which is how they pronounced his name.” “In my mind,” Ghosh concludes, “there was no doubt about who I needed to thank.”

…

With 28 consonant phonemes, Arabic is a consonant phoneme rich language, although it is also known as a ‘p’-less language, that is a language lacking the sound unit or phoneme /p/. The letter ‘p’ is absent from standard Arabic keyboards. Loanwords and proper names containing this letter are a noted exception even though the phonological value of the phoneme can vary from one end of the Arabic speaking world to the other and may greatly depend on the level of education and/or the socioeconomic status of the speaker. It may approximate the value of the /p/ phoneme as we vocalize it in the western world or be a poor substitute, closer in production to the phonemes /b/ or /f/, or it may acquire any value along that sound spectrum.

During the academic year 2010-2011, Zireb Siradj submitted a dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the License degree to the Faculty of Letters and Languages/ Department of Foreign Languages/ English Section in The People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria under the auspices of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.

The title of the 72 page paper is as follows: The Difficulty of Pronouncing the /p/ Phoneme for Arab Learners of English (The case of Students of English Originating from ElOued and ElHdjira). The aim of Zineb Siradj’s research is stated straightaway on page 1:

In this piece of research, we aim at highlighting the problem of pronouncing the /p/ phoneme for students of English originating from ElOued and ElHdjira. Our concern is to investigate why students substitute the /p/ phoneme with the phoneme /b/.

Below and still on the same page, the author offers her hypothesis:

It is hypothised [sic] that foreign students originating from ElOued and ElHdjira face difficulty in pronouncing the /p/ phoneme due to the interference of the mother tongue which does not include the /p/. As they are close to Classical Arabic, they tend to use the phoneme /b/ which is much familiar to them than the phoneme /p/.

From Iraq, once the very center of ancient Mesopotamia and considered in the West to be the cradle of civilization, to Algeria, the next-to-last country teetering on the edge of the old world before Christopher Columbus set sail in direction of the New World and the largest country on the African continent, Arabic speakers share a mother language that is derived from Classical Arabic but that may take many different incarnations. However, no matter the linguistic variant it assumes and regardless of where it is spoken, Arabic has a constant: it lacks the phoneme /p/.

…

The word Palestine is generally traced back to Greek (Palaistine) and was used throughout history to designate the coastal land from Phoenicia south to Egypt or the land mass located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as well as various adjoining lands. The etymology is derived from the Hebrew word Pelesteth, meaning “Land of the invaders.” In 1920, under British mandate, established by the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, Conference of San Remo and, in 1922, by the Treaty of Sèvres, the denomination of that region was revived as Palestine as the official political territorial name.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible (New York: Perennial, 2002, p. 42), describes that vaguely defined geographical entity as follows:

For much of history, the narrow strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean has been a curiosity, a foyer to the world, a place to pass through but not to stay. The Egyptians called it “Kharu,” the Greeks and Romans “Palestina.” The Syrians called it “Canaan.”

Barbara Tuchman in her Bible and Sword: How the British came to Palestine, first published in the U. S. in 1956, (London: Papermac, 1982, p. 105), paints a most drab picture of that desolate part of our world at the turn of the twentieth century:

Terraced vineyards crumbled away, hillsides eroded, cisterns and aqueducts choked up with silt. The land that supported the gardens and palaces of Solomon, and all the “crowded, busy world” of Biblical times, was but a backwater of the Ottoman empire.

…

Things were about to get a drastic makeover following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of WW1. In an eerie and ill-fated synchronicity, competing ideologies, streaming from Europe, spurred in part by the Dreyfus Affair in France, the advent of Zionism, the pogroms in Russia and Poland, and the pervasive anti-semitism in Europe came to clash with the rise of Arab anti-colonial movements and Pan-Arab Nationalism melding with Arab anti-semitism as well as the proclivity of some Arab leaders to adopt and accept Hitler’s Final Solution, — were to find a fertile ground to wage a war of ideas, ideals and ideologies and to set claims on this “backwater,” godforsaken land. Suddenly, this convergence of opposing events made the land nobody wanted to become the land everyone wanted to claim. I leave it to the students of history and/or the Bible and to the myriad historico-political assessments to speak to and to provide the necessary perspectives to grasp how Palestine was resettled. Suffice it to say that the same ideologically driven divisions and primacy claims to that piece of real estate that brewed in that cauldron of opposing ideologies are still at play, today, in 2013.

So who were the inhabitants of Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century? And, if it was “a place to pass through but not to stay,” who came to set up roots in Palestine and why?
How did the place populate and whence did the new immigrants come from? In other words, are there discernible migration patterns that point to the movement of people from one land, or one continent, to Palestine at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries?

Again, I will let the reader consult the vast literature that addresses these questions from a theological, historical, political or sociological perspective. Today’s debate regarding the rightful existence of Israel is little concerned with any such references, be they biblically or historically-based. Everything is subject and is subjected to revision and revisionism to fit a particular narrative. Today’s israelophobes are only interested in the “plight” of the Palestinian people and in the alleged abuses they suffer in the vice of the Israeli “occupier/colonizer”. Demonization of that small nation is fashionable and de rigueur for any selfavowed liberal thinker. So, I’ll let the israelophobes to their frenzied and indefensible hatred. I’ll forego descriptions of other injustices that do not even evoke a response from human rights defenders if these atrocities are taking place anywhere but in Israel. I will not add my voice to the litanies of objective views and opinions comparing and contrasting the unequal treatment Israel receives in the media nor will I quarrel with the distorted and ideologically biased depictions of Israel as an “apartheid” society. The lines have been drawn; were drawn long ago and the tenor of the argument seems to be in the camp of those who oppose Israel’s existence, because they are loud, because they shamelessly invent and repeat propagandistic mantras, because they put to the forefront the plight of children, the very same children who are raised to hate “the sons of pigs” and whose greatest existential ambition is to wage jihad against the Jews and against the West. (Witness the article in the WJC blog of 13 June 2013, with photos from the AP, which describes how Gaza children are trained as future Jihadist fighters in summer camps.)

In a guest column to the Jerusalem Post, dated Jan. 22, 2009, Denis Maceoin concludes his column thusly:

I have personally had enough of it all. The whining double standards, the blatant lies, the way their leaders have forced Palestinians to suffer for 60 years because peace and compromise aren’t in their vocabulary and because they won’t settle for anything but total victory. Painful as it was, in the 1920s Ireland created a republic by compromising on the status of the North. Ireland subsequently became a prosperous country and, in due course, one of the hottest economies in the world. When the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, they left stateoftheart greenhouses to form the basis for a thriving economy. Hamas destroyed them to the last pane of glass. Why? Because they had been Jewish greenhouses.

But was anyone listening? This was back in 2009. Since then, anti-semitism across European capitals has only grown louder, less restrained and is unabashedly lusting for Jewish blood. And nothing will deter those bloodthirsty hoodlums. “Mort aux juifs,” is a favorite slogan of the “disenfranchised” French “youth.” Unfortunately, it is reprised in the national language in countries such as Holland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Greece, Spain and too many others.

…

My overall purpose, if it hasn’t been made evident so far, is to tread carefully, to tiptoe, if you will, through the minefield that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by consulting “safe,” noncontroversial, incontrovertible evidence detached from a politically or ideologically driven perspective. The budding Algerian scholar who seeks to understand the difficulty of voicing the phoneme /p/ for Arabic speakers or the seasoned scholar (see below) who is presenting an abstract for peer review do not, I can safely infer, seek to impart their research with an ideologically or politically slanted narrative. Their candor and the zeal they bring to their work are, in my opinion, apolitical and speak to the demands of independent and original research and to the rigors of academia.

Fred H. Gottheil, a faculty member of the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote a Faculty Working Paper which was published on August 17, 1971 and titled Arab Immigration into pre-State Israel: 1922-1931.
On pages 1213, professor Gottheil writes:

That migration is highly synchronized with international investments and with disparities in the rates of economic growth in different regions has been well established. Although the statistical record of economic activity in the Middle East is severely limited for the period 19221931, a consensus of economic reporting does appear to suggest that an Arab migration of 54,790 [immigrants] to pre-State Israel and 4,677 [immigrants] to non-Israel Palestine should be considered as something less than a total surprise.

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Using the only census data available for Palestine for the years 1922-1931, professor Gottheil is able to establish a migration pattern of Arab migrants into pre-State Israel in search of work and a betterment of their economic status. (I will draw here an analogy between these migrants into pre-State Israel and the youth who keep streaming into Israel from Gaza in search of better life opportunities, even if it means incarceration, as reported in Al-Monitor, a Gaza blog, on June 4, 2013.)

Contrast these figures, and many others in professor Gottheil’s research, with the stagnant economies surrounding pre-State Israel:

Economic conditions in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and TransJordan appear to have been substantially different. In Syria, for example, the growth of new industry and the conversion of handicraft production to mechanization had been insufficient to absorb the surplus labor generated by the decline in overall industrial and handicraft production.

In the agriculture sector, progress appeared to have been equally unattractive. (p. 14)

And, on the following page:

Similar descriptions are offered for Iraq and TransJordan; the latter described as “a parasite existing on the permanent subsidy of Britain and the civil administration of Palestine.” … Industrial activity in Egypt appeared to have been hardly more successful. (p. 15)

In tandem, then, with the influx of Jews into pre-State Israel who came to build a nation, Arab jobseekers from surrounding economies came for better life opportunities. It would thus appear than the “native” population of Palestine either didn’t provide a large enough pool for labor or wasn’t a population to reckon with because they were still a nomadic people without a profound attachment to the land (“just passing through’”) or, perhaps, because they wanted to preserve their way of life and weren’t interested in settling down.

Arab immigration into Palestine, and specifically into pre-State Israel during the census period 19221931 reflects, to some degree, the different levels of economic activity within Palestine and between it and the contiguous Arab States. Arab immigration accounted for 38.7 percent of the total increase in Arab settled population in pre-State Israel, and constituted 11.8 percent of its 1931 population. Although less numerically than the Jewish immigration during the period, the significance of Arab immigration is nonetheless emphasized by its comparison with the Jewish population inflow. Arab immigration composed 36.8 percent of the total immigration into pre-State Israel. The situation in non-Israel Palestine was somewhat different. There, Arab immigration was positive, but inconsequential.

Not everyone, however, privileges objectivity even when dealing with what would seem like the most innocuous of human hobbies: stamp collecting. In the preface to Zobbel’s specialized catalogue: A Short Introduction To The Philately of Palestine published in 1971, the author, a certain Tobias Zywietz, asserts the following:

In order not to seperate [sic] philately from its historical context, I have written concise introductions. These are not meant to be ideologically balanced portrayels [sic] and are not giving the various diveregent [sic] interpretations of events equal value. The history of the middle-East is probably the most controversial field of historiography. I may hold positions that do not necessarily concur with the dominant pro-zionist historiography.

In searching for a source to consult I was guided by the following themes: Did a Palestinian administrative entity in charge of postal services exist prior to the establishment of the state of Israel? If so, what were the events, places and icons chosen to represent the cultural and national patrimony of Palestine prior to 1948? In other words, what were the symbols of Palestinian culture, of Palestinian history and of Palestinian civilization? Wikipedia’s article Postage stamps and postal history of Palestine (3.2) reveals that:

During the mandate postal services were provided by British authorities. The British Post service designed its first 4 stamps in 1923 …

The stamps represent Rachel’s Tomb, the Tower of David, the Dome of the Rock (built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 691 AD and sacred to all three main monotheistic religions), and a view of a mosque in Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee. Nowhere is there a representation of anything intrinsically or remotely ‘palestinian.’ Nowhere is there a representation of a ruler or king or of a representant of a dynastic line; nowhere, moreover, is there a mention of Palestine as a governed or autonomous entity ever made in any history books prior to the 1960s and trade inside Palestine apparently didn’t require the minting of money, for none exits.

Tobias Zywietz in his Introduction to the Philately of Palestine offers his slanted interpretation for the 1948 ArabIsraeli war in a section called The General Situation (19481967):

In reaction [to radical zionist settlers proclaim[ing] the state of Israel on 14.05.1948] to the UN resolution being broken by the unilateral declaration of statehood and in order to protect the civilian population several Arab nations dispatch troops in Palestine. These form the “Arab Legion,” consisting of military units from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

These are the same five countries whose faltering economies prompted their citizens to seek better opportunities in pre-State Israel. Those same five countries would have carved up the land among themselves in order to eradicate the nascent Jewish nation from their midst. In effect, they enacted the “Mufti’s proclaimed wartime objective [to] a united, independent Arab state encompassing Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq.” (Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, New York: Random House, 2010, p. 669)

These nations feared the return of the Jewish people to their historical home. They were well aware of Rashid Hajj Ibrahim’s writings from the late 1940s suggesting “that the Jews wanted to reconstruct the solomonic empire, beginning with Syria and Lebanon … they also coveted Egypt …, Iraq …, the Hejaz from whence Ishmael came, and Transjordan, which had been ‘part of Palestine and used to be part of Solomon’s kingdom.”(Ibid., p. 697)

Pan Arabism was the driving force behind the 1948 undeclared war against Israel and it may be worth noting that not a single military unit bearing the name Palestine is to be found anywhere. There isn’t even a mention of a posse of patriots rising in arms against the occupier. There isn’t even a Palestinian fireteam!? What there is, however, is the recognition that this was Jewish land.

If one realizes that demands for the recognition of a Palestinian people and of a Palestinian state were officially launched at the Arab League Summit in Cairo in 1964, when and where Yasser Arafat formalized his political and military opposition to Israel by founding the Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO, then the confusion thickens: Whence did they surface and why did they wait so long to be reckoned with? Since then, these Arab nations and the Arabs in Palestine have been hard at work working out a Palestinian identity, even though there exist no archeological relics, no numismatic or philatelic records, no royal lineage, and thus, no court intrigues, (mis)alliances with other powers to privilege one dynastic line over another, or the existence of a direct descendant of the prophet and no historical data to buttress their existence as a people with rights to the land. They arose to oppose the right of return of the Jews.

Consistent with my original project then, my goal is not to confuse the reader with facts. Propagandists do away with such things and construct their own narrative to reinforce their prejudiced ideologically-driven notions. The attraction some people have towards conspiracy theories is that they offer so much unsubstantiated material for very little intellectual effort and, best of all, they are difficult to disprove.

In my gleaning of some rudimentary, simple historical facts, my sole intention is to provoke in the reader the possibility that the situation on the ground or the one commonly thought to be familiar to the general public may be at odds with the historical, anthropological, linguistic or archeological data readily available to anyone curious enough to do a little basic research. Even the most rabid anti-zionist source I cite doesn’t bring to the table anything new, except his vitriol. What, then, can we conclude? What narrative can emerge from traipsing through this minefield?

Historically, Palestinians as a people or representants of a culture or of a civilization do not register a beep prior to the 1960s. Contrary to the historical record for the five countries surrounding Israel, there is no recorded history of a dynastic line: no Palestinian king or prince; no Palestinian ruler ever who reigned over that piece of earth. And no descendant of the prophet has ever claimed sovereignty over it. Moreover, there are no archeological vestiges of a past or extinct Palestinian civilization. The opposite, however, is true: artifacts that keep being unearthed all point to a Jewish presence, a past if extinct civilization. These artifacts fill museums.

Tellingly, and perhaps conclusively, no history book written prior to the 1960s ever makes mention of Palestine, the land claimed by the self-described Palestinians, as an autonomous political entity, governed by its own inhabitants. Unsurprisingly, then, in attempting to work out a distinct identity, Palestinian Arabs have had to do their utmost to usurp, appropriate and replace what would stand in the way of their “physical narrative,” that is of them as a people from that particular land. History and historical facts must, if need be, and they often must, be turned on their heads, if they do not conform to the new Palestinian reality, to the new historical narrative they are so fervently spinning. Inverting facts becomes a sine qua non of the new transformative narrative. For admitting facts on the ground would in fact be admitting their interloper status. By inverting facts:

● the Jews become the interlopers;
● the proponents of a new holocaust become the victims of a cruel and evil occupying power whose only raison d’être is to bring Islam to its knees;
● while pursuing their racist and religious supremacist policies, they blame Israel for being an apartheid nation. In the process women, gays and minorities are heavily discriminated against, often at the price of their lives.
● As they unashamedly stand to accuse Israel of all sorts of sins against the Palestinian people, they are scheming to live in a Judenfrei MiddleEast, where Jews and other minorities will cease to exist unless they convert to Islam or are killed.
● And while the world is busy inventing new libels against Israel to reinforce its view that it is a colonial and expansionist power driven to conquer the world at whatever cost, it conveniently disregards the following historical events:

Israel’s withdrawal from the entirety of the Sinai peninsula in 1982;
Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and
Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza strip in 2005, when all its Israeli settlers were evicted, many of whom were removed by force;

● while Arabs openly and defiantly militate for the takeover of Europe, see the very explicit names of such European movements as Islam4UK, or Islam4belgium or Islam4holland whose goal is the establishment of Shariah, to dominate all other societal systems, or the promise during Friday night sermons in mosques all over the world that the flag of Islam will one day fly over the White House.
● By clamoring for their “right of return,” they obfuscate the fact that millions of Jews were driven out of Moslem countries and thus deny Jewish claims to property, businesses and to Jewish history in Arab lands, “to the last pane of glass.”

It boggles the mind how common sense, logic and simple facts can be so distorted that they end up meaning the exact opposite of what is factually observable, objectively neutral, scientifically sound. Yet, this is the prevailing view. Many of today’s activists are not to be bothered by facts so as to not be confused by them. They are “presentists”. They operate in the now and are defending a “truth” they feel exists in their midst and that can be completely dealt with in the absence of any context. After all, human rights can not be contained by nor constrained to a particular set of circumstances. Human rights exist as universal rights. If anyone is mistreated, abused or discriminated against, that injustice must be redressed. Context is forgotten for it would be too much of a burden to address and redress. That, the tireless defenders of human rights are certain! In their world view, there is no causality. And while the world is told over and over and over again of an all-powerful Jewish lobby and of countless Jewish cabals to control the world through banking and the media, Palestinians and their sympathizers seem to have few problems getting their messages across a wide array of news outlets or to find innovative ways to launder illegal gains from drug trafficking or used car dealerships to arm and finance murderous ‘resistance” movements.

Repeated enough, even in the face of events that would seem to contradict the lies, distortions and inventions, these falsehoods take a life of their own and find a fertile ground in the mind of young people whose sole but noble purpose is to be of help to the oppressed.

But these new adherents must neither be excused nor dismissed. If they have chosen to be used, they have opted to be part of a propaganda machine that will diffuse boldfaced lies to buttress its toxic message. These sympathizers need not live in complete darkness nor become the hapless aiders and abettors of psychopaths. They need not be a party to the facilitation of a new holocaust for, if carried to its ill-fated end, the ultimate objective of Arabs and pro-Palestinians is to annihilate the Jewish state, to take over its rightful land and to crow over a Judenfrei Middle-East, one step closer to the conquest of “Andaluz” in the name of Islam, for the glory of Allah.

Let me remind the reader that while Palestinians and their acolytes bemoan the cruelty and the bloodthirstiness of the IDF, they relentlessly seek new and improved weapons of greater destruction to unleash their destructive power upon civilian populations in Israel and while they accuse the IDF of systematic, intentional and indiscriminate killing of children, Palestinian and their propaganda servers have to resort to fabricating such murders to keep them newsworthy, (see the Mohammed al-Dura case, 2000) or have to resort to recycling photos of dead children from other conflicts or stage mock funerals of ‘undead’ martyrs or, worse yet, rush to press photos of a dead child in the arms of his father, BBC correspondent Jihad alMashawari, surrounded by Hamas heavyweights, just a few days before it was determined that the young boy, 11 month old Omar, had been killed by an errand Hamas rocket. Common sense and simple logic would dictate that the IDF is not the monstrous killing machine it is made out to be if killings, faked or real, have to be recycled, fabricated, staged or falsely assessed. Distortion, recycling, montages, lies and fabrications, these are the tools in the panoply of the most devious propaganda machine the world has ever seen. Yet, the general public seems to have accommodated to the inversion.

More puzzling yet is that those same self-proclaimed human rights activists who would flex their political power to keep the separation of church and state alive and who hold the most libertarian positions when it comes to the role of the government in our private lives, are the greatest apologists for a political system that derives its God-given authority from a religious tract and uses it to legislate and impose its arch-conservative views on the people it governs. While they militate for a clearly defined separation of powers at home and express, for the most part, their disdain of religious dogmas, of any dogma, they have fallen squarely behind one of the most oppressive religious ideologies the world has had to deal with. These defenders of human rights and opponents of human abuses are fully endorsing a religious system that is misogynistic, homophobic, anti-democratic, anti-”human rights” and virulently anti-multicultural. But why bother if the enemy is Israel, the evil beast endowed with all human frailties, with all sins, guilty of still being alive! Pro-Palestinian sympathizers are inconsistent in their worldview but are the perfect useful idiot foils for the Palestinian propaganda machine.

Propaganda is successful when its deception becomes a substitute for the truth; when the distance between fact and fiction, between what can be objectively measured and the artful falsification of the detractors is blurred or is not longer separable. This duplicitous behavior was honed and perfected by a masterful deceiver called Yasser Arafat. Unfortunately, his legacy lives on. Arafat’s message would change depending on the language he delivered it in. In English, it was conciliatory, humane, and was tailor-made for worldwide media distribution and Palestine was Palestine: it was delivered to appeal to a western, non-Arabic audience; in Arabic, however, the tenor changed. Promises of a return to Palestine were forcefully stated except that Palestine there became Filastin or Falastin or Filistin and it was clothed in the ideology of Pan-Arabism: it was delivered to whip up Arab nationalism and stoke the flames of the anti-Israel propaganda. Truth, thus, in the experienced hands of the perpetrators of hate and supremacy mongers is a construct. Pure fiction, inventions and fabrications, lies and distortions can be all turned into the truth they desire to convey, away from any observable evidence even if, or perhaps especially if, it runs contrary to common sense or simple logic. The more outlandish the lie, the more likely it is to impress and resonate with whomever lends it a sympathetic ear and who, moreover has decided not to be confused with the facts.

It is highly improbable that the Arab world would ever drop Arabic as its mother tongue to embrace English in its stead. The chance of it ever occurring are extremely slim and are not even worth considering. After all, the messages communicated are calibrated according to the audiences they are intended to reach. Pro-Palestinians sympathizers have, for the most part, no trouble pronouncing the “p” word, but what of the people directly affected? In the process of working out an identity and of claiming their land, they have forgotten that, outside of the Arab-speaking world, they would be hard-pressed to state their nationality, to utter the “p” word. There is no question, in my mind, that this conundrum will come to a natural end once the Arab nations and all the judeophobes united have defeated Israel. Then, the Arabs will thank their supporters for a job well done and for shouldering some of the responsibility of having enacted a new holocaust and will promptly rename the land and impose on their non-Muslim friends an ultimatum: convert or be conquered. Most logically, the renamed land might be known in a Judenrein Middle-East as (Trans)-Jordania or South Syriana or, perhaps, New-Hitleria. Or perhaps as the Arabic equivalent of “The Land That Millenia Old Obsessional Hatred Conquered.” I’m pretty certain a clever neologism will be coined in Arabic to convey the idea that their obsessive and murderous tendencies finally prevailed. Let us hope that time won’t tell!

For, in all seriousness, how can a people and, by extension a nation, that cannot name itself exist? So, as Bob Dylan once famously asked, “What have we been fighting for?”

We, the people in the West, have been conned! We’ve been played! And masterfully so.

We’ve been seduced by half-truths and barefaced lies and enlisted in the service of a fight that explicitly avows to annihilate the Jewish people. If Palestinian activists and their apologists and facilitators successfully realize their objectives, the sole Jewish state of Israel will be no more, and it is unlikely the Jewish people will find a refuge in Europe where large Muslim populations are openly anti-semitic and where Jews are feeling under siege. The Muslim world will count with one more Islamic theocracy to be added to the 50 or so that already exist. The world will have to live with a Jewish diaspora and perhaps relearn, if it ever forgot, how to program pogroms at regular intervals to keep those infernal Jews under control. Is this what we are fighting for? Is this expected outcome of the virulent, implacable delegitimization campaign, of the inversion of truth and of the machinations of propaganda, the outcome welcomed by those who truly seek a just and fair solution for all parties involved or is it the solution, the “final solution,” sought by those who pretend to seek justice for one party in order to help extinguish the other?

If the construct that is Palestine can not be uttered by those who are directly affected by it and if this fight is fought under false pretenses by using the foot soldiers it needs, even if their usefulness is limited in time and scope, they are and remain the accomplices of and the gun fodders for a broader and far more sinister campaign that will make use of whatever lies, fabrications, inventions and distortions necessary to accomplish its ultimate goal … and rename itself.

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