Mitri Raheb’s book Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes (2014) confirmed an answer to a question that had long perplexed me: Who are the Palestinians? Joan Peters’ book From Time Immemorial (1993) viewed the Palestinians as recent Syrian immigrants in search of richer living conditions in economically developed Israel. Peters was academically demolished by Israeli historians, though not all supporters of Israel accepted this.
A case in point was my wife’s best friend Truda – a young German Jewish woman whom she had met when they both worked at the atomic plant at Deep River. Their friendship was bonded by Truda’s convalescence at my wife’s parents’ home after a bad car crash in northern Ontario. The friendship, however, could not survive our dismissal of Peters’ book which Truda treated as literal history. She had gone from a non-practicing secular outlook to a strong emotional Zionist commitment.
But if Palestinians were not recent immigrants to Israel as Peters claimed, who were they? Whence their provenance? Over the years I posed this question to persons I deemed to be Middle East experts but never received a definitive answer. Eventually I formulated an experimental answer of my own. It was, however, so absurd-sounding that I kept it to myself and moved on to other questions.
For what conclusion had I hypothesized? The Palestinians were Jews! The context was this: Though much of the Jewish elite may have remained in Babylon after the exile of 586 BC, a goodly number returned to the ancestral home to rebuild the temple and their way of life. We jump ahead to the time of Jesus. Now we find that though a greater number of Jews lived in the diaspora (many evangelized by Paul) there was still a significant population of Jews in the Holy Land, split into various groups, the best known being the Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, Sadducees.
The Pharisees are the important group, for their conservative interpretation of Torah shapes the outlook and practice of scribes and rabbis that are the matrix of contemporary orthodox Judaism. As John Barton tells us, “the Pharisaic movement was focused on stricter standards of observance of the Torah than was usual amongst most Jews – something like modern ultra-Orthodox Judaism” (A History of the Bible, 2019, p. 159).
But the greatest number of Jews may be found not among these ideological groups but among the am-ha’aretz (the people of the land) despised by the Pharisees because of their laxity towards the Torah. With the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD these peoples – held together by neither Pharisaic Torah nor Sadducean temple – would have been susceptible to mass conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and later to Islam in the 7th Century. Arab culture, religion, and language became dominant influences in the Palestinian amalgam of peoples. The openness of Jews to Islam during some periods of history may be seen in the florescence of Judaism in what scholars have called the Judeo-Islamic age when important works of Jewish piety were written in Arabic.
I finally got around to Google, which I had not previously consulted, being an appalling ingénu in IT matters. I was chagrined to learn that the topic of the historical origin and identity of the Palestinians had actually been covered in a scholarly way. I had wondered if I had stumbled on something original. However, it turns out that some scholars, including some pre-Mandatory Zionists, affirm my hunch that the Palestinian people are – in part – Jews, with the other constituents being indigenous peoples like the Canaanites and the Philistines (hence the name of the land Palestine). In the words of Ahad Ha’am, “the Moslems [of Palestine] are the ancient residents of the land…who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and become Moslems on the arrival of Islam” (as cited by Tamari, 2004).
The implication of this line of exploration is that the Palestinian people have a human right to abide in their ancestral homeland in which they have physically dwelt for millennia. The present state of Israel is, at heart, only one of the most recent aggressions of domination against dwellers in the land, triggered by the European-inspired concept of the nation state (evidenced, for instance, at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919).
Ultimately, however, this exploration of Palestinian origins and emergence of national self-consciousness is, ironically, highly irrelevant to my present purpose. This is not an ethnographic undertaking but one of human rights and social justice. Whatever the tributary groups that make up the Palestinians – Canaanite, Philistine, Jews, Greeks, and Arab – they are the people who have been brutally expunged from their homeland by the nationalistic program of political Zionism.