You must have heard of denying Holocaust is a crime in many western countries, what you may not know is the very same people who will go berserk for anyone questioning the authenticity of the claim that there were Six Million Jews® barbequed in the gas chamber during the Holocaust, actually and totally have no qualm to deny there is such thing as Palestine!

Local Official Says Palestine Doesn’t Exist, Refers To People As “So-Called Palestinians”

Kalman Yeger, at a CB14 meeting in 2015

BORO PARK – Councilman Kalman Yeger, representing District 44, yesterday referred to the Palestinian people as “so-called ‘Palestinians,’” responding to a tweet about Ahmad Tibi wanting to become the prime mister of an Israel-Palestinian state. He has also claimed that “there’s no such thing as Palestine.”

More evidence that the ultimate goal of the so-called “Palestinians” is the destruction of the Jewish state and its people. And THAT’S why there will never be peace. https://t.co/BWpkZMwRfU

— Kalman Yeger (@KalmanYeger) March 29, 2018

This is not the first time Yeger has discredited Palestine or Palestinians on Twitter. On April 26, 2016, when Yeger was not yet a councilman but a member of Community Board 14, he tweeted in a Twitter thread of Bernie Sanders who said he’d get the Democratic nomination, putting Palestine in quotes.

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“Poor Bernie Sanders doesn’t know there’s no such thing as Palestine”

That was not the only time he tweeted at Sanders.

Nor was it the only time he tweeted “there’s no such thing as Palestine.”

Yeger had won the Democratic nomination for then-Councilmember David Greenfield’s open position last summer. Greenfield endorsed him and declined to comment on Yeger’s tweets.

Yeger’s office told media: “The tweet stands for itself.”

While the USA does not officially recognize Palestine, U.N. General Assembly voted in 2012 to recognize Palestinian state, and much of the rest of the world (137 countries) does.

Are Palestinians descendents of ancient hebrews?

There is two ways of looking at the evidence, genetic and historic, and they do agree in supporting that Palestinians are one and the same.

Firstly the historic element is captured in this excellent documentary, showing how they are one and the same:

On the website of the film Searching for Exile: Truth or Myth (BBC4 Documentary)

“For centuries, Jews have lamented the destruction of their holy city Jerusalem and their temple by the Romans, which they believed was the beginning of their long 2000 years of exile. Exile is not only a religious Jewish belief but for millions of Jewish and non Jewish alike it is a historical fact. But what has been considered as fact for centuries is now being challenged by archeological evidence unearth across Israel. Here in the ancient town of Sepphoris just 70 miles from Jerusalem evidence points not to a people driven into exile but on the contrary to a population that not only survived but flourished. So why has exile been seen as a reality for thousands of years? and if it did not take place exactly as told, then what accounts for the millions of Jews who over the centuries have settled around the world? and perhaps the inevitable question, what happened to the inhabitants of places like Sepphoris who were never exiled. Until 1948 a predominantly Muslim Palestinian village stood on the ruins of Sepphoris, the village was destroyed and its inhabitants barred from returning. Is it possible that some of the Palestinian residents are descendants of ancient Jews who were never exiled?”

The Jewish kingdoms were only one of many periods in ancient Palestine

“The extended kingdoms of David and Solomon, on which the Zionists base their territorial demands, endured for only about 73 years…Then it fell apart…[Even] if we allow independence to the entire life of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, from David’s conquest of Canaan in 1000 B.C. to the wiping out of Judah in 586 B.C., we arrive at [only] a 414 year Jewish rule.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”

Secondly they are more or less genetically identical to their Palestinian brethren:

1. The shared genetic heritage of Jews and Palestinians

“What they revealed was that Arabs and Jews are essentially a single population, and that Palestinians are slap bang in the middle of the different Jewish populations (as shown in this figure).

Another team, lead by Almut Nebel at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, took aSix Million Jews® closer look in 2001. They found that Jewish lineages essentially bracket Muslim Kurds, but they were also very closely related to Palestinians. In fact, what their analysis suggested was that Palestinians were identical to Jews, but with a small mix of Arab genes – what you would expect if they were originally from the same stock, but that Palestinians had mixed a little with Arab immigrants. They conclude:

We propose that the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin represent, to a large extent, early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area and additional lineages from more-recent population movements. The early lineages are part of the common chromosome pool shared with Jews (Nebel et al. 2000). According to our working model, the more-recent migrations were mostly from the Arabian Peninsula…

So, as far as male lineage goes, the genetic story is very clear. Palestinians and Jews are virtually indistinguishable.”

A Problematic Reading of the Genetic History of the Jews

“Ostrer also exhibits a disappointing proclivity for overreading the import of his findings for contemporary geopolitical dilemmas. This is why readers will be troubled by Ostrer’s assertion that “the stakes in genetic analysis are high,” because genetic evidence lies at “the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel.”

“This is a problematic assertion for several reasons, of which the simplest is that Ostrer conflates the claim to a national homeland made by pre-state Jewish nationalists and the right to sovereignty on the part of an existing nation state. More troubling is Ostrer’s assertion that investigation of where one’s ancestors lived upwards of 2000 years ago is relevant to the rights of nations-a standard that would leave few contemporary nation states on firm footing”

“A thornier problem is that Ostrer, like many research physicians, takes genetic data to be more scientific, and therefore more definitive, than they are. Genetically described populations reflect probabilistic clusters of markers inscribed in our DNA. They are not a concretization of race. Moreover, many of the conclusions that can be drawn from genetic evidence are reliant on the quality of accompanying historical data. For example, the Cohen modal haplotype is a cluster of distinctive genetic markers shared by a high percentage of contemporary Jewish Cohanim (the priestly clan that traces its ancestry back to Moses’ brother Aaron). The idea that the ancestry that these men share can be traced to the ancient Israelite priesthood makes sense to almost everyone who views these data, but it is not inherent in the data. The data show only that these men share common ancestors who lived a specified number of generations ago. Estimating when those ancestors lived depends on an educated guess about the length of an average generation during the last 3000 years or so. But the idea that those ancestors were Cohanim is derived from our knowledge of Jewish history, it is not inscribed in the genetic markers.”

And scientific research can be politically pressured – Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians

“Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.

Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma”

“One of them said: ‘If Arnaiz-Villena had found evidence that Jewish people were genetically very special, instead of ordinary, you can be sure no one would have objected to the phrases he used in his article. This is a very sad business.’”

So the evidence does point to them being the same people.

The same can’t be said of the infamous Six Million Jews® …

SIX MILLION JEWS 1915-1938

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dda-0Q_XUhk&bpctr=1522561108

10 newspapers from 1915-1938 before the Holocaust allegedly happened. Library of Congress https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?state=&date1=1836&date2=1922&proxtext=6000000+jews&x=11&y=17&dateFilterType=yearRange&rows=20&searchType=basic

So, Do Palestinians Really Exist?

Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth …

We’re not all terrorists, we’re not “cockroaches,” and we’re certainly not an “invented” people. What you don’t know about Palestinians.

Palestine. My late father, Abdul Musa Obeidallah, was born there in the 1930s. When I say Palestine, that’s not a political statement. It’s just a statement of fact. When he was born, there was no state of Israel. There was no Hamas. No PLO. There were just people of different faiths living together on the same small piece of land called Palestine.

And to be honest, but for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I doubt you would’ve heard much about Palestinians. My father, like the seven generations of Obeidallahs born before him in his sleepy farming town of Battir, didn’t harbor grand dreams or bold plans. They lived a simple life of growing fruits, vegetables, and lots of olive trees. (Palestinians love olives!) Their biggest battles weren’t with other people, but with the elements.

Most of my Palestinian ancestors lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. That would likely have been my father’s path as well. But as we are all keenly aware, fate had far different plans.

I share this story because I think that lost in the current Gaza conflict is the story of the Palestinians as a people. Instead, they’ve been continually defined as being the “bad” part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They’ve been broadly labeled as terrorists or seen as acceptable losses. Some Israeli leaders have alleged Palestinians don’t exist, or called them “cockroaches,” “crocodiles,” or a “cancer.”

As you might imagine, being Palestinian is unique. When you tell someone you’re of Palestinian heritage, it’s not just an ethnicity, it’s a conversation starter. In fact, just saying the word Palestine inflames some. People will tell me to my face that there has never been a Palestine and there are no such thing as Palestinians. To them, I guess Palestinians are simply holograms.

When I ask these people what the land where Israel is now located was called before 1948, they tend to stammer or offer some convoluted response. The answer is simply Palestine. Not a big deal, really.

Indeed, the United Nations debate in 1947 over the creation of the state of Israel was described in terms of the “question of Palestine.” The U.N. even explained in its official summary that “It is recognized that Palestine is the common country of both indigenous Arabs and Jews, that both these peoples have had an historic association with it,” adding that “Palestinian citizens, as well as Arabs and Jews who, not holding Palestinian citizenship, reside in Palestine.” It’s hard to hold legal citizenship of a place that doesn’t exist.

Nowadays, few disagree there is a Palestinian people. After all, there are more than 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel alone. Of course, that didn’t stop Newt Gingrich from commenting during his failed 2012 run for president that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Here, I thought for years my father had been a cook, but apparently he was an inventor. If Gingrich—who was simply parroting his then-benefactor Sheldon Adelson’s views—had engaged in the most basic of research, he would have found that most historians mark the beginning of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement as happening in 1824, when the Arabs there rebelled against Ottoman rule.

The Palestinians, along with Israelis, have been through a lot, to say the least, since 1948, when Israel was created and the boundaries of Palestine were revised by way of UN Resolution 181. That moment immediately changed the destiny of countless Palestinians who until then had been living a humble life.

As most know, a war immediately erupted, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being driven from their home or fleeing. Ironically, this war was waged by the surrounding Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, etc.—which claimed they were doing it for the Palestinian people. But when Palestinian refugees sought to move into these Arab countries after the war, they often were met with horrible discrimination. In some instances, they would not be able to obtain government benefits, were not hired because of their ethnicity, or worse, were fired from a job because a citizen of that country wanted it.

To this day, many are relegated to overcrowded refugee camps, which still exist in the occupied territories as well as in Lebanon and Jordan, which is home to 22 refugee camps and millions of registered refugees per the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). I’ve visited some of these refugee camps in the West Bank, and the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. The Palestinians there don’t live in tents, as we see with the more recent Syrian refugee crisis. It’s more akin to overcrowded ghettos where dreams are deferred on a daily basis.

That’s the life of millions of Palestinians. They have survived upon the “kindness of strangers.” You see, there’s nothing that truly links Arabs across the region. Moroccans don’t have much in common with those in Dubai. Egyptians view themselves as leaders of the Arab world, while many in Lebanon, which is relatively close to Egypt in terms of kilometers, see themselves as more European than Arab. But sympathy for the Palestinians, on varying levels, is one issue that unites them.

My forebears didn’t flee their homes in Battir during the 1948 war. Since then, they have been under Jordanian rule and then Israeli after the 1967 war. They have endured intifadas and an often cruel military occupation. My grandmother’s land outside Bethlehem was even confiscated by Israeli settlers, who made it part of a Jewish-only settlement. Not because she did anything wrong but simply because she was the wrong religion.

In the 1950s, my father, along with many other Palestinians, immigrated to America in search of a better life. I’ve often wondered what would’ve become of me if I had been born in the West Bank instead of New Jersey. Would I have been able to go to college and law school? Would I have a job? Would I even be alive?

When I think back to growing up in New Jersey, I realize it was a far different time for Palestinians than today. Then we were generally unknown, almost exotic. Sure, the PLO was starting to grab headlines with its deplorable terrorist attacks, but the overwhelmingly negative images we currently see associated with Palestinians had not yet taken hold.

In fact, when I was about 9 years old in the late 1970s, my teacher asked about the ethnicity of each student so she could pin it on a map of the world. When she came to me, she was stumped—she didn’t know much about Palestinians, and of course she couldn’t find it on the map since it wasn’t there. Thankfully for her I’m also half Sicilian, and she found that easily, since most of my classmates were Italian.

Later that night, I relayed that story to my father and asked him: “Where is Palestine?” He paused for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. He then touched his heart and head and responded: “In here.”

I wonder what my response will be if I have children and one day they ask: “Where is Palestine?” Will I be able to take out a map and simply point it out, like most people do when they are asked about their heritage? Or will my only option be mimicking my late father’s answer? What’s most painful to me is not that those are my two options but that I feel powerless to change which answer I will be able to offer.