An interview with a survivor, Deborah Tzarfaty. (Maya Milova)
Once upon a time—before 1967—Arabs in Israel, Judah, Samaria, and Gaza did not call themselves Palestinians; they were Arabs. Back then, if you said "Palestinian," everyone assumed you meant a Jew. For example, The Palestinian Post, founded in 1932, was a Jewish paper. (The local Arab paper was called Al-Jami'a Al-'Arabiya.)
Then, in the 1960s, came Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian born in 1929, who-- with a little help from the Soviet Union-- rebranded the Arabs of the region. Suddenly, they were "Palestinians" and claimed a deep, ancient connection to the Land. Along the way, they also borrowed the keffiyeh from Iraqi Arabs, because nothing says "indigenous" like a headscarf from another country.
To this day, Palestinian identity remains a patchwork. Culturally, they are not a single people. Palestinian Muslim women don’t even share a common style of modest dress—some are covered head-to-toe in black, others wear tight jeans and revealing tops but cover their hair, while some opt for long raincoats year-round. The only common thread in Palestinian dress? That borrowed keffiyeh for the boys.
Their actual roots? A mix of 19th and 20th-century immigrants from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. A few were in the land before the 19th century and some of those families may have been Jewish before the Muslim conquest of the Land in the 7th century.
Meanwhile, according to the UN’s own definition of indigeneity—having historical continuity with pre-invasion societies and maintaining a distinct culture—Jews are, without question, the indigenous people of Israel. Our culture was born here, shaped here, and maintained a presence here through multiple colonial empires: Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Arab Muslim, Byzantine, and British, to name a few. Coins minted by many of these empires acknowledged the Jewish connection to the Land by featuring Jewish symbols, such as a menorah or the Hebrew words ארץ ישראל (Land of Israel).
Palestinian culture also meets one requirement for indigeneity: its current culture developed in this Land (during the last 70 years). However, this culture does not spring from a connection to the Land or a people, but from a single, unifying obsession: hating Israel and killing Jews.
The flowering of this culture occurred on October 7, 2023, which tells you everything you need to know.
