Yes, The So-Called "Palestinian Arabs" Are Canaanites

An "alternative history narrative" has been promoted by Arab propagandists and their fellow-travellers. 

The Arabs who reside in the territory of the former Mandate of Palestine, which dissolved on May 15, 1948 after the UN recommended on November 29, 1947 it be partitioned as a Jewish state, and Arab state and a special regime which was rejected by the Arabs, claim to be the direct descendents of the pagan peoples of the Bible who lived in this region 4000 years ago. The ramifications of this are critical to any peace process.

In August 1996, an official "Culture festival" was held at Sebastya (p. 163) with Arab youth dresses as "Canaanites". Others appeared as Girgashites, Ammorites and Perizites, et al.

As explained in this article by David Wenkel who holds a master's degree in Christian thought from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois:

Many Palestinian Arabs, including such prominent figures as Yasir Arafat and Faisal Husseini, claim that Palestinians descended from the Canaanite tribe of the Jebusites. Such declarations should not surprise. History is political. Many Middle Eastern cultures and states retroactively claim roots to the ancient tribes and empires in order to legitimize their modern nationalism...How significant, then, is the Palestinian-Jebusite link? Connections between modern Palestinians and ancient Jebusites would trump the Jewish claim by predating it and legitimize the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem and Israel. The political and diplomatic impact is clear, especially as Palestinian leaders insist that Israel forfeit sovereignty over Jerusalem....

And in further detail:

The claim to Jebusite heritage within the Palestinian community is a recent construct... Andrew S. Buchanan, then a doctoral candidate in international relations from St. Andrews University, Scotland, framed this claim to "uninterrupted continuity" with Jebusites and Canaanites...The Palestinian-Jebusite linkage first appeared in the Arabic literature. Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian activist and historian, wrote that in the mid- or late 1960s, Palestinian nationalism developed a historiography that "anachronistically read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern." In an accompanying footnote, he wrote that this historical "outlook" created a "predilection for seeing in peoples such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Philistines the lineal ancestors of the modern Palestinians."...

...the 1978 Al-Mawsu'at Al-Filastinniya (Palestinian encyclopedia)...declared, "The Palestinians [to be] the descendants of the Jebusites, who are of Arab origin," and described Jerusalem as "an Arab city because its first builders were the Canaanite Jebusites, whose descendants are the Palestinians...By 2001, what Khalidi once attributed to anachronistic revisionism, he came to promote when he attached his name to an article published by the American Committee for Jerusalem which declared, without corroborating evidence, that "According to a number of historians and scholars, many of the Arabs of Jerusalem today, indeed the majority of Palestinian Arabs, are descendants of the ancient Jebusites and Canaanites." Khalidi now argued that Palestinians did not descend from those who arrived with Muhammad's armies, but rather, "native Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim Arabs, are of a mixed race whose connection with the land reaches back into very early history."...

PASSIA, an official Arab body, has a rather unique Jerusalem chronology which 'establishes' the Jebusite basis the predates the Jews but also links it to the Arabs by a simple trick: it minimizes and ignores Jewish existence in any form.

(And, by the way, read this dispute.)

I have dealt in a series of posts (here; and here; and here and see other references there) on the "In Canaanite Eyes" theory of Nur Masalha.

But perhaps there is something to all this hocus-pocus.   Maybe some Arabs are descended from pagan Canaanites, like those that engaged in human sacrifice. Some dispute that practice.  Others do not (and here; and also here; as well as here).

The act of ritual murder committed on the Fogel family in Itamar on Shabbat night was "worthy" of Arabs who champion their Canaanite roots.  The barbarism, the immorality, the inherent evil in such an act will forever signify the futility of coexistence and peace with such people.

And the only hope is that they will disappear just as the Canaanite and Jebusite and Ammorite civilizations did.

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