tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7014209.post7014663305064990040..comments2024-03-18T11:15:05.940+02:00Comments on My Right Word: In The Twinkle of A (Canaanite) EyeYMedadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14333122797414935958noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7014209.post-34016162892678264362009-08-20T08:18:40.224+03:002009-08-20T08:18:40.224+03:00i'm not sure why you even bother engaging with...i'm not sure why you even bother engaging with anti-intellectual politically motivated morons like<br />masalha. also, i have a few quibbles with your own debunking of his ridiculous anti-historical polemic, but i won't go into it because i, too, am politically motivated and we're on the same side in this matter.<br /><br />but, to keep things "fair and balanced" :) maybe you should have just called him a snivelling, lying putz and left it at that.yoninoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7014209.post-88128930976818914372009-08-20T08:00:00.768+03:002009-08-20T08:00:00.768+03:00"since 1967 fundamentalist rabbis have routin..."since 1967 fundamentalist rabbis have routinely compared the Palestinian people to the ancient Canaanites, Philistines and Amalekites, whose annihilation or expulsion by the ancient Israelites was predestined by a divine design."<br /> <br />You might wish to take issue with this comment. In fact, it has been an essential tenet of revisionist Palestinian history that the Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Canaanites and therefore have a superior historical claim to the land. For an example of this argument, see Tad Szulc's piece on the Palestinians in the 1990s National Geographic articles soundly debunked by the late David Bar Illan. Jewish leaders would have been remiss to accept this Palestinian sophistry, let alone affirm it in order to justify reinvigorating the Biblical injunction to destroy them. <br /> <br />With regard to the Phillistines, the argument invoked by Jewish nationalists is not that the Palestinians are descendants of the Phillistines, but rather that Palestine was a Roman construct to obscure the Jewish connection with the Land of Israel by renaming the area after a people that had been long extinct at the time the name Syria-Palaestina was coined by Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century. The Jewish position is that by co-opting the name Palestinian to identify themselves, the Arabs of the Land of Israel demonstrate their lack of national identity by embracing the name of a people (the Phillistines) with whom they have no connection whatsoever. It is also ironic that the Phillistines were themselves outsiders who immigrated to the Land of Israel from the Greek isles, speaking some as yet undeciphered form of Greek, worshipping Mediterranean idols and otherwise practising a culture that was utterly foreign to the indigenous Semitic peoples of the region. <br /> <br />As for the Amalekites, this is one ancient people with whom the Arabs of Palestine have not sought to create a cultural link for some reason. The contemporary Jewish injunction is to remember Amalek we are no longer commanded to destroy them unless they first seek to destroy us. Even the most extreme of Jewish nationalists have not advocated destroying the Palestinian Arabs a la Amalek, but rather only to transfer them outside of the Land of Israel and then usually as part of a consensual arrangement.Marcnoreply@blogger.com