Palestine is Southern Syria, 1915

"Palestine is Southern Syria"

Ze'ev Jabotinsky
June 30, 1915

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Yes, Palestine Was Considered Southern Syria

"the Arab Independence Party (Ḥizb al-Istiqlāl al-‘Arabiyya). Al-Istiqlāl was created with three goals, as expressed on the official statement registering it as a political organization on 13 August 1932: 

“1) The independence of the Arab countries; 2) The Arab countries are one and inseparable; 3) Palestine is an Arab country and an integral part of Syria.”...as the idea of a “Greater Syria” (Sūriya al-Kabīra or Bilad al-Sham) – of which Palestine comprised the southern section..."

Source

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Fawzi al-Qawuqji and Southern Syria

Fawzi al-Qawuqji (or spelled Fauzi el-Kaukji) played a role in two Arab anti-Zionist military campaigns.

He was Lebanese-born, Tripoli, and fought for Faisal in Syria, against the French, then in the French-Syrian Army, for Saudi Arabia and even was a colonel in the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War II, and served as the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) field commander during the 1948 Palestine War.

In 1912, he graduated from the military academy in Istanbul. During World War I, he served as a captain in the 12th Ottoman corps garrison in Mosul and fought in several battles alongside General Otto von Kreiss's Prussian unit. He was at Beersheva and Nebi Samuel.

In 1936, he crossed over into the Palestine Mandate territory to fight the British and the Jews.

His title?

Supreme Commander of...South-Syrian Palestine.

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High Commissioner Harold MacMichael and Southern Syria

In mid-1944, Harold MacMichael, the High Commissioner for Palestine, was convinced that an Arab entity of "Palestine" was artificial and was the southern region of Syria.  It had no inedependent history of its own:

The "Cairo Report", the summary of a conference held there over April 6-7, 1944, can be found in F.O. 371/40135 [E2987G].

From this academic article.

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'Palestine' as Southern Syria 1936-1939

'Palestine', as a geo-political entity, did not exist as a defined country. It was a territory, a region.

During Ottoman Empire rule it consisted, at various times, of different and alterating administrative units such as sanjaks and vilayets.

Several blogs posts I have published (here; and here, for example) detail the usage of 'Southern Syria' into the 1920s by local residents as well as political activists.

I add one more, from a study by Lori Allen of SOAS. It points to the consciousness of Palestine as Southern Syria, not an independent entity, during the 1936-1939 period:

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"Palestinians" were Syrians

From MYTHS ABOUT PALESTINIANS by Kathleen M. Christison, (1987) Foreign Policy, (66), 109. 

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Palestine or Palestine of Syria?

From Emigration from Syria by Najib E. Saliba, Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1981):

"Palestine", during the end of the Ottoman period, was not a separate country.

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"Palestine" - Part of Greater Syria

From "Missouri Zion, Missouri Intifada: Mormonism, Zionism and the Palestine Conflict", Graham St. John Stott, Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, May 2007, Edinburgh University Press:

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Was 'Arab Palestine' Thought of by Arabs As A Separate Country?

Did the idea that "Palestine" for the Arabs was not really thought of as a separate country a 'Zionist plot'?

Or...?

Page 35:

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Syro-Palestine

My blog has multiple posts documenting that the Arabs residing in the territory of what was to become the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine viewed themselves not as "Palestinians" but "Southern Syrians" and did not reognize "Palestine" as a separate geo-political entity.

Have you heard of the 1921 Syro-Palestinian Congress?

It was founded on August 25, 1921 in Geneva by a group of Arabs from Greater Syrian, including  Palestine and even the Syrian National Society based in Boston, under the auspices of the Syrian Unity Party. The main aim of the congress was to try to influence the terms of the proposed League of Nations mandate over the region that would be awarded to France.

Its formation followed the July 1919 "Pan-Syrian" Syrian National Congress. 

On September 21, after almost a month of deliberations in the Plainpalais Assembly Hall , a public statement to the League of Nations was issued demanding:

Recognition of the independence and national rule (al-Sultan al-Qawmi) of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine; Recognition of the right of these countries to unite in the framework of a civilian government, responsible to a parliament elected by the people, and in association with the other Arab lands; Immediate annulment of the Mandate; Departure of the French and British forces from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine; and the annulment of the Balfour Declaration.

From the New York Times report:

Some of the attendees:

The members of the Interim Executive Committee of the Syro-Palestinian Congress:

Additional source.

An academic review suggests, contradistinctively, that Arabs representing Palestine "desired separate recognition of their cause". The author, Reem Bailony, notes that

in 1922, the Congress collected Palestinian protests against Zionism, the Balfour declaration, and the British mandate, in order to publish them throughout Egyptian newspapers. The Jerusalem branch was run by the Palestinian notable, Haj Amin al-Husayni [Jamal al-Husayni was the acting as secretary of the Jerusalem committee]. It acted as an important linkage between the activists within Syria, and those in Cairo and Europe

As Raja Adal suggests, to former Ottomans like Arslan, Syria meant "greater Syria and included not only the French mandates of Syria and Lebanon but also the British mandate of Palestine".

In other words, throughout the 1920s, the Mufti of Palestine was a pro-United Syria activist. A central figure, Michel Lutfallah, a Greek-Orthodox from a wealthy merchant landowner family of the Syrian community in Egypt, was the driving force and financier of the Congress and was appointed its president, was known for his "steadfast friendship" to the Hashemite family. Just prior to the French bombardment of Damascus in October 1925 responding to the Syrian Revolt which had begun in August, the Congress addressed an appeal to the League of Nations’ General Assembly to inform about ‘the unhappy position of the Syro-Palestinian people’.

For sure, other voices in Lebanon sought a reverse course of complete atomization of Syria into its Moslem Shiite and Sunni, Christian, Druze, Alawite, Ismaili, Kurd and Circassian and other components. Nevertheless, the concept of a 'Greater Syria' was the dominant narrative.

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More on 'Palestine is But Southern Syria'

Not only did the Arabs of Mandate Palestine claim they were but Southern Syrians, moreover, elements in Transjordan did as well.

June 14, 1928, Palestine Post:

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Revisiting "Palestine is Southern Syria; Palestinians are Southern Syrians"

I see Elder of Ziyon has found more interesting material confirming my assertion that "Palestine" was never an independent entity in Arab history (and if it weren't for the Zionists, Palestine would have disappeared from out memory).

He quotes Nazmi Al Jubeh, Bir Zeit University's Associate Professor of History and Archaeology and the director of Birzeit University Museum.

Elder quotes from this article: "Palestinian Identity and Cultural Heritage" and I will limit my quotations to a few excerpts:

The Palestinian people are not different from other Greater Syrian (Bilad al-Sham) peoples. They are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial, and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied, and passed through this strip of land. Wars and invasions have never totally replaced the local population in any period of history; they rather added to, mixed with and reformulated the local identity. The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jabousites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders, and the Kurds, who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine. [no Jews. or Israelites, or Judahides? In another section he complains that the "treatment of the history of Palestine starts with abstaining from deliberately marginalizing or even erasing the history of others."]

...The artificial division of Greater Syria [after World War One] was imposed on the people. If there had been no Sykes-Picot Agreement, I am not sure that the Palestinian people would have chosen an independent state as a container of their identity...The idea of an independent Palestinian state was raised quite recently; as a matter of fact, the Palestinian national movement continued to market the conflict as an “Arab-Israeli” one and not as a “Palestinian-Israeli” one. The idea of the Palestinian independent state was raised in 1973 in the aftermath of the October War and specific international, regional, and national political developments;...

Oh, and as regards "Palestine" being the name of a country, he notes:

the word “Palestine” is not clear; there are different interpretations of its meaning. (Brug 1985, Deger-Jalkotzy 1983, p. 99-120). As an administrative terminology, it was used since the Greco-Roman period in the first and second centuries BC. It is worth mentioning that Herodotus (ca. 490-430 BC) had already written about Palestine, meaning of more or less the now familiar land of Palestine...Herodotus extends the term “Palestinian Syria” to the entire coastal strip between Phoenicia (roughly today’s Lebanon) and Egypt. The Greek term “Palestine” was then transferred into Latin: “Palestina”. This Latin term, starting from 135 A.D., meant to the Romans the entire province of “Judea” and was introduced in order to erase the use of the term “Judea” after they had put down the Jewish rebellion against the Romans, to challenge the memory of the Jews. Jerusalem was renamed “Aelia Capitolina” (Wilkinson 1975, p. 118-136).

Thank you Prof. Al-Jubeh who, I am positive, I heard at lectures I attended at the Abright Institute (and about which I may have blogged).

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P.S.

On the Syria aspect:

The Peace Conference, as a result of the dissatisfaction, appointed [in 1919] an inter-Allied commission to ascertain the wishes of the people. France, who claimed the whole of Syria, which included Palestine, declined to send out her representatives; and her example was followed by England. The work of the Commission, therefore, devolved upon the two American representatives, Ambassador Crane and President King. This Commission held a most impartial and exhaustive inquiry, hearing delegates from almost every town and village. In order to be ready to give useful information before the Commission, branches of the Moslem and Christian League were formed at Jaffa, Gaza, Hebron, Djenin, Nablus, Acre, Haifa, Safed, and other places. All branches worked under a constitution approved by the Military Governor of Jerusalem. It was decided to draw up three resolutions to be presented to the Commission:

1. The independence of Syria, from the Taurus Mountains to Rafeh, the frontier of Egypt.
2. Palestine not to be separated from Syria, but to form one whole country.
3. Jewish immigration to be restricted.

The entire Christian and Moslem population agreed to these resolutions.

And at IV here:

"It should be said here that there is no justification, from an ethnological or geographical point of view, for dividing Syria into the northern part under the French and a southern part, namely Palestine, under the British. This has already been pointed out by the greatest authority on the history and geography of Palestine, Sir George Adam Smith. One race, the Syrian, or Palestinian, is dominant throughout the territory, from Aleppo to Beersheba; and there is no natural frontier that can divide the two halves of this land."

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Southern Syria, aka "Palestine"

I have blogged several times (here and here;) that, historically, a specific Palestinianism, that is, an Arab nationalism based on a country called Palestine and one distinct from other forms of Arab nationalisms, was quite late in developing.

Palestine was a region of Syria. It never was an independent country or state and its borders altered over centuries as did its internal administrative boundaries.

The idea to rejoin Palestine to Syria was a staple of their propaganda.

Into the mid-1920s, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission was receiving such requests. This line continued years later.

Here are some abstracts from a PhD dissertation relating to the subject:

...In December 1918, Hitti and George Khairalla established the New Syria National League. The group lobbied for the establishment of a Greater Syria under American protection, reaching from the Sinai to the Euphrates.229 These groups intensified their activities in light of the upcoming peace conference in Paris. Shatara and Hitti reached out to John Huston Finley, the chief of the Red Cross Commission in Palestine, asking Finley not to detach Palestine from Greater Syria.230 During the conference, Hitti’s New Syria National League also sent a telegram to Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau advocating an American protectorate over Syria. 231 Abraham Mitrie Ribhany, the author of ‘America save the Near East’ (cited above) and a member of both the Palestine Antizionism Society and the New Syria National League, attended the Paris conference. His presence allowed for direct lobbying with the American representatives in Paris and the members of the King-Crane commission. On March 15, he sent a petition on behalf of the New Syria National League to the Americans, which was also read by commission chief Henry C. King. The petition made the case for an American mandate over a Greater Syria.

... On April 21, 1922 Fuad Shatara and the New York attorney Selim Totah testified alongside anti-Zionist Jews in front of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs with regard to the Lodge-Fish resolution.236 In 1921, the Palestinian National League, the successor organization of the Palestine Antizionism Society, also published the book ‘The Case against Zionism’, a collection of anti-Zionist
articles by Jewish and Arab-American thinkers. The book ended with a call for “Palestine not be separated from her neighboring sister states.”237 The case of the Arab-Americans was still  overwhelmingly pan-Syrian and not in favor of an independent Arab Palestinian state. This focus would only change much later.

... In summer 1936, the Palestinian National League was replaced by its successor the Arab National League (ANL) in New York.335 The bulk of politically active Arab-Americans were of Syrian origin. Most of them had been followers of a pan-Syrian ideology, as seen above, before their eventual conversion to Arab or even Palestinian nationalism. The establishment of the Arab National League signified such a shift towards Arab nationalism. However, the language of pan-Syrian ideology was still present in the ANL’s publications. A manifesto published in 1937, which lays out the founding principles of the organization, for instance calls for “complete independence of the Syrian nation as a united, coherent political unit within the natural geographic borders of Natural Syria.”336 The term ‘Natural Syria’ not only includes the territory of the modern state of Syria, but also those of Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.337 The same manifesto declared “effective resistance to Zionism, the biggest threat to Syrian Unity”, as imperative.338

...The leading spokesman for the Arab Cause in the 1950s, however, was Fayez Sayegh...who was born in 1922 in Syria, was the scion of a prominent Protestant family, which had settled in Palestine during the British mandate period. He was a graduate of AUB and Georgetown.1036 Fayez and his older brother Yusif had been active in leading positions in the Palestine branch of Antoun Saadeh’s Syrian Socialist National Party (PPS) during the 1940s, with Fayez chairing the Culture and Propaganda Committee. The party sought to spread Saadeh’s pan-Syrian ideology. By the 1940s, Pan-Syrianism  had by now lost the popularity it had enjoyed in Palestine twenty years before and the party apparently met little success, as recounted by Yusif: “There was not a great deal of readiness to accept the ideas of the PPS because it emphasized the Syrianness of Palestine; that Palestine was Southern Syria. The Palestinians always call themselves ‘Arabs’, and they thought of the Palestine problem as an Arab problem rather than a Syrian problem.”1037


226 Knee, The Concept of Zionist Dissent in the American Mind, 1917-1941, 201–2.
227 “Untitled,” New York Times, November 9, 1917; cited in Davidson, “Debating
Palestine,” 230; see also Knee, “The King-Crane Commission of 1919,” 204.
228 Davidson, “Debating Palestine,” 231.
229 The Formation of Modern Iraq and Syria (Routledge, 2013), 147.
230 Knee, The Concept of Zionist Dissent in the American Mind, 1917-1941, 205.
237 Davidson, “Debating Palestine,” 232.
335 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 187–89; Davidson, “Debating Palestine,”
230–32.
336 Arab National League of America, “Declaration of the Arab (National) League”
1937; cited in Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 190–91.
337 Daniel Pipes, Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition (Oxford University Press,
1990), 142.
338 Arab National League of America, “Declaration of the Arab (National) League”;
cited in Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 190–91.
1035 “The Executives’ Club of Chicago Urges You to Hear Dr. Fayez Sayegh Counselor, Arab States Delegations, ‘Arab Nationalism and the West’” September 18, 1959, FSAC Mid001 Bx 239 Fd 4,
https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=842916.
1036 Mattar, Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, 359.

Palestine is Southern Syria.

Only the Jews conceived of it as a separate entity in recognizable borders.

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"Palestine" as Part of Syria

From the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Report of 1946:

As early as 1920, Palestine Arab opposition to Zionism and desire for self-government led to a threat to public security. Propaganda for union with an independent Syria led in April of that year to three days of rioting in Jerusalem, in which Arab mobs fell upon Jews with sticks, stones and knives. 

Note: not "Palestinian Arab" aka Arabs of a Palestine nationality but Arabs of Palestine.

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'Palestine is Southern Syria', The Map

I have blogged multiple times that the Arabs called today as "Palestinians", originally demanded not to be known as such and that the territory all called "Palestine" should be called "Southern Syria", not specifically "Palestine".

In other words, there was no unique Palestinian national identity among Arabs residing in the territory of what was accepted to be Palestine.  They were Syrians.

Here.

And here.

And also here.

And now, the map:

Take note.

So, is it the "Heritage of Palestine" or, the "Heritage of Southern Syria", etc.?

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UPDATE

...In line with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916...the French occupied the northern Levant, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River and beyond...The French quickly realized that their Syrian dominion – two millions inhabitants in 1920 – was a patchwork of conflicting communities. Charles de Gaulle, who was stationed as a young staff officer in Beyrouth from 1929 to 1931, dryly observed, “The people who live here never contented themselves with anything nor anybody.”...According to Viscount Robert de Caix de Saint-Aymour, Syria did not exist and would never exist. It had to be partitioned into smaller but more homogeneous entities...The State of Lebanon was created in 1920, and turned six years later into the semi-independent "

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The Oddity of Being Anti-Zionist is Becoming Anti-"Palestinian"

Just under 100 years ago, Albert T. Clay,  professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University, published an article in The Atlantic Monthly in its February 1921 issue.

It was so good that the author of a piece in Current Opinion a month earlier quoted him approvingly. That author (I was not successful in identifying him) had this opinion about Zionist leaders:

Clay thought that

this scheme for a Jewish state not only accentuates and increases the animosities that have always existed, but invites another tragic chapter in the history of the Hebrews."

Clay held there were 

three aspects of Zionism, namely, the religious, economic, and political aspects.

and defined them so:

Religious Zionism is an expression used to represent the belief of orthodox Judaism that the Jews are the chosen people of the one and only God; that a Messiah will be sent to redeem Israel; and that Jehovah will gather his people, restore the Temple and its service, and reestablish the priesthood and the Jewish  kingdom...Economic Zionism, so-called, has as its object the amelioration of the deplorable conditions in which Jews have lived in certain lands, where they have been outrageously persecuted...Political Zionism...claimed that the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would become an active force, by bringing diplomatic pressure to bear upon the nations, to secure protection for Jews in all lands. A clannish sense of pride in the Jewish race, however, seems to be uppermost in their minds. They apparently think that their status in society will be enhanced everywhere if a Jewish nation exists in Palestine. This phase of Zionism is the crux of the whole Palestine problem.

Political Zionism, Clay continues, seeks to

foist upon the intelligent public the idea that the population of this land is made up of Bedouins, or even of Arabs, is a deliberate attempt to deceive it.

They are not?

No.

The inhabitants of the land should be called Syrians — or Palestinians, if Palestine is to be separated from Syria. True, there are many Arabs living there, more, for example, than Greeks, Germans, or Latins, because of the proximity of Arabia; but these are not the real Palestinians, nor do they represent the bulk of the substantial part of the nation...There can be no question that the blood of the present Palestinian, or Syrian, includes that of the Jew as well as of the Amorite, Hittite, Phoenician, Philistine, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Arab. Such a fusion is not unlike that found in the veins of many Americans whose ancestors have lived here for several generations. When the whole population of Palestine became Mohammedan, there is little doubt that a large percentage of the Jews were also forced to accept this faith; their descendants are now classed by the Political Zionists as ‘Arabs.’...it is a deliberate misrepresentation to classify the inhabitants as ‘Arabs.’... if we are to decide the question of actual ownership of the territory, the Palestinian who has continuously lived there surely has a clearer title than the Jew. 

For some on my posts on the "Palestinians" actually being Southern Syrians, see:

here.

here.

here. 

and here.

Clay continues:

In order to be ready to give useful information before the [King/Crane] Commission, branches of the Moslem and Christian League were formed at Jaffa, Gaza, Hebron, Djenin, Nablus, Acre, Haifa, Safed, and other places. All branches worked under a constitution approved by the Military Governor of Jerusalem. It was decided to draw up three resolutions to be presented to the Commission:
1. The independence of Syria, from the Taurus Mountains to Rafeh, the frontier of Egypt.2. Palestine not to be separated from Syria, but to form one whole country.3. Jewish immigration to be restricted.
The entire Christian and Moslem population agreed to these resolutions.
It should be said here that there is no justification, from an ethnological or geographical point of view, for dividing Syria into the northern part under the French and a southern part, namely Palestine, under the British. This has already been pointed out by the greatest authority on the history and geography of Palestine, Sir George Adam Smith. One race, the Syrian, or Palestinian, is dominant throughout the territory, from Aleppo to Beersheba; and there is no natural frontier that can divide the two halves of this land...The question arises then, why should the land and people be separated, and two separate administrations be established, with all the expense that this implies? For the entire territory, from Aleppo to Beersheba, is only about 400 miles long and 100 miles wide — about the length of Pennsylvania, and one third its width? Why divide this small land and its people? 

There is no real "Palestine" and if it weren't for Zionism, we would never have heard of such a country or a nationality.

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l

Another "Palestine is Southern Syria" Reference

From this book, p. 139:

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Maybe A Smirky Laugh, Too?

The farce gets more farcical as the Palestinian Authority says legal proceedings will soon start against British government:

alleged Foreign Minister Riyad Malki said that legal proceedings against the British government will be soon brought before British, European and international courts to lift the injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people by the Balfour Declaration.

He said in a statement that the alleged State of Palestine "made every effort possible to persuade the British government to abandon plans to celebrate the centennial of the Balfour Declaration because such a celebration shows lack of sensitivity to the Palestinian people.”

However, because these efforts have failed to yield results and because of its moral and national obligation towards its people, the Foreign and Expatriates Ministry will soon act to bring legal proceedings before the British courts against the British government to remedy its mistake of 100 years, Malki said.

May I suggest to the British Government and others one line of defense:

at the time there was no concept of  a "Palestinian people".  Indeed there was no "Palestine" in recognized borders and there surely was no state o that name.

Moreover, the so-called "Palestinian people" then referred to themselves as Southern Syrians even in 1926.

And in addition, the Arabs welcomed the Declaration and Faisal signed an agreement to that effect.

Of course, the lawyers could simply stand up in court and start laughing.  It needn't be too smirky, though.

___________

P.S.

As someone wrote to me now:

They are suing the wrong people, the Declaration was only an aspirational letter. If anyone is to be sued it would be the League of Nations.

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Southern Syria Was Also a Palestinian Newspaper

Here:

Suriyya al-Janubiyya (Arabic: سوريا الجنوبية‎‎, 'Southern Syria') was the name of a newspaper published in Jerusalem beginning in September 1919 by the lawyer Muhammad Hasan al-Budayri, and edited by Aref al-Aref, with contributions from, amongst others, Haj Amin al-Husayni.

At the time, the term "Southern Syria" referred to a political position which implied support for the Greater Syria nationalism associated with the kingdom promised to the Hashemite dynasty of the Hejaz by the British during World War I. After the war, the Hashemite prince Faisal attempted to establish such a Pan-Syrian or pan-Mashriq state (i.e. a united kingdom that would comprise all of modern Syria, as well as Mount Lebanon and Palestine, including Transjordan, so that Palestine would be the province of "Southern Syria"). This kingdom was to be united with the other Hashemite domains in Hejaz and Iraq, thus contributing in large measure towards the fulfillment of Pan-Arabist ambitions. However, he was stymied by conflicting promises made by the British to different parties (see Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration and McMahon–Hussein Correspondence), leading to the French destruction of the self-proclaimed Kingdom of Syria in 1920.

The newspaper Suriyya al-Janubiyya espoused this Pan-Syria idea alongside Pan-Arabist and Palestinian nationalist political positions. These positions were not contradictory at the time and, in fact, were mutually supportive. With the disappearance of Faisal's Syrian kingdom, the idea of Pan-Syrianism lost support, and the newspaper focused on Palestinian nationalism and opposition to British rule and Zionist immigration, prior to the suppression of the paper by the British authorities in April 1920.

And here:

Southern Syria is a designation that is called the areas south of natural Syria, which are also known as historic Palestine and eastern Jordan (sometimes including the Houran Plain). This name was used during the London Conference in 1840 and was used by the British Encyclopedia in its 11th edition in 1911 as follows: «Palestine can be referred to as the third third of the state of Syria»

South Syria extends to the Sinai, where the Egyptian historian Abdul Rahman al-Jabarti referred to the inhabitants of El-Arish as Syrians [1]. This label spread especially at the end of the British mandate over Palestine and talk about a national homeland for the Jews in it. The Arabs of Palestine called for using this term to denote that this country is part of Syria. This term was used at the Syrian General Conference, which represented all the inhabitants of Syria (including the south) and called for its unity.

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Reconstructed vs. Poststructural Palestine

The authors of this 2011 essay, "The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine", Khaled Furani1 and Dan Rabinowitz, offer a thesis that

ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century [is]: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural.

 They further claim that

the new admissibility of Palestine [as subjects of anthropological inquiry] is embedded in two interrelated epistemological-political conditions. First is the demystification of nations and the ethnic groups that formed them, and a corresponding surge in the legitimacy afforded to groups with counterclaims.

and they seek to propose 

an ethnography that draws upon postcolonial critique but goes beyond its common concerns..a future ethnography of Palestine could examine the theological underpinnings of the secular state, as a particular embodiment of sovereignty. To what extent does such a state enable cohabitation of people with different religions or with none at all? What are the regimes of tolerance that national sovereignty requires and how are they produced? How might the Palestinian notion of summud (persistence) address the prevalent devaluation of patience in classical and contemporary analyses of power?...How might Palestinian narratives of return (‘awdah) challenge the selfevident linearity of the secular sense of time?...Can the predicament of modern Palestinians help rehabilitate a forgotten vocabulary of social theory that includes idioms such as silence; invisibility, finitude; revelation, fate; exile, and absence? 

One definition of ethnography is "the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution" and another has it that ethnography is "a sociological method that explores how people live and make sense of their lives with one another in particular places. The focus might be on people and the meaning they produce through everyday interactions, or places, and the organizational logics that guide our activities."

The article does not mention identification as Southern Syria, or actions and practices that would continue to seek that ethnic identification.

An example I recently noticed is in the words of Hadash Party President, and former MK, an Mohammad Barakeh when he condemned the U.S. attack in Syria. As Haaretz reported, on his Facebook page he wrote: 

“the solution in Syria must be a diplomatic one, getting rid of ISIS terror and whoever supports it, maintaining the unity of Syria as a country and nation with all its constituent components.”

As a political scientist as well as a logical and rational person, I would suggest that the underlined phrase above contains an implicit recognition of the demand for the reconstruction, not a poststructural, of Greater Syria wherein the region of "Palestine", which never was a defined country in Arab/Islamic history, is considered but Southern Syria.

I would hope those who wrote this essay and those who have read it, take my suggestion into consideration.

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