Sunday, November 14, 2004
This is almost a decent article in that the author's point is fairly taken - the Palestinian Arabs would do better with a fresher, more sophisticated face than Yasser Arafat's. The problem comes when she tries to sneak in a little bit of bad history:
Washington Post: The Truer Palestinian Face:
But my grandmother, like so many Palestinians, was educated because she had to be. Because so many Palestinians are dispossessed of their land, they have to carry their culture and history in their heads...
The author has her facts reversed. The word Palestinian comes from the word Philistine. The Philistines were the ancient biblical enemies of the Jews, and after the final Roman conquest of of the Jewish Kingdom, the Romans applied the name to the region:
The ancient Philistines have no historic connection to the Arab peoples living there in modern times. Etymology and Word History: [see link for special characters]
WORD HISTORY: It has never been good to be a Philistine. In the Bible Samson, Saul, and David helped bring the Philistines into prominence because they were such prominent opponents. Though the Philistines have long since disappeared, their name has lived on in the Hebrew Scriptures. The English name for them, Philistines, which goes back through Late Latin and Greek to Hebrew, is first found in Middle English, where Philistiens, the ancestor of our word, is recorded in a work composed before 1325. Beginning in the 17th century philistine was used as a common noun, usually in the plural, to refer to various groups considered the enemy, such as literary critics. In Germany in the same century it is said that in a memorial at Jena for a student killed in a town-gown quarrel, the minister preached a sermon from the text �Philister �ber dir Simson! [The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!],� the words of Delilah to Samson after she attempted to render him powerless before his Philistine enemies. From this usage it is said that German students came to use Philister, the German equivalent of Philistine, to denote nonstudents and hence uncultured or materialistic people. Both usages were picked up in English in the early 19th century.
So the word "Philistine" is a word that has its origins in the Hebrew Bible as many Western cultural expressions of speech do. It is used with impunity as a derogatory word today because there have not been any Philistines or their descendants around to be offended by it in a very, very long time.
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Solomon said this: "So the word "Philistine" is a word that has its origins in the Hebrew Bible as many Western cultural expressions of speech do. It is used with impunity as a derogatory word today because there have not been any Philistines or their descendants around to be offended by it in a very, very long time."
If there are no philistines or their descendents around today then who are the palestinians. The philistines were arabized with the Islamic conquests after the birth of Islam - but they still carry philistine blood in their veins. No populations exist in a vacuum - that is exist without contact and interbreeding of some type with foreign groups. In this very way the Philistines were Romanized - and then later Arabized - and today are considered arabs as their mother tongue has been Arabic since the Islamic expansions out of the Arabian Penninsula (before that it was Palestinian Aramaic and before that it was unknown as there are no surviving Philistine texts only very short and very limited and obscure inscriptions on pottery sherds) - But there no doubt has been some amount of gene flow from the Philistines of the Bible to the Palestinians of modern times. As a matter of fact there likely was even gene flow from the Cannanites (the pre-philistine and pre-hebraic culture that existed in modern Israel/Palestine before the arrival of the Hebrews or the philistines) to the Philistines of the Bible when the Philistines arived on the coast of Canaan sometime around the 12th or 13th centuries BC - meaning there is also Cannanite blood in the veins of modern Palestines - not to mention also in the blood of the indigenous Jews of Palestine/Israel (not including jews of European ancestry).
I understand I have "blood" in my veins from people who dwelled in the area of what is now an east African rift valley, but so what? We're not talking about genes here. Of course there's always intermingling of races, but thanks for pointing out that European Jews have no racial tie to the area.
The Philistines as a "people" (a language, a culture, a polity) were lost to history by the time the Romans arrived, hell, they were done by the time Alexander the Great arrived, AFAIK. I'm fairly certain that the Babylonians deported the last of them (other than perhaps a remnant that never coalesced into anything?) and unlike many of the Jews, they never came back.
As to who the modern Palestinians are, it would take a bit more of an expert to say - hopefully one who's not poisoned by modern politics. There have been many conquests and migrations in that area over the past three-thousand years. I suspect, though, that they're probable from the same area of rift valley that I'm from.
Edit: Besides, even if there were *anyone* left that identified with or came as a direct decendent of the ancient Philistines, how is it that people spread all over what is now Jordan, Jerusalem and Judea and Sammaria could lay claim to such a connection? It doesn't even begin to make sense.