The Palestinian Historian

My Palestinian history professor paced from one end of the platform to the other. He had taken off his suit jacket and his pink dress shirt was rolled up past the elbows. He was gesturing forcefully and passionately to punctuate each word that he was saying. Suddenly he stopped behind his desk and pounded the desk with his hand as he shouted his condemnation of Arafat and the PLO (it was kind of like Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the podium back in the day, sorry that was the only example I could think of to help you picture the situation). My Palestinian history professor is awesome. He's walked the walk, and now he's talking the talk. The entire class hangs on each word he says. He had so many great quotes today in class that I wrote down as many as I could to share them with you. Some I do not agree with, but I will share them all the same because mere disagreement shouldn't stop someone from admiring the words being spoken. In the middle of his lecture, he started passionately condemning Arafat and the PLO for signing agreements with Israel that no Palestinian had seen and approved of beforehand. He said "Who gave him the right to speak for Palestine!? Who gave him the right!? We didn't! I want to write a critique of Arafat in Arabic for my people to read, but I can't do that. My people would shoot me." He says that the Palestinians need to stop the cult worship of Arafat and recognize him as the swindler and liar that he was. He went on to talk about how the Palestinians desperately want a state, but are going about it entirely the wrong way. He shouted at us "Slogans on a wall do not create a state! Facts on the ground create a state!" In the first part of the quote, he was referencing the graffiti Palestinians have painted on the security fence. He continued on this train of thought, shouting with conviction: "If you want a state, you build it! That's what the Jews did! You build schools, hospitals, roads, and bridges! YOU PAY YOUR EMPLOYEES INSTEAD OF TAKING ALL OF THE MONEY FOR YOURSELF! Abbas (President of Palestine), you do not need 15 Mercedes to drive 2 miles! You do not need 28 ministers when 18 would be more than enough!" He did not spare the Israelis criticism either. He looked at us and said, "The Israelis cannot go to war and take land and keep it! The Americans never did that!" This was one of the few things he said that I disagreed with, purely on a historical technicality. America most definitely went to war for land and kept said land when we won. That was what the Mexican War was all about. We took the entire southwest from Mexico. I didn't correct the man because I am merely a student and he is the professor, and you do not correct professors unless they've made a grave error, and even then you must hesitate before taking the plunge. They have earned our respect. Anyway, he continued along this line of reasoning, "We (the Palestinians) go back to 637 A.D. (the conquest of the land of Israel by the Muslims) This land is ours! We are the original inhabitants!" Here again, I disagreed with him (privately). Please bear with me, as I am about to try and summarize thousands of years of history in a paragraph. The original inhabitants of "Palestine" were the Canaanites. No, before you ask, the modern Palestinians are not descendants of the Canaanites. The Jewish people, or the Israelites, settled in "Palestine" in about 1250 B.C. (or earlier, depending on what year Abraham settled there, but they settled as a people in about 1250 B.C.), and created the Kingdom of Israel (about 1800 years before the Muslim conquest). Even though the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 B.C. and the Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., Jews remained in the land of Israel, through Persian, Greek, and Roman occupation. After the second failed Jewish revolt in the 130's A.D., the Roman Emperor of the time (Hadrian) decided to make an end to the "Jewish problem". He blotted "Israel" and "Judea" out of all of the maps and changed the name of the land to "Palestine", a reference to the ancient Philistines, the Israelites' ancestral enemies. So originally, the term "Palestine" was meant as an insult to the Jewish people by an anti-Semitic emperor. Even during this time, according to my professor, the Palestinians didn't show up until 500 years later, and Jews were always present in the land right up until 1948. Research the histories and conflict for yourself and make up your own minds; don't send me a message or email biting my head off if you happen to disagree with my timeline. The professor, in any case, commands great respect because of the passion and sincerity that he brings to the subject. He concluded the lecture by saying, "The problem, the conflict, boils down to this: The Israelis do not know what they want. And the Palestinians do not know what they want. If they would just decide! If Israel would take a map and draw the borders it wants, and if the Palestinian leadership would do the same, then we would get somewhere! Then we can actually start negotiating! But nobody knows what they want, and you can't reach a viable agreement if neither party doesn't have a clue!" He ended with a warning to all of us, "People are losing hope, and when they lose hope, how can you make peace?" I may not agree with everything the guy says, but he is still a great man, and there is much that he can teach and that I can learn about this area of the world. He truly is middle of the road, a legitimate moderate, a man who has incurred the wrath of the Palestinians many times over the years for daring to say that they must work with Israel instead of hating them. It is a privilege to listen to him.