In an interview aired on The Jewish Channel on Friday, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said, "I believe that the Jewish people have the right to have a state. Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, who are historically part of the Arab community." Gingrich, who earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Tulane University in 1971, often describes himself as a historian, so when he makes a statement dealing with history, he should be believed, right? Not in this case.
Gingrich makes three historical claims in these brief remarks that are incorrect and one that is correct. We can dispose of the correct claim first: Palestine was indeed once part of the Ottoman Empire, and before that part of the Mamluk Sultanate, the Kingdom of Jerusalem (a Crusader State), the Fatimid Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Sassanid Empire (briefly), the Byzantine Empire, the Parthian Empire (briefly), the Roman Empire, the Ptolemaic Empire, the Seleucid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, and the Hittite Empire. Palestine and the surrounding lands of the Levant have changed hands a lot during the 5,000+ years of recorded history. So Gingrich is right: the land we now call Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. However, even this correct historical note in his comments is somewhat misleading, because it seems to suggest that the land of Palestine (or "Palestine," as Gingrich might put it) was transformed after the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I directly into the state of Israel. Of course it first went through a period of "supervision" by the British, when it was known as the British Mandate of Palestine. The history of the region in the decades leading up to and since the independence of Israel in 1948 is covered well in the U.N. document entitled The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988. Now to the misrepresentations of history.
First, Gingrich claims that "there was no Palestine as a state." This statement begs the question, what is the origin of the name Palestine? The modern name comes directly from the name of the Roman province of Syria Palaestina, formed after the failure of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 132-135 C.E., in which Jewish followers of Simeon Bar Kochba attempted to drive the Romans out of Judaea. The name Palaestine is a Latin version of Philistia, named after one of the early inhabitants of the land, the Philistines. The Philistines, who perhaps originated in Crete, were part of a larger movement of Mediterranean people attempting to migrate from their places of origin in the west to the lands of Egypt, Canaan, Hatti, and Mesopotamia. Since many of them came by ship to their new homes, they were called Sea Peoples by the earlier inhabitants of those lands. The Hittite Empire in Anatolia fell under the pressure of the invasions. Egypt managed to repel the Sea Peoples from Egypt proper (i.e., African Egypt), but only at the expense of the territory they controlled to the north of the Sinai Peninsula, the land of Canaan, to which they redirected the group of Sea Peoples who became known as the Philistines.
Historians of the ancient Near East believe that the Philistines entered Canaan from the west at about the same time as the people who were called Israel were entering from the east, about 1200 B.C.E., at the beginning of the Iron Age. The fact that it was the beginning of the Iron Age was significant in the early interactions between the Philistines, who inhabited the coastlands, and the Israelites, who inhabited the hill country to the east. (The original inhabitants, the Canaanites, along with subgroups such as Jebusites, and a smattering of other people groups such as Hittites and Hurrians, mostly lived in walled cities and the immediately surrounding villages in the lowlands.) According to an account in the book of Judges, the Philistines for awhile had a monopoly on iron smelting in the region, and thus with their iron weapons they were able to prevent further Israelite movement to the west, where the Philistine lived (the Israelites had only Bronze weapons at the time). The Philistines established five major cities which more or less defined the land of Philistia: Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gaza, and Gath, in approximately the same region as the modern Gaza Strip. Although the Philistines were probably originally Greek-speaking, like the Israelites they adopted the Canaanite language as their own within a century or so (Hebrew is a form of the Canaanite language; Israelite tradition told of Aramaic-speaking ancestors). Philistia was one of several small states that flourished in the region during the 450-year power vacuum that was bracketed by the collapse of the five regional powers (Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria, and Babylonia, c. 1200 B.C.E.) and the rise to power of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-pileser III (745 B.C.E.). Other small states in the region were Israel, Judah, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Aram, and Phoenicia. The fact that Philistia, the ancestor and namesake of Palestine, flourished for several centuries as an independent state in the region, and that its claims to antiquity rival those of Israel, belie Gingrich's claim that there has never been a Palestinian state.
If Gingrich were to counter that this Philistine/Palestinian state existed too long ago to count, he would have to explain why he makes that argument with regard to Palestine but doesn't make the same argument with regard to Israel, which lost its independence to Tiglath-pileser at the same time as his conquest of Philistia. The small state of Judah persisted for another 135 years before its conquest by the Babylonians. Judah enjoyed another brief period of independence for about a century, from 167 to 63 B.C.E. However, to follow Gingrich's logic concerning the names of the states, Judah does not equal Israel. They were related, but not precisely the same, in the centuries preceding the common era.
Gingrich's second fallacious historical argument is that the Palestinians are "an invented people." It has already been established that all or part of the land that today makes up the state of Israel and the Palestinian Territories was called Philistia, or its Latin derivative Palestine, from the late second millennium B.C.E. But did the name cease to be used until it was revived in the modern period? Hardly! The Byzantine emperors (who called themselves Roman emperors; "Byzantine Empire" is a modern invention: maybe the Byzantines were an invented people!) continued to call the territory Palestine. After the Arabs took the territory from the Byzantines, they continued to call it Palestine, or as it was pronounced in Arabic, Jund Filastin, "the land of Palestine." The name was used throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period both by its Arab overlords and by European observers and visitors. Shakespeare, for example, refers to Palestine in both The Life and Death of King John and Othello. Notably, the First Zionist Congress in 1897, chaired by Theodor Herzl, founder of the Modern Zionist Movement, states, "Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine." Clearly the name Palestine has a long and persistent history in the region.
Not surprisingly, the people who have lived there over the centuries have often been referred to as Palestinians (i.e., people of Palestine). But perhaps Gingrich is arguing that the people of Palestine are not a true people group, or nation. If so, this is a particularly pernicious line of argument. The land of Palestine has been a crossroads for people traveling from Egypt and Arabia in the south to Mesopotamia and Anatolia in the north for millennia. The valuable trade routes through the region were precisely the reason that so many battles were fought over it in ancient times, from the epic wars of Egypt and Hatti in the mid-second millennium B.C.E. to the various Arab conquests of the medieval and modern periods. Not surprisingly, many of the people of the region can trace their ancestry to people who hail from a variety of people-groups, including Canaanites, Greeks, Romans, Hittites, Egyptians, Jews, and Arabs, among others. Does the fact that the ancestors of the Palestinians came from many different regions disqualify them from bring a "true" rather than an "invented" people? No, not any more than it prevents Jews and many other groups from being labeled "invented." For a real "invented" people, look at Americans!
Third, Gingrich says that the Palestinians "are in fact Arabs, who are historically part of the Arab community." Yes, many of the ancestors of the modern Palestinians originated in Arabia, but as just noted, they have many other ancestors as well, undoubtedly including people indigenous to the region and who occupied it at the dawn of the historical period. By calling the Palestinians Arabs, Gingrich may be alluding to the fact that they are unified by a common language, Arabic. Things are not quite so simple, however. It turns out that "Arabic" is an umbrella term for a number of related, though sometimes mutually unintelligible, languages spoken by people throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Saying that Palestinians speak Arabic is commonplace, but in actuality it is akin to saying that Italians and the French speak Latin. The common Arabic base language is preserved in the Quran and is used in formal writing, but the languages that are spoken and used in informal writing vary from region to region. Palestinians speak Levantine Arabic, one of five major forms of Arabic (properly, one of five different related languages). So yes, Palestinians speak a form of Arabic, but not the same form as that spoken in other areas, such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
It is also possible that by identifying the Palestinians as Arabs Gingrich is alluding the great Arab/Muslim expansion that began after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. Like the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans before them (cf. also European Christian colonialism afterwards), the Arabs went on wars of conquest and missionary proselytism beginning in the seventh century, and one of the first places they conquered was Palestine. Calling the Palestinians Arabs may be a subtle way of pointing out that they weren't the original inhabitants of the region, that they were in fact foreigners, perhaps in contrast to the Jews (or Israelites, or Greeks, or Romans). If that is the point in identifying the Palestinians with Arabs, then Gingrich is in good historical company. The oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible was begun in the third century B.C.E., and it was a translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. About a century later many of the books describing the history of Israel from its settlement in the land of Canaan to the Babylonian exile were translated into Greek, and the translators often used the term αλλοφυλοι (allophyloi), "foreigners," to refer to the Philistines. This designation is particularly ironic in the light of the history of the Philistines recounted above, since they appeared in the land of Canaan at about the same time as the Israelites. If the point of identifying the Palestinians as Arabs is to rob them of their identity as descendants of indigenous settlers in the region--yes, mixed with many later peoples as well--then the same could be applied to many people living in many different lands.
Gingrich elaborates on his description of the Palestinians as Arabs by saying that "they are historically part of the Arab community." Which Arab community? There hasn't been a single Arab community since the days when the Arabs swept out of the Arabian Peninsula into Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and eventually the Iberian Peninsula and parts of eastern Europe. The vast region controlled by the Muslims included many Arabs and descendants of mixed Arab-indigenous marriages, but they also included native Persians, Egyptians, Berbers, and others. The area was too large to be controlled by a single individual, and the Muslim world was quickly divided into rival caliphates and sultanates. The largest, the Abbasid Caliphate, fractured into smaller groups within two centuries, and there has not been a single "Arab community" since.
Perhaps Gingrich means that since Palestinians are Arabs, they are also Muslims, and thus they are part of a larger Muslim community. That is true to an extent. Most Palestinians are Muslims, but prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, sizeable populations of both Jews and Christians lived in the region, and a sizeable minority of Palestinians and members of the Palestinian diaspora continue to identify themselves as Christians. A look at the history of the region reveals that Arab Jews and Christians have a long history. The Quran mentions tribes in the Arabian Peninsula that had converted to Judaism prior to the time of Muhammad, and some Arabs and their descendants continued to practice the Jewish faith. Similarly, groups of Arabs converted to Christianity in the first few centuries of the common era, and the New Testament was translated into Arabic by the eighth or ninth century. Also, does the larger Muslim community include both Sunnis and Shia? That's hardly a single group, religiously speaking! The Palestinians, like other Arabs, are not completely homogeneous in their religion any more than they are in their genetics, but that doesn't preclude them from being a "real" as opposed to an "invented" people.
In conclusion, Gingrich's comments concerning the Palestinians are faulty on a number of historical bases. The Palestinian people have a rich, diverse, and interesting history, and they deserve better than to be labeled an "invented" people. Many populations throughout history have failed to establish independent states in the modern sense, yet we regard them as "real" peoples without question. Several modern examples include the Catalonians, the Basque, the Kurds, the Comanche, the Apache, the Hmong, the Karen, and the San. All are "real" peoples, along with the Palestinians.