Newt and the “Invention” of Palestine

Palestinians are just Jordanians. Everything else is propaganda.

by Rod D. Martin
December 12, 2011

Newt Gingrich may have unnerved Mitt Romney by saying “Palestinian” is “an invented nationality”.  But he spoke the truth.

“Palestine” (from the Greek for Philistine, the deadly enemies of ancient Israel) was a creation of the World War I Allies after they severed it from the Ottoman Empire, or Turkey.  It was largely empty, and even then a large percentage of the people in the western portion (today’s Israel) were Jews.

In 1917 the British committed themselves in the Balfour Declaration to creating an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine, in the same way that the Allies shortly carved up Europe into independent homelands for the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Hungarians, Slovenes, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Croats.  This was based on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the driving principle of which was the end of empire and the right of self-determination.

Hardly anyone opposed this.  As Hussein ibn-Ali, the Ha…