Fashion & Art

The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.

I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.

Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they're just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just... scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go "Arab." An Arab is an Arab. It's a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it's all the same to them.

It's a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.

Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren't the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don't create an ethnostate by sharing.