Last week, we linked to Mark Steyn's piece on Israel's pullout from Gaza, in which he wrote:

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

THE FICTION OF THE ‘PALESTINIAN’ IDENTITY

Amidst all the fine insights found in your piece on Gaza - the best of which is that what Sharon is doing is shifting Gaza from being Israel's problem to everybody's problem - you miss making one fundamental point about the genesis of Palestinian nationalism. The term Palestinian is not an ethnic identity, but a political identity generated only after the creation of Israel and defining itself expressly in antagonism to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. The premise of the modern push for nation-states was that the Greeks (ditto: Italians, Finns, Poles, Vietnamese, Koreans, Nepalese, Kurds, Tibetans etc ) possessed a distinct ethnic identity as a people and for that reason deserved self-government in their own state. This rationale is inapplicable to what had been, for three decades in any delineated form, the geopolitical entity called "Palestine".

There were no "Palestinians" under Ottoman rule 1500-1917. Nor under the preceding Mameluke, Abbassid, Ummayyad etc rule. There were, in what was long known in the West as the Holy Land: Arabs, Jews, Druze, Greeks, Turks, Circassians and Armenians with Bedouins on the arid margins. The Arabs, speaking the Syrian dialect of Arabic, insofar as they aligned with a national identity at all, thought of themselves as Syrians and then only towards the very end of Ottoman rule. The Ottoman-ruled land west of the Jordan River, was merely the southern end of the vilayet ( primary administrative division) of Beirut." Palestine" even as a geographic descriptor came to exist, by the second half of the C19th, only in the minds of Europeans hoping to wrest the Holy Land from the ailing Ottoman Empire. It was not a descriptor embraced or even recognized by the local Arabs anymore than the Seminole Indians embraced or recognized the descriptor "Florida" as the name given by the Spanish to the peninsula upon which they lived.

The United Nations, in creating an agency to look after those displaced after the 1948 war, didn't give it the suffix "[UNRWA] for Palestine refugees in the Near East" out of gratuitous long-windedness - nobody, not even the refugees, recognized any ethnic identity "Palestinian". Various Arab representatives said just that in numerous inquiries to sort out the mess that British Palestine had become.

There was a very good reason that the PLO was founded in 1963 as the Palestine, not Palestinian, Liberation Organisation; the notion of a distinct Palestinian identity had yet to begin its long gestation. Moreover, the PLO was not so much concerned with creating a place for people, just as now with the PA as you rightly point out, but removing other people from that place. Its charter - Point 1- was explicitly directed to liberating the land that the Jews occupied. As Jordan had also been created out of British Palestine, the PLO's charter also implicitly had the lands of the Hashemite dynasty targeted as phase two. Note that when a Palestinian national flag was invented, they took the Jordanian flag minus the Hashemite crest.

Only after Israel wrested control of the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt respectively in 1967, was the notion of a Palestinian people invented. Taking their cue from the Algerian and Vietnamese national liberation movements, the PLO cannily understood that they would have to cast themselves as a people who were merely seeking national sovereignty. As the period 1948 -1967 had demonstrated, an irridentist movement with a catch cry " Liberate the south-western corner of Syria from the Jews " would be a non-starter. Western sympathies were much more likely to be elicited with " Liberate the Palestinian people ", so they gave it a go. One must concede that it proved to be a magnificent PR strategy as much of the West by the late 1970's had bought it hook, line and sinker. And today everybody knows that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Hafez Assad , in common with the PLO, never regarded " Palestine" and " Palestinian" as anything more than rhetorical devices for Western consumption, to assist in the removal of the Zionist entity and thereby pave the way for Greater Syria. And he reminded the famous Cairene, Yasser Arafat (posthumous congrats "Mr Palestine" on a job well done - you fooled 'em all you old bugger) of this fact often. Too often, as Arafat, seeing dills like President Carter of the USA fretting about the "Palestinians" needing their own state, decided by 1980 that he could dispense with Assad's patronage (Arafat's Fatah - Arab Homeland - movement was formed pre-PLO under Syrian tutelage) and become lord of his own little fief. Hence the surprising 1982 re-alignment of Syria to the Christian side in the Lebanese civil war. Dr Frankenstein had decided his little monster had gotten out of his control and should be crushed or driven out to somewhere distant like Tunisia.

How the Kurds and Tibetans - peoples just as venerably distinct as Estonians or Thai - must weep over the profound misfortune of having been occupied by states other than a Jewish one.