I would never say I knew everything there is to know about the territories that have been called “Palestine”, but I do know that Westerners who visited that area in the nineteenth century (before Zionism) met both Jews and Arabs living there. Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad” from 1869, for example (though he is rarely positive about either group).

Who are the Balestinians?

The Palestinian narrative in the Holy Land has always relied on their perceivable indigenous standing as a people in the land for thousands of years. To uninformed observers Palestine is the location’s authentic name. After all, the maps confirm this “fact.”

Further down – a quote by Anat Berko:

“As we’ve noted, the letter ‘P’ doesn’t even exist in Arabic, so the borrowed term (Palestine) is worth looking into.”

OK – time for AI!!!

DeepSeek – Does the letter ‘P’ exist in Arabic?

No, the letter “P” does not exist in the Arabic alphabet. Arabic has its own set of letters, and while many sounds in Arabic correspond to sounds in other languages, the “P” sound is not native to Arabic. As a result, Arabic speakers often substitute the “P” sound with the closest available sound, which is “B” (?). For example, the name “Paul” might be pronounced as “Baul” by Arabic speakers.

Guess the map makers didn’t know that…

The “palestinian” issue is not intractable; it is not even a difficult problem. It is merely that nobody was willing to do what is required to remedy it.

Agreed there.

It was started by the USSR, which used Arafat and his supporters as a tool against the western allies.

No it wasn’t. At best the “Palestinian” label was started by the USSR and its allies like the aforementioned, or at least popularized. But the problem of anti-Jewish, genocidally totalitarian Arab ethnonationalism in the area well predates the Soviets, and first metastasized in the 1920s under the likes of Amin al-Husseini, who were clients of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, not the Soviets (who funded parallel groups but had little traction).

This is something I think trying to simplify things to being “just another USSR plot” fails, especially when you see how the Balestinians like Hamas, PIJ, and Fatah use and re-use the icons and labels of the previous age like the Sheikh Qassem (one of al-Husseini’s allies) and rhetoric.

Arafat etc. al. were pawns of the Soviets, but they were willing pawns of it with agendas that well predated sizable Soviet influence. And even pawns can make moves of their own.

After the USSR was dissoved, the western allies continued to treat the palestinians like they were still supported by the USSR, and the palestinians got it into their heads that they were insulated from attack just as they had been when the USSR was extant.

Not really. The IDF pursued a similar policy of trying to bleed out the paramilitaries going back to the late 1940s, if not the 1930s back before it was teh IDF proper. Soviet influence helped make things worse but it didn’t create this problem.

It’s all been a sham and a fool’s game.

Agreed there.

The solution to the problem is simply to eliminate the problem; Trump just made that crystal clear. There will no longer be “palestinians.”

And that gets screamed from the rooftops by “Balestinian” nationalists and their patrons like Iran and Qatar.

The idiot, self-destructive “palestinians” set the stage for this resolution by stupidly attacking Israel on October 7, 2023. They gave Israel and by extension, the world permission to eliminate them. Once removed from their nesting/breeding place, they will find their political influence as dispersed as their physical location. Problem solved.

Even if that worked in theory and the Israelis and others were prepared to accept what was needed, it didn’t work before. Hence things like the Beirut era of the BLO/PLO that helped kick start a new round of Lebanese Civil Wars.

Their communities do need a healthy amount of denazification and possibly relocation, but that won’t be easy and there’s always the risk they will continue stirring shit up elsewhere (like in Kuwait). But just killing them all would not be tolerable. Nor should it be. We aren’t genocidal, they are. But when you have nearly a century of a group being under genocidal leadership it’s hard as hell to subdue or reform it in any kind of sustainable way.

And that was a problem well before the Soviets were, even if the Soviets helped evolve the problem into its current shape.

Someone needs to do that meme with the dude holding the arm of one girl while looking back at a different one. Trump’s the dude, of course. North Korea is the girl on his arm and Gaza is the hot new one.

Trump’s Plan to Free the Palestinians.
https://archive.md/Nqoft

The purpose of the strip is to keep them as perpetual refugees waging a forever war on Israel.

Dershowitz has some good points, but the main one is that it’s time to think of something different than the old, unworkable status quo, and Trump’s idea is getting that discussion going.
Plus, historically, even as recently as WWII, forcibly moving and replacing populations has long-established precedent, and it was a good thing for world peace. (Well, up to a point; Russians taking Konigsberg is still a problem.)

He also reminds us that Trump did “what can’t be done” when he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and other things in his first term.
Not celebrating everything Trump does, but not denying credit for what he has done, especially to help Israel.
Giving Trump an E for effort and an A for action.
Reminds us that some people always sacrifice for peace, and houses (where you live) is not as important as raising your children in peace (I think he imputes more rationality to Gazans than they have exhibited).
Reviews Obama’s Iran deal — they were lying — and praises Trump for getting out of that deal. Both promised that Iran would not get the bomb, but Obama was lying, and Trump is not.
Dersh says he had been friends with the Obamas for many years, and he regrets the break between them (IMO, obviously, he was being used as cover, “some of my best friends are Jews” style).

“We can’t predict what will happen” if America takes control; no one really supports any other plan to put Fatah, Jordan, or Egypt in charge.
He wants to give Trump’s proposal a chance, although he still wants to think about it, and appreciates the fresh new idea.
I liked the Jewish proverb he cited: Don’t make a decision while standing on one leg. IOW, sit down and consider the issue.

By the end, he sounds like a Trump bro!

We can be pretty sure that Dersh is NOT getting grants from USAID.

Well, in response to a call for out of the box thinking, maybe we could float an iceberg into the Mediterranean and put the Gazans on it as part of a beachfront resort build out.

Perhaps Kate or others can comment on this fantasy idea I had:
Given how poorly the Christian Egyptian Copts are treated by the local Muslims, I had the thought that those 8 million (?) people could be relocated into the Sinai or into Gaza, with Gazans taking over their housing in Eygpt. The Bedouins in N Sinai would have to be accommodated somehow if it went that way? And Egypt does not want the Gazans, either, so maybe that part would not work. But with the Trump idea, maybe the Copts could be brought into Gaza to do the rebuilding, then move there as more housing is available. I also understand the Copts, although Christian, are not real fans of the Israelis, either. But they are not terrorist jihadis, either. I did suggest it as a fantasy.

Well, Western scholarship over the last 10+ years has suggested that the MHMD references* in the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, relating to “the praised one” or “the annointed one”, actually refers to Jesus, not Mohammed. The argument is that the Arabs living and controlling the rea were really Christians of one variety or another, also shown by the impressions of a cross on some of the coins from that era (around 690 AD).

This of course calls into question the historical existence of Mohammed, so perhaps the Jordanian King is not a descendent after all. But he is also probably not a descendent of Jesus, either, except in the context that all mankind are claimed as His descendents.

*[=all consonants without vowels, so open to multiple interpretations]