It’s a shame to see Newt Gingrich haul out the old and stupid argument that the Palestinians are an “invented” people with no claim to the land they live on.
The Jewish Channel, a U.S. cable TV network, released excerpts of the interview on Friday in which the former House speaker said Palestinians were not a people because they never had a state and because they were part of the Ottoman Empire before the British mandate and Israel’s creation.
“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state — (it was) part of the Ottoman Empire. I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places,” Gingrich said, according to a video excerpt posted online.
Let’s remember that the Ottoman Empire was run by Turks and that the Turks ruled over the Arabs for centuries. By Gingrich’s logic, there are no Arab people, let alone Saudis, Iraqis, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, etc. Another way of looking at this question is to ask whether we invented Croats, Serbians, Slovenians, Kosovars, Bosnians, etc. Those ethnicities also lived under Ottoman rule, and then under the Yugoslav umbrella. When they began fighting over land, each of these groups had the theoretical opportunity to “go many places” to avoid the conflict.
Many Palestinians weren’t exercising much of choice when they were forced off their land and into the squalor of fetid refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
Gingrich says the most inflammatory and intolerant things about Muslims, and this is just one more example. It will probably help him gain a few points in the polls.