Submitted by Lawrence Kuznick, Jun 25, 2007 06:50

The Hamas leader, Ismael Haniyeh, said yesterday: ".....Our land, our nation will not come back to us except with steadfastness and resistance." Frankly, what nation? There never was a "nation" there until the Jews created one. That led to Palestinian nationalism. But that was within the fold of Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank (Jordan being anyway a mostly Palestinian population) and Egypt controlling Gaza. "Palestine" as a nation never existed. Indeed, in the 1930's and 1940's, when one said "Palestinian", it was a reference to the Jews there, never the Arabs. The Arabs were part of the Ummah, all the Moslems. They never thought of themselves in the narrow sense of nationality.

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