“A Jihad Watch reader recently took issue with my noting that the world had never heard of the “Palestinian” nationality before the 1960s: "‘You are absolutely wrong on all counts. First of all there was never any Palestine to begin with... so who exactly do you mean by Palestinians?' There were also no "Israelis" as such until Israel was officially created. Both identities are constructed ones. Again, so what?

In the end, they're fighting over land. If either side wanted peace, they'd have it by now. As it is, there are people on both sides who have profited, and continue to profit, from the continuation of hostilities."

No, but the word "Palestinians" and the invention of the "Palestinian people" was a deliberate construct. It did not begin right away. It was not the term used, ever since there were Arabs in what Western Christendom called "Palestine." The local Arabs never used the phrase until after the defeat in the Six-Day War. And then, having jettisoned Shukairy a few years before, the Arabs collectively decided, with a little help from public-relations advisers in the West, to thoroughly redo their presentation.

The most important thing was to redefine the conflict. No longer are all those Arabs against a tiny Jewish state. No. Now, by an act of optical illusion, the tiny Jewish state would be transformed into a vast empire, this Greater Israel. Why, the same BBC newscasters who routinely refer to Lebanon as that "tiny country" and to Jordan as that "tiny country" -- I hear it all the time -- for some reason never use that epithet with Israel. Never. Not once. Yet that Greater Israel, even if it came into being, would be all of the size of Massachusetts, and less than one one-thousandth the size of the Arab states.

But the absurdities pile up. It was time to rename the local Arabs, both those in the territories won by Israel that were part of the original Palestine Mandate (Gaza, the "West Bank" -- quondam Judea and Samaria) and those who had been called simply, and a bit too easily, "Arab refugees" -- by every single Arab spokesman at the U.N., the Arab League, and elsewhere. These were the people living in those villages (always described as "refugee camps," though some are full-fledged cities, and all have stores and built-up areas; these are not tent cities, the kind of thing that refugees in Darfur must endure) in Jordan, Lebanon, and so on.

The term "Israeli" was not deliberately invented to score political points. Far from it. The Jews of Israel are really what is in play here, the survival of a Jewish state, of the right of the Jews to have a state.

It is absurd to equate the deliberate and sinister creation of this fake "Palestinianidentity" (google "Zohair Mohsen" and "Palestinian people" for more) for political ends, with the simple term "Israeli" to describe those who are citizens of the state of Israel.

So let's do it otherwise. Let's, more truthfully, talk about Arabs and Jews. Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. Do the Jews who come from the Middle East have a right to a state?

Remember, a million of them in 1948, having endured for centuries the life of dhimmis under Muslim rule (save in those places, such as North Africa, where the brief rule by European powers led to Jewish emancipation from the burden of living under Shari'a -- thanks in Algeria to the loi Cremieux of 1870), left the Arab countries where they had lived, and most fled to the state of Israel. Do the Jews have a right to a state, a state that can be defended against permanent Muslim aggression, or do they not?

And as for the local Arabs, their numbers have been exaggerated -- few bother to consult the Ottoman cadastral or demographic records, such as they are, in pronouncing on the subject of "Palestine," and fewer still put that "Palestine" and the non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities of the Middle East into their proper light, their proper perspective. Do the Kurds also, now is perhaps the time to add, have a right to an independent state? And Lebanon, by rights, should remain a haven, a final haven, for the Arabic-using Christians -- not all, by a long shot, are Arabs -- in the Middle East. …