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Oh, and you're right, there is no such thing as a Palestinian people (in terms of them being a separate and distinct nation from other arabs). A palestinian, by the UN definition, is any arab that is descended from someone who lived west of the Jordan before 1948 for 2 years or more. That's it. While a very small minority of the palestinians are actually descended from arabs who had been in the land a long time, the vast majority are descended from arab migrant workers and laborers who went to the land seeking employment, after Jewish immigration, and their development of the land, started creating economic opportunity. These people were not native to the land. The palestinians are made up of egyptian, syrian, jordanian, and lebanese arabs. They do not have a unique history, and they never identified themselves as a distinct people until after 1967. They never demanded statehood while Egypt occupied Gaza, or Jordan the West bank. Arafat himself is an egyptian. I will refer to "the palestinians", even though the term originally was used for the jews. They are indeed, however, not a distinct people. Sorry if my "zionist rhetoric" is too much for you, or deflates any beloved fantasies about history.
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Truth is peace. We are all souls in bodies.
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