Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a descendant of colonists who hail from the Ukrainian town of Smotrich, declared last week in Paris that there is “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people”. His remarks were met with roaring applause.
Calling the Palestinians an “invented people”, Smotrich asserted that it was, in fact, he and his family who are the “real Palestinians”.
This has always been a fashionable claim by Israeli officials and their American Jewish supporters.
Among current Israeli leaders, Smotrich is hardly alone in making this claim. In 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a descendant of Polish colonists who changed their names from Mileikowsky to “Netanyahu”, tweeted: “There’s no connection between the ancient Philistines & the modern Palestinians, whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years later.”
Netanyahu has more recently asserted that when European Jews began their colonisation project in Palestine, the country was “empty for all intents and purposes”.
Source: Middle East Eye
