Who Are the Palestinians? | Deep Dive with William Dalrymple
"The Palestinians Were Erased From Their Own History"
What do historical records, ancient texts, archaeology, and DNA research actually tell us about Palestinians?
In this episode of The Deep Dive, Ahmed Alnaouq is joined by historian and bestselling author William Dalrymple to explore the deep history of the Palestinian people, which he argues have too often been erased from mainstream narratives and the documented history of Palestine.
Together, they discuss how history is taught in Britain, the origins of the name Palestine, the continuity of the people who have lived on the land for thousands of years, and why understanding the past is essential to understanding the present.
AMAZING #HISTORY! WITH EVIDENCE!
Thank you for this thought provoking interview with Dalrymple. He is a lively and thorough historian. His upcoming book will be revelatory. But I don't know why he kept shaking his finger at you about jews and palestinians being close genetic cousins, even after you told him this was common knowledge. That was discomfiting. But I loved the way he confirmed that Palestinians have maintained a continuous unbroken presence in your homeland for over 4000 years, as highly literate pastoralists, with a library at one point that surpassed the glory of the one in Alexandria. That is not common knowledge. But it may be the root source of both Palestinian sumud and Israeli rage. You and your besieged people have what no Israeli will ever have, even as they desperately try to erase you: unbroken ancestral family ties and traditions that are inseparable from your cellular belonging to the holy land. Nothing and no one will ever erase that. Maybe this is what makes the Israelis so violent. They are having a prolonged temper tantrum of grief, jealousy and rage at their essential rootlessness in the face of your people's unquestionable belonging. This just kills them. Maybe it would be better for them to embrace their unique genius and calling as wanderers than to savage their Palestinian kin in an effort to attain your fiercely settled grace by stealing your land and traditions. I think Dalrymple was issuing a challenge to your great writers today when he said that "the Palestinian curse is having been written out of their own history by the bible". There has never been a better time to rectify that injustice. I have read that the subconscious reason why humans torture each other to death is to try to steal their souls. It is a grisly way to say that they want who you are and what you have. I think there are better and more successful ways to learn from each other. I pray that Israel will wake up from its frightened and defensive delusions of grandeur and become a very real and genuine good neighbor to its Arabic kin in the very near future. Dalrymple seemed to think this can and must happen, within the next 20 years! I like how he reminded us that the future can never be predicted because of the hidden ways of the human spirit. But it can certainly be longed for.