APAN President Nasser Mashni has uploaded to his social media an excerpt from a speech he delivered at Melbourne University on “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People”, which is commemorated annually on the 29th of November.
This is how it starts:
Mashni is clearly joking, but the joke is rather revealing.
The “Palestinian” identity is, after all, a made-up one; in the early part of the 20th century it was almost exclusively used to refer to the Jews living in what was to become the modern state of Israel. Only as a reaction to Zionism and the establishment of Israel was there a movement to refer to the Arabs here with this label. This was popularized by the PLO in the 1960s before being adopted by all and sundry.
But the goal posts continue to move, with palestinian Arabs in recent times now trying to subsume our Jewish identities under this “Palestinian” umbrella. BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has done it as a way to oppose Jewish self-determination, others in order to claim the Jewish Jesus was “Palestinian”, and now Mashni is doing it.
If Mashni and company are going to move the goal posts, then why can’t a McDonald’s hamburger be considered “Palestinian”?
It goes without saying that Jews are not “Palestinian”, and even Hamas – who Mashni cannot bring himself to condemn unequivocally – are at least more honest about this than he is.
