I guess Husseini's wikipedia page is hasbara propaganda and those Hitler and Himmler meetings and concentration camp visits are pure fabrications. And Arafat wasn't born in Cairo, Zuheir Mohsen's 1977 De Trouw interview never happened, Fathi Hammad didn't say 1/2 of Palestinians are Egyptians and 1/2 are Saudis, King Hussein never said "Jordan is Palestine, Palestine is Jordan" and all those Masris in Palestine didn't come from Egypt.
But listen to your co-religionists: “Ahmad Shuqeiri, a Lebanon-born politician of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi, and Turkish descent who served as the Arab League’s deputy secretary-general. As he put it, “Palestine is part and parcel in the Arab homeland.” Asked to clarify which part of the “Arab homeland” this specific territory belonged, he added that Palestine “is nothing but southern Syria.”
And so, it is no surprise that Yasser Arafat, the (Egyptian born and educated) father of the “Palestinian people” followed this pan-Arab line. The 1964 PLO charter defined the Palestinians as “an integral part of the Arab nation”, rather than a distinct nationality (emphasis mine) and vowed allegiance to the ideal of pan-Arab unity — that is, to Palestine’s eventual assimilation into “the greater Arab homeland.”
In 1996, even that bastion which proclaims itself as the leader in the “struggle” for the Palestinian “people”, Hamas, said this, “Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state … In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state. … [Hence] our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic… This…land…is not the property of the Palestinians…. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world.” (senior Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar, 1996) (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-invention-of-the-palestinian-people/)
And from Avneri's The Claim of Dispossession and https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/israel-settler-colonialists-32e515e4d2b1
Palestine's everybody from everywhere demographics
Asking the indigeneity question debunks Husseini's claim to an Arab monopoly of it, and Jennings uncritically ingesting it, in this little speck of a corridor country between multiple giant empires (Egyptian, Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Persian/Assyrian/Babylonian, Arabian). Here's a brief sample of migration to Palestine from:
Egypt and Libya: "The French scholar, M. Sabry, whose sources were the archives in Cairo writes: "Abdullah, the Governor of Akko, encouraged the migration of fellaheen from Egypt and gave them shelter. Mohammed Ali, the ruler of Egypt, complained to the Porte (the Sultan), who replied that the immigrants were citizens of the Empire and were entitled to settle anywhere they pleased. In 1831, more than six thousand fellaheen crossed the Egyptian border, and Abdullah, in his bountiful mercy, refused to return them (to Egypt)." After he conquered Palestine, not only did Mohammed Ali refrain from sending back the draft evaders to Egypt, but he sent new settlers to consolidate his rule. The Egyptian settlers scattered to many urban and rural points, appropriated large tracts of land, and lent variety and numbers to the existing population." (The Claim of Dispossesion, Arieh Avneri, 1984: page 13)
"According to the British Palestine Exploration Fund regional map of Jaffa, most of the city was made up of Egyptian-populated districts. "Saknet el-Mussariya," "Saknet Abu Kebir," "Saknet Hammad" and "Saknet Abu Derwish" were all settled by Egyptians who had accompanied the conquering army. Another district, "Saknet el-Abid," was settled by freed slaves." (Avneri, page 14)
"Philip Baldensperger states that in 1893 the inhabitants of many villages in the southern part of the country, like Zamuqa and Kubeiba, were of Egyptian origin; that they were unlike the other Arabs then resident in the country; that the fellaheen used to call them "Masserein" ; and that a Palestinian Arab would never give his daughter in marriage to an Egyptian, and would rarely take to wife a woman of Egyptian stock. The dwellers of the village Quttra in the southern part of the country (later the site of Gedera) were originally brought to Palestine from Libya. In a number of villages in Wadi 'Ara - 'Ara, 'Ar'ara and Kafer-Kara - and south of the triangle in the villages Kafer-Qasim, Taiyiba and Qalansawa, there are hundreds of families of Egyptian origin who accompanied the conquering forces of Ibrahim Pasha. According to the tradition among these people, their ancestors were the camel riders for the army of occupation and when the Khedive's troops left they remained and settled there. Similarly, in the cities of Samaria and Judea there are hundreds of families which, to this day, are named Masri. The origin of all of them is traceable to those who left Egypt at the time of Ibrahim Pasha." (ibid)
Algeria: In 1856, the French permitted Abd el-Kader to leave Algeria, together with some followers. Some of them went to Syria and others to Palestine. The Algerian Arabs settled in several cities and founded about ten villages. These immigrants, who were called by the natives Mugrabis (Westerners), founded four villages in Lower Galilee - Shara, Ulam, Ma'ader and Kafer-Sabet….The elders of these villages continued to speak the Berber language up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Kurdistan: W.J. Masterman, an associate of the Palestine Exploration Fund, dated 1914, describes the Moslem population as being of mixed origin. One of the neighborhoods was called Hareth el-Karad, which denotes a population of Kurdish origin. (Avneri, page 17)
Mid 19th to early 20th century Arab society had a clear intra-Muslim racial pecking order, with blacks, often freed slaves, at the bottom, then Egyptians and Mugrabis (westerners) at the top:
"In the same report to the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly, 1893, Baldensperger describes the Mugrabis of Jaffa, who had migrated to the country over the years. They tended to live near the mosques and were employed as watchmen in the citrus groves and in the fields. Some established themselves permanently. Most of them had passed through Jaffa on their way to Mecca and some Mugrabis intermarried with the local Moslems, something that the Egyptians and blacks had not succeeded in doing." (Avneri, page 17)
The British and French mandatory authorities and foreign travelers confirm this picture:
From Time Immemorial, 1984, Joan PetersThe only British mandate official who raised the issue of the sieve allowing so much illegal immigration was assassinated. The case was never solved:
From Time Immemorial, 1984, Joan PetersFrom Time Immemorial, 1984, Joan PetersFrom Time Immemorial, 1984, Joan PetersBritain's need to protect its Suez Canal and Middle East oil lifelines made appeasing the Arabs imperative in the runup to WWII. Arab and Iranian jihadis' embrace of the Nazis' genocidal anti-semitism is nothing new. It dictated ignoring illegal Arab immigration into mandatory Palestine while ruthlessly enforcing the May 1939 White Paper's near total ban on Jewish immigration, in violation of its League of Nations mandate.
Who's indigenous and who's not?
If the descendants of the 851,000 Jews expelled and expropriated from Arab lands since Baghdad's Farhud pogrom of 1941 aren't "indigenous", then neither are the Egyptian Masris of Nablus and Ramallah. Jennings clearly applies a higher standard for "local" - indigeneity - to Jews returning to their ancestral homeland than to Arabs, Berbers, Turkmen and Circassians coming from the Maghreb, Egypt, Iraq, Turkmenistan and Syria illegally immigrating to mandatory Palestine due to growth and opportunities created by Jewish capital and investment.
Somehow the Jews of Gaza's ancient Jewish community become settler colonialists, while the tens of thousands of Egyptian settled there by the Nasser regime get a free pass to indigeneity:
Presumably this menorah carved into the great Mosque of Gaza, originally from Gaza's 6th century synagogue, also exemplifies Jewish settler colonialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Gaza#cite_note-ArchaeologicalResearches-17While these Egyptian settlers and the Cairo-born Yasser Arafat are granted full indigeneity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_3JmWa2v8
Gazans demanded a return to Egyptian rule, not a Palestinian state.Jennings brands as settler colonizers the great grandchildren of the Eastern European and Mizrahi Jews who reclaimed the malaria-ridden swamps of the Ottoman-ruled vilayet called Southern Syria. Then apply the same label to the descendants of the Haurani, Syrian, Egyptian, Algerian, Circassian and Iraqi refugees and laborers who found jobs in the ports, railroads and building sites created by the British army and Jewish capital investment after centuries of Ottoman neglect that left the land a depopulated malarial swamp.
Double standards demographics
The facts of Palestine's demographic history of inbound and outbound population exchanges expose Husseini's localist branding as utterly fraudulent. Othering Israel's Jews as foreign settler colonizers is classic double standards anti-Semitism, not just anti-Zionism.
It gives a free pass to Palestine to the 19th and 20th century Arab descendants of immigrants from Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Circassia, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Iraq and Persia, while denying it to Jews expelled and expropriated from exactly those countries. If that isn't anti-Semitism, then nothing is.
Mandatory Palestine's population growth far beyond any possible natural increase and Ottoman immigration records prove that the majority of so-called Palestinians are the progeny of immigrants from Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algerian refugees from the 1830 French conquest, Circassian-Ottoman refugees from the Russian conquest, Iraqis, Syrians, Bosnians, Lebanese, Persians, Kazakhs, Sudanese. Migration is the only possible explanation for these triple digit population increases in 22 years: From Time Immemorial, 1984, Joan Peters
Settler colonialist and displacement libel based on indigeneity fraud
To validate the claim of settler colonialism requires validating, instead of just assuming, the indigeneity of those allegedly displaced. Israel's accusers automatically deny Jewish indigeneity, despite 3000+ years of Jews' ties to and habitation in the land. Aren't Jews always foreign interlopers and rootless cosmopolitans?
