“There is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9
David of Judah faced Goliath the Philistine of Gaza in the 10th century BC, three thousand years ago. The boasting hordes of the Philistine army seemed overwhelming to the fighters of Judah – until David took their most feared fighter down with a stone, and the Philistines fled in terror.
Today on that very same soil Israel faces an implacable enemy determined to erase the name and memory of the Jews from the Land of Israel. Those who call themselves Palestinians use a non-Arabic word derived from the Hebrew Pleshet or Plishtim, which means invaders, squatters. Only once in the ancient scrolls of the Torah is the territory of the Plishtim (transliterated as Palestine) mentioned, and that is only along the Mediterranean coast by Gaza, and does not include Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank. Ask any Palestinian what the word Palestine means, and they will only shake their head, but continue to call the Israelis invaders, squatters.
The name Palaestina was attributed to the land which until then was known as Judea (from which arises the name Jew) by the Romans after destroying Jerusalem and its Temple in 70AD, and exiling its Jewish population, humiliating them further by renaming the region after the historical nemesis of the Jewish people, the Philistines. That name, like Columbus’ thinking he had arrived in India and erroneously naming the indigenous inhabitants ‘Indians’, stuck for centuries.
I had a Palestinian acquaintance in the West Bank (historically known as Judea and Samaria) in whose home I sat and drank coffee, who told me when I asked about a photo on the wall that looked like a college graduating class, that it was his “family that left for Jordan when the Arabs told them to leave in 1967, and that when they destroyed Israel they could come back to their homes They did not destroy Israel and are still in Jordan, but Mahmud stayed and still lives in his home” (his words) and has 17 children, at last count. I also taught English to the Mukhtar of the Arab village next to where I lived in Gilo, who stayed and lives happily with his family. There are now some two million Arabs, 20% of Israeli citizens, with full rights dwelling in Israel and making little news as we dwell together in every walk of life, even voluntarily serving in the IDF, a supreme court justice, Knesset members, doctors, cops, etc. etc. No ‘apartheid’ over here.
The Philistine Hamas sign and symbol is the crossed swords of hate, offering little else of value to the betterment of humanity, whereas the symbol and sign of Israel, contributing much in every field of human endeavor, is the Menorah, the lampstand of Light in the encroaching darkness.