“declared the Faqqua iris as the national flower of the State of Palestine”. Uhhhhhh? am I missing something. There’s never been and there currently isn’t a Palestinian state. It’s a propaganda fiction that leads to loss of life. Sorry, I love your posts but get sick every time I see these false statements about “Palestinian statehood” pop up as though it’s a real thing.
Whether you like it or not, there is such a thing as Palestinians. There is also a Palestinian Authority - recognized by IL - that acts as a de facto independent state, with its own military, economy and territory. The most significant point, is that the Israeli government transacts and interacts with this entity very much as it does with other nations, transferring security insights, funds, commodities and other exchanges as it would with any other nation. As an example, when Haredim and others wish to grave worship in Nablus, the Palestinian government and the IDF facilitate this in close coordination. These people then leave Israel and enter into what is, effectively, Palestine.
Also, “with its own military, economy, and territory” . Let’s take each of these one by one.
Economy: they use OUR currency and our economic laws/system.
Military: they have NO military. Just a police force to maintain civil order in their towns and villages.
Territory: all checkpoints are controlled by Israel. There is no PA checkpoint controlling entrance and/or exit to their towns and villages. The IDF does that.
So they actually have no independent economy, no military, and no independent territorial control. Yet, you say they are a de facto country…..just because they say so? That’s a fantasy not reality.
I never said anything about there not being Palestinians. I’m fully aware of the fact that the stateless Arabs who inhabit the West Bank and Gaza call themselves Palestinians. They are stateless Arabs who have decided to call themselves tha. It doesn’t make where they live a state just because they call themselves that.
A. There NEVER was a state called Palestine. It was a large swath of land that originally included Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel. It was later shrunk to include only Jordan, the West Bank and Israel by Britain in the early 1900’s. This fact is not even debatable. It’s ignored by Arabs and the left, but it’s true. There never was an independent Arab Palestinian state In the West Bank or Gaza. Unless you’re referring to the Jordanian and Egyptian occupations from 1948 to 1967. Or the 400 years prior when the country of Turkey controlled all this land. But I digress. I am fully aware that the Israeli government Interacts with the Palestinian Authority. The entity that the Oslo accords (Israelis and Palestinians) agreed upon to administer limited civil government in selected areas. But I would hardly call that state. Immediately outside of these cities and villages are the huge red signs warning physical harm and death to any Israeli who dares enter. It’s more like apartheid no-go zones where Israelis and Jews are forbidden to travel out of threat to their life. (Ah, the religion of Peace). But the Oslo accords have been broken numerous times by the terrorist activities of the Palestinian authority and Hamas. Our governments just haven’t had the fortitude to stand up and declare the utter failure of these agreements and that we are no longer bound to them. So we are in sort of a holding pattern for all these years where we have this quasi-governmental civil authority that we have to deal with, but the bottom line is we control all of the territory. They most certainly DO NOT have a military. They have a police force to maintain civil order. The Israeli army deals with all terror threats when it needs to. Yes there is coordination with the PA because we are a polite and civilized country. But don’t for a second make the mistake in thinking that Palestine is an actual country in any form. It isn’t. While the Palestine Authority is simply a quasi governmental entity that the Israeli government allows to exist for the civil administration of Arabs living in Judea and Samaria. And that is the truth, “whether you like it or not”.
The Palestinians have claim over everything: Jesus was a Palestinian; the red flower is Palestinian; the statue of liberty is palestinian; the natives of Australia were palestinian… what will they claim next?
On my favorite sit-com, "All in the Family", Archie Bunker had an argument with his son-in-law, Michael, as to what was the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from. (They didn't know that the Gemara posits that it could have been a fig, grapes, or wheat. But, anyway...).
Michael: How do you know that it was an apple?
Archie: Because God started with the A's! [=G-d created the fruits in alphabetical order.]
Michael: How do you know it wasn't an avocado?
Archie: Look what you got here (pointing at his throat). It's an "Adam's Apple", not an "Adam's Avocado"!
There's a similar circular reasoning that the Palestinians are engaging in: They say (now) that the poppy is the color of their flag. But many of the Arab countries (Jordan, UAE, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria) created their flag using exactly the same colors, just altering the graphics a bit here or there. It's hardly indicative they have ownership of the poppy more than any of those other nations.
(In addition to the 3 views mentioned in the gmara, there's a lesser known (since it's not in bavli) fourth view in bereishis Raba 15,7, mentioned in Ramban on vayikra 23,40, that it was an esrog. For an allusion to apples, see the top of taanis 29b, what it says about what the ריח שדה אשר ברכו השם was, although, I don't know much about it, but translating תפוחים as apples may well be anachronistic, as the second tosfos on the amud in taanis there indicates and also maharsha, don't know why the latter says that this is an opinion in the gmara though)
In a very old Rationalist Judaism post, I believe I read that Rabbi Herschel Schachter uses an esrog for Charoses, instead of an apple! (It mentions in the Gemara that it has to have קיוהא, and apples are typically sweet, not tart. Well, at least not as tart as an esrog!)
אמר אביי, הלכך צריך לקהוייה וצריך לסמוכיה [רשב”ם: לסמוכיה, להטיל ולכתוש בו הרבה, כדי שיהיה עבה. וצריך לקהוייה, להטיל בו תפוחים, דאית ביה קיוהא]. לקהוייה, זכר לתפוח. וצריך לסמוכיה, זכר לטיט.
The Zohar mentions different colors and flavors of apples, some being sweet (indicating chessed) and some being tart (indicating gevurah). But, as you said, this is used by some scholars to prove the later authorship of the Zohar, and that תפוחים in Shir HaShirim and the Gemara doesn't mean today's apples.
People didn't eat apples in the time of Tanach. (They were inedible.) "Tapuach" almost certainly means "fruit," much as "pome" and even "apple" can be used for various fruits or fruit-like objects. In some places it probably refers to some sort of citrus.
But "apple" comes before "avocado" alphabetically.
Michelangelo draws a fig, by the way.
To be precise, the Arab Revolt flag of World War I, which looked sort of like the current Palestinian one with the colors in a different order, is the ancestor of a lot of the Arab flags of today. The colors have to do with various historical Islamic regimes and have nothing to do with the flower. And of course the PLO didn't exist until 1964, so its flag can't be said to stand for anything that far back.
Yes, Archie didn't give that answer. It was mentioned in other episodes that Mike is going for a Master's degree, while Archie never finished high school.
Much of the Palestinian identity is made on-the-fly. They also identify with the watermelon, since it has the same colors.
The "cultural approbation" nonsense isn't what irks me. They are always accusing the "Zionists" of one crime or another.
What bothers me is the explanation about the redness of the poppy symbolizing the blood of their "martyrs". They saturate their children's minds with the need to have to "fight the occupation/the occupiers" (=the Jews).
But, in fact, most of the martyrdom and victimhood of the Palestinians is purely self-inflicted. If they could have signed a peace agreement with Israel at any point, or agreed to the 1947 UN Partition, no one would have had to be "martyred".
In fairness, Israel does something similar with a flower called "dam hamaccabim," but we don't see it as our national flower- it's utilized as such only on Yom HaZikaron.
Also, the Maccabim truly fought for religious freedom in the face of an oppressive empire.
The Palestinians like to frame their "struggle" as a fight against Zionist oppression, but 1) the Zionists have given them numerous opportunities to achieve statehood through negotiations, which they have consistently rejected, and 2) there is no evidence that Palestinian rule is any less oppressive than Zionist rule. Israeli Arabs by and large prefer Israeli citizenship to Palestinian citizenship, if given the choice.
A few years ago I learned something about the original November 11th that really depressed me:
The Armistice was signed at 5 A.M. They had radios then; all units in the field knew the war was over within minutes. But the geniuses who signed- the same geniuses who'd started the damnfool war in the first place- decided that since it was November 11th- 11/11- that it would be cute to end the war at 11 A.M. (It's a miracle the morons didn't decide to hold out until 11:11 and eleven seconds.)
Six more hours. What do you think happened in those six hours? Twenty-seven years later, over two weeks separated V-J Day and the actual Japanese surrender, and they were (mostly) peaceful. In 1918, the idiot generals decided to...keep fighting. Scheduled Allied attacks- attacks for land they *knew* the Germans would be leaving in a few hours- *went on as scheduled.* Soldiers were sent "over the top," and went. The last casualty of the war was an American who charged a German checkpoint at 10:59 A.M. The Germans yelled at him, in English, that the war was ending in *one minute*, but he kept going and they shot him. And those are just a few examples of many of the madness. In those six hours, on both sides, there were about three thousand killed and over eight thousand wounded or missing. That's more than both sides combined on D-Day.
I have a book of reprints of the original Sherlock Holmes stories as they appeared in the Strand Magazine. In one from about 1922 there's an ad for a Great War board game. Endorsements by, of course, senior generals from the war. Less than five years later!
Just in case you think we're somehow a normal, sane- rational- species.
Just a mention that before the kalanit was voted on, the national flower of Israel was officially the rakeffet, or cyclamen.
The national tree was recently voted on as well. I voted for the b'rosh (cypress) because that's what you see on the Har HaBayit, but of course the olive won, as I guess it should have. (There are lots of olive trees on the Har HaBayit as well.)
Rounding things out, the national dog breed of Israel is the Canaan Dog, and the national bird is the hoopoe, displacing the white-spectacled bulbul. The common blue butterfly is the national butterfly.
None of these are official in the way the flag and other national symbols are.
Of course the irony seems to be lost on the Palestinian apologists, whose claim to exclusive cultural ownership of the poppy symbol is admittedly appropriated from Greek mythology
Allow me to spell it out: First, the Canaanites and Phoenicians were the same people. It's just the Canaanite and Greek words, respectively, for "purple," since they traded in what we call argaman. (The Romans called them "Punic." Also the same people.) We think of them as being different because the Bnei Yisrael conquered them in Israel but not in Lebanon, so we don't think of the "Phoenicians" of Lebanon as being Canaanite, but they were.
They worshipped, of course, Baal. (The name of the famous Punic king, Hannibal, is Hanan-baal, much as Jews have the name Hanan-yah. Canaanite and Hebrew are pretty much the same language.) But another very popular god was Tammuz, the god of fertility, who even gets mentioned in Sefer Yechezkel because a lot of Jews worshipped him too. (And of course we named one of our months- the month in which he supposedly died and was resurrected- after him.) But often they considered the name "Tammuz" too holy to use, and so they called him "Adonay," l'havdil the same way Jews do to Hashem.
The Greeks picked up the legend, like they picked up a lot of things (including the alphabet), from the Phoenicians, except in their version of the story (which Shakespeare later turned into a long poem), the main character changed from a god into a mortal. Greeks didn't like having vowels at the end of male names (which is how we get Moses, Jesus, Neron, Platon, etc.) and so turned "Adoni" into "Adonis," which remains an English word for a good-looking man to this day.
The Palestinians love to try to connect themselves to Philistines, Jebusites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, etc. It's nonsense: The Philistines were from the area of Greece and disappeared. The population of much of Lebanon still has Phoenician DNA. The Palestinians, on the other hand, tend to be most closely genetically related to...the Jews. They'd just never admit it.
I was referring mostly to the claim about the mythology. Adonis was a general Middle Eastern god the Greeks adapted.
But on genetics: Yes, of course, all Middle Eastern peoples, especially the Semites, are related to each other if we go back far enough. (I believe Semites originally arose in Mesopotamia.) But Palestinians (or at least many Palestinians) and Jews are much more *recently* related than either is to Canaanites., that is, from about the time of the Islamic conquest, when a lot of Jews and Christians were forced to convert. (The Christians were largely Greek, though, as are most of the Christian Arabs of Israel today, or Greek-Aramaic, or descended from Crusaders. The Bedouin and Druze are more distant, and of course many Palestinians arrived much more recently.) The Lebanese, by and large, are *direct* descendants of Canaanites.
Oddly, the groups Jews (and Palestinians) are more closely related to (allowing for all the usual caveats about genetics) seem to be the Kurds and Armenians, who aren't even Semites. (Linguistically, of course. Of course, linguistically Hebrew is a much closer relative to Canaanite than Arabic, for what that's worth, which isn't much.) But hey, the Torah says that every one of the Avot and Imahot came from what today is Kurdistan, or close to it, so who knows.
well, there is no universally accepted definition of who is a Palestinian, but certainly many of them came from Arab countries in the past couple of centuries, or are descendants of those who left the Arabian peninsula 1300 years ago to spread Islam across the Middle East
Says the person who ingest too many peyote cacti. Cacti are not native to the region, they come from the Americas.
"orange"
Oranges come from Asia.
"national flower "
The concept of a national flower is discriminatory because it ignores the countless other species of flower, and demeans those regions which are incapable of cultivating the flower. Worse, the very concept of a "national flower" was appropriated from the bigot who came up with the concept to start with.
"the green stem "
A green stem. How unique.
"The flower is believed to have its red color from the martyrs’ blood in the land."
Said the person after ingesting too many poppies.
"The story is an old Palestinian belief that originates back from Canaanite and Phoenician times and relates to Greek mythology."
Because the original Philistines were Greek invaders?
"The flower came to be associated with renewal, resurrection, and life."
In the realm of the anti-Israel kooks everything is about “Palestine”, though no such Arab state ever existed, while many Jewish kingdoms did. Climate change? That’s about Palestine. “Trans rights” that’s about Palestine. World War 1, obviously fought only over Palestine. Any national Memorial Day? Palestine!
This is ridiculous, that the descendants of Arabs who didn’t use the word “Palestinian” or want a Palestine, and their antisemitic supporters, are laying claim to the poppy. But the again, everything in the world is about Palestine, despite so much that isn’t.
1. The person whose Tweet you lead with is a graduate student in Ontario and has something of a reputation for violent rhetoric on social media, including lots of October 7th cheerleading. She is very active in organizing protests against the Israeli government, Jewish institutions, and the Canadian government. She was actually kicked off the board of a moderate pro-Palestinian group because of her glorification of violence.
2. The poppy is something of a sacred symbol in Canada at this time of year (as it is in the UK) and so people tend to react very negatively to moves like Sada's in that Tweet.
3. It's a touch ironic that the Kalaniyot song reached its popularity due to its performance by Shoshana Damari, who as a child fled Yemen with her family (the first few hundred kilometers on foot) due to institutionalized anti-Semitic persecutions by the Arab authorities.
Like the IDF, the British military wears a range of colors of berets, although heavily greens and greys. Red is worn but only by some regiments, who were stationed in Palestine but not the only ones. Maybe the red stood out for some.
Once again thanks for an informative piece — on a little known subject. The part about Libstein makes me so mad. Until everything is decided to Israel’s satisfaction, and after for about 18 years, there should be no jobs offered to Gazans in Israel. No no no. No medical, no jobs, and they can create their own currency.
“declared the Faqqua iris as the national flower of the State of Palestine”. Uhhhhhh? am I missing something. There’s never been and there currently isn’t a Palestinian state. It’s a propaganda fiction that leads to loss of life. Sorry, I love your posts but get sick every time I see these false statements about “Palestinian statehood” pop up as though it’s a real thing.
Whether you like it or not, there is such a thing as Palestinians. There is also a Palestinian Authority - recognized by IL - that acts as a de facto independent state, with its own military, economy and territory. The most significant point, is that the Israeli government transacts and interacts with this entity very much as it does with other nations, transferring security insights, funds, commodities and other exchanges as it would with any other nation. As an example, when Haredim and others wish to grave worship in Nablus, the Palestinian government and the IDF facilitate this in close coordination. These people then leave Israel and enter into what is, effectively, Palestine.
Also, “with its own military, economy, and territory” . Let’s take each of these one by one.
Economy: they use OUR currency and our economic laws/system.
Military: they have NO military. Just a police force to maintain civil order in their towns and villages.
Territory: all checkpoints are controlled by Israel. There is no PA checkpoint controlling entrance and/or exit to their towns and villages. The IDF does that.
So they actually have no independent economy, no military, and no independent territorial control. Yet, you say they are a de facto country…..just because they say so? That’s a fantasy not reality.
It’s a territory granted by Israel with no historical validity.
Not much of an independent economy if they're using the "occupiers'" currency.
I never said anything about there not being Palestinians. I’m fully aware of the fact that the stateless Arabs who inhabit the West Bank and Gaza call themselves Palestinians. They are stateless Arabs who have decided to call themselves tha. It doesn’t make where they live a state just because they call themselves that.
A. There NEVER was a state called Palestine. It was a large swath of land that originally included Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel. It was later shrunk to include only Jordan, the West Bank and Israel by Britain in the early 1900’s. This fact is not even debatable. It’s ignored by Arabs and the left, but it’s true. There never was an independent Arab Palestinian state In the West Bank or Gaza. Unless you’re referring to the Jordanian and Egyptian occupations from 1948 to 1967. Or the 400 years prior when the country of Turkey controlled all this land. But I digress. I am fully aware that the Israeli government Interacts with the Palestinian Authority. The entity that the Oslo accords (Israelis and Palestinians) agreed upon to administer limited civil government in selected areas. But I would hardly call that state. Immediately outside of these cities and villages are the huge red signs warning physical harm and death to any Israeli who dares enter. It’s more like apartheid no-go zones where Israelis and Jews are forbidden to travel out of threat to their life. (Ah, the religion of Peace). But the Oslo accords have been broken numerous times by the terrorist activities of the Palestinian authority and Hamas. Our governments just haven’t had the fortitude to stand up and declare the utter failure of these agreements and that we are no longer bound to them. So we are in sort of a holding pattern for all these years where we have this quasi-governmental civil authority that we have to deal with, but the bottom line is we control all of the territory. They most certainly DO NOT have a military. They have a police force to maintain civil order. The Israeli army deals with all terror threats when it needs to. Yes there is coordination with the PA because we are a polite and civilized country. But don’t for a second make the mistake in thinking that Palestine is an actual country in any form. It isn’t. While the Palestine Authority is simply a quasi governmental entity that the Israeli government allows to exist for the civil administration of Arabs living in Judea and Samaria. And that is the truth, “whether you like it or not”.
The Palestinians have claim over everything: Jesus was a Palestinian; the red flower is Palestinian; the statue of liberty is palestinian; the natives of Australia were palestinian… what will they claim next?
Also the Dead Sea Scrolls. (I wish I were kidding, but they do claim them to be their rightful heritage / property.)
Jordan is still holding a few.
Big Ben in London.
I kid you not.
Don't forget Moshe Rabeinu... he was the very first Palestinian.
Big Ben. Not a joke.
Didn’t you know that Adam and Eve were Palestinians?
To British readers, I am with you on Remembrance Day.
I knew that! The world went downhill after that bite from the abble.
The abble is the national fruit of Falastin!
On my favorite sit-com, "All in the Family", Archie Bunker had an argument with his son-in-law, Michael, as to what was the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from. (They didn't know that the Gemara posits that it could have been a fig, grapes, or wheat. But, anyway...).
Michael: How do you know that it was an apple?
Archie: Because God started with the A's! [=G-d created the fruits in alphabetical order.]
Michael: How do you know it wasn't an avocado?
Archie: Look what you got here (pointing at his throat). It's an "Adam's Apple", not an "Adam's Avocado"!
There's a similar circular reasoning that the Palestinians are engaging in: They say (now) that the poppy is the color of their flag. But many of the Arab countries (Jordan, UAE, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria) created their flag using exactly the same colors, just altering the graphics a bit here or there. It's hardly indicative they have ownership of the poppy more than any of those other nations.
(In addition to the 3 views mentioned in the gmara, there's a lesser known (since it's not in bavli) fourth view in bereishis Raba 15,7, mentioned in Ramban on vayikra 23,40, that it was an esrog. For an allusion to apples, see the top of taanis 29b, what it says about what the ריח שדה אשר ברכו השם was, although, I don't know much about it, but translating תפוחים as apples may well be anachronistic, as the second tosfos on the amud in taanis there indicates and also maharsha, don't know why the latter says that this is an opinion in the gmara though)
In a very old Rationalist Judaism post, I believe I read that Rabbi Herschel Schachter uses an esrog for Charoses, instead of an apple! (It mentions in the Gemara that it has to have קיוהא, and apples are typically sweet, not tart. Well, at least not as tart as an esrog!)
אמר אביי, הלכך צריך לקהוייה וצריך לסמוכיה [רשב”ם: לסמוכיה, להטיל ולכתוש בו הרבה, כדי שיהיה עבה. וצריך לקהוייה, להטיל בו תפוחים, דאית ביה קיוהא]. לקהוייה, זכר לתפוח. וצריך לסמוכיה, זכר לטיט.
The Zohar mentions different colors and flavors of apples, some being sweet (indicating chessed) and some being tart (indicating gevurah). But, as you said, this is used by some scholars to prove the later authorship of the Zohar, and that תפוחים in Shir HaShirim and the Gemara doesn't mean today's apples.
People didn't eat apples in the time of Tanach. (They were inedible.) "Tapuach" almost certainly means "fruit," much as "pome" and even "apple" can be used for various fruits or fruit-like objects. In some places it probably refers to some sort of citrus.
Fascinating (I just want to note that I didn't mention zohar or its authorship, my point was that tosfos and maharsha understood תפוח to mean esrog)
But "apple" comes before "avocado" alphabetically.
Michelangelo draws a fig, by the way.
To be precise, the Arab Revolt flag of World War I, which looked sort of like the current Palestinian one with the colors in a different order, is the ancestor of a lot of the Arab flags of today. The colors have to do with various historical Islamic regimes and have nothing to do with the flower. And of course the PLO didn't exist until 1964, so its flag can't be said to stand for anything that far back.
Yes, Archie didn't give that answer. It was mentioned in other episodes that Mike is going for a Master's degree, while Archie never finished high school.
Much of the Palestinian identity is made on-the-fly. They also identify with the watermelon, since it has the same colors.
The "cultural approbation" nonsense isn't what irks me. They are always accusing the "Zionists" of one crime or another.
What bothers me is the explanation about the redness of the poppy symbolizing the blood of their "martyrs". They saturate their children's minds with the need to have to "fight the occupation/the occupiers" (=the Jews).
But, in fact, most of the martyrdom and victimhood of the Palestinians is purely self-inflicted. If they could have signed a peace agreement with Israel at any point, or agreed to the 1947 UN Partition, no one would have had to be "martyred".
In fairness, Israel does something similar with a flower called "dam hamaccabim," but we don't see it as our national flower- it's utilized as such only on Yom HaZikaron.
Also, the Maccabim truly fought for religious freedom in the face of an oppressive empire.
The Palestinians like to frame their "struggle" as a fight against Zionist oppression, but 1) the Zionists have given them numerous opportunities to achieve statehood through negotiations, which they have consistently rejected, and 2) there is no evidence that Palestinian rule is any less oppressive than Zionist rule. Israeli Arabs by and large prefer Israeli citizenship to Palestinian citizenship, if given the choice.
Just when you think they have reached bottom...
I think the whole mass murder thing, and cheering it on, is hitting bottom already.
A few years ago I learned something about the original November 11th that really depressed me:
The Armistice was signed at 5 A.M. They had radios then; all units in the field knew the war was over within minutes. But the geniuses who signed- the same geniuses who'd started the damnfool war in the first place- decided that since it was November 11th- 11/11- that it would be cute to end the war at 11 A.M. (It's a miracle the morons didn't decide to hold out until 11:11 and eleven seconds.)
Six more hours. What do you think happened in those six hours? Twenty-seven years later, over two weeks separated V-J Day and the actual Japanese surrender, and they were (mostly) peaceful. In 1918, the idiot generals decided to...keep fighting. Scheduled Allied attacks- attacks for land they *knew* the Germans would be leaving in a few hours- *went on as scheduled.* Soldiers were sent "over the top," and went. The last casualty of the war was an American who charged a German checkpoint at 10:59 A.M. The Germans yelled at him, in English, that the war was ending in *one minute*, but he kept going and they shot him. And those are just a few examples of many of the madness. In those six hours, on both sides, there were about three thousand killed and over eight thousand wounded or missing. That's more than both sides combined on D-Day.
I have a book of reprints of the original Sherlock Holmes stories as they appeared in the Strand Magazine. In one from about 1922 there's an ad for a Great War board game. Endorsements by, of course, senior generals from the war. Less than five years later!
Just in case you think we're somehow a normal, sane- rational- species.
Just a mention that before the kalanit was voted on, the national flower of Israel was officially the rakeffet, or cyclamen.
The national tree was recently voted on as well. I voted for the b'rosh (cypress) because that's what you see on the Har HaBayit, but of course the olive won, as I guess it should have. (There are lots of olive trees on the Har HaBayit as well.)
Rounding things out, the national dog breed of Israel is the Canaan Dog, and the national bird is the hoopoe, displacing the white-spectacled bulbul. The common blue butterfly is the national butterfly.
None of these are official in the way the flag and other national symbols are.
Latest poppy appropriation example:
https://x.com/narindertweets/status/1855541386134671779
BTW, read the comments there. No one is having it.
I first saw this on another X post. So, so typical. And just the thing to get the British public up in arms against them.
Of course the irony seems to be lost on the Palestinian apologists, whose claim to exclusive cultural ownership of the poppy symbol is admittedly appropriated from Greek mythology
Actually Greek mythology story here seems to have come from Canaan.
Allow me to spell it out: First, the Canaanites and Phoenicians were the same people. It's just the Canaanite and Greek words, respectively, for "purple," since they traded in what we call argaman. (The Romans called them "Punic." Also the same people.) We think of them as being different because the Bnei Yisrael conquered them in Israel but not in Lebanon, so we don't think of the "Phoenicians" of Lebanon as being Canaanite, but they were.
They worshipped, of course, Baal. (The name of the famous Punic king, Hannibal, is Hanan-baal, much as Jews have the name Hanan-yah. Canaanite and Hebrew are pretty much the same language.) But another very popular god was Tammuz, the god of fertility, who even gets mentioned in Sefer Yechezkel because a lot of Jews worshipped him too. (And of course we named one of our months- the month in which he supposedly died and was resurrected- after him.) But often they considered the name "Tammuz" too holy to use, and so they called him "Adonay," l'havdil the same way Jews do to Hashem.
The Greeks picked up the legend, like they picked up a lot of things (including the alphabet), from the Phoenicians, except in their version of the story (which Shakespeare later turned into a long poem), the main character changed from a god into a mortal. Greeks didn't like having vowels at the end of male names (which is how we get Moses, Jesus, Neron, Platon, etc.) and so turned "Adoni" into "Adonis," which remains an English word for a good-looking man to this day.
The Palestinians love to try to connect themselves to Philistines, Jebusites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, etc. It's nonsense: The Philistines were from the area of Greece and disappeared. The population of much of Lebanon still has Phoenician DNA. The Palestinians, on the other hand, tend to be most closely genetically related to...the Jews. They'd just never admit it.
Not sure what you're saying here. The Palestinians DO have a strong genetic connection to the Canaanites. As do we.
I was referring mostly to the claim about the mythology. Adonis was a general Middle Eastern god the Greeks adapted.
But on genetics: Yes, of course, all Middle Eastern peoples, especially the Semites, are related to each other if we go back far enough. (I believe Semites originally arose in Mesopotamia.) But Palestinians (or at least many Palestinians) and Jews are much more *recently* related than either is to Canaanites., that is, from about the time of the Islamic conquest, when a lot of Jews and Christians were forced to convert. (The Christians were largely Greek, though, as are most of the Christian Arabs of Israel today, or Greek-Aramaic, or descended from Crusaders. The Bedouin and Druze are more distant, and of course many Palestinians arrived much more recently.) The Lebanese, by and large, are *direct* descendants of Canaanites.
Oddly, the groups Jews (and Palestinians) are more closely related to (allowing for all the usual caveats about genetics) seem to be the Kurds and Armenians, who aren't even Semites. (Linguistically, of course. Of course, linguistically Hebrew is a much closer relative to Canaanite than Arabic, for what that's worth, which isn't much.) But hey, the Torah says that every one of the Avot and Imahot came from what today is Kurdistan, or close to it, so who knows.
not to mention that the Palestinian flag is actually appropriated from the Arab flag. Oh wait, the Palestinians are actually Arabs from Arabia
No, they are not from Arabia. Their religion is, though.
well, there is no universally accepted definition of who is a Palestinian, but certainly many of them came from Arab countries in the past couple of centuries, or are descendants of those who left the Arabian peninsula 1300 years ago to spread Islam across the Middle East
Probably around half. They are genetically connected to the Canaanite.
And their language, of course.
The Bedouin seem to be from further south, although the Bedouin aren't Palestinians.
Says who? Some Bedouin do consider themselves Palestinian. Again, no clear definition exists
Hey bro!
Yes, the Greek myth is that Adonis' blood stained the poppies red.
In Middle Eastern myth, Adonis was a god, and thus didn't bleed to death.
Ah, so the poopy "was always" a symbol of a country that never existed. Got it.
"Land of symbols: Cactus"....
Says the person who ingest too many peyote cacti. Cacti are not native to the region, they come from the Americas.
"orange"
Oranges come from Asia.
"national flower "
The concept of a national flower is discriminatory because it ignores the countless other species of flower, and demeans those regions which are incapable of cultivating the flower. Worse, the very concept of a "national flower" was appropriated from the bigot who came up with the concept to start with.
"the green stem "
A green stem. How unique.
"The flower is believed to have its red color from the martyrs’ blood in the land."
Said the person after ingesting too many poppies.
"The story is an old Palestinian belief that originates back from Canaanite and Phoenician times and relates to Greek mythology."
Because the original Philistines were Greek invaders?
"The flower came to be associated with renewal, resurrection, and life."
I though that was mistletoe.
In the realm of the anti-Israel kooks everything is about “Palestine”, though no such Arab state ever existed, while many Jewish kingdoms did. Climate change? That’s about Palestine. “Trans rights” that’s about Palestine. World War 1, obviously fought only over Palestine. Any national Memorial Day? Palestine!
This is ridiculous, that the descendants of Arabs who didn’t use the word “Palestinian” or want a Palestine, and their antisemitic supporters, are laying claim to the poppy. But the again, everything in the world is about Palestine, despite so much that isn’t.
A few thoughts:
1. The person whose Tweet you lead with is a graduate student in Ontario and has something of a reputation for violent rhetoric on social media, including lots of October 7th cheerleading. She is very active in organizing protests against the Israeli government, Jewish institutions, and the Canadian government. She was actually kicked off the board of a moderate pro-Palestinian group because of her glorification of violence.
2. The poppy is something of a sacred symbol in Canada at this time of year (as it is in the UK) and so people tend to react very negatively to moves like Sada's in that Tweet.
3. It's a touch ironic that the Kalaniyot song reached its popularity due to its performance by Shoshana Damari, who as a child fled Yemen with her family (the first few hundred kilometers on foot) due to institutionalized anti-Semitic persecutions by the Arab authorities.
So now we have disagreements about flowers? The red poppy has been of symbol of service, honor and remembrance since World War II?
Are not the kalanit and the Poppy worn in England fundamentally different (although visually similar) species?
Distantly related and similar, so they get called the same thing.
Yes. Kalanit is anemone, while poppy in Hebrew is parag
Without Googling, I thought the song Kalaniyot hinted at the red berets of the British soldiers in pre-state Israel? Am I totally dreaming?
Like the IDF, the British military wears a range of colors of berets, although heavily greens and greys. Red is worn but only by some regiments, who were stationed in Palestine but not the only ones. Maybe the red stood out for some.
Once again thanks for an informative piece — on a little known subject. The part about Libstein makes me so mad. Until everything is decided to Israel’s satisfaction, and after for about 18 years, there should be no jobs offered to Gazans in Israel. No no no. No medical, no jobs, and they can create their own currency.