The Palestinian 'Emperor's New Clothes'

“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, was published in 1837. It has been adapted in many forms. Today, “the emperor has no clothes,” is a metaphor for people living or perpetrating a lie or are too stupid to admit that.

In the original story, an emperor with an obsession for fancy clothes hires conmen posing as weavers to make him magnificent clothes that are so unique, they are invisible to those who are incompetent or stupid. One day, the “weavers” report that the emperor’s new clothes are finished. They pretend to dress him, and the emperor parades himself through the whole city, not wishing to be identified as incompetent or stupid himself. His subjects go along with the pretense, also not wanting to appear stupid. Suddenly, a child exclaims that the emperor is naked. Everyone realizes that they have all been fooled, making themselves look foolish in the process.

Today’s version of the “New Clothes” tale is the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas demonstrators adorning themselves with the “Palestinian” keffiyah. Unlike the emperor who was too proud to acknowledge he was being conned, those adorning the keffiyah today are too stupid to realize how stupid they are.

Forget their genocidal chants against Israel and the Jewish people which are the backbone of their protests, and which would never be tolerated against any other religious, racial, ethnic, or any other people in the western countries whose public spaces they hijack and freedoms they trample. In many cases, the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas thugs are also protesting, and burning the flags, of the very countries in which their protests are tolerated.

For those with a brain beneath their keffiyah, it’s important to get some facts straight.

Not in 1837 when the “Emperor’s New Clothes” was published, and not a century later, was there ever an independent geographic entity (much less a state) called Palestine. There was no Palestinian emperor, king, emir, or democratically elected president or prime minister.

The name “Palestine” was first introduced by the Romans in the Second Century as a way to eviscerate the Jewish people following the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman occupation, a revolt led by the indigenous Jewish population of the land, that the Romans renamed from Judea to “Palestina.”

“Palestine” has nothing to do with the Philistines, a non-semitic people who once occupied parts of and attempted to conquer the Jewish people and Land of Israel. The most famous battle defeating the Philistines, eventually causing their retreat from the Land altogether, is told in another well-known story of David and Goliath from over 1000 years earlier.

1000 years later, before the first revolt against the Romans, Jesus was an indigenous Jewish man in the Land of Israel. He never heard of “Palestine.” After his crucifixion, and the destruction and looting of the Temple, the Romans documented their victory and this historic reality, depicting bringing thousands of Jewish slaves and vessels of the Temple to Rome, under the banner “Judea Capta,” not “Palestina Capta,” because no such place ever existed. The archaeological and historical evidence still stands today.

In 1837, the Arab population of “Palestine” was fewer than 300,000. But the Ottomans who were the ruling power for hundreds of years didn’t call the land “Palestine.” Rather, it was divided in geographic districts as part of the Ottoman Empire called “sanjaks.” A century later, the Arab population increased remarkably, impossible to explain in natural growth.

It’s an undisputed fact, still evidenced by the last names of many who identify as “Palestinian” today, that massive immigration to the Land took place in the ensuing century. Arabs from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Arabia, following the “trending” return of the Jewish people to their indigenous home, looked for opportunities to be part of the prophesy of the Land prospering again when the Jewish people returned.

One hundred years after the “Emperor” tale, when my father was born in Haifa, he and his parents were three among the indigenous Jewish population, who were referred to as “Palestinian.” The term, coined by the British, then occupying the Land, stopped being used in May 1948 when they became citizens of the State of Israel. No longer “Palestinian,” they became Israeli.

Before 1948, “Palestinian” coins minted by the British under their “Palestinian mandate” to establish a Jewish state, used the Hebrew letters “Aleph and Yud,” denoting it as “Eretz Yisrael,” the Land of Israel. Surely no indigenous “Palestinian” Arabs would have done that if “Palestine” had ever been a distinct geopolitical Arab entity.

Before 1948, “Palestinian” athletic groups, media, and its philharmonic orchestra were all Jewish. Afterward, the term “Palestinian” went into hibernation, until hijacked by the nascent terrorist “Palestinian Liberation Organization” in the 1960s. Along with the newly minted people, then occupied and subjugated by Jordan and Egypt, the keffiyah became their new clothes, covering the inconvenient truth that, until then, there was never a distinct ethnic Palestinian people, or state in any form whatsoever.

All this is not to say that today, nearly two centuries since the Emperor’s con, there are now millions of people who identify as “Palestinian,” and that’s a demographic reality, even if it’s based on a tale with less basis than the Emperor’s new clothes.

However, today’s vast cultural appropriation of the keffiyah exposes these naked lies, by people marching through and hijacking western streets and campuses, too ignorant, and/or hateful, to care about the truth. For them, history is fluid not fact. Ironically, for those among them who are gender-fluid, or LGBTQ, were they to try to live that way in “Palestine” they would be lynched by the same terrorists who committed unspeakable atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.

As much as genocidal threats made against any other people in the world today would not be tolerated, if anyone in the west were to “culturally appropriate” the dress or symbols of any other ethnic, national, or religious group, they would be crucified. Not when that symbol depicts one that worships Jew-hatred and genocide.

In adopting “Palestinian” dress, they support a genocidal ideology, world view, and false narrative that does not seek peace or two states, but “intifada,” “revolution,” and a “Palestine” that’s judenrein, “from the river to the sea.”

This is what their keffiyahs represent. They must be torn away and exposed for the naked evil that they represent.

Jonathan Feldstein is president of the Genesis 123 Foundation and RunforZion.com, building bridges between Jews and Christians. He is the host of the “Inspiration from Zion” podcast, and editor of the forthcoming book “Israel the Miracle.” He and his family made moved to Israel in 2004. He can be reached at FirstPersonIsrael@gmail.com.