The Philistines were the monsters and brutes in the stories of the Old Testament.  Goliath was a bully, killed by  David, the Israelite shepherd boy.  Sampson was the Israelite version of the good giant who killed Philistines by the thousands, but who was seduced by the Delilah vamp, stripped of his power  and delivered into the hands of the brutish Philistines who put his eyes out.
These were the good-versus-evil stories we were taught as Christian children in our Lutheran and Methodist camps.  No one ever mentioned it was David and the Israelites who were the usurpers, crashinvading the land of the Philistines, and that the Philistines might have had reason to fight back.

In 1948, European invaders (no relation to the Israelites) took the name “Israel\’ for themselves to gain sympathy from Christian Americans in the boys and girls camps.  We were innocent enough to believe they had some legal right to be there. The Israelis hid their brutality behind the yarn that they were getting even with the Philistines, when in fact, they were usurpers, killing and torturing in order to drive the people called Palestinians from the land named for them.
Torture became so much a standard Israeli practice that it eventually became approved by its Israeli Supreme Court. Now are we learning an even more terrible truth;, the Israelis have new torture tactics worse than Guantanamo, our government is again involved, and we American consumers are paying the cost of hiring hungry, and mercenary Arabs to torture their own people.  Bright people around the world are taking notice in horror.
On November 21, 2010, the Financial Times of London, a prestigious private subscription daily, published, \’Allegations of West Bank torture increase\’ by Tobias Buck, who stated:

“There is evidence that a significant number of detainees are tortured during interrogation. The most common form of abuse is known as Shabeh, in which detainees are handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods. Claims of torture and abuse by members of the Palestinian security forces are not new.”

On October 20, the same Times did a detailed feature in which it stated: “more than 100 allegations of torture [have been] registered so far this year,” including one involving a man tortured for ten days; that “the PA has been extremely lax in prosecuting security officials for torture and ill-treatment of detainees”; and that eight detainees have allegedly died in custody since 2007.”
Who are these Palestinian Arabs who torture their own people while being brutally occupied by Israel?  They are the same people who come to Washington to negotiate peace for the Palestinians, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, whose corrupt family succeeded the enormously wealthy “lone wolf” of the Palestinian Liberation Army, Yasser Arafat.  According to Financial Times, The Palestinian Authority runs its torture program through Fatah, which is, Times tells us, a secular, activist wing of the PA.
The real competition for this corrupt sold out gang is Hamas, which ousted the PA in a free election over all of Palestine some four years ago.  But the USA kept Hamas from taking over the government, except inside the gulag called Gaza. There they administrate a prison from the inmate side, and seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

-end

Part II: Why the PA can never represent the Philistines.