The word Palestine is a perversion of Philistine the name of an ancient people that lived in the Gaza area. The Philistines were an Aegean (Cypriot) people that became extinct nearly 3,000 years ago. They didn’t refer to themselves as Philistines as this was the Jewish term for them. The Hebrew bible refers to them as “Palishtim” which means “invaders” (this was later translated into Latin as Philistinus), ironically, in an attempt to claim they’re indigenous the Palestinians named their national movement after a people that were not indigenous.
Wasn’t there a country called Syria-Palestina?
2,000 years ago the region was under Roman occupation and between the years 66 and 132 CE the Jews waged continuous rebellions against the Romans. Upon crushing the Jewish Revolt of 132 CE the Romans exiled the majority of the Jews and renamed Israel “Syria-Palestina”. The idea was to erase the Jewish presence from Israel by exiling and renaming their homeland after their Biblical enemies. It was a final humiliation.
Geographically Syria-Palestina stretched from Egypt to Turkey and from Israel to Jordan, it had a diverse demography but with the Jews exiled the majority population was Phoenician, Greek and Roman… not Arab, like the Palestinians of today.
Where does the word Palestine come from then?
Various empires came and went in the Middle East, each of them swallowing up this tiny tract of land. Some of these empires preserved the Roman names of Syria and Palestina using them as provincial labels. By the 17th the name had almost dropped out of common parlance in the Muslim world (which favoured the names Syria and Southern Syria for that region). The name was largely kept alive by Europeans who continued the Roman tradition of calling the region Palestine.2
One of the longest empires to control the land was the Turkish Ottoman Empire which stood for 400 years (1517 – 1917). They divided their empire into provinces, but there was no province of Palestine, instead there was the Sanjak of Nablus, the Sanjak and of Acre and the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. When referring to this region collectively the Ottomans preferred the term Southern Syria and on very rare occasions Palestine (Filastin), but this was not an identity the inhabitants of the region ever adopted, they remained aligned to their religious identities.
After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I the conquering European powers divided the land and labelled part of it Palestine – resurrecting the European name for the region. The borders of the British Mandate of Palestine bore no resemblance to the Roman province and instead incorporated all of Jordan, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
The term was so sparsely used that in 1937 a Nablus born proto-Palestinian leader declared:
– Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi 3
If Palestine were the name of the country his people originated from, why would he, one of the most prominent leaders of the anti-Zionist movement, be so unfamiliar with it that he believed it to be a Zionist creation? His confusion stemmed from the fact that many of the early Zionist organisations adopted the European term Palestine (such as the Palestine Wine Company) and very few Arabs used the term.
Furthermore if the British Mandate of Palestine included Jordan (a country three times the size of Israel and the disputed territories) why is there no movement to free Palestine from Jordan? This is probably best explained by King Hussein of Jordan
“The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan”.4 There was never a country called Jordan which is another corruption of Hebrew (“trans” is latin for “beyond”, while “Jordan” is a latin for the Hebrew name of the river “Yarden”). Palestine and Jordan never existed and their leaders saw them as one entity – there is nothing which made the two distinct.
There was never a country called Palestine, check the timeline:
- Pre 1272 BCE
Canaanite kingdoms
- 1272 BCE
Kingdom of Israel, its rulers were Jewish.
- 1272 BCE
Israel splits into two Jewish Kingdoms (Judea and Israel)
- 510 BCE
Babylonians conquer Israel
- 333 BCE
Greek Seleucids conquer Israel
- 174 BCE
Jewish Hasmoneans re-establish Israel
- 73 CE
Romans conquer Israel, they rename an area which stretches from Turkey to Egypt as Syria-Palestina. This was a province of the Roman empire and had no connection to modern day Palestine or the Palestinians
- 330 CE
The area becomes part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, a Greek empire.
- 650 CE
Umayyad Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Arab empire
- 750 CE
Abbasid Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Arab empire
- 868 CE
Tulunid Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Turkish empire
- 905 CE
Abbasid Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Arab empire
- 969 CE
Fatimid Shia Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Arab empire
- 1099 CE
Christian Crusaders conquer Israel, incorporating it into their European empire
- 1187 CE
Ayyubid Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Kurdish empire
- 1250 CE
Bahri Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Turkish empire
- 1382 CE
Burji Sunni Muslims conquer Israel
- 1517 CE
Ottoman Sunni Muslims conquer Israel, incorporating it into their Turkish empire
- 1917 CE
Britain conquers Israel from the Ottomans in Israel
- 1920 CE
Britain awarded Mandate over the region by the League of Nations
- 1945 CE
Britain hands political decision making for Mandate over to the United Nations
- 1947 CE
The United of Nations voted to partition the land into Jewish and Arab States
- 1948 CE
Britain pulls out of the Mandate. The Jews declare independence, the Arabs reject the partition plan and several Arab nations invade Israel. The Palestinians refuse to declare independence.
- The Jordanians conquer the West Bank and make it part of Jordan, granting all the Arabs Jordanian citizenship. They do not establish a Palestinian state.
- The Egyptians conquer the Gaza Strip but and also fail to establish a Palestinian state (they do setup a pseudo-Palestinian government which they later shut down).
How these empires looked:
There may not have been a country, but perhaps there was people
Many will argue that although there was never a country called Palestine, there were a people that lived there for thousands of years. This is a gross distortion of Palestinian nationalism and the history of the Levant.
- The Palestinians are not an ancient people
- Before the 60s they were not a national people
Most Palestinians today descend from recent migrants to region, the majority of the population were attracted to the economic opporutnities Zionist and British enterprise created.
The strive for Palestinian self-determination is unlike any other in history. Usually self-determination requires a people in an area determining their own political independence. If we look at some of the more notable examples in modern history:
- Kurdistan
The Kurds are an ethnic group, they have a shared history, language and culture that make them distinct from the ethnicities that surround them.
- Chechnya
The Chechens are also an ethnic group, they have a shared history, language and culture that make them distinct from the ethnicities that surround them.
- Basque Country
The Basques are an ethnic group, they have a shared history, language and culture that make them distinct from the ethnicities that surround them.
The Palestinians are not and never were a distinct people. They are a mixed multitude of people that settled in the region over the centuries (it should be noted the majority descend from recent migrants). A Greek Orthodox Christian whose forefather came from Europe does not belong to the same ethnic group as a Sunni Muslim whose forefathers came from Arabia.
Before 1900 there is no example of these groups Jews, Samaritan Jews, Karaite Jews, Arab Muslims, Arab Bedouins, Arab Ahmadis, Arab Christians, Arab Druze, Aramean Christian, Assyrian Christians, Greek Christians, Russian Christians, Catholic Christians, Armenian Christians, Circassian Christians and Baha’is collectively referring to themselves as “Palestinians”.
It is foolish to force these ethnicities together and claim them to be the same people. To understand what we mean by this, there is no Palestinian language, no Palestinian culture, no Palestinian history and before the birth of Zionism – there were no Palestinian people.
In the 1960s the anti-Zionist movement presented the “Palestinian” identity as the national identity of the indigenous people of the land. However, this was a complete fabrication as their leaders brazenly declared:
– Yasser Arafat 5
Today millions of people have taken on this identity and their right to do this should be respected. However, to present this identity as being an ancient one is dishonest.
You can read more about the fabrication of the Palestinian people here.
Palestine may have been diverse but it was an Arab land
We often hear that Palestine has always been an Arab country, what they mean is that Palestine has always been under Arab rule. The biggest problem with this logic is that it suggests that if a minority have oppressed the majority – the majority should be denied the right to self-determination. In the case of Israel/Palestine it is absolutely incorrect. The two ethnic groups that have ruled the land longer than any other are Jews and Turks.
In fact when we look at how long each dynasty has ruled the land, it is strikingly obvious that the Jews reigned longer than any other people in the land. They are also the people with the oldest and strongest claim to sovereignty over the land. Despite this,
they have always been willing to share the land.
Wasn’t there a country called Palestine between 1917 and 1947
No, British mandatory Palestine was never a country – it was a Mandate that was awarded to Britain so that Britain could help the Jewish people in that region to establish a Jewish National Home. Many objects and businesses from that period that mention Palestine are often flaunted as proof that there was a country called Palestine, we would like to dispel some of these myths below:
\\
Summary
- There was never a country called Palestine
- Philistine was the Hebrew word for an ancient people with no connection to the Palestinians
- Syria-Palestina was a Roman province which bore no resemblance to Palestine people present today
- British Mandatory Palestine was not a country, but an entity that was invented by the international community to help establish a Jewish National Home
- Jews are the ethnic group that ruled the land for the longest
- There was never a Palestinian people
- Palestinian national identity was born in the 20th century
- The inhabitants of the land had been very diverse and there was no language, history or culture that would tie them together as an ethnicity or a people
www.chuckmaultsby.net
