Some people make the mistake that modern-day Palestinians have a greater claim to the land of Israel than the Jews.

This is seen in the constant use of terms like “the occupied territories” and “the settlements” on the West Bank of the River Jordan in Israel.

Palestinians

Palestinian is a modern concept promoted by Yasser Arafat to create a narrative which many people now take for granted.

Arafat created the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964 with the help of the USSR.  The USSR was the first country to recognise the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, hoping that this would make Israel a Soviet ally in the region.  However, too many Jews had suffered in the pogroms of Russia for this to happen, so Soviet Russia began to create a narrative that the Palestinians had been dispossessed by the Jews.  The Soviets brought Arafat and Mahmood Abbas of the current Palestinian Authority to Moscow and trained them to promote this narrative.

There has never been a state called Palestine.  It has no capital, no borders, no flag, no anthem, although those who now identify as Palestinians are using the United Nations to promote the concept.  Just as the Jews were for two millennia “a people exiled from their land”, so the Palestinians are trying to create a people although they have no land nor history as Palestinians.

The name Palestina was used to describe a region that was certainly under occupation for a long time during the last two millennia, but not by the Jews, but first by the Romans and then by arabs. 

The Roman Empire gave the name Syria Palaestina to the region in order to insult the Jews for their rebellion against Roman rule and occupation.  After the decline of the Roman Empire, the arabs were the next colonizers, and latterly the Ottoman Empire controlled the area, which in its 400-year occupation did nothing to progress the area nor did it create a Palestinian State, and no-one demanded it.  Rather, a Palestinian State is a recent demand by the recently formed PLO and popularised by Yasser Arafat in his 1974 speech to the United Nations claiming: “The roots of the Palestinian question reach back into the closing years of the nineteenth century, in other words, to that period we call the era of colonialism and settlement as we know it today. This is precisely the period during which zionism as a scheme was born … Palestine was usurped and its people hounded from their national homeland.” So why did Egypt controlling Gaza, Syria controlling the Golan Heights, and Jordan controlling the West Bank between 1948 and 1967 not give these lands to the Palestinians? Because the Palestinian concept was a new-born entity when Arafat and the newly-formed PLO put their “faith in political and diplomatic struggle as complements, as enhancements of our armed struggle”, as he told the UN in 1974.

It was only after the Jews returned to their own land, after 1800 years of exile, that the hitherto desolate land of Israel began to flourish. 1800 years earlier, Joseph was told to take the infant Jesus, exiled in Egypt, “and go into the land of Israel” Mat 2:20-21. It was Israel then and it is Israel now. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War the arab hegemony over the land was broken and the modern history begins, where Arafat wants to begin his tendentious narrative.

Look at Lebanon to its north.  It was a prosperous country even in recent times, but not since Hezbollah began to impose its policy upon the country.  Jordan and Egypt have learned to accept the existence of Israel but not the jihadi muslims in the Middle East as exemplified by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houtis in Yemen, who are proxies used and supported by Iran, whose terrorist regime does not only suppress its own population in Iran but it wants to wipe Israel off the map.

Philistines

So where did the name Palestine come from? It was devised by Roman emperor Hadrian.

Before Hadrian, the Romans understood that the land was called Judaea. After the First Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70AD, Roman emperor Vespasian struck a coin in 71AD to celebrate the Roman victory with the legend on the reverse reading IVDAEA CAPTA “Judaea conquered”. After another Jewish Revolt was suppressed by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135AD, he renamed Judaea as part of the wider region Syria Palaestina.

In doing so, he resurrected the name of Israel’s former enemies, the Philistines, to insult the Jews. The Philistines were foreigners who had settled and occupied the area of modern Gaza and frequently attacked Israel. The giant Goliath of Gath, whom David killed with a stone from his sling, was a Philistine. The Philistines were defeated by the Babylonians in 604BC and the Babylonians gave the land of the Philistines to the children of Israel. Ashdod, a Philistine city, is in the land of Israel to this day.

The Philistines have nothing to do with the Palestinians today – they are totally different groups. The only similarity is in the spelling of the names, adopted by Hadrian. Present-day Palestinians are arabs whose ancestors arrived in the area in the 7th century with the muslim conquests. These arabs are “the occupiers”, “the colonialists” or “settlers” but they did very little to cultivate the land, described in 1867 by travellers such as Mark Twain as utterly desolate. From about 1882 the Jews began to return to their own land and with Jewish industry, more arabs began to move in for employment.

The neighbouring Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is arab-derived from Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and two-thirds are Palestinian arabs. After World War I, Jordan was given as an “arab state” by Winston Churchill to fulfil a promise to the arabs through Lawrence of Arabia for helping to overthrow the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East in WWI. This was “the two-state” solution of that era, Jordan receiving about 76% of the British Mandate and the Jews 24% of the British Mandate on the west of the River Jordan, similar to today.

Before 1923, the land of Israel was known as southern Syria, part of the Ottoman Empire, and before this the name Palestine was used historically because of Hadrian’s renaming the region, not because of ‘Palestinians’, which is a modern designation. There never was a state of Palestine.

Today is the first anniversary of the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas on southern Israel with the slaughter of more than 1000 Israeli civilians, the first invasion of Israeli territory since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It occurred, like the Yom Kippur War, on a Jewish religious holiday, and the next day, on 8th October 2023, Hezbollah in Lebanon began firing missiles into northern Israel, which continues to the present day.

Update:

3 Nov 2024: former US President Bill Clinton explains how unwilling Arafat was to accept a two-state solution and says that the Peace Process needs to start all over again.

27 Dec 2024: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contrasts the ancient history of the Jews and the modern narrative of the Palestinians concerning the land of Israel.