Palestine: 10 Facts to Know About This Highly Contentious Word

Palestine is a confusing term these days.  A Vox news article is a recent example of the way the word Palestine is erroneously used when it opined that Palestine is an alternative name for Israel and that Palestinians are a distinct group of Arabs who are “occupied” by Jews. Or take Palestinian National Council President Rawhi Fattouh, who asserts Palestinians are a distinct people who’ve been living in a national called Palestine for one and half million years.  Or US Representative Ilhan Omar, who’d retweeted the false assertion that Jesus was “a Palestinian man.”  The United Nations echoes this view, asserting that the area of present-day Israel has been called “Palestine” from time immemorial.

All of this is fundamentally flawed. It erases the thousand-year history of the Jewish kingdom of Judea. It ignores the fact that for generations Jews called themselves Palestinian. It completely erases the fact that Palestine has been ruled by many groups through the ages. Or that for generations Palestine was part of Syria.

Facts about Palestine

Here is a description of these and other little-known facts about the term Palestine to help set the record straight.

1. The Plishtim: Ancient Greek people

Pharaoh Ramses III ruled over Egypt approximately 3,000 years ago. Inside the walls of his mortuary temple are a series of carved pictures showing wave after wave of Greek invaders who tried to conquer Egypt. “They were coming forward towards Egypt,” the tomb records; one of these groups was known as Peleset (Philistines).”

Depiction of the Philistines at Medinet Habu.

These fearsome Greek warriors had already attacked and despoiled cities in modern-day Turkey, Cyprus, and Syria.  Ramses III managed to defeat them and encouraged them to settle in a coastal area near Egypt, in present day Gaza. The Philistines established five towns and used these as a base from which to attack Jews living in next-door Judea.  For generations during the Biblical era, the Philistines were seen as the primary enemy of the Jewish people. The Torah describes how Philistine fighters stole the Ark of the Covenant, fought their Jewish neighbors, tortured captives, and mutilated the bodies of those they killed.  They were finally defeated by King David around the year 1000 BCE.

The Philistines came to an end in the 7th century BCE. Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar II (605-562 BCE) conquered the Philistine cities as well as the adjacent Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Israel, killing untold numbers of people and forcibly transferring much of these societies into exile in Babylonia, to the north. There are no records of Philistine civilization after his brutal conquest.

2. Thousands of years later, Roman Emperor Hadrian resurrected the name of the Plishtim.

Fast forward a few centuries. The Plishtim (Philistines) had long ago disappeared, as had the Jewish society that once lived in the Jewish kingdom of Israel. Jews from the ancient kingdom of Judea, however, remained under Babylonian control. Within a generation, the Persian king Cyrus (590-529 BCE), whose kingdom displaced Babylonia as the major power in the region, allowed Jews to return to Judea; tens of thousands of Jews did so.

The Jews rebuilt Judea. With the Plishtim long gone from Gaza, Jewish communities sprung up in this neighboring area as well. They rebuilt the Jewish Temple on the very spot in Jerusalem where the first Temple had once stood.

What happened next is a tragedy: the Jews of Judea became divided, riven by internal divisions which weakened them. With the Jews disunited, Romans were able to crush the kingdom of Judea. They destroyed Jewish cities and towns, then in the year 70 CE, destroyed Jerusalem. Jews remained in Judea and tried to resist Roman rule. (The fortress of Masada was one such holdout, falling in 73 CE).

Jews continued to try and resist Roman rule. After an escalation in Roman repression, a major Jewish revolt broke out in the year 132 CE, led by a Jewish leader named Shimon ben Kosiba. His followers renamed him Bar Kochba - “Son of the Star.”  After two years of fighting, Roman Emperor Hadrian succeeded in brutally putting down Bar Kochba’s revolt.  To emphasize his total victory over the Jews, he renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, in a nod to Hadrian’s clan name (Aelia) and to the god Jupiter (Jupiter Capitolinus) and erected a temple to Jupiter where the Jewish Temple once stood.  Hadrian changed the name of the ancient Jewish kingdom Judea to “Syria Paelaestina.”  Syria referred to the seat of local government in the province; “Paelaeastina” invoked the name of the Philistines, the most fearsome enemy of ancient Judea.

3. The Palestinian Talmud

Compiled in the aftermath of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Talmud elucidates the Oral Law, which was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, alongside the Written Law, the Five Books of the Hebrew Bible.  There are two versions of the Talmud: the Babylonian Talmud, written in Babylonia, and the Jerusalem Talmud, which is called the Palestine Talmud, compiled in the land that was formerly known as Judea.

4. History of Jews in Palestine

Some narratives these days falsely assume that the region was Jew-free for millenia. In reality, Jewish towns and communities endured in the region after the Romans renamed it Paelaestina.

In his master work about Jewish communities after the end of the Judean kingdom, historian Gedaliah Alon traced the lives of Jews who remained in the area.  Lod, a suburb of modern-day Tel Aviv, is best known today as the home of Ben Gurion International Airport.  In ancient times, after the destruction of Jerusalem, however, Lod emerged as a major center of Jewish life: “It seems that many towns in that area – and perhaps also the coastal cities of Jaffa and Caesarea – received an access of Jewish inhabitants at that time….  The fact that a number of new synagogues were built in Lod…and a number of old ones refurbished, may be due to this internal migration.”  Jewish communities also expanded in the Galilee and other regions that today make up northern Israel.  (Quoted in The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age by Gedaliah Alon, translated and edited by Gershon Levi.  Harvard University Press: 1989.)

Jews remained in the region as Roman rule gave way to Byzantine domination, then the Umayyads a Muslim dynasty who gained control of much of Syria Paelaestina in 638 CE.  (They were followed by dynastic rulers including the Abbasids, Fatamids, Tulunids, Seljuks, and others.)  These new Muslim rulers divided areas in present day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria into regions with names such as Jund Filastin (Military District of Palestine), Jund Al-Urdunn, (Military District of the Jordan River).

5. Christians called the area the “Kingdom of Jerusalem,” not Palestine.

When Christian Crusaders conquered the region in 1099 they rejected the name Palestine and dubbed much of present-day Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It retained this name for 200 years.  (Some British churches include prayers about “Jesus, the Palestinian carpenter” in their Christmas liturgy, but when Christians ruled the Holy Land, they never used the term.)

6. Palestine was historically part of Syria

The Ottomans conquered much of present-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in 1516.  (They displaced the Mameluks, another Muslim empire.)  Far from reverting to the Roman name Palestine, the Ottomans assigned rule over modern-day Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and much of Lebanon and Jordan, to Syria, and called the entire region Esh Sham.

For over hundreds of years – the Ottomans ruled the area until 1918 – people living in today’s Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza considered themselves Syrian. In fact, it was the Balfour Declaration – a British government document issued in the midst of World War I – which introduced the term Palestine into the region when it called for the establishment of a Jewish state in the ancient Kingdom of Judea.  Arabs opposed the plan, and were also angered by British suggestions that they were “Palestinian” instead of Syrian.

After World War I concluded with an allied victory, France made it clear they were to govern territory in present day Syria, while Britain claimed present day Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and other lands. Britain imposed the name Transjordanian Palestine on this area, a move that caused bitter resentment amongst Arabs in the region. “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria,” a group of local Arabs declared in an official resolution during post-war negotiations; “as it has never been separated from it any time.  We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.”  “Palestine” was seen as an imported European term.

7. In the 1800s, “Palestinian” meant “Jewish”

In the years before Israel’s establishment in 1948, it was Jews, not Muslims, who were called Palestinians. Historian Farid Georges Kassab noted in his 1909 book Palestine, Hellenism, and Clericalism that “Palestinian Ottomans call themselves Arabs.”

As Jews moved to the region in greater numbers in the 1800s, they called the institutions they established there Palestinian.  The Palestine Post was a Jewish newspaper which today is known as the Jerusalem Post.  The Palestine Symphony Orchestra was established in 1936 by Jewish musicians; today it’s called the Israel Philharmonic.

8. The United Nations voted to create a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.

Britain tried to negotiate the creation of Jewish and Arab states in Transjordanian Palestine. Debates were bitterly acrimonious, with Arab leaders objecting to a Jewish state in the region.

In 1946, Britain gave all of Palestine east of the Jordan River to the Hashemite dynasty to rule; the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946 declared independence on May 25 that year.  The issue of what to do with Palestine west of the Jordan River was much thornier; in 1947, Britain turned the matter over to the United Nations and asked them to come up with a solution.

After much debate, the UN came up with a partition plan that divided the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River into two states: Arab and Jewish.  The Jewish leadership in Mandatory Palestine welcomed this plan; instead of building an independent Palestinian state, Arabs rejected the proposal.  Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt declared war on Israel the moment the fledgling Jewish state was declared, on May 14, 1948. In the subsequent fighting, Egypt seized Gaza and Jordan took the West Bank: both the areas that the UN had designated for a Palestinian Arab state.

9. Arab nations didn’t create a Palestinian Arab state when they had the chance.

For two decades, Arab countries controlled Gaza and the West Bank. They could have established a Palestinian state, but did not.

Egypt seized Gaza City in May, 1948 and turned it into a military base.  Egypt controlled Gaza with a brutal military occupation for the next 19 years; Arabs living there were not permitted to enter Egypt or to use Egyptian schools, hospitals or social services. A few miles away, Jordan annexed the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem in 1950.  They barred Jews and Muslims from Israel from visiting holy sites and stationed soldiers on the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock is located, and persecuted local Christians.  At no point was there an international outcry calling for Egypt or Jordan to set up the Arab state the UN had envisioned in Palestine.

10. Leadership in Gaza and the West Bank seem more interested in battling Israel than establishing a Palestinian state.

In 1965, instead of calling for a Palestinian Arab state, the Arab League set up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).  Its stated goal was the “liberation of Palestine,” though it was clear that the PLO had no designs on territory held by Jordan or Egypt, only Israel.

After Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 “Six Day” War, the PLO amended its charter to formally call for Israel’s destruction. Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, also calls for an end to Israel.  Both have embarked on campaigns of terror which have killed tens of thousands of Israelis and others through the years.  Both groups have saturated their schools, media, mosques, and civic dialogue with bitter hatred for Israel, naming roads and parks after terrorists and paying pensions to the families of suicide bombers.

In 1996, PLO leader Yassir Arafat declared: “We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and plan a purely Palestinian state.”  That was while the PLO and Israel were formally committed to negotiating a “two-state solution” and the establishment of a State of Palestine.  Today, relations have become even worse.  Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who rules Gaza, stated in August 2024 that he aims for “the eradication of Israel.” Leaders of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, have offered Sinwar and other Hamas leaders their full-throated support.  The dream of a “two state solution” with an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel isn’t dead, but few believe current conditions are favorable for such an outcome.