The term “Palestinian” today refers to the Arab population living in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. By adopting this name, there is an implication that these people have been linked somehow to this land for thousands of years; that is, these Palestinians have deep roots in the land – which is certainly not the case.
The term “Palestinian” is derived from the word Philistine. The Philistines (of whom Goliath was one) were a sea-faring people who likely originated in Crete and invaded the coastal strip around 1200 BCE. Their land included the Gaza Strip and extended north to around present-day Caesarea. The Philistines disappeared under the Babylonian conquest in the 6th century BCE and, as far as I know, have not been heard of since.
In 63 BCE, the Roman army under Pompey the Great captured Jerusalem. The Roman goal was to destroy any vestige of Jewish attachment to this land, which was then called Judea and from which the term Jew arose. The Romans then reinvented and modified the name by calling the land Palestina.
Islam was founded in 610 CE, and spread rapidly by conquest and conversion. The Muslims reached and conquered Palestina in 632 CE and the name Palestina disappeared.
The Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 CE and drove out or killed thousands of Muslims and Jews and repurposed al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock as Christian shrines. Jerusalem was later taken back in 1187 by the Muslim military genius Saladin.
In 1291, the Templars were defeated in the siege of Acre (the capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the last major stronghold of the Crusaders) by the Mamluks. It was only a matter of time before the Christian presence in The Holy Land was extinguished. The land remained under the control of the Mamluks for 220 years until their surrender to the might of the Ottomans in 1516.
During the Ottoman rule, which lasted 400 years, the land was referred to as Filastin.
In 1917, British forces entered Palestine. In 1918, Ottoman rule ended following the defeat of its forces at the battle of Megiddo.
On April 25, 1920, the League of Nations gave Britain a Mandate over Palestine. The name Palestine was resurrected by the map makers drawing up all the new country borders in the Middle East.
Historically, "Palestine" referred to a place, not a people
UNTIL THE 20th century, the name “Palestine” referred exclusively to the ancient land of the Jews. The Arabs who lived there were called Arabs and considered themselves living in southern Syria. They never identified the land as a unique national homeland for themselves.
During the Mandate, it was the Jews who often referred to themselves as Palestinians.
The Arabs that lived west of the Jordan called themselves “The Sons of South Syria.” About half of these Arabs came from Syria and about half came from Egypt. These Arabs were so reluctant to use the name Palestinian that it was accepted by everyone that Palestinian was a term used only for Jews. Golda Meir in fact stated “I am a Palestinian.”
In 1964 the Russian KGB, the godfather of all Arab terrorism, decided the optics of 200 million Arabs against a tiny Jewish state caused too much sympathy toward Israel – who was perceived as the biblical David whereas the Arabs were Goliath – so they came up with the idea of turning the table.
They selected the Arab refugees from the 1948 war, and called them Palestinians. The Russians found the Islamic world was a petri dish in which they could nurture a virulent strain of American-Israeli hatred, because Islamic antisemitism ran deep. In order to make Yasser Arafat the figurehead of the struggle, the Russians destroyed the documentation that showed he was born in Cairo and forged instead the documents that showed that he had been born in Jerusalem. Thus, a new Palestinian and a Palestinian people was born.
The Six Day War and the Arab’s devastating loss caused enormous damage to Russian prestige. In an attempt to rectify the damage, they unleashed a constant flow of anti-Zionist propaganda. Four thousand Russian agents with thousands of copies of the Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed all over the Arab world.
They promoted the idea that the US and Israel were fascist and that the Imperial-Zionist country was being bankrolled by rich Jews. The USSR came up with a lot of Nazi-borrowed trigger words like genocide, racism, and concentration camps. The United Nations turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet propaganda resulting in Resolution 3375 condemning Zionism as a form of racism and discrimination.
Thus, it was the USSR that rebranded the term Palestinian – which, despite the fact that they stand for everything opposite to Western liberal thinking, has nevertheless won the hearts of the poorly informed, the naïve and the not-so-latent antisemitism amongst us.
The writer is a practicing endocrinologist in Dallas, Texas, who now lives part time in Caesarea, Israel. He is the author of thirteen books about his personal experiences that have taught him life lessons.