Walk around any university campus in America after October 7, 2023, and you will hear the same catechism - “Palestine is the land of the indigenous people“, “The Jews are settler-colonizers“, “From the river to the sea.“ They hardly know from which river to which sea, but that is another topic. The Palestinian Authority textbooks go even further by teaching that today's Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites. The thesis is that the people who today call themselves Palestinians are the indigenous people of this land, and the Jews came as European intruders.
This is a powerful story.
It is also completely untrue.
The first mistake in this story is the name itself. "Palestine" does not come from the name of an ancient Arab nation. It comes from the Philistines (Pelesets in Egyptian written sources) - a seafaring people of Aegean origin, who in the 12th century BC settled along the coastal strip around Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod. They were not Arabs, nor were they ancestors of today's Palestinians. They were part of the so-called "Sea Peoples", closer to the early Greek world than to Arabia, and disappeared as a separate people two millennia ago. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus used the name Palaistin? for the coastal region of Syria between Phoenicia and Egypt. It is about geography, not a nation. They are not computers, but compotes.
Later this name was turned into a weapon. After the revolt of Simon bar Kokhba in 132-135 AD, Emperor Hadrian renamed the Roman province of Judea "Syria Palaestina" (Syria Palaestina) for punitive purposes. The very name "Judea" that the place had previously borne testified that this was the land of the Jews. The new name "Palestine", borrowed from the name of their ancient coastal enemies, was intended to erase this fact. Jerusalem was rebuilt under the name Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden access to their city.
This land had a name long before the arrival of Rome, and it was not "Palestine", but "Judea and Samaria". Judea bears the name of the tribe of Judah and of the Kingdom of Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem. The name "Jew" and the English word "Jew" come from the same root. Samaria, Shomron in Hebrew, was the hilltop capital that King Omri built for the northern Kingdom of Israel in the 9th century BC. These are the names used in the Hebrew Bible, in the writings of Greek and Roman historians, and in the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, which refers to the "mountainous region of Samaria and Judea". The name "West Bank" only appeared after Jordan captured the territory in 1948.
Jews have always inhabited this land. This is not my claim, history testifies to this. The Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah are Jewish states. The First Temple stood in Jerusalem until 586 BC, when it was destroyed by the Babylonians. The Jews returned, rebuilt the Second Temple, and later ruled an independent Hasmonean state. Rome crushed the Great Jewish Revolt in 70 AD and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 AD. The center of Jewish life then shifted north to Galilee. The Jewish presence in the country, however, did not cease. The Jerusalem Talmud was composed here. Jewish communities continued to exist in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed throughout the empires that followed. By the 1860s, Jews were once again the largest community in Jerusalem. They had been a majority in their ancient capital even before the first modern Zionist aliyah began. This is not about "colonialism," but about a people who never completely left this land of theirs and never stopped returning home.
Of course, this does not mean that the Arabs were absent. They were not. After the Islamic conquest in the seventh century, the Arabic language and culture spread throughout the Levant, and families who today call themselves "Palestinian" have lived in these cities for generations. But this does not equate to indigenous status in the national sense that is now being claimed on American campuses by uneducated activists. A separate "Palestinian people" as a political nation distinct from the surrounding Arab world is a 20th-century construct.
The instrument that turned this identity into a weapon, however, is not ancient, but was created in the 1960s. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964, and its original charter called not for a state alongside Israel, but for the liquidation of Israel. In 1977, Zoher Muhsin, a member of the PLO Executive Committee who is part of a pan-Arab movement within the organization, told the Dutch newspaper Trouw: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. There is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation. Yes, the separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.“ Jordan, he explains, cannot lay claim to Haifa and Jaffa. A “Palestinian” can.
Yasser Arafat, the face of this tactic, was born in Cairo in 1929. Fact. According to former head of Romanian foreign intelligence Ion Mihai Pacepa, who fled to the United States, the KGB trained Arafat at its special operations school in Balashikha and helped fabricate a Palestinian biography for the Egyptian-born operative. I don't see how Soviet patronage of the PLO can be the subject of any meaningful dispute. On November 15, 1988, in the city of Algiers, the Palestinian National Council proclaimed the "State of Palestine." Algeria was the first to recognize it. The Soviet Union followed, followed by the countries of the communist bloc and the Non-Aligned Movement. By the end of the year, some 78 countries had recognized it, almost all of them partners of the USSR or members of the Arab League. But this does not create a functioning state, because the Palestinian Authority was only established in 1994 after the Oslo Accords as an interim body to pave the way for negotiated peace.
Then the United States did something that today's chanting activists prefer to portray as nonexistent. The Americans tried to give the Palestinians a state. At the Camp David summit in July 2000, and again in December of that year, President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed the creation of a Palestinian state on approximately 97 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Despite this enormous opportunity for a solution to the conflict, Arafat walked away from the talks. "I was devastated by the effort to give the Palestinians a state. "I had an agreement that they rejected," Bill Clinton would later say on the subject.
It is no wonder that a generation that has never studied this history believes the mediocre story of Hamas. This same Hamas that proclaimed in its 1988 Charter that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam destroys it." Look at the surrounding countries and Israel's uniqueness becomes impossible to ignore. Throughout the Middle East, religious minorities are melting away, fleeing or living with restrictions. Israel is the exception. A Jewish state that is also the only liberal democracy in the region, the only country where Muslims, Christians and Druze vote, sit in parliament, sit on the Supreme Court and openly practice their religion. Arab citizens make up a fifth of the population. This is what the only multi-religious state in this region looks like.
So what is Palestine? It is an ancient geographical name, taken from the name of an extinct Aegean people and imposed on Judea by a Roman emperor who wanted the Jews living there to be forgotten. It is a name from the era of the British Mandate and a modern national project, assembled in the mid-20th century, brought to light by Arab regimes and the Soviet bloc and narrated as if it were as old as the stones of Jerusalem. But it is not. These stones are Jewish. The temples of the Jewish people stood there. Of those who, during two millennia of exile, kept the name of this country in their prayers and never stopped living in it.
They are not colonizers. They are at home.