Mick Hartley

Further to the fantasy history propounded by Mahmoud Abbas, here's Einat Wilf with the real story of how "Palestine" has been appropriated by the Arabs:

The land “from the river to the sea,” to use the now-ubiquitous slogan, has been known as Palestine only twice before. First, the Roman Emperor Hadrian used “Palestina” as a way of suppressing Jewish resistance to his imperial rule. Second, it was used under the British Mandate, which was entrusted to Britain with the purpose of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

In both cases, it was understood that “Palestine” simply denoted the territory where there had been, or would be, a Jewish homeland. This is why the League of Nations, in establishing the Mandate, did so to “give recognition to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” thereby forming “the grounds for reconstituting the Jewish people’s national home in that country.” This is also why local organizations at the time freely used the word “Palestine” in connection to entirely Jewish entities: The Palestine Post, for instance, which later became The Jerusalem Post, or the Palestine Philharmonic, later the Israel Philharmonic. Football associations with players bearing names such as Kastenbaum, Friedmann, Nudelman, and Kraus, as well as coins, bore the name Palestine (but always with a mention of “Eretz Israel,” the Land of Israel).

Nor was that all. The Mandate gave Britain the option to separate the territory east of the River Jordan out of the area mandated for a Jewish home. What became Transjordan, and later Jordan, was forbidden to Jewish settlement. The remaining areas are, fantastically, now called “historic Palestine.” As Shany and I observed, “they are ‘historic’ only insofar as they lasted for barely three decades, were governed by a European superpower, and delimited as the future national home for the Jewish people.”

With independence, the Jewish people then did what every self-respecting nation that achieved independence did in the world at the same time. They shed the colonial name given to their territory (Siam, Gold Coast, Ceylon, Rhodesia, and, yes, Palestine) and replaced it with one rooted in its own culture, geography, and history: Israel.

It was only after Israel declared independence, and especially in the 1960s and ’70s, that the Arabs of the land increasingly appropriated the name Palestine to indicate an Arab identity that possesses the sole exclusive “indigenous” claim to any land controlled by sovereign Jews. In doing so, they inverted and erased two millennia of customary association of the land with the Jews and their history, thereby turning the Jews, whose continuous historical, cultural, and religious connection to the land was never previously questioned, into the “foreign interlopers” in an Arab land to which they have no connection. At the end of this process, the associated meanings of the word “Palestine,” of a history and connection of one people to one land (the Jews to Eretz Israel) were thereby transferred to those who have newly taken the name: the Arabs.