The world keeps hearing about “Palestine,” as if there was once a sovereign Arab nation that was conquered, colonized, or stolen. But here’s the undeniable truth: there has never been a sovereign Arab country called Palestine. Not in ancient times, not under Islam, not under the Ottomans, and not before 1948.
The name Palestine has a long history but it was always a geographic term, never a national one. It referred to a region, not a country. To understand the power of this historical distortion, we must go back to where it began.
From Judea to “Syria Palaestina” and Rome’s Act of Erasure
After crushing the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian sought to erase the Jewish identity of the Land of Israel. He banned Jewish practice, destroyed Jerusalem, and renamed both the city (Aelia Capitolina) and the land itself calling it “Syria Palaestina.”
This was not the birth of an Arab Palestine; it was the deliberate Roman attempt to erase “Judea.” The name “Palestina” came from the ancient Philistines, long extinct by then. There was no “Palestinian people” in the modern sense just a Roman label imposed on a conquered land.
Empires Came and Went, But Never a Palestinian State
Over the next 1,800 years, the region was ruled by a long line of empires:
- Byzantine (Christian Roman)
- Arab Caliphates (Umayyad, Abbasid)
- Crusaders
- Mamluks
- Ottoman Turks
- British Empire
In every era, “Palestine” was a
province,
district, or
region, never an independent political entity. There were no kings or parliaments of Palestine, no Palestinian currency, no embassies, no borders, no treaties signed by a Palestinian ruler.
When the Ottoman Empire ruled from 1517 to 1917, the area we now call Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank was divided among
three administrative regions (sanjaks) within Greater Syria. The word “Palestine” was barely used at all.
In fact, most local Arabs identified as Syrians, Muslims, or members of tribal clans, not as “Palestinians.” The very idea of a “Palestinian national identity” was virtually unknown.
The British Mandate: When the Name Returned
After World War I, the League of Nations awarded Britain the Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948). This was the first time in centuries the term “Palestine” was used officially again and ironically, it referred to a territory meant to become the Jewish national home, as promised in the Balfour Declaration (1917).
During this time, Jews proudly called themselves “Palestinians.”
There were Jewish institutions like the Palestine Electric Company, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, and the Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post).
In contrast, the Arab population rejected the name “Palestine.”
Prominent Arab leaders demanded that the region be reunited with* Syria or Jordan.*
One of them, Awni Abd al-Hadi, testified before the British Peel Commission in 1937:-
“There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
Let that sink in. The same Arab leadership that now claims a historical “State of Palestine” openly denied its existence less than a century ago.