Arabs living in what Jews call the Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, call themselves “Palestinians” after “Palestine,” the non-Jewish term for the region. However, the people did not begin to call themselves “Palestinians” until the twentieth century. Nonetheless, many Arabs in the region and their sympathizers have co-opted the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” to give their national movement a sense of longevity, credibility, and ownership.
Historically, much of what scholars know about the land of ancient Israel comes from the Hebrew Bible. According to the text, Israel’s origins can be traced back to Abraham, who is considered the father of both Judaism (through his son Isaac) and Islam (through his son Ishmael).
Abraham’s descendants were thought to be enslaved by the Egyptians for hundreds of years before settling in Canaan, which is approximately the region of modern-day Israel.
The word Israel comes from Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, who was renamed “Israel” by the Hebrew God in the Bible.
King David ruled the region around 1000 B.C. His son, who became King Solomon, is credited with building the first holy temple in ancient Jerusalem. In about 931 B.C., the area was divided into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.
Around 722 B.C., the Assyrians invaded and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. In 568 B.C., the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple, which was replaced by a second temple in approximately 516 B.C.
For the next several centuries, the land of modern-day Israel was conquered and ruled by various groups, including the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians, Mamelukes, Islamists and others.
Notable historical references to the name Palestine as a place name for the region of Palestine and the wider Middle East in West Asia throughout the history include its counterparts in other languages, such as Arabic Filasṭīn and Latin Palaestina.
The term “Peleset” (transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t) is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people, who are generally identified with the Philistines, or their land Philistia, starting from circa 1150 BCE during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The first known mention is at the Medinet Habu temple which refers to the Peleset among those who fought against Egypt during Ramesses III‘s reign, and the last known is 300 years later on Padiiset’s Statue. The Assyrians called the same region “Palashtu/Palastu” or “Pilistu,” beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c. 800 BCE through to an Esarhaddon treaty more than a century later. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term
The term “Palestine” first appeared in the 5th century BCE when the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê” between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, as he applied the term to both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley.
Later Greek writers such as Aristotle, Polemon, and Pausanias also used the word, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Roman Judean writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus. There is not currently evidence of the name on any Hellenistic coin or inscription.
In the early 2nd century CE, the term “Syria Palaestina” (literally, “Palestinian Syria”) was given to a Roman province incorporating Judaea and other territories, either before or after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135. In around the year 390, during the Byzantine period, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was then reorganized into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris.
Following the Moslem conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic, and the Jund Filastin became one of the military districts within the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Bilad al-Sham.
From 1517 to 1917, what is today Israel, along with much of the Middle East, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
But World War I dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. In 1917, at the height of the war, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour submitted a letter of intent supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British government hoped that the formal declaration—known thereafter as the Balfour Declaration—would encourage support for the Allies in World War I.
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The word “Palestine” is not Arab or Middle Eastern in origin. It dates back over three millennium and is derived from a people who were not native to the region—the Philistines—a people from the Aegean Sea who were closely related to the ancient Greeks. They lived on the coast of what is now the Gaza Strip and Israel but had disappeared by the 6th century BCE.
The name associated with them, however, did not die out. The Romans, in a fit of spite, reapplied the term “Palestine” to the Land of Israel centuries later, after they defeated a Judean uprising in 135 CE. In effect, the Romans sought to erase the association between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.
The “Palestine” moniker continued to be used long after the Roman Empire fell. When Muslim armies conquered the region in 629 CE, they Arabized the name to “Filastin.” This term cannot be found in the Quran, while the name “Israel” is mentioned several times.
The regional name “Palestine” endured. During the Middle Ages, the name became common in early modern English and was employed by the Crusaders. But for nearly 2,000 years, the name never referred to a country or a group of people.
