One of the most intellectually dishonest habits in the modern conversation about Israel is the way people speak about the word Palestine as though it has always meant an ancient, continuous Arab national state that was later stolen by the Jews. That is not history. That is propaganda. That is a LIE!

The historical record is far more complicated, and for that very reason, far more revealing.

The word Palestine did not begin as a name for a modern Arab nation. In classical usage, the term traces back to the Greek Palaistine and the Latin Palaestina, connected to the Philistines, an ancient people associated primarily with the coastal strip, not with a modern Arab nation. Encyclopaedia Britannica traces the term Palestine to the Philistines and notes that Greek writers used related forms centuries before Islam even existed. In other words, the word long predates any modern Palestinian Arab national identity.

That matters because the word did not originally describe an Arab people. It described a geographic area, and later, under the Romans, it was used as deliberately political. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE, the Roman authorities renamed the province of Judaea as Syria Palaestina. Encyclopaedia Britannica and other historical summaries identify this renaming with the Roman period after the suppression of Jewish revolt. Whether one sees the renaming as purely administrative or partly punitive, one fact is clear: the name was imposed over Judea, over a land already identified historically with the Jewish people. The........

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