Actually, the Ottoman Empire administrative areas (Vilayets) were Aleppo (Haleb), Basra, Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus (Suriye/Syria), Hejaz, Mosul, Syria (later reorganized), Tripolitania (in Libya), Yemen... There is no Palestine. The British exhumed this term from Roman history ...
I was just writing a comment to similar effect, when you submitted your own comment and it popped up on my screen!
I should add that Ottoman provincial (vilayet) and district (sanjak) organisation changed over time, but this never included use of the Roman provincial name 'Palestine.'
'Suriye' is actually just a 19th century Latin loan word adopted under European influence around the same time that 'Palestine' belatedly entered the Arabic lexicon.
Until then, the Arab term for Syria (i.e. Greater Syria including Palestine) was Bilad al-Sham, which was adopted by the Ottomans and which continues to be used, not least by 'Islamic State': Hence the variant translations ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant i.e. Greater Syria including the entire eastern coastal region of the Mediterranean).
Ottoman provincial and district names were normally based on the names of administrative capital cities, rather than the names of regions, as is shown by most of your examples.
For our purposes, the most important example is the 'Sanjak Kudus' the District of Jerusalem (with the Turkish variant Kudus of the Arabic name al-Quds 'the holy place' a variant of Bayt al-Maqdis 'Houses of the Holy', which is an Arabic cognate of the biblical Hebrew name for the Temple complex).
There were several periods in the 19th century when the Sanjak Kudus was administered separately from the rest of the Vilayet Sham as a special district answerable directly to the Ottoman Sultan.
However, the Sanjak Kudus was only ever the southern region equivalent to historical Judea.
Historical Samaria was divided into several districts based around Nablus, Acre and Safed.
When the British established the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, there were local protests against the partition of Syria (al-Sham).....!
NB: Izzaddin al-Qassam the great hero figure still honored by HAMAS by adopting the name al-Qassam brigades and al-Qassam rockets, was of course a Syrian preacher from the northern coastal Latakia region, who had studied in Egypt, supported Libya resistance to Italy and then joined a rebellion against the League of Nations French Syria Mandate before fleeing to the British Palestine Mandate to stir up rebellion there instead.
The death of al-Qassam in 1935 helped stir up the revolt of 1936 to 1939 under the leadership of the openly pro-Nazi Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had incited serval previous massacres of Jews since 1922 including not just Zionist immigrants, but also the 1929 mass rape, mutilation and murder of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron). The clan name of 'Husseini' shows that his family were descendants of the grandson of Mohammed from the Hejaz and only migrated to Jerusalem in the late 19th century.
After a subsequent career of high profile Nazi collaboration including war crimes in Iraq and Bulgaria and then being made Secretary of the Arab League, Haj Amin al-Husseini handed over the mantle of 'Palestinian' leadership to his young cousin and protégé 'Yasser' Arafat al-Husseini, who was born and brought up in Egypt.
So, these are the great revered historical leaders of the 'Palestinian' Arab movement: A northern Syrian from Latakia educated in Egypt; a descendent of recent high-profile immigrants from the Hejaz; and an Egyptian descendent of these same migrants from the Hejaz.
Neither HAMAS nor Fatah officially consider Palestine and the Palestinian Arabs to be a 'nation', but only part of the wider Arab nation. The Arab Nationalism / Pan-Arabism still at least nominally supported by Fatah / PLO and all countries that use the Pan-Arab colours in their flags is really just a secular euphemism for the establishment of a new Caliphate, as advocated by HAMAS and all other Muslim Brotherhood off-shoots. All agree that Israel must be destroyed as a necessary precondition for a Pan-Arab union / new caliphate.
An helpful history . You highlight several important points .
1. Palestine is a propaganda creation . Nobody is particularly interested in these south Syrian arabs . Most other arabs wish they would disappear .
2. The Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi sponsored organisation. Funded from the mid 1930s by Nazis , they operated pipelines for fleeing Nazis after WWII into Egypt and Syria , and to this day they share the main Nazi objective.
This piece is a legal tour de force. Thank you for sharing it with us! I would add only one thing… The ‘palestinian’ problem is a complete creation of the KGB. This basically invalidates every other pro-‘palestinian’ argument.
Diaspora Jews are their own worst enemies in this regard. Unfortunately, I am sure that many do not realize it. Whatever their motivations, be it ignorance, contempt for Israeli viewpoints, or their quest to fit back into the liberal cocktail crowd, many continue to call the Israelis who live in J-S "settlers". This reinforces the viewpoint that these Israelis are "colonialists" and if not for them, the Arabs would live on the land and there would be peace among the cousins forever. Of course, it goes without saying that all of those Jews would need to be "relocated" to elsewhere. After all, you can have Arabs living on Jewish land but you cannot have any Jews living on Arab/Muslim land (witness the "great relocation project" of Jews from Arab lands after 1948). One of the previous FofJ authors this last week wrote that Diaspora Jews deserve a voice in directing the affairs of the State of Israel. Perhaps, but only up to a point. Personally, I wish that most of them would just be quiet. In any case, the Israelis have earned the right, in blood and treasure, to figure this out for themselves.
If only people would focus on the simple facts. Judea and Samaria , Gaza and Golan , and all of Jerusalem were intended for the future Israel on the original plan . Everything else since is confusion , noise , incomplete negotiation or straightforward invasion . Peacemakers must start with these irrefutable facts in mind .
Then let the international community help with deporting the Gazans and “west bank” radicals for deradicalisation , just like after WWII .
Regrettably, Jews are among the offenders - Jews who are in leadership positions, Jews who are educators, Jews who speak and write for Jewish institutions. They say "West Bank," "settlers," "occupied territories." Uninformed and poorly educated Jewishly, they give away the discussion and argument when they open their mouths.
All good points, and let me add that the 1964 PLO Charter (Art. 24) specifically stated that "The West Bank" and Gaza were NOT part of "Palestine." Relatively few people realize this. Then, 3 years later, Israel captured Judea/Samaria from Jordan, and the territory magically became "stolen Palestinian land!" The bottom line is, land isn't "Palestinian" because it was ever an Arab country by that name - it becomes "Palestine" only when Jews have hegemony there. Rest assured, had Israel lost the 1948 war, the land would've been divided up amongst Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, and we never would've heard the words "Palestine" or "Palestinian" again.
Brilliant breakdown of how terminology shapes legal interpretation. The Mandate framework gets glossed over so often in mainstream discourse, but the historical right of settlement there is genuinely relevant when international instutions make sweeping claims about occupation. I've been digging into Schwebel and Rostow's work myself lately and it's weird how easily their arguments get dismissed just because they're not the 'consensus.' Sometimes the minority view is just waiting for its moment.
As we say in the military sciences: today's insurgents could one day be the incumbents. There is a long history of "minority" opinions, on a range of topics, that eventually became commonplace.
If I may nitpick a bit, Judea isn’t exactly precise either. Historical Judea also includes the areas known today as the Jerusalem mountains west of the city and the Judean Lowlands, the Shfelah, which includes Bet Shemesh, where I live. These areas have been part of modern Israel since 1948, so calling the “West Bank” Judea really refers to only part of that broader region.
This isn’t just a semantic point. My area of Judea was the heart of Jewish life in both Temple periods, and it is where I guide historical foraging walks, eating the plants whose ancestors were eaten by our ancestors.
And although this is controversial, I’m not especially bothered by the term West Bank. To me it sounds fairly neutral and almost meaningless, which makes it far preferable to the provocative “occupied territories” or the imprecise “Judea and Samaria.”
Erasing the "other" is as old as Humankind. The idea of co-existing with the " other" is a civilisation anathema to Muslims. Thus the " other" is obliterated. Pax Muslimaica. Pax Palestinica. Keep going, invent. So someone who always knew his/her name was X, now must, by no choice in the matter, become Y, to satisfy medieval racists.
So there we are , we, the Judeans of Judea, the Jews of today, looking at these ludicrous liars. As if the Jordan river were a historical golden apple.
To the " Judean Palestinians", the new Jews:
Salve!, as the Romans would have said when they invented " Palestina".
Israel should start calling the West Bank "Eretz Israel" and award all Arabs residing there one way tickets to somewhere else in the Muslim world, preferably very far from Israel.
The ethnic cleansing of the pre Zionist Yishuv from Judea Samaria began with the violence in the teens and twenties of the 20th century. The Hebron genocide being the most glaring example. Jews are either "colonizers" or they are the indigenous rightfully reclaiming what is theirs. The first has won out. I expect very few universities apart from Yeshiva and some Christian colleges teach the Jewishness of the history of this disputed land. The armistice line from '49 suddenly became Israel's internationally recognized boundary.....not by Islamic world and the Arabs, but by others. That it has not existed for more than fifty years doesn't stop the EU from demanding the removal of every last Jew from Judea Samaria and from Jerusalem including the Jewish Quarter and The Kotel. So as to create a Juden rein apartheid entity such as existed for the Jordanian occupation.....when no "Palestine" emerged though the Arabs controlled every inch of "land claimed by Palestinians for their state."
Actually, the Ottoman Empire administrative areas (Vilayets) were Aleppo (Haleb), Basra, Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus (Suriye/Syria), Hejaz, Mosul, Syria (later reorganized), Tripolitania (in Libya), Yemen... There is no Palestine. The British exhumed this term from Roman history ...
You took the words right our of my mouth!
I was just writing a comment to similar effect, when you submitted your own comment and it popped up on my screen!
I should add that Ottoman provincial (vilayet) and district (sanjak) organisation changed over time, but this never included use of the Roman provincial name 'Palestine.'
'Suriye' is actually just a 19th century Latin loan word adopted under European influence around the same time that 'Palestine' belatedly entered the Arabic lexicon.
Until then, the Arab term for Syria (i.e. Greater Syria including Palestine) was Bilad al-Sham, which was adopted by the Ottomans and which continues to be used, not least by 'Islamic State': Hence the variant translations ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant i.e. Greater Syria including the entire eastern coastal region of the Mediterranean).
Ottoman provincial and district names were normally based on the names of administrative capital cities, rather than the names of regions, as is shown by most of your examples.
For our purposes, the most important example is the 'Sanjak Kudus' the District of Jerusalem (with the Turkish variant Kudus of the Arabic name al-Quds 'the holy place' a variant of Bayt al-Maqdis 'Houses of the Holy', which is an Arabic cognate of the biblical Hebrew name for the Temple complex).
There were several periods in the 19th century when the Sanjak Kudus was administered separately from the rest of the Vilayet Sham as a special district answerable directly to the Ottoman Sultan.
However, the Sanjak Kudus was only ever the southern region equivalent to historical Judea.
Historical Samaria was divided into several districts based around Nablus, Acre and Safed.
When the British established the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, there were local protests against the partition of Syria (al-Sham).....!
NB: Izzaddin al-Qassam the great hero figure still honored by HAMAS by adopting the name al-Qassam brigades and al-Qassam rockets, was of course a Syrian preacher from the northern coastal Latakia region, who had studied in Egypt, supported Libya resistance to Italy and then joined a rebellion against the League of Nations French Syria Mandate before fleeing to the British Palestine Mandate to stir up rebellion there instead.
The death of al-Qassam in 1935 helped stir up the revolt of 1936 to 1939 under the leadership of the openly pro-Nazi Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had incited serval previous massacres of Jews since 1922 including not just Zionist immigrants, but also the 1929 mass rape, mutilation and murder of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron). The clan name of 'Husseini' shows that his family were descendants of the grandson of Mohammed from the Hejaz and only migrated to Jerusalem in the late 19th century.
After a subsequent career of high profile Nazi collaboration including war crimes in Iraq and Bulgaria and then being made Secretary of the Arab League, Haj Amin al-Husseini handed over the mantle of 'Palestinian' leadership to his young cousin and protégé 'Yasser' Arafat al-Husseini, who was born and brought up in Egypt.
So, these are the great revered historical leaders of the 'Palestinian' Arab movement: A northern Syrian from Latakia educated in Egypt; a descendent of recent high-profile immigrants from the Hejaz; and an Egyptian descendent of these same migrants from the Hejaz.
Neither HAMAS nor Fatah officially consider Palestine and the Palestinian Arabs to be a 'nation', but only part of the wider Arab nation. The Arab Nationalism / Pan-Arabism still at least nominally supported by Fatah / PLO and all countries that use the Pan-Arab colours in their flags is really just a secular euphemism for the establishment of a new Caliphate, as advocated by HAMAS and all other Muslim Brotherhood off-shoots. All agree that Israel must be destroyed as a necessary precondition for a Pan-Arab union / new caliphate.
An helpful history . You highlight several important points .
1. Palestine is a propaganda creation . Nobody is particularly interested in these south Syrian arabs . Most other arabs wish they would disappear .
2. The Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi sponsored organisation. Funded from the mid 1930s by Nazis , they operated pipelines for fleeing Nazis after WWII into Egypt and Syria , and to this day they share the main Nazi objective.
To your point #1. Even more so: "Concept of Palestinian state is employed for sole purpose of destroying Israel" https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-733351 & https://thetruthfulproject.blogspot.com/2023/03/appeared-in-jerusalem-post-edited-for.html
Never call them Palestinians either. They are Arabs defined by location…Gaza Arabs, etc. And yes, ‘The West Bank’ is a lie. Words matter.
This piece is a legal tour de force. Thank you for sharing it with us! I would add only one thing… The ‘palestinian’ problem is a complete creation of the KGB. This basically invalidates every other pro-‘palestinian’ argument.
To your point, I actually wrote this article as part of a trilogy on language and warfare; see:
https://davidfiresterphd.substack.com/p/why-i-write-palestinian-in-quotation
and
https://davidfiresterphd.substack.com/p/how-opt-occupied-palestinian-territories
excellent work . thank you
“Jews are occupying Judea” sounds weird. So they kept “West Bank.”
Diaspora Jews are their own worst enemies in this regard. Unfortunately, I am sure that many do not realize it. Whatever their motivations, be it ignorance, contempt for Israeli viewpoints, or their quest to fit back into the liberal cocktail crowd, many continue to call the Israelis who live in J-S "settlers". This reinforces the viewpoint that these Israelis are "colonialists" and if not for them, the Arabs would live on the land and there would be peace among the cousins forever. Of course, it goes without saying that all of those Jews would need to be "relocated" to elsewhere. After all, you can have Arabs living on Jewish land but you cannot have any Jews living on Arab/Muslim land (witness the "great relocation project" of Jews from Arab lands after 1948). One of the previous FofJ authors this last week wrote that Diaspora Jews deserve a voice in directing the affairs of the State of Israel. Perhaps, but only up to a point. Personally, I wish that most of them would just be quiet. In any case, the Israelis have earned the right, in blood and treasure, to figure this out for themselves.
If only people would focus on the simple facts. Judea and Samaria , Gaza and Golan , and all of Jerusalem were intended for the future Israel on the original plan . Everything else since is confusion , noise , incomplete negotiation or straightforward invasion . Peacemakers must start with these irrefutable facts in mind .
Then let the international community help with deporting the Gazans and “west bank” radicals for deradicalisation , just like after WWII .
Regrettably, Jews are among the offenders - Jews who are in leadership positions, Jews who are educators, Jews who speak and write for Jewish institutions. They say "West Bank," "settlers," "occupied territories." Uninformed and poorly educated Jewishly, they give away the discussion and argument when they open their mouths.
"Diaspora Jews." You need to define that Bub. Some "Diaspora Jews" are staunch Zionists and believers in annexation. Gimmie a break.
All good points, and let me add that the 1964 PLO Charter (Art. 24) specifically stated that "The West Bank" and Gaza were NOT part of "Palestine." Relatively few people realize this. Then, 3 years later, Israel captured Judea/Samaria from Jordan, and the territory magically became "stolen Palestinian land!" The bottom line is, land isn't "Palestinian" because it was ever an Arab country by that name - it becomes "Palestine" only when Jews have hegemony there. Rest assured, had Israel lost the 1948 war, the land would've been divided up amongst Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, and we never would've heard the words "Palestine" or "Palestinian" again.
Brilliant breakdown of how terminology shapes legal interpretation. The Mandate framework gets glossed over so often in mainstream discourse, but the historical right of settlement there is genuinely relevant when international instutions make sweeping claims about occupation. I've been digging into Schwebel and Rostow's work myself lately and it's weird how easily their arguments get dismissed just because they're not the 'consensus.' Sometimes the minority view is just waiting for its moment.
As we say in the military sciences: today's insurgents could one day be the incumbents. There is a long history of "minority" opinions, on a range of topics, that eventually became commonplace.
Agree. Agree. And lets take is a step further: "Yishuv ≠ Settlement. Israelis ≠ Settlers." https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-754746
(I did not write the Jpost headline. I would not have used the phrase 'West Bank'}
Great article. I agree with all of your points (including the point you made here about Jpost using the incorrect terminology).
If I may nitpick a bit, Judea isn’t exactly precise either. Historical Judea also includes the areas known today as the Jerusalem mountains west of the city and the Judean Lowlands, the Shfelah, which includes Bet Shemesh, where I live. These areas have been part of modern Israel since 1948, so calling the “West Bank” Judea really refers to only part of that broader region.
This isn’t just a semantic point. My area of Judea was the heart of Jewish life in both Temple periods, and it is where I guide historical foraging walks, eating the plants whose ancestors were eaten by our ancestors.
And although this is controversial, I’m not especially bothered by the term West Bank. To me it sounds fairly neutral and almost meaningless, which makes it far preferable to the provocative “occupied territories” or the imprecise “Judea and Samaria.”
I welcome the nitpick and I respect what you've said. I suppose I'm a little more bothered by the "West Bank" terminology, as I feel it forms a portion of the dictionary our enemies have constructed. I say as much here: https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/12/05/stop-letting-israels-enemies-write-the-dictionary/
Erasing the "other" is as old as Humankind. The idea of co-existing with the " other" is a civilisation anathema to Muslims. Thus the " other" is obliterated. Pax Muslimaica. Pax Palestinica. Keep going, invent. So someone who always knew his/her name was X, now must, by no choice in the matter, become Y, to satisfy medieval racists.
So there we are , we, the Judeans of Judea, the Jews of today, looking at these ludicrous liars. As if the Jordan river were a historical golden apple.
To the " Judean Palestinians", the new Jews:
Salve!, as the Romans would have said when they invented " Palestina".
Israel should start calling the West Bank "Eretz Israel" and award all Arabs residing there one way tickets to somewhere else in the Muslim world, preferably very far from Israel.
The ethnic cleansing of the pre Zionist Yishuv from Judea Samaria began with the violence in the teens and twenties of the 20th century. The Hebron genocide being the most glaring example. Jews are either "colonizers" or they are the indigenous rightfully reclaiming what is theirs. The first has won out. I expect very few universities apart from Yeshiva and some Christian colleges teach the Jewishness of the history of this disputed land. The armistice line from '49 suddenly became Israel's internationally recognized boundary.....not by Islamic world and the Arabs, but by others. That it has not existed for more than fifty years doesn't stop the EU from demanding the removal of every last Jew from Judea Samaria and from Jerusalem including the Jewish Quarter and The Kotel. So as to create a Juden rein apartheid entity such as existed for the Jordanian occupation.....when no "Palestine" emerged though the Arabs controlled every inch of "land claimed by Palestinians for their state."
Name change
Muslim Sweden
Muslim England
Muslim Spain
Muslim Ireland
Muslim Portugal ...etc