Jews were the original Palestinians.
The modern "Palestinian" identity was invented for the explicit purpose of destroying the Jewish state.
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This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer focused on media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In 1938, someone living in Tel Aviv (the first modern, all-Jewish city) reading the morning news was likely looking at The Palestine Post. A classical music fan attending a concert would probably watch the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. A builder needing a loan for a Jewish settlement went to the Anglo-Palestine Bank.
They were Jewish, and they were Palestinian.
Today, that sounds very much like a contradiction. People have been brainwashed to view the word “Palestinian” as an exclusive ethnic and national identity belonging solely to the Arab residents of the region. But history leaves a very long paper trail, and those documents show a different reality.
The current use of the word is a recent invention. It’s not born from ancient roots, but from a calculated political strategy in the 1960s. To understand how a word that once described Jews became the battle cry against them, it helps to look at the timeline.
Words matter, which is why empires change them.
The linguistic root of “Palestine” comes from Peleshet (Philistia), the coastal strip once inhabited by the Philistines. They were an ancient Aegean seafaring people who disappeared from history centuries before the Common Era.
But the word’s application to the entire region was a weaponized rebrand. In 135 CE, after the Roman Empire crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt (a massive Jewish uprising), Emperor Hadrian decided to punish the Jewish population by severing their psychological connection to their homeland. He erased the name Judea from the map and merged it with a neighboring territory to create the province of Syria Palaestina.
It was a geographic label, a Roman administrative district.
If “Palestinian” was an enduring national identity, it would make sense to see it assert itself over the next 18 centuries. But it didn’t. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of World War I, the word functioned strictly as a European geographic reference or an imperial tax grid. For centuries at a time, it vanished from the local map altogether.
When Arab armies conquered the Levant (a historical and geographical term denoting the eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia) in the 7th century, they didn’t declare a Palestinian state. They absorbed the territory into the Islamic Caliphate and Arabicized the Roman administrative name “Palaestina Prima” into Jund Filastin, which literally translates to the “military district of Filastin.”
Crucially, this wasn’t an independent entity. It was merely a sub-district of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria). Being from Jund Filastin simply meant living in a specific military and tax jurisdiction of Syria.
During the Crusader period (1099 to 1291), the term dropped out of local Arab and Christian administration entirely, replaced by the Catholic Kingdom of Jerusalem. The succeeding Mamluk Sultanate (1250 to 1516) similarly had no use for the word. They ruled the region from Damascus and Cairo, carving the land into regional governorships (niyabat) anchored by cities like Safed (Tzfat in Hebrew), Jerusalem, and Gaza.
For the 400 years of the Ottoman Empire (1516 to 1917), “Palestine” wasn’t even an official province. The Ottomans didn’t organize the map that way. The region was divided into districts named after capital cities, like the Sanjak of Jerusalem and the Vilayet of Beirut.
If a resident in 1890 was asked what they were, they wouldn’t say “Palestinian.” They identified by their religion, their local city, or more broadly as an Ottoman subject.
When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed after World War I, the Arab residents of the region didn’t demand a “State of Palestine.” In fact, when the concept was proposed by the victorious Allied powers, local Arabs actively rejected it.
At the time, the dominant political force in the Arab world was Pan-Arabism. Specifically, this was the desire to create a unified “Greater Syria” stretching from Damascus down to the Sinai Peninsula. The local Arab leadership viewed “Palestine” as a European colonial invention designed to carve up their unified Arab land.
In February 1919, the First Palestinian Arab Congress met in Jerusalem and drafted a resolution addressed to the Paris Peace Conference. They actively petitioned to be called Southern Syria (Suriyya al-Janubiyya) and demanded to be ruled by King Faisal in Damascus.
It was only after the French overthrew Faisal in 1920 and shattered the dream of Greater Syria that local Arab leaders realized they were stuck with the newly drawn British Mandate borders. They pivoted to defending “Palestine.” Even then, it was a geographic defense, not a distinct national identity.
During the British Mandate (1920 to 1948), the British resurrected the Roman name. The 1925 Palestinian Citizenship Order created a civic nationality.
Anyone living within the Mandate borders, whether a Jewish refugee from Poland, a Muslim farmer in Hebron, or an Armenian shopkeeper in Jerusalem, held a passport that identified them as a “Palestinian.” Mandate coins and stamps featured the word “Palestine” in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, with the Hebrew version adding the initials for Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) in parentheses.
Looking at international newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s, the press didn’t use “Palestinians” to describe Arabs exclusively. They used terms like “Arabs of Palestine” and “Jews of Palestine.” The word was simply an address.
When the British Mandate for Palestine was originally established in 1920, it included all the land stretching from the Mediterranean Sea, across the Jordan River, and deep into the eastern desert. But in 1922, the British made a sweeping administrative decision.
They severed the entire territory east of the Jordan River. This accounted for around 77 percent of the total Mandate landmass. The British handed this massive eastern territory to the Hashemite dynasty to create the Emirate of Transjordan, which later became the Kingdom of Jordan. The British stipulated that this new eastern territory would be an exclusively Arab region where Jewish settlement was legally barred.
In practical terms, the original Palestine Mandate was partitioned in 1922. The vast majority of the land became an Arab state.
This explains why Jordan’s role following the 1948 war is so critical. When Jordan invaded and captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, they didn’t declare it an independent Palestinian state. In 1950, they formally annexed the territory and granted full Jordanian citizenship to all the Arab residents living there.
For nearly two decades, the Arab residents of the West Bank were legally Jordanians. It wasn’t until 1988, long after Jordan lost the territory to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, that King Hussein officially severed administrative ties with the West Bank and stripped its Arab residents of their Jordanian citizenship. With the stroke of a pen, they became legally stateless.
When the State of Israel was born in 1948, the shared geographic label fractured. Jewish “Palestinians” adopted their new national identity: Israelis.
The Arabs who remained inside Israel became Arab Israelis. But for the Arabs outside those borders who lived in the West Bank (which was quickly occupied and annexed by Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (occupied by Egypt), identity entered a state of limbo.
Between 1948 and 1967, there wasn’t an international outcry for an independent “Palestinian state” in the West Bank and Gaza because Jordan and Egypt already controlled those territories. The Arab residents there were largely viewed by the international community as “Arab refugees.”
If a distinct “Palestinian” national identity existed in the mid-20th century, the international community and the Arab world would have used the term in their official documents. They didn’t.
In 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition the land (Resolution 181), they didn’t call for a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The text explicitly calls for an “Independent Arab State” and an “Independent Jewish State.”
Twenty years later, the language still hadn’t changed. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the UN drafted Resolution 242 to establish a framework for peace. It doesn’t mention “Palestinians” or a “Palestinian state” anywhere in the text. It only calls for a “just settlement of the refugee problem.” As late as 1967, the international community viewed the displaced population as Arab refugees, not a stateless Palestinian nation.
But the most revealing piece of paper comes from the Palestine Liberation Organization itself, the first major Palestinian Arab political entity that (much like Hamas today) was also a terrorist organization.
When it was founded in 1964, Israel didn’t control the West Bank or Gaza. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. Because of this, the original 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization Charter disclaimed those territories. Article 24 of the charter states that it “does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”
Their only goal in 1964 was the destruction of Israel. It was only after Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 that the Palestine Liberation Organization suddenly rewrote their charter in 1968. Only then did they claim those exact territories as the historic Palestinian homeland.
The shift from a geographic descriptor to an exclusive, weaponized national identity took organized form in 1964 with the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But it was really under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, who took control of the organization in 1969, that the rebrand was perfected.
After the Arab armies were decisively defeated by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Pan-Arab strategy of destroying Israel through conventional military invasion collapsed. Arafat realized that framing the conflict as hundreds of millions of Arabs versus a tiny Jewish State was a losing public relations strategy in the West.
He flipped the script. By heavily promoting a distinct “Palestinian” national identity, Arafat turned the narrative into an anti-colonial struggle. Now, it was the stateless Palestinian people against the powerful Israeli military.
It was a stroke of strategic genius, and it worked. By the 1970s, the global media had entirely dropped “Arabs of Palestine” and adopted “Palestinians” as a distinct ethnic and national group.
Once the Palestine Liberation Organization took control of the narrative, the identity evolved into a full-scale ideology. Political scientists and historians often refer to this as “Palestinianism.”
Most national movements build their foundations on a unique language, a shared religion, or centuries of independent self-governance. Palestinianism was uniquely forged in opposition. Reading the foundational charters of the Palestine Liberation Organization from the 1960s, they don’t focus on building a distinct cultural framework or a functioning state apparatus. They focus almost entirely on the negation of Zionism and the dismantling of Israel.
This ideology relies on erasing the pre-1948 history of the word. For Palestinianism to work on the global stage, its supporters have to convince the world that the identity is ancient, indigenous, and exclusive to Arabs. Admitting that Jews were proudly calling themselves Palestinians in 1935 breaks the core narrative of the movement.
Understanding that the word was a shared geographic label until the mid-20th century makes it clear exactly how Palestinianism functions today. It operates as a political movement designed to delegitimize a sovereign state by claiming exclusive ownership over a word that once belonged to everyone in the region.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union desperately wanted to counter American influence in the Middle East. Because Israel was aligned with the West, the Soviets needed a proxy to destabilize the region. They found one in Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. But the Soviets knew that Arafat’s early rhetoric, which frequently called for the outright destruction of Israel, alienated Western audiences.
The KGB stepped in to change the narrative. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer to ever defect from the Soviet bloc, the KGB took Arafat under their wing and completely overhauled his public relations strategy. Soviet intelligence understood that Western academics and politicians were deeply sympathetic to anti-colonial movements.
If the Palestine Liberation Organization wanted global support, they couldn’t just sound like another Arab nationalist group. They had to sound like an oppressed indigenous population fighting an imperial power.
The KGB advised the Palestine Liberation Organization to adopt the language of human rights and anti-imperialism. They helped draft their materials and trained their leaders to reframe a localized territorial dispute into a global struggle for liberation.
It was a brilliantly calculated psy-op. By adopting this new vocabulary, Arafat was able to walk into the United Nations in 1974 wearing a keffiyeh and be greeted as a freedom fighter. The Soviet propaganda machine successfully exported Palestinianism to the Western world, ensuring the ideology would thrive long after the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
Did the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership know they were politically engineering an identity? Yes, of course they did. And sometimes they even admitted it out loud.
In March 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, a senior leader for the organization and commander of the As-Sa’iqa faction, gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper. A committed Pan-Arabist, Mohsen explained the tactical nature of the “Palestinian” identity with stunning candor. He stated that a separate Palestinian people didn’t exist, and that the creation of a Palestinian identity was strictly a political tool to oppose Zionism and push for Arab unity.
He explained that because Jordan was a sovereign state, it couldn’t tactically claim Israeli cities like Haifa or Jaffa.
As a so-called “Palestinian,” however, he could.
A good, and serious take on the project of Palestinianizing the world. For those who need a laugh, here's my satirical take on Jesus as a Palestinian: https://ruthvanita452091.substack.com/p/what-i-learnt-last-year
The common story, which you cite, traces the name Palaistina to Peleshet. But there are some problems with that idea. The name Palaistina first appears in Herodotus’s “History,” written about six centuries before the Romans applied it to Judea. The derivation requires a few steps, and assumes that Herodotus would have named the region for a people which had vanished a couple of centuries earlier, conquered by the Assyrians. It also ignores the existing name for the region Philistia, which the Greeks would have known.
Further, it turns out that there is a Greek word, Palaistas, which matches the first seven letters of Palaistina letter for letter. It seems much more reasonable to have based the name on that. And what does that word mean? Wrestler. That is, he called it “the land of the wrestlers.”
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/is-palestine-the-ancient-greek-name-for-the-children-of-israel/