The Lie About 'Palestine' That Keeps the Middle East at War
The world keeps pretending that a “Palestinian state” still needs to be created. It ignores the one that already exists. That illusion has destroyed more lives than any war.
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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a consultant by day, passionate Zionist and Israel advocate by night, and third-generation Holocaust survivor.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
For nearly 2,000 years, “Palestine” was a name on a map, not a country.
It was a label imposed by empires to describe a region, never a nation. There was no flag, no parliament, no sovereign will. Locals called the land by older names like Judea, Samaria, the Holy Land, Al-Sham, and the Levant. “Palestine” was an outsider’s term, a placeholder for territory caught between other powers.
When the British took control in 1918 after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, they revived the term “Palestine” for administrative use. Everyone under the British Mandate, Jews and Arabs alike, was called Palestinian. But only one group actually embraced the name.
The Jews built the Palestine Post, the Palestine Philharmonic, Palestine Airways, and Palestine Bank. They built farms, schools, factories, and hospitals. They turned a colonial designation into a living civic identity. They were the Palestinians who built.
At that time, most Arabs identified as part of the wider Arab nation, not as a distinct Palestinian people. Their leaders looked toward Damascus and Cairo, not Jerusalem. Arab statesman Emir Faisal, soon to be king of Iraq, even signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, welcoming Jewish immigration. Two peoples, one region, both seeking renewal.
But from the same soil grew another seed, the early Islamist movement that would become the Muslim Brotherhood. It taught not coexistence but confrontation. It preached that to resist was holier than to build.
In 1922, Winston Churchill divided the British Mandate. Everything east of the Jordan River became an Arab state called Transjordan. Everything west remained open to the Jewish national home. Transjordan was, in effect, the first Palestinian Arab state. Its people were Arabs of Palestine, and when it declared independence in 1946 as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, that identity became reality. Two years later, the Jews of western Palestine declared independence as the State of Israel. East Palestine became Jordan. West Palestine became Israel. Two nations born from one Mandate.
From that moment forward, three kinds of Palestinians emerged:
Palestinian Arab Nationalists, the founders and citizens of Jordan (despite the Hashemite rulers imposed on them by the British)
Palestinian Jewish Nationalists, the founders and citizens of Israel (having fought a war of independence to rid themselves of British colonial rule)
Palestinian Revolutionary Anti-Nationalists, those who rejected both and devoted themselves only to the destruction of the Jews
It is this last group that the world now calls “the Palestinians.” The name that once described builders has been captured by those who burn. It has become synonymous not with creation but with grievance. The tragedy is not just historical; it is ongoing. For decades, leaders in Gaza and Ramallah have traded their people’s future for a false promise of revenge. They have built nothing lasting, preserved nothing of value, and turned every offer of compromise into another call for war. They have made their own people hostages of their hatred.
This is not a condemnation of ordinary men and women; it is a truth about what has been done to them. Every generation has been taught that dignity comes through martyrdom instead of mastery. Every child learns that the road to freedom runs through someone else’s destruction. Every foreign dollar meant for housing and schools ends up funding terrorism and weapons. The only exports from this so-called “resistance” are grief and ruin.
Meanwhile, the two states that actually emerged from the British Mandate, Jordan and Israel, have proven what is possible when identity serves life instead of death. Both are sovereign, functional, and responsible members of the global community. Jordan is a stable Arab kingdom with peace treaties, universities, and a growing economy driven largely by Palestinians. Israel is a technological superpower with democratic institutions and a flourishing civil society. Both began as “Palestine.” Both succeeded.
Yet the world keeps pretending that a “Palestinian state” still needs to be created. It ignores the one that already exists. It keeps chasing the illusion that peace depends on rewarding those who have never built anything but walls of hate. That illusion has destroyed more lives than any war. It has convinced generations of Arabs that their liberation depends on Jewish annihilation, and generations of Westerners that compassion means indulging the lie.
The truth is simpler and harder. The Palestinian state exists; it is called Jordan. It was born from the same soil, inhabited by the same people, and recognized by the same powers. It has proven itself stable, moderate, and capable. It is what the Arab world made of its share of “Palestine.” The rest, the enclaves ruled by militias and bureaucrats, the territories governed by slogans instead of laws, are not a state-in-waiting; they are a wound kept open for political gain.
Peace will never come from pretending that the wound is a country. It will come from telling the truth about what has already been achieved. Israel is the Jewish state of the old British Mandate. Jordan is the Arab state of the same British Mandate. Together, they represent the only two viable outcomes of the British experiment called “Palestine.” Everything else has been failure, propaganda, and waste.
The world has spent 75 years trying to invent a second Arab Palestine while ignoring the one that exists. It has rewarded corruption, excused terror, and taught millions that victimhood is a permanent identity. The result is exactly what we see today: a people trapped in the rubble of their own refusal to move forward.
It’s time to stop feeding that delusion. It’s time to recognize the Palestinian state that already exists, the one that has proven itself worthy and capable, instead of empowering those who have only proven they can destroy.
Real peace begins when the world stops confusing defiance with destiny and starts rewarding those who build.
Great stuff.
A question, first, for Guy: you write
"Palestinian Jewish Nationalists, the founders and citizens of Israel (having fought a war of independence to rid themselves of British colonial rule)".
I am confused: I always understood Israel's War of Independence was due to the Arab invasion after the state was proclaimed. The Brits were already leaving, having returned their Mandate earlier to the UN. The fights against the British preceded the War of Independence, I always thought. There was huge Jewish resistance to the British, much handled by underground groups today seen as terrorists, but I never heard it called a war of independence.
Unrelated, I wish a great psychologist of collective thought or perhaps called group psychologist would tell the world what we are dealing with as Arab characteristics in this confrontation:
the traits of revenge, supremacy,honour, death cults, war as life pursuit, Jew-obsession, malignant narcissism, a deceitful mind sanctioned by Islam's ideology -which passes for religion -that would make Orwell blush, inferiority complex resulting in projection and domination lust, the acceptance and encouragement of cruelty, the perception of the rest of the world as inferior, the dictate that conquest grants eternal ownership, the fossilisation of their minds under oppressive Islam, the world's oblivion of the Hashemite fraud, the PLO's attempts to take over Jordan , the slaughter of Black September, the Marxist Communist support for " liberation " movements ( read: terrorists who harm the West), the failure and lack of accountability of the Arab world, their using and abusing of the refugees they themselves created in 1948, and I could go on.
There is no serious major coordinated Jewish attack on " Arabism" , Islam per se or the oxymoron of "Islamophobia", and we all know that defence requires a good attack strategy.
This article is of course a positive step, but we need massive influence. Our own Al-Jazeera. And interference with the Muslim Brotherhood's diffusion to the Arab world. Finally, since there will not be a Palestinian state on Judea and Samaria and Gaza had its own independence until they blew it and don't deserve another chance, let's remind the world that Jordan kept the " other" Palestinians under Jordanian citizenship for 20 years, annexing those territories, but never thought of giving them a state of their own. Since 1967, the world is in turmoil because now the Jews own the territory. As they did earlier in History. Can't Jordan be bribed to take their own Palestinians in?
And ironically they don’t refer to themselves as ‘Palestinians’ but Jordanians…