To be fair, we should put 'Palestinian' in quotation marks.
The term "Palestinian" is a modern invention. Based on Arab, Jewish, and international scholarship, the historical record is quite clear.
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This is a guest essay by David E. Firester, the author of “Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
To ground the reader in the deep historical context, the 18th-century map depicts the traditional divisions of the Land of Israel — Judea, Samaria, and the surrounding tribal regions — centuries before modern political terminology emerged.
This doesn’t deny the existence or humanity of the Arab population living in Gaza, nor in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank). Rather, it situates the term “Palestinian” within its proper historical, political, and methodological context.
The quotation marks I use are not derogatory; they are methodological. They denote a contested identity category whose modern form emerged only in the 20th century, and whose historical antecedents are absent from antiquity, medieval sources, and Ottoman1 administrative documents. These marks signal analytical distance and historical precision. They do not diminish human worth.
This essay draws on Arab, Jewish, and international scholars; primary-source admissions by leaders of the “Palestinian” movement; testimony from insiders such as Mosab Hassan Yousef; and the global academic literature on nationalism. It culminates in a scholarly (not political) recommendation: that we employ quotation marks around “Palestinian” when referring to identity claims that did not exist prior to the 20th century, so as to preserve terminological integrity and resist retroactive mythmaking.
There is no evidence of an ancient or medieval “Palestinian” people. Regional identities prior to the 20th century were rooted in clan (hamula); town or city (for example Jaffawi, Khalili, and Nabulsi); religious affiliation; and broader Arab or Syrian self-conceptions.
Arab historians such as Philip Hitti and George Antonius, foundational figures in Arab historiography and nationalism, explicitly described the region as part of Greater Syria, not as the homeland of a distinct “Palestinian” nation. Their work is unambiguous on this point.
Scholars such as Yehoshua Porath, Eliezer Tauber, and Mordechai Kedar have demonstrated that during the British Mandate2 period, political mobilization in the territory was not centered on a common national identity. Rather, clan rivalries (especially Husayni versus Nashashibi) dominated political life, loyalties were regional or urban, pan-Arab and “Southern Syria” frameworks overshadowed parochial ones, and no unified “Palestinian” national consciousness emerged.
As Porath showed, early political organizations defined themselves overwhelmingly as Arab or Syrian, not “Palestinian.”
Before 1948, the term “Palestinian” overwhelmingly referred to Jews or to the land, not to a distinct Arab people. Prominent examples include: the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (a Jewish orchestra founded by Bronisław Huberman), Palestine Airways (a Jewish-owned airline), and The Palestine Post (a Jewish newspaper, later The Jerusalem Post). British Mandate passports labeled residents as “Palestine Jews,” “Palestine Christians,” and occasionally “Palestine Arabs,” but did not recognize a “Palestinian” nationality
In this period, newspapers, governments, and international bodies consistently used “Palestinian” to signify Jews or Jewish institutions, and “Arabs” to signify the region’s Arab population. The distinction was clear and widely understood.
Following the Arab invasion of the new State of Israel in 1948, two key developments reshaped the region: Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, granting local Arabs Jordanian citizenship and referring to the territory as the “West Bank” (a term invented only after 1948 to obscure Jewish historical claims); and Egypt placed Gaza under military rule, without creating or recognizing a separate “Palestinian” nationality. No Arab state claimed that a distinct “Palestinian” people existed.
This clear separation between land (“Palestine”) and people (“Arabs”) was standard across global media.
In 1948, the front page of the Boston Globe said: “Arabs Invade Palestine.” Similarly, a New York Times headline said: “Arab Armies Invade Palestine.” Both distinguished between “Arabs” as a people and “Palestine” as a geographic area. The term did not denote an Arab nationality at the time. Together, these headlines form a consistent evidentiary record across the English-speaking world, reinforcing that “Palestine” was a place, not a nation.
Meanwhile, the terms Judea and Samaria are historically attested for millennia, appearing in biblical texts, classical histories, medieval chronicles, and Western cartography without interruption. These names reflect the region’s continuous Jewish presence and its deep historical roots.
The term “West Bank,” by contrast, was created in 1950 by Jordan’s Hashemite regime after its illegal occupation of the western bank of the Jordan River — an annexation recognized by almost no other country. Using Judea and Samaria is historically accurate. Using “West Bank” uncritically is to adopt a mid-20th-century political euphemism designed to obscure historical continuity with Jewish antiquity.
A similar problem arises with the modern phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Despite its ubiquity in journalism, diplomacy, and much of academia, it has no historical antecedent in any British Mandate document, Ottoman administrative register, Arab political memorandum, or United Nations text from 1947 to 1948. The region currently labeled as the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” was never described as “Palestinian” territory prior to 1967, nor was it under a recognized Palestinian state. It was Judea and Samaria, later seized and annexed by Jordan, whose claim was accepted by virtually no one.
To apply the term “Occupied Palestinian Territories” retroactively is therefore not an act of historical description, but a projection of late-20th-century political terminology backward onto earlier periods. The phrase is no more historically grounded than “West Bank,” and both obscure more than they clarify. Precise terminology matters because it anchors the reader to what the region was actually called by the people and institutions of the time, rather than by political narratives formed decades later.
This same pattern of retroactive labeling appears not only in territorial descriptions, but also in the modern ethnonational use of the term “Palestinian,” which entered political vocabulary long after the periods in question.
Multiple Arab and “Palestinian” figures have openly acknowledged that modern “Palestinian” identity is a constructed response to 20th-century political developments rather than an ancient ethnonational reality. These admissions, made across decades and ideological camps, reinforce the documentary record.
Zuhair Mohsen, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official, stated bluntly in a 1977 interview that a distinct Palestinian people existed chiefly for “political and tactical reasons,” adding that broader Arab unity remained the movement’s ultimate aim. Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), one of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s founders, wrote that modern Palestinian identity crystallized only after 1948 (and especially after the 1967 Six-Day War) as a reaction to shifting regional power dynamics. Hanan Ashrawi, a leading “Palestinian” intellectual, has similarly acknowledged that the idea of Palestinian peoplehood grew primarily in response to British policy and the rise of Zionism.
Even former Hamas insider Mosab Hassan Yousef described how internal elites, especially Hamas leadership, deliberately shaped “Palestinian” identity by mobilizing narratives that often contradicted historical fact. According to Yousef, identity was molded through indoctrination, mythmaking, and political necessity — not deep-rooted nationhood.
Taken together, these testimonies reflect a broader pattern: The identities invoked in the Arab-Israeli conflict are often shaped by political circumstances rather than inherited from distant antiquity. This is not unique to “Palestinian” identity; it is characteristic of modern Arab political consciousness more generally.
As British historian Albert Hourani demonstrated in “Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,” modern Arab nationalism emerged not from an ancient, continuous ethnonational consciousness, but from the intellectual and political ferment of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hourani emphasized that Arab identity during this period was shaped by new political ideas, elite debates, colonial pressures, and regional crises — not by primordial national traditions. He showed that local identities in the Levant (whether tied to village, clan, city, or a broader Syrian affiliation) remained primary well into the British Mandate period.
If Arab nationalism itself was a modern construct, then its later regional variations (including the modern “Palestinian” national identity) necessarily arose even later and as part of the same historical process. Hourani’s analysis reinforces the point that the emergence of a distinct “Palestinian” ethnonational identity is a recent political development rather than a deeply rooted historical continuum.
This broader scholarly understanding of nationalism provides the necessary framework for interpreting how modern political identities (especially in the Middle East) are formed, articulated, and projected backward into history. It is these theoretical foundations that help explain why the modern usage of “Palestinian” diverges so sharply from the terminology of earlier eras.
The leading theorists of nationalism (namely Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Walker Connor, Anthony D. Smith) agree that most nations are modern constructs; they are not ancient or timeless; they result from political mobilization, selective memory, media narratives, and shared myths.
The modern “Palestinian” identity fits this model precisely: Its emergence is late, political, and reactive.
Thus, the quotation marks around “Palestinian” serve several scholarly purposes: They mark the term as contested and modern, they avoid projecting a recent political identity backward into periods where it did not exist, they uphold historical accuracy, and they prevent ideological narratives from overwriting documentary evidence.
Again, this is not a denial of any person’s humanity. It is simply a refusal to endorse historical inaccuracies, and a call for historical clarity.
The Ottoman Empire ruled the territory of Palestine from 1516 to 1917.
The British Mandate of Palestine was a League of Nations mandate, approved in 1922, where Britain administered the territory of Palestine following World War I. The mandate was officially tasked with creating conditions for a Jewish national home, as per the Balfour Declaration, while also being responsible for protecting the rights of the existing Arab population.
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Thanks for engaging so thoughtfully — especially as a self-described staunch Zionist. Let me clarify what I am and am not arguing.
My article does not deny that there are Arabic-speaking people who today sincerely understand themselves as “Palestinians,” nor does it deny that Arabs have lived in this land for many centuries. What I challenge is the retroactive claim that there has always been a distinct, ancient nation-state called “Palestine” belonging to an age-old “Palestinian” people, analogous to the continuous peoplehood and indigeneity of the Jewish nation.
On the newspaper you mention: I assume you mean Filastin / Falastin, the Arabic newspaper founded in Jaffa in 1911 by Issa and Yousef al-Issa. It’s an important source — and it actually supports my point. A newspaper founded in 1911 that begins addressing its audience as “Palestinians” is evidence of a modern, early-20th-century political identity taking shape under late Ottoman and Mandate conditions, not evidence of an ancient national continuity stretching back millennia.
Notice as well that, only a couple of decades later, Zionist Jews founded The Palestine Post in Jerusalem (1932) as an explicitly Jewish, pro-Zionist paper. So simply pointing to the word “Palestine” (or “Filastin”) in a newspaper title does not settle the question of which community it belongs to, or what kind of national identity existed centuries before.
The core of my argument is:
“Palestinian” identity, as a distinct national project, is historically recent and politically constructed, like many other national identities that crystallized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The terminology built around it — especially phrases like “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” — has been deliberately weaponized in international forums to recast Jews as late-arriving colonial intruders and to erase Jewish indigeneity, rather than simply to describe a neutral geography.
Using quotation marks around “Palestinian” is my way of signaling that this is a contested, historically contingent label, not a timeless fact of nature — not a way of denying anyone’s humanity or lived experience today.
You say you don’t feel the need to “diminish the history or legitimacy of Arab Palestine” in order to affirm Jewish rights. I agree that we don’t need to erase Arab presence or suffering to affirm the Jewish people’s right to a homeland in Israel. But we also shouldn’t accept a revisionist narrative in which an eternal “Arab Palestine” is imagined into antiquity and Israel is portrayed as a recent, illegitimate colonial imposition. That inversion of chronology is exactly what my piece is pushing back against.
So I’m not trying to make Arabs here into non-people. I’m insisting that we be honest about when “Palestinian” identity emerged, how the term has been used politically, and how language has been weaponized to delegitimize the one people whose connection to this land really is ancient and continuous: the Jewish people.
I’ve been putting everything “ Palestine” related in quotes since they got on my nerves. And adding that Palestine ceased to exist in 1947. Since then, there is Israel and Arab states, to whom the lion’s share of what was Palestine - a fake term since the Romans invented it -was allocated. Recently, “ Palestinianism” has been added to the fraudulent repertoire. I think it is the greatest hoax in many centuries. Can’t even think of a similar monstrous fake entity created for a nefarious purpose, deranging the world and causing so much turmoil and world savage Jew-hatred, dormant only for a few decades.