There is no such thing as a Palestinian Arab nation! Palestine is a name the Romans gave to Eretz Yisrael with the express purpose of infuriating the Jews Why should we use the spiteful name meant to humiliate the Jews. The British chose to call the land they mandated Palestine, and the Arabs picked it up as their nation's supposed ancient name, though they couldn't even pronounce it correctly and turned it into Falastin a fictional entity.
Golda Meir quoted by Sarah Honig, Jerusalem Post, 25 November 1995 Palestine has never existed as an autonomous entity. There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands.
Israel represents one-tenth of one percent of the landmass. But that's too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough.
From Myths of the Middle East,Joseph Farah, Arab-American editor and journalist, WorldNetDaily, 11 October 2000 From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries.
Professor Bernard Lewis, Commentary Magazine, January 1975 Talk and writing about Israel and the Middle East feature the nouns Palestine and Palestinian, and the phrases Palestinian territory and even Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. All too often, these terms are used with regard to their historical or geographical meaning, so that the usage creates illusions rather than clarifies reality.
THE HISTORY OF PALESTINE!
Thousands of years before the Romans invented Palastina the land had been known as Canaan.
The Canaanites had many tiny city-states, each one at times independent and at times a vassal of an Egyptian or Hittite king. The Canaanites never united into a state. After the Exodus from Egypt probably in the Thirteenth Century BC but perhaps earlier, the Children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan. There they formed first a tribal confederation, and then the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the post-biblical kingdom of Judea.
From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has the only united, independent, sovereign nation-state that ever existed in Palestine west of the Jordan River. (In biblical times, Ammon, Moab and Edom as well as Israel had land east of the Jordan, but they disappeared in antiquity and no other nation took their place until the British invented Trans-Jordanin the 1920s.)
After the Roman conquest of Judea,Palastina became a province of the pagan Roman Empire and then of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and very briefly of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire.
In 638 CE, an Arab-Muslim Caliph took Palastina away from the Byzantine Empire and made it part of an Arab-Muslim Empire. The Arabs, who had no name of their own for this region, adopted the Greco-Roman name Palastina, that they pronounced Falastin. In that period, much of the mixed population of Palastina converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language.
They were subjects of a distant Caliph who ruled them from his capital, that was first in Damascus and later in Baghdad.They did not become a nation or an independent state, or develop a distinct society or culture.
In 1099, Christian Crusaders from Europe conquered Palestina-Falastin. After 1099, it was never again under Arab rule. The Christian Crusader kingdom was politically independent, but never developed a national identity. It remained a military outpost of Christian Europe, and lasted less than 100 years. Thereafter,Palestine was joined to Syria as a subject province first of the Mameluks, ethnically mixed slave-warriors whose center was in Egypt, and then of the Ottoman Turks, whose capital was in Istanbul.
During the First World War, the British took Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its subject provinces Palestine was assigned to the British, to govern temporarily as a mandate from the League of Nations.
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