A Name With Many Histories

“What began as a Roman insult to Jewish identity has been repurposed into a political narrative that erases it.”

For many, “Palestine” evokes a modern political cause, a map divided by borders, or a flag waved at rallies. But the word itself has a far older and more complex history – one that predates the modern conflict and even the rise of Islam by centuries. Understanding how this name came to be, and how its meaning has shifted, reveals something essential about the relationship between history, identity, and truth.

From Philistia to Palaestina

The term Palestine traces its linguistic roots not to an ancient Arab or Muslim civilization, but to the Peleset or Philistines – a seafaring people who settled along a narrow stretch of coastal Canaan in the 12th century BCE.¹ They were not Arabs, nor indigenous to the region: most scholars identify them as part of the Aegean migrations that swept across the eastern Mediterranean. Their name, Peleset, was transliterated into Hebrew as Pelistim (Philistines) and later into Greek as Palaistina.²

For centuries, Philistia referred only to that small coastal enclave – roughly from Gaza to Ashkelon.³ It never denoted the Judean highlands, Samaria, or Galilee, which were the heartlands of ancient Israel. The association of “Palestine” with the entire Land of Israel came much later – and deliberately so, with intent to insult Jews.

Rome’s Revenge

In 135 CE, after crushing the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman Emperor Hadrian sought not only to destroy Jewish sovereignty but to erase Jewish memory. He renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and the province of Judea became Syria Palaestina.⁴ This was an act of imperial erasure – an early form of cultural warfare designed to sever the link between Jews and their ancestral homeland. The renaming did not reflect new demographics or political realities: it was Rome’s punishment for Jewish rebellion.

The historian Dio Cassius records this act explicitly: Hadrian “changed the name of the province so that the Jews might forget their homeland”. The name Palestina, then, was not a recognition of a local Arab identity but a deliberate insult to the Jewish one – the linguistic scar left by Rome’s attempt to delete Israel from the map.⁵

A Name Without a People

For the next 1,700 years, “Palestine” remained a geographic term of convenience, not a national one. Under Byzantines, Islamic Caliphates, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottomans alike, there was no distinct political entity called Palestine. The land was divided administratively among various districts: Jund Filastin under early Islam referred to part of the coastal plain and Judea, but it was neither unified nor sovereign.

When the British defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine. British Mandate Palestine encompassed the territory west of the Jordan River, while Transjordan (east of the Jordan River) was administratively separated early on and became a distinct entity in 1921. The mandate recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land and included provisions for establishing a Jewish national home. During this period, “Palestinian” often referred to Jews living under the mandate: Jewish institutions such as the Palestine Post (now Jerusalem Post), the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank were prominent and central to the land’s civic life.

The Arab inhabitants, by contrast, generally identified as southern Syrians or members of broader Arab and Muslim communities. As the Arab historian Philip Hitti told the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.” The shift in meaning – from a geographic term to a nationalist one – came only after 1948, when Arab leadership reframed the name as a rallying cry against Israel’s existence.

A Reclaimed and Rewritten Word

In the 20th century, the term Palestine became weaponised. What began as a Roman insult to Jewish identity was repurposed into a political narrative that erased Jewish nationhood and reimagined Jews as interlopers in their own land. Ironically, it was precisely because Palestine had once denoted Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel – that it proved so useful for this inversion.⁸

The new usage detached the name from its historical roots and attached it to a nationalist movement born in opposition to Jewish self-determination. As the Tikvah Foundation observes,^6,7 this transformation has created a “semantic fog” in which a name once associated with Jewish continuity has been turned against it.

Remembering What Was Forgotten

The history of the word Palestine mirrors the history of the land itself: layers of conquest, renaming, and reinvention. Yet through it all, one constant remains – the Jewish people’s unbroken connection to their homeland. The attempt to erase that connection through language has failed, just as Rome’s edict failed two millennia ago.

Names carry power. They tell us who belongs, who remembers, and who defines history. To reclaim the truth about Palestine is not to deny others’ experiences, but to restore accuracy to a term long used as a political weapon. It is to recognise that Palestine was never an Arab nation erased by Zionism – but a Jewish homeland renamed by empire and reinterpreted by modern politics.

Understanding that simple fact cuts through centuries of myth. It reminds us that history, like language, can be manipulated – but never permanently rewritten.

To learn about the history of the name Judea and Samaria, click here.

References

This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.