Some Thoughts on the Use of the Word 'Palestinian'

What follows is a slightly extended version of a comment I placed on the ‘Prince Charles’ thread over the weekend. I think it is an important example of the significance of words in debate, a significance of which their users are often unconscious. Knowing the inflamed passions which this subject arouses, I would ask any contributors to respond to what I actually say here, rather than to imagine statements I have not made, or meanings which cannot be simply deduced from what I have actually written. The only hope for innocent people in this dispute is through reasonable compromise rather than utopian 'solutions'. It;s my belief that knowledge fosters such calm reason:

 

 

I am instructed to 'admit' that the Arabs of the region in and around Israel are 'Palestinians'. This designation is not a fact, but an opinion with political implications. Therefore to 'admit' it would be to concede to an opinion I do not hold, and which has a propaganda purpose with which I do not agree.

 

The name ‘Palestine’ returned to political usage after more than a thousand years of disuse, in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which promised the ‘establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people’. (note, not a ‘state’, or a country, but a ‘national home’, an ambiguous formulation).

 

The choice of this word is itself very telling. Arthur Balfour, like most of the British governing classes at the time, had been raised in the Christian scriptures, was familiar with Old and New Testaments of the Bible,  and knew that much of the region had been under Jewish rule for much of its history. He knew who the Philistines were.

 

But he had also been through an education (see also below) which was principally classical, and viewed the ancient world very much through a Graeco-Roman prism. Those who had experienced this schooling tended to regard the British empire as heir to its Roman forerunner, and would have instinctively resorted to Roman terminology for this area.

 

There may have been other reasons, and I’d be grateful if any reader has actual knowledge about this). It is possible that the Colonial Office, even at that date, was simply anxious to avoid a clear commitment of support for Zionist objectives, and even hoping to wriggle out of the commitment made by Arthur Balfour, and so chose a ‘neutral’ Roman name rather than the Biblical ‘Judaea’, which would obviously have been clearly biased towards the Zionists (who themselves would eventually choose ‘Israel’ when they had the power to do so). Perhaps the formula was similar in intent to the official name of Switzerland ‘Confoederatio Helvetica’ (as used in the ‘CH’ plate on Swiss cars and the ‘CHF’ international designation of the Swiss Franc) so as to avoid giving preference to any of that country’s four official languages. Perhaps not.

 

 'Palestinian' between 1922 and 1948 meant any inhabitant of the Palestine Mandate,  including Jews. At that time, for instance, the principal English-language newspaper published in Jerusalem was 'The Palestine Post', which now survives as 'the Jerusalem Post'. When the Mandate ended in 1948, 'Palestine' was eventually carved up, by force of arms, into three entities, making the term (once again) a bit homeless. The three inheritors of Mandate Palestine were Israel, recognized by the UN but not by the Arab world, which contained Jews (Zionist and non-Zionist, secular and religious, some of them descendants of forebears resident in the region for many centuries)but also large numbers of Christian and Muslim Arabs; Gaza, seized by Egypt but not actually annexed by it, which was wholly Arab and predominantly Muslim; and what is now known as the 'West Bank',  including much of Jerusalem, which was inhabited by Muslim and Christian Arabs; this area was seized in 1948 by, and then annexed by, Transjordan - which then renamed itself Jordan.

 

This annexation was achieved by the British-trained forces of Transjordan in the war of 1948, and was not (how shall I say?) unwelcome to the government in London. Interestingly it, was never recognized by anyone apart from Britain and Pakistan, though it was also not much condemned or denounced, as the subsequent Israeli occupation of the area has been. This raises interesting questions about the legality of the later Israeli occupation of the same area after 1967. Why? Because under international law it had originally been designated (under the League of Nations Mandate) for 'close Jewish settlement'. That designation has never been superseded by any other internationally agreed convention. So whose is it now? In what way are the Jewish settlements now in it 'illegal', as is invariably stated? The more you find out, the more complex it gets. Before the foundation of the Mandate the term 'Palestine' had only a (rather complicated) historical or Biblical significance, dating back to the Romans' rather spiteful use of the word.

 

For the word ‘Palestine’ actually refers to the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Israelites (‘The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!’) , a usage the Romans adopted to convey to the Jews that they were thoroughly beaten. As Wikipedia explains : ‘After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman Emperor Hadrian applied the name Syria Palestina to the entire region, that had formerly included Iudaea Province. Hadrian probably chose a name that revived the ancient name of Philistia (Palestine), combining it with that of the neighboring province of Syria, in an attempt to suppress Jewish connection to the land.’ Hadrian also renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, crammed it with Roman temples and banned Jews from so much as entering it.

 

The Philistines themselves had long ago disappeared from history, during the repeated conquest and reconquest of this region before Roman times. The use of their name had no basis in reality. The Ottoman empire, which held the region for long centuries before the creation of the Palestine Mandate, recognized no such entity or nationality in recent times, and none of its sanjaks or vilayets (administrative divisions) bore that name or had any congruence with the 1922 borders of Mandate Palestine or its successor states. The last time it was used in any political sense was after the Arab Muslim conquest of the region (until then largely populated by Christians) in the seventh century AD. A military district of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphate, a small sub-province, was called ‘Jund Filastin’ or ‘Military District of Palestine’. This was itself probably a survival from Byzantine usage - the Byzantine empire is known to have referred to the area as ‘Palaestina’ in the Fifth Century AD. After the Crusades the later takeover by the Ottomans, the term disappeared. Its last previous poitical use, 14 centuries ago was itself no more than a survival, probably through inertia,  from Roman times. It is, I think, significant, that all these uses before 1917 commemorate the dispossession by force of the Jews in the area.

 

The whole story illustrates the huge complexity (often discussed here) of who (if anyone) has secure title to any piece of land anywhere on the planet. The more ancient the evidence of human settlement, the more claimants there will be. In this case there is a long list of expellees, as well as a long list of invaders.  The one thing of which we can be certain is that the Philistines themselves are no longer claimants to the land, for they are not to be found. One can only shudder to imagine why that might be, but in a region so afflicted with ruthless invaders, it is not hard for a small people to be wiped off the map. 

 

One has to assume that Colonial Office classicists such as Ronald Storrs, came up with the name (rather than, say , 'Judaea') for the Mandate in their usual jaundiced, witty, not necessarily philo-Semitic but probably cynical way.

 

Before 1948, the usage 'Palestinian' was not common among the Arabs of the region when referring to themselves. Their leading body during the Mandate styled itself the 'Arab Higher Committee'. I think the same is true of the Arab revolt (mainly a successful campaign to halt Jewish immigration) in Mandate Palestine in the late 1930s, a revolt which was never described at the time as 'Palestinian'. In fact the term 'Palestinian' in the current propaganda sense did not come into widespread use anywhere until after 1948, and very rarely until after the defeat of the Arab conventional forces in the war of 1967.  The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, but did not really come to prominence until after Israel’s 1967 defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in conventional battle, and particularly until after the seizure of the West Bank by Israel after that war. The term also became important in the (largely forgotten) Black September episode (1970-71), in which the PLO battled against the King of Jordan in an extraordinarily bloody struggle for control of that country.

 

Since then it has suited Arab propaganda to challenge the Zionist claim of national identity and entitlement with a matching 'Palestinian' nationalism. This goes with unyielding use of a map of ‘Palestine’, displayed universally in PLO propaganda, which  shows ‘Palestine’ as a single Arab country, with pre-1967 Israel entirely expunged from it, and suggesting that there was at some time an Arab country of that name dispossessed by Israeli conquest, when the truth is immensely more complex. I find many British people who take strong positions on this subject actually believe that this was so, that there was an Arab nation of ‘Palestine’ which was invaded and colonised by Israel. Historical knowledge of the dispute is rare among noisier partisans on either side.

 

There are several problems with this, not least in explaining how citizens of Jordan (originally part of Mandate Palestine) are not 'Palestinians', and in claiming as 'Palestinians' (as is increasingly done nowadays, though it was not until a few years ago)  the Israeli Arabs who (despite the many and undoubted disadvantages under which they live) are privately quite glad to be under Israeli rather than Arab rule.

But gullible westerners, who know little or nothing about the history of the region or the history of the dispute there, are beguiled by the term and use it without thought for its implications, this highly questionable claim that there once existed an actual historical, cultural independent national entity (rather than an arbitrary British colony) called 'Palestine' which has a superior claim to the whole territory of Israel, to that of Israel itself. No reasonable compromise can be reached if this argument is accepted. I think that is the best reason for informed persons to steer clear of this designation.