No Palestinian Language, No Palestinian Currency, No Palestinian History Before 1964

Every genuine nation in human history has possessed three fundamental markers of distinct identity: a language of its own, a currency issued in its own name, and a continuous history predating the political circumstances that gave rise to its modern form. The Israelites had Hebrew, the shekel, and a documented national history spanning three thousand years. The Greeks had Greek, the drachma, and a civilization whose records stretch back to Homer. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Persians, the Egyptians — every people who can credibly claim nationhood can point to these three things. The Palestinian national movement, by contrast, possesses none of them. There is no Palestinian language. There has never been a Palestinian currency issued by a Palestinian government. And there is no distinct Palestinian national consciousness traceable to any point in history before the Palestine Liberation Organization was established in 1964.

This is not a polemical assertion. It is a verifiable historical fact — and it was stated plainly, not by Israeli propagandists, but by the Palestinians’ own leaders. Zuheir Muhsin, a senior member of the PLO’s executive committee, told the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977 that Palestinian national identity was a tactical construct, not a historical reality. His statement, quoted above, remains one of the most candid admissions in the entire history of the conflict. The Palestinian people, as a distinct national group separate from the broader Arab world, were invented — not discovered, not liberated, not recognized, but invented — for the specific strategic purpose of denying Israel’s legitimacy.

No Palestinian Language

Language is the most intimate expression of a people’s distinct identity. It is the vessel in which their literature, their law, their scripture, their poetry, their memory, and their collective inner life are carried across generations. Hebrew is to the Jewish people what Greek is to the Greeks, Arabic to the Arabs, Persian to the Iranians — an irreducible marker of a civilization’s distinctness. There is no Palestinian language. Palestinian Arabs speak Arabic — the same Arabic spoken across twenty-two Arab nations, from Morocco to Iraq, from Syria to Saudi Arabia. The dialect spoken in the West Bank and Gaza is the Levantine Arabic dialect group, identical in its essential features to the Arabic spoken in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. There is no vocabulary, no grammar, no literary tradition, no scriptural canon, no body of written law that is uniquely Palestinian and distinct from the broader Arabic-speaking world.

This is not a trivial point. The Welsh have Welsh. The Catalans have Catalan. The Basques have Euskara, one of the most linguistically isolated languages on earth. The Kurds have Kurdish. These are peoples with distinct linguistic identities who have, in various degrees, sought or achieved national recognition. The Palestinian Arabs have Arabic — the language of their Arab neighbors, their Arab co-religionists, and the twenty-two Arab states that collectively control over five million square kilometers of territory. The argument that this particular subset of Arabic speakers constitutes a distinct nation, entitled to its own state carved from the one Jewish state on earth, requires more than a shared dialect with Syria and Jordan. It requires a distinct identity. And that identity — stripped of its political construction — does not exist in language.

No Palestinian Currency

A sovereign nation issues its own currency. The currency bears the name of the nation, the symbols of its identity, and the authority of its government. It is one of the clearest possible expressions of national sovereignty and distinct existence. There has never been a currency issued by a Palestinian government. Under the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the region from 1517 to 1917, the currency of the land was the Ottoman lira — the currency of a Turkish imperial administration with no Palestinian dimension whatsoever. Under the British Mandate from 1920 to 1948, the currency was the Palestine pound — used equally by the Jewish and Arab populations of the Mandate territory, issued by the British-administered Palestine Currency Board, and bearing the inscription “Palestine” in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. It was a British colonial currency, not a Palestinian one.

After 1948, the regions where Palestinian Arabs lived were absorbed into the currencies of neighboring Arab states. The West Bank, annexed by Jordan, used the Jordanian dinar. The Gaza Strip, administered by Egypt, used the Egyptian pound. Neither currency was Palestinian. When the Palestinian Authority was established following the Oslo Accords of 1993, it did not issue its own currency. The Palestinian Authority uses the Israeli new shekel as its primary currency, with the Jordanian dinar also accepted in the West Bank. At no point in history — not under the Ottomans, not under the British, not under Jordanian and Egyptian administration, not under the Palestinian Authority — has a Palestinian government issued a Palestinian currency. The image of a Palestine pound banknote is frequently circulated as evidence of Palestinian statehood. What it actually shows is a British colonial currency bearing three languages, none of them indicative of a distinct Palestinian nation.

No Palestinian History Before 1964

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded on May 28, 1964. Before that date, there was no organized Palestinian national movement, no Palestinian national government in exile, no Palestinian national charter, no Palestinian national flag, and no international recognition of Palestinians as a distinct national people separate from the broader Arab world. The residents of what had been the British Mandate of Palestine identified themselves — in their own words, in contemporary records, in census data, and in political declarations — primarily as Arabs, as Muslims or Christians, as members of specific families and clans, as Jordanians (after Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950), or simply as residents of specific towns and villages. The concept of a distinct Palestinian national identity, in the modern political sense, was not present.

This is not obscure historical revisionism. It is documented in the statements of Arab leaders at the time. The Arab Higher Committee, which represented Palestinian Arabs during the Mandate period, consistently identified its constituency as part of the broader Arab nation, not as a distinct Palestinian people. When the Arab League rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947 and launched a military campaign to prevent Jewish statehood, the stated goal was not to create a Palestinian state — it was to prevent a Jewish one. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon did not fight in 1948 to establish a Palestinian state. They fought to absorb the territory into existing Arab states. When Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950, no significant Palestinian political movement protested the annexation or demanded an independent Palestinian state instead. Because the concept of a Palestinian state, as distinct from Arab sovereignty over the territory, had not yet been invented.

The Retroactive Fabrication of Ancient Palestinian Roots

Confronted with the absence of pre-1964 Palestinian national history, Palestinian political discourse has constructed an alternative: the claim of continuity with the ancient inhabitants of the land — the Canaanites, the Jebusites, and the Philistines. Palestinian Authority textbooks assert that modern Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites and thus the original inhabitants of the land, predating the Israelites. Yasser Arafat routinely claimed Jebusite heritage. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has made similar claims. This narrative has been accepted uncritically in much Western academic and media discourse.

It is historically incoherent on multiple levels. The Canaanites were not Arab. They were not Muslim. They spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew, not Arabic. They disappeared as a distinct ethnic group thousands of years before the Arab conquest of the Levant in 637 AD. The genetic, cultural, linguistic, and religious continuity between the ancient Canaanites and modern Palestinian Arabs does not exist in any serious archaeological or historical scholarship. The Jebusites — the Canaanite tribe that held Jerusalem before David conquered it, circa 1000 BC — are not documented in any source after approximately 800 BC. The Philistines, as noted in our earlier article in this series, were Aegean migrants who disappeared as a distinct people by approximately 600 BC. None of these ancient peoples were Arab, and no credible genetic or archaeological study has established a continuous line of descent between them and the modern Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza.

The Jewish people, by contrast, have a continuous, documented, archaeologically confirmed, and genetically verified connection to the land stretching back three thousand years. The Hebrew Bible — independently confirmed in its historical dimensions by decades of archaeological excavation — provides a detailed record of Jewish life in the land from the period of the Judges through the United Kingdom, the divided monarchy, the Babylonian exile, the return under Ezra and Nehemiah, the Maccabean revolt, the Herodian period, and into the Roman era. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran between 1947 and 1956, contain Hebrew manuscripts dating to the second and first centuries BC — manuscripts copied in the land of Israel by Jews living in the land of Israel, writing in the same Hebrew language that Jewish children learn today. There is no comparable documentary, archaeological, or genetic record connecting Palestinian Arabs to a distinct pre-Islamic, pre-Arab civilization in the same land.

What the Palestinians Themselves Have Said

The most compelling evidence against the claim of a distinct, ancient Palestinian national identity is not found in Israeli sources. It is found in the statements of Palestinian and Arab leaders themselves — statements made before the current political climate made such candor costly. Zuheir Muhsin’s 1977 interview has already been quoted above. He was not an obscure figure; he was a member of the PLO’s executive committee and head of the military operations department. His statement that Palestinian identity was a tactical construct — useful for claiming territory that Jordan could not officially claim — is a precise description of how and why Palestinian national identity was invented.

King Hussein of Jordan stated in 1981: “The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.” In 1988, when Jordan formally renounced its claim to the West Bank — a renunciation widely interpreted as strategic rather than principled — Palestinian national identity suddenly became, in Jordanian and international discourse, a distinct and ancient thing rather than the recently constructed political instrument it had been acknowledged to be only a decade before. Faisal Husseini, the PLO’s representative in Jerusalem and a respected Palestinian intellectual, stated in 2001 that the Oslo Accords were a “Trojan horse” and that the ultimate goal of the Palestinian national movement was “Palestine from the river to the sea” — the entire territory of Israel, with no Jewish state remaining. The Palestinian national movement, in its own words and in its leaders’ own admissions, has always been about eliminating Israel, not building Palestine.

What God Has Always Called It

The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been called many things by many empires. The Canaanites called it their territory. The Romans called it Judaea, then Syria Palaestina. The Crusaders called it the Holy Land or the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Ottomans divided it among administrative districts. The British called it Palestine. But God, whose covenant predates all of these designations and whose authority supersedes all of them, has always called it by one name: the land He gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their descendants. Not Canaan. Not Palestine. Not the Occupied Territories. Eretz Yisrael — the Land of Israel.

The Jewish people have a language: Hebrew, revived from liturgical use to become a living national tongue, the only language in history to be successfully resurrected after millennia without native speakers. They have a currency: the Israeli new shekel, issued by the Bank of Israel, the central bank of a sovereign state. And they have a history: three thousand years of documented presence in the land, a history that predates every other claim made upon it by any people, empire, or political movement on earth. The Palestinian national movement has political institutions, international recognition, and enormous Western financial support. What it does not have — what it has never had — is the three things that define a genuine nation. The Word of God, which called this land Israel before any empire had a name for it, is not confused about who it belongs to.