Palestine, the Lie — Influx of Indignation

“From Time Immemorial”

The "Palestinians" pervasively and continually assert themselves as the rightful owners of the land of "Palestine." The "Palestinians" claim to be a "displaced" people — cast from an ancestral homeland that has been theirs "From Time Immemorial" (a phrase coined by the author Joan Peters in her landmark 1984 work of the same name, a meticulously documented examination of the demographic history of the region that the Arab propaganda apparatus has spent four decades attempting to discredit without success). On the wings of such deception, the "Palestinian" demand for an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital continues to soar and, in the eyes of the international community, sprout an increasingly dangerous degree of merit.

That so many educated people, governments, and international institutions have accepted these claims without scrutiny is itself one of the most remarkable propaganda victories in recorded history. The "Palestinian" narrative has been repeated so persistently, and with such emotional intensity, in universities, newsrooms, the halls of the United Nations, and the chambers of European parliaments, that it has acquired the veneer of established fact. It is not established fact. It is, at its core, a fabrication — one assembled piece by piece over the latter half of the 20th century with breathtaking cynicism and remarkable effectiveness. Even so, history tells an entirely different tale.

FALSEHOOD:

The "Palestinians" are direct descendants of the ancient Philistines, and thus can subsequently trace their presence in the region to said time period — some three thousand years into antiquity.

HISTORICAL FACT:

The ancient Philistines were not an Arab people. They were not Semitic people of any description. They were entirely Greek — or more precisely, they were Aegean Sea Peoples, most likely originating from the Mycenaean world of the eastern Mediterranean, who arrived on the Levantine coastline around 1200 BCE as part of a broader wave of migrations that also disrupted Egypt and the Hittite Empire. These were "invaders" — which is, in point of historical fact, precisely what the name "Philistine" translates to: invaders or migrants. They settled into the coastal plain of what is now the Gaza Strip and southern Canaan, establishing the five Philistine city-states of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, Gath, and Gaza.

The Philistines maintained a continuous and historically documented conflict with the Israelites — the established inhabitants of the interior highlands — throughout the period of the Judges and into the reign of Saul and David. By the Hellenistic period, the Philistines as a distinct ethnic and cultural entity had been thoroughly absorbed and had ceased to exist as an identifiable people. They left no surviving descendants, no linguistic tradition, no cultural continuity that can be traced into the modern era. The genetic, cultural, linguistic, and historical gap between the ancient Philistines and the 20th-century Arab population that appropriated their name is, in the most precise terms available, absolute. There is no line of descent. There is no ancestral connection. The claim is not merely unproven — it is, by every available measure of historical inquiry, impossible.

FALSEHOOD:

The "Palestinians" were a thriving, established, indigenous people who were displaced and uprooted from their ancestral land by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 — an act of colonial dispossession visited upon an ancient people by European Jewish newcomers.

HISTORICAL FACT:

Twain described the Valley of Jezreel — one of the most fertile and strategically significant corridors in the entire region — as "a desolation." He wrote of the Sea of Galilee lying in "a melancholy solitude." He described the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem as nearly devoid of human habitation. This was not a land teeming with a "Palestinian" people on the verge of statehood. It was an emptied and exhausted landscape, depopulated by centuries of war, plague, overtaxation, and Ottoman mismanagement. This is the historical record. It is not contested by serious historians.

The demographic reality began to shift meaningfully only with the arrival of the first waves of Jewish immigration — the aliyot — beginning in the 1880s. Jewish pioneers purchased land legally from Ottoman and Arab landowners, drained the swamps, irrigated the desert, planted the orchards, and built the towns. Tel Aviv was founded on a sand dune in 1909. The agricultural revolution that followed transformed the land. And it was precisely this transformation — the newfound economic opportunity created by Jewish development — that attracted large-scale Arab immigration into the region from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and elsewhere. The Arab population of Mandatory Palestine grew significantly not because it was an ancient settled people returning to ancestral roots, but because Jewish development had made the land economically viable for the first time in centuries. History will further show that on May 14, 1948 — the day Israel declared independence as a sovereign nation — the surrounding Arab states of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia immediately launched a coordinated military invasion, vowing to drive the Jews into the sea. That invasion was repelled. The nascent Jewish state, surrounded and outnumbered at ratios that defy strategic logic, prevailed. The "Palestinian refugee" crisis that followed was not the cause of that war. It was the consequence of the Arab decision to wage it.

More Propaganda

The machinery of the "Palestinian" narrative does not rest. It is industrious, well-funded, and relentless. Having failed on the battlefield in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973, the Arab world understood that the destruction of Israel could not be achieved by conventional military means. The strategy shifted — from armies and artillery to words and institutions. The United Nations became a megaphone. Western universities became recruitment centers. The international press became a compliant amplifier. And the falsehoods multiplied.

FALSEHOOD:

"Israel" does not legitimately exist as a nation-state. "Palestine" is the only historically accurate and morally legitimate name for this land, and the Zionist entity that calls itself Israel is an illegal colonial implant with no rightful claim to the territory it occupies.

HISTORICAL FACT:

The term "Palestine" found its origin not in Arab history, not in Islamic scripture, and not in any organic expression of indigenous identity. It found its origin in an act of Roman imperial spite. In 135 CE, following the brutal suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt — the third and final Jewish uprising against Roman rule — the Emperor Hadrian made a deliberate administrative decision to erase the Jewish identity of the land entirely. He renamed the province of Judea — a name with an unbroken Jewish association stretching back over a thousand years — to Syria Palaestina: "Philistine Syria." The choice was not accidental. It was a calculated insult, selecting the name of Israel's most ancient and reviled enemies — the Philistines, themselves long since extinct — to stamp out the memory of Jewish nationhood. He simultaneously renamed Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and barred Jews from entering it on pain of death.

Let us be precise about who was and who was not involved in this renaming. The players: the Romans, the Jews, and the long-extinct Philistines — Aegean invaders from the Greek world. The conspicuously absent party: the Arabs. Arab civilization, as a historically identifiable entity, did not emerge in the Levant until the 7th century CE — nearly five hundred years after Hadrian renamed the province. The Arabs had no presence in, no claim to, and no relationship with the land that Hadrian renamed "Palestine." The name "Palestine" is therefore a Roman invention, imposed to punish the Jews, commemorating a Greek people who had been extinct for centuries — and it is this name that the modern Arab nationalist movement has adopted as the cornerstone of its identity and its territorial claim. The irony is almost too exquisite to be accidental.

The name "Israel," by contrast, predates the Roman Empire by over a thousand years. It appears in the Merneptah Stele — an Egyptian victory inscription dating to approximately 1208 BCE — as the name of an established people in Canaan. It appears throughout the Hebrew scriptures as the name of both a people and a kingdom. It appears in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian records. The continuous presence of a people called Israel in that land is one of the most thoroughly documented facts of ancient history. To assert that "Israel does not exist" is not a political opinion. It is a statement of demonstrable historical illiteracy.

FALSEHOOD:

The "Palestinian" Arabs are the rightful and original owners of the land, for they inhabited the region before the Jews — or at the very least, alongside the Jews — for thousands of years prior to the Zionist movement.

HISTORICAL FACT:

Recorded history clearly shows the Arabs as a people who did not emerge in this region as a significant political or demographic presence until the Islamic conquest of the 7th century CE — specifically following the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE, when Arab Muslim forces defeated the Byzantine Empire and swept through the Levant. Prior to this, the Arab presence in what is now the land of Israel was essentially negligible: a scattering of nomadic Bedouin tribes in the desert fringes, but no settled Arab civilization, no Arab towns, no Arab political institutions of any consequence in the region's interior. The Arab claim to have inhabited this land "for thousands of years" before the Jews is not merely unsubstantiated — it is chronologically impossible. It predates the emergence of Arab civilization itself.

Yet the "Palestinian" propaganda apparatus continues to boast, incessantly and with extraordinary brazenness, of ties to the land that date back thousands of years. This claim rests entirely upon the mythical "Palestinian" Arab connection with the ancient Philistines — the sea-faring Greeks of the Aegean — which would supposedly date Arab lineage in the region to the Bronze Age. We have already established that this connection does not exist. The Philistines were Greek, not Arab. They are extinct. Their DNA, their language, their culture, their religion bear no relationship whatsoever to the Arab Islamic civilization of the 7th century and beyond. The claim is not a simplification of history. It is the replacement of history with invention.

While recorded history remains incapable of doing the "Palestinians" any favors, it entirely and unequivocally supports a Jewish presence in this region dating back some 2,000 years before the time of Christ — and that is by the most conservative secular-historical reckoning. To those who would submit that the Holy Scriptures do not qualify as an authentic source of recorded history, and subsequently do not represent legitimate evidence supporting such an early Jewish presence, consider the following: in the 1890s, archaeologists unearthed the Merneptah Stele in Thebes, Egypt. Dating to approximately 1208 BCE, it contains the earliest known non-biblical reference to Israel as a settled people — inscribed in stone by a Pharaoh who was gloating over having defeated them. Israel is mentioned as a recognized nation in Canaan more than three thousand years ago, in an Egyptian royal monument, chiseled into granite at a time when the Arab world as we know it did not yet exist. The historical record is not ambiguous. It is not contested among serious scholars. It is simply inconvenient for the narrative.

Although this author sides entirely with Biblical record — for the Word of God is the ultimate authority on the history of His people and His land — both the scriptural and the archaeological records arrive at the same conclusion: the Jewish people have been continuously present in this land for over three millennia. In all of recorded history, and through all the destruction and catastrophe that has come upon the Jewish people — the Assyrian conquest, the Babylonian exile, the Greek persecution, the Roman devastation, the Byzantine hostility, the Crusader massacres, the Ottoman indifference, and ultimately the Nazi Holocaust — they have always maintained a presence, albeit to a varying degree, in the land that is Israel. There has never been a period in which the Jewish connection to this land was severed entirely. Never. The concept of Jewish exile implies a homeland from which one is exiled. And that homeland has always been, and will always be, Israel.

To assert that the Arab people never had any presence in, or control over, the land would itself be historically inaccurate — and intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge this. Recorded history does confirm Arab political dominion over the region during certain periods: the centuries following the Islamic conquest of 636 CE and leading up to the Crusades, as well as a brief transitional period before the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the early 16th century. The Ottoman Turks — themselves not Arab — then controlled the region from 1517 until the British Mandate period following the First World War. Nonetheless, despite these intervals in which various foreign powers — Arab, Turkish, Crusader, Byzantine, Roman, Greek, Persian, Babylonian, Assyrian — established their dominion over the Holy Land, not one of them erased the Jewish presence. Through every conquest and every catastrophe, the Jewish people remained. The thread was never cut.

The Jewish people can claim an ancestral, continuous, and historically documented presence in this region that dates back some 3,300 years. The "Palestinians" can accurately lay claim to an Arab presence dating back no earlier than the 7th century CE — approximately 1,400 years ago. The difference is not trivial. It is a difference of nearly two millennia. To erroneously purport that the "Palestinians" inhabited this region before the Jewish people is an inveracity of not only a historical nature, but of a mathematical one, as well. The numbers simply do not support it. The dates do not support it. The archaeology does not support it. And no amount of repetition, outrage, or international institutional endorsement changes those facts.

FALSEHOOD:

Israel deliberately and violently expelled the Arab population of Palestine in 1948 — in an act of ethnic cleansing that the "Palestinian" narrative describes as the Nakba, the "catastrophe" — and is therefore morally and legally responsible for the ongoing "Palestinian refugee" problem and the demand for a "Right of Return."

HISTORICAL FACT:

Said Arabs were not evicted from the region by Israel. They fled. The distinction is not a minor one — it is the entire hinge upon which the moral architecture of the "Palestinian" narrative rests, and it is a hinge that, upon close historical examination, turns out not to exist. The Arab residents who departed the region in 1948 did so overwhelmingly in response to urging — and in many cases direct instructions — from the Arab political and military leadership of the surrounding states, who were preparing to invade the newly declared Jewish state and who told the local Arab population to evacuate temporarily so that they would not be caught in the crossfire of what was expected to be a swift and total Arab military victory. The Arabs, they were told, would return once the Jews had been driven into the sea.

The evidence for this is not subtle, not disputed among serious historians, and not dependent on Israeli or Zionist sources. Arab historians, Arab political leaders, and Arab military commanders of the period documented it themselves. Habib Issa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, wrote in 1951: "The Arab League instructed the Arabs of Palestine to leave their country, since the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead." The Jordanian newspaper Falastin wrote in February 1949: "The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies." These are not Israeli sources. They are Arab sources, speaking to Arab audiences, in the years immediately following the events in question.

Meanwhile, the other half of the refugee equation — the one the international community has chosen largely to ignore — is the story of the Jewish refugees. Nearly one million Jews were expelled from Arab countries following Israel's declaration of independence: from Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, and elsewhere. These were Jewish communities, many of them ancient, with roots stretching back centuries or millennia before the Arab conquest of their countries. They were stripped of their citizenship, their property, their businesses, their bank accounts. They were subjected to violence, imprisonment, and forced expulsion. They arrived in Israel destitute, traumatized, and stateless. Israel absorbed them. Within a generation, they and their children were full and contributing members of Israeli society. The refugee crisis was resolved — not by perpetuating it, not by institutionalizing it, but by solving it.

Now consider the Arab parallel. Approximately 700,000 Arabs fled the territory that became Israel in 1948 — at the urging of their own leadership, as documented above. They went to Jordan, to Egypt, to Lebanon, to Syria. These were Arab countries, sharing Arab language, Arab culture, Arab religion, and Arab political solidarity with the refugees. What did those countries do? They refused to absorb them. They confined them to refugee camps. They denied them citizenship. They denied them the right to work in most professions. They denied them property rights. They institutionalized their grievance and their statelessness — and then they pointed at Israel as the cause of it all. The United Nations, through the unique institution of UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, the only refugee agency in the world that defines "refugee" status as hereditary and permanent — has spent over seven decades not solving the "Palestinian" refugee problem but cementing it, funding it, and transmitting it from generation to generation as a perpetual political weapon.

No other refugee population in the history of the world has been handled this way. The tens of millions displaced by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 — the same year as the Arab-Israeli conflict — were absorbed by their respective countries within a generation. The millions of German civilians expelled from Eastern Europe after the Second World War were absorbed by Germany. The Greek and Turkish populations exchanged under the Lausanne Convention of 1923 were absorbed by their respective nations. In every other case in modern history, refugee populations were integrated, resettled, and their crisis resolved. The "Palestinian" refugee crisis is the singular, deliberate exception — maintained artificially, funded internationally, and sustained politically, because it serves as the most powerful propaganda tool in the Arab world's ongoing war against the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Such are the dynamics surrounding the elusive and unprocurable "Palestinian Right of Return."

Perspective

Let us state plainly what the historical record, examined honestly and without ideological prejudice, actually shows. There has never been a sovereign Arab state called "Palestine." There has never been a "Palestinian" head of state, a "Palestinian" currency, a "Palestinian" national language distinct from Arabic, or a "Palestinian" cultural tradition that predates the 20th century. The "Palestinian" national identity — as a distinct and self-conscious political identity — was effectively invented following the Six-Day War of 1967, when the Arab states, having failed three times on the battlefield to destroy Israel, adopted the more sophisticated strategy of delegitimization: if the Jews could not be driven out by armies, perhaps they could be isolated, boycotted, and ultimately delegitimized by the sustained assertion that they had stolen their land from an innocent indigenous people.

The Arabs are the only people in recorded history to willfully and emphatically pass on their "refugee" status from generation to generation — not as an unfortunate consequence of circumstance, but as a deliberate political strategy. A Palestinian Arab born in Ramallah today, who has never lived anywhere but Ramallah, is classified by UNRWA as a "refugee" from a village their great-grandparents may or may not have lived in. This classification is not humanitarian. It is ideological. It is designed not to alleviate suffering but to perpetuate grievance — because grievance is the engine of the political project, and the political project is the elimination of Israel. Make no mistake: this is a wound that was self-inflicted, and where their soldiers failed, their lies have prevailed.

The Christian community bears a particular responsibility in this moment of history. To stand silently while the land that God gave to the Jewish people — by covenant, by scripture, by promise — is subjected to a campaign of historical falsification is not neutrality. It is complicity. The Bible is not ambiguous on the question of Israel's right to the land. From the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 15 to the prophetic promises of Ezekiel 36 and 37, from the Psalms to the Revelation, the God of Israel has staked His own name and reputation on the promise that this land belongs to the Jewish people — not as a political arrangement subject to revision, but as an eternal, unconditional, divine grant. For the Christian who takes the Word of God seriously, the "Palestinian" narrative is not merely factually wrong. It is a direct assault on the faithfulness of God.

This series — Palestine, the Lie — has been, across its three installments, an effort to equip the reader with the historical facts necessary to stand against that assault with confidence and clarity. The lie is powerful. It is well-funded. It has the endorsement of the United Nations, the sympathy of Western media, and the moral vocabulary of the progressive left. But it is, in the final accounting, still a lie. And the truth, as always, is on the side of Israel.