There never was a Palestine

BlessedPeace · Jun 2, 2024

Fascinating. Think LW media would report this?

bluedragon · Jun 4, 2024

The term Palestine was created by the Romans as an insult to the Hebrews. The Romans hated being assigned there. Desolate, women avoided the occupiers. Ask France occupied, some women and men enjoyed the fruits of the occupation, by Nazi Germany. They paid an eventual price.

These women didn’t date…..there were no pleasures as there were other regions.

Jericho · Jun 4, 2024

"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies." -Mark Twain upon visting the Holy Land in 1867.

Wrangler · Jun 4, 2024

bluedragon said:
The term Palestine was created by the Romans

Agreed. It was always a geographical region - like Pacific north west - not a sovereign State.

Palestine is the Roman term for the Hebrew region of Judea. The reason it was called Judea is because the Jews lived there.

BlessedPeace · Jun 5, 2024

The Real History Of The Name “Palestine”

By Kenan Jaffe
September 25, 2017

J. J. Goldberg’s September 18 column, “A Major Jewish Philanthropist Just Published a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Palestinians,” is an important journalistic contribution to the American Jewish discussion about Israel, but it contains one subtly pernicious misconception. Mr. Goldberg repeats the received wisdom that the term Palestine was “coined” by the Roman rulers of Jewish Judea. According to this story, which I have heard on many occasions from knowledgeable individuals, the Romans renamed most of the land of Israel after the traditional Israelite enemy, the Philistines, as an insult to the Jews who had unsuccessfully rebelled in the early 2nd century CE.

I only discovered that this story is clearly and demonstrably false by accident through a chance encounter with some basic classical texts and subsequent research. It is true that the Romans only implemented the name Palestine as an administrative provincial category after the Bar Kochba rebellion, which is no doubt the source of much confusion. But more than a century before Bar Kochba and before the Romans had any political use for the term, the Roman poet Ovid wrote that a primordial mythological character “sat by the edge of the waters of Palestine,” contextually referring to a region west of Mesopotamia. In the 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus referred by name to Palestine as a land connecting Egypt and what is now Lebanon, inhabited by several peoples.
These are only two examples of many texts that attest to an ancient and ongoing reference to the name Palestine. The name Palestine does not derive from a historical episode that is all about Jews and our rebellions and lost primacy in the land of Israel. Since the beginning of classical antiquity, Palestine has been consistently used as a general term for an ill-defined region inhabited by many groups, Jews often prominently, but never exclusively among them.

Jericho · Jun 5, 2024

Exerpts from Wikipedia, for what it's worth:

A possible predecessor term, Peleset, is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people, starting from c. 1150 BCE during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The word was transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t.

The Peleset (Egyptian: pwrꜣsꜣtj) or Pulasati are a people appearing in fragmentary historical and iconographic records in ancient Egyptian from the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 2nd millennium BCE. They are hypothesised to have been one of the several ethnic groups of which the Sea Peoples were said to be composed. Today, historians generally identify the Peleset with the Philistines.

Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.

Whilst the term was used in Egyptian and Assyrian times, prior to the time period in which the Bible is thought to have been written, scholars generally conclude that the term is cognate with the Biblical Hebrew פְּלִשְׁתִּים‎ Pəlīštīm [Philistines].

The term Palestine first appeared in the 5th century BCE when the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, as he applied the term to both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley.

Writers during this period also used the term Palestine to refer to the entire region between Syria and Egypt, with numerous references to the Jewish areas within Palestine. It has been contended that some first century authors associated the term with the southern coastal region.

The English term "Palestine" itself is borrowed from Latin Palaestīna,[31] which is, in turn, borrowed from Ancient Greek Παλαιστῑ́νη, Palaistī́nē, used by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.

Timeline of the name Palestine - Wikipedia

So, the ethmology of "Palestine" certainly has a long and murky history. It's been used to describe a very broad region from Syria to Egypt, and more specifically the coastal regions. It has also been associated with the Philistines at different times.

Whatever the case may be, the name was chosen by the Romans to disconnect the Jews from the land. Prior to that, even the Romans referred to that region as Judea, as evidenced by this Roman coin, which reads "Judea Capta" meaning "[the land of Judea] is captured."

quietthinker · Jun 6, 2024