The myth of 'Palestine'

I see a lot of users, especially from Muslim and Arab countries, going on and on about a so-called nation known as Palestine, that apparently is being occupied by Zionists or Israel, and needs to be liberated.

The truth is, no such country does exist, or has ever existed.

Here is a present day map of the Middle East:

At present there is no country called Palestine.

The past maps yield the same conclusion:

 The rallying cry around 'Palestine'is often no more than a way of delegitimizing Israel in favour of a country that as literally been invented under its feet. 

Palestine was a province, renamed by the Romans to humilitate the defeated and expelled Jews, on top of the ancient Jewish Kingdoms of Israel and Judah (see map above).  The Muslim Conquests in the 7th century brought settlers of Arabs who settled in the region, and arabized the Roman name to 'Filistin'.  Jews on the other hand, have always referred to the land by its ancient name 'Eretz Israel' (Land of Israel) for thousands of years and during the Exile.

Before 1918, the province was apart of the Ottoman Empire. Afterwards, it was a British Mandate, still not an independant Arab state.

After 1948, the current territories that are supposed to be 'Palestinian' were controlled and governned by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (West Bank).

An additional question somebody should ask. If the 'Palestinians' were a nation, why didn't they ask for independance when their 'brother Arabs' were ruling them?

 MAP (1948-1967):

is there anyone except fabs who agree that?  

this map or similar is in every Bible… 

I dont know what the others think about this argument but I find it fully stupid and such argumets mostly come from fabs.

Palestine is as old as Judea,

How do you Explain the David and goliath story. As far as I know,  goliath was a Palestinian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines

But people today who are claiming to be Palestinains are just Arabs from Jordan. Apart from few settelments, no one lived or wanted that place proir to 1900.  

If not for the Marathas, Arabs/Persians/Turk whould have claimed that India was Muslim land.  Arabs/Persians/Turk  legacy of Invasion is still felt in Kashmir. 

The ancient Phillistines have nothing to do with the modern day Arabs that call themselves Palestinians, because of the Roman change of name of the province.

Goliath was not a 'Palestinian'. 

Arabs are the first people who lived in this regions

And the Canaanites have nothing to do with the present day Arabs either. That link isn't there, and is also just invented. We're talking about a  tribe that existed around 3000 years ago.

I'm repeating myself, but a common theory is that the Israelites were either the same as the Canaanites, or at least were absorbed into the Israelites when they conquered the province.

These people, anyhow, did not identify themselves as Arabs. Modern day Arabs have nothing in common with these tribes,so I don't see  how you can say that these people were 'Arabs', except by historic invention.

It's ludicrous. If you want to call Canaanites and Phillistines Arabs, you can just as easily call the Israelites Arabs with similar evidence.

On the other hand, the link between the Israelites and modern day Jews is much more direct.  

fabs is right that Palestine has never existed as an independent country. 

I don't think that means, however, that the people who currently live in the area, regardless of their ethnicity or religion have no right to self-determination or to protecting themselves.

was that land as an independent Israel state  ?

Check the maps that I've provided, there have been at least a dozen different Jewish states or kingdoms there throughout history.

@arabhamid:

What you're showing is the clever pseudo-history that the Arabs have invented with the rise of Arab nationalism.

The Canaanites were not Arabs, and were not Arabs any more than the Phoenicians, the Hittites or the Israelites.

You've just retroactively decided to change the identity of a people that lived 3000 years, have no customs that you have, did not speak the language that you have, and did not live anywhere where the first Arabs lived.

Why don't you just say that the ancient Chinese were Arabs, then you can lay claims on China.

And just for the record, that article you've sent stinks of bias. If I have to read anymore one-sided articles ranting on about 'imperialists' and 'Zionists' I will go crazy. Trying to dissect the lies out of the article would simply disintegrate it. So I won't even bother.

Again it uses this word 'Palestine' as if we're talking about a country, a nation, instead of simply a province that exchanged hands from ruler to ruler since the Jewish Exile.

Cannanites are the people who lived because the any jew existed, and they came from the south, the land of arabs, or who late were called arabs. some say from 7000 years ago, and some say from 5000 years ago.

They weren't called Arabs 7000 years ago. And either way, the Arabs were from the East, not the South.

"The Bible attributes the name to Canaan, the son of Ham and the grandson of Noah, whose offspring correspond to the names of various ethnic groups in the land of Canaan, listed in the "Table of Nations" (Gen. 10), where Sidon is named as his firstborn son, to be subdued by the descendants of Shem."

Jews formally were not Jews till Mount Sinai, that doesn't mean that their predecessors weren't around.

you kept yelling that jews are pure race, and now you say that the cannanites were absorbed into israelites !!!!!!!

It's an idea by historians. There is on the other hand, no credible historian that says that the modern Arabs are partially from the Canaanites. 

"Jonathan Tubbs, a British archaeologist, argued that the Israelites were themselves Canaanites, and that "historical Israel", as distinct from "literary" or "Biblical Israel" was a subset of Canaanite culture.[16] Canaan when used in this sense refers to the entire Ancient Near Eastern Levant down to about 100 AD, including the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.[16] For example, Mark Smith in "The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel" states "Despite the long regnant model that the Canaanites and Israelites were people of fundamentally different culture, archaeological data now casts doubt on this view. The material culture of the region exhibits numerous common points between Israelites and Canaanites in the Iron I period (ca. 1200–1000 BC). The record would suggest that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture… In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature. Given the information available, one cannot maintain a radical cultural separation between Canaanites and Israelites for the Iron I period." (pp6–7).[27]"

It's pure invention just to claim that 'Arabs' lived there before the Jews.

Then it changes from the Canaanites to the Phillistines and so on and so on.

Historians attribute the Arab presence in the land from the Muslim conquest, which brought Arabs into the Palestine, i.e. the province.

If Arabs were really that much of an ancient part of it, they would have had their own name for the province, and not some bad Arabization of the Roman name 'Filistin' (Palestine).  Jews on the other hand call the province by its ancient name, 'Eretz Israel'.

when I say arabs, I mean they came from arabic lands, and have the same race as the arabs.

But there is and was no 'common land' of the Arabs to begin with. You said yourself that modern Arab identity is a combination of all these nations that ended up speaking Arabic who decided that they were culturally Arabs.

The idea of 'Arabic lands' or a united 'Arab world' are all things that came thousands of years later, and as a result of military conquest and the spread of Islam and ideas from the original Arabs, who came from Saudi Arabia. In the East, not th South.