Today Palestine consists of two territories geographically separated by Israel. To the west of the Jordan River is what we call the West Bank, which was occupied by Israelis following the Six Day War of 1967, to the east is Gaza.
The name Palestinian comes from the Hebrew word Pelisti, which originally came from the mysterious Sea Peoples mentioned in an Egyptian temple text at the time of Ramesses III in Thebes in the twelfth century BC.
The Sea Peoples are believed to have migrated from the Aegean area of Anatolia. They ravaged the whole of eastern Mediterranean; invading Egypt where they were pushed back to what is now the coast of Gaza and Israel where they founded cities of Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod.
The whole region has been subjected to one invasion after the other over thousands of years, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders and Turks. So who are the Palestinians, ethnically that is to say by language and culture they are Muslim Arabs. Their blood is no doubt a mixture of the peoples who flowed back and forth across that strategically important but narrow strip of land between the sea and the desert.
For the last few hundred years it had no significant status and was part of the Ottoman Empire. That is until the end of World War I and the end of Ottoman rule when it fell under the rule of the British Mandate.
One of the great roads of the ancient world passed through Gaza, running from north to south, a narrow corridor with the sea on one side and the desert on the other, a resting point before crossing the Sinai to the south. Gaza was the nearest western sea port for the Nabateans and was the Gate of Canaan for the Egyptians.
For ancient Egyptians, it was an advance defence against the invaders from the north, first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians followed by the Persians and finally the Greeks and Romans. It was a garrison town with a source of fresh water.
The first known people to live in Gaza were the Hyksos, a sea people believed to have come from the north. They then conquered the Nile Delta and founding a new dynasty ruled over Egypt for two hundred years before the Egyptians revolted and drove them out. The Greeks arrived with Alexander the Great, who besieged and destroyed Gaza, then transformed it into a fort.
‘So you can see that until the arrival of the Romans, Gaza was independent from Israel and Judah,’ Hadi Mahmoud told him. ‘Since the arrival of the British and the colonisation of Palestine by the Jews we have suffered, but now we have new hope.’
Gaza has been one of the great crossroads of civilization, from the most ancient prehistoric times of human existence when man his first steps outside of Africa. Then came the emergence of human civilisation in Egypt and the civilisations born in the Fertile Crescent: Mesopotamia, Assyria and Persia, followed by the Greek and Roman civilisations, after that the Arabs and finally the West, all these overlapped and mixed together.
Archaeological treasures and evidence are everywhere, but Palestine has neither the means nor the immediate need to build a suitable museum, their priorities are elsewhere, further most Palestinians are not even aware of their country’s rich historical heritage.
‘You know that Palestine is not the historic name for the country,’ said Hadi.
‘I thought Palestine was derived from Philistia, today’s southern coastal area?’ said O’Connelly.
‘No, not exactly.’
‘What was it then?’
‘Syria, that was the name originally used by the early Greeks and the Romans.’
‘So when did Palestine come in?’
‘Actually, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus used the name ‘Palestinian Syria’.’
‘So Palestine was at least part of the name!’
‘Yes, classical writers used the term Palestinian Syria for a region that includes present day Syria, Israel, the Lebanon, part of Jordan, and even part of south-eastern Turkey. So it was really a geographic reference for the Greeks, not one just one country.’
Hadi described how the region had in fact been several different countries with different names and the coastal region that is today Lebanon and Syria was called Canaan, or Phoenicia by the Greeks. Then the territory that is now Israel plus the West Bank was composed of two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. In addition they were other states, such as Ammon, Moab and Edom that lay on the banks of the Dead Sea. In the Hebrew Bible, Pleshet or Philistia covered the coastal area south of Jaffa including Gaza.
Judea was the Roman name for Israel, and for them Judea included the whole region under the control of the Jews. It lay on both sides of the Jordan River and part of the surrounding area including Samaria and most of the Galilee and some other localities, but the name ‘Palestine’ was not used officially by the Romans until Hadrian in 135AD.
Herodotus called the inhabitants of the region Palestinian Syrians because of their languages, a Semitic group, close to that of the Phoenicians.
After Alexander the Great’s conquest, the Greek name was Ioudaia, then when the Romans took over they called it Iudaea. After the first great Jewish revolt in 70AD, which ended the destruction of the Temple, the Romans transformed Judea into a Roman province. Then 65 years later in 135AD, the Roman Emperor Hadrian crushed the last Jewish revolt led Bar-Kokhba, and renamed it Provincia Syria Palaestina. From that moment the Jews were forbidden under pain of instant death to approach Jerusalem, which was rebuilt and renamed Aelia Capitolina, thus the Jews were prevented seeing their ancient capital, the home of their sacred Temple.
Aelia Capitolina was in effect a Roman colony and a polis, without the Jews, who were banished, forced into exile in Galilee, Golan, Jericho and overseas.
When the Arabs arrived they did not consider it as a separate country, it was part of what they called Bilad ash-Sham or Greater Syria and it remained so for the next 1,200 years, until the end of the British mandate, however the name Filastin was used, but only for the southern region of the country, what the Romans called Palaestina Prima.
The Christians and Crusaders called the region the Holy Land, Palestine, Judea, Zion and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Only in modern times did Palestine become the official name, so as to avoid the religious connotations of Holy Land. Therefore Palestine was a Western name, as it had been in ancient times, it was first officially employed in 1920 at the San Remo Conference when it was legally declared the Jewish National Home.
‘By the way, whilst were talking of names, where does the word Zion come from?’
‘Zion, or the Hebrew transliteration Tziyyon, is one of the names of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the Bible,’ said Hadi.
‘Ah….’
‘You see under the Ottoman’s the region of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard was divided into three administrative regions, to the north was the Vilayet of Beirut with its three sanjaks, Beirut, Acre and Nabulus. To the south was the Independent Sanjak of Jerusalem. To the east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea was the Vilayet of Damascus that was divided into two sanjaks, to the south of the Dead Sea was Maan and to the north was Hauran.’
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The Archaeology of Jerusalem
The Legacy of Solomon Page 67