There is no historical country that crudely corresponds to the modern conception of “Palestine.”

Tomas McIntee

 

Ph.D. from University of California, Irvine (Graduated 2015) Jan 22

There is no historical country that crudely corresponds to the modern conception of “Palestine.”

Directly, the name is drawn from the British Mandate of Palestine, which initially had borders that looked very different from the modern concept and was intended to be the site of a future Jewish homeland.

Notably, it included all of what is presently the country known as Jordan. The British divided this into a Muslim piece to be ruled by an ally of theirs (now the kingdom of Jordan) and a smaller piece that would be the site of a future Jewish homeland (keeping the name “Palestine”). Prior to Israel’s declaration of independence from British rule, the area had spent about 1800 of the last 2000 years being a subjugated piece of one or another large empire. The exception?

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, one of the famous “Crusader Kingdoms,” was a sovereign kingdom with borders roughly corresponding to the British-ruled mandate. It was a Christian kingdom with a diverse population that included Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

“Palestine” in the modern sense is conceived of as an Arab Muslim state, consisting either of the West Bank and Gaza, or the two of them plus the modern state of Israel inconveniently located in between those two. It’s a new construction born out of the problem that many Arab Muslims local to those areas do not want to share a state with Jews.