September 14, 2023

Of all the falsehoods that have been mythologized regarding Israel and Palestine, none has been more pervasive and damaging than the claim that Israel constitutes “Occupied Palestine.”

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Why? Because this claim underlies all other Palestinian claims of being the legitimate and persecuted inhabitants of Israel. Take away this keystone myth, and Palestinians lose all other claims of Israeli/Jewish victimhood and justifications of decades of violence propagated against Jews, Arabs, and Europeans.

These pernicious claims of Palestinian originalism have been promulgated since Israel’s founding by a range of bad actors, including radical Arab countries, the Soviets, and European and American Progressives…not to mention the Palestinians themselves. Ask your average American or European why Palestinians deserve their own country, and one is likely to be told, “because they were there first, and they were displaced by European Jews.” Wrong!

Image: The Western Wall from the Second Temple era by DGtal. CC BY-SA 4.0.

What is “Palestine”?

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Definitions of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” have always been fungible. Technically, “Palestine” refers to a historically amorphous area that encompassed Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, parts of Egypt, and parts of Arabia. It was the location of multiple migrations by many tribes over millennia. The area was part of the Mamluk Egyptian Empire from the mid-1200s until 1516 when it was captured by and integrated into Ottoman Turkish Empire by Sultan Bayezid II. Modern “Palestine,” in the 19th-century, referred to the part of the Ottoman Empire encompassed by modern-day Israel (East of the Jordan River) and Trans Jordan (West of the Jordan River).

This area remained part of Ottoman Turkey until the Turks were defeated in World War I, and the British took effective control of both “Palestine” and Trans-Jordan in 1923 with the goal of eventually ceding independence to its inhabitants. Earlier, in 1917 (during WWI), the British had committed themselves to partitioning the area between Jewish and Arab inhabitants in the area under the Balfour Agreement.

Jews and Palestinians in Palestine

Not all Jews left the area during the diaspora of the Roman era; many remained in the area and drifted back to Jerusalem. More Jews arrived after Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II turned the Ottoman Empire into a refuge for Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal during the 16th-century Inquisition-mandated expulsions.

Over time, more Jews migrated into Palestine, especially Jerusalem. Although the area was predominantly Arab (Druze and Bedouin) and Turk during this period, the 1880 Ottoman census tallied 275,000 people in a land that Mark Twain, in his 1867 travel memoirs, described as “desolate” and “barren.” Of this total, about 10% were Jewish, mostly concentrated in Jerusalem. Jews continued to migrate to Palestine, purchasing land from Turkish and Arab landowners.

By 1900, Jews comprised the largest ethnic segment of Jerusalem’s population. Also by the early 1900s, European Jews began to arrive into the area as part of Zionist-inspired “Aliyah” migrations. Just before Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the Palestinian mandate’s population was about 1.3 million people, of which 30% were Jewish, but after Palestinians out-migrated the area upon partition (confident that the Arab armies would finish off the Jews), the population fell to 800,000, 82% of which was Jewish. This marked the beginning of “Israel.”