etymology, the history of words, is frequently fascinating yet generally academic and trivial compared to the history of conflict. there may be many exceptions but the one that stands out in the modern age is the history of the word "palestine". there is no word that has been at the center of so much fighting in recent times. even in the twentieth century, neither "nazi" nor "soviet", even "communism" or "socialism" had such emotional histrionics and wailing over them. the level of unintelligent babbling and crazed, panicked energy at the mere mention of the word "palestine" rivals anything from our prehistoric days of brutal animalistic behavior and the bloodiest religious battles of the crusades.
the trouble is that the people reacting to the mere mention of the word "palestine" with such intensity, losing both their minds and their logical processing and diving into mob thought and reactionary silliness, have no clear understanding of where the word comes from. they most certainly don't understand the history of the middle east or its people. but, even with that, to have a clear picture of the current situation begins with the history of just the word. if you can clearly and unemotionally trace the history of "palestine" as a word, it is the first step to thinking about the conflict as something other than a pawn in games that have been played against you since before you were born. unless, of course, you are thousands of years old. in which case, you are most certainly no longer alive enough to be reading this and are not my target audience.
it all begins on the coast of the mediterranean sea. history is always a continuum but we must start somewhere. we will choose 3500 years ago because that's before the word in question is relevant to anyone and it's good not to dive into the middle of a story, especially when trying to grasp a long historical timeline. about 1550bce, the egyptian leader ahmose defeats the hyksos, the people we now call the jews, pushing many of them back to their indigenous borders, leaving a significant population in egypt as their equivalent of "guest workers" in today's terms, poor families working on backbreaking egyptian construction projects much like migrant workers in places like the southern united states now. while this is a decisive historical event in many ways, it just gives us a starting point etymologically.
there were various powers vying for control of the entire region but they had relatively stable territories over long timescales. the egyptians and nubians on the african side of the divide, the jews, assyrians, babylonians and persians on the asian side. there were other small groups but most were little more than nomadic tribes and irrelevant to our story, though one tribe becomes very significant a couple of millennia later. the important part to understand is that the mediterranean coastline mostly encountered the egyptians to the south, the jews to the southeast and the assyrians to the northeast. there are numerous places bordering on the mediterranean but, at this point, only one other really impacts what we're looking at -- the greeks. there were, of course, the greek entities we are all familiar with that gave us the philosophers and mathematicians whose names are synonymous with civilization. but there were other greeks, many of them grouped under the name "sea peoples". but we're getting ahead of ourselves. before we talk about the people, we need to get a firm understanding of the geography.
the boundary between egyptian and jewish territory developed to be around the sinai peninsula. which group controlled the peninsula varied but for the next few thousand years it would remain a good approximation of where territory was divided, plus or minus a few hundred kilometers. this border region on the jewish side, at this time, was the kingdom of judah, a place anyone familiar with jewish, christian or muslim scriptures certainly knows, perhaps as judah or the latinized version, judea, just two versions of the same word. like any region, it was subdivided into many sub-regions. one of the most thinly-inhabited of these, mostly because it was so close to egyptian territory and prone to some of the harshest coastal weather, was in the far southwest of judah, the region of peleset. it was a few kilometers wide starting right at the coast. you can approximate where it existed by drawing a line straight west from jerusalem and another straight west from be'er sheva. peleset runs between those two lines a few kilometers from the mediterranean coast.
about 1175bce, the story sees its first action. peleset is invaded by a tribe of the sea peoples we mentioned. it is thinly-inhabited and far from any of the major jewish or egyptian cities. in fact, it is not too far from the midpoint between jerusalem and the nile delta, making it an ideal place for invasion by a much smaller and weaker force not looking to engage either group's army. sadly, we have absolutely no idea what this group called itself. they had almost no peaceful interaction with their neighbors, despite living in the region for centuries. people living nearby certainly would have communicated with them but no records have survived of those interactions for us to read. all we can go by are what their enemies recorded. being jewish territory, the region unsurprisingly had a hebrew name, peleset. and it was the jews who also gave the group, mostly accidentally, the name we know them by. i say accidentally because it was a misnomer and nobody would have intentionally applied it to them. to understand this, you have to know a little about how the hebrew language works, though only a little.
we won't bother with hebrew characters but we'll use a modern example. america in hebrew is "amrika". an american is "amrikai". the plural of "amrikai" is "amrikaim". this is a predictable pattern. france is "tzarefat", a french person "tzrafti", french people "tzarftim". as you have likely noticed, vowels often get compressed but the endings get tacked onto the same consonant groups. that's as technical as we need to get.
in much the same way, a person from peleset was "pelisti", multiple people "pelistim". because there was no record of what the invaders called themselves, they were referred to in surviving records as the attackers from peleset, the "pelistim". this is to some extent analogous to innu and inuit tribes in the arctic being called "eskimos", a slur applied to a group by its enemies. in this case, though, it wasn't even in a language the group likely even understood at the time.
what happened next was somewhat predictable because it follows a typical model for coastal regions. for the moment, despite it being an awkward name for them because they weren't actually from peleset, we'll call them the pelistim. you can think of it as being an ironic naming because it emphasizes their foreignness in the same way chinese immigrants in america were referred to as "americans" but always with a fake chinese-sounding accent on the word in the nineteenth century.
they lived on the coast and attacked neighboring towns by sea, raping and pillaging, one might call it. in other words, they were pirates. they certainly had families but what we're talking about is a collection of marauders causing destruction and taking what they could up and down the mediterranean coast from northern egypt to assyria with coastal judea and israel in the middle. the pelistim were everyone's enemies in the way that pirates generally are and their basecamps were occasionally targeted by nearly every force in the region. they managed to survive for a few centuries, though, despite their population never becoming particularly large, even by the standards of the time.
there are biblical references to significant pelestim defeats by the jews but it is difficult to confirm or refute them. what is known, however, is that they were decisively defeated by the assyrians in the 700s bce. much of this is because the egyptians and assyrians were continuously fighting over territory and both used their neighbors, especially the jews and pelistim, as proxies for their wars to try to cause their enemies trouble. while the jews were large enough to survive the battles of their neighbors, the pelestim were first conquered and enslaved by the assyrians then completely eradicated by the babylonians in 604/603bce under nebuchadnezzar ii, a prominent figure in biblical literature as well as egyptian records. his troops wiped the five pelestim cities off the map with barely a trace remaining. pelestim pottery and artifacts simply disappear after that point.
of course, they were only a small fraction of the sea peoples and their relatives continued to exist in the mediterranean and were absorbed into greece over time but their importance to our story ends in 603bce.
from an etymological perspective, what happens to the name is significant. the pelestim are a cautionary tale all across the region. the egyptians refer to them as "prst" and "plst" (egyptian heiroglyphs generally write words without vowels). the jews continue to call them the pelistim. what happens to the region in the intervening centuries is of vast historical significance but little to do with the etymological story we're telling. until the romans show up bringing greek and latin as well as overwhelming domination over the entire region, peleset included. we've already mentioned their minor renaming, judah to judea. what they didn't have, though, was a good understanding of hebrew and is related languages, which didn't really function using the same structure as latin and greek.
the greeks called the pelistim "philistiim", which became "philistinus" in latin. in english, this was written "philistines", a word most english-speakers are familiar with, even if not with its origins, just as a word for uneducated barbarians, which is exactly how they were seen in the region, likely accurately, given that it was a group of coastal pirates. the place didn't really need to be talked about in greek or latin because it was a tiny segment of their vast empire.
in 66ce, though, the jews began revolting against roman rule. by 70ce, jerusalem had been destroyed and an untold number slaughtered by the romans more as an example than a military exercise. unlike the babylonians, who had enslaved the jews, the romans decided on genocide, not wholly surprising from the romans. they killed hundreds of thousands and enslaved the remainder, bringing many to rome and the western part of the empire, jumpstarting what we now know as the european diaspora. all told, the fighting lasted until 136ce when the bar kokhba revolt was put down after about four years. what remained of the jews were now powerless and divided, many in europe and west africa with only a fraction of their original population remaining in their indigenous territory.
in a final insult, the romans decided to rename their conquered territory from judea to "syria palaestina". the name is significant for a variety of reasons but the first is that it was the southern counterpart to "syria" in the north, the other roman province in the asian portion of the middle east. the name "syria" comes from the assyrians, the imperial power once based there before the romans conquered the entire region. the second significance is that the jews historically had several enemies but the nearest were the assyrians and the peleset, the philistines. after committing genocide against the jews and enslaving the remaining population, renaming their territory to the names of their two greatest enemies was a symbolic demonstration of ultimate power from rome. the name "syria palaestina", we must also keep in mind, would translate to english as "philistine syria". in other words, the part of the roman region of syria owned by the philistines.
as we've already discovered, by 136ce, the philistines had already not existed for more than seven centuries, nearly six hundred of those years being before the roman empire had even been founded. it wasn't a declaration of real ownership because it was like signing the deed for your house over to tutankhamen. it was purely a message to the jews. the message was clearly that they were as defeated as their extinct enemies, the philistines.
this is not the end for the name, though. far from it.
what happens next is mostly a regional pause for five centuries as the roman empire crumbles from the inside and tries, very unsuccessfully, to save itself by breaking into pieces. the western empire completely disintegrated in the fifth century but the fragmented remains of syria palaestina were in the eastern empire, what we generally refer to as the byzantine empire.
by the seventh century, the byzantine empire was in no fit state to defend itself from a new onslaught from the south that nobody could possibly have predicted. an insignificant collection of desert tribes had been consolidated under a charismatic new military leader named muhammad and turned into a crazed cult of warriors united by complete submission to his custom-built religion created with one focus in mind, complete personal surrender. this was an army unlike anything seen before, fearless because they had been brainwashed into thinking death was insignificant and their lives only had value in dying for the expansion of their unified tribe. they called themselves the "ummah", arabic for "nation". but what it really functioned like was the union of family and army. from a small sliver of the arabian peninsula, these muslim armies rapidly moved north into the byzantine empire and their first stop where they met resistance was the ancient jewish territory. keep in mind that they were from the southern arabian peninsula but nearly everything between them and their jewish and byzantine neighbors to the north was uninhabited and mostly uninhabitable desert, which had separated the arabs and other small tribes to the south and kept them from developing modern civilizations like the rest of the region.
under muhammad, however, development of a modern army, if not a modern culture, was rapid. literacy flourished as a vehicle for indoctrination and brainwashing and what had taken millennia in other parts of the middle east was accomplished in decades for the arabs. arab culture became a bizarre combination of tribal barbarism from nomadic life and constant low-grade battles with neighbors and the tight restraints of muslim doctrine on behavior to try to curb those wild norms. it succeeded in creating a terrifying but highly-disciplined army that, when it was let off its leash, was animalistic in its brutality, terrorizing its way across the middle east, north africa and into southern europe.
when the arabs conquered the southern segment of the byzantine empire, they settled some of their armies there as a base to conquer the rest of the region and launch attacks into what had once been egypt and syria. they distinguished it from the northern syria by taking the adjective from "syria palaestina" and turning it into "falastin", arabic having no "p" or "ph". for the first time, the name of the people (pelistim), which had come from the name of the place (peleset), had turned back into a new name for the place. this time, though, it wasn't the indigenous people using the name to describe the outside invaders. it was the new invaders using the name to describe the land they were conquering for their nascent empire. they just didn't realize they were using the name of the inhabitants instead of the original name. or that they were using the name attributed to the people who had been exterminated twelve-hundred years earlier to describe not only the territory they had invaded but the entire region, hundreds of times larger.
it made little difference to the arabs, of course, because they weren't looking to preserve history or allow pre-existing culture to survive. their entire methodology was to unify, pacify and indoctrinate.
oddly enough, the first region they conquered, what they called falastin, was the only region whose surviving indigenous people didn't submit to the arabs and join the ummah. as such, they were enslaved. the jews, once a powerful force in the region, had been reduced to what the arabs called "dhimmis", slaves by another name. that is how they would remain for more than a thousand years. unrelated to the linguistic history, as the arabs conquered their way across north africa, this same method of subjugation or enslavement traveled with them and they began to supply enslaved africans to white traders by the thousands. they had used the jews in falastin as their test case for the beginning of what developed into the transatlantic slave trade, sending millions to europe and the americas.
when the europeans decided to fight back against the muslim empire in the crusades, their maps no longer used the roman designations of judea or syria palaestina. they just used the shortened misnomer from the arabs and called it "palestine". over time, the name of the invaders (pelistim) had begun to be used as the name for the territory (palestine) by all the groups that had either conquered it or were attempting to.
when the arabs finally fell to british forces in the first world war, the british took over and promised to return the land to its indigenous owners, the jews. it was a hollow promise that looked and sounded great at the time, especially to try to get funding to develop it and rebuild from the aftermath of the war across europe. the british government was in many ways just using a false promise of eventual freedom for jews after so long as a way to get preferential treatment from prominent jewish banks at a time of economic crisis. the british, as with most of the rest of europe, had to continue to play nice with the arabs as oil was being discovered all over muslim-controlled regions and the europeans had just exhausted themselves fighting the first world war so they had no ability to conquer the middle east and take the oil. they certainly drew up plans to do it, much of which was put into action in the second world war. talk was cheap, though. they called the promise the "mandate for palestine".
in a bizarre quirk of language evolution, the name of the people (pelistim) became the conquerors' name of the region (palestine), which gave birth to a new term for the people living there, the "palestinians". they couldn't call them the "philistines", of course. because they had been exterminated. what's important to note here is that there were two groups of people living in the mandate along with the british. the jews and the arabs. the jews were recently-freed slaves from under arab rule and the british called them the "palestinians". the arabs were still part of the unified arab identity and aggressively rejected being grouped with the jews. so they were simply referred to as "arabs". in other words, you could either be "arab" or be "palestinian" but not both.
the british, of course, as predicted, didn't bother to fulfill their promise to return the land to the indigenous jews and gave nearly three-quarters of it to the arabs, calling it "transjordan", eventually "jordan", despite their guarantee (their "mandate") to give it to the jews who had originally lived there before being enslaved. what remained was eventually liberated by the jews as the land of israel, the historic name of the other jewish kingdom in the region. the name was a compromise. why not call it "judah" like the dominant kingdom? the reason was linguistic more than historical. someone from "judah" was "jewish". that's where the word comes from. but the inhabitants of the newly-liberated nation wouldn't just be ethnic jews. there would be lots of arabs, too, welcome there who couldn't really be called "jewish" as inhabitants of the state. but they could be called "israeli".
the next piece isn't linguistic but is necessary to understand for the following terminology shift from a language perspective.
in the early twentieth century, as the british conquered the arab territory of falastin, much of the arab population organized itself into a movement to hold onto their colony there that they had owned for more than a thousand years. the british didn't seem to care much about following through on returning the land to the jews so this new movement didn't do much of significance until a new movement in europe began to talk not just about hating jews but about exterminating them. this new movement called itself the "national socialist movement" and many of the arabs of the mandate, those in the anti-british and anti-jewish movement, aligned themselves with their neighbors to the northwest. they called themselves the "arab national socialist movement", led by amin al-husseini, the muslim leader for the mandate based in jerusalem. al-husseini and his followers worked with their german and austrian counterparts to build death camps across the middle east as the german empire spread and were granted the status of "honorary aryans". they were even sanctioned by the vatican to carry out what was considered a "holy task" of eliminating the people they considered responsible for the death of jesus.
at the end of the second world war, the arab national socialists hadn't accomplished most of their goals but they had certainly spread across the mandate. they were the vast majority of arabs in the region, though a tiny minority of arabs across the whole middle east. of course, the arabs were allies of the nazis during the war but far less tightly than the arab national socialists, who were full-fledged partners of the reich.
not long after the end of the war, the state of israel was born as a free multiethnic nation in the jewish indigenous homeland. jews, arabs and others were welcomed and given citizenship. the arab national socialist movement, however, rejected a unified free state and demanded a unified arab state and the eradication of all jews. the world was in no state to fight another global war but the arab nations across the middle east were happy to oblige and joined the arab national socialists in attacking israel to try to finish the job the germans had tried to complete in europe, a total end to all jews everywhere. surprisingly to everyone, not least the combined arab armies, israel fought them off and drove them back, though they stopped far short of completely pushing them out of jewish territory.
the result was that the arab national socialists were pushed into the far southwestern corner of israel and some were scattered around the jerusalem region, what we now know of as judea and samaria. other arabs were given israeli citizenship and became part of the new free state. what's significant to take from this is that there was a clear division between the arab national socialist movement and the peaceful arabs of the former mandate who weren't part of the movement.
before the declaration of the state of israel, the rest of the world called the jews of the mandate "palestinians" and the remaining arabs in the region "arabs". after israel was freed, these terms changed. the "palestinians" became "israeli jews". the arabs who weren't part of the arab national socialist movement and had gotten israeli citizenship instead of fighting against israel became "israeli arabs". the rest of the arabs now called themselves "southern syrians", an odd choice because syria had been under french control but, from their perspective, was at least now an arab nation again. the irony of it was that the assyrians were enemies of the arabs but that fact appears to have been lost on them.
twenty years passed like that with constant attacks from the "southern syrians" against both jewish and arab israelis.
what was happening in the rest of the world was significant, though, to our linguistic story. the union of soviet socialist republics was one of the most powerful empires in history and it was just to the north of the middle east. there was a single ally of the united states and the rest of the west in the middle east and both the americans and soviets were engaging in proxy wars against each other including the vicious multi-year conflicts in korea and vietnam. both were actively looking for new proxy battlegrounds and the middle east was the ideal playground, especially for the soviets.
they found their perfect proxy force in the "southern syrians" or the "arab national socialists". but the soviets had defeated the nazis only a few short decades earlier. they couldn't possibly sell supporting another nazi movement to their people or even their leadership. so they came up with a creative solution, a linguistic one. they worked with an egyptian terrorist leader, yassir arafat, who had taken charge of the arab national socialists and happened to be a soviet collaborator, to rebrand the movement as the "palestinians". the name had now been discarded by the jews in favor of "israelis" but the world still remembered there being "palestinians" indigenous to the region. they were but they were the jews, who no longer used the term. but taking the term meant they didn't have to do much work to convince the world that their terrorist movement was actually a legitimate ethnic group with indigenous claims to the land they had conquered and enslaved in the seventh century. it was perhaps the first linguistic war of terrorism in history.
to finish the linguistic story, the soviets and their newly-acquired terrorist army claimed they were indigenous to the region and would take it back, killing all the jews and israeli arabs, renaming it "palestine".
we have gone from a tiny jewish region with very little population to being used for the name of the people who conquered that territory to use as their pirate base to the name used for the conquered jewish region after they had been enslaved by the romans to a new name for the same region after it had been conquered and enslaved by the arabs. now we've moved to an entire fictional alternate history of a nonexistent ethnic group that's taken the non-indigenous name of an extinct pirate colony who now uses it as an excuse to perpetrate terrorism and warfare against jews, arabs and western interests in the region. that's, without any competition, the wildest story in linguistic history.
the terrorist organization calling itself the "palestinians" today has spent a century building a fictional narrative but it has waited until the rise of ai to be able to perpetuate such a widespread fraud against the world, the west in particular, convincing people of a fictional genocide and staging protests for tens of millions worldwide in support of the largest terrorist organization in history. all because of an emotionally-charged story and a linguistic trick from the soviets in collaboration with the remains of the nazi movement in the middle east.
language truly is a weapon in the right hands.