What "Palestine" Actually Was

The earliest reference to "Israel" in any document on earth, cut into granite by an Egyptian pharaoh thirteen centuries before "Palestine" enters administrative use. The hieroglyphic determinative marks Israel as a people. The boast — "Israel is laid waste; his seed is not" — has proved, in the longer view, premature. The fourteen empires that subsequently governed the territory are processed, in order, in Ancient Origins; none was Palestinian.

The only currency in history to bear the name "Palestine." The legend is trilingual: Palestine in English, فلسطين in Arabic, and — in Hebrew — פלשתינה (א״י): "Palestine, Land of Israel." The Arab Higher Committee protested the inscription; the disturbances of 1929 cited it among their grievances; the Currency Board declined to amend a single character. The two Hebrew letters remained on every coin and note to the Mandate's last day. The territory's complete monetary record — 2,600 years of other people's money — is catalogued in the Currency Collection.

The official Mandatory postage, bearing the same trilingual legend as the coin, (א״י) included. The pictorial series depicted Jewish and Christian holy places — the Tower of David, Rachel's Tomb, the Sea of Galilee. In a Muslim-majority territory containing the Dome of the Rock, no Islamic monument made the issue.

Cover legend, in Hebrew: ממשלת פלשתינה (א״י) — "Government of Palestine (Land of Israel)." This was the travel document of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Shimon Peres, who applied for Palestinian citizenship in 1937, aged fourteen. The portrait gallery of the territory's other national leadership hangs in National Leaders; there are some lighting issues.

A Zionist airline founded by Pinhas Rutenberg with Histadrut and Jewish Agency funding. Hebrew corporate name: נתיבי אויר ארץ ישראל — "Air Routes of the Land of Israel." The fuselage carried Hebrew lettering. The same photograph circulates today as "proof" of historical Palestinian aviation; the Review exhibits it for the same purpose.

The English-language daily of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine — editorial line Zionist, readership Jewish. The famous front page reproduced here, of 16 May 1948, ran the banner The State of Israel is Born. In April 1950 the paper retitled itself the Jerusalem Post, under which name it remains on the newsstand.

Founded by the Polish-Jewish violinist Bronisław Huberman to rescue Jewish musicians from Nazi orchestras. Seventy-five founding members; not one an Arab. Toscanini conducted the inaugural concert at the Levant Fair, Tel Aviv. In 1948 the orchestra renamed itself the Israel Philharmonic, under which name it is still performing.

A bilingual lithograph from the Artistic Bezalel Workshops, Jaffa Road, Jerusalem, commissioned by The Association of Jewish Guides. A pith-helmeted guide points east across a yellow map of the territory, labelled in Hebrew and garlanded with holy sites — the Tower of David, Rachel's Tomb, the Western Wall. The English title reads TOURISM IN PALESTINE. The Hebrew beside it reads תיירות בארץ ישראל: Tourism in the Land of Israel. The slogan, set into the design in both languages, is Come and See Erez Israel — the Hebrew name transliterated even in the English.

Founded by Yosef Yekutieli of the Maccabi sports movement. The team in the photograph is entirely Jewish, as were the sides "Palestine" fielded in the qualifying rounds of the 1934 and 1938 FIFA World Cups. Arab clubs withdrew in 1934 over the imposition of Hebrew and Saturday fixtures. In 1948 the body renamed itself the Israel Football Association.

Twelve hours after the British Mandate concluded and the State of Israel was proclaimed, this banner ran across an American daily. The Reader is asked to parse it with care.

Arabs. Subject. Plural. On the move.
Invade. Verb. Transitive. Hostile.
Palestine. Object. The thing being invaded.

The subhead names the invaders — Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian. The defenders go unnamed, being simply the population of the place under attack: the population, that is, of Palestine. Nor was the construction idiosyncratic. Variants — "Arab Armies Invade Palestine," "Five Arab States Attack Palestine" — ran on American front pages across the country that morning.

No editor appended a parenthetical clarification reading "(by which we mean the part being settled by the people now generally identified as the invaders)." The clarification was felt to be unnecessary. In May 1948 the word Palestine was sufficiently unambiguous on its own.

HaMashkif (המשקיף, "The Observer") was the Hebrew-language daily of the Revisionist Zionist Movement, founded in Tel Aviv in 1938 under the editorial direction of the Jabotinsky circle — a "Palestinian" newspaper in the only sense the phrase then had: published in the Mandate, in Hebrew, by Jews.

The proclamation was read on a Friday afternoon; the Hebrew press does not print on the Sabbath; the first Hebrew front pages therefore appeared on Sunday, 16 May. HaMashkif opened with the banner reproduced here — The State of Israel was established — over portraits of Herzl and Jabotinsky, the text of the Declaration, and a statement of the Irgun.

The 2nd Maccabiah brought to Mandatory Tel Aviv some 1,300 athletes representing twenty-eight nations, each delegation parading under its country's banner. The hosts — the "Palestinian" delegation, in the contemporary nomenclature — paraded under the name Eretz Yisrael: the Land of Israel. The Editorial Board notes the absence, in the 1,300-strong field, of any delegation identifying itself as Filasṭīn.

The American Colony Photographers — Christian American expatriates resident in Jerusalem under the Mandate — operated a commercial photographic service whose several thousand negatives were donated to the Library of Congress in 1966. The catalogue records, among other Jerusalem subjects, a long series of photographs of Jewish prayer at the Western Wall, pre-dating by decades the founding of any modern Palestinian political movement. The wall is, on the contemporary American photographic record, exactly what that record describes: a Jewish devotional site in continuous use.

The parchment scroll from which David Ben-Gurion read in the gallery of the Tel Aviv Museum on the afternoon of 14 May 1948. Hebrew text; thirty-seven handwritten signatures of the members of the Provisional Council of State; wax seals at head and foot; a scroll, in the Jewish documentary tradition.

The text identifies the territory, in Hebrew, as Eretz-Israel. It cites the Bible, the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate of the League of Nations, and the UN partition vote of 29 November 1947. It does not cite, because none exists, any prior or competing claim by a Palestinian Arab national body to the land it constitutes.

The State Department of the United States of America, on its own letterhead, on the morning of 31 January 1949, recognised the State of Israel de jure. (Truman had recognised de facto, in eleven hand-amended minutes, on the evening of 14 May 1948; the de jure document is the durable instrument of record.)

The press release identifies the country, throughout, as the State of Israel. It does not append the parenthetical clarification considered at Plate X. The clarification was, once again, felt to be unnecessary.