Notes & Queries

Question 1

Was there ever a sovereign Palestinian state?

Accepted Answer

No. The survey runs from the Merneptah Stele, c. 1208 BCE, to the present quarter: 3,500 years, fourteen administrations, forty-seven archives consulted. Each state that governed the territory left constitutions, coinage, treaties, and tax rolls. The corresponding catalogue for a sovereign Palestinian state has also been completed. It is the shorter of the two.

Question 2

Did Palestine exist before 1948?

Accepted Answer

As a name, yes; as a country, no. The word enters the administrative record four times before 1948 — as a Roman reprisal of 135 CE, a Byzantine filing convention, an Arab district heading, and a British Mandate governed from London. Each administration kept meticulous records. A Palestinian state appears in none of them.

Question 3

Who ruled Palestine throughout history?

Accepted Answer

Fourteen foreign powers in succession: Egypt’s New Kingdom, Assyria, Babylon, Achaemenid Persia, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, Rome, Byzantium, the Arab caliphates (entered as one), the Crusaders, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and Britain. All fourteen kept records, and the records survive. The one state to govern from within the territory — Hasmonean Judea — is entered separately. Its language of government was Hebrew.

Question 4

Did Palestine ever have its own currency?

Accepted Answer

One currency was created for a territory of that name: the Palestine pound, in circulation from 1 November 1927 until 1948, issued by the Palestine Currency Board — a body constituted in London by the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Its Hebrew legend read פלשתינה (א״י) — Palestine, Land of Israel. The visitor is asked to examine the Hebrew.

Question 5

Were Jews once called Palestinians?

Accepted Answer

Yes. For the twenty-eight years of the Mandate, “Palestinian” institutions were, in the main, Jewish: the Palestine Post, now the Jerusalem Post; the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, now the Israel Philharmonic. The Arab leadership declined the adjective; its first congress, assembled at Jerusalem in 1919, had resolved the country “part of Arab Syria.”

Question 6

Is Palestine mentioned in the Qur’an?

Accepted Answer

No. The word — Filasṭīn — does not occur in the Qur’an, in any sura. Banū Isrāʾīl, the Children of Israel, appear more than forty times. The Hebrew Bible returns the same zero for “Palestine,” against upwards of two thousand five hundred mentions of Israel. The Review records the disparity and declines to interpret it.

Question 7

Was Jesus a Palestinian?

Accepted Answer

No; the name arrived a century too late. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Galilee, executed at Jerusalem c. 30 CE in the Roman province of Judaea — renamed Syria Palaestina by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 CE, as a reprisal. The Review is unable to backdate a decision of the Emperor Hadrian by one hundred years, and regrets that it cannot oblige.

Question 8

How many peace offers have been refused?

Accepted Answer

Eight were extended, and none accepted, between 1937 and 2020: the Peel partition, the United Nations partition of 1947, land-for-peace in 1967, Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001, the Gaza disengagement of 2005, the Olmert map of 2008, and the plan of 2020. Six of the eight drew no counter-proposal at all. The score has never changed.

Question 9

Why did the UK and France recognise Palestine in 2025?

Accepted Answer

The acts were filed in September MMXXV, and the registry re-verified upon each announcement. Article 3 of the Montevideo Convention — the instrument the announcements invoke — makes statehood independent of recognition, and the Review applies the article evenly. The registry’s condition is unchanged.

Question 10

Aren’t all nations modern constructions?

Accepted Answer

Quite possibly. The Review has read Renan, Anderson, and Hobsbawm and finds no fault in them; it notes only that the argument is customarily advanced in defence of a claim of antiquity the argument cannot survive. The Review takes no position on nations imagined in MCMLXIV; it audits the antiquity imagined for them. Where the parallel is offered — Zionism as a nineteenth-century revival — the Review agrees on the dating, and directs the reader to Room I, where the polity being revived is in the record, on coins, in Hebrew.

Question 11

Does the Review deny that Palestinians exist?

Accepted Answer

No, and the question mistakes our subject. People appear throughout the record — in Jund Filasṭīn, in Ottoman registers, in Mandate censuses — and no page of this Review says otherwise. What we catalogue are states: constitutions, currencies, seated heads of state. The people appear in the record. The state does not.

Question 12

Is this site satire?

Accepted Answer

The Review presents documented fact in the format the subject’s documentary record deserves. The dates are real, the treaties are real, the coin is real, and so is the Hebrew on it. If the result reads as satire, the Editorial Board notes, with regret, that it did not write the record.

Questions of Record