The Identity Wing · Identity & Memory
When "Palestinian" Meant Jewish.
For the twenty-eight years that "Palestine" named a distinct political entity — a British Mandate — the term Palestinian identified its Jewish residents. The Arabs called themselves Syrians.
Four rooms · Reading time: 8 minutes · "Palestine" in the Qur'an: 0 mentions
There is a simple test of any national identity: ask the people involved who they are. If they answer that they are not the thing they would later claim to be, write it down.
The contemporary record on this question is unusually consistent. The Wing reads it below in four rooms: the name, the land, the refugees, and the flag.
Room I · Nomenclature
Who Were the Palestinians?
Under the British Mandate (1920–1948), the term Palestinian identified, almost without exception, the Jewish residents of the territory. The Arabs of the same territory rejected the term as a Zionist coinage; they identified themselves as Syrians, Arabs of Bilād al-Shām — Greater Syria. Both positions were sincerely held. Both are documented below.
The civic and cultural institutions of the Mandate that bore the name "Palestine" were, with the exception of the Mandate's own organs of state, Jewish foundations. A partial register follows; the coinage and the passports receive collections of their own.
The English on the stamp reads PALESTINE, the Arabic فلسطين, and the Hebrew פלשתינה (א״י) — "Palestine (Land of Israel)." The Mandate's stamps named Jewish holy places in three languages, and identified the land, in Hebrew, as Israel.
Today — The Jerusalem Post.
Today — the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
Today — the Israel Electric Corporation.
Hebrew name — "Air Routes of the Land of Israel."
Today — the Israel Football Association.
Later — the backbone of the IDF Givati Brigade.
Hebrew legend — "Palestine (Land of Israel)."
Broadcast in English, Arabic, Hebrew.
Held by Ben-Gurion, Meir, Peres, Eshkol.
The Arabs ran none of these — by their own choice, in most cases. The Arab clubs withdrew from the Palestine Football Association in 1934 over the imposition of Hebrew and the Jewish Sabbath; the Symphony, the Post, and the airline were declined as Zionist enterprises. They were correct.
The Qur'an Test
A Comparative Observation
Search the Qur'an for "Palestine" — Filasṭīn. The word does not appear. Not once, in any sura.
No Entries Found
Search for "Israel," or for the formula Banū Isrāʾīl — the Children of Israel. More than forty results, distributed across the suras.
Search the Hebrew Bible for "Israel": over two thousand five hundred. For "Palestine": zero.
The Review records the disparity and declines to interpret it. Readers wishing to reproduce the figure of zero at scale are referred to the Document Archives, where it is the standard result.
In Their Own Words
On the question of what the Arabs of Mandate Palestine considered themselves, the Review defers to three witnesses: the assembled political leadership of Arab Palestine, in formal congress at Jerusalem; the Princeton historian who wrote the standard History of the Arabs, testifying before the Anglo-American Committee; and a sitting member of the PLO Executive Committee, speaking to a Dutch daily. None of the three was a Zionist.
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time.
There is no such thing as Palestine in history. Absolutely not.
The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel … Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people.
The Review notes that all three witnesses spoke from within the Arab world; that the first was not a person but a congress — the assembled leadership of Arab Palestine, resolving collectively; and that the third was, at the moment of speaking, a senior official of the organisation whose people he had just described.
The Map That Moves
The witnesses having settled the question of the people, there remains the question of the territory. It has been continuously revised. Each revision has, by coincidence, extended the claim to exactly the territory under Israeli administration at the moment of the revision.
| Year | Instrument | Territory Claimed | Disclaimed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | PLO Charter, Art. 24 | State of Israel (1949 lines) | West Bank, Gaza, al-Ḥamma |
| 1968 | Charter amended | All of Mandate Palestine | — |
| 1988 | Algiers Declaration | West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem | State of Israel (1949 lines) |
| 1993 | Oslo Accords | WB Areas A & B; Gaza | State of Israel |
| Today | Varies by speaker | "All Palestinian land" | — |
The eight occasions on which some portion of this moving claim was offered as a state are tabulated on the Timeline. The boundary of Palestine, in the sources, tracks the boundary of Israel — never the other way around. It is the only territorial claim known to this Review that follows its adversary's borders rather than its own population's settlement.
Room II · Conveyancing
The Stolen Land That Was Purchased with Receipts
A tradition of contemporary commentary describes the Jewish reclamation of late-Ottoman and Mandate Palestine as "settler colonialism," and the land on which it now sits as "stolen." The Review notes the formulation. It then notes the records.
The acquisition was conducted, almost without exception, by purchase at market rates from registered owners. The paper trail is unusually clean: bills of sale, transfer deeds, the Ottoman tapu registers, the cadastral surveys of the Mandate's own Survey Department, and the audit ledgers of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael — the Jewish National Fund, founded in Basel in 1901 for precisely this purpose. In the catalogues of the great sales, the seller is overwhelmingly an absentee landowner in Beirut, Damascus, or Cairo, selling soil he had never tilled to a buyer who proposed to till it.
Nor was it prime soil. Under Ottoman land law, the bulk of the territory was classified as mīrī — state land, leased for use — or mawāt, "dead land," uncultivated and unowned. The northern valleys, when the first Zionist agronomists arrived, were malarial swamp; the southern Negev was, and largely remains, desert. The Peel Commission of 1937 — a Royal Commission of His Majesty's Government, not noticeably partial to Zionism — concluded that "much of the area now containing orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased."
Sixty-six Jewish families divided twelve acres by drawing numbered seashells. The bill of sale is held by the Tel Aviv–Yafo Municipal Archive.
Yehoshua Hankin negotiated the transfer of approximately 50,000 dunams of malarial swamp from the Sursocks, a Greek Orthodox absentee-landlord family of Beirut. Drainage and reforestation followed. The valley is now the agricultural heart of northern Israel.
The Palestine Land Development Company acquired the Hula Valley wetlands under formal concession from the Lebanese owners and the Mandatory administration. The Hula is now a nature reserve.
Specimen — Land, stolen, Palestinian. Condition at acquisition: sand, swamp. Accompanying paperwork: complete.
The record contains a further fact, much noted at the time and rarely quoted since: Arab immigration into Mandate Palestine increased sharply during the 1920s and 1930s, drawn by the medical infrastructure, the drained land, the new towns, and the wages that the Jewish enterprise had created. The Peel Commission's own demographic report identifies substantial in-migration from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Hawran. The Mandate's Survey of Palestine (1946) is in agreement.
The "stolen land" of Tel Aviv was sand. The receipt is in the municipal archive.
The "stolen land" of the Jezreel Valley was malarial swamp, purchased from an absentee Greek Orthodox family in Beirut who had never set foot on it.
And throughout the decades of the alleged theft, Arab migration ran toward the scene of the crime.
The Review notes the apparent paradox and declines to resolve it. It is, in any case, not the Review's paradox.
Room III · Asymmetry
The Other Refugee Question
Between 14 May 1948 and the early 1970s, approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from — or fled, under conditions amounting to expulsion — the Arab and Muslim countries in which their ancestors had lived. The Iraqi Jewish community, the oldest of them, traced itself directly to the Babylonian Exile of 586 BCE; it had occupied the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, continuously, for more than two and a half thousand years before its erasure was concluded in 1951. The Egyptian, Yemenite, Moroccan, Libyan, Tunisian, Algerian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iranian communities are all of comparable antiquity. They are, as of MMXXVI, gone.
The expulsions were accompanied by the seizure of property, the revocation of citizenship, the dissolution of synagogues, the dispersal of cemeteries, and, in several cases, by pogroms — the Farhūd in Baghdad of 1941, the Aden riots of 1947, the Tripoli pogroms of 1945 and 1948, the Aleppo pogrom of 1947. Israel absorbed every one of the refugees so produced — by sealift (Operation On Wings of Eagles, Yemen, 1949–50), by airlift (Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, Iraq, 1950–51), and, where these were not available, by visa.
The descendants of these refugees, the Mizraḥi and Sephardi Jews of Israel, constitute, today, approximately half of the country's Jewish population. They are full citizens. They sit in the Knesset. They serve in the cabinet. They edit the newspapers. The Review has been unable to locate a refugee camp, a hereditary refugee-status registry, or a dedicated United Nations agency for any of them.
The contrast with the other refugee population produced by the same conflict is, in the Editorial Board's view, one of the great unaddressed asymmetries of twentieth-century diplomacy. The Review presents it without commentary, save the format of the room.
Display Case A
Jewish Refugees from Arab & Muslim Lands
| Displaced | ~850,000 · expelled or driven out, 1948 – early 1970s |
| Absorbed | By the State of Israel, fully and in a single generation |
| Citizenship | Granted on arrival |
| Property | Seized; no compensation to date |
| Hereditary refugee status | None |
| Dedicated UN agency | None |
| Descendants today | Approximately half of Israel's Jewish population, fully integrated, full citizens |
Display Case B
Arab Refugees from Mandate Palestine
| Displaced | ~700,000 · displaced during the 1948 war |
| Absorbed | By no Arab state into citizenship, with the partial exception of Jordan |
| Citizenship | Denied, in most cases, for the subsequent seventy-eight years |
| Property | Subject to compensation claims; campaigned for in international fora |
| Hereditary refugee status | Unique in the world; passes to grandchildren and beyond |
| Dedicated UN agency | UNRWA, founded 1949, still operating |
| Descendants today | Registered population in excess of 5,000,000, the original 700,000 having been carried forward, by the unique UNRWA definition, through four generations |
The Editorial Board is, professionally, unable to explain the discrepancy in international response. The accountancy of historical injustice is not, in any case, within its remit. The arithmetic is.
One side solved its refugee crisis. The other side franchised it.
Room IV · Vexillology
The Flag
National flags are ordinarily informative, and the Palestinian flag is no exception. It is the Pan-Arab banner — black, white, and green bands, a red triangle at the hoist — first raised during the Arab Revolt of 1916, a rising launched from the Ḥijāz, in present-day Saudi Arabia, against the Ottoman Empire. The PLO adopted it in 1964.
By the conventional account, the four Pan-Arab colours honour the dynasties of classical Islam: the black of the ʿAbbāsids, the white of the Umayyads, the green of the Fāṭimids, the red of the Hāshimites.
Those dynasties governed from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Mecca, respectively.
The Review has read the list twice. Jerusalem is not on it.
The flag of Jordan is the same flag with a white seven-pointed star added to the triangle. To distinguish the flag of Palestine from the flag of its eastern neighbour, the observer checks for the star and finds it absent. By the time of its adoption as a national emblem, the design had served other causes for half a century — first a revolt in Arabia, then a kingdom east of the Jordan. Its career as a specifically Palestinian symbol began in 1964: the same year, the Timeline records, that the PLO's founding charter disclaimed the West Bank and Gaza.
Specimen — Flag, national, Palestinian. Designed: 1916, for the Arab Revolt. Distinguishing feature, from the flag of Jordan: one seven-pointed star, absent.
- "Palestine" appears zero times in the Qur'an. "Israel" / Banū Isrāʾīl appears more than forty.
- Shimon Peres applied for Palestinian citizenship in 1937, aged fourteen — because the Jews were the Palestinians.
- The 1935 Maccabiah Games — the "Jewish Olympics" — brought competing "Palestinian" athletes from twenty-eight nations. Not one was an Arab.
- The Hebrew name of Palestine Airways was נתיבי אויר ארץ ישראל — "Air Routes of the Land of Israel." The fuselage carried the Hebrew, in lettering visible from the ground.
- The 1964 PLO Charter disclaimed the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Article 24 was reversed only after Israel won those territories in 1967.
Editorial
A Closing Note
A nation, in Renan's well-worn phrase, is a daily plebiscite: the criterion of national existence is the self-identification of those said to compose the nation. The self-identification of the Arabic-speaking population of Mandate Palestine, when asked, was uniform. They were Syrians.
The Jews of the Mandate, by contrast, identified as Palestinians, ran the Palestinian institutions, played for the Palestinian football team, edited the Palestinian newspaper, and held Palestinian passports. Their flag, at least, was their own. They were also, throughout this period, Jews.
The current usage of the word "Palestinian" is, in this strict historical sense, an inversion. The Review notes it without further commentary.