Fifty Stations.
Zero of Them Palestinian.

Pharaohs administer Canaan from Thebes. The Amarna correspondence names every town of consequence in the territory; Palestine is not among the names.

The first reference to "Israel" in any document on earth. There is no corresponding reference to Palestine; the word will not exist for another thirteen centuries.

David takes Jerusalem; Solomon builds the First Temple. It is the first indigenous monarchy attested in the documentary record.

The kingdom divides into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Both are Jewish; both leave seals, inscriptions, and an archive.

Sargon II destroys the Kingdom of Israel and deports the ten northern tribes. Judah pays tribute and endures.

Nebuchadnezzar burns Jerusalem and the First Temple and exiles the Jews to Babylon. His annals make no mention of Palestine.

Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon and frees the Jews to return. The satrapy is called Eber-Nāri, "Beyond the River" — not Palestine.

Macedonian conquest. The territory then passes between Ptolemies and Seleucids; neither calls it Palestine.

Mattathias and his sons rebel against Seleucid Hellenisation, and the Temple is rededicated. (This is Hanukkah.)

The only indigenous sovereign state in this territory between the Babylonian Exile and 1948 — Jewish, minting its own coins. Its name was Judea.

Rome intervenes in the Hasmonean civil war. Judea becomes a Roman client state.

The territory is constituted as the Province of Judea. Pontius Pilate will arrive twenty years later.

Titus destroys Jerusalem. The Arch of Titus in Rome still shows the spoils of the Temple carried in triumph.

After the Bar-Kokhba revolt, Hadrian renames the province Syria Palaestina, expressly to erase the Jewish connection. It is the first administrative use of "Palestine" in history.

Constantine wins the East, and the territory becomes three Christian provinces — Palaestina Prima, Secunda, Tertia. All three are run from Constantinople.

The Rashidun conquest; Jerusalem surrenders. The territory becomes Jund Filasṭīn, a military district governed from Medina.

The capital moves to Damascus. The Dome of the Rock is built in 691, on the Temple Mount.

The Abbasid revolution moves the capital to Baghdad. The territory remains, as before, a province governed from elsewhere.

An Egypt-based Shiʿa caliphate takes the territory. It is governed from Cairo.

Godfrey of Bouillon and his French knights take Jerusalem, and the Latin Kingdom is proclaimed. The court language is Old French.

Saladin — a Kurd from Tikrit — reconquers Jerusalem after Hattin. Ayyubid administration follows.

Turkic and Circassian slave-soldiers run the territory from Cairo. It is parcelled into the districts of Safed, Gaza, and Karak.

Selim I defeats the Mamluks, and four centuries of Turkish rule begin. Three sanjaks: Jerusalem, Nablus, Acre.

Jerusalem is elevated to an autonomous district reporting directly to Constantinople. In four centuries of Ottoman administration, no unit of any rank is named Palestine.

His Majesty's Government commits itself, in writing, to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Within six weeks General Allenby enters Jerusalem on foot, and four centuries of Ottoman rule are over.

Formally conferred on Britain, with the Balfour Declaration cited in the preamble. The Mandate's central obligation is the Jewish national home.

Arab counsel argues to the Commission that the country is properly Southern Syria, "Palestine" being no Arab word. Partition is offered regardless; the Jews accept, the Arabs decline.

Britain proposes an independent Palestine within ten years — Arabs and Jews sharing government, the existing Arab two-thirds majority held in place by a cap of 75,000 on Jewish immigration, the deadline postponable at London's discretion. The Zionist leadership rejects it; the Arab Higher Committee refuses it also, judging the offered independence "more of an illusion than a reality." Declined by both sides, it is filed among the antecedents, and the count of offers stays at eight. What was declined was an Arab-majority state on a ten-year clock; the clock would have run out in 1949.

The General Assembly recommends partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accept; the Arabs reject it and declare war.

Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration in Tel Aviv; five Arab armies invade, and lose. No corresponding Arab state is proclaimed — then, or since.

Proclaimed by the Arab League in Gaza City; it holds one session and relocates to Cairo. No territory, no army, no currency — Egypt dissolves it in 1959.

Four armistice agreements, February to July, draw the Green Line where the armies stopped. The Egypt–Israel text is careful on the point: Article V.2 provides that the line "is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary," and the Jordanian agreement, at Article VI.9, enters the same reservation in its own words. The lines later argued over as "the 1967 borders" were thus declared not to be borders by their own drafters.

The Hashemite Kingdom formally annexes the territory west of the river, Jerusalem included. The annexation is recognised by Britain, and scarcely anyone else; the Arab League, declining to recognise it, resolves that Jordan holds the territory in trust. No Palestinian state is proclaimed there in the nineteen years the territory remains in Arab hands.

Three years before the "occupation" it claims to resist, while Jordan holds the West Bank and Egypt holds Gaza. Article 24 of its charter expressly disclaims both territories — a clause deleted in 1968, the year after Israel took them.

Israel takes the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan from Syria. The territory of Mandate Palestine is, for the first time since 1948, under a single government.

The assembled Arab heads of state issue their formal reply to the prospect of land for peace: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. The drafting has been admired for its economy.

King Hussein severs Jordan's legal and administrative ties to the territory it annexed in 1950, dissolving the chamber in which West Bank seats were half the house. The claim is relinquished, not transferred; there is no state to receive it. The Algiers declaration follows within four months.

Arafat reads a Declaration of Independence written by the poet Mahmoud Darwish. It creates no government, no army, no currency, no territory; it is a declaration.

Rabin, Arafat, and Clinton on the White House lawn. The Palestinian Authority is established — interim, autonomous, and not a state.

Barak offers Arafat a state on roughly 91% of the West Bank — raised to 94–96% with land swaps under the Clinton Parameters that December — and all of Gaza. Arafat declines, proposes nothing in its place, and the Second Intifada begins.

Terms improving on Camp David; the delegations reported themselves never closer to agreement. The talks adjourn days before the Israeli election, and the offer lapses, unaccepted.

Wins the PA presidency with 62.5%. Term: four years, expiring 9 January 2009.

Israel removes every soldier and every civilian from the Gaza Strip: twenty-one settlements dismantled, some eight thousand residents evacuated on the orders of their own government, and fourteen million dollars of greenhouses — bought by American Jewish donors for the incoming Palestinian administration — left standing. The greenhouses are looted within hours; Hamas holds the territory within two years; rocket fire follows, and has continued at intervals ever since.

Hamas wins the legislative election. Twenty years on, it is still the most recent national election held.

Fatah and Hamas fight a brief civil war, and Hamas wins Gaza. The PA's writ shrinks to portions of the West Bank.

Olmert offers Abbas approximately 94% of the West Bank with land swaps, all of Gaza, and a shared Jerusalem. Abbas does not respond.

Under Article 36 of the Basic Law.¹ He continues in office.

The General Assembly accords Palestine the status of non-member observer State, by 138 votes to 9, with 41 abstentions. Adopted sixty-five years to the day after the Assembly's previous recommendation on the subject. The anniversary was deliberate; the outcome, unchanged.

A Palestinian state on the bulk of the West Bank and Gaza, with land swaps, a capital in parts of East Jerusalem, and a fifty-billion-dollar economic package — refused by Mahmoud Abbas in advance of publication. The reply was styled "a thousand no's." The Review, which files replies by content rather than volume, records it as one.

Mahmoud Abbas remains in office, twenty-one years and five months after his single elected term commenced. No subsequent national election has been held.