For Arabs, the term Palestine was unacceptable. For Muslims it was alien and irrelevant but not abhorrent in the same way as it was to Jews. The main objection for them was that it seemed to assert a separate entity which politically conscious Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere denied. For them there was no such thing as a country called Palestine. The region which the British called Palestine was merely a separated part of a larger whole [of Syria]. For a long time organized and articulate Arab political opinion was virtually unanimous on this point.