"How long has Palestine been a specifically Arab country?
“Palestine became a predominately Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century.
"Almost immediately thereafter its boundaries and its characteristics — including its name in Arabic, Filastin — became known to the entire Islamic world, as much for its fertility and beauty as for its religious significance...In 1516, Palestine became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this made it no less fertile, no less Arab or Islamic...Sixty percent of the population was in agriculture; the balance was divided between townspeople and a relatively small nomadic group.
"All these people believed themselves to belong in a land called Palestine, despite their feelings that they were also members of a large Arab nation...Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority.
"
For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314.” Edward Said, 'The Question of Palestine.”'
The Origin of Palestine
Bogus website, Georgie.
Arabs have never even recognized Palestine for most of history. It was merely southern Syria.
Palestine isn't even an Arab word. The Romans renamed the land Palaestina after the destruction of the Second Temple, named after the Philistines who were Aegean, not Arab.
Eminent Middle East historian Bernard Lewis...
For Arabs, the term Palestine was unacceptable...For Muslims it was alien and irrelevant... 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 [Syria].
Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity. For a long time organized and articulate Arab political opinion was virtually unanimous on this point.
Uneducated Georgie gets smacked down, again.