Here's were you went off the beam Penelope. Wrong claim. I wasn't attempting to establish any right by virtue of a name. That was the other guys.
This thread spun off one called Jordan is palestine and palestine is Jordan. The claim was that Jordan was NOT Arab Muslim palestine. My contention was that it is.
My detractors went on and on about palestines brave history and heritage. So I started this thread on the history of palestine as a cultural identity ethnicity or nationality.
My contention is that palestine never really existed as a specific place and even in Roman times not really as a specific nation other than within the British mandate period and certainly never as an identity. In Roman times it had been the province of Judea but we all know how that went and so the name of the province was changed in the Roman narative to palaestina. I've also argued ( possibly less successfully ) that palestine is a term applied to Judea in Roman times as an insult to the Judaic people and that the more accurate description of its development might be found within the JVL which reads as follows,
Quote
A derivitave of the name "Palestine" first appears in Greek literature in the 5th Century BCE when the historian Herodotus called the area
"Palaistinē" (Greek - Παλαιστίνη). In the 2nd century CE, the
Romans crushed the
revolt of
Shimon Bar Kokhba (132 CE), during which
Jerusalem and Judea were regained and the area of Judea was renamed
Palaestina in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel.
Under the
Ottoman Empire (1517-1917), the term Palestine was used as a general term to describe the land south of
Syria; it was not an official designation. In fact, many Ottomans and Arabs who lived in Palestine during this time period referred to the area as "Southern Syria" and not as "Palestine."
After
World War I, the name "Palestine" was applied to the territory that was placed under
British Mandate; this area included not only present-day Israel but also present-day
Jordan.
Leading up to Israel's
independence in 1948, it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate as Palestinians. It was not until years after Israeli independence that the Arabs living in the
West Bank and
Gaza Strip were called Palestinians. In fact, Arabs cannot even correctly pronounce the word Palestine in their native tongue, referring to area rather as“
Filastin.”
End Quote
IMHO and given that the Ottomans didn't really use the term. The Syrians in Ottoman times divided the area up into provinces none of which were called palestine. Previous to that there is extremely little usage of the term other than immediately following the Roman conquest. Oh and there are of course the coins.
The argument was never that it was always or even ever called Israel prior to modern times. The argument was that it was never a nation and the term palestine had never implied a specific culture or heritage indicative of a national identity of any kind.
My contention is that the areas sole cohesive culture and native peoples over all this time, dating back to some time shortly after the late bronze age collapse are in fact the Judaic tribes. I would further suggest that the present culture, language and identity of Arab Muslims within todays area as defined in the mandate period is predominantly of the Arab Muslim colonists who arrived in several waves. One with the first military conquest and another in the mid to late zionist period when census counts show population growth much higher than what can be accounted for by fecundity.
The topic isn't if the modern day Israeli's can lay claim to the land based on it ever having been called Israel prior to 48.
The topic is if the people today who refer to themselves as palestinians can. Which was the distraction made on the original thread.
Nice bait and switch though ;--)