Just What is a "Palestinian," Anyways?

...The Arabs may represent a significant portion of what was once the British Mandate of Palestine, but they obviously never represented all of it. The Jews were always willing to share, just as the Arabs were always determined to prevail in a zero-sum contest against their formerly persecuted subjects. But if one is an all-or-nothing kind of person and if you cannot grab it all, you very often get nothing. This is something that Mahmoud Abbas might well keep in mind.

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
28 May '14..

The Philistines, of course, were a seafaring people of the Aegean islands.

They were one of the rivals for regional dominance competing with the ancient Israelites along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea over one thousand years before Jesus of Nazareth walked the land.

They were, needless to say, not a people from the Arabian peninsula and were in no way the forebears of those who conquered the Land of Israel in the seventh century.

This is to say that the ancient enemy of the Jews, the Philistines, are in no way related to the contemporary Arabs who have, for some reason, taken a Latin name that refers to a Greek people.

Furthermore, Palestinian-Arab authorities sometimes claim to be either descendants of the Philistines or descendants of the ancient Canaanites or descendants of the little known ancient Jebusites.

The areas of Judea and Samaria, and all the Land of Israel, was renamed Syria-Palestina by the Roman Emperor Hadrian around the year 135 CE for the explicit purpose of erasing Jewish history on the land of the defeated indigenous Jewish population upon the failure of the Bar Kochba Rebellion.

From that day to this the traditional homeland of the Jewish people was generally referred to as either "Palestine" or the "Holy Land" or "Eretz Israel," depending upon among whom, when, and where the conversation was taking place.

By the time that the Zionist project was well under way in the early part of the twentieth-century the terms "Palestine," to refer to the region, and "Palestinian," to refer to the Jews of the region, were commonplace in the west.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth-century a "Palestinian" was generally considered a Jew or, in official British terms during the period of the mandate, anyone, without regard to race or religion, who resided within the mandate, itself. This definition, in my opinion, is probably the only one that actually makes sense from a liberal perspective.