Past and present wrong use of the ‘P word’

By Victor Sharpe

Coins from the Bar Kochba revolt, taken from the monumental work of Yigael Yadin, Bar – Kochba, and taken from the memorial and heritage Kfar Etzion. (Photo by Unknown author, Public Domain)

Throughout the Arab and Muslim world, the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea is still called Palestine, while the name, Israel, is maliciously blotted out.

The so-called ‘moderate wing’ of the Palestinian Authority displays a wall map behind the desk of its terrorist Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, he of the “pay to slay” obscenity, showing the State of Israel in its entirety, but falsely termed Palestine.

Indeed, the PA too often refuses to use the name, Israel, preferring like the Iranian death cult mullahs, to call it “the Zionist entity.” In doing so, it should remove from the minds of objective observers any faith in the Arabs’ and Islamists’ any interest in making a true peace. If the Arabs, mullahs ad nauseam, cannot even bring themselves to correctly name their peace partner, then the entire peace process is a farce: a disaster waiting to happen. And so, it did on October 7, 2023.

But the fallacious use of the term, Palestine, in a Biblical context is often used just as insidiously as that employed routinely by the PA and assorted anti-Jewish rogues worldwide.

Christian and even Jewish writers, many eminent yet hardly admirable, often use the word Palestine along with or even instead of Israel, Judea and Judah when referring to the Biblical period. This, consciously or unwittingly, helps to belittle the inextricable links of the Jewish people to their Biblical and ancestral homeland.

It is time to restore historical correctness and dispose, once and for all, of the literary and present day propagandistic use of the term Palestine when referring to the Biblical and present period.

Nowhere in the Jewish Bible is the word Palestine used. Read the New Testament texts and look for the word, Palestine. Hopefully it also does not exist. But Israel is used, for instance, in Matt. 2:20-21:

And he arose and took the young child and his mother, and came into the Land of Israel.

Any Bible commentary that refers to the Biblical period, as in Palestine, is either committing an historical error or is making a determined and sinister effort to deny the Jewish Biblical names of Judah, Israel, Judea, Samaria and Galilee – especially that of Israel. It is, therefore, necessary to briefly review some history to understand how the use of the word Palestine ever came about, and the monumental error now is being committed.

During the First Jewish uprising against the Romans, the Roman general, Titus, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Subsequently Rome issued coins with the phrase, Judea Capta, meaning that the Jewish province of Judea had been captured. However, they did not use the term, Palestine, for it was as yet unknown and certainly never employed in Roman coinage of that time.

The second Jewish Revolt against the ever more brutal Roman occupation of Judea broke out under the banner of Bar-Kochba in 132 CE. It was eventually crushed in 136 CE after four more years of heroic resistance against the legions of Rome’s emperor, Hadrian Publius Aelius.

Incidentally, a discovery of 120 coins minted by followers of Bar Kochba, who was known as the Son of a Star, were found by Israeli archaeologists near the Dead Sea where the Jewish defenders made their final stand against Rome. The coins all had the words, ‘Freedom for Jerusalem,‘ imprinted on them.

It is intriguing to consider that if the British tribes, at the other end of the empire, had risen in revolt against Roman occupation at the same time, both peoples may have prevailed, and history would be very different from what it became.

Hadrian destroyed Jewish Jerusalem, plowing the city under and filling the furrows with salt. He renamed it Aelia Capitolina, in part after his own name, and built a shrine to the Roman god Jupiter on the site where the Holy Jewish Temple had once stood.

But he also chose to rename Judea with that of the hated ancient enemy of Israel, the now long extinct Philistines. This was done as a lasting insult to the Jewish people. Hadrian thus renamed the land of Judea with that of Philistia, later Latinized into Palestina and, in time, becoming Palestine.

We should note that the Philistines were known as the “Sea Peoples” whom, it is believed, originated from Crete. They settled along much of the southeastern Mediterranean coastline and certainly had nothing to do with the ancestry of any Muslim Arabs — despite the deluded imaginings of the late arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, and now that of the brainwashed students at Harvard, Columbia, ad nauseam.

Interestingly, when the Crusader King Frederick II obtained a lease of much of the Holy Land from the Egyptian Sultan, Al-Kamil, places including Jewish Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, he merely called it the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

When Great Britain was awarded the Mandate for the territory in 1920 by the League of Nations, it immediately employed the term, Palestine, on both sides of the River Jordan.

The British term became the geo-political usage for several decades and the Jewish community was obliged to use terms such as the Palestine Post for today’s Jerusalem Post and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra for today’s Israel Symphony Orchestra. The historically correct name, Israel, was finally revived after the reconstituted State of Israel proclaimed its independence in 1948.

No such place as Palestine existed in Christ’s time or at the time of the Biblical Jewish Judges or Kings. The Jewish patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, never lived in a place called Palestine, nor did any of the Biblical prophets. Canaan would be accurate for patriarchal times but the Canaanites, the Philistines, and a host of other pagan tribes had already long disappeared by later Biblical times.

Indeed, as we know, no independent state called Palestine has ever existed in recorded history, certainly not an Arab one. Palestine – like, for instance, Patagonia or Siberia – have always been merely geographical NON-STATE areas.  

Those still believing in historical correctness, not the dubious and transitory concept known as political correctness, might wish to urge publishers and writers to restore historical correctness to the nomenclature in their works.

It is sad to witness glaring historical errors in such titles as: Palestine in Biblical Times; Palestine during the Time of the Judges; Palestine in the Times of the Kings, or Jesus’ Palestine, when a geographical territory called Palestine did not even exist during those times.

After all, we do not write about Alexander the Great’s journey through Bactria as Alexander in Afghanistan. Nor do we describe the invasion into Carthage of Rome’s General, Scipio Africanus, as Scipio in Tunisia. So why use the term, Palestine, to describe a historical period and location when that word had not yet been invented?

Surely the use by authors and Bible commentators of a name that never existed until at least 135 CE can finally begin to be corrected.

Historical correctness must always trump political correctness.

Victor Sharpe is the author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.

Victor Sharpe is the author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.