Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name Palestine (Greek: Παλαιστίνη; Arabic: فلسطين , Filastin), is the conventional name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands. This work explores the evolution of the concept, histories, identity, languages and cultures of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the modern era. Moreover, Palestine history is often taught in the West as a history of a land, not as Palestinian history or a history of a people. This book challenges colonial approach to Palestine and the pernicious myth of a land without a people (Masalha 1992, 1997) and argues for reading the history of Palestine with the eyes of the indigenous people of Palestine.

The Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine; their local roots are deeply embedded in the soil of Palestine and their autochthonous identity and historical heritage long preceded the emergence of a local Palestinian nascent national movement in the late Ottoman period and the advent of Zionist settler-colonialism before the First World War.

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that history is always written from and with a particular perspective and the past looks different from different perspectives, although some perspectives are empirically more truthful or less distorting than others. This work is not aimed at creating a grand narrative or a metanarrative for Palestine, as a way of mirroring or mimicking the foundational myths of Zionism. However, considering alternative and critical perspectives and looking for proof and empirical evidence are also central to critical historical writing. Using a wide range of contemporary evidence, testimony and sources, this book applies a multiple-perspective approach to the history of Palestine across time, while always keeping in mind the realities of the country and its indigenous people. It further argues that multi-linear evolution of the conceptual experience of Palestine, with its unanticipated twists and turns over time and space, centre on the general and concrete ideas which represent the historical and fundamental characteristics and lived experiences of Palestine and its indigenous people.

The geo-political unit and contextualised representations (and indigenous framing) of Palestine are deeply rooted in the collective consciousness and empirical experiences of the indigenous people of Palestine and the multicultural and shared ancient past.

The name Palestine is the most commonly used from the Late Bronze Age (from 1300 BC) onwards. The name is evident in countless histories, ‘Abbasid inscriptions from the province of Jund Filastin (Elad 1992), Islamic numismatic evidence maps (including ‘world maps’ beginning with Classical Antiquity) and Philistine coins from the Iron Age and Antiquity, vast quantities of Umayyad and Abbasid Palestine coins bearing the mint name of Filastin. As we shall see below, the manuscripts of medieval al-Fustat (old Cairo) Genizah also referred to the Arab Muslim province of Filastin (Gil 1996: 28‒29). From the Late Bronze Age onwards, the names used for the region, such as Djahi, Retenu and Cana’an, all gave way to the name Palestine.

Throughout Classical and Late Antiquity – a term used by historians to describe a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, a transitional period from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean world, Europe and the Near East – the name Palestine remained the most common. Furthermore, in the course of the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods the conception and political geography of Palestine acquired official administrative status. This work sets out to explain and contextualise the multiple beginnings and evolution of the concept of Palestine, geographically, culturally, politically and administratively. It also seeks to demonstrate how the name ‘Palestine’ was most commonly and formally used in ancient history. It argues that the legend of the ‘Israelites’ conquest of Cana’an’ and other master narratives of the Old Testament (or ‘Hebrew Bible’) – a library of books built up across several centuries – are myth-narratives designed to underpin false consciousness, not evidence-based history which promotes truth and understanding. It further argues that academic and school history curricula should be based on contextualised historical facts, empirical evidence, archaeological and scientific discoveries, not on conventional opinions or the fictional narratives of the Old Testament and religio-political dogmas repeatedly reproduced in the interest of powerful elites.

The celebrated English historian and Enlightenment author Edward Gibbon, writing in 1776, noted that ‘Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the [collective] memory of mankind’. Gibbon also astutely observed that the Romans, Persians and Arabs wanted Palestine for the extraordinary fertility of its soil, the opulence and beauty of its cities and purity of its air (Gibbon 1838, Vol. 1: 40; 1840, Vol. 5: 173).

Today the idea of a country is often conflated with the modern concept of ‘nation-state’, but this was not always the case and countries existed long before nationalism or the creation of metanarratives for the nation-state. The conception of Palestine as a geo-political unit and a country (Arabic: bilad or qutr), with evolving boundaries, has developed historically and continues to do so. The identity and cultures of Palestine are living organisms: they change, evolve and develop. This work explores the representation of Palestine over time as a mixture of the perceived and conceived and the lived realities of the country. The evolving idea of Palestine is framed here within five basic assumptions which also centre on the principles of human agency, context and lived experiences:

• Palestine is the individual and collective bilad (country) – in modern terms: watan, or mawtin (‘homeland’) – of the Palestinian people: the indigenous people of historic Palestine (Filastin al-Tarikhiyyah) and the indigenised immigrants in Palestine. The Palestinian people (individually and collectively) have a multifaith and multicultural heritage and a multi-layered identity deeply rooted in the ancient past (Farsoun 1997).

• Palestinian history is a house of many mansions – to echo an expression coined by the late Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi in connection with the modern history of Lebanon. The cultural pluralism of Palestine and the multi-tier identity of the Palestinians (as individual and collective agencies) must be situated within their evolving social, cultural and political context and actual historical circumstances.

• The multicultural dimensions of Palestianness and the textured polity of Palestine are grounded here in the living history and living experiences of the indigenous people of Palestine and the Palestinised immigrants in the country.

• Of particular interest here are the urbanisation processes, the emergence of early city city-states and state formation in Palestine. Contrary to the claims about the tribal organs of the state in the Arab Middle East, this book argues that early state formation in Palestine and the wider Near East was a product of urbanisation processes. These processes began in the Early Bronze Age at around 3200 BC and were associated with the emergence of great urban centres in Palestine – stratified urban social spaces in comparison with the somewhat smaller and more egalitarian Chalcolithic localities in the country (4000‒3200 BC). In the course of the Early Bronze Age urbanisation in the great urban centres in the country, each about 100‒400 dunums in size, was accompanied with the appearance of the Semitic alphabet, stratified society, public buildings, palaces, temples, towers and fortification systems. Some of urban centres which emerged in Early Bronze Age Palestine were represented in Jericho, Gaza, Tell al-Ajjul, Tell al-Sakan, Tell al-Tell, Jerusalem, Tell Dothan, Tell Taannek and Tell al-Mutasallim – the latter being the archaeological site of the powerful city-state of Megiddo which emerged during the Bronze Age (Taha 2017: 6‒11; De Vaux 1966). The work will also explore the interaction of Palestinian cities across history with their surrounding rural life and the wider regional context. In this respect, Henri Lefebvre’s three constituents of the social production of urban spaces – perceived, conceived and lived experiences (Lefebvre 2011) – are relevant to the way multicultural urban Palestine – Caesarea-Palaestina (also known as Caesarea Maritima; Arabic: Qaysariah), Gaza (Ghazzah)

Ascalon (‘Asqalan), Nablus, al-Ramla, Jerusalem, Acre (Arabic Akka; Greek: Ptolemais) Nazareth, Jaffa, Tiberias, Beisan, Safad – evolved historically. Greek, Roman and Byzantine urbanisation processes and urban planning were maintained under Islam in the Middle Ages and this urban planning is still visible today in the Arab Islamic medieval Old City of Jerusalem, a city whose urban planning and architecture are among the best surviving medieval cities in the world.

Some Arab writers and artists promoting the political and national cause of Palestine or pan-Arabism create metanarratives to depict Palestinian national identity or Arab nationalism as being more ancient than they actually are. Moreover, until the advent of anachronistic European political Zionism at the turn of the 20th century the people of Palestine (Arabic: sha’b Filastin) included Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Arab Jews. Being a rendering of the Israeli Zionist/Palestinian conflict, historically speaking the binary of Arab versus Jew in Palestine is deeply misleading. The Palestinian people experience their country of Palestine individually and collectively. Although Zionist settler-colonialism violated their indigenous right to self-determination in their historical homeland and they live either under settler-colonial occupation or exiled and rarely allowed to speak for themselves, they continue to speak of Biladuna1 Filastin (‘Our Country, Palestine’;2 vernacularly: bladna Falastin) or Filastinuna (‘Our Palestine’3). Even Palestinian citizens of Israel often speak of al-blad or bladna (‘Our Country’) as a patriotic way of mentally or representationally avoiding the term Israel and connecting with historic Palestine and the Palestinian people as a whole. The terms bilad or biladuna are medieval Arabic terms which have been in common use for many centuries and are deeply rooted in people’s daily lives. In the second half of the 19th century the medieval Arabic term watan (‘homeland’) was impacted by the European term patria, and watan became more closely associated with the rise of modern forms of patriotic homeland nationalism (wataniyyah) in Palestine and throughout the Arab world.