Many see the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as another chapter in the long-running conflict. Understanding the current crisis requires a deeper look at Palestine’s long, complex history
A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has gone into effect, nearly two years after the Palestinian nationalist organization Hamas launched a major attack in response to the Israeli occupation of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,200 people, the majority of whom were civilians. Subsequently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led a devastating, genocidal military campaign in Gaza, resulting in an estimated 67,000 casualties. While many dismiss it as another chapter in a long history of violence, understanding the current crisis requires a deeper look at the history of Palestine: a land shaped by colonization, displacement, and ongoing conflicts over sovereignty.
What or where is Palestine?
For more than two thousand years, Palestine has been distinguished by three monotheisms. Nabil Matar writes in Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes, “While some of these men and women sacrificed, collected relics and prayed, others studied, fought, preached, excavated or conquered. No land has been as much a center of religious tourism and piety, pilgrimage and colonization as Palestine, a rich granary in the Fertile Crescent.”
According to Palestinian historian and academic Nur ad-Din Masalha in Palestine: 4000 Years of History, the earliest known names for the region later called Palestine were Retenu and Jahi, which were used in ancient Egyptian texts such as the Story of Sinuhe (14th century BC). Retenu broadly refers to the eastern Mediterranean coast, divided into three subregions: the Amur in the north, Lebanon (Upper Retenu) in the middle, and the Jahi in the south, extending from the Litani River to Ascalon and the Rift Valley.
Traditional interpretations of Palestine (Peleset) and ancient Palestine were shaped by colonial and biblical scholarship. However, recent genetic, archaeological and epigraphic discoveries – such as the 3,000-year-old Philistine cemetery at Ascalon – have challenged earlier views, revealing that the Philistines were natives of the Near East, and not an Aegean ‘sea people’. Egyptian inscriptions from the reign of Ramesses III (1150 BC) mention Pelesset as part of his campaigns in Jahi, i.e. Palestine, while Assyrian records from the 8th–7th century BC refer to the area as Palastu or Pilistu, and call the people living there Palestinians.
To the ancient Hebrews, ‘Philistia’ referred to a confederation of five coastal cities where the Philistines lived: Gaza (Gaza), Ashkelon (‘Asklan), Ashdod (Isdud), Ekron (‘Akir), and Gath (Zath), and possibly also the regions connecting them. What is noteworthy is that in the myth of Israel, this population has been consistently portrayed negatively: from Goliath to Delilah, they have been portrayed as symbols of evil. The Old Testament mentions the ‘Land of the Philistines’, and the Bible refers to the Mediterranean Sea as the ‘Sea of ​​the Philistines’.
In Islamic geography, Palestine was variously defined: some described it as the area bounded on the south and north by Rafah and Lajjun, and on the west and east by Jaffa and Jericho; Others limited it to the city of Ramla and its hinterland. Early modern European cartographers sometimes used Palestine to describe only the coastal plain, while others conceived of it more broadly as the entire terra sancta or ‘Jerusalem and its mountains’. By the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods (1870–1910), Palestine was often taken to extend northwards to the border between Ramallah and Nablus, roughly corresponding to the northern border of the Jerusalem District. During the British Mandate (1920–1940), the term acquired administrative precision, dictated by surveyed boundaries that reached as far north as Ras al-Nakura.
Today there are people who completely deny its existence.
Palestine in ‘Prehistory’ and Civilizational Development
Archaeological research in Palestine has been largely dominated by religious and historical perspectives. At the same time, as Dr. Brian Boyd points out in Palestine Prehistory and the “Origins of Agriculture”, there is research on ‘prehistory’, or the study of pre-literate societies/communities, which is irrelevant, indicative of the politics of “settler-colonial history and the discovery of … European origins”.
The early ancestors of today’s Palestinians – the Canaanites or inhabitants of Canaan – were Semitic people who arrived in the region around 3000 BC. Biblical tradition tells that Abraham, the common ancestor of the three monotheistic religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – was called by God from Ur (in Mesopotamia) to establish the land of Canaan.
The Canaanite cities are said to have had strong trade and diplomatic ties with nearby Egypt and Syria. Hieroglyphic inscriptions, such as those used by the Egyptian king Seti I (1300 BC), attest to its importance. These Canaanite urban cultures worshiped local and regional deities, but over time, religious practices (and languages) became shared across the Levant. Between 1550–1400 BC, while these city-states were under Egyptian domination, with the withdrawal of the Egyptians in the late 13th century BC, the region became dominated by the groups that became known as the Israelites and Philistines.
Interestingly, Niels Peter Lemche – an Old Testament scholar – suggests that the Old Testament narrative of ‘Israelites’ and ‘Canaanites’ were ideological creations of others (non-Jews) rather than any actual historical group. Masalha says that even the term ‘Canaanite’ is “a theological-ideological construct by the (Old Testament) writers – (and) it does not necessarily reflect that there was conflict between historical Israelites and Canaanites in Palestine.”
The region then saw a series of conquests: the Assyrians conquered the region in the 8th century BC, then the Babylonians (601 BC), followed by the Persian Achaemenid Empire (539 BC). Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the late 330s BC, beginning Hellenization.
Masalha states that “There are good reasons to believe that the development of the highly advanced Philistine city-states in Palestine resembled, to some extent, the development of the sophisticated ancient Greek *polis*.” Particularly during the Hellenic or Roman period, many cities such as Ascalon developed into a distinct *polis*. The term, and its equivalent in Arabic – Medina – continued into the Hellenic, Roman, and Byzantine periods and “became common for naming cities in Roman and Greek-speaking Byzantine Palestine; it is also found in the adapted name of the Palestinian city of Nablus (originally Neapolis) in modern Palestine.”
For several centuries, Caesarea-Palestina served as the administrative capital of Roman Palestine and emerged as one of the major cultural and intellectual centers of the eastern Mediterranean, eventually competing with, and in some cases succeeding, the classical prominence of Athens and Alexandria.
The Jewish elite rebelled twice under the Romans (66–70 CE and 132–136 CE); Both rebellions were crushed, Jerusalem and the Second Jewish Temple were destroyed (70 CE), and most of the Jewish population was killed or expelled. In the classical period, Palestine was the province of Judea or Palaestina Prima, inhabited by Jews, Samaritans, pagans, and Christians.
This area was captured by Arab Muslim armies in 637-638 AD. Masalha claims, “For almost half a millennium from the 630s until the Crusader invasion of Palestine in 1099, … the official Arab Islamic administrative province of Jund Filastin existed.” Arab rule (under dynasties such as the Rashiduns, Umayyads, Abbasids, Tulunids, Ikhshidids, Fatimids, and Seljuks) brought Islam to the land, and Arabic became the dominant language. Monumental works such as the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE) were constructed in Jerusalem under the Umayyads, reflecting the city’s new religious importance.
,Historicity is a column by writer Vale Singh that tells the story of a city that is in the news by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. Views expressed are personal,
