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Comment and Opinion

Fathom Journal: Alongside or instead of Israel: which Palestine is the UN in solidarity with? by Einat Wilf and Shany Mor

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Tomorrow, the United Nations marks the ‘International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.’ But which version of the Palestinian state is the UN solidarity with? For there are two, and a choice must be made between them.

Palestine Pasts

Only twice in history was the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean officially called ‘Palestine,’ and neither was for an Arab or Muslim entity of any kind. The first related to the end of Jewish sovereignty over the land, and the second related to its prospective renewal.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian was the first to make official use of the name ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestina’ to refer to the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. To secure the end of Jewish resistance to the Roman Empire he not only quashed their revolt and forced them into exile, but he dismantled the Province of Judea, as it was called at the time, and renamed it Palestina. This name was taken from the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, referring to the Biblical and Egyptian ‘Pleshet’ or land of the ‘Philistines’ on the southern coast (near present day Gaza). During the following centuries of Arab and Ottoman domination of the region it was no longer called Palestine but the southern part of ‘Al-Sham,’ or greater Syria (the territory claimed now by the Islamic State).

The only other political entity in the Middle East to bear the name Palestine was the British Mandate, constituted in 1920 by the League of Nations, for the express purpose of effecting ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ The Mandate allowed Britain the option of cutting the territory east of the River Jordan out of the mandate for a Jewish national home, which it duly exercised two years later, with the creation of Transjordan, today’s Jordan. This step actually further serves to emphasize the connection between the name Palestine and the project of Jewish national liberation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people: land which was now closed to Jewish settlement no longer bore the name Palestine, and Palestine itself had – from that point in 1922 until the end of the mandate in 1948 – the borders that today encompass Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Stip. These borders are often referred to ‘historic Palestine’. Usually without mentioning that they are ‘historic’ only insofar as they lasted for barely three decades, were governed by a European superpower, and delimited as the future national home for the Jewish people.

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