PALESTINEA FOUR
THOUSANDYEARHISTORY

NUR MASALHA

Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History was first published in 2018 by Zed Books Ltd, The
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Professor Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and a member of theCentre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London. He is also editorof the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. His books include
Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992); A Land Without a People (1997); The
Politics of Denial (2003); The Bible and Zionism (Zed 2007) and The
Palestine Nakba (Zed 2012).

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1.

The Philistines and Philistia as a distinct geo-political entity: Late
Bronze Age to 500 BC
2. The conception of Palestine in Classical Antiquity and during theHellenistic Empires (500‒135 BC)
3. From Philistia to Provincia ‘Syria Palaestina’ (135 AD‒390 AD): theadministrative province of Roman Palestine
4. The (Three in One) Provincia Palaestina: the three administrative
provinces of Byzantine Palestine (4th‒early 7th centuries AD)
5. Arab Christian Palestine: the pre-Islamic Arab kings, bishops and poets
and tribes of Provincia Palaestina (3rd‒early 7th centuries AD)
6. The Arab province of Jund Filastin (638‒1099 AD): continuities,
adaption and transformation of Palestine under Islam
7. Between Egypt and al-Sham: Palestine during the Ayyubid, Mamlukand early Ottoman periods
8. Palestinian statehood in the 18th century: early modernities andpractical sovereignty in Palestine
9. Being Palestine, becoming Palestine: rediscovery and new
representations of modern Palestine and their impact on Palestinian
national identity
10. Settler-colonialism and disinheriting the Palestinians: the appropriationof Palestinian place names by the Israeli state
Bibliography

NotesIndex

Acknowledgements

Any credit for this book should be shared with a large number people who
provided me with documents, archival and material sources, logistics, ideas,
comments and moral support. These include Thomas Thompson, Rosemary
Sayigh, Hamdan Taha, Hussein Hamzah, Emanuel Beška, Ghalib Anabsi,
Maysa Hamzah, Raja Khalidi, Marie Antoinete, Salim Tamari, Sherna
Berger Gluck, John Docker, John Rose, Saad Chedid, Gilbert Achcar,
Yosefa Loshitzky, Bernard Regan, Ismael Abu Saad, Nahla Abdo, Asia
Zrike, Hassan Hakimian, Ehab Masalha, Peter Mayo, Laura J. Khoury,
Hatem Bazian, Faiha Abdulhadi, Niels Peter Lemche, Ella Shohat, Nadera
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Maryse Gargour, Ilan Pappe, Issa Jubrael Sarie,
Khalil Nakhleh, Adrian Beidas, Oren Ben-Dor, Rashid Khalidi, Ghada
Karmi, Khalil Hindi, Iman Saca, and Ahmad Sa’adi. My special thanks go
to Professors Thomas Thompson and Haim Bresheeth for their
extraordinary generosity and insightful comments and to the twoanonymous reviewers for their time and helpful advice. My family andfriends have also been an ongoing source of inspiration and encouragement
and this book could not have been completed without the support my wife
Stephanie and my daughter Maryam; to both I owe enormous gratitude. At
Zed, I am particularly grateful for the comments and practical help of theCommissioning Editor Kim Walker, Production Director Amy Jordan and
Project Manager Linda Auld. Needless to say that, while all the above havecontributed directly and indirectly to this work, thus enabling the book tocome to fruition, any mistakes or shortcomings in this book are entirelymine.

Introduction

PALESTINE AS A NAME COMMONLYUSED THROUGHOUT ANCIENTHISTORY

First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name
Palestine (Greek: Παλαιστίνη; Arabic:, Filastin), is the conventionalname 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 themodern era. Moreover, Palestine history is often taught in the West as ahistory 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 aland without a people (Masalha 1992, 1997) and argues for reading thehistory 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 ofZionist settler-colonialism before the First World War.
Friedrich Nietzsche argued that history is always written from and with aparticular perspective and the past looks different from different
perspectives, although some perspectives are empirically more truthful orless distorting than others. This work is not aimed at creating a grandnarrative 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 empiricalevidence 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 timeand space, centre on the general and concrete ideas which represent thehistorical and fundamental characteristics and lived experiences of Palestineand 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 withClassical 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 alFustat (old Cairo) Genizah also referred to the Arab Muslim province ofFilastin (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 thename Palestine. Throughout Classical and Late Antiquity – a term used byhistorians to describe a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, atransitional 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 ofPalestine acquired official administrative status. This work sets out toexplain and contextualise the multiple beginnings and evolution of theconcept of Palestine, geographically, culturally, politically andadministratively. It also seeks to demonstrate how the name ‘Palestine’ wasmost commonly and formally used in ancient history. It argues that thelegend of the ‘Israelites’ conquest of Cana’an’ and other master narrativesof 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 andunderstanding. 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 foreverlive in the [collective] memory of mankind’. Gibbon also astutely observedthat the Romans, Persians and Arabs wanted Palestine for the extra-ordinary
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 conceptof ‘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 andcontinues to do so. The identity and cultures of Palestine are livingorganisms: they change, evolve and develop. This work explores therepresentation of Palestine over time as a mixture of the perceived andconceived and the lived realities of the country. The evolving idea ofPalestine 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: theindigenous people of historic Palestine (Filastin al-Tarikhiyyah) and theindigenised immigrants in Palestine. The Palestinian people (individuallyand collectively) have a multifaith and multicultural heritage and a multilayered identity deeply rooted in the ancient past (Farsoun 1997).
• Palestinian history is a house of many mansions – to echo an expressioncoined by the late Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi in connection with themodern history of Lebanon. The cultural pluralism of Palestine and themulti-tier identity of the Palestinians (as individual and collective
agencies) must be situated within their evolving social, cultural andpolitical context and actual historical circumstances.
• The multicultural dimensions of Palestianness and the textured polity ofPalestine 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 emergenceof early city city-states and state formation in Palestine. Contrary to theclaims about the tribal organs of the state in the Arab Middle East, thisbook 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 theappearance 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 inJericho, Gaza, Tell al-Ajjul, Tell al-Sakan, Tell al-Tell, Jerusalem, Tell
Dothan, Tell Taannek and Tell al-Mutasallim – the latter being thearchaeological 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 theirsurrounding 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 – CaesareaPalaestina (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 andarchitecture are among the best surviving medieval cities in the world.
Some Arab writers and artists promoting the political and national causeof 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, historicallyspeaking the binary of Arab versus Jew in Palestine is deeply misleading.
The Palestinian people experience their country of Palestine individuallyand collectively. Although Zionist settler-colonialism violated theirindigenous 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 (‘OurCountry, 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 thePalestinian 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 theEuropean term patria, and watan became more closely associated with therise of modern forms of patriotic homeland nationalism (wataniyyah) in
Palestine and throughout the Arab world.
PALESTINE AS AN OFFICIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ENTITY
The British occupied Jerusalem in December 1917 and historians often
argue that Palestine did not exist as an official administrative unit until thecreation of Mandatory Palestine by the British in 1918. In fact, as we shallsee below, Palestine existed as a distinct administrative unit and a formal
province for over a millennium. This was first as the joint Roman provinceof ‘Syria Palaestina’ (135‒390 AD) and subsequently, as a province
separate from Syria, in the form of the three administrative provinces of
Byzantine Palestine: Palaestina Prima (Палестина Прима), or Palaestina I,
Palaestina Secunda (Палестина Секунда) and Palaestina Salutaris or
Palaestina Tertia (Палестина Терция). Moreover, these three provinces
were effectively governed politically, militarily and religiously from
Palaestina Prima as a ‘three-in-one’ polity from the 4th century until theearly 7th century. And once again Palestine existed as a separate
administrative entity in the form of the administrative Arab Muslim
province of Jund Filastin. This administrative province of Jund Filastin(Arabic:) existed for nearly four and half centuries from theMuslim conquest of Palestine in 637‒638 until the Latin Crusader invasionof 1099 AD.
Distinction between Filastin, al-Sham, Bilad al-Sham andpresent-day Syria: Palestine as an administrative Muslim
province, al-Sham as an Islamic geographic region
For nearly half a millennium from the 630s until the Crusader invasion ofPalestine in 1099, and the creation of the first Crusader Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem (1099‒1187), the official Arab Islamic administrative province ofJund Filastin existed within the wider geographic region of al-Sham. In
Muslim geography and cartography, al-Sham (‘the North’) was ageographic region (iqlim: al-Maqdisi 2002: 135‒162) – a vast region which
included the territories of present-day Syria, Palestine/Israel, Lebanon,
Jordan and south Turkey. For several centuries, al-Sham consisted ofseveral administrative Muslim provinces, Palestine included. In 1890 Guy
Le Strange (1854‒1933), a scholar of Arabic and Persian at Cambridge
University, published an important work entitled: Palestine under the
Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from AD 650 to 1500,
published in London by the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Translating extensively from the works of the medieval Arab geographers,
Le Strange conveniently and mistakenly rendered all geographic Arabic
references to ‘al-Sham’ into ‘Syria’. Subsequently further confusion wasadded to this automatic conflation of the al-Sham region with modern Syria
by some historians of the modern Middle East and by the fact that the cityof Damascus, the capital of present-day Syria, was also historically called
al-Sham. This historic city of al-Sham became synonymous with the capital
city of the Muslim province of Dimashq (Damascus) in the Middle Ages.
Yet today anyone who is familiar with the works of medieval Muslim
geographers and Arab historians knows that the region of al-Sham consistedof a vast geographic region, from southern Turkey in the north to Palestinein the south, and several provinces (al-Maqdisi 2002: 137‒138). Al-Sham,in medieval Islamic geography and history works, was not synonymouswith present-day Syria. This vast ‘northern’ region became the basis of themedieval Islamic term for the geographic area of Bilad al-Sham (), which often referred to the two Muslim provinces of Damascus andAleppo.
Under Arab Islam the Greek and Latin forms of the name (Palaistinê andPalaestina) were rendered in Arabic into Filastin and the Arab Islamic
province of Jund Filastin existed for nearly half a millennium from the 630s
to the late 11th century. Before Islam the al-Sham region was partly
populated by Monophysite Arabs and Miaphysite Christians, including
Ghassanid Arabs and Aramaic-speaking Christians. While Palestine became
an administrative province under Islam, al-Sham was never a single
administrative province; the Muslim province of Dimashq (Damascus) in
the Middle Ages was only one of the five provinces of the al-Sham region,
one of which extended deep into present-day southern Turkey. In any case
Filastin and al-Sham were neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. The
province of Filastin was part of wider region of al-Sham (al-Maqdisi 2002:
165‒162). However, of all the neighbouring countries, Palestine’s historic
links with al-Sham under Islam were the closest and most enduring (alMaqdisi 2002: 165‒162). However, it would wrong to argue that the Arab
Islamic term al-Sham made the perception of Palestine anachronistic underboth the Mamluks and Ottomans. As we shall see below, the two geopolitical terms coexisted throughout the Middle Ages and modern period
and the term Filastin was viewed as a component of the wider region of alSham. And Palestine’s strategic and geographic location between Egypt andal-Sham (‘countries of the north’) had a lasting impact on its history, artsand culture as well as identity as a geo-political and administrative unit.
Being Palestine, becoming Palestine: reimagining Palestinian
territorial identity, from regional to national
The history of Palestine, unlike the myth-narratives of the Old Testament,
has multiple ‘beginnings’ and the idea of Palestine has evolved over timefrom these multiple ‘beginnings’ into a geo-political concept and a distinct
territorial polity. The concept of Palestine is often approached in an abstract
or ahistorical way, rather than as a contextualised representation of an entity
whose (physical, administrative, territorial and cultural) boundaries have
evolved and changed across three millennia. But there are no pure ideas oran ideal concept of Palestine per se; empirical evidence and humanexperience are fundamental to the formation of ideas and knowledge about

Palestine. Crucially, we do not know Palestine only ‘from without’ throughperceptions and generalisations but also ‘from within’ through embodied
experiences and affections. The classical Greek scholars – who were among
the first to popularise the concept of Palestine – conceived of time in two
distinct ways: khronos, the way human beings measure time quantitatively
and chronologically: days, months, years, centuries; and kairos, the way
human beings experience and remember particular moments or events fromand with a particular perspective. Following this distinction between thetwo different notions of time, this work explores the multi-linear evolutionof the conception of Palestine and the experiences of Palestine through timeand across time. While putting the highest value on synchronic(contemporary) evidence and testimony, this work analyses the conceptionof Palestine across time both synchronically and diachronically.
Although there are multiple beginnings and multiple meanings to theidea of Palestine, the important question is not so much about the ‘origin’ of
the idea of Palestine, or where the idea came from, but how the identity ofPalestine evolved and experienced through and across time. Also, to borrowfrom Martin Heidegger’s notions of Being and Time (2010) and temporality(past, present and future) and the way human beings experience the world
through time, ideas, terms and discourses on Palestine should be exploredsynchronically and diachronically as well as the human experiences ofPalestine time. Furthermore, terms and concepts evolve multi-linearly anddiscursively and are experienced differently by different people – to borrowfrom Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (2001) discourse on ‘family resemblance’ andmultiple meanings.
From Ahl Filastin to Sha’b Filastin: from indigenous to modern
national collective consciousness
In Palestine, the indigenous collective consciousness of, and Arabic
terminology for, ‘the people of Palestine’ (Ahl Filastin, Abnaa Filastin or
Abnaa al-Balad) long preceded, but also followed, the modern Arabic
nationalist terms Sha’b Filastin (the ‘people of Palestine’) or al-Sha’b alFilastini (the ‘Palestinian people’). Of course, the actual connotations ofterms and representations of social and collective identities have evolved
and changed historically and the evolution of the multicultural identity forthe people of Palestine is no exception. The Islamic reference to the Arabic
term sha’b, people or nation, is enshrined in the Quran and the term isdescribed positively and pluralistically: ‘O mankind! We created you … andmade you into nations [pl. shu‘ub] and tribes [qabail], that ye may knoweach other’. Thus, social pluralism became fundamental to the way
collective identities were framed throughout Islamic history. Of particular
relevance to the evolution of the indigenous concept of Palestine are theself-representation of the people of Palestine in indigenous PalestinianArabic writings between the 15th and 20th centuries. These representations
are framed as follows: the Arabic terms Ahl Filastin and Ard Filastin(‘people of Palestine’ and ‘land of Palestine’) were repeatedly used byindigenous Palestinian Arab writers in the 10th‒18th centuries, long before
the emergence of a nascent Palestinian national movement in the late 19thand early 20th centuries. In the second half of the 19th century the Arabic
term Ahl Filastin evolved into Abnaa Filastin and Abnaa al-Balad – the(indigenous) ‘sons and daughters of Palestine’ and the ‘sons and daughtersof the country’ respectively; and these terms evolved into Sha’b Filastin –the nation or people of Palestine – in the early 20th century; and again into
al-Sha’b al-Filastini and al-Kiyan al-Filastini – the Palestinian
people/nation and the Palestinian entity – in the second half of the 20th
century. All these terms (Sha’b Filastin, al-Sha’b al-Filastini and al-Kiyan
al-Filastini) refer to the articulation and consolidation of the collective
identity of the Palestinian nation under the impact of modern Palestinian
territorial nationalism; but, read flexibly and not literally, these collective
terms are also deeply rooted in a premodern indigenous collective
consciousness centred around Ahl Filastin, Ard Filastin and Abnaa alBalad.
The ancient term Palestine (country, Balad or Bilad) and modern
Palestinian nationality are not identical or synonymous; the latter has
existed for millennia while the former has come into a modern use and was
the product of the emergence of modern Palestinian nationalism. This
critical distinction between Palestine as a country and Palestinian
nationality should also be kept in mind when reflecting on the fact thatsome historians of modern Palestinian nationalism have overlooked thelinks between land and country (and Palestine-based territorialconsciousness) which was evident in the works of Palestinian Muslim
scholars and writers such al-Maqdisi (Shams al-Din Abi ‘Abd Allah
Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Muqaddasi,)(1866, 1994, 2002), Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi (c. 1495), Khair al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) and Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashi in the 10th‒17th
centuries and the reimagining of Palestine in modern Palestinian territorial
nationalism. As we shall see below, these Muslim writers of the 10th‒17th
centuries displayed a sense of, and pride in, Palestinian regional-territorial
identity, though of course within the context of the multiple identities
Palestinians at the time possessed (religious and local identities included).
Reading the history of Palestine through the eyes of the indigenous people,
this work argues that the reimagined modern Palestinian people as anational community (Palestinian-framed nationalism) along the lines
suggested by Benedict Anderson (1991) should also take into account theliterature and social memory of historic Palestine bequeathed to us byindigenous Palestinian authors between the 10th and late 17th centuries: alMaqdisi, al-Ramli, Mujir al-Din and al-Tumurtashi. All these writers
produced a rich literature with extensive description of the medieval
territorial and administrative Arab province of Filastin.
Late 19th century Palestine saw a cultural and educational renaissancecoupled with incipient local nationalism. An important distinction made inthis work is between this nascent Palestinian national identity or local
Palestinian nationalism of the late Ottoman period, under the impact ofmodernity and through the literary works and journalism of Palestinian
writers such as Khalil Beidas, Ruhi al-Khalidi, Yousef al-‘Issa, ‘Issa
al-‘Issa, Khalil al-Sakakini and Tawfiq Cana’an, and Palestinian territoriallybased regional consciousness of historic Filastin. Although regional
consciousness is found in the writings of Josephus in 1st century AD
Roman Palestine and the works of the celebrated authors Prokopios(Procopios) and Eusebius of Provincia Palaestina in the 4th and 6th
centuries, by the 19th century Palestine had for centuries been an Arabcountry with Arabic and the symbols of Islam being key markers (andsignifiers) of its identity. In fact, territorially based consciousness of Filastin
as a distinct Arab region/country (bilad), with Arabic and Islam being key
markers of identity, is also evident in the works of al-Maqdisi, Mujir al-Din
al-‘Ulaymi, Khair al-Din al-Ramli and Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashi inthe period between the 10th and late 17th centuries. The territorially based
multi-faceted regional identity articulated by Palestinian Muslim authors
was partly derived from the cultural and religious heritage of the Arab
Islamic province of Filastin, an administrative province which existed forseveral centuries.

This work makes a third distinction between historic Palestine (Late
Bronze Age to 1917) and Mandatory Palestine (1917‒1948). Palestinian
territorial nationalism has evolved since the late Ottoman period and, likeall modern nationalisms, it continues to renew itself. However, historians,
who tend to focus on the boundaries of British Mandatory Palestine, haveoverlooked the evolution of Palestinian territorial nationalism from the late
Ottoman period into the British Mandatory period (1917‒1948). While
Palestinian nationalists of the late Ottoman period draw inspiration from
historic Palestine – including greater Palaestina under the Byzantines andthe Arab province of Filastin under Islam – Palestinian nationalism has
since 1918 been fixated symbolically on the territorial map of Mandatory
Palestine as a key marker of territorial nationalism. The political andcultural geography of Palestinian nationalism has had a major impact on theevolution of the modern geo-political concept of Palestine. For instance,
traditionally different styles of embroidery by and for women were asignifier of regional identities within Palestine. Today embroidery (as well
as necklaces, and many other forms of art work produced in Palestine)
repeatedly reproduces the territorial map of Mandatory Palestine, with thenames of its historic Arab cities, as a powerful symbol of Palestinian
national identity.
Of course, the issue of historic Palestine and the rise of modern
Palestinian nationalism is a complex one. However, a discussion about thehistories and shared memories of Palestine has to address the emergenceand becoming of the Palestinian national identity which has emerged since
the late 19th‒early 20th centuries. The evolution of this modern national
identity, which will be explored in chapter nine, will be addressed within
the conceptual and methodological framework of ‘being Palestine,
becoming Palestine’ proposed by, among others, Mahmoud Darwish. For
Darwish, in particular, being and becoming is a lifelong process of learning,development, self-discovery and the opening up of possibilities, somethingwhich is central to the pluralist social traditions of Palestine. These
pluralist, multifaith and shared traditions were woven into the fabric ofmodern Palestinian national identity as conceived by the Palestinian‘national’ poet. Darwish’s conceptualisation of ‘being Palestine, becoming
Palestine’, of formation and transformation of Palestinian identity, was nota binary or two-tier conception; it is rather in line with the multidimensional
and textured identity of Palestine and the Palestinians. Moreover, themodern national conception of Palestine did not totally displace and/or
completely replace older conceptions of Palestine; on the contrary, thenationalist idea did not come out of the blue and was, as I argue here,
deeply rooted in the ancient past. In fact, the new nationalist idea of thenation-state simply added further modern overarching layers to the alreadymulti-layered identity and histories of the country.
The current debate about the one-state or two-state solutions in Palestineis beyond the scope of this work. However, it will explore the conceptual
experiences of Palestine both ‘from within’ and ‘from without’. It will
make a clear distinction between Palestine as a country and ‘regional
territorially based consciousness’ of Palestine, on the one hand, andPalestinian nationality and ‘national, territorially based consciousness’ ofPalestine, on the other. Palestinian nationalism and nationality, like all othernationalisms and nationalities, are a modern phenomenon. The emergenceof modern Palestinian national identity along the lines of reimaginedcommunities (to paraphrase Benedict Anderson 1991) has been explored by
Rashid Khalidi (1997: 171‒190, 1998), Muhammad Muslih (1989, 1991)
and others. Yet Palestine as a country (with its shifting boundaries) has
existed across more than three millennia and this historical reality wasbound to produce forms of territorially based consciousness. Evidence of
this regional territorially based consciousness of Filastin as a country under
Muslim rule can be found ‘from within’ Palestine. As we shall see below,
the shared memories of territorially based consciousness of a distinct Arabregion called Filastin, with clear boundaries extending to Rafah in the south
to the district town of al-Lajjun (in Marj Ibn ‘Amer) in the north, is shown
clearly in the works of four Palestinian Muslim scholars and writers: alMaqdisi, Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi and Khair al-Din al-Ramli and Salih ibn
Ahmad al-Tumurtashi in the 10th‒17th centuries, as well as in the recordsof the Islamic Sharia Court (Sijillat al-Mahkamah al-Shari’yyah) of
Jerusalem in the 18th‒19th centuries. In the 17th century both al-Ramli, of
al-Ramla, and al-Tumurtashi, of Gaza, called the country where they were
living Filastin and unquestionably assumed that their readers would do
likewise. What is even more remarkable is al-Ramli’s use of the term ‘thecountry’ and even ‘our country’ (biladuna), which is exactly how
Palestinians today describe Palestine.
Of course, there are multiple ideas (and representations) of being
Palestine and being Palestinian – ancient, medieval, modern, nationalist.

The nationalist framing of Palestinian identity have been dealt with bymany scholars (Khalidi, R. 1997: 171‒190, 1998; Suleiman 2016, Masalha
2012; Muslih 1989, 1991; Kimmerling and Migdal 1993; Said 1980). As
Rashid Khalidi (1998) and Muhammad Muslih (1989, 1991) have shown, adistinct Palestinian national identity anchored in the land of Palestine
emerged in the late 19th‒early 20th century. However, much of Palestinian
national identity is derived from attachment to the past and to Palestine as acountry. Moreover, throughout the world countries existed long before theemergence of modern nationalism, the nation-state or modern national
identities, and the existence of Palestine for over three millennia is no
exception. The idea that Palestinian national identity emerged out of theblue, or was created ex nihilo, in the late 19th‒early 20th century iscompletely untenable. Viewed from the perspective of this work, and of themulti-layered identity of historic Palestine, the impact of the features andhistoric heritage of the country, which has evolved across millennia, on
modern Palestinian national identity construction can hardly be overstated.
However, there are three ways of juxtaposing the old notions of Palestinewith the emergence of modern Palestinian national identity. These ways canbe explored through (a) essentialising, (b) nominalising or (c)conceptualising strategies:(a) All these evolving ideas of Palestine are essentially the same; they only
differ in appearances, manifestations, attributes.
(b) Although nominally the same, and despite the similarities inappearance, all these perceptions of Palestine are fundamentallydifferent.
(c) The conceptualising strategy applied in this work is related to
Wittgenstein’s (2001) idea of ‘family resemblance’, although sharing
many features of old Palestine, modern Palestinian national identity is
distinct.
Furthermore, much of the millennia of history of Palestine as a country,
narrated in a tapestry of stories which explored the evolving multi-textured,
embroidered identity of the country, has nothing whatsoever to do with thePalestinian‒Zionist conflict which in historical terms is a relatively recent
development of late 19th‒early 20th century. Furthermore, the conception
and historic identity of Palestine should not be confounded or automaticallyconflated with the reframing and reconfiguration of modern Palestinian
national identity, although clearly the latter would have a major impact on
the perception, representational experiences and evolution of modern
Palestine from the late Ottoman period onwards. The themes of imported
modernities, nationalism, ethnicity and the nation-state are some of the key
preoccupations of historians of the ‘modern Middle East’. But historians
often reproduce their own preoccupation with identity politics and imported
nationalism and modernities and the millennia of Palestinian history cannot
just be treated as a footnote to modern nationalism or the idea of a modern
nation-state in Palestine. Moreover, the millennia of Palestinian history
cannot be an appendage to the ‘Israel‒Palestine’ conflict or subsidiary to
the debates on identity politics in Palestine-Israel.
It is impossible to talk about Palestine intelligently without having a
concept of the real Palestine in the same way as we cannot talk about
Britain or China without having a concept of these two countries. Concepts
are better understood not in the abstract or nebulously, but from the groundup: from the real, concrete and historical to the representational, from theobservations and experiences to the concept, from the particular to thegeneral. However, Israeli historians often seek to belittle Palestine andminimise the fact that the conceptual experiences of Palestine are deeply
rooted in the ancient past. In her Introduction to Islamic Art andArchaeology in Palestine, Myriam Rosen-Ayalon (2006: 15), Mayer
Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem, argues: ‘As a geographical entity, the concept of Palestine isrelatively modern and it is somewhat difficult to find references to it inhistorical sources’. She then goes on to contradict herself by referring tosome of the ‘historical sources’:
The Muslim conquerors translated the Roman terms ‘Palestina prima’and ‘Palestina secunda’ as ‘Jund Filastin’ and ‘Jund al-Urdun’ todesignate the two parallel strips of land that divided the country from
north to south. They made Ramla the capital of Jund Filastin to replace
Caesarea, and Tiberias the capital of Jund al-Urdun to replace Baysan ...
The division adopted later by the Ottomans was more or less identical.
(Rosen-Ayalon 2006: 15; see also Avni 2014: 41)

The conventional wisdom that the conception of Palestine is a modern,artificial construct is not confined to Israeli academics or opinion formers in
the West; it is also shared by some influential Palestinian intellectuals. In
fact, it is not just Israeli authors who continue to propagate the myth of therecent provenance of the idea of Palestine. Palestinian and pan-Arabintellectual ‘Azmi Beshara has also repeated the claim in interviews in the
Israeli Hebrew media that the idea of Palestine and ‘Palestinian nationality’are ‘colonial inventions’. For instance, Beshara had this to say long before
he was forced to leave Palestine for exile in Qatar in 2007:
I don’t think there is a Palestinian nation at all; No, I think there is an
Arab nation [ummah ‘arabiyyah] ... And I always thought like that. I
didn’t change my opinion. I don’t think there is a Palestinian nation I
think ‘Palestinian nation’ is a colonial invention. When were any
Palestinians? When was this? ... Despite my strong struggle against theoccupation, I’m not a Palestinian nationalist, never. I think Palestine
until the late 19th century was greater southern Syria.4
In fact, contrary to the claims made by Beshara, not only did colonialism
not create Palestine or Palestinian nationalism; British colonialism andZionist settler-colonialist nationalism gave birth to the Israeli state andbrought about the destruction of much of Palestine and expulsion of thePalestinians from their homeland in 1948 (Masalha 1992, 2012; Pappe
2006). Furthermore, while the term (‘ummah ‘arabiyyah’)is just over 100
years old, the term ‘Palestine’ is more than three millennia old. Working
from a particular type of collective memory (and forgetfulness) and panArab nationalist identity construction, rather than the actual histories ofPalestine and the region, Beshara failed to acknowledge that all
nationalisms (French, Arab, Indian, Egyptian, Palestinian, Turkish, Iranian,Jewish, Scottish) are ‘invented traditions’ and that the idea of an ‘Arabnation’ (‘ummah ‘arabiyyah’) was also a late 19th century form of
reimagining; the concept was reconfigured by Nahdah (reawakening)
intellectuals as a form of secularisation of the religio-medieval
representations of the ‘Islamic ummah’ (ummah islamiyyah). Some panArab intellectuals have failed to come to terms with the emergence of
wataniyyah (or a two-tier ‘homeland nationalism’) over the last century.
This two-tier nationalism which has emerged in Palestine, Iraq, Syria andother Arab countries in the course of the last century was in part theoutcome of the influence of European nationalist ideas and the colonial
legacy. In large measure, it was the product of the multi-layered Arab
Islamic identity which is deeply rooted in the cultural history and political
geography of this region.
Moreover, as we shall show, contrary to Beshara’s ahistoricism andRosen-Ayalon’s self-contradiction, the conception of Palestine as a country
and a geo-political unit is deeply rooted in the political history, culturalgeography and heritage of the country from the late Bronze Age onwards.
Furthermore, in fact it was the Christian Byzantines, not the pagan Romans,
who in Late Antiquity created the administrative provinces of Palaestina
Prima and Palaestina Secunda, and the Arab Islamic provinces of Jund
Filastin and Jund al-Urdun to the north-east were no parallel or equal strips;
in fact, the province of Jund Filastin encompassed both Byzantine
Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Salutaris (the Third Palestine Province) in
the south and south-east. Moreover, geographically the Arab province ofJund Filastin, which was four to five times the size of Jund al-Urdun,
effectively encapsulated the core of Byzantine Palaestina. Also, if the
Muslim conquerors came from Arabia to the south and south-east ofPalestine, why would they want to divide Palestine ‘from north to south’,
rather than ‘from south to north’ (Jund Filastin and Jund al-Urdun
respectively)? Crucially, as we shall see below, the perception of Palestineis deeply embedded in the ancient past and extensively grounded in ancient,medieval and early modern historical sources.
The evolution across time of the country of Palestine as a distinct
political geography – with its own distinct and diverse traditions and amelange of styles – is deeply rooted in the local psyche and consciousness;
the toponym (place name) of Palestine is deeply rooted in the ancient pastfrom the Late Bronze Age onwards. The name is found in numerous anddiverse sources for the Ancient Near East throughout the last 3300 years.
The name Palestine was used by the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians,classical Greek writers, Romans, Christian Byzantines and Medieval Arabs.
The toponym Palestine is also evident in countless inscriptions, histories,‘world maps’, ecclesiastical histories, chronicles, letters, coins andencyclopaedias from Classical and Late Antiquity, medieval and modern
Palestine. For a millennium and a half of Classical Antiquity and Byzantine

Christianity as well as under Islam in the Middle Ages the term Palestine
also acquired official administrative status.
This book sets out to chart and explain the historical beginnings andancient roots of the name ‘Palestine’ within the multifaith and sharedsettings of the country. It also presents a list of major ancient and medieval
sources for and references to the name Palestine and to its cognates andmanifestations in various Semitic and European languages – such as
Peleset, Palashtu, Pilistu, Παλαιστίνη, Палестины, Palaistinē, Palaestina,
Philistia,
Filastin//Plishtim,–
throughout the ancient, medieval and modern history of the region.
Different Assyrian spellings are Pilishti, Pilishte, Palashtu, Pilishtu, Pilistu,
Pilisti, Pilistin and Greek and Latin-Roman forms are: Palaistinê andPalaestia. The silver coinage of Philistia (Gaza, Ascalon, Ashdod) of late
600 and 500‒400 BC (see below) shows that the process of peaceful andgradual ‘Hellenisation’ of Palestinian place names, which also becameclosely associated with cosmopolitanism, started long before the conquestsof Alexander the Great in 332 BC. These processes were revived under andafter Alexander, accelerated in Late Antiquity and lasted for 1000 years.
The English name ‘Palestine’ comes from the Old French name Philistin,which comes from the classical Latin Philistinus (Palaestina) which in turncomes from the late classical Greek-speaking Philistinoi. Interestingly, thepronunciation of the medieval/modern Arabic toponyms Filastin (standard
Arabic) and Falastin (vernacular Palestinian Arabic) are close to the Old
French pronunciation, Philistin, and the classical Greek term Philistinoi.
The work also seeks to demonstrate how the name Palestine (rather than
the term ‘Cana’an’) was most commonly and formally used in ancienthistory, in a wide range of sources including material evidence, toponymy,
maps, coins produced ‘in Palestine’, famous texts and inscriptions from theLevant and the wider Mediterranean region. The book further argues that
academic and school history curricula should be based on historicalfacts/empirical evidence/archaeological discoveries and evidence-based
historical research – not on religious belief or Old Testament sacrednarratives and religio-ideological myth-narratives (e.g. ‘Israelites’ conquestof Canaan’) (Numbers 13: 1‒16; Joshua 1:1–18; 2:1–5:15; 2:1–24; 3:1–17;
4:1–5:1; 6:1–12:24; 9:1–27; 10:1–43; 11:1–23).

FROM PALESTINE-FOCUSED BIBLICAL ORIENTALISM TO
THE NEW HISTORIES OF ISRAELNo need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you
can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about
your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you
in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine,
my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority.
I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of
my talk. (Hooks 1990: 243)
History and collective memory are often a tapestry of stories woven bysocial elites, with disregard for the voices of ordinary people and selfrepresentation of the oppressed, colonised, indigenous and marginalised.
Much of the histories of Palestine are written by powerful elites and those
who are in the service of conquerors and colonisers. However, today there
are three types of writings on Palestine influenced by three distinct
traditions: (1) scriptural geography and Israeli settler-colonialist writings;(2) the discourses of the ‘New Histories’ of Israel in which the millennialong history of Palestine is treated as a mere appendix to modern Israel; and(3) indigenous and decolonisation scholarship informed by a people’s
history of Palestine, ‘history from below’, subaltern studies, indigenous
self-representation and the classical writings of Edward Said and Frantz
Fanon on the coloniser and colonised. This work comes under the third
category of writings. It prioritises giving Palestine and the Palestinians avoice and allowing Palestine to speak for itself. The other two discourses
are challenged in this book:• Orientalist, biblicist and colonialist writings: this literature ofhistory/collective memory has been largely produced and circulated byWestern or Israeli Zionist biblical geography on behalf of powerful social
elites, with little regard for the autochthonous Palestinian agency andvoices. Furthermore, obscuring the history of the country, historicalapproaches to Palestine are often constructed through the chronologies of
empires and through imperial conquest or dynastic chronologies (Roman,
Ottoman, British and so forth) and ‘from without’. There is very little
appetite among historians, often dependent on funding by powerful elites,to record the voice of Palestine ‘from within’, independent of biblicalmyth-narratives or imperial possession, or as having its own agency andshaping its own destiny.
• The New Histories of ‘Israel’: the Zionist liberal coloniser has oftensought to combine ‘settler-colonisation’ with ‘democracy’ – twocontradictory projects – and this tendency has in recent decades
contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Histories’ of Israel. These newhistories have also been backed by the generously funded ‘peace process’
industry – an industry which has spawned ‘new’ academic elites, drawn
for the most part from the same powerful social classes, and repackaged
discourses which have sought to subsume Palestine and obscure its
millennia-long history of the country under the rubric of ‘IsraelPalestine’. One of the most revealing aspects of this new peace industryof ‘Israel-Palestine’ is found in the much-hyphenated ‘Israel-Palestine’,with Israel constructed as a core (primary) political entity and Palestine
as a (secondary, marginalised, subordinate) appendage to Israel. These
New Histories of Israel are designed to micro-manage, rather thanchallenge, the impact of ongoing settler-colonialism in Palestine. This
anachronism is deployed even when the entire work focuses on Ottoman
Palestine (1516‒1917) or Mandatory Palestine before the State of Israelcame into existence. Israel itself was created in 1948 by ethnic cleansing
the indigenous people of Palestine and founded on the ruins of a country.
Works published on the history of Ottoman or Mandatory Palestine areoften now packaged as ‘New Histories’ or ‘New Perspectives’ on Israel,
without the liberal colonisers of these New Histories of Israel bothering
to explain why a new state (Israel), which was created in 1948, shouldcome before the name of a country (Palestine) which has existed formillennia. The Zionist New Histories of Israel often claim to ‘speak for’and ‘represent’ everyone, while ignoring that the asymmetry of powerand experiences of ‘colonised’ (Palestine) are fundamentally different
from the experiences of the ‘coloniser’ (Israel). In a famous 1998 article
in Al-Ahram online, entitled: ‘New History, Old Ideas’,5 the late Edward
Said challenged the Zionist ‘New Histories’ of Israel, which seek tocreate artificial symmetry between ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ and, on theface of it, bridge the ‘narrative gap’ between the coloniser (Israel) andcolonised (Palestine). In effect, however, the New Histories of Israel seek

to represent Palestine and speak for the Palestinians, rather than allowing
the indigenous people of Palestine to speak for themselves.
In his seminal work The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing ofPalestinian History, Keith Whitelam (1996) shows how the term ‘ancient
Israel’ was invented as ahistorical religious dogma. He links the problemsof the modern biblical discipline to the Palestine question and examines thepolitical implications of the terminology of biblical scholarship chosen to
represent this area. Whitelam shows how the naming of the land implied
control and possession; how the religious term ‘the land of Israel’ – a latereligio-literary fiction that does not relate to any particular period in theactual history of the land – has been invested with secular political meaning
in both Western and Israeli scholarship. He also argues that in Western and
Israeli biblical scholarship the term Palestine has no intrinsic meaning of its
own, no history of its own; but provides a background for the history of
Israel. Commensurate with this lack of history is also the absence of theindigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the land. The history of Palestine andits inhabitants in general is subsumed and silenced by the concern with, andthe search for, ‘ancient Israel’ (Whitelam 1996: 40‒45).
Inspired by the works of Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) and The
Question of Palestine (1980), Whitelam argues powerfully that specific
Palestine-focused biblical Orientalism have been part of and an extension of
the hegemonic Orientalist discourse and representation in the West, which
has been written without any ‘Oriental’ subject in view. For both Said andWhitelam, in this Orientalist‒biblical discourse the local cultures ofPalestine and Palestinians were presented as incapable of unified action orcollective memory. Whitelam develops Said’s arguments further, showingthat the history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by thediscourse of biblical studies, which has its own agenda: ‘Western
scholarship has invented ancient Israel and silenced Palestinian history’(Whitelam 1996: 1, 3). Ancient Palestine, Whitelam insists, has a history of
its own, and needs to be freed from the grasp of romantic biblical
Orientalism and scriptural geography:
The problem of Palestinian history has remained unspoken within
biblical studies, silenced by the invention of ancient Israel in the imageof the European nation state. Only after we have exposed theimplications of this invention will Palestinian history be freed from theconstraints of biblical studies and the discourse that has shaped it.
(Whitelam 1996: 36)
As we shall see below, modern romantic biblical Orientalism andProtestant Restorationism were two of the ideological catalysts forsupporting Zionism in the West and for backing the creation of the Israeli
state. Specific Palestine-focused biblical Orientalism also led to theconcoction of the pernicious myth that Palestine was ‘a land without people
for a people without land’ and the long development of Christian Zionism
laid the foundation for a concept of Palestine without Palestinians (Kamel
2014: 1‒15, 2015; Masalha 1997). In the modern period, European writers
adopted the terra nullius concept for territorial and colonial conquests.
Variants on the theme of Palestine being terra nullius were popularised inZionist Jewish settler culture (Wolfe 2006: 391; Masalha 1992, 1997).
Collective religious memory versus evidence-based history:
polytheistic Palestine, pluralism and the archaeological evidence
In Palestine multifaith and polytheism went hand in hand and for millennia
the country was a multifaith/polytheistic polity; the multitude of religions
and cultures in Palestine is one of its most striking and characteristicfeatures. This multitude of faiths in the country and the role of Palestine(and Arabia) as the birthplace of the three monotheistic traditions is a major
topic of this work, which argues that religious pluralism has always been at
the heart of the pluralist identity of Palestine, well before monotheism.
Writing in the 5th century BC, Herodotus was the first historian to describe
vividly a multifaith country located naturally (geographically) between
Phoenicia and Egypt, and to denote a geographical region he called
Palaistinê (Παλαιστίνη) which was larger than ancient Philistia. He also
reported that Palestine was deeply polytheistic. Today the findings ofarchaeology, including recent archaeological excavations in Philistia, which
are central to the ways in which the ancient history and heritage of Palestine
are understood and taught in Western universities and schools, confirm
Herodotus’ account of polytheistic Palestine and contradict the grandnarratives of the Old Testament. In fact monotheism evolved gradually (notin a revolutionary fashion) through a centring strategy of representationfrom polytheism (many pagan gods) to monolatrism,6 and from ‘mono-polytheism’ (pagan ‘God of gods’) to strict monotheism, focusing on one
God and one authority, under Islam in the early Middle Ages.
The terms holy ‘Bible’ and ‘biblical’ as signifiers meant different things
to different people across the centuries. Today it is widely recognised thatthe ‘Bible’ is not a single book; it is a library of books. While Christianity
distinguishes between two traditions, Old Testament and New Testament,
the Quran identifies three distinct traditions, or holy books, associated with
the Bible: the Tawrah (or Torah) attributed to Moses, the Injil, the Arabic
name for what Muslims believe to have been the original Gospel of Jesus,
and Zabur (or the Book of Psalms), attributed to David. The diversity of
traditions and sources associated with the evolution of the ‘Bible’ is central
to any scholarly understanding of the evolution of ‘biblical’ narratives.
Furthermore, the ‘biblical’ narratives are literary imagination, adaption,
theology and officially sanctioned memory – not history. Its stories andnarratives were derived from conventional wisdom, which was produced
and circulated by educated elites and opinion formers of the time, which
may or may not contain facts. Much of the new research on the Old
Testament focuses on its Babylonian conventional wisdom and recreatedBabylonian social memory (Masalha 2007), but also evidently recreated
Greek religious memory, and Hellenistic imagination and representations
are adapted in the stories of the Old Testament (Hjelm and Thompson
2016). The adaptation and reimagining of Hellenistic representations arealso evident in the ‘mono-polytheism’ of the Old Testament. The impact of‘Hellenisation’ on the literary imagination and representations of the Old
Testament and the representation of the divine in the post-Alexander era
should not be underestimated. Hellenistic allegorised representations hadconstructed a hierarchical pantheon of ‘King of gods’ – a supreme absolutedeity (Zeus) at the head of ‘twelve Olympian deities’. This pagan Greek‘mono-polytheism’ was represented by Zeus as ‘God of gods’(‘Representation of representations’). The Greek term theós was later
conflated with deōs (‘to the gods’), although etymologically the word is not
related to Latin deus, which comes from a different root. However, in spiteof these etymological differences, in Latin deus and theos became
inescapably linked.
In the Christological debates and controversies of Late Antiquity, which
hugely affected Palestine and the Near East, the predominantly Greekspeaking Orthodox Christianity adapted and reconceptualised that

Hellenistic ideas about ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ as well as allegorised andanalogous representations of divinity. These adaptations and representations
were reflected in the Trinity, ‘three individual persons in one nature’, and in
Christology of the ‘god-man’, ‘one person in two natures’, and of Jesus
born from a human mother. The Greek forerunner of this latter idea was
Dionysus, son of Zeus. These complex Christian representations of divinity
brought Aristotelian Maimonides (1138‒1204) to contrast sharply with thepurity and simplicity of monotheism in Islam in the Middle Ages. Under
impact of the strict Oneness and Unity of God in the holy Quran,
Maimonides came to believe that the doctrine of Trinity (‘three persons in
one nature’) undermined true monotheism. Interestingly, in modern times,
under the impact of Quranic monotheism, Scottish Orientalist and scholarof Islam William Montgomery Watt came to interpret radically the ‘three inone’ idea of Trinity. Like the ninety-nine names/attributes of God in the
Quran, Montgomery Watt believed the ‘three in one’ were not ‘three
individual persons on one nature’, but three attributes, faces or personas of‘one’ God.7
Race and ethnicity are problematic terms: they were both invented andconstructed in modern times on the basis of myths, whether physical or
national myths. There is no race without racism, while the myth of common
ancestry is fundamental to the conception of ethnicity. Being Arab Jewish
himself, Maimonides’ conception of Judaism had nothing to do with themodern conception of race or ethnicity. His conception of Jewish identity ishighly relevant to the multicultural notion of identity in historic Palestineand the analytical framework of this book. For Maimonides, Judaism wasrooted in and based on faith; it had nothing to do with modern ideologicalconstructs of race or ethnicity. Originally, being Jewish was one of themany regional identities within Palestine; it simply meant an inhabitant of
Judaea. The latter derives from the name Judah which dates from the 8th
century BC and refers to the region of the southern highlands, foothills andadjacent steppe lands at some stage in the course of the 8th‒early 6th
century BC. The inhabitants of Judaea became associated with what
subsequently became known as the ‘Israelites’, who, as a group, appearedin Assyrian inscriptions at one point in Iron Age II in the 9th‒8th centuries
BC.
For Maimonides, however, the ancient ‘Israelites’ were not a race or an
ethnicity – but a community of faith. And in post-exilic Judaism, and formany centuries before and after Maimonides, being Jewish meant
belonging to a community of faith, the Jewish faith. Things began to change
ideologically and radically in the 19th century under the impact ofEuropean racial theories and social Darwinism, when being Jewish was
reinvented into a racial identity. This racial framing of Jews persisted until
the Nazi Holocaust. In the post-Holocaust era, and following the horrors ofNazism, being Jewish was reinvented again into a single ethnicity. Today
the Arab Jews of Iraq, Morocco and the Yemen, together with the Amharicspeaking Falasha Jews of Ethiopia and the Russian, German and Polish
Jews are all treated as having a single ethnicity, if not a single race, by the
Israeli Zionist regime. In fact, until the advent of European Zionism,
members of the Arabic-speaking Jewish minority of Palestine, known
locally and fondly as ‘the Jews sons of the Arabs’ (‘al-yahud awald
al-‘arab’), were an integral part of the Palestinian people and their Arabic
language, culture and heritage – all of which are related to the heritage ofMaimonides – and were also destroyed by the European Zionist settler elite.
The double reinvention of the ‘Jewish people’ in the modern era is often
overlooked by critical scholars, Shlomo Sand (2009) included (Masalha2007). The relatively more recent ethnicisation of the Jewish people, often
by Israeli and Zionist Jewish academics, is designed to homogenise
multicultural and multi-ethnic Jewish identities, recasting it in a softer andmore palatable – yet no less misleading – notion of historic Judaism than
the racial theories of the 19th century (Masalha 2007). However, within thewider analytical framework of this work, being a Palestinian Jew (whether
Aramaic- or Arabic-speaking), simply means being a member of the Jewish
faith community in Palestine.
Furthermore, historically, holy mountains played a key role in the sacred
histories of diverse religious traditions as well as in the mega-narratives of
Greek and biblical divinities. Creative biblical social memory, conventional
wisdom, reimagined traditions and recreated Hellenic representations also
found their way into the collective religious memory of Palestine. Mount
Olympus was notably known in Greek religion as the home of the Greek
gods. This reimagined and reconfigured social memory is found in theimaginative Exodus story of the Ten Commandments and Mount Sinai.
Mount Sinai (Quran: Tur Sina) is referred to in the Quran in several surahs,
but the Quran does not assert its exact location. In the religio-social
terminology of officially Greek-speaking Palestine of the 4th century AD

Itabyrium (‘Mount Tabor’, the name based on Psalm 89:12) in Lower
Galilee became the fixed site of the Transfiguration of Jesus tradition, a key
story of the New Testament. However, for many centuries Itabyrium has
been designated by the local Palestinian Muslims and Christians as Jabal alTur and this indigenous social toponymic memory is similar the Quranic
designation of Tur Sina (Mount Sinai). As we shall see below, during the
Byzantine era the region of Mount Sinai was part of the Byzantine provinceof Palaestina Salutaris (late 4th century to early 7th century). In indigenous
toponymic social memory, ‘al-Tur’ (‘mount’ in Aramaic and Arabic) is acommon designation of holy mountains in Palestine and the Quranic
designation of ‘Tur Sina’ was probably aimed at differentiating this holy
mountain from other holy mountains in Palestine. Jabal al-Tur is also a
name used by Palestinians to refer to Mount Grezim near Nablus; al-Tur isalso a Palestinian neighbourhood on the Mount of Olives (which is holy for
Christians) in East Jerusalem located on a hill about 150 metres from the
Old City. .
Religio-social memory and the Christological debates and controversies
of Late Antiquity deeply affected Palestine and the whole Near East. These
debates emerged from Christian Neo-Platonism – an influential Hellenistic
tradition of philosophy that arose in the 3rd century AD, which was greatly
influenced by Plato – and the attempt to synthesise Neo-Platonism withbiblical (Old and New Testament) ideas. Founded by Plotinus (c. 204/5–270), Hellenistic Neo-Platonism conceived the derivation of the whole ofreality from a single principle, ‘the One’; hence the Christological doctrinesof Jesus being ‘Two in One’ and the Trinity doctrine of ‘Three in One’.
Synthesising Platonic and Aristotelian notions, Neo-Platonism remainedhugely influential throughout the Middle Ages and many of its ideas were
integrated into the philosophical and theological traditions of some of themost important medieval Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers. With theevolution of strict monotheism in the Middle Ages, the rationalist Muslim
philosophers, in particular, adhered to the principle of the reality of ‘many’deriving from the single monotheistic principle of the Almighty (eternal,
absolute) ‘One’ (or ‘One in One’).
Interestingly, however, the Septuagint, the first translation of some of the
Old Testament stories, was made in the 3rd century BC in Koine Greek (the‘common dialect’), a prevalent language in Palestine and Egypt throughout
this time. This translation survived in fragments. Koine Greek was adominant language which was spoken and written during Hellenistic andRoman Antiquity and the Byzantine era of Late Antiquity. It had evolved
from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in
the 4th century BC and had served as the lingua franca of much of theMediterranean region and the Near East in the course of the following
centuries. The Septuagint was aimed at Greek-speaking audiences. In it theterm Elohim (plural for ‘gods’) in the Old Testament was rendered into
Greek theós (Θεός), the supreme God at the top of the divine hierarchy.
Elohim can be read in both monolatrist and Hellenistic mono-polytheistic(‘representation of representations’) terms. The allegorised Greek deity of‘twelve Olympian deities’ headed by Zeus (‘Twelve of One’ or ‘Twelve inOne’) were adapted and synthetised with Near Eastern legends andallegorised in the form of the stories of Genesis including the ‘twelve sonsof Jacob’ and ‘twelve tribes of Israel’.
Read in these evolutionary terms, representations of deity frompolytheism to ‘mono-polytheism’ (‘God of gods’) to austere monotheism
evolved out of the local cultures of ancient Palestine and the surrounding
Near East (Gnuse 1997), but also under the impact of forms ofHellenisation in the regions. Adaptations of mono-polytheistic
representation of deity continued to evolve in Palestine and the Near East
many centuries after Herodotus had visited deeply polytheistic Palestine in
the 5th century BC. As we shall see below, many aspects of polytheism andpagan temples can still be found in Late Antiquity Palestine – for instance,
in Gaza in the early 5th century – a millennium after Herodotus had visitedthe country.
The Genesis story of Moses leading the ‘Israelite tribes’ from Egypt to‘Cana’an’ is a late literary construct that does not necessarily relate to any
historical period or actual, evidence-based history; but it is also central tothe myth-narrative (and mega-narratives) of the Samaritan Pentateuch8 andthe Old Testament. There is also a distinct story of Moses (Arabic: Musa) in
Egypt in the Quran (sura 19, Maryam, ayat 51‒53). Medieval Islam
admired the ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitab), adapted the classicaltraditions and developed its own strong and distinct tradition of bibliophilia:of book writing, book translation, calligraphy and libraries of knowledge.
Its medievalist view of religious pluralism brought it to recognise formallythe religious and social autonomy of four ‘monotheistic’ religious
traditions: Majusiyyah (Zoroastrianism) or Majus (Greek: magos;practitioners of Zoroastrianism), Sabaeanism, Christianity and Judaism, andaccorded them the status of autonomous and protected communities(dhimis); Samaritanism in Palestine was treated as a ‘type’ of Judaism andgiven the same status as an autonomous, protected community (al-Maqdisi
2002: 40). However, generally speaking, the Abrahamic traditions (Islam,
Christianity, Samaritanism and Judaism) have shared traditions as well as
distinct narratives. Crucially the empirical archaeological and diverse
historical evidence is different from elite ‘sacred texts’ or elite ‘sacredcollective memory’ which produces ‘one story from many’ and allows aprosopography (group narrative) of power elites to emerge. In the last two
centuries, ancient Egypt has been scientifically and systematically
excavated (perhaps more than any other country on earth) and no empiricalor archaeological evidence was uncovered to substantiate or validate this
Old Testament story of Egypt. This does not mean that there was no Moses;
it simply means there is no empirical historical evidence or facts tocorroborate positively the Old Testament Exodus text. Moreover, these elite
narratives are interpreted today by theologians and biblical scholars using avariety of methods and the texts are read more as theology than as accurate
history. Therefore, the collective ‘sacred literature’ is more likely to betaught today in academic departments or programmes of theology andbiblical studies.
Also, crucially, after more than 150 years and thousands of biblicalexcavations carried out in and around the Old City of Jerusalem, there is
still no material history or archaeological or empirical evidence for the‘Kingdom of David’ from 1000 BC. The reason for the lack of any material
or empirical evidence for the ‘United Kingdom of David and Solomon’ andother mega-narratives of the Old Testament is simple: these are invented
traditions (Masalha 2007, 2013). The ‘Kingdom of David’ as a large andinfluential polity was probably based on a small tribal leader in Judaea – thelatter is a name which appears in the Assyrian sources in the course of 8th‒
early 6th century BC. This lack of material or empirical evidence for a‘United Kingdom of David and Solomon’ is almost universally recognised
by archaeologists in the West and also by some leading Israeliarchaeologists. Broadly speaking, the collapse of the historicity of theevents described in the Old Testament about the ‘United Kingdom of Davidand Solomon’ – Iron Age II (around 1000 BC) – over the last four decades
has been the result of two interrelated factors: empirical archaeologicalevidence, and critical textual and literary criticism (Masalha 2007; Sturgis
2001; Thompson 1992, 1999, 2003).
Material histories and the archaeological revolution (or paradigm shift)of recent decades centres on the ancient history of Palestine (Masalha 2007:
241‒262) and the new ways in which this history should be readindependent of Old Testament stories by scholars and history students alike.
Zeev Herzog (Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and the
Director of its Institute of Archaeology from 2005 to 2010), in an article in
the weekly magazine Haaretz entitled ‘Deconstructing the walls of Jericho’,wrote:
Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel,archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary, theIsraelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did notconquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of Davidand Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts
have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody
wants to hear about it. (Herzog 1999: 6‒8)
Herzog went on to explain that the empirical and critical archaeology ofmodern Palestine has shown that the Old Testament narratives of ‘Exodus’and ‘Joshua’s conquest of Cana’an’ could not have happened:
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in theLand of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in thedesert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass
it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the factthat the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by
the Bible [Old Testament] as a regional power, was at most a small tribal
kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God
of Israel, Jehovah [Yahweh], had a female consort [see below] and thatthe early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning
period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai. Most of those who are
engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible,archaeology and the history of the Jewish people – and who once went
into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story – now
agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people’semergence are radically different from what that story tells. (Herzog
1999: 6‒8; see also Sturgis 2001)
The Old Testament is not actual history but imaginative fiction, theology,
sacred literature, ethics and wisdom. The Jewish contribution to themultifaith, pluralist heritage and long history of Palestine is undeniable. But
the genres of fiction and storytelling of the Old Testament may or may notcontain some historical facts. Herzog argues that the archaeology ofPalestine has completed a process that amounts to a scientific revolution inits field; archaeology – which has become an independent professional
discipline with its own conclusions and its own observations – presents us
with a picture of a reality of ancient Palestine completely different from theone which is described in the Old Testament. Palestine archaeology is nolonger using the Old Testament as a reference point or a historical source;
the biblical archaeology is no longer the ruling paradigm in Palestinearchaeology. For the critical archaeologists, the Bible is read as literature
which may or may not contain some historical information (Herzog 1999:
6‒8; 2001: 72‒93).
Although academic departments of theology will continue to teach andexplore these distinct narratives of Solomon and David in the Old
Testament and the Quran, today, as a result of more than 150 years ofcritical biblical scholarship and critical archaeological excavations, there
are very few archaeologists or historians in the West who treats these stories
literally or as actual ‘historical facts’ (Masalha 2007, 2013).
Interestingly the diverse Abrahamic prophetic traditions of the Old
Testament, New Testament and the Quran all argue that the ideology of‘kingship’ (malchoot in Old Testament Hebrew, malakut, from the verb
malak ‘to own’ in Quranic Arabic) belongs to the ‘One Almighty God’. The
claim by mainstream biblical scholars that ‘absolute kingship’ was intheocratic form in ‘Israel’ under Saul, David, Solomon and their successors
is ahistorical and completely unfounded. The Old Testament stories of Saul,David and Solomon are imagined traditions (fiction, literary invention andtheology) not proven historical facts. The primary aim of these post-exilic
literary invention and fictional stories (about the ‘kingdom’ of Saul, Davidand Solomon) was to construct ideo-political and theocratic justificationand legitimisation for the (originally Persian Šahanšah, ‘King of Kings’, orEmperor) idea of ‘absolute kingship’. Interestingly, the Gospel of John’shierarchical Hellenistic representation of this theo-political doctrine of‘absolute kingship’ is to argue that Jesus of Nazareth is ‘King of Kings’, the‘Son of God’ and ‘King of the Judaeans’ (John 19: 3). The Quranic
representation of this debate is to reject the Trinitarian notion that Jesus isdivine or the literal ‘Son of God’ (Quran 4: 171‒172). The Quranfurthermore narrates that Jesus was backed by Ruh al-Quds (the ‘sacredspirit’) and was a human prophet; ‘kingship’ (malakut) belongs exclusively
to the ‘One Almighty God’, not to humans. The Islamic Caliphate,
therefore, began as a non-monarchical tradition, but often developed into ahereditary form of government. It rejected absolute monarchy and vested
political legitimacy in the Jama‘a (group or people) – in principle a form ofIslamic social and political pluralism.
The strict monotheistic theology of the Quran further teaches that the‘One Almighty (Maximum Absolute) God’ has sent messengers andprophets to humanity, at different times and places, to communicate His
message. There are twenty-five prophets and messengers (all men)mentioned by name in the Quran. All, in essence, are equal and all taught
the message that the Quran communicated to Prophet Muhammad, known
to Muslims as the ‘Holy Prophet’ and the last prophet sent by God tomankind. The Quran and Islamic traditions link Prophet Muhammad andseveral prophets (messengers) – Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), Dawud(David), Suleiman (Solomon), Jesus (‘Isa) – directly and indirectly toPalestine and to al-Quds (Aelia Capitolina/Iliya/Bayt al-Maqdis/Jerusalem)in particular. The Quran and the theological traditions of Islam offered an
inclusive, multi-religious representation of the shared heritage of Jerusalem.
While many evangelical Christian fundamentalists (mostly in the US andsome in Europe) and Zionists (both Christians and Jews) continue to readthese biblical stories literally, today mainstream academics who teach Old
Testament and biblical studies in the West tend to treat these stories
metaphorically and allegorically or as ‘sacred literature’ or ‘sacred texts’,
while historians and archaeologists treat them as literature and social
memory which evolved across many centuries, rather than as actual
accurate history.
Evidence-based history – unlike officially sanctioned sacred literature –requires a scientific approach, critical thinking, empirical and material
evidence and accurate facts. Scholarly approaches to history require provenevidence, ‘facts’ or refutation. Scholarly historical research should not beconflated or equated automatically with ‘sacred literature’ or with specificreligious beliefs and traditions. Religious traditions often evolved fromsocial memory and across many generations. The Old Testament meganarratives, in particular, were often derived from the evolving oral traditions
and from the repackaging of Near Eastern epics and legends such as
Gilgamesh rather than being accurate historical events of the past. Whilethe beliefs and religious sensitivities of Muslims, Christians and Jews
should be respected and people are entitled to their beliefs and religious
traditions, critical scholarship and academic and school history curricula
and textbooks should be grounded in scientific research, criticalmethodology, historical facts and evidence-based historical andarchaeological research on ancient Palestine – not on meta-narratives orreligious-ideological orientations.
Furthermore, it can be shown empirically and based on material anddocumentary evidence that the name Palestine is continuously anduninterruptedly found in ancient, medieval and modern histories andhistorical sources, including: (a) ancient Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions
and texts (Assyrian: Palashtu, Pilistu, Palastu, Pa-la-as-ta-a-a); (b) classicalGreek texts and literature (Παλαιστίνη); (c) Roman and Byzantine
administrative divisions of the region and sources (Palaestina); (d) medieval
Arabic and Islamic Arabic sources on Palestine; (e) modern Hebrew(Peleshtina); (f) and all modern European languages and sources.
The ancient history and heritage of Palestine are the study of the past in
the region of Palestine generally defined as a geographic region in Western
Asia between the Mediterranean Sea, the Jordan River and the Red Sea.
Palestine is the name most commonly used from the Late Bronze Age (from1300 BC onwards) to the modern period to describe this distinct geographic
region between the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Jordan Riverand various adjoining lands.
The region of Palestine was among the earliest in the world to see humanhabitation, agricultural communities, material civilisation and eventuallysophisticated urbanisation in the Early Bronze Age. With the beginning of
the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic period) in about 12,000 BC humans in
Palestine began to raise animals and farm the land. The Neolithic period
consolidated agricultural practices in Palestine, in Jericho, circa 11,000–
8800 BC. The modern Palestinian city of Jericho is believed to be one ofthe oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with archaeologicalevidence of settlement dating back to 9000 BC, providing important
information about early human habitation in the Middle East.
It is widely recognised by historians and archaeologists that Palestine
had a remarkably stable population from the end of the Neolithic period,
some 6000 years ago, when the Mediterranean economy was firstestablished in the region. In the 1980s biblical scholars Thomas Thompson(Copenhagen University), Francolino Goncalvez and Jean-Marie van Cangh(1988) completed a pilot toponymic project on two regions in Palestine, thePlain of Akka (Acre) and the Jerusalem Corridor, which was published in1988 in a monograph entitled Toponomie Palestinienne. This study brought
out the many names of hills, wadis, springs and wells, but only those on
maps. However, this project was limited in its scope and has not directly
worked with the oral tradition. Thomas Thompson’s works Bronze Age
Settlements of Sinai and the Negev (1975) and The Bronze Age Settlementsof Palestine (1979) have a very useful list of antiquity sites with thecorresponding modern Arabic names (see also Ra‘ad 2010).
Furthermore, the Tubingen Bible Atlas (2001), based on the Tubingen
Atlas of the Near East (TAVO), documents the ancient historical andcultural geography of Palestine in a unique way in twenty-nine high quality
maps and extensive indices. Although the question of the Arab Muslim
heritage of Palestine in the toponymic memory of the region is one which
the Tubingen Bible Atlas project never took up directly, many maps ofPalestine in the Tuebinger Bible Atlas and TAVO archives are important
historical and geographical sources on ancient Palestine. More recently,
Salman Abu-Sitta’s Atlas of Palestine 1917‒1966 (2010) also provides
useful maps and indices on the modern Palestinian Arabic place names of
the region.
On the theme of the charting of maps and the production anddissemination of knowledge on Palestine in the medieval and ancientperiods, Robert North’s A History of Biblical Map Making (1979) is an
important source. North’s volume on early historical maps of Palestine had
its basic foundation in the archives of the Vatican library, Rome. In
addition, there are some cartographic materials on Palestine in the libraries
of Istanbul. There are three kinds of maps:• Maps such as the Carte Jacotin; The British Mandate map 1:20.000; theMap of Israel 1:10.000 (although many sheets are classified secret by theIsraeli military) and 1:50.000 (this entire map (including Sinai) has been
declassified.
• Scholarly geographically and historically analytical maps, such as thosein the Atlas of Israel 1967 and other atlas studies such as Salman AbuSitta’s Atlas of Palestine 1917-1966 (2010).
• The TÁVO maps, both the A and B series.
POLITICAL AUTONOMY, INDEPENDENCE AND
STATEHOOD IN PALESTINE OVER THE LAST THREEMILLENNIA
Conventional wisdoms are often articulated by powerful elites; they are notalways based on facts. The conventional wisdom is that Palestine never in
its history experienced self-government, political or cultural autonomy, notto mention practical sovereignty and actual statehood. Nothing is further
from the truth. As we shall amply demonstrate in this work, over threemillennia from the late Bronze Age and until the establishment of the Israeli
state in 1948, Palestine enjoyed a great deal of social, political andeconomic autonomy and also experienced statehood through six distinct,
though not mutually exclusive, ways – ways which had a profound impact
on the evolution of the ideas of Palestine across the millennia:• Autonomous economic and monetary systems and the issuing ofPalestinian currency: the institution of independent monetary policies
and the minting of distinct Palestinian currency were evident in the casesof the coinage of Philistia or Philisto-Arabian in the 6th‒4th centuries BC(discussed in chapter one) and the minting of Arab currency ‘in Filastin’
throughout early Islam (discussed in chapter six).
• Imperial patron‒protégé systems: the construction of patron‒clientsystems and the rise of local and autonomous regional and urban elites inPalestine, as was in the case of the ‘urban notables’ of Ottoman Palestine.
But ultimately, as we shall see in chapter eight, these Ottoman urban
elites in Palestine were rule-takers not rule-makers and rule-breakers.
• Administrative, provincial and military autonomy: this is evident
throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods in what became widely
known as Provincia Palaestina or the Dux Palaestinae, the ‘militarycommander of Palestine’ (discussed in chapter four), Mutawalli Harb

Filastin (“”, Military Governor of Palestine)(discussed in chapter six) and in late Ottoman period Palestine with thecreation of the autonomous administrative Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem as
the key province of Palestine (discussed in chapter nine).
• Palestinian client states: the emergence and creation of several
Palestinian client states, partly based on the same patron‒client
relationships. Although the types of client states in Palestine and thedegree of their subordination to imperial or powerful states varied
significantly, the kings of Philistia throughout much of the Iron Age, theclient King Herod the Great under the Romans in the 1st century AD(discussed in chapter four), the Ghassanid tribal Arab federate kings(supreme phylarchs) of Palaestina Secunda, Palaestina Prima andPalaestina Tertia in the 6th and early 7th centuries (discussed in chapter
five) and to a lesser extent the autonomous regime of Ahmad Pasha alJazzar in the 18th century were cases in point.
• Palestinian practical sovereignty and statehood: this was achieved byDaher al-‘Umar following his successful rebellion against Ottoman rulein the middle of the 18th century (discussed in chapter eight).
• Ecclesiastical independence and autocephaly: this was achieved by the
Church of Aelia Capitolina and Provincia Palaestina from the mid-5th
century following the Council of Chalcedon (discussed in chapter four).
In addition to all the above arguments and distinctions already made,seventeen points are central to the argumentation of this work on theevolution of the conception of Palestine across time:
1. Before the Late Bronze period (before 1300 BC) we have names oftowns, but none for the particular (Palestine) region as a whole, although
the name ‘Cana’an’ (ka-na-na, kinahhu) does occur earlier, in the Late
Bronze Age in New Kingdom inscriptions (1400s BC) and in thecuneiform tablets known as the Amarna Letters. The latter primarily
consisted of diplomatic correspondence spanning thirty years between
the Egyptian administration and its representatives in ‘Cana’an’ andAmuru (north-western Syria and north Lebanon) during the New
Kingdom of Egypt.
2. 1350s‒1330s BC: in the inscriptions of this period the name Cana’an
refers primarily to the northern coastal regions of Lebanon, much as it isused in 5th century Greek texts and later. In the Late Bronze age, thenormal name for the region of Palestine in Egyptian texts is not Cana’an,
but Djahi, which is used to designate the southern part of the greater
region of Tehenu.
3. It is true that the name Peleset first occurs in the 13th century BC and is
not witnessed in any earlier historical source. So it would be historicallyinaccurate to use the name Palestine for the region before the 13th
century. However, to be historically accurate one should point out thatthe name of the region of Palestine prior to the Late Bronze Age issimply unknown.
4. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, the names used for the region of thesouthern Levant, such as Djahi and Retenu or Cana’an, all gave way to
the name Palestine, the name which thereafter is the most commonlyused throughout ancient history and Classical Antiquity,9 as well as in
the period of Byzantine Christianity.
5. No other early toponym from the Late Bronze Age, such as (a) Retenu(1500s‒1200s BC); (b) Djahi (1500s‒1200s BC); or (c) Cana’an(1400s‒1300s), is used as the name of the region in the Iron Age I (c.
1200‒1000 BC) and later. One or other form of the name Palestine isused from the 12th century BC through the Roman period. This is also
the most common name for this region from the end of the 18th century
AD to the present, which includes the British Mandate period, when
Palestine was the internationally recognised name of the country. No
other historically known toponym is used. One perhaps should also pointout the ‘official’ administrative toponym of Provincia Palaestina, which
was consolidated in Classical and Late Antiquity and revived officiallyin the modern period.
6. The toponymic use of the name Judah dates from the 8th century andrefers to the region of the southern highlands, foothills and adjacent
steppe lands only at some stage in the course of 8th‒early 6th century
BC. Similarly, the name Israel exists first in the 9th century BC and isused until the 4th quarter of the 8th century BC, when this name gives
way to the name of the Assyrian province of Samerina.
7. The modern conception of Palestine as a geo-political unit and a distinct
country is deeply rooted in the ancient history, culture and material andintellectual heritage of the land. Already in the course of the Iron Age(1200 to the Assyrian conquest of 712 BC) Philistia evolved not only
into a distinct political geography but also as a separate geo-politicalentity. This fact would have a long-term impact on the evolution of theancient, medieval and modern representations of Palestine.
Palestine as a country (balad or bilad) with a distinct history, physicaland cultural geography, evolving boundaries, shifting capital cities (alQuds/Aelia Capitolina/Iliya/Jerusalem, Caesarea-Palaestina, al-RamlaFilastin), regional capitals (Gaza, Tiberias, Scythopolis/Beisan, Safad,
Acre, Nablus) existed for millennia; a country may or may not be asovereign state; Palestine as a country (like Scotland, Wales, Catalonia,
Andalus/Andalusia, Kurdistan, the Basque region, Chechnya or
Kashmir) should not be automatically conflated or equated with modern
Palestinian nationalism or any modern national representations of the‘nation-state of Palestine’.
8. Archaeological evidence shows that urbanisation and most of thePalestine towns and cities that are known in historic times existed
throughout the Early Bronze Age in the 3rd millennium.10 Moreover,while ancient literature and the physical remains of cities in Late
Antiquity attest to the power that urban cultures held over the lives of
their inhabitants as well as over the rural communities in which the
majority of people lived, archaeological excavations demonstrate thecontinuing interdependence of urban centres and rural contexts.
9. Historical evidence indicates that the toponymically Hellenised
Palestinian cities of the Byzantine era: Caesarea Maritima (Arabic:
Qaysariah), Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem; Arabic: liya, al-Quds) Lydda(Greek: Diospolis/Georgiopolis), Beisan (Greek: Scythopolis), Gaza,
Tiberias, Nablus (Greek: Neapolis), Jaffa, Arsuf (Greek: Apollonia)‘Amwas (Emmuas), Rafah, Beit Jibrin (Greek: Eleutheropolis), Acre
(Greek: Ptolemais), Ascalon (Arabic: ‘Asqalan), Aelas (Arabic: Aylah
modern-day ‘Aqabah) continued to function as major urban centres
under Islam and some kept their ancient place names. Andrew Petersen’s
The Towns of Palestine under Muslim rule: AD 600‒1600 (2005), which
focuses on urban sites from Byzantine to early Ottoman times, provides
important archaeological evidence about the continuities and recycling ofmaterial objects and art forms in urban regeneration and development.
Petersen’s study also includes a detailed investigation of al-Ramla, which
was founded by the Umayyads within the first century of Muslim rule,and cites the archaeological discovery of Byzantine-style mosaics andmotifs in the city. Interesting also are the architectural forms of earlyurban Islamic Palestine: in Jerusalem, Jericho Hisham Palace (Khirbat
al-Mafjar), al-Ramla and Khirbet al-Minyar, near Tiberias; all exhibit
continuities and an exquisite mélange of Islamic andGreco/Roman/Byzantine styles and modes of organisation. The adaptionof ideas and art forms from Late Antiquity Palaestina continued under
Islam throughout the Middle Ages and this was combined with newIslamic architectural forms, thus creating a mix of Islamic andGreco/Roman/Byzantine styles. The recycling of ideas, material objects
and art forms of ancient Palestine persisted into the modern period. For
instance, some of the building materials, marble and granite components,
for the spectacular White Mosque of Acre, famously known as al-Jazzar
Mosque – constructed in 1781, with a complex which included an
Islamic theological academy with student lodging, an Islamic court and apublic library – were taken from the ancient ruins of medieval Acre,
Caesarea-Palaestina of Late Antiquity and Castello Pelegrino (Atlit
fortress), to the south of Haifa, one of the largest fortresses built in
Palestine by the Latin Crusaders in 1218 and one of the best examples of
Crusader military architecture. Modelled on the great mosques ofIstanbul, the al-Jazzar Mosque (also known as the ‘White Mosque’) is awonderful example of the mixture of styles, Ottoman, Byzantine
Palestinian and Persian, incorporating and recycling the extraordinarilyrich martial and cultural heritage of Palestine.
10. Until the modern era and the conception of Mandatory Palestine (1918‒1948) the perception of what constituted Palestine’s eastern boundaries
was shifting, although in the course of the classical age and under Islamthe boundaries of Palestine often extended to areas lying east of the
Jordan River.
11. The classical, post-classical, medieval (Arab Islamic) and modern
conceptions of Palestine all went far beyond the original ‘land of thePeleset’ (pi-lis-te, or Pilistu, ‘from Gaza to Tantur’) of the Late Bronze
Age and Iron Age.
12. Seafaring and international trade routes in Palestine and the highlysophisticated urban coastal centres of Philistia (which included Gaza,
Ascalon, Ashdod and Jaffa) combined to develop geo-politically as anintegrated south in the course of Iron Age II (c. 1000‒600 BC) andPhilistia was the first to develop political autonomy and an autonomousmonetary system in Palestine in the form of silver coins, issued in thelate 6th, 5th and 4th centuries BC. This local Palestinian currency, known
as the coinage of Philistia, was circulated widely in the Philisto-Arabianregion and became known as Philisto-Arabian coins.
13. The official conversion of the Eastern Roman Empire to Christianity inthe 4th century and the massive spread of Christianity in the Near Eastand Roman Provincia Arabia brought about religious, social, intellectualand cultural transformation of the country and the creation of greater
Palestine (Provincia Palaestina). At its greatest extent in Late Antiquity,
greater Palestine under the Byzantines (from the 4th to the early 7th
centuries) was divided into three provinces: Palaestina Prima, Palaestina
Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris. But as we shall see below, these were
not seen as three totally separate provinces. Politically, militarily,
culturally and ecclesiastically they were conceived and continued to
evolve under the Byzantines as ‘Three in One’ Palestine provinces. With
time the (One in Three) Provincial Palaestina under the Byzantines wasseen and, indeed, consciously constructed – militarily-strategically,
politically and religiously – as a core province: Palaestina Prima,surrounded to the east and south by two ‘frontier provinces’, Palaestina
Secunda and Palaestina Tertia (Palaestina Salutaris). A ‘frontier
province’, Palaestina Salutaris was created in the southern Transjordan in
the late 4th century and from the 5th century also became known as
Palaestina Tertia. The names Palaestina Tertia and Palaestina Salutaris
became interchanged and some documents refer to Petra as themetropolis of ‘Third Palestine Salutaris’ (Ward 2008: 93). The Third
Palestine also encompassed the former Roman Provincia Arabia. The
three Palestine provinces included the Naqab (Negev), Beersheba (Bir
Sabi’), Nabataea (and its capital Petra) and major parts of Sinai. This
greater Palestine also included large parts of Transjordan in the east and
the Golan plateau in the north. This was a period of great prosperity andurban expansion, with Palestinian cities such as Aelia Capitolina(Jerusalem), Gaza, Neapolis (Nablus), Caesarea-Palaestina (also known
as Caesarea Maritima; Qaysariah), a thriving seaport and the imperial
capital of the province of Palaestina Prima, being built. Palestinian socialand religious urban centres acquired a great deal of political and religious
autonomy and projected classicising cultural influences throughout theMediterranean region. Scythopolis (later Arab Beisan), the capital of
Palaestina Secunda, and Eleutheropolis (Beit Jibrin) reached their peak inpopulation in the course of Late Antiquity, and the diverse population ofthe ‘Three Palestines’ may have reached as many as one and a half
million.
14. Greater Palestine (the three provinces of Byzantine Palaestina) of the
4th‒early 7th centuries AD became a major centre of cultural andintellectual renaissance and classicising in Late Antiquity. The two most
famous symbols of classicising Palaestina were the Rhetorical School ofGaza and the Library of Caesarea Maritima, the most extensive
ecclesiastical library of Late Antiquity. Caesarea Maritima and Gaza
were the two most important cities of Palaestina Prima, which was
effectively the dominant political and cultural centre of greater Palestine.
As we shall see below, the ‘Three Palestine’ provinces had a great deal ofreligious and cultural autonomy and the All Palestine Church of Aelia
Capitolina (Jerusalem) achieved independence from both Churches of
Antioch and Constantinople. It was not only one of the mosteconomically prosperous countries in the Mediterranean region, but also
– with the highly influential Mediterranean schools of Gaza andCaesarea-Palaestina and the architectural and urban planning work ofJulian of Ascalon – one of the most important centres of learning andintellectual activity in Late Antiquity; in effect, Caesarea-Palaestina andGaza superseded and replaced both Athens and Alexandria as thepremier centres of learning for the whole Mediterranean region.
15. In the 3rd‒early 7th centuries AD large parts of the ‘Three Palestines’
were settled by the Ghassanid Arab population that immigrated from
Arabia; the Palestine ecclesia integrated these Ghassanid Arabs and large
parts of these provinces were gradually transformed in the 5th‒6th
centuries into Ghassanid Arab phylarchates, or ‘frontier kingdoms’,
under Byzantine patronage and indirect imperial control. Ghassanid
influence on Provincia Palaestina lasted for centuries, and their ChristianArab kings (supreme phylarchs) reined until the Islamic conquest ofPalestine in the 7th century.
16. Unlike the six regional and neighbouring countries – Egypt, Syria, Iraq,
Arabia, Turkey and Iran – throughout its history Palestine neverproduced empires or mighty imperial cities, although its history was
hugely shaped by powerful empires. Its Patriarchs in Late Antiquity

became part of the Pentarchy, the five major Patriarchs governing thechurches of the Byzantine Empire, largely due to the unique status of theholy city of Jerusalem. As a Mediterranean country, strategically locatedbetween Asia, Africa and Europe, and between the Mediterranean Sea
and Red Sea, Palestine managed to flourish culturally and economicallyand achieve a degree of autonomy by relying largely on its soft power:
its holy places, academies and libraries (famous examples are the
Rhetorical School of Gaza and the Library of Caesarea-Palaestina). Itsability to accommodate and integrate multiple social and cultural groups
and its successful synthesis of diverse traditions and a variety of styles
became central to its identity.
17. In contrast with the European Zionist settler-colonial project, which isbased on old legends and new Social Darwinism – of ‘iron walls’ and‘survival of the fittest’, of the appropriation and erasure of indigenous
heritage of the country (see chapter ten) – Palestine and its local heritage
have survived across more than three millennia through adaption, fluidity
and transformation. The continuities, ruptures, adaption, re-adaption andmetamorphosis of Palestine (from Philistia to Palaestina to Filastin) arealso exhibited in the medieval Arabic name Philistin (Filastin), which
preserved the Latin Philistina or Philistinus, deriving from ancient
Philistia – which gave rise to the Roman administrative name ofProvincia Palaestina – in turn based on the ancient name preserved in avariety of ancient languages, the Akkadian (Babylonian) Palastu andEgyptian Parusata/Peleset.
FROM THE GEO-POLITICAL TERM PALESTINE TO THE
CONCEPT OF PALESTINE: CARTOGRAPHY, PLACE NAMESAND SOCIAL MEMORY
For practical reasons, the historical evolution of terms and place names
often precedes and follows the evolutions of concepts. Although the geopolitical term Palestine can be traced to the late Bronze Age and theindigenous Philistines, the consolidation of the concept of Palestine can betraced to Herodotus and other Greek historians, ethnographers andgeographers of Classical Antiquity. This study intends to link Bronze Age
Palestine and Classical Antiquity Palestine with modern times and explore
the etymology of Palestine toponyms – the term derives from the Greekwords topos (‘place’) and onoma (‘name’) – and their changes through andacross time. Modern Palestinian collective memory and place names have
evolved from the Neolithic Age into the modern period by embracing
multiple traditions and preserving the shared and multi-layered heritage ofthe land. In a largely peasant society with one of the most fertile lands in the
Fertile Crescent, many Palestinian Arab toponyms were based on plantfoods (such as varieties of beans, lentils), fruit trees (olive, fig, vine) andnatural geographical sites (hills, meadows, springs, streams, wadis, valleys
and mountains). By and large the names of Palestinian villages and towns
were very stable, but names of provinces and districts were evolving.
Palestine is found on the earliest known world maps beginning with Late
Antiquity and the famous ‘word map’ of Claudius Ptolemy (100–c. 170
AD). Of course, cartography is a practical science and since Ptolemy
produced a map of the world known to Hellenistic society in the 2nd
century cartography has never been about ‘objective’ representation ofreality. In the Middle Ages cartography was developed by Muslim
geographers such as al-Khawarizmi and deployed in the service of theAbbasid state and for practical purposes such as international Muslim trade,navigation and pilgrimage. In modern times cartography and renaming werealso central to expanding European trade and empire-building (Bassett
1994: 316–335).
Place names (including human settlements such as villages, towns, cities,
streets and countries and natural places such as mountains, hills, valleys,
rivers, springs and wadis) are meant ‘to provide clues as to the historicaland cultural heritage of places and regions’ (Kearns and Berg 2002: 284).
Yet in reality place names are not just spatial references; they are rooted in
power relations and struggles over land and resources and the identities ofthe people that inhabit these places (Kearns and Berg 2002). Struggles overland, toponyms, naming and renaming between indigenous peoples andsettler-colonists are common. Examples include Zimbabwe (Rhodesia),
Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands), Istanbul (Constantinople), Northern
Ireland (Ulster; the Six Counties), Azania (South Africa), Aotearoa (New
Zealand), Palestine (Israel), al-Quds (Jerusalem) (Masalha 2007, 2012,2013; Benvenisti 2002; Zerubavel 1995, 1996; Yacobi 2009; Gann 1981;
Nyangoni 1978; Abu El-Haj 2001; Ra‘ad 2010; Berg and Kearns 1996;
Berg and Vuolteenhaho 2009; Nash 1999; Housel 2009; Kadmon 2004). In
modern times the drive to rename geographical sites is also about staking

claims to a country. This focus on place names in the context of nationalism
shows how hegemonic political elites and state authorities use thetoponymic process as a way of constructing a new collective memory and‘inventing traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1996) and as a tactic of landgrabbing as well as an ideological reversion to a supposedly ancient or
mythical ‘golden age’. State authorities deploy renaming strategies to erase
earlier political, social and cultural realities and to construct new notions ofnational identity (Guyot and Seethal 2007; Nash 1999; Azaryahu and Kook
2002; Azaryahu 1996, 1997).
In view of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine in 1948 andthe current reality of coloniser/colonised in the country, the liberal Zionist
slogan that the history of modern Palestine centres on the idea of ‘one land,
two peoples’ rings hollow. The asymmetry of power in Palestine informs
the works of nearly all Israeli ‘New Historians’. This work, by contrast,
challenges this ‘Zionist nationalism’-based perspective and argues fordecolonising methodologies; this work argues that the nationalism
perspective serves to camouflage the heart of the conflict in Palestine; itargues further that at the heart of the question of Palestine is the vastly
asymmetrical conflict between an eliminationist European settler-colonialist
movement, backed by major Western powers (first Britain and now the US),and the indigenous people of Palestine. Furthermore, place-naming
cartography and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern
European conquest of the earth, empire-building and settler-colonisation
projects, the Zionist enterprise included. Scholars often assume that place
names provide clues to the historical and shared heritage of places andregions. This work uses social memory theory to analyse the culturalpolitics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ studyof the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christianmedieval pilgrims, the work shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies inPalestine: their superimposition of Old Testament and Talmudic toponyms
was designed to erase the local Palestinian and Arab Islamic heritage of thecountry. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised 19th
century Western explorations of Old Testament ‘names’ and ‘places’ andappropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing ofPalestine in 1948 and the ruptures of the Nakba, the Israeli state, now incontrol of 78 per cent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project andpursued methods whose main features were memoricide. Continuing intothe post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods continue to threaten thedestruction of the diverse cultural and historic heritage of the land.
The toponyms of historic Palestine derive from a wide range of sources,
including Phoenician, Philistine, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic –toponyms which are representative of the multi-layered cultural identity ofPalestine. The social and cultural importance of toponymic memory andgeographical rendering of sites and terms in historical writing is evident inmany histories from antiquity, medieval and modern Palestine. One
classical example is the listing of the name of ancient Palestine in Histories(or The History, 1987) by Herodotus, written from the 450s to the 420s BC.
Herodotus is believed to have visited Palestine in the fifth decade of the 5th
century BC. Like the classical tradition of Greek and Romanhistoriography, Herodotus’ work put the greatest value on oral testimony forcontemporary history (Robinson, C. 2003: 26). Herodotus was the first
historian to denote a geographical region he called Palaistinê (Παλαιστίνη),which was far wider than ancient Philistia. He refers to Palestine or ‘Syria’,or simply ‘Palaistinê’, five times, meaning an area encompassing thedistinct region between Phoenicia and Egypt (Rainey 2001; Jacobson
1999). Herodotus also mentions the city of Ascalon (Akkadian: Isqalluna;Greek: Ascalon; Arabic: ‘Asqalan; Latin: Ascalonia; Hebrew: Ashkelon), a
great ancient seaport city which dates back to the Neolithic Age. At thetime of Herodotus Palestine was deeply polytheistic and consequently, incontrast to the myth-narratives of the Bible, Herodotus does not mention
Jews or monotheism but describes Ascalan as having a temple for
Aphrodite and its polytheistic tradition. Although Herodotus’ Histories is
now considered a founding work of history in Western literature, and serves
as a key record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography and clashes ofvarious powers that were known in Greece, Western Asia and North Africa,
when it comes to Palestine and toponymic memory Western Christianwriting relies not on Herodotus’ Histories but on the myth-narratives of the
Bible. Interestingly, however, the Greek toponym for Palestine and Ascalanwere preserved in indigenous Palestinian Arab tradition and by medieval
Arab historians, geographers and travellers, and ‘Ascalon’ became known
to the Palestinian Arabs from the 7th century as ‘Asqalan’.
The emphasis of this work is on the indigenous (individual andcollective) agency and the ability of the peoples of Palestine to borrow,adapt, shape and transform outside influences and their own environment.

Consequently, the superficial use of the term ‘Hellenisation’ in Palestine isproblematic. This uncritical use marginalises the indigenous agency andover-emphasises the Hellenistic side of the relationship as the primarysource of power and legitimacy. However, aspects of the ‘toponymical
Hellenisation’ of Palestinian urban place names are evident. Toponymical‘Hellenisation’ of urban Palestine, which began with the conquest by
Alexander the Great in the late 330s BC and developed over several
centuries, was markedly accompanied by extensive economic growth anddevelopment that included urban planning and the establishment of wellbuilt fortified cities. Distance and regional trade and gradual ‘cultural
Hellenisation’ had some impact on Palestine and this was felt in the urban
centres and major cities. In addition to the impact of Hellenisation on thehistoric cities of Gaza, ‘Asqalon, Jerusalem and Jaffa, ongoingHellenisation of place names and renaming of Palestinian cities affected
Scythopolis (Beisan), Ptolemais (Akka/Acre), Diospolis (Lydda),
Eleutheropolis (Beit Jibrin), Sepphoris (Diocaesaraea/Saffuriyah),Nicopolis (Emmaus), Petra (Greek: rock; Aramaic: Raqmu; Arabic: alBatra), Philadelphia (‘Amman), Antipatris (Surdi fonts/Binar Bashi), Flavia
Neapolis (Nablus) and Sebastos (Sabastiyah). Sebastia (Greek: Sevastee) is
today a large Palestinian village, located some 12 kilometres north-west of
the city of Nablus. Rebuilt in 63 BC, its name derives from Sebastos(‘venerable’), the Greek equivalent of the Latin Augustus, a name chosen inhonour of Emperor Augustus. For many centuries, the town was the seat ofa bishop, first in Palaestina Prima under the Byzantine Empire, then in theprovince of Jund Filastin under Islam and again a Latin bishop in the
Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem. The original Palestine Orthodox traditionof Sebastia was restored after the defeat of the Latin Crusaders andcontinued under Islam into the modern era. Since 2005 a leading Palestinian
Arab public figure, Atallah Hanna (Theodosios), with a strong commitment
to Palestinian Arab national identity, has been the Archbishop Sebastia in
the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, a religious title which
embodies the continuities and the deeply rooted toponymic social memories
of historic Palestine.
As for the name of the Palestinian city Nablus, it derives from GrecoRoman name Flavia Neapolis (Νεάπολις) – the ‘new city of the Emperor
Flavius’ – which was given to it by the Roman Emperor Vespasian in 72
AD. Thus Nablus shares its name with the Italian city of Naples. Flavia

Neapolis had been founded near Tell Balatah, the site of the remains of anancient Palestinian city Shechmu, traditionally identified with the Samaritan
city of Schechem. The site of Balatah is one of the most ancient localities inPalestine and archaeologists estimate that the towers and buildings at thesite date back 4000 years to the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages. Today Tell
Balatah is listed by UNESCO as part of the Inventory of Cultural andNatural Heritage Sites of Potential Outstanding Universal Value inPalestine. Ancient and modern Palestinian cities are closely related not onlyin terms of toponymic memories. Archaeological evidence shows thehistorical continuities, interruptions, revival and continuous transformationof the urban centres of Palestine from the Early Bronze Age to the modern
period:Archaeological data take us beneath and beyond such recitation [ofmilitary battles] to gain a glimpse of what life was actually like inHellenistic Palestine. A presentation of the period’s architectural
remains, changes in its settlement patterns, and the variety of its material
cultures helps us understand how the inhabitants of various parts of thecountry lived and how their lives changed during the course of these
momentous centuries. Peaceful and increasingly wealthy andcosmopolitan lifestyles emerge from the obscuring dust of the historian’s
preoccupation with battles. (Berlin 1997: Abstract)
Palestine’s educated urban elites and thriving urban spaces played an
important part in shaping the early idea of Palestine. Both Latin and Koine
Greek were the dominant languages of the Byzantine Empire until the 6th
century; Latin remained the official language of the government in the 6th
century, whereas the prevalent language of merchants, farmers, seamen andordinary citizens in Palestine was Greek. Also, Aramaic – closely related to
Arabic – was a prevalent language among the (predominantly Christian)
Palestinian peasantry which constituted the majority of population in the
country. In practice, Greek and Latin were the prevalent languages of theeducated urban elites of Byzantine Palestine, affecting education, trade,
administration, official documents, art and architecture and key place names
throughout Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. Greek, however,
became the lingua franca of late Byzantine Palestine, shortly before theadvent of Islam. Consequently, the Hellenisation of Palestinian toponyms

was not uncommon in Late Antiquity. A well-known example ofHellenisation from Late Antiquity is the work of the 1st-century RomanoJewish historian and translator Josephus (Titus Flavius Josephus 37‒c. 100
AD) who spoke Aramaic and Greek and who became a Roman citizen.
Both he and Greco-Roman Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria used the
toponym Palestine (Robinson, E. 1865: 15). Josephus believed in thecompatibility of Judaism and Greco-Roman thought, often referred to as
Hellenistic Judaism.11 He listed local Palestinian toponyms and renderedthem familiar to Greco-Roman audiences. In his works The Jewish War(1981) and the Antiquities of the Jews (2004) which include material about
individuals, groups, customs and place names, Josephus almost never refers
to Torah-authority Jewish scribes as ‘scribes’; instead he refers to them as
sophists and elders. Similarly, Josephus refers to Jewish ‘sects’ (a loadedterm) as philosophies or schools. The term he used to refer to Transjordan,
Peraea (‘the country beyond’), is not found in the Bible, modern ‘Amman isreferred to by its Greek name, Philadelphia. Medieval Muslims and modern
Palestinians preserved Greco-Roman toponyms such Nablus (Greek:
Neapolis, Νεάπολις), Palestine, Qaysariah12 (Caesarea; Greek: Καισάρεια),but not Philadelphia. Eusebius’ 4th century work on Palestinian topography,
Onomasticon: On the Place Names in Divine Scripture (Notley and Safrai
2004; Eusebius 1971), refers to ‘Amman: this is now Philadelphia’.
In addition to the Hellenisation of many Palestinian toponyms by the
Jewish writer Josephus, the Founding Fathers of Christianity introduced
religio-political dimensions to Palestinian place names. The role of thisreligio-social memory in influencing the geographical mapping andtoponymic memory of Palestine was widely recognised in the 4th century
AD in two famous works: St Jerome’s Vulgate translation into Latin and thesubsequent work on Palestinian topography, Onomasticon: On the Place
Names in Divine Scripture by Eusebius of Caesarea (Eusebius Caesariensis;
260/265‒339/340 AD) – a historian of Greek descent, a topographer and an
exegete and one of the Founding Fathers who became the Bishop of
Caesarea about AD 314. Eusebius’ work, Onomasticon (Notley and Safrai
2004; Eusebius 1971), the first comprehensive attempt to construct and‘locate’ these places and names from the biblical narratives, was partly
based on Jerome’s religio-imperial enterprise which was driven by the factthat Christianity had become an official religion of empire. It was these twoworks by two of the Founding Fathers of Christianity, Jerome and Eusebius,rather than Herodotus’ actual history of Palestine which formed the basis ofWestern religio-social toponymic memory and the reimagining of Palestine
as a Christian Holy Land (Sivan 2008: 57). Eusebius, in Onomasticon,
provides a list of place names of Provincia Palaestina, with additional
geographical, historical and religious commentary partly based on biblicalstories. His topography of Palestine was later translated into Latin. St
Jerome relocated physically to Judaea in Provincia Palaestina whileworking on the Vulgate translation. Jerome, a founding father ofChristianity and a major contributor to its seminal religious memory, wasthe first person to go back and translate the Old Testament from Hebrew
rather than from the Septuagint (or ‘Greek Old Testament’).
The evolving multi-layered identity and conception of Palestine since thelate Bronze Age has geo-political, secular, administrative and legal
connotations. The Byzantine era also added a religious layer to the geopolitical, secular conception of Palestine, in the form of the ‘Holy Land’.
The religio-sacred representations of Palestine, the Holy Land, the ‘land of
the Gospel’ as religious memory and an imagined sacred territory have been
embraced and celebrated by the indigenous people of Palestine: Muslims(from the Quranic traditions), Samaritans (based on the Samaritan
Pentateuch), Jews (from the traditions of the Old Testament) and Christians(from the traditions of the Old and New Testaments). This multifaithidentity of Palestine is universally recognised.
Furthermore, the medieval Western Christian religious memory of, andpilgrimage to, the Terrae Sanctae had a major influence on the modernsocial memory theory of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877‒
1945), whose seminal writings on the sociology of knowledge and thesocial construction of memory was entitled Mémoire Collective (1980). In
his work Halbwachs contrasted structured, evolving ‘social memory’ withactual history and thus established ‘collective memory’ both as a concept
and as a distinct research field. The term ‘collective memory’ itself is
traceable to the founder of modern sociology, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who wrote extensively in Les formes élémentaires de la vie
religieuse (2003) about organised religion, collective memory, rememberingand commemorative rituals. Halbwachs, a student of Durkheim and apositivist sociologist, contrasts ‘history’ with evolving ‘social memory’ andargues that an individual’s memories and understanding of the past areclosely related to group memberships, ‘collective memory’ and groupconsciousness. According to Halbwachs (1992), this production of social
memory is dependent upon a religious or political ‘cadre’ as well as theframework within which a group is situated within a society.
Halbwachs’ work on the social framing of collective memory and theconstruction (and reproduction) of social memory began with his landmark
study on Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (1925, 1992) and La
Topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: étude de mémoire
collective (1941, 1992). Halbwachs was preoccupied with religious andnationalist social memory. His work La Topographie légendaire desévangiles en terre sainte focuses on publicly available commemorative
symbols, rituals and representations. It also examines the religio-social
memory of successive generations of medieval Christian pilgrims and Latin
Crusaders in the Terrae Sanctae and their geographical subdivision ofPalestine, Syria and Arabia, and how these groups ‘found’ and then ‘found’
again (reproduced) particular place names from the Gospel narratives.
This work will show how the collective (religio-social) memory ofWestern scriptural scholars such as Edward Robinson and Victor Guérin(like the medieval Crusaders and pilgrims) ‘found’ again and(reconstructed) in the 19th century particular place names in Palestine fromthe biblical narrative – place names which formed the basis of Zionist
replacement toponymic projects. Place names, geographical sites andlandscape are also – to borrow French historian Pierre Nora’s term, Les
Lieux de mémoire (1996, 1997, 1998) – ‘sites of memory’ around whichsocial groups consciously construct and cultivate social and cultural
memory and individual and collective identities. Underpinned by the social
memory theory of Halbwachs, Nora and others, this book also draws onother approaches: the exploration of Israeli archival historical documents;
Palestinian oral history and memory accounts; map-making and the cultural
production of maps in Palestine‒Israel.
In the modern period, and especially during the British Mandate ofPalestine (1918‒1948), the term ‘Palestinian’ was used to refer to all people
residing in Palestine, regardless of religion or ethnicity, including those
European Jewish settlers granted citizenship by the British Mandatory
authorities. Earlier, in the second half of the 19th century, the British had set
up the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) as an imperial project. It was
founded in London in 1865 under the patronage of Queen Victoria andcoined the terms ‘Western Palestine’ and ‘Eastern Palestine’ (the Survey ofWestern Palestine and Survey of Eastern Palestine) and mounted
geographical map-making expeditions in Palestine in the 1870s. The large
number of publications by the PEF included The Fauna and Flora ofPalestine (Tristram 1884). There was no mention of the expression ‘Land of
Israel’ by the PEF – this was later coined by the founding fathers of Jewish
Zionism.
However, one of the key religio-political-strategic objectives of the PEF
was clear from its own publication: Names and Places in the Old and New
Testament and Apocrypha: with their Modern Identifications (Palestine
Exploration Fund 1889). The PEF listed more than 1150 place names
related to the Old Testament and 162 related to the New Testament. Shortly
after the British military occupation of Palestine in 1918, the British
Mandatory authorities set out to gather toponymic information from thelocal Palestinian inhabitants. Following the PEF, the Mandatory authorities
assumed that the Palestinian Arabs (Muslim, Christian and Arab Jews) had
also preserved knowledge of the ancient place names which could help
identify archaeological and biblical sites.
In Palestine, the struggle between the coloniser and colonised over land,demography, power and ownership also centred on representation,
misrepresentation and self-representation. The metaphoric selfrepresentation of the European settler-coloniser as a ‘return to history’works to uproot and ‘detach’ the native from history. The settler-coloniser
invaded the space and appropriated the heritage of the local Palestinians andsimultaneously detached itself from the colonised and disinherited
Palestinian. The production of historical knowledge and power by the
Ashkenazi Zionist settler-coloniser – a self-referencing ouroboros – resulted
in the creation of a range of foundational myths, self-indigenising and selfantiquating strategies, including the myths of ‘exile and return’ and ‘return
to history’. But the ‘many returns’ of Zionism, as Israeli scholar Gabriel
Piterberg put it in The Returns of Zionism (2008), did not just manifest
themselves in the obsessive ‘return to history’ by the European settler
coming to reclaim the land, they were also constructed around erasure, thenon-existence of the indigenous people of Palestine and the actual, physicaluprooting of the Palestinians and their detachment ‘from history’.
Since the mapping and explorations of the PEF and especially since theestablishment of an ethnically cleansing Israeli state in 1948, the productionof historical knowledge and cultural struggle over the naming (and

renaming) of Palestine sites/cities/towns and villages have become major
weapons of Zionist settler-colonial nationalism, biblicisation,
Hebrewisation and Judaisation strategies that sought to detach thePalestinians from the history of the country. Toponymy itself is a branch of
onomastics or onomatology, the study of the origin, history and uses ofnames of all kinds. Anthroponomastics (or anthroponymy) is the study of
personal names. Chapter ten will explore Zionist toponymic,
anthroponymic and self-naming strategies. The eliminationist projects ofZionist settler-colonisation in Palestine did not just centre on land-grabbing
and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine. These
projects also consisted of self-indigenisation, self-antiquation, biblicisationand Hebrewisation in addition to the Judaisation of the land.
LOCATING PALESTINE: THE METHODOLOGICAL ANDINTELLECTUAL FRAMEWORKThis work locates the multicultural identity and shared histories of Palestine
in a very long history of the whole region. It locates Palestinian history in
the ancient, classical, post-classical, medieval, early and modern histories of
the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. The intention is not to produce anintellectually detached form of history but rather to offer a socially,
intellectually, culturally and politically informed and engaged history.
While attempting to cover the vast span of history, this work links questionsof history from below, social memory, cultural identity and politics.
This is not a ‘nationalist history’ or a narrative about the Bible to thepresent for a ‘Palestinian nation’, although I am fully aware of history’s
power to create national/political legitimacy in the present. ‘Nation’ andnationalism are modern inventions and constructions and I am highly
sceptical about the utility of a political term such as ‘nation’ across a vast
sweep of history. Of course, the process of ‘national invention’ andvisualisation is not confined to modern Palestine or the Palestinians. It is
common to all modern national entities and groupings, and it is an
important ingredient both in nationalism and in the creation andmaintenance of nation-states. Nation-building and the invention of tradition
was a typical European practice of using collective memory selectively by
manipulating certain bits of the national and religious past, suppressing
others and elevating and mobilising others in an entirely functional way andfor political purposes; thus mobilised memory is not necessarily authentic
but rather useful politically (Said 1999: 6‒7). Competing modes of modern
nation-building and nationalist myth-making have received extensive
critical reappraisal in the works of Benedict Anderson (1991: 6, 11‒12),
Eric Hobsbawm (1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1996), Anthony Smith(1971, 1984, 1986) and Ernest Gellner (1983). Hobsbawm’s mostcomprehensive analysis of nation-building and myth-making in Europe isfound in Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Published in 1990 with thesubtitle Programme, Myth, Reality, his work is about the ‘invention of
tradition’, the creation of national culture, and the construction of national
identities from a mixture of folk history and historical myths (Hobsbawm
1990). In The Invention of Tradition Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1996:
1‒14, 263‒283) explore the way social and political authorities in theEurope of the mid-19th century set about creating supposedly age-old
traditions by providing invented memories of the past as a way of creating a
new sense of identity for the ruler and ruled.
Often liberal Israeli Jewish scholars (Sand 2009; Sternhell 1998;
Piterberg 2001, 2008; Rabkin 2006, 2010; Ben-Zeev 2014; Greenstein2014) critique the ‘nationalist inventive’ traditions of Zionism and theimpact of this ‘imagined tradition’ on the Jewish people, rather than on thecatastrophic consequences of Zionism for its main victim, the indigenous
people of Palestine. But since this Zionist nation-building and the inventionof tradition was typical of European ‘nationalist’ practices of using
collective memory, this scholarly approach places Zionism among the‘normal’ European traditions of nationalist invention and myth-making. In
effect this ‘normalisation’ and ‘nationalisation’ of Zionism is exactly what
Zionist ideologues have always argued for. Also, these myth-making
strategies of Zionism are hardly its worst aspects. By contrast, reading
Zionism from below, from the viewpoint of its main victim, the indigenous
people of Palestine, places Zionism within an altogether different tradition:
among the forces of modern European settler-colonisation, ethnic cleansing
memoricide and cultural genocide (Masalha 1992, 2012; Pappe 2006;
Rashed et al. 2014).
Furthermore, as I have argued in The Bible and Zionism: Invented
Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel (2007)
and The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure ofMemory (2013), Palestinian history as people’s history can and should only

be written independent of the Old Testament stories. These works have also
addressed the ways in which Zionism attempted to validate its colonisation
projects and its own ‘historical claims’ through extensive uses and abusesof the biblical text. This theme has also been explored in Keith Whitelam’s
seminal work, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of PalestinianHistory (1996). This book is not designed to revisit that ground or build on
Whitelam’s excellent work and his effective dismantling of a Bible-toindependence ‘historical continuum’ for Israel. It rather seeks to move
forward by recovering and narrating a history of Palestine completely
independent of the biblical debates and the biblical scholarship.
Furthermore, while arguing that the complex history of Palestine is deeply
grounded in the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, there is noattempt here to mimic the Zionist claims of a long, ‘unbroken’ and neat
history of Palestine. On the contrary, as this volume will demonstrate, themulti-layered heritage of Palestine is a history of mixed styles andcontradictory traditions; a history full of twist and turns, of memory andforgetfulness, and of suppression and recovery.

Chapter 1

THE PHILISTINES AND PHILISTIA AS A
DISTINCT GEO-POLITICAL ENTITY
Late Bronze Age to 500 BC

THE PHILISTINES AS INDIGENOUS PEOPLE: EPIGRAPHIC
AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOR PELESET AND
THE PHILISTINESThe most traditional and earliest toponyms for the area which became
known in classical Antiquity as ‘Palestine’ were not related to Cana’an.
They were the toponyms of Retenu and Djahi, which might be seen as
traditional names, as used in the 14th century BC Egyptian story of
Sinuhe.1 Retenu was used to refer to the regions along the eastern shore of
the Mediterranean and was divided into three sub-regions: Amurru, in thenorth, Lebanon (sometimes referred to as ‘Upper Retenu’), which lay southof Amurru and north of the Litani river, and Djahi, the southernmost part ofRetenu, which referred to the regions south of the Litani to Ascalon(‘Asqalan, or perhaps Gaza) and as far as the Rift Valley to the east.
The traditional approaches to the Philistines, ‘Peleset’ and ancient
Palestine have been constructed through the eyes of settler-colonisers. New
archaeological discoveries and epigraphical evidence can help us read thehistory of Palestine through the eyes of the indigenous. New archaeologicaldiscoveries in Palestine/Israel and epigraphic evidence on ancient Palestine– carved on walls, temples, memorials, gravestones, coins and Philistine
graveyards uncovered recently in Ascalon, dating to about 3000 years ago(Ariel 2017) – have all transformed our understanding of the ancient history
of Palestine and have resulted in new paradigms which revolutionised ourscholarly knowledge on Palestine. A cognate of the name Palestine,‘Peleset’, is found on five inscriptions as referring to the settlement of aseafaring people along the southern Palestinian coast from the mid-12th
century BC during the reigns of Ramesses II2 and III of the nineteenth
Egyptian dynasty. The 3200-year-old documents from Ramesses III,
including an inscription dated c. 1150 BC, at the Mortuary Temple ofRamesses III at the Medinat Habu Temple in Luxor – one of the bestpreserved temples of Egypt – refers to the Peleset among those who fought
against Ramesses III (Breasted 2001: 24; also Bruyère 1929‒1930), whoreigned from 1186 to 1155 BC. Ramesses III’s war against the so-called‘sea peoples’ (1181‒1175 BC) placed Peleset, geographically, in the land of
Djahi, that is Palestine. In fact, new archaeological discoveries from a
3000-year-old Philistine graveyard in Ascalon have resulted in a newparadigm on the origins of the Philistines, firmly suggesting that they were
not marauding Aegean invaders of the southern Levant or ‘sea peoples’ thatappeared in Palestine in the course of the Late Bronze Age, but an
indigenous population of the Near East (Evian 2017; David 2017). Since
the 19th century biblical Orientalist scholars have linked the Egyptian
cognate Peleset inscriptions with the ‘biblical Philistines’. Assyrian
inscriptions from the 8th and 7th century refer to this southern coastal
region as ‘Palashtu’ or ‘Pilistu’.
Arabic-language epigraphic evidence from Palestine east of the Jordan
River is extensive, with some Arabic inscriptions dating from the Romanera and as early as 150 AD. In fact, Palestine is extremely rich in Arabic
inscriptions, most of which date from the early Islamic and Umayyad
periods. Already in early Islam Palestine acquired particular religious,
economic and strategic importance. The historical importance of Filastin isshown in the hundreds of Palestine Arabic inscriptions which cover a hugevariety of topics: architecture, Islamic religious (waqf) endowments,
epitaphs, construction, markets, dedication, Quranic texts, prayers andinvocations. A large collection of the inscriptions is assembled in the multivolume Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestina (Sharon 1997‒2013;
van Berchem 1894).
THE NAME ‘CANA’AN’ IN THE LATE BRONZE PERIODThe Old Testament is based on exilic and post-exilic imagination, literary
invention and fiction not facts. Its myth-narratives should be read as fiction,

theology and literature, not proven facts. The ‘Cana’anites’ are in fact
identical to the Phoenicians. The alphabet of the Phoenicians of the coastal
regions of Palestine and Lebanon – conventionally known as the protoCanaanite alphabet – was given to Greek, Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew.
However, the Old Testament terms ‘Canaanites’ and ‘Israelites’ in Palestine
do not necessarily refer to or describe two distinct ethnicities. Niels Peter
Lemche, an Old Testament scholar at the University of Copenhagen, whose
interests included early Israelites and their relationship with history, the Old
Testament and archaeology, has suggested that the Old Testament narrativeof the ‘Israelites’ and ‘Canaanites’ must be read as ideological constructs of
the other (as the non-Jews) rather than as a reference to an actual historicalethnic group: ‘The Canaanites [of Palestine] did not know that they werethemselves Canaanites. Only when they had so to speak “left” their original
home … did they acknowledge that they had been Canaanites’ (Lemche
1999: 152).
Literary invention and the fact that exilic Old Testament authors
imaginatively coined the term ‘Canaanites’ – a religio-ideological construct
by these authors – does not necessarily indicate that there was a conflict
between historical Israelites and Canaanites in Palestine.
However, in the modern era (beginning with the late 19th century)
European Zionist leaders appropriated the Old Testament narratives ashistorical accounts and used them instrumentally to justify their settler
project and their conflict with the indigenous people of Palestine.
Nevertheless, the Israeli‒Palestinian conflict is a modern conflict andshould not be confused with the real, historical, ancient Palestine or any
subsequent religio-ideological constructs of the Old Testament narratives.
Historically the name Cana’an was indeed used in the Late Bronze Age.
But the name did not always refer to the Cisjordan area from Gaza to the
Litani River. Nor was it the only term used in connection with this area
(between the Wadi Gaza and the Litani). Other names such as Palestine, as
well as earlier names, such as Retenu and Djahi, were also used for this area(including, at times, the inland regions of western Palestine and theTransjordan) at some point in the course of the Late Bronze Age. Cana’an
referred to a geographical region of varying size, along the Mediterranean
coast of Lebanon, Palestine and Syria (and not just Palestine). At times thisincluded regions inland. In the first millennium, however, Phoenicia(modern Lebanon) was the most common name used for the northerncoastal region, which had earlier been referred to as Cana’an, while theAssyrian-derived name of Philistia was most often used initially for thesouthern coast and later for Palestine as a whole. The name Cana’an isfound in ancient Near Eastern inscriptions with reference not just to thespecific area of Palestine but crucially to Syria from the 15th century BC tothe early 9th century BC. The first certain reference to the name Cana’an isfound in cuneiform on the statue of Idrimi from Alalakh in northern Syria(c. 1500 BC) in the form Kinahhu.
The name Cana’an is also found sixteen times in Egyptian texts; ofthese, twelve are from the New Kingdom (Hasel 2009: 8–17). The name isfound on some of the Amarna tablets in the form kn’ny – about thirty years
from the middle of the 14th century BC. In these inscriptions, the ancient
port city of Ugarit itself does not belong to Cana’an, but Qadesh does. The
name also occurs in Egyptian inscriptions in the form k3n‘n‘ from the 13th
century Hattusa, Ramesses II and Merneptah inscriptions (this last from c.
1205 BC). On the Merneptah Stele, the town Gaza is referred to as ‘themouth of (that is, “the opening to” k3n‘n‘’.
THE NAME PALESTINE TAKES OVER FROM THE LATE
BRONZE AGE ONWARDS
The international trade between Palestine and Egypt dates back to the
Chalcolithic period (4000‒3200 BC), during which Palestine exported
copper to Egypt. Also, a large amount of Palestinian (‘Canaanite’) pottery
from this period was discovered in Egypt – pots manufactured in Palestineand transported to Egypt presumably as containers of wine and olive oil(Grainger 2016: 27).
However, the name Palestine first occurs in Egyptian sources from theLate Bronze Age in relation to the Egyptian struggle to control thePhilistines during the reigns of Ramesses II and III and of Merneptah(1276‒1178 BC). In fact, the name Palestine originally derives from the3200-year-old documented name Peleset, used to refer to the people insouthern Levant, allies of the ‘Libyans’,3 who are mentioned in Egyptian
inscriptions, including the Merneptah Stele, which celebrates the Egyptian
victory over Libya. These allies of the Libyans include a number of peoples
besides the Peleset, some of whose names are identifiable. These names
include the Shardana (Sardinia), the Ekwesh, the Teresh, the Tjekker, theLukka, the Kheta (Hatti = Hittite), the Amor (Amurru), the Shasw (Bedouinin the Sinai), including possibly the Asher or Israel of the Merneptah Stele.
Following the integration of the Philistines with other population, the name
Peleset succeeded the name Djahi as the dominant toponym for the region
as a whole.
From the Late Bronze Age onwards, it should be stressed, the names
used for the region of the southern Levant, such as Djahi, Retenu andCana’an, all gave way to Palestine, the name most commonly used in 8th
and 7th century Assyrian inscriptions. Using a ‘part for the whole’designation, Palestine came to refer to the greater region (Palashtu, Piliste(or Philistia), literally the ‘land of the Peleset’ (Greek: Γη των Φυλιστιειμ),of the southern Levant. This wider conception included not only the wellknown cities of Philistia: Gaza, Ekron, Gath,4 Ashdod, Ascalon, Timnah5
and Tantur, but served also for the interior of the country and gradually as awider designation for the whole area from Lebanon to Egypt. Interestingly
also, almost all the toponyms of the cities of Philistia: Gaza (Ghazzah),
Askelon (‘Asqalan), Ashdod (Isdud6), Tantur (Tantura), Gath (Jat), Ekron(‘Aqir) survived into the modern era and were preserved in the modern
Palestinian Arabic names and were mostly depopulated by Israel in 1948.
THE NAMES PILISTE AND PHILISTIA IN ASSYRIANSOURCESIn seven known Assyrian clay tablet and Cuneiform inscriptions fromdifferent periods the Assyrians called the region connected with modern
Palestine ‘Palashtu’, ‘Palastu’ or ‘Pilistu’, and called the people who lived
in this region Palestinians: ‘pa-la-as-ta-a-a’, beginning with the King of
Assyria Adad-Nirari III (from 811 BC to 783 BC) in the ‘Nimrud
inscriptions’ in 800 BC through to Esarhaddon (who reigned 681 to 669
BC) more than a century later (Room 2006: 285; also Smith, G. 1875: 115).
The Nimrud inscriptions were discovered in 1854 by William Loftus in his
excavations at Nimrud, a major ancient Assyrian city originally known as
Kalhu. Located 30 kilometres south of the Iraqi city of Mosul, Nimrud wasa strategic Assyrian city between approximately 1250 BC and 610 BC.
They are among the best studied of the inscriptions of Adad-Nirari III, since
they include a description of early Assyrian campaigns in Palestine andSyria. The text of the Saba’a Stele, the inscription of the reign of Asas-

nirari III, was translated by Daniel Luckenbill (1881‒1927), an American
Assyriologist and Professor at the University of Chicago, as:
In the fifth year [of my official rule] I sat down solemnly on my royalthrone and called up the country [for war]. I ordered the numerous armyof Assyria to march against Philistia [Pa-la-áš-tu]. I crossed the
Euphrates at its flood. As to the numerous hostile kings who had rebelledin the time of my father Shamshi-Adad and had wi[thheld] their regular[tributes], or overwhelmed them [and] upon the command of Asur, Sin,
Shamash, Adad (and) Ishtar, my trust [in] gods ... I received all thetributes … which they brought to Assyria. I ordered [to march] against
the country Damascus [Ša-imērišu]. (Luckenbill 1926: 260‒261)
The inscription goes on:
I subdued [the territory stretching] from the bank of the Euphrates, theland of Hatti, the land of Amurru in its entirety, the land of Tyre, the landof Sidon, the land of Humri, the land of Edom, the land of Palastu, as far
as the great sea of the setting sun. I imposed tax (and) tribute upon them.
(Grayson 1996: 212; see also Luckenbill 1926; Smith, G. 1875: 115)
The Palestinians are also mentioned in the Nimrud Letters, whichcontain Cuneiform texts of royal correspondence from the reigns of Tiglathpileser III and Sargon II of Assyria. The correspondence includes the letterof Qurdi-Ashur-lamur to Tiglath-Pileser III, dated c. 735 BC:
Concerning the ruler of Tyre, about whom the king said: ‘Talk nicely tohim’, all the wharves are at their disposal. His subjects enter and leave
the warehouses at will, and trade. The Lebanon range is accessible tohim; they go up and down at will and bring lumber down. On the lumber
they bring down I impose a tax. I have appointed tax inspectors over thecustoms [houses] of the entire Lebanon range, [and] they keep the watch
on the harbour. I appointed a tax inspector [for those who[ were going
down into the custom houses which are in Sidon, [but] the Sidonians
chased him away. Thereupon I sent the Itu’a contingent into the Lebanon
range. They terrified the people, [so that] afterwards they sent a message
and fetched the tax inspector [and] brought [him] into Sidon. I spoke tothem in these terms: ‘Bring down lumber, do your work on it, [but] donot deliver it to the Egyptians or Palestinians [pa-la-as-ta-a-a] or I shallnot let you go up to the mountains’. (Cited in Saggs 2001: 155‒157)
Four decades later, the annals of the Sennacherib, a record of
improvements in the Assyrian capital in c. 694 BC, mention thePalestinians. The annals speak of the ‘the people of Kue and Hilakku, Pilisti
and Tyre’ (‘Ku-e u Hi-lak-ku Pi-lis-tu u Sur-ri’) (Luckenbill 1924: 104),
while another Assyrian record of his successor, the treaty of Esarhaddon, in
675 BC identifies du-u’-ri (Dor or Tantur) ‘in the district of pi-lis-te’7(Pilistu or Peleset). An earlier Assyrian tablet, Sargon II’s Prism A, an
inscription dating to c. 717 BC, which describes describes Sargon II’s
campaigns, speaks of the incorporation of the region of Pilistu into the
Assyrian Empire. Pi-lis-te or Pi-lis-tu is the Assyrian name for thePhilistines, while Peleset is the Egyptian name for one of the so-called Sea
Peoples throughout the reigns of Ramesses II and III. The ‘land of thePeleset’ is used in an inscription from the reign of Ramesses III. The
Egyptian use of peleset refers to indefinite areas which possibly include thesouthern and central coast, but might also include areas inland.
IRON AGE PHILISTIA AS A DISTINCT POLITY: THE
COUNTRY OF THE PELESET FROM GAZA TO TANTUR(1200‒712 BC)
The Assyrian name pi-lis-te (also pilistu palashtu, pilistu, pi-lis-te, pa-la-asta-a-a, pilishti, pilishtu, pilistu, pilisti, pilistin) referred to an area that runs
from Gaza to Tantur, and may include much larger areas inland. The
Assyrian filisti, filistin and palashtu are Assyrian spellings of this namewhich are used variously. Perhaps it should be distinguished from the
Assyrian provinces of Tantur (Tantur to Akka), Magiddu (; in theJezreel valley/Marj ibn ‘Amer), Samerina (the central highlands) and
Sennacherib’s Jerusalem (including Lakhish) and possibly other regions.
Over a period of six centuries, these names were found on a handful of
Assyrian inscriptions.
The Old Testament talks about a ‘land of the Plishtim’. In the Bible theMediterranean Sea was also known as the ‘Sea of the Philistines’ (Exod.
23:31), named after the people occupying a large portion of the shores ofthe Mediterranean. The Philistines were known in the Old Testament as

Plishtim and their Mediterranean territory as Pleshet: Philistia (1 Sam.
17:36; 2 Sam. 1:20; Judg. 14:3; Amos 1:8). Most American and Israeli
biblical scholars identify this Peleset with a somewhat historicised, butultimately biblical ‘land of the Philistines’; that is, at least the coastal region
from Gaza to Tantur.
The militant myth-narratives of the Books of Joshua, Deuteronomy andSamuel have provided modern Zionist settler-nationalism with themuscular, militaristic and violent dimensions of the ‘conquest of the land of
Cana’an’ and elimination of its indigenous people. The Book of Judges has
also given Zionism another militarist tradition: the ‘holy war’ stories
associated with the (real or imagined) struggle against the Philistines, andthe narrative of Samson (an Israelite hero) and cunning Delilah, whobetrayed Samson on behalf of the Philistines of Gaza (Judg. 16).
Philistia of the late Bronze Age and Iron Age was dominated by thePhilistines and evolved into a distinct geo-political entity with strong
international trade links, a distinct economy and a sophisticated urban
environment. The Philistines – a highly advanced people who, according to
the Old Testament, ruled five famed Pentapoli of Philistia: Gaza, Ascalon,
Ashdod, Ekron and Gath (Niesiołowski-Spanò 2011: 38) – have, for
centuries, suffered under the weight of their relentlessly negative portrayalin the books and stories of the Old Testament. From Goliath to Delilah, they
have personified the intrinsically evil Other in the burgeoning narrative
myth of the nation of Israel (McDonagh 2004). In the Old Testament, thePhilistines were constructed as a typical ideological scapegoat (McDonagh2004). Modern European racism and biblical constructs and prejudicestowards the Philistines have survived in the derogatory and offensive
connotation of the modern Western term: ‘a philistine is a person ignorantof, or smugly hostile to, culture’ (Eban 1984: 45; Rose 2004: 17;
McDonagh 2004).
There are recent pro-Zionist sources which seem to suggest that ‘p-l-s-t’(‘Peleset’; Philistines) was an area corresponding roughly to today’s Gaza
region. In fact, contrary to these propagandistic claims, from the Late
Bronze Age onwards and the beginning of the Iron Age I (about 1200 BC),
the Peleset intermingled with other local populations inhabiting theMediterranean coastal region of Palestine, from Gaza in the south to Tantur
in the north. In all probability, the land of the Peleset extended further northto Mount Carmel. Tantur is the normal international English name forTantura. This small Palestinian harbour town (depopulated in thePalestinian Nakba of 19488) is located south of Haifa and 8 kilometres
north-west of the Israeli town of Zikhron Yaakov (founded in 1882) on the
Mediterranean coast, 35 kilometres south of Haifa. Nearby Tantura (Tantur)
is the ancient site referred to as Tel Dor, or Dora, by archaeologists. Tantur
was the centre of the Assyrian province of Tantura and controlled the coast
north to Acre for about a century. Around 1100 BC the Philistines expanded
their inland territory eastwards to include the city of Beisan (later
Scythopolis), an important strategic city located at the junction of the
Jordan River and the Plain of Esdraelon (Arabic: Marj Ibn ‘Amer). The
large extent of the coastal region of the ‘land of p-l-s-t’ (‘Peleset’,‘Philistines’), from Tantur in the north to Gaza in the south and including
vast areas inland, suggests that the ‘land of the Peleset’ was fifteen to
twenty times larger than the current Gaza Strip, encompassing much ofgreater Tel Aviv, the Israeli metropolitan area, which includes the cities ofHolon and Petah Tikva, the latter known in Zionist historiography as Im
Hamoshavot, the ‘Mother of the Colonies’. Tel Aviv is a city which grewout of and then consumed its parent, the ancient Palestinian city of Jaffa,
whose indigenous inhabitants were driven out en masse in 1948 (Rotbard2015). The Tel Aviv metropolitan area, which, according to Avishai
Margalit (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), had never been thehistoric homeland of the Jewish people (Margalit, A. 1991), constitutes
Israel’s largest conurbation with 3,700,000 residents, over 40 per cent of thecountry’s population.
Overall Israeli settler-colonial collective memory links the ancient
Philistines with the modern Arabic-speaking people of Palestine. Zionist
ethnic cleansing tactics in the 1948 War against the Palestinians evidently
adopted and adapted the legendary narrative of Samson’s ‘sacred war’against the Philistines. To do this, the Israelis officially named one of their
key 1948 commando units Samson’s Foxes (Shu’alei Shimshon); it operated
within the Givati Brigade which took part in the expulsion of thePalestinians. Furthermore, a secret reconnaissance battalion of the same
name, Samson’s Foxes, was re-established by the Israeli army in 2002, toback its occupation of the Gaza Strip, a region to which Israeli (biblicist)
collective memory links to the ancient Philistines. The fox logo of theIsraeli Army’s Southern Command is also designed to foster the samecollective and Israeli struggle against the indigenous people of Palestine.

THE HIGHLY DEVELOPED CITIES OF PHILISTIA
Throughout much of the Iron Age (c. 1200‒600 BC) Philistia flourished onstrong international trade links and, as we shall see below, developed thefirst monetary system of Palestine in the late 6th‒early 5th century BC.
Terrestrial excavations and underwater archaeology of shipwrecks ofPhilistia have revealed that the Philistines were a highly civilised people.
They were sophisticated seafarers and highly accomplished architects andurban planners, highly artistic potters and weavers and ivory andmetalworkers (Dothan 1992). Like the Phoenicians, the Philistinesdeveloped advanced naval technology which probably enhanced theirreputation as seafaring people. Although their origin (Aegean or Near
Eastern) has been seriously disputed among scholars (Berlin 1997) – withthe most recent research suggesting they were an indigenous people of theLevant (Evian 2017) – there are good reasons to assume that the evolutionof the highly advanced Philistine city-states in Palestine resembled, to someextent, the evolution of the sophisticated ancient Greek polis. In time, andmore noticeably during the Hellenic and Roman periods, several cities inPalestine, especially Ascalon in the south and Ptolemais (Acre) in the north,would evolve into typical Greek poleis. The Greek term polis (pluralpoleis), ‘city-state’, continued to evolve in the course of the ancient period
as the ancestor of city, state and eventually citizenship; the Greek term polis(Arabic madinah) persisted into the Hellenic, Roman and Byzantine periods
and became common to the naming of cities in Roman- and Greek-speaking
Byzantine Palestine; it is also found in modern Palestine in the adaptedname of the Palestinian city of Nablus (originally Neapolis). However, thehistorical evolution of Nablus (‘new city’) and Iliya/al-Quds/Jerusalem into
the key Arab Islamic madinas in Palestine did not result in cities very
different from the earlier Greco-Roman-Byzantine poleis.
Greek‒Roman‒Byzantine urban planning flourished under Islam and is
still much in evidence today in the Arab Islamic medieval Old City ofJerusalem, one of the best preserved medieval cities in the world. Like
Gaza, Caesarea Maritima and other poleis/madinas in Palestine, Nablus,
Gaza, ‘Asqalan, Akka (Acre) and the medieval Islamic City of Jerusalem
are classic examples which exhibit both historical continuities andcontinuous processes of adaption and transformation of the rich urban
landscape of Palestine. Furthermore, the Greco-Roman poleis, dominatedby small urban social elites, evolved and changed with the development of
the centre of governance in the city to signify ‘state’, which included its
surrounding villages, and this form of governance (the city with its
surrounding villages) is also evident in Byzantine and Islamic Palestine.
However, it should be pointed out that the Greek poleis were unlike otherprimordial ancient city-states in the Near East like Sidon and Tyre, whichwere ruled by a king or a small oligarchy, but rather were political entities
ruled by their bodies of citizens.
The strong tradition of trading and the technological innovation ofPhilistia during that period, and the nature of Philistine civilisation – ahighly developed and influential Mediterranean culture and polity – have all
been confirmed by recent archaeological excavations. The archaeology ofPhilistia has shown that the Philistine city-states had a highly sophisticatedculture, in fact far more advanced in urban and technological development(from iron to pottery) than other contemporary regions of Palestine. Israeliexcavated archaeological evidence for this high level of development of thecoast of Philistia was found outside the northern border of the modern cityof Tel Aviv (the Israeli metropolis – ‘mother city’ – founded by East
European Jewish settlers in 1909 and effectively the capital of the Zionist
Yishuv settler colony in Palestine until 1948) in the remains of Tel Qasile, aPhilistine town which formed a thriving harbour town through the 12th‒
10th centuries BC. These archaeological discoveries were deposited in ‘theEretz Israel Museum’ on the campus of Tel Aviv University, a historical andarchaeological museum in the Ramat Aviv neighbourhood of Tel Aviv. The
campus of Tel Aviv University itself was constructed on the ruins of anancient Philistine town and a modern Palestinian village, al-Shaykh
Muwannis, depopulated by the Haganah in March 1948.
Throughout the Iron Age Philistia, with its southern and northern naturalborders, emerged as a distinct polity nestling between two powerful tradingneighbours, Egypt and Phoenicia, but also cultivated flourishinginternational trade with the Aegean region in the West and Arabia in thesouth. This neighbourhood was shrewdly exploited by the Philistines, whoused it to develop their international trade links, economy and a distinct
geo-political region and material culture (Ben-Shlomo 2010; Thompson
2016). The trade-based economy of Philistia was also a major unifying
factor in a country which was shaped by polytheism and cultural hybridity.
The Philistines integrated with other local populations and lived in coastal

port towns and their surrounding villages. Their key cities were ruled byautonomous kings and their populations were mixed and integrated withother indigenous populations of Palestine. Pottery remains excavated inancient cities such as Gaza, Jaffa, Ekron, Ashdod, Ascalon and Gath,decorated with stylised birds, provide archaeological evidence for highly
developed Philistine cities in ancient Palestine. Ships sailing along theEastern Mediterranean coast between Egypt and Phoenicia used theharbours of Philistia (Gaza, Ascalon, Ashdod, Jaffa and Tantur/Dor) toreplenish supplies and take shelter in stormy weather. Crucially, the cities ofPhilistia controlled the international trade route of the Via Maris (‘Way of
the Philistines’) and charged the trade caravans tolls for passing throughtheir region (Gallagher 1999: 113).
The great trading cities of Philistia were not only credited withintroducing iron weapons and chariots to ancient Palestine, but, as we shallsee below, also with the creation of the earliest monetary and coinage
system in Palestine in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Regional and distanttrade was a key factor in shaping the history of ancient Palestine and musthave contributed to the introduction of the coinage of Philistia, which also
became known as Philisto-Arabian coins, struck in the period 538‒332 BC(see below);[The] integration [of the Philistines] with the indigenous population
resulted in the geographically, but hardly ethnically, distinctive region ofPhilistia, which was tightly linked to the international trade routes. Thesefollowed the Via Maris, on the one hand, through the Jezreel and in the
direction of northern Mesopotamia, and, on the other hand, continued
along the coast to the Phoenician seaports of northern Palestine andsouthern Lebanon. Under Assyrian patronage, Palestine’s expansive
trading politics not only dominated the coastal economy but, over thecourse of the Iron II period, created an integrated South. Arab tradesupported the processing of grains, cattle and fruits from the Northern
Negev and coastal plain with the sheep and wool, olives and wines fromthe Judean foothills and highlands. Among the southern coast’s mostimportant towns were Jaffa, ‘Aphek, Ekron, Ashdod, Gimti (Tall asSafi), Askelon and Gaza. (Thompson 2016: 165)

In 712, after an uprising by the Philistine city of Ashdod, supported
militarily by Egypt, the Assyrian King Sargon II (reigned 722–705 BC)
invaded Pilishte to oust the King of Ashdod Iamani and annexed the whole
region; Philistia was brought under direct Assyrian control, in effectbecoming an Assyrian province (Thompson 2016: 165), although the Kingof Ashdod was allowed to remain on the throne (Gallagher 1999: 115). By
the time Sargon II died, he ‘had two provinces in Philistia: Dor (Tantur) andAshdod, a reliable king in Gaza and a clearly defined border with Egypt(Gallagher 1999: 115).
THE ‘WAY OF THE PHILISTINES’: PALESTINE AS A
TRANSIT COUNTRY AND THE HISTORIC ROAD OF VIA
MARISPalestine as a ‘transit country’ from North to South and from West to East is
another striking feature. The great importance of the country as a junctureof trade, industry, technology and monetarism, as well as agricultural
innovation, and the importance of the famous Via Maris (the ‘Way of theSea’), also known as Way of the Philistines, can hardly be overstated.
Historically Palestine fully exploited its geo-political position as a ‘transit
country’ serving international trade and linking three different continents.
Both the Philistines and Phoenicians controlled much of the Levantine coastof Philistia and Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) and the Way of the Philistines,or Via Maris, was described in Exodus as the ‘way of the Land of thePhilistines’ (Old Testament: ‘derech Eretz Plishtim’: 13:17). Much of theevidence concerning this route comes from Egyptian and Assyrian sources.
The section connecting cementing Egypt with Palestine via Gaza wasdescribed in Egyptian sources as the ‘Way of Horus’. It was an importantinternational trade and traffic route running through the country’s coastline
dating from the early Bronze Age. It was the most important historic routefrom Egypt to the Levant, and linked Egypt with Palestine and the Fertile
Crescent throughout all historical periods; along its route most of theimportant cities in the country sprang up, including Gaza (ancient Egypt’s
administrative capital of Palestine), Ashdod (Isdud), Ascalon (‘Asqalan),
Joppa (Jaffa), Tantur (Tantura) and later Caesarea-Palaestina. It followed
the coastal plain of North Sinai and Palestine until Tantur before veering
north-eastwards, with alternative roads through Wadi ‘Ara into Marj Ibn

‘Amer (the Plain of Esdraelon), then passing by Mount Tabor andnorthwards towards present-day Syria. One branch continued from Tantur
northwards along the Phoenician coast. This international trade highway ofPalestine was criss-crossed by other trading routes in the country, includingfrom Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Marj Ibn ‘Amer in the north to the Jordan
valley in the east and from the rich port city of Gaza in the south to thewealthy trading town of Petra (originally known to its literate Nabataean
Arabs as Raqmu) in the east and via the long-distance spice trade andincense route of Arabia and the Yemen. The Nabataean Arab tradeflourished across southern Palestine and northern Arabia. Not surprisingly,
for practical reasons the earliest form of Arabic script (also known as theKufi script) – which evolved from the Nabataean Aramaic and proto-Arabic
scripts, which, in turn, can be traced to the Phoenician alphabet – evolved
under the impact of these important trade routes of Palestine and Arabia andthe growing urbanisation of the Arab Near East.
PHILISTO-ARABIAN COINS: CURRENCY, POWER AND
AUTONOMY IN PHILISTIA (6TH–4TH CENTURIES BC)
Although coming under imperial (direct and indirect) rule, the highly
advanced cities of Philistia (or Philistin) were the first to develop amonetary system in Palestine, and Philistia was the first region in the
country to witness a movement from bullion to a coin economy andPalestinian currency struck in Gaza from 538 BC until the occupation ofPalestine by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Subsequently an ancient
Greek-style currency, drachma, was struck in several Palestinian cities,
including Gaza, Ascalon, Joppa (Jaffa) and Acre. The drachma gave rise to
the silver dirham, the Arab Islamic coin whose name derives from thedrachma.
The coinage of Philistia of the 6th‒4th centuries BC refers to the muchdiscussed group of silver coins of the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries, minted by
the autonomous rulers of the Palestinian cities of Gaza, Ascalon andAshdod, and these coins represent the earliest and most significant phase of
the development of money in Palestine. This monetary development
continued in the 4th century until the end of the Achaemenid (Persian) ruleover Palestine. Philistia’s early coinage consisted of silver and silver-platedcoins. Some of the famous and unique pieces of this large collection arehoused in the British Museum. The coins issued in Philistia circulated andwere traded widely in the Philisto-Arabian region and became known as
Philisto-Arabian coins.
The iconography of the coinage of Philistia was influenced by a melangeof Greek, Sidonian, Achaemenid, Egyptian and local Palestinian sources
and patterns (Hill 1914, 2011; Tal 2016; Gitler and Tal 2006). The presenceof Greek Archaic silver coins, with strong Athenian artistic influences, wasnoted by several authors and the ‘most striking influence on the Philistia
coinage is notably Athenian. The people of Philistia observed these foreign
motifs and frequented adopted and adapted them to local use’ (Tal 2016:253). The iconography also represents the most miscellaneous assemblageof deities of Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Palestine.

Chapter 2

THE CONCEPTION OF PALESTINE IN
CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY AND DURING
THE HELLENISTIC EMPIRES (500‒135
BC)

Palestine was the name used most commonly, consistently and continuously
for over 1200 years throughout classical and Late Antiquity, from thehighlight of classical Athenian civilisation in 500 BC until the end of the
Byzantine period and the occupation of Palestine by the Muslim armies in637‒638 AD.
To substitute the vague and imprecise term Cana’an for the real
historical and official toponym Palaestina used during a classical period
lasting over a millennium would be tantamount to the elimination of thehistory of this region and would create major obstacles to an understandingof Classical and Late Antiquity. The substitution of the term Cana’an(known only for a limited period during the Late Bronze Age) for
Palaestina would also eliminate the possibility of any real historicalknowledge of one of the most important periods in the ancient history of theregion, namely early Christianity and Byzantine Palestine. Greek-speaking
Byzantine Christianity in Palestine began in the reign of the Roman
Emperor Constantine the Great (306–337 AD) and lasted until the
beginning of Muslim rule in Palestine in 637‒638 AD.
THE GREEK NAME ΠΑΛΑΙΣΤΊΝΗ IN CLASSICAL AND
FOUNDATIONAL GRECO-HELLENIC SOURCES

Classical Antiquity and the Hellenistic period from 500 BC to 135 BC is
one of the periods when records of life in Palestine were numerous andwell-kept. This is also a period in which the first famous historians andauthors of Antiquity, including Herodotus and Aristotle, wrote about thecountry in detail, and the strategic, commercial and cultural importance ofPalestine to the various Hellenistic monarchs, military commanders, traders,travellers, cartographers and scientists led to great interest, and close
examination of the country and its people.
The term Palestine was also extensively used in referring to the entire
area connected with modern Palestine in 5th century BC Ancient Greece.
The name Παλαιστίνη (Phalastin) was widely used by the most importantancient Greek historians, cartographers, writers, philosophers and scientists,
including Herodotus, Aristotle and Ptolemy. The Greco-Roman-Byzantinename ‘Palestine’ is commonly found in major classical Greek texts,
especially the Histories of Herodotus, written near the mid-5th century BC.
THE CONCEPTION OF PALAISTINÊ BY THE FOUNDING
FATHER OF HISTORY
Palestine always played a special role in the imagination, sacred literatureand historical representations of the West (Said 1980: 9). This began withthe earliest classical literature and seminal works of the Greek writers,
especially Herodotus and Aristotle in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It was in
the writings of Herodotus (who lived in the 5th century BC (c. 484–425
BC) that the name took on its Greek form Παλαιστίνη (Palaistinê orPhalastin) and was used as the name of the region. Herodotus talks about
Palaestine, Palaestine-Syria and the ‘Syrians of Palestine’ and hedistinguishes the Phoenicians from the ‘Syrians of Palestine’ (Herodotus
1841: 135). He also describes the physical geography of the region which is
associated today with the modern Middle East as follows:
The other [region] starts from the country of the Persians, and stretches
into Erythraean sea, containing first Persia, then Assyria, and after
Assyria, Arabia. It ends, that is to say it is considered to end, though it
does not really come to termination, at the Arabian gulf ... between
Persia and Phoenicia lies a broad and ample tract of country, after which
the region I am describing skirts our [Mediterranean] sea, stretchingfrom Phoenicia along the coast of Palestine-Syria till it comes to Egypt,where it terminates. This entire tract contains but three nations.
(Herodotus 1860: 27)
In his geographic representation of Παλαιστίνη (Palaistinê or Phalastin)
Herodotus uses the term in its wider sense and not merely in reference toPhilistia, or the coastal strip of land from Carmel to Gaza, but also theinterior of the country (Herodotus 1841: 135). He and Aristotle, forexample, used the term in a way that includes the regions of Transjordan, or‘Eastern Palestine’, beyond the Jordan Rift Valley. Herodotus not only
mentions Palestine as an autonomous district of Syria but describes it
geographically, as the country we know today, but also including someadjoining areas in the Sinai and the north, as well as the area east of theriver Jordan. Herodotus also adds that southern Palestine sea ports from
Cadytis to Jenysus (or Ienysos, modern Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip) were
occupied by Arabians (Herodotus 1841: 135).
Herodotus’ conception of Palaistinê included the Galilee and referred toPalestine in the wider sense. In effect, this conception applied to the regionof the ‘Levant between Phoenicia and Egypt’ (Jacobson 1999). This
classical conception of Palestine also influenced modern representations of
the country and a map of Palestine in c. 450 BC, according to Herodotus,
was reconstructed in 1897 by John Murray, one of the most important andinfluential publishers in Britain.
Herodotus’ wider conception of Palestine also reflected the expansion of
the province of Idumaea in the south, following the destruction of Iron Age
Edom by the Babylonian Nabonidus. The Idumites were identified by somescholars to be of Nabataean Arab origins. Idumaea’s centre, first in Hebron(al-Khalil) and later centred in Lakish, in the southern foothills, createdboundaries stretching from the Transjordan plateau to the Mediterranean. In
132 CE, under the Romans, Idumaea was joined to the provinces of Judaea
and the Galilee and the Latin form Palaestina was used to refer to the wholeof the southern Levant.
Herodotus was a contemporary of Socrates and is widely referred to as‘the Father of History’ (Cicero, 1st century BC). He was the first historianto systematically investigate historical subjects, arranging material into ahistorical narrative. Herodotus’ Histories (also known as The History, 1987)
is one of the most famous historical texts on the origins of the Greco-

Persian Wars, a text known to academics, historians and history students
throughout the world. Histories is now considered a foundational text in theWestern academy. It serves as a key record of ancient oral traditions,politics, geography and the clashes of various powers that were known in
Greece, Western Asia and North Africa. When it comes to ancient Palestineand toponymic memory, modern Western Christian writing relies partly on
Herodotus’ classic work (1987).
In this classical text (written from the 450s to the 420s BC), Herodotus
writes about a ‘district of Syria, called Palaistinê’ and lists place names ofancient Palestine. Herodotus himself visited Palestine in the fifth decade of
the 5th century BC. He travelled extensively through ‘the part of Syria
called Palestine, I myself saw’,1 and acquired first-hand knowledge of thecountry and its people (Jacobson 1999). Herodotus refers to Παλαιστίνη
(Palaistinê), Syria, or simply Palaistinê, many times as an area comprising
the whole region between Phoenicia and Egypt (see also Herodotus 2014:
724, Map 10).
Herodotus’ text includes the description of key towns and ports, the roadlater to be called Via Maris, and many other places he had seen andrecorded. He describes in detail the city of Ascalon, an ancient seaport citywhich dates back to the Neolithic Age. At the time of Herodotus Palestine
was polytheistic and he consequently describes Ascalon as having a temple
for Aphrodite Urania. This signified ‘celestial love’ and the ‘spiritual’, asdistinct from the more earthly aspect of Aphrodite Pandemos, ‘Aphrodite
for all the people’. The cult of Aphrodite Urania was associated with bodyand soul and with spiritual love, beauty, fertility, procreation and pleasure,and its sacred doves still flocked on the roofs of the city in Roman times(Lewin 2005: 156). The cult of Aphrodite Urania was also associated withthe sea and existed in several Palestinian cities, including the ancient port
city of Jaffa, often referred to in Arabic by Palestinians as ‘Arus al-Bahr’(Bride of the Sea).
Classical Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400
BC), in contrast with the authors of the Old Testament, sought to separate
myth (muthos) from reality based on reasoned argument (logos) andhistories of the gods from histories of humans; they disregarded politicaland myth-narratives in favour of facts on the ground. Their histories werealso strongly geo-ethnographic. Geo-ethnography is central to Herodotus’
account of ancient Palestine and its inhabitants. Greek historians andgeographers were fully conscious of the fact that the Mediterranean and
Red Seas were a major route of international trade and a major source ofwealth for Palestine. Herodotus refers to the Arabs who occupied
Mediterranean sea ports in southern Palestine (Herodotus 1841: 135) andnorth Sinai and controlled the incense trade route from the Eastern
Mediterranean to southern Arabia and via the Red Sea to India – thefrankincense road of Antiquity which comprised a network of major ancientland and sea trading routes linking the Mediterranean world with easternand southern sources of incense, spices and other luxury goods. Stretchingfrom the Mediterranean ports of Palestine and Egypt through Arabia andbeyond, and involving the Nabataean Arabs (and Petra at its height at the
beginning of the 2nd century AD), the long-distance land trade in incense
flourished between the 7th century BC and the 2nd century AD.
Thus Herodotus records his many conversations with the Philistines andother groups he meets, and interesting facts he learnt about their lives, suchas the practice of male circumcision (originally polytheistic) learnt from theEgyptians: the ‘Syrians called Palestinians’ ‘confess that they learnt thecustom of the Egyptians’ (Herodotus 1858, Book II, Ch. 104; 1836, Vol. 1,
Book II: 247). Egypt had the oldest documented evidence for malecircumcision dating back to 2345–2182 BC (World Health Organization
2007: 3). David Asheri (1925‒2000), Professor of Ancient History at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (1972‒1975), in A Commentary on Herodotus, Books 1‒4, writes:the ‘Syrians called Palestinians’, at the time of Herodotus were a mixtureof Phoenicians, Philistines, Arabs, Egyptians, and perhaps also otherpeoples ... Perhaps the circumcised ‘Syrians called Palestinians’ are theArabs and Egyptians of the Sinai coast; at the time of Herodotus there
were few Jews in the coastal area. (Asheri et al. 2007: 402)
Herodotus, who travelled widely in Palestine and Syria and beyond thecoastal region, does not mention Judaea or refer to Jews. He does not
mention terms such Cana’an or Canaanites or Israelites in Palestine; nordoes he describe monotheism in the country. First, as archaeologicalevidence shows, monotheism was a much later development in Palestineand the Near East (Masalha 2007). Second, also significantly, many of theOld Testament religio-ideological dogmas evolved centuries after
Herodotus.
Interestingly the ancient Philistine and Greek toponyms for Palaistinê,Tantur (Tantura) and Ascalon (‘Asqalan) were preserved in local Palestinian
Arab tradition and by medieval Arab historians, geographers and travellers,and ‘Ascalan’ became known to the Palestinians as ‘Asqalan (or Majdal‘Asqalan), depopulated by the Israel army in 1950 (Masalha 1997). Thisshows how, by and large, the local names of Palestinian villages and towns
were fairly stable throughout the ancient, medieval and modern history ofPalestine.
THE NAME PALESTINE IN ARISTOTLE’S METEOROLOGYApproximately a century after Herodotus, the celebrated Greek scientist,
philosopher and historian Aristotle (Aristotélēs, 384–322 BC) talks about‘Palestine’ and does not mention the term ‘Cana’an’ – primarily because‘Palestine’ applied to a real historical region, while the term ‘Cana’an’ wasprobably derived from a subsequently constructed religio-ideologicalnarrative of the Old Testament with which at the time Aristotle could nothave been familiar. The work of Aristotle is foundational for ancient,medieval and modern empirical sciences and philosophy. His work
constituted the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Aristotle was the first genuine
scientist in history ... [and] every scientist is in his debt’.2
In his famous work, Meteorology (Greek: Μετεωρολογικά (340 BC),
Aristotle describes the special qualities of the Dead Sea water:
Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind aman or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bearout what we have said. They say that this lake is so bitter and salt that nofish live in it and that if you soak clothes in it and shake them it cleans
them.
This is widely and logically understood by scholars to be a reference to theDead Sea (Jacobson 1999: 66‒67)
Aristotelian terminology and thought profoundly influenced ArabIslamic, Arab-Jewish and Christian philosophical thought throughout theMiddle Ages. Aristotelian terminology and naming were well known
among medieval Muslim intellectuals and scientists and he was widely
revered by Muslim scholars as ‘The First Teacher’. Throughout the Middle
Ages Muslim translators, scholars and scientists became closely acquainted
with classical Greek sources, including sources in history, sciences,philosophy and geography. An Arabic compendium of Aristotle’s
Meteorology, called al- Athar al- Ulwiyyah was produced c. 800 CE by the
Arab Christian scholar Yahya ibn al-Bitriq and was widely circulated
among Muslim scholars over the following centuries.
PALAESTINA ON THE WORLD MAP OF PTOLEMY: THE USE
OF THE TERM PALAESTINA BY GREEK GEOGRAPHERS
AND HISTORIANS DURING THE SELEUCID AND
PTOLEMAIC EMPIRES
Another giant of the Hellenistic world, the highly influential Alexandrian
cartographer and writer Ptolemy: Claudius Ptolemaeus (c. AD 100–c. 170)
produced the first known map to describe Palestine; Ptolemy clearly
distinguished between the so-called Syria-Coele, Phoenicia and Palestine,
proving the latter was conceived and treated as a separate and autonomous
entity. The toponym Syria-Coele or Coele-Syria (Greek: Κοίλη Συρία,Koíle Syría; Latin: Cava Syria; English: Hollow-Syria) is often confoundedor equated by some historians with the modern invented term ‘Southern
Syria’ (e.g. Cohen 2006: 41). This strategy is partly designed to camouflage
the existence of historic Palestine as a geo-political unit, thereby denying
the widespread use of the term Palestine throughout Classical Antiquity.
Rendered as Coelosyria and Celesyria, Coele-Syria was a geographicaldesignation of a region in Syria in Classical Antiquity. Although the term
Coele itself was possibly a transcription of the Aramaic kul, all (Arabic kul)of the region of Syria, the term actually acquired a different meaning inboth Greek and Latin: Cava Syria or Hollow-Syria. Crucially, it was often
applied in a narrower sense to the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon (Pliny the
Elder’s Naturalis Historia, Book V (c. 78 AD; Sartre 1988) and later to the
Roman province of Syria-Coele in northern Syria.
After the collapse of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great in
323 BC the Hellenistic Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings fought over Palestine.
However, the official use of the name Coele-Syria emerged at some stage inthe period of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire (Cohen 2006: 4I), which
existed from 312 BC to 63 BC. The Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires began
after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great and faded away withthe rise of Rome in the 1st century BC. The Seleucid Empire, whose capital
was Antioch, was a major centre of Hellenistic culture that maintained thepre-eminence of Greek customs where Greek political elites dominated,mostly in the urban areas.
However Greek historians, following Herodotus, by and large made aclear distinction between Coele-Syria and Palaestina, although they were
not in agreement as to the exact boundary between the two geo-politicalunits.3 The term Coele-Syria was used by some historians in Classical
Antiquity in a wider sense to indicate ‘all Syria’ or ‘all Syria without
Phoenicia’ (Cohen 2006: 41) and by Greek geographers and historians toindicate ‘all Syria with the exception of Palestine’. This included Ptolemy,
to whom later generations of Arab geographers and scientists referred using
his name in Arabic: Batlymus. Ptolemy’s world map is a map of the world
known to Hellenistic society in the 2nd century. It is based on thedescription contained in Ptolemy’s Geography, written c. 150. This work,
which had been lost to the West for centuries, was known to the Arabs andByzantines. It was brought to Italy in the late 14th century and translated
into Latin in Florence (Edson 2007). Ptolemy’s world map made a clear
distinction between Palaestina and Syria-Coele, Phenecia (roughly modern
Lebanon) as three completely distinct countries. As we shall see below, thenew province of Syria-Palaestina created later by Emperor Hadrian in 135
AD was distinct from the Roman province of Syria-Coele created in 193
AD in the north of Syria.
This crucial distinction made by Ptolemy between the three countries,
Palaestina, Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, was hugely influential and impacted
on the way future historians, geographers, cartographers, travellers,pilgrims and romance seekers would reproduce similar distinctions. In the
2nd century BC this was evident in the work of Agatharchides orAgatharchus of Knidos (in modern Turkey). Agatharchides was animportant political figure of his time, and served as a guardian to one of
Ptolemy’s sons. In composing his speeches Agatharchides was an imitatorof Thucydides, whom he equalled in dignity and excelled in clarity.
Ptolemy’s world map – and the distinction between the countries of
Palaestina, Coele-Syria and Phenecia – was cited directly or indirectly byStrabo, Pliny the Elder, Diodorus Siculus, and Josephus and Philo of
Alexandria.
As we shall see below, Filastin and Palaestina are also found on theworld maps of cartographers Muhammad al-Idrisi, Pietro Vesconte, Marino
Sanudo and Fra Mauro in the 12th, 14th and 15th centuries. Of course,‘world maps’ were not just about representations of space and reality, they
were designed for practical purposes of traffic and navigation and for theuse of traders and pilgrims to the holy places; world maps often provided an
expression and fulfilment of power and were produced for empires andstate-builders. Ptolemy’s world map was no exception; it was produced,
reproduced and revised to promote the political agendas of different powers
across many centuries. The map was first used to expand the Roman
Empire. In the 9th century Ptolemy’s Geography and map were translated
from Greek into Arabic and played a role in the corrective cartography of
al-Khawarizmi (780–c. 850) in the Mediterranean region, the Middle East,
Africa and Asia, and his scientific work and geographic world map wasused in the service of the Muslim global trade and the Baghdad-based
Abbasid state. In the late 19th century Ptolemy’s map was reproduced by
Claude Reignier Conder, of the British Palestine Exploration Fund, andused to advance British imperial ambitions in the Near East and Palestine.

Chapter 3

FROM PHILISTIA TO PROVINCIA‘SYRIA PALAESTINA’ (135 AD‒390 AD)
The administrative province of Roman
Palestine

During Roman rule in Palestine, and more specifically between 135 AD and390 AD, Palestine became one of the Provincias of the empire. This is alsoa period from which many written records were preserved in a variety oflanguages – Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew –and also covered in the annals
and texts of the new religion of Christianity. By this time the name
‘Palestine’ was more than a millennium old and had substantial currency.
During the Roman period the official/administrative name of ‘Palestine’
was consolidated and popularised in Latin and Greek, which were the two
lingua francas of the Roman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean. These two
languages affected trade, administration, education, religion, architecture,
diplomacy, coinage and key place names throughout the Eastern
Mediterranean.
THE UPGRADING OF PALESTINE BY HADRIAN: THE
OFFICIAL DESIGNATION OF THE PROVINCE OF ‘SYRIAPALAESTINA’ (135‒390 AD)
In Roman times, a province (Latin: provincia, pl. provinciae) was the basic
and, until 293 AD, largest territorial and administrative unit of the empire.
A Roman provincia in the modern sense was a geographically defined
official administrative unit. Provinces were generally governed bypoliticians of senatorial rank, former consuls or top army commanders. The

Romans also distinguished between two types of provinces: minor
provinces, or procuratorial provinces, such as Judaea in 1st century AD, andmajor provinces, or proconsular provinces, such proconsular provinces like
‘Syria Palaestina’ after 135 AD.
In 135 AD, the Roman Emperor Hadrian (Hadrianus; reigned 117–138
AD) officially combined the minor Roman (procuratorial) province of
Iudaea (comprising Judaea and Samaria) with the old Philistia, the Galilee
in the north and Idumaea in the south to form a new major (proconsular)
province of ‘Syria Palaestina’. According to some accounts the newprovince was created following the military defeat of the Jewish revolt of
Bar-Kochba in 135 AD. Four years later the official designation of the newprovince of ‘Syria Palaest[ina]’ was given in a 139 AD Roman military
diploma granted for military service – ‘a rectangular bronze tablet’ whichwas ‘discovered in Palestine near Nazareth’ in the late 19th century and was
exhibited at the Louvre Museum (de Villefosse 1897). Issued by the Roman
Emperor and lodged in the military archive of Rome, these militarycertificates were inscribed in bronze confirming that the holder wasdischarged from the Roman armed forces and had received the grant ofRoman citizenship with its privileges, as a reward for military service. In
addition to this military evidence, the first numismatic evidence for theprovince of Syria-Palaestina comes from the period of Marcus Aurelius,
Emperor from 161 to 180. However, the new province of ‘Syria Palaestina’should not be conflated with Roman Syria as a whole – as some historians
do – or with either the separate Roman province of Syria-Coele in thenorthern parts of Syria or Roman Phoenicia (modern Lebanon).
The Roman (and Hadrian’s) conception of Palestine had nothing to dowith any biblical narratives or the Old Testament narrative of the‘Philistines’. For Hadrian, in addition to a combination of political andmilitary-strategic calculations following the defeat of the Bar-Kochba
rebellion in 135, the historical-geographic considerations behind the official
upgrading of Palaestina by the Romans in the early 2nd century should also
be taken into account. After all, Emperor Hadrian chose the 1000-year-old
name of Philistia, the most common geo-political designation for Palestineused by Greek geographers and historians, long before the Old Testamentstories were put together; and Hadrian combined Palestine with thesouthern parts of Syria.

The Greek name for the country Palaistine and the Latin name Palaestina
were frequently and repeatedly cited in classical literature and by classicalGreek and Roman historians and poets with reference to the country
between Egypt and Phoenicia. The metamorphosis of Palestine – from
Philistia to Palaestina – is not surprising when considering that the early 1st
century Roman poet Ovid, one of the canonical poets of Latin literature,
repeatedly invoked the term Palaestina and adjective Palaestino(Palestinian) in Metamorphoses and his other epic poems.1 In Ars Amatoria(‘The Art of Love’) Ovid also mentioned ‘the seventh-day feast that the
Syrian of Palestine [Palaestino Syro] observes’, with reference to followersof Judaism in Palestine, who were in the 1st century AD one of the many
religious groups in the country. Ovid and other Roman writers did notconfine the term Palaestina and Palaestino to the coastal region known as
Philitia, but included the interior of the country. In c. 90 AD another famous
1st century Greco-Roman author, Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–c. 115 AD), an
orator, philosopher, historian of the Roman Empire (born at Prusa, presentday Turkey), was quoted by Synesius – Greek bishop of Ptolemais, inmodern Libya, in the early 4th century – referring to the Dead Sea as
located ‘in the interior of Palestine’ (Dio Chrysostom 1951, Vol. 5: 378‒
379).
Another classical Roman poet of the 1st century AD, Publius Papinius
Statius, in the Silvae, refers to ‘liquores Palaestini’ (Palestinian wine)(Zeiner 2005: 104; Feldman 1996: 565), which was produced in large
quantities and was widely known throughout the Mediterranean region. Its
fame was partly derived from the application of south Arabian spices andlocal herbs and the Palestinian aromatic Balsam2 to wine-making in
Palestine and the Arab region as a whole, something which Statius called
liquores Arabes (Zeiner 2005: 104). In the course of the subsequent
Byzantine period, large-scale production of Palaestini liquores in greater
Palaestina led to international commerce in the commodity, and Palestinian
wine was exported around the Mediterranean region and in the Near East.
Although religiously discouraged, the genre of wine poetry (al-Khamriyyat)
became a recurring theme in classical Arabic poetry of the Abbasid period
in the Middle Ages. Ancient methods of wine-making survived in Palestine
into the modern period, while the balsam shrub was reported to be
cultivated in the Galilee in the early 19th century (Burckhardt 1822: 323).

The administrative name of the new province, ‘Syria Palaestina’, wasalmost certainly inspired by the works of classical Greek and Romanhistorians, geographers and poets who had contributed so much to the
spread and popularisation of the name Palaestina since the work of
Herodotus in the 5th century BC. Considered by many to have been aclassicising humanist, and one of the greatest and most accomplished of the
Roman Emperors, Hadrian was fond of Greek culture, historiography andliterature (Birley 1997). During his reign, he travelled extensively with the
Roman military and visited nearly every province of the empire, including
Palestine. An admirer of cultural Hellenisation, he sought to make Athens
the cultural capital of the empire and ordered the construction of many
opulent temples in the city. Hadrian had served as the Governor of Syria,
giving him an intimate knowledge of the region (Birley 1997: 75). He had
travelled through Palestine and visited Gaza – the most powerful city of old
Philistia – on his way to Egypt in 130 AD: ‘Gaza began dating its coinage
by a new era beginning with Hadrian’s arrival, which can be narrowed
down to July. A “Hadrian festival” was also founded there’ (Birley 1997:
234). Hadrian’s trip further encouraged the classicising culture of the cityand the building of many Greek temples there.
The speed with which the new name of the administrative province of‘Syria Palaestina’ was widely adopted is evident in its use not only by
establishment Roman historians and geographers who often defended thestatus quo, but also among Palestine-based early Christian apologists who
were often philosophically radical and politically subversive. Greco-Romanhistorian Appian of Alexandria (c. 95–c. 165 AD), who flourished before,
throughout and after the reign of Hadrian, wrote in his Preface to Historia
Romana (c. 150 AD):
Intending to write the history of the Romans, I have deemed it best to
begin with the boundaries of the nations under their sway ... Here [afterEgypt] turning our course we take in Palestine-Syria, and beyond it apart of Arabia. The Phoenicians hold the country next to Palestine on thesea, and beyond the Phoenician territory are Coele-Syria, and the parts
stretching from the sea as far inland as the river Euphrates, namely
Palmyra and the sandy country round about, extending even to theEuphrates itself.3

The new genre of early Christian apologetics focused on defending the
new religion in philosophical terms and on equating Christianity with Greek
philosophy. Early Christian apologists included prominent Palestine-based
writers such Justine the Martyr and Origen. Justine the Martyr was born to apagan family in Flavia Neapolis (Nablus), then a largely Greek-speaking
town in the Roman Province of Syria-Palaestina (Parvis 2008). At the time,
Flavia Neapolis was also a flourishing centre of Greek philosophy and
Platonism. Today Justine is regarded as the foremost interpreter of theconcept of the Greco-Christian logos in the 2nd century AD (Rokeah 2002:
22). Following his conversion to Christianity Justine travelled to Romeduring the reign of Antoninus Pius (138‒161 AD) and started his own
Christian philosophical school. Justine was beheaded in Rome. Addressed
to Antoninus, his sons and the Roman Senate, his First Apology (c. 155
AD) passionately defended the morality of the Christian faith and provided
various ethical and philosophical arguments to convince the Roman
authorities to abandon their persecution of the fledgling sect. In the
introduction to the First Apology Justin also refers to his native city ‘Flavia
Neapolis in Palestine’.4
Both the official administrative name of the province of ‘Syria
Palaestina’ and the term Palaestina continued for many years to be widelyand interchangeably used by native Palestinian and Roman and Greek
writers, geographers, historians and imperial administrators to refer to thearea between the Mediterranean Sea and River Jordan. The Romans
promoted further urbanisation in Palestine and the province of ‘Syria
Palaestina’ itself had a well-organised road network and an efficient trafficsystem as basic elements of proper imperial administration. The importanceof Provincia Palaestina can be seen by the fact that the Romans invested
great resources in the urban infrastructure and transport system of thecountry, in labour and technological skill in road building. During much ofthis period of Roman Provincia Palaestina Jerusalem served as one of thetwo administrative and cultural hubs of the country – the other one being
the city of Caesarea-Palaestina – and the seat of the Roman Governor andthe royal court.
Continuing the long Hellenistic tradition of changing place names andpersonal names in Palestine – a tradition which was actively pursued
internally by Roman Jewish rulers and public intellectuals from King
Herodes (Herod) the Great to Josephus – the city of Jerusalem was renamed

by Emperor Hadrian (full name in Latin: Publius Aelius Hadrianus
Augustus) as Aelia Capitolina (Wilkinson 1975). Capitolina was dedicatedto Jupiter Capitolinus, the chief deity of the Roman state religion, while
Aelia referred to Hadrian’s own second name and to the name of Lucius
Aelius Caesar, the father of Emperor Lucius, who was adopted by Hadrian
and named heir to the throne, but died before Hadrian. The latteraccelerated the Hellenistic tradition of renaming Palestine cities.
Subsequently Aelia Capitolina remained the official name of Jerusalem for
more than five centuries until 638 AD when the Arabs conquered the cityand kept the first part of the name as Iliya. In fact, it seems that the Arabs
began to use the name Iliya at a ‘very early period’, long before the Islamic
conquest of the city (Gil, M. 1997: 114). The name ‘Jerusalem’ almost
became extinct; Aelia Capitolina becoming the common name for the city.
Its Arabic version, Iliya, was still being used in medieval Arabic sources in
the 10th century, together with the other Arabic name for Jerusalem, Bayt
al-Maqdis (al-Maqdisi 2002: 135, 144; Drijvers 2004: 2). However, acentury later, during the Fatimid period, Muslim traveller Nasir Khusro(Khusrau), who visited Jerusalem in 1047, reported that the people ofPalestine and al-Sham as a whole called al-Bayt al-Muqaddas (the Holy
City) by the name al-Quds (Khusrau 1888). This is also the modern andcurrent name of the city used by the Palestinians.
Aelia Capitolina, due to its centrality under both the Romans and later
the Byzantines, served as a starting point for no fewer than seven highways.
These seven highways were later broadly reflected in the 16th century
Ottoman walls and gates of the Old City of al-Quds. The ‘Hadrian Column’
can be seen in the Madaba Floor Mosaic Map of the 6th century (seechapter 4). The name has also survived in local modern Palestinian social
memory and in the naming of the most spectacular Ottoman Gate of the Old
City of Jerusalem: Bab al-‘Amud (literally, the ‘Column Gate’), also known
as Damascus Gate.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS: FROM ‘SYRIA PALAESTINA’TO PALAESTINAIn the course of time, and especially from Vespasian (Emperor from 69 to
79 AD) onwards, the term Palaestina began to supersede the longer Romanname of the province of ‘Syria Palaestina’. The territorial boundaries ofPalaestina in the time of the Romans embraced the coastal region ofPalestine, Idumaea, Judaea, Samaria, Perasa (northern modern Jordan) andTrachonitis (modern Arab, Lajat), south-east of Damascus. Following
Herodotus and classical literature, this Roman conception of Palestine
applied to the country in the wider sense: to the area of the southern Levant
between modern Lebanon and Egypt. The shift in the terminology from theofficial Roman province of ‘Syria Palaestina’ introduced by Emperor
Hadrian to more and more emphasis on Palestine is reflected in the works
of important Roman writers such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Pomponius
Mela and classical Jewish authors including Josephus and Philo of
Alexandria.
THE 1ST CENTURY GEOGRAPHY OF PALAESTINA BY
STRABO, PLINY THE ELDER AND POMPONIUS MELA
Historical and geographical knowledge and power are inextricably linked
and the expansion and consolidation of the Roman Empire brought about
the rise of encyclopaedic multi-volume works. In the 1st century AD there
are three well-known geographical accounts of Palestine by: (a) GrecoRoman geographer and historian Strabo (64‒63 BC–c. 24 AD), in his
multi-volume work Geographika (Strabo 1917) – this encyclopaedic
knowledge was based on his extensive travels throughout the Mediterranean
region and Near East; (b) Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) in his work Naturalis
Historia (c. 78 AD);5 (c) Pomponius Mela, who was the first Roman
geographer and wrote the only ancient treatise on geography in classical
Latin, De Situ Orbis (‘A Description of the World’), written around 43 AD.
The accounts of Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Mela all treat the country ofPalestine in the wider sense, in the same way as the name applied by theclassical Greek writers to the whole country.
Pliny, Strabo and Mela may well derive some of their information on
Palestine from earlier Hellenistic sources. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (c. 78AD) is an encyclopaedic book about the natural world written by a Roman
author and naval commander who also belonged to Emperor Vespasian’s
inner circle. The geo-administrative term Palaestina used in Naturalis
Historia, Book V: Chapters 13 and 14, reflects both the evolving place
names of the time and the changes introduced by Vespasian. Geographically
Pliny uses Palaestina in two distinct ways: old Palaestina, or old Philistia,

and the new Palaestina whose vast expanses reach all way to modern
Lebanon and Syria:
The next country on the coast is Syria, formerly the greatest of lands. It
had a great many divisions with different names, the part adjacent toArabia being formerly called Palestine [Palaestina, or old Philistia], andJudaea, and Hollow Syria, then Phoenicia and the more inland part
Damascena, and that still further south Babylonia as well as
Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and the Tigris ... Behind Sidon
begins Mount Lebanon, a chain extending as far as Zimyra in the district
called Hollow Syria [Coele-Syria], a distance of nearly 190 miles.
Facing Lebanon [Phoenice], with a valley between, stretches the equallylong range of Counter-Lebanon, which was formerly connected with
Lebanon by a wall. Behind Counter-Lebanon inland is the region of the
Ten Cities [the Decapolis in the Roman province of Syria-Palaestina andlater Byzantine Palaestina Secunda] and with it the tetrarchies alreadymentioned, and the whole of the wide expanse of Palestine [Palaestina].
(Pliny 1991: Book V)
The work of Pomponius Mela, A Description of the World(Chorographia), although inferior by the standard of the works of Strabo
and Pliny the Elder as well as by modern technical standards, was circulated
widely in the course of Europe’s Great Age of Exploration from the end of
the 15th century to the 18th century, and was translated into English. It
remained highly influential throughout the modern period. Published in 44
CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, Mela’s work was one of the world’s
earliest geo-ethnographies and is the earliest surviving geographical work in
Latin (Romer 1998). This work was influenced by classical Greek sources
and, like Herodotus, Mela describes Palestine in the wider sense: from
Phoenicia in the north to Egypt in the south. Unlike Herodotus, however,Mela mentions Judaea but he correctly views it as a small part of thecountry he calls Palaestina. In 43 AD Mela spoke of ‘the Arabs ofPalestine’ (Hic Palaestine est qua tangit Arabas) and describes Syria andPalaestina as follows:[Syria holds a broad expanse of the littoral, as well as lands that extend
rather broadly into the interior, and it is designated by different names indifferent places. For example, it is called Coele, Mesopotamia, Judea,
Commagene, and Sophene.
It is Palestine at the point where Syria abuts the Arabs, thenPhoenicia, and then – where it reaches Cilicia – Antiochia, which was
powerful long ago and for a long time, but which was most powerful by
far when Semiramis held it under her royal sway. Her works certainly
have many distinctive characteristics. Two in particular stand out:
Babylon was built as a city of amazing size, and the Euphrates and Tigris
were diverted into once dry regions.6
It is also fascinating what Mela had to say about Gaza and otherimportant cities of the country he calls Palaestina. In Semitic languages, thename Gaza means ‘strong’ or ‘fierce’ (Hebrew:, ‘strong’).
Etymologically the Greek and Latin name: Γάζα and Gaza, were probably arendition of the Syriac:(ganzā, gazzā) which originated from
Persian ganj (‘treasure’, ‘store’, ‘granary’). The ancient Egyptians called it
Azzati, the ‘prized city’ (Shahin 2005: 414; Katzenstein 1982). Mela goeson to describe the Palestine cities of Gaza, Ascalon and Jaffa and refers toboth Semitic and Persian connotations of the name Gaza:
In Palestine, however, is Gaza, a mighty and very well fortified city. This
is why the Persians call it their treasury: when Cambyses headed for
Egypt under arms, he had brought here both riches and the money forwar. Ascalon is no less important a city. Iope [Jaffa] was founded, as
they tell it, before the flood. Iope is where the locals claim that Cepheus
was king, based on the proof that particular old altars–altars with thegreatest taboo–continue to bear an inscription of that man and his brotherPhineus. What is more, they even point out the huge bones of the seamonster as a clear reminder of the event celebrated in song and legend,
and as a clear reminder of Andromeda, who was saved by Perseus.
(Pomponius Mela, in Romer 1998: 52‒53)7
THE OFFICIAL DESIGNATION OF PALAESTINA BY
CLASSICAL JEWISH SCHOLARSThe same wider territorial concept of Palestine was embraced by classicalJewish writers, especially Josephus (37–c. 100 AD; Hebrew: Yosef ben

Matityahu), born in Jerusalem to a priestly family, and Philo of Alexandria(c. 25 BC–c. 50 CE; Hebrew: Yedidia HaCohen; also called Philo Judaeus),
the Jewish philosopher and a contemporary of Jesus who lived in the
Roman province of Egypt and became the most important representative ofHellenistic Judaism. Philo (whose father had apparently played a prominentrole in Palestine before moving to Alexandria8), wrote in Quod Omnis
Probus Liber Sit9 that ‘four thousand’ Essenes10 – a Jewish sect thatflourished from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD and who gained
fame in modern times as a result of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls –lived in ‘Palestine and Syria’.11
Hellenised Greek-speaking Jewish authors such as Philo and Josephus
wrote in standard Greek for educated Jewish classes in the region and forRoman and Greek audiences. Like Greek and Roman writers and many
Jewish Roman citizens, both Josephus and Philo understood and applied theterm Palestine to ‘greater Palestine’ extending from modern Lebanon to
Egypt (Robinson 1865: 15; Jacobson 1999), and not just to Philistia, thecoastal region of Palestine, or the former ‘land of the Philistines’ from Gaza
to Tantur.
The official Roman designation of the province as Syria-Palaestina
existed long before the Jewish revolt of 66–69 AD. However, Vespasian –the patron of Josephus – who was personally involved in subduing therevolt in Judaea, formally widened the territorial boundaries of Palestineand officially designated the whole country as ‘Palestine’, and this isevident from Roman coins of the period. However, it would be wrong toassume that Roman Provincia Palaestina displaced or replaced Judaea. The
latter simply was and remained one of the regions of Provincia Palaestina.
Judaea was always seen as representing only a specific and small
component of this greater whole, while Palaestina was viewed by classicalGreek and Jewish writers and Roman politicians as representative of thewhole country from Phoenicia (mostly associated with modern Lebanon) to
Egypt.
Writing in the late 1st century, Josephus embraced the Roman patron‒
protégé system and himself would later write his history works Antiquitiesof the Jews, The Jewish War and Against Apion in Greek; in these works ofhistory Vespasian is positively remembered by Josephus. Josephus made aclear distinction between Syria and Palestine and endorsed Herodotus’
account of Palestine from the 5th century BC.

Josephus holds Herodotus in high esteem as the founder ofhistoriography, recognizes his authority on ethnographical matters,
praises his reliance on autopsy as a basis for knowledge, uses material,
vocabulary and themes from the Histories, and even uses historicalinformation to ‘correct’ the Bible. (Priestley and Zali 2016: 6)
Although occasionally Josephus would refer to Palaestina in connection
with Philistia and the ‘land of the Philistines’, by and large he accepted thewider Roman conception of Palestine and used the name within the wider
context of the official Roman designation and toponymic representation of
the country (Flavius Josephus 1981, 2004, 2013).
As with the iconography of the Coinage of Philistia of the 5th and 4th
centuries BC (discussed above), for many centuries Hellenistic andAthenian intellectual and artistic creations had exercised considerable
influence on the culture of the coastal Palestinian cities of Ascalon, Gazaand Ashdod and their Hellenised intellectuals. The most famous Palestinian
academic was Antiochus of Ascalon (130‒68/67 BC), by far the mostdistinguished Palestinian philosopher of the Roman era. Born in thePalestinian city of Ascalon on the Mediterranean coast, Antiochus’compatriot Sosus of Ascalon, a Stoic, played an important part in his
philosophical education (Sedley 2012: 11). Antiochus travelled to Athens,at the time the world centre of philosophy, at around 110 BC and became aneminent Platonic philosopher and a friend of Cicero, Rome’s greatest
politician and orator; the latter was his pupil in Athens in about 78‒79 BC.
Antiochus was a pupil of Philon of Larisa and succeeded Philon as the headof the New Academy which had been founded in Athens by Plato. Afterteaching philosophy in Athens, he travelled to Alexandria and later founded
his own school of philosophy which ‘advocated the possibility ofknowledge, thus reversing the sceptical tradition of the recent Academy’(Sedley 2012: 3). He also attempted to reconcile the principles of Platonic
epistemology with those of the Stoics and in 87/86 he went on a mission to
Alexandria and the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire to spread his
ideas (Gerson 2005: 42).
Antiochus’ school of philosophy, especially Antiochian epistemology
and ethics, had ‘a considerable impact among the Romans of his day’,
Cicero included (Sedley 2012: 4); ‘Antiochus’ influence at Alexandria wasalso considerable’ (Sedley 2012: 5). However, there is no evidence tosuggest that Antiochus went back to teach in his native Ascalon.
Nevertheless, as we shall see below, half a millennium after he led Platonic
academies of Athens and Alexandria, another Greek-speaking Palestiniancity on the Mediterranean coast, only 20 kilometres to the south of Ascalon,
would replace both Athens and Alexandria as the most important centre ofclassicising Hellenistic philosophy in the Mediterranean region.
THE RISE OF CAESAREA-PALAESTINAThe Romans reoriented Palestine towards the Mediterranean region and thisresulted in the establishment and subsequent spectacular rise of the coastal
city of Caesarea Maritima (Greek: Parálios Kaisáreia; Παράλιος
Καισάρεια), which was also famously known as Caesarea-Palaestina (or‘Caesarea of Palestine’). For centuries Caesarea-Palaestina would serve as
the capital of Palestine and one of the most important cultural centres in the
Mediterranean region, in effect replacing the two great cities of Athens andAlexandria. Originally a Palestinian/Phoenician village on the
Mediterranean coast, Caesarea-Palaestina became one of four Roman
settlements (coloniae) for demobilised veterans in the province of SyriaPalaestina (Butcher 2003: 230), named in honour of Augustus Caesar. The
Roman city and its major harbour were spectacularly expanded by the
Roman client king of Judaea in Palestine, Herod the Great (Greek:
Horodos), who ruled from 37 to 4 BC. Herod, whose ancestors were
Idumites (possibly of Nabataean Arab origins) who had converted toHellenistic Judaism, became known for his colossal building programme,
including the construction of the port at Caesarea Maritima, the Greek-style
temple in Jerusalem (‘Herod’s Temple’) and the fortress at Massada. He
also constructed or rebuilt several military forts along the Via Maris. The
construction of a massive port at Caesarea Maritima signalled the decline of
Joppa (Jaffa) in importance as a historic harbour. Two years after the deathof Herod, Caesarea Maritima became the seat of a Roman prefect – head ofan administrative area – beginning in 6 AD.
To distinguish Caesarea Maritima from Caesarea Philippi (or Caesarea
Paneas) – a name which mutated into modern Arab Banyas in the Golan
Heights – and Caesarea Cappadocia (modern Turkey), Caesarea-Maritima
became famously known throughout the Mediterranean region andChristian world as Caesarea-Palaestina. The reputation of its academy,library and Christian scholars soared throughout the 3rd‒6th centuries as it
effectively replaced Alexandria as the most important learning centre in the
Eastern Mediterranean.
Caesarea-Palaestina was described in detail by the 1st century Roman
Jewish historian Josephus in his work The Jewish War (1981). As theheadquarters of the Roman government in Palestine, Caesarea graduallybecame the largest and most important city in the country and the economic
and political hub of Roman and Byzantine Palestine. Its predominance waselevated further after the Jewish Bar Kochba revolt and war, waged in thecourse of the later years of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (132‒136 AD).
The city and its big harbour were extensively rebuilt by Hadrian and at its
height the city covered an urban area of nearly a thousand acres – almost
five times the size of Jerusalem. Praise for the splendour and physicalattributes of Caesarea and other cities of Provincia Palaestina were common
in Roman sources. Ammianus Marcellinus, a 4th century Roman soldier
and historian, born to a Greek-speaking pagan family in Syria or Phoenicia– whose work was highly regarded by English historian Edward Gibbon –describes Provincia Palaestina in c. 380 AD as follows:
The last region of the Syrias is Palestine, extending over a great extent ofterritory and abounding in cultivated and well-kept lands; it also hassome splendid cities, none of which yields to any of the others, but they
rival one another, as it were, by plumb-line. These are Caesarea, which
Herodes built in honour of the emperor Octavianus, Eleutheropolis [BeitJibrin], and Neapolis [Nablus], along with Ascalon and Gaza, built in aformer age. In these districts no navigable river is anywhere to be seen,
but in numerous places natural warm springs gush forth, adapted tomany medicinal uses. (Ammianus Marcellinus c. 380, Book XIV: 8, 11;cited in Johnson, L. 2000: 36)
From the early 3rd century Caesarea-Palaestina became the civil
metropolis of Palestine, and later, when Palestine was divided into threeprovinces (see below), it remained the capital of Palaestina Prima. In the
3rd and 4th centuries the diverse population of this pluralistic
Mediterranean city included Greco-Roman citizens worshipping GrecoRoman deities, Samaritans, Greek and Aramaic-speaking Jews (Donaldson

2000), Greek-speaking Christians, Aramaic-speaking Christians and Arab
Christians.

Chapter 4

THE (THREE IN ONE) PROVINCIA
PALAESTINA
The three administrative provinces of
Byzantine Palestine (4th‒early 7th centuries
AD)

The Christian Byzantines transformed urban Palestine socially, religiously,
economically and architecturally, and this particular period from the 4th tothe early 7th century underscored the centrality of Christianity inPalestinian history. The fast spread of the new religion to all countries
bordering Palestine made this period important for an additional reason: it
was the centre of a strong, confident and growing religion which was bornin the country, and continued to consider Palestine as its spiritual centre
even after placing the Catholic Church in the capital city of the Roman
Empire.
The remnants of the architectural splendour of urban Palestine under the
Byzantines can still be seen today. Byzantine Palestine also gave birth toJulian of Ascalon, a native of the ancient Palestinian coastal city, whobecame a renowned Palestinian architect and whose work on the growthand planning issues of the built environment and on construction and design
rules in 6th century Palestine influenced Istanbul’s urban planning andendured for more than 1400 years; his work can still be relevant to modern
environmental urban planning (Hakim 2001).
After the Christian Byzantines replaced the Romans, Palaestina and its
major cities – Caesarea-Palaestina, Jerusalem, Gaza, Neapolis (Nablus),
Scythopolis (Beisan), Tiberias and Beit Jibrin (Eleutheropolis) –experienced their greatest growth and prosperity in Antiquity. Throughout
the early Christian and Byzantine period, the 4th to the 7th centuries AD,
Palaestina remained the dominant and universally applied name for thisregion. The former Roman provinces of ‘Syria Palaestina’ were split by the
Christian Byzantines, who also redrew the administrative regions of thecountry. Palaestina was reorganised into three subdivisions. The spread of
Greek- and Aramaic-speaking Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean,
Near East and Roman Provincia Arabia1 and the creation of greater
Palestine in the 4th century AD further expanded the early Roman conceptof Palestine and the designation employed by classical Greek writers suchas Herodotus from the mid-5th century BC onwards. This greater Palestineconsisted of Palaestina Prima (in the centre of the country), Palaestina
Secunda (much of the Galilee) and Palaestina Salutaris (in the south andsouth-east).
The Christian Byzantines came up with a major reconfiguration ofPalestine. Byzantium itself (renamed Constantinople and later Istanbul)
came to the fore upon becoming the imperial residence in the 4th century
and the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire came to be known as the
Byzantine Empire after 476 AD. The creation of greater Palestine and theofficial administrative reorganisation of expanded Palestine by the Eastern
Roman Empire around 284–305 AD produced ‘Three Palestine’ provinces
whose lingua franca was Greek. These three administrative provinces ofPalestine lasted from the 4th to the early 7th centuries:• Palaestina Prima (combining Philistia, Judaea and Samaria), extending
from Rafah in the south to the bay of Haifa in the north, with CaesareaPalaestina for its capital. In the 630s AD when the Arab Muslim armies
took control of Palestine they initially kept Caesarea as the capital of theprovince of Jund Filastin (the official administrative centre of Palestine).
The capital was temporarily moved to Lydda, which was also thetemporary capital of Suleiman ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad
Governor of Filastin (wali Filastin, ‘’), until he built the newcity of al-Ramla. Becoming Caliph in 715‒717, Suleiman ibn ‘Abd alMalik permanently transferred the capital of Filastin to al-Ramla. AlRamla, approximately 20 kilometres south-east of Jaffa, was locatedstrategically on the highway of al-Sham-al-Fustat, Damascus‒old Cairo,
the latter being the first capital of Egypt under Muslim rule. Al-Ramlaremained the administrative capital of the Arab Muslim province of Jund
Filastin and an economic hub for the country for over three and a half
centuries until the late 11th century.
• Palaestina Secunda (including most of the Galilee and the Golan Heights,
parts of Peraea2 and some of the cities of the former Roman Decapolis ofEastern Palestine3), with Scythopolis (Beisan) for its capital.
• Palaestina Salutaris (created in the 4th century and later became known
also as Palaestina Tertia) included the former Roman Provincia Arabia(Ward 2008), Idumaea, the Naqab/Negev, parts of Sinai, south-west of
Transjordan, south of the Dead Sea and Arabia Petraea,4 whose
Nabataean capital at the beginning of the 2nd century AD was Petra. It
was split from Arabia Petraea in the 6th century AD (Shahin 2005: 8).
Petra became the capital of Palaestina Salutaris
Interestingly, the naming of the ‘Three Palestines’ (Prima, Secunda andTertia) was inspired by classical and early Christian representation of‘Three in One’. The most famous analogy of this Greco-Byzantine concept
was the theological idea of Trinity which was settled and codified at theCouncil of Nicaea in 325 AD. Crucially the ‘Three Palestines’ were notconceived as totally separate provinces. Politically, militarily, culturally andecclesiastically they were conceived and evolved, managed and defended as‘Three in One’ provinces of Palaestina. The ‘Three Palestines’ were closely
linked in four different areas:
1. Politically, militarily and ecclesiastically they were dominated by
Palaestina Prima. The capital of Byzantine Palestine and of Palaestina
Prima was Caesarea-Palaestina, ‘Caesarea of Palestine’ (von Suchem
1971: 7, 111; 2013; Gilman et al. 1905). This city was also called‘Caesarea by the Sea’, or Caesarea Maritima. Since the creation of Israelin 1948 historians in the West have tended to avoid referring to thehistoric name of the Palestinian city, Caesarea-Palaestina, and use only
the name Caesarea Maritima. But, as we shall see below, the social
memory of Caesarea-Palaestina has been preserved in ecclesiastical
records and by both the Catholic and Palestinian Orthodox churches.
2. Culturally, they came under the influence of the two most important
cultural centres in Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean: Caesarea-

Palaestina5 (or Caesarea Maritima) and Gaza, which were both also
located in Palaestina Prima.
3. Militarily and strategically they were commanded by Dux Palaestinae,
the ‘military commander of Palestine’, whose headquarters were in
Caesarea-Palaestina and who commanded all Palestine.
4. Ecclesiastically, from the mid-5th century onwards the ‘Three Palestines’
were united under one single independent all-Palestine Patriarchate of
Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) with officially recognised religious
jurisdiction over the ‘Three Palestines’.
Of the three provinces of the country Palaestina Prima was the largest,
most powerful economically and most developed culturally. Its bishops of
Aelia Capitolina and Caesarea-Palaestina dominated the independent(autocephalous or ‘self-headed’) All Palaestina Church. The Notitia
Dignitatum (‘the List of Offices’) is a unique early 5th century imperial
chancery document that details the administrative organisation of the
Byzantine Empire. It notes that Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris
were administered by a praeses,6 while Palaestina Prima was presided overby a governor who bore the high rank of proconsul (Ward 2008: 89‒90).
This should not be confounded with the Dux Palaestinae, the ‘militarycommander of Palestine’, who was based in Caesarea-Palaestina andcommanded the garrison of the ‘Three Palestines’ in the 5th and 6th
centuries (Shahid 1995: 192‒193; Röhricht 1890: 7).7
Palaestina Prima lasted from 390 AD until the early 7th century. In 614,
both Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Secunda were conquered by the
Persian Sassanids. The Byzantines lost control of the three Palestine
provinces again and irreversibly in 636‒638 AD in the course of the
Muslim conquest of Bilad al-Sham and Palestine. The urban structure ofPalestine and Bilad al-Sham remained largely unscathed by the Sassanid
and Islamic conquests (Walmsley 2000: 273) and the core of greater
Palestine, or Provincia Palaestina, under the Byzantines – which combined
Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Tertia (Salutaris) – became known as theprovince of Jund Filastin under Islam.
CAESAREA MARITIMA AS A MEDITERRANEAN CAPITALOF CULTURE: THE CITY’S METROPOLITAN ELITEThe Christian era of Byzantine Palestine (which refers to this geographic
region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various
adjoining lands in Transjordan, Nabataea and former Provincia Arabia),with its coastal capital and metropolitan city of Caesarea-Palaestina, was an
extraordinary time of cultural flourishing and of great expansion andprosperity in Late Antiquity. New areas were brought under cultivation,
urban development increased and the cities of greater Palestine including
Gaza, Neapolis (modern Nablus), Jerusalem, Scythopolis (modern Beisan)and Caesarea Maritima grew considerably in population and the diverse
population of greater Palestine may have reached as many as one and a half
million.8 Also, monasteries proliferated throughout the country. In fact, theearliest monasteries in Christianity outside of Egypt were built in Palestineduring the Byzantine era, notably that of the St Hilarion Monastery, one ofPalestine’s oldest Christian monuments, today located in the Gaza Strip.9 At
the heart of greater Palestine was the province of Palaestina Prima.
Caesarea Maritima was the administrative capital of both Palaestina Primaand greater Palestine. The country consisted of a mixed Greek andAramaic-speaking population, minorities of Samaritans, Christian Arabs,
the Ghassanids, who were the dominant group among the Monophysites
and who believed in the single-nature doctrine of Jesus, and Miaphysite10
Arabs (see also below), Jews and Nabataean Arabs were present as well.
Throughout the 6th century and until the Arab Muslim conquest of 638 AD,
the Ghassanid Arabs practically ruled Palaestina Secunda (which included
parts of the Galilee) and Palaestina Tertia (which included the
Naqab/Negev) and, together with Byzantine soldiers, defended andprotected the holy sites in Palestine (Shahid 2009, Vol. II, part II: 63‒64).
The Louvre Museum in Paris exhibits a masterpiece bronze bowl createdin the 4th century AD to commemorate the founding of CaesareaPalaestina.11 A flourishing Mediterranean seaport and later the metropolitan
city of Palaestina Prima, the city’s harbour rivalled the Piraeus of Athens(Barnes 1981: 81). The urban social space of Caesarea is of particularinterest. By the 3rd century Caesarea, officially still pagan, had become acosmopolitan, culturally and socially diverse metropolis, and the largest andmost developed city in Roman Palestine; the city contained as many as
100,000 inhabitants of many ethnic and religious backgrounds (Barnes
1981: 82). Caesarea Maritima12 also became the home of the FoundingFathers of the Church and of prominent Christian intellectuals, missionaries
and martyrs. Under the Romans, and more visibly under the Byzantines,
Caesarea became not only the most powerful city in greater Palestine but
also home to the metropolitan, predominantly Greek-speaking, cultural eliteof the country. As a major centre of learning and scholarship in the Eastern
Mediterranean, it became home to outstanding scholars and theologians andsome of the best historians and philosophers of Late Antiquity. This
metropolitan cultural elite included Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima andProkopios of Caesarea Maritima (c. 500–c. 554 AD), in Palaestina Prima.
The city also became for many years the home of the Church Father Origen(185–254 AD) and several leading Palestinian Christian theologians who
also sought to forge a distinct Palestinian Christian identity based on theunique position of Palestine. Prominent historian Prokopios of Caesarea, anative of Palaestina, had this to write in 560 AD about another compatriot
Palestinian:Jesus, the Son of God, was in the body and moving among the men ofPalestine, showing manifestly by the fact that he never sinned at all, andalso by his performing even things impossible, that he was the Son of
God in very truth; for he called the dead and raised them up as if fromsleep, and opened the eyes of men who had been born blind, andcleansed those whose whole bodies were covered with leprosy, andreleased those whose feet were maimed, and he cured all the otherdiseases which are called by the physicians incurable. (Prokopios 2005)
But the greatest theologian of Caesarea Maritima was Origen. Born inAlexandria, Origen was later summoned to Provincia Arabia, to give
instruction to the governor of that region. Afterward, on account of a great
tumult in Alexandria, he left Egypt and went to Caesarea Maritima. St
Jerome says that Origen went to Achaia in Greece on account of heresies
which were worrying the churches there. His words are: ‘Et propter
ecclesias Achaiæ, quæ pluribus hæresibus vexabantur, sub testimonio
ecclesiasticæ epistolæ Athenas per Palæstinam pergeret’ (And for the
churches of Achaia, with which many heresies grew throughout Palestine
under the ecclesiastical head). He passed through Palestine on his way to
Greece, and it was at this time that he was ordained a presbyter by
Palestinian bishops.

An avid collector of books, Origen helped create the Library of Caesarea
and provided Caesarea Maritima with some of the cosmopolitan charisma
and intellectual vigour of large cities such as Alexandria and Antioch.
Caesarea became his fixed abode in 232 AD. He also became a catalyst forthe phenomenal rise of a Palestinised Greek-speaking cultural elite – anelite which made Caesarea-Palaestina one of the most important cities ofclassical Antiquity. Palestinised Origen became a prolific Christian author, aphilosopher of history and the Father of the Homily. He founded a Christianacademy in Caesarea, which included the Library of Caesarea-Palaestina,
an ecclesiastical and historical library of 30,000 manuscripts (Carriker
2003; Murphy-O’Connor 2008: 241) and second only to the Library ofAlexandria in its heyday. Origen also became known for composing
seminal works on Christian Neo-Platonism, including his famous treatise
On First Principles (1966), a work which had a huge influence on Christian
thought and modern Renaissance humanism. Origen wrote Hexapla(‘sixfold’)13 and other exegetical and theological works while living in
Caesarea.
Caesarea-Palaestina has been one of most extensively excavated areas of
Byzantine Palestine (Avni 2014: 42). Palestine of the 3rd‒6th centuries AD
centred on Caesarea, the largest metropolitan city in the whole country:
In the sixth century the city expanded further, beyond its walls, creating
extramural quarters with spectacular residences. A large and wealthy
agricultural hinterland expanded beyond the urban limits of Caesarea.
This urban expansion reflects the constant growth of the urban
population, which made Caesarea the largest city in Palestine. (Avni
2014: 42)
Already in the 3rd century AD Provincia Palaestina was centred on its
wealthy, largely well-educated and highly developed Mediterranean capitalcity, Caesarea Maritima. Palaestina was also treated as a distinct country in
the writings of its educated urban elites. From the capital Caesarea
Maritima, Origen corresponded with the Roman Emperor Philip (Marcus
Julius Philippus, or Marcus Iulius Philippus Augustus, who reigned from
244 to 249 AD), also known by his Latin nickname ‘Philippus Arabs’. He
was born in the northern part of Provincia Arabia, the Roman Arabia
Petraea. Inhabited by a mixed population and many Arabs, this region of

the Hauran would later become part of Palaestina Secunda and would be ineffect ruled by Ghassanid Christian client Arab kings under nominal
Byzantine control. ‘Philip the Arab’ himself went on to become a major
figure in the Roman Empire (Bowersock 1994: 122). Among early
Christian historians ‘Philip the Arab’ had the reputation of being
sympathetic to the Christian faith. Some later Christian traditions, firstmentioned by Eusebius, who was from Caesarea-Palaestina, in his
Ecclesiastical History, claimed that Philip was the first Christian Roman
Emperor (Eusebius 2011: VI.xxxiv). Critics, however, argue that ‘Philip the
Arab’ fared well with ecclesiastical historians because of his religious
tolerance and overall sympathetic attitude towards Christians (Shahid 1984:
76‒77).
After Origen’s death, Palestinian Origenism continued to spreadthroughout the Near East – until the general condemnation and persecutionof Origenism in the mid-6th century – and the theological Library of
Caesarea was managed and expanded by St Pamphilus of Caesarea (latter
half of the 3rd century–309), who was chief among biblical scholars of his
generation and a friend and teacher of the church historian, and Bishop of
Caesarea, Eusebius (263–339 AD). Eusebius (the ‘Father of Church
History’) was himself born in Caesarea and lived most of his adult life in
the city. Pamphilus devoted his life to searching out and obtaining ancient
texts for the library, which became one of the most famous and richest in
Antiquity. It attracted church historians and theologians from all over the
Roman Empire: St Basil the Great (329–379), Gregory of Nazianzus, a 4th
century Archbishop of Constantinople and St Jerome (c. 347–420 AD). The
latter was a ‘Father of the Church’ who is best known for his translation of
the Bible into Latin. All these famous scholars came to study in CaesareaPalaestina. Moreover, today the Caesarea text-type is widely recognised byscholars as one of the earliest types for reading the four Gospels (Streeter
1926).
While Christianity continued to play crucial role – not always positive,
as cited above only the one case of the persecution of Origen andintellectual followers – in the history of the country and its people, it is thisperiod of its great spread which was the most important for the new religion
in Palestine, creating many iconic cultural texts and objects and making
Palestine probably the best known country in the world at the time, due tothe many descriptions, artefacts, literary, religious and historical workswhich made it a household name within Christianity and beyond. Some of
the iconic texts about the country were produced by the ‘Father of Church
History’, Eusebius of Caesarea, who took pride in in his native country of
Palaestina; he repeatedly used the name Palaestina in his works, which later
influenced generations of Christian writers worldwide. De Martyribus
Palaestina14 by Eusebius (1861) gives us a clear indication of theconsolidation of the concept of Palaestina as a country during the early
Byzantine period. The Martyrs of Palestine relates to the persecution ofearly Christians in the capital of the country, Caesarea-Palaestina, and thecountry at large in the early 4th century AD. This account may haveoriginally been composed in Palestinian Aramaic, the language of Jesus ofNazareth. Hebrew at the time of Jesus was largely an extinct language, with
the Jews of Palestine speaking Aramaic, and Hebrew being confined toliturgical uses. Closely related to Arabic, Palestinian Aramaic was alanguage with which Eusebius was well acquainted. At the time, Aramaic
was the main vernacular speech of the country and was spoken in thecapital, Caesarea-Palaestina.15 Aramaic would also influence the evolutionof Palestinian vernacular Arabic.
Byzantine Palestine also gave birth to the 6th century world’s mostimportant historian, Prokopios of Caesarea Maritima, an illustrious scholarfrom Palaestina Prima, the principal historian of the 6th century Byzantine
Empire and of the reign of Emperor Justinian. Prokopios travelledextensively throughout the Mediterranean region and the Near East,
accompanied the Byzantine general Belisarius as secretary in the wars ofJustinian and commented extensively on the Ghassanid tribal Arab kings(top phylarchs) of Palaestina Secunda, Palaestina Prima and Palaestina
Salutaris. In his multi-volume work, The Wars of Justinian (c. 560),
Prokopios wrote:
The boundaries of Palestine extend toward the east to the sea which iscalled the Red Sea. Now this sea, beginning at India, comes to an end at
this point in the Roman domain. And there is a city called Aelas[present-day ‘Aqabah] on its shore, where the sea comes to an end, as I
have said, and becomes a very narrow gulf. (Prokopios 2014)
Prokopios (Greek: Prokopios ho Kaisareus; Latin: Procopius
Caesariensis) added that Chosroes (Khosrow I, 501–579), the Shahanshah

(King of Kings) of the Sasanian Empire of Persia from 531 to 579, had agreat desire to make himself ruler of Palaestina on account of its
extraordinary fertility, its wealth and the great number of its inhabitants(cited in Gibbon 1838, Vol. 1: 40; also Prokopios 2014). Commenting on
Prokopios’ observation about the fertility of the country, the English
historian Edward Gibbon, in his most important work, The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in eight volumes between
1776 and 1788, wrote that the Roman historian Tacitus described Palestine
as follows: ‘the inhabitants are healthy and robust; the rains moderate; thesoil fertile’ (Gibbon 1838, Vol. 1: 40). Gibbon added: ‘Palestine, and theholy wealth of Jerusalem, were the ... objects that attracted the ambitions, orrather the avarice, of Chosroes [I]’ (Gibbon 1840, Vol. 5: 173). He further
added that the Muslim Arabs ‘thought the same, and were afraid that Omar,
when he went to Jerusalem, and charmed with the fertility of the soil andpurity of the air, would never return to Medina’ (Gibbon 1838, Vol. 1: 40).
During the early Christian period, particularly from the 4th century
onwards, the Holy Land – a nebulous, abstract and semi-mythical location –was transformed into a real country called Palaestina, with thriving cities,
ports, beautiful churches and numerous monasteries, famous philosophicalschools and libraries, an extensive road system, villages and a large,
commercially and culturally active population, which added to the interest
shown by (Latin-speaking) Europeans. It was in the course of this early
Christian period that the Latin term Terrae Sanctae became synonymous in
Christian texts with the extensive use of the term Palaestina by Christianpilgrims and local historians. On the Martyrs of Palestine (311 AD) was
written by the church historian and Bishop of Caesarea-Palaestina, Eusebius(AD 263–339), ‘Father of Church History’, who composed his monumental
work Historia Ecclesiastica and his Onomasticon (On the Place Names inthe Holy Scripture) (1971), a comprehensive geographical-historical studyof Palestine, in the city: ‘Eusebius states that he compiled On the Place
Names in the Holy Scripture by working through the Bible piecemeal’(Barnes 1981: 109). This major biblical enterprise has been described by
British classicist Timothy David Barnes (1981: 106) as a ‘biblical gazetteer
which is still the main literary source for the historic geography of Palestineboth in biblical times and under the Roman Empire’.
Although his Onomasticon was partly based on religiously constructed
and officially sanctioned scriptural geography and religious memory,

Eusebius uses the name Provincia Palaestina repeatedly and in application
to the whole country from Lebanon in the north to Egypt in the south, andthis Roman/Byzantine administrative and official use influenced later
generations of Christian and European writers. A native of CaesareaPalaestina, whose language was Greek, Eusebius, in his Oration in Praiseof Constantine, writes proudly about the special attention given to ‘our
Provencia Palaestina’:he [Emperor Constantin] has selected two places [for his church-building
programme] in the eastern division of the empire, the one in [‘ourprovince’] Palestine (since from thence the life-giving stream has flowed
as from a fountain for the blessing of all nations), the other in that
metropolis of the East which derives its name from that of Antiochus; inwhich, as the head of that portion of the empire, he has consecrated tothe service of God a church of unparalleled size and beauty. The entire
building is encompassed by an enclosure of great extent, within which
the church itself rises to a vast elevation, of an octagonal form,
surrounded by many chambers and courts on every side, and decorated
with ornaments of the richest kind.16
NICAEA AND HISTORICAL ECCLESIASTICALREPRESENTATIONS OF PALESTINE: THE ARCHIEPISCOPALSEE OF CAESAREA
The diocese of Caesarea-Palaestina is ancient – one of the earliest Christianbishoprics ever established. Records of the diocese (Greek:‘administration’) date as far back as the 2nd century and its bishopric
became a metropolitan see. Under the Byzantines the diocese was themetropolis of Palaestina Prima. It was initially directly subject to the
Church of Antioch, one of the five major Christian churches during theearly Byzantine period. After the All Palestine ecclesia of Aelia Capitolina
was granted by autocephaly and independence in the mid-5th century by theCouncil of Chalcedon (see below), with top ecclesiastical jurisdiction overthe ‘Three Palestines’, for many centuries the metropolitan Church of
Caesarea-Palaestina continued to see itself as a ‘mother church’ and as ‘firstamong equals’ of the churches of Palestine.

The most distinguished bishop of the diocese was Eusebius of Caesarea,
who was among the most famous bishops to attend the First Council of
Nicaea in 325. Today the historic metropolitan see of Caesarea-Palaestina,
or the archiepiscopal see of Caesarea in Palaestina, is preserved by themodern Orthodox Palestinian Church. The Archiepiscopal See of CaesareaPalaestina is also known as a Latin titular see of the Catholic Church(Segreteria di Stato Vaticano 2013: 867; Riley-Smith 1978). A titular (nondiocesan) metropolitan or archbishop of the Catholic Church is a title used
to signify a diocese that no longer functions, often because the diocese once
flourished but the land was conquered by Muslims.17 In later days, ‘titularsee’ was seen by the Catholic Church as important to preserve the historic
memories of ancient metropolitan churches such as that of Caesarea
Maritima. In the period between the creation of this titular Bishopry of
Caesarea-Palaestina in 1432 and 1967 twenty-eight Catholic bishops haveoccupied this honorary position. From 1975 to 2012 the Eastern Orthodox
Metropolitan of Caesarea was Basilios Blatsos, who was also an Exarch of
Palaestina Prima, under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Orthodox
Patriarchate of Jerusalem (formerly the Patriarchate of Aelia Capitolina).
In Roman Provincia Palaestina Jerusalem was renamed by Emperor
Hadrian as Aelia Capitolina. Under the Byzantines the name Jerusalem
became largely extinct; officially Aelia Capitolina became the common
name for the city (Drijvers 2004: 2). At the Council of Nicaea Eusebius andMacarius, the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina, were accompanied by seventeen
other bishops representing all the major cities of Palestine (Palaestina Primaand Palaestina Secunda) (Wallace-Hadrill 1982: 165).18 In ecclesiasticalmatters, the elites of urban spaces in Palestine interacted with, and often
dominated, their surrounding countryside. In the event, however, thecouncil gave the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) the first place
among the bishops of Palestine, while leaving the Rites of the Church of
Caesarea applicable to the whole of greater Palestine. Caesarea-Palaestinaalso retained its position as metropolis to the Church of Aelia Capitolina
and was directly subject to the Church of Antioch. This ambiguous situation
created by Nicaea was subsequently used by the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina,
Maximus, to ordain bishops for Palestine and to assemble a council ofbishops for the whole country. Inevitably this situation brought about
conflicts between the Church of Aelia Capitolina and the older (ancient)
Church of Caesarea-Palaestina. The latter persisted and continued to claim

for a while ecclesiastical primacy over Palestine (Du Pin and Wotton 2010:107).
THE EMERGENCE OF INDEPENDENT PALESTINIAN
CHURCH: POLITICAL VERSUS RELIGIOUS CAPITALS IN
PALESTINE
Politically and administratively a capital city is the city enjoying primary or
official status in a country, province or state as a seat of government. The
word capital derives from the Latin caput (‘head’), but in Greek-speaking
Byzantine Palestine the Greek term for capital cities was metropolis. Some
capital cities, such as Jerusalem, were also religious centres. Furthermore,
under Islam an arrangement of joint political and administrative capitals
existed at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate: Baghdad and al-Raqqa (inmodern Syria), under Harun al-Rashid in 796‒809 AD.
The first to make a clear distinction between political/administrative
capital city and religious capital in Palestine was the Greek-speaking
Idumite King Herod the Great, who developed and expanded CaesareaPalaestina as his metropolitan political capital, while at the same time
continuing to develop Aelia Capitolina as the religious capital of his
autonomous kingdom.
Under the Byzantines over time two crucial ecclesiastical developments
took place in Palestine:
1. The ecclesiastical autonomy of the three Palestine provinces continued to
evolve throughout the 5th and early 6th centuries and the evolution of a
distinct Palestinian religio-cultural identity benefited greatly from theinternational organisation of the churches in the East which wasconceived as radically different from that in the West.
2. The All Palestine Church of Jerusalem was headed by both Greekspeaking and Arab bishops (Shahid 2006a: 46‒48, 193‒194, 523) andseveral Arab bishops of Palestine – including the bishops Elusa, in
Palaestina Tertia, Abdelas (Arabic ‘Abdallah; Greek Theodulos, which
was a translation of his Arabic name: ‘Servant of God’) and Aretas (alHarith) – participated in the crucial ecumenical councils of Ephesus andChalcedon in 431 and 451 respectively (Shahid 2006a: 523; Sharon
2013: 75).

In Palestine and the Near East as a whole the churches began ‘frombelow’ as a network of independent churches, while the Rome-based(Catholic) Church in the West ultimately evolved into a single, hierarchicalstructure with sub-churches. In contrast with the Catholic notion that the
Bishop (and Church) of Rome was above all bishops, in the East the
churches adopted the Greek ideas of autocephaly (αὐτοκεφαλία, ‘selfheaded’) and ‘first among equals’ (Greek: Πρῶτος μεταξὺ ἴσων). These
became the guiding principles of the Orthodox churches whose Palestine
Patriarchs (‘Bishop of Bishops’ or Archbishops) did not have to report toany higher-ranking Patriarch, including the Patriarchs of Antioch orConstantinople. These two principles contributed to the consolidation of an
independent Palestine Orthodox Church with jurisdiction over the ‘Three
Palestines’. They also contributed to the emergence of a distinct religiocultural identity in Palestine. Ironically, however, this ecclesiasticalindependence of the Church of Aelia Capitolina contrasted with the rigid
formal power structure of the Byzantine Empire, in which provincial
political and military powers in the ‘Three Palestines’ were ultimately
subordinate to the Emperor of Constantinople.
The All Palestine Church of Aelia Capitolina was granted autocephaly
and its head bishop, or Patriarch, did not have to report to any higherranking Patriarch in Byzantium. This development began with the Councilof Chalcedon in 451 AD, which was attended by four Arab bishops
including the bishops of Elusa in Palaestina Tertia, Gaza and Neila inProvincia Arabia (Shahid 2006a: 523) and which was a turning point in thehistory and growing independence of the Palestinian church. This growth in
the autonomy and power of Palestine had begun with the increased
Christian pilgrimage and growing economy of the country throughout andafter the reign of Constantine the Great. The growth in pilgrimage andrevenues increased the fortunes of the head bishop of Aelia Capitolina.
Already in 325 AD the first ecumenical council of the church, the Councilof Nicaea, attributed special honour to the holy city, though without
awarding it the ‘metropolitan’ status, then the highest rank in the church,which went to the metropolitan of Caesarea-Palaestina rather than to thebishop of Aelia Capitolina. Until the creation of the idea of the Patriarchate
in 325 AD, the position of metropolitan was the highest episcopal rank in
the church. However, in 531 the title of ‘Patriarch’ of Aelia Capitolina wascreated by Byzantine Emperor Justinian (reigned 527–565 AD). Yet, inreality, Aelia Capitolina continued to be viewed as a bishopric until 451,
when the Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council of thechurch, granted it independence not only from the metropolitan of Caesarea
but also from any other higher-ranking bishop, including that of Antioch, inwhat became known as autocephaly, a self-governing church over the‘Three Palestines’. In the Council’s seventh session, the ‘Decree on the
Jurisdiction’ of Aelia Capitolina and Antioch contains the following
reference to the three provinces of greater Palestine:
The most magnificent and glorious judges said: … The arrangement
arrived at through the agreement of the most holy Maximus, the bishopof the city of Antioch, and of the most holy Juvenal, the bishop of
Jerusalem [Aelia Capitolina], as the attestation of each of them declares,
shall remain firm for ever, through our decree and the sentence of theholy synod; to wit, that the most holy bishop Maximus, or rather themost holy church of Antioch, shall have under its own jurisdiction the
two Phœnicias and Arabia; but the most holy Juvenal, bishop of
Jerusalem, or rather the most holy Church which is under him, shall haveunder his own power the three Palestines all imperial pragmatics andletters and penalties being done away according to the bidding of ourmost sacred and pious prince.19
Here the Council of Chalcedon makes a clear geo-political distinction
between the ‘Three’ provinces of Palaestina, the ‘Two provinces ofPhœnicias’ (i.e. the two provinces of Syria) and the province of Arabia.
This decree of elevating the Palestine Church led to the Church of Aelia
Capitolina not only becoming an independent Patriarchate, but also to
becoming (a) the dominant ecclesiastical and religious capital of the ‘Three
Palestines’ and (b) one of the five Patriarchates of Christendom, at the time
known as the Pentarchy (Πενταρχία). In this model, which was reflected by
the laws of Emperor Justinian I (527–565 AD) and received formal
ecclesiastical sanction at the Council in Trullo (692 AD), universal
Christendom was governed by the heads of the five major Patriarchs of theempire: Constantinople, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Aelia Capitolina.
The latter was not among the biggest and most powerful urban centres ofthe empire; it was included by virtue of its holiness. Although the Pentarchy
came about because of the political and ecclesiastical prominence of thesefive Patriarchs, the idea of their universal and exclusive authority was
linked to the increasingly hierarchical administrative structure of the
Byzantine Empire in the 7th century, thus moving the churches further
away from their democratic roots and their status as an association of
independent churches. In reality, however, infighting among the Sees, andthe rivalry between Rome and Constantinople, prevented the Pentarchy
from functioning effectively. Yet the extraordinary elevation of the Palestine
Church made it a top international player far beyond its formal jurisdiction
over the ‘Three Palestines’, which were perceived and represented in
Church documents as one country. However, the metropolitan (‘mother’)church of Caesarea-Palaestina remained the political, military, commercial
and administrative capital of greater Palestine and its metropolitan bishop
remained highly influential both politically and religiously.
Furthermore, in the Orthodox tradition, bishops and archbishops
exercised both religious and temporal political power. Autocephaly for thePalestine Church and membership in the Pentarchy (the five major
Patriarchs of the empire) meant five things:• Religious autonomy, self-governing, self-legislation and ecclesiasticalindependence from the Church of Antioch or Church of Constantinople.
• The extension of the religious jurisdiction and temporal power of the
Church of Aelia Capitolina over the ‘Three Palestines’ (Prima, Secunda
and Tertia).
• Autocephaly and primacy for the Church of Aelia Capitolina reinforced
the distinction between secular and religious capitals in Byzantine
Palestine, of Aelia (Jerusalem) versus Caesarea Maritima.
• Autocephaly and independence of the Palestine Church reinforced theunity of greater Palestine. Now the ‘Three Palestines’ were also officiallyunited ecclesiastically. They were already closely linked commerciallyand militarily and were commanded by the Dux Palaestinae, ‘the militarycommander of Palestine’, who was based in Caesarea-Palaestina andcommanded the garrison of all three provinces of Palaestina in the 5th
and 6th centuries. This all meant that by the early 6th century, in both
ecclesiastical-religious-temporal and military affairs, greater Palestine
was treated as more than three Palestine provinces of the Byzantine
Empire; it was longer treated as separate ‘Three Palestines’ but had
evolved into a single religio-political entity.

• Membership in the exclusive club of Pentarchy provided the Church of
All Palestine with an added international prestige and further clout at
home.
Interestingly, a medieval document written in the 9th or 10th century,
entitled The Limits of the Five Patriarchates, describes the five
Patriarchates of Christendom in the Middle Ages and treats Palestine as acountry. The sequence of the text, which was found appended to somemanuscripts of the New Testament, is a variation of the Pentarchy
established by ecumenical Councils of Chalcedon and Trullo, with the
Patriarchates of Jerusalem moving from fifth to first place. The text, which
in some sources is entitled Knowledge and Cognition of the Patriarchate
Sees (Scrivener 1893: xx), states: ‘The first See and the first patriarchate isof Jerusalem ... contains the whole Palestine a country until Arabia’(Πρῶτος θρόνος καὶ πρώτη πατριαρχία Ἱεροσολύμων ... περιέχων πᾶσαντὴν Παλαιστίνων χώραν ἄχρι Ἀραβίας).
Some of these religious and secular administrative features of Palestine
were initially maintained and later adapted under Islam. Following theMuslim conquest in the 7th century the Arab rulers endorsed the principleof Autocephaly, recognised the autonomy of the Church of Aelia Capitolina
as the seat of Palestinian Orthodox Christianity and recognised the Patriarch
as its leader. For many years, the Muslim Arabs continued to call the city
Iliya (Aelia Capitolina) and they initially minted Arab Byzantine style coinswith the name Iliya Filastin. Palestinian historian al-Maqdisi and someMuslim writers were still using the name Iliya in the 10th century in
combination with other Muslim names for the holy city such as Bayt alMaqdis (al-Maqdisi 2002: 43, 135, 144; Drijvers 2004: 2; Gil, M. 1997:
114).
However, sometime after the Islamic conquest the Arabic term Bayt alMaqdis came into common use. And later, largely starting from the 11th
century onwards, the current name al-Quds became the most common,
supplanting all the other names (Gil, M. 1997: 114). Moreover, for several
centuries throughout early Islam (as under the Christian Byzantines), theclear distinction between the political and administrative capital of Filastin(al-Ramla) and the religious capital of the country (Iliya, Bayt al-Maqdis)
was maintained.

Throughout early Islam the city of Caesarea continued to thrive as alargely Christian city, led by a Greek-speaking elite. However, the local
Christians were predominantly Arab Christians who were connected to thePalestinian Muslim Arabs by language, history and social customs. The
powerful metropolitan archbishops of the city kept their autonomy andmanaged to maintain ecclesiastical ties with the churches of the Byzantine
state. However, in the absence of close Byzantine imperial control, the local
autonomy of the archbishops of Caesarea (and of Aelia Capitolina)
increased significantly under Arab Muslim rule and the See of Caesarea
Maritima became the effective local rulers not only of the city but also of its
surrounding countryside.
LATIN PALESTINE
The current archaeological knowledge about Palestine during the Islamic
period shows that for several centuries the country prospered and grewunder its Muslim rulers. This should surprise no one; the similar situation in
the Andalus (Muslim Spain) is evidence for the great opulence andinnovation of the Muslim regime. Indeed, when the European (Frankish)
Crusaders invaded Muslim-majority Palestine in 1099, they found there acultural and technical level of development unknown in contemporary
Europe.
The Catholic Church, reaching the peak of its political power in the High
Middle Ages, called armies from across Europe to a series of Crusades
against Islam. The Latin Crusaders occupied Palestine in 1099 and founded
the Crusader states in the Levant. Following the great East–West schism of1054 between the Eastern Orthodox and Latin churches and after the arrivalof the first Latin Crusaders in Palestine, the Crusaders appointed a Latin
Patriarch in Jerusalem. The hierarchical international organisational
structure of the Latin Church contrasted sharply with the organisation in the
East of a network of independent churches. The Crusaders also dismissed
the principles of autocephaly and the independence of the Palestine
Orthodox Church. As a result, the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch chose to
relocate to Constantinople, in exile until 1187, and returned to the city only
after its liberation by Salah al-Din. Furthermore, paradoxically in the Latin
Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, in the early 12th century the diocese of‘Caesarea in Palaestina’ lost its religious and cultural autonomy and wassubjected to the direct control of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem which
was overseen by the European rulers and settlers of the Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem.
However, the Latin Kings of Jerusalem sought to revive memories of
Byzantine Palaestina and the actual diocese system of the All Palaestina
Church was revived in Frankish Palestine. For instance, the ‘Archbishop of
Petra, in Palaestina’ – which in the 6th century was the metropolis of the
Byzantine province of Palaestina Tertia (Salutaris) – was established atsome stage during the Crusader era and served the diocese of Palaestrina
III, the Transjordan area, and traditionally included St Catharine’s
Monastery on Mount Sinai, although Crusader military protection rarely
extended deep into Sinai. Despite the dwindling number of Christians in the
Petra region, appointing Archbishops of Petra lingered into the 20th
century.
The hierarchy of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and high-minded
elite Frankish crusaders in Palestine, who sought to create a European
Latin-speaking colony in the Holy Land, could not prevent thetransformation, within a generation or so, of the outlook of many ordinary
Latin settlers in Palestine. Some churchy Latin crusaders were deeply
concerned that many ordinary European colonists practically went native inPalestine, adopting ‘Oriental’ styles and local customs. Fulcher of Chartres,a priest who participated in the First Crusade (of which he later wrote achronicle), then served the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and acted aschaplain to Baldwin, the Latin King of Jerusalem, until 1118, wrote in July1124:
For we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who
was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilean, or an inhabitant of Palestine.
One who was a citizen of Rheims or of Chartres now has been made acitizen of Tyre or of Antioch. We have already forgotten the places ofour birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least,
are unmentioned. Some already possess here homes and servants which
they have received through inheritance. Some have taken wives not
merely of their own people, but Syrians, or Armenians, or even Saracens[Muslim Arabs] who have received the grace of baptism ... One
cultivates vines, the other the fields. … Different languages, now made

common, become known to both races. (Cited in Heng 2015: 359; also
Folda 2001)
This rapid ‘Orientalisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of many ordinary
European Crusaders should surprise no one; after all, the levels of social,
cultural and technical development in Palestine and the Near East at thetime under Islam were superior to those in Europe. However, by the 1120s,
Nazareth in Galilee, under the impact of educated Frankish settlers, had
become a scholarly centre of some importance and was referred to as a‘famous religious community’ in a papal document of 1145 (Riley-Smith
2005: 75): The city provided a living to some literary figures including
Rorgo Fretellus of Nazareth and Gerard of Nazareth; its library, thecatalogue of which survives, had similarities with European schools.
Although Latin settlers in Palestine and the Levant still looked towards
Europe for learning and culture, today Palestine and the Levant areconsidered to have been a channel for the transmission of Arabic learning toEurope (Riley-Smith 2005: 75). In the 1130s, a Frankish archdeacon, Rorgo
Fretellus of Nazareth (Fetellus), who had moved to Palestine, wrote a
guidebook that was used by pilgrims and scholars. He spoke of Provincia
Palaestina in his descriptions of Latin Palestine: ‘The city of Jerusalem issituated in the hill-country of Judea, in the province of Palestine’ (Fetellus1892). Jonathan Riley-Smit has pointed to the ‘survival in Latin Palestine of
the Muslim administration’ (1977), and in all probability Fretellus ofNazareth was conflating scriptural geography with the actual Arab Islamic
province of Filastin prior to the Latin Crusades.
Overall, following the establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
the power and religious independence of the local Palestine Orthodox
church were reduced sharply and the two Sees of Caesarea Maritima andJerusalem were transformed into a Frankish archdiocese, subordinate to theLatin Patriarch of Jerusalem. The Crusaders also confiscated properties andseized key ecclesiastical positions traditionally held by the Greek Orthodox
clergy in Palestine (Ellenblum 2003: 505). This policy undermined further
the position of the Greek Orthodox clergy in the eyes of the predominantly
Orthodox Arab Christians of Palestine. In the early 13th century, following
the defeat of the Latin Crusaders by the Ayyubids, the Palestinian Arab
town of Qaysariah (Caesarea-Palaestina) was still being described by Arabgeographers as a key town in Filastin (Le Strange 2014: 29). In the post-

Crusader period, however, Qaysariah and its formerly renowned andpowerful metropolitan bishops and scholars never recovered theirinfluential position after the destruction of the first Latin Kingdom by Salah
al-Din (Saladin) in 1187 and the eventual elimination of the 200-year
Frankish rule from Palestine by the Mamluks in the late 13th century,
Although today the formerly powerful Archiepiscopal See of CaesareaPalaestina is largely symbolic, the social memory and spectacular history of
Caesarea-Palaestina are remembered by the Palestinian Christians, and theEastern Orthodox Metropolitan of Caesarea is represented by an Exarch of
Palaestina Prima, under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Orthodox
Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
The local Arab Muslim‒Christian bonds in Jerusalem can be traced toearly Islam. Following the elimination of the European Latin Crusadersfrom the city, indigenous Arab Muslim‒Christian shared traditions ofconvivencia in Jerusalem were re-cultivated; symbolically, the keys to the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre were entrusted to two aristocratic Palestinian
Muslim families in the city, the Nuseibeh and Judeh al-Ghoudia. Created by
Salah al-Din shortly before his death in 1193, this post-Crusader ceremonial
tradition added another widely respected layer of daily rituals to the multilayered ancient sacredness of the site. Today the ruins of Crusader sites(churches, hostels and castles) are visible throughout historic Palestine andgraffiti left by Crusaders can still be seen in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
RELIGIO-CULTURAL AND INSTITUTIONAL MEMORIES OFPROVINCIA PALAESTINA AND MODERN PALESTINE
The structure of the Palestine Church created during this period is stillpreserved in the structure of the Palestine Church today. The Church inPalestine became an independent body in the 5th century (autocephaly), nolonger an appendage of the empire of Byzantium, an important stage indeveloping the polity of Palestine. Also, the religio-cultural‒geographic
memories of Provincia Palaestina (greater Palestine) under the Byzantines
have been kept alive by the local churches of Palestine. Today the sharedmemories and indeed actual institutional continuities of the ‘Three in One’
Palestine is represented in the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem,or the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Arabic: Kanisat Al-Rumal-Ortodoks fi-Quds), the Byzantine Orthodox Church of al-Quds.
Originally the Patriarchate of Aelia Capitolina, it is regarded by many
Christians as the ‘mother’ church of all Christendom. Today it exercises
ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the predominantly Arabic-speaking
Orthodox Christians of Palestine, Israel and Jordan. The headquarters of thePalestine Orthodox Patriarchate is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem. The church dates back to 4th century Palestine. The name
Church of the Holy Sepulchre is derived from the Latin Ecclesia Sancti
Sepulchri. The Israeli name, Knesiyat ha-Kever, is derived from the same
European tradition which began with the Latin Crusaders. Yet the Arabic
name used by Palestinian Christians and Muslims, the Church of the
Resurrection, Kaneesat al-Qiyamah, is directly derived from the Orthodox
Greek toponym of Byzantine Palestine: Church of the Anastasis (Ναός τηςΑναστάσεως), named after the ‘resurrection’ of Jesus. This is another way
of showing how Palestinian toponyms and local toponymic memory
managed to preserve some of the social and historic memories of 4th
century Palestine and the dominant religious traditions of the ‘Three
Palestines’ of Late Antiquity.
Moreover, the religious authority over the Orthodox Christians ofPalestine, Israel and Jordan is derived directly from its autocephaly,
independence and jurisdiction over the ‘Three Palestines’ of Late Antiquity.
This social memory of historic Palestine is also reflected by the fact that the
Church celebrates its liturgy in the Byzantine Rite, whose original language
is Koine Greek, the official language of the ‘Three Palestines’ during the
Byzantine period.
Also, today the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III of
Jerusalem is represented as ‘Patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem and allPalestine’; ‘all Palestine’ of today, then, is a modern reformulation of the‘Three Palestines’ of the Byzantine era. Elected in 2005, Theophilos III
could trace his office in Jerusalem to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, an
office with historical ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Provincia Palaestina(Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris). The
Patriarch of Aelia Capitolina is also the religious leader of Eastern
Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land/Palestine/Israel and Jordan, who are
predominantly Palestinian and Jordanian Arabs. The election was endorsed
by Jordan on 24 September 2005, as one of the ‘three governments’ whose

endorsement is apparently required. Two years later, the Israeli government
officially recognised his election on 16 December 2007.
MATERIAL EVIDENCE AND POWERFUL SYMBOLS OFBYZANTINE PALAESTINA (ΠΑΛΑΙΣΤΙΝΗ): THE 1884
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY OF THE MADABA
MOSAIC MAP
Urban development and the construction of civil buildings and churches inPalestine reached a zenith in the reign of Justinian (527 to 565 AD) (Burns
and Eadie 2001; Walmsley 1996) and the Madaba Mosaic Map is one of themost powerful symbols of this urban Palestine during this spectacular era ofLate Antiquity. Discovered in 1884, in the course of the construction of a
new Greek Orthodox church in Madaba (present-day Jordan) on the site ofits Byzantine predecessor, St George’s church, the map is the most famousand among the oldest surviving material evidence for the official use of thename Palaestina in Late Antiquity. Since then more churches with floor
mosaics have been discovered in Madaba that are similar to those found in
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The city contains one of the greatest
concentrations of mosaics from the Byzantine and Umayyad periods andthese mosaics are also testimony to the spectacular Palestine mosaic
industry, ancient, medieval and modern (see chapter seven). Showing
Palestine, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, and featuring a detailed
description of the holy city of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) at its centre,
being one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the study of
Byzantine Palestine, the remaining part of the map contains the oldest
surviving original cartographical depiction of Byzantine Palaestina. Thispart also contains details of some of the key cities of Palaestina Prima
including Aelia Capitolina, Gaza, Ascalon and Eleutheropolis (Beit Jibrin).
Dated 560‒565 AD, the map was created originally on a large scale(measuring 15 by 6 metres) and was part of the mosaic floor of the early
Byzantine church of St George, Madaba, 30 kilometres to the south-west of‘Amman. The mosaic floor map was created by local Christian artists andwas aimed at Christian pilgrims, travellers and theologians. At the time
Madaba, part of the administrative Byzantine province of Palaestina Prima,
was the seat of a Christian bishop.

The Madaba Map has a famous extract showing ‘οροι Αιγυπτου καιΠαλαιστινης’ (the ‘border of Egypt and Palestine’). There is no mention of
the terms ‘Cana’an’ or ‘land of Israel’ on this historic map of Late
Antiquity Palestine. The map (with the ‘border of Egypt and Palestine’) is
another powerful indication of the fact that the name Palaestina was theofficial name of the country throughout early Christianity and Late
Antiquity.
The Madaba Map shows Eleutheropolis as a walled city with three
towers, a curving street with a colonnade in the central part and a large
basilica. In the 4th century AD the city had a Christian bishop with thelargest territory in Palaestina Prima. Its bishop Maximus attended the First
Council of Nicaea which was convened in 325 by the Emperor Constantine
I. In December 1964, the Volkswagen Foundation provided funding to theDeutscher Verein für die Erforschung Palästinas (German Society for the
Exploration of Palestine) to work on saving the Madaba Map. And, we shallsee in chapter nine, this sensational and widely publicised discovery of1884, which, at the time, also involved the All Palestine Greek Orthodox
Church of Jerusalem, would also contribute to reviving memories ofhistoric Palestine among some Palestinian Arab Orthodox intellectuals inlate Ottoman Palestine.
THE ‘ATHENS OF ASIA’ IN PALAESTINA: GAZA AS A
MEDITERRANEAN CENTRE OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE
AND RHETORIC
Mass literacy in Palestine, as in all countries, is a modern phenomenon.
However, looking at the thriving learning centres of Palestine in the 5th and6th centuries AD, one gets a strong sense of the country’s sense of selfidentity, its vibrant economy, its relatively widespread education andliteracy and its overall confident cosmopolitanism. One of the mostimportant centres of learning in the country during this period was the cityof Gaza, which emerges as a seat of classical literature and rhetoric, with anumber of famous scholars living and working there, a vibrant and cultured
Christian urban centre of the whole Mediterranean region.
Throughout this period the harbour cities of Gaza and CaesareaPalaestina, linked by sea transport and the highway of the Via Maris,
competed and worked together as the two most cosmopolitan urban centres

in the country, and both cities had sizeable Arab communities. Also
significant is the fact that in 451 AD, at the crucial ecumenical Council of
Chalcedon, the city of Gaza was represented by an Arab bishop (Shahid
2006a: 523). In the 530s AD Aratius, Dux of Palaestina Prima, and Archon
Stephanus, proconsul of Palaestina Prima are praised in the encomium20
written by a fellow compatriot of Provincia Palaestina, Choricius of Gaza, aphilosopher and rhetorician (died in 518 AD), for maintaining law andorder and improving the water supply system of Caesarea Maritima by
maintenance work, clearing obstructions from the high-level aqueducts(Patrich 2011: 109; also 2001; Prummer 2002: 246). Encomium also refers
to several distinct aspects of rhetoric for which the classical Gaza School of
Rhetoric became very famous in Late Antiquity.
Established more than 5000 years ago, Gaza is one of the oldest cities in
the world. Located strategically between Egypt and Asia, at the centre of
the ancient road of the Via Maris, and on a beachfront, Gaza has neverstopped looking at the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza was also a very ancient
port and the closest outlet for Arabia. It treated Petra as its hinterland andthe ancient Greeks knew that it was through Gaza they could reach India(Humbert 2000).
In the 12th century BC the Philistines made Gaza the leading city of thePentapolis of Philistia. As we have seen above, Gaza was always identified
with the key cities of Philistia and with the ancient Philistines. Mentioned in
the Amarna letters as ‘Azzati’, Gaza served as ancient Egypt’s
administrative capital in Palestine. In the 5th and 4th centuries BC the cities
of Philistia maintained their international trading links and developed their
distinct Philisto-Arabian coins; the city continued to flourish under the
Romans and in the 2nd century AD imperial Roman bronze coins werestruck in Gaza. In the course of the two long periods of Palestine under the
Romans and Byzantines, Gaza expanded and its strategically locatedMediterranean port continued to prosper. In 635 AD, Gaza became one of
the first cities in Palestine to be conquered by the Arab Muslim army and it
quickly developed into a major centre of Islamic jurisprudence. Today thecity of Gaza, with a population of over 500,000, is the largest Arab city inPalestine; the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants are Muslims, but there is also a
Christian Arab minority.
Under the Byzantines, Palestinian society of Late Antiquity was, on thewhole, an educated one. Basic education was widely available, sometimes

at village level, especially for men. Education was fostered not only in theimperial capital Constantinople but also in schools operating in major
centres such as Antioch, Alexandria, Caesarea Maritima and Gaza. The
main components of education were rhetoric, philosophy, law andlanguages (Greek and Latin) with the aim of producing educated leadersand officials for state and church. However, female participation in
patriarchal society was not encouraged in the new ‘Athens of theMediterranean’. For instance, the lot of women in classicising Gaza was notmuch better than the situation of women in the patriarchal classical Athensof the 4th century AD (Sivan 2008: 300).
Today the spectacular classical heritage of Late Antiquity Palestine is nottaught in Palestine; educated Palestinians are more likely to recall theclassical heritage of the ‘House of Wisdom’ (Bayt al-Hikmah), a major
intellectual centre in Baghdad throughout the Golden Age of Islam from the
9th to the 13th centuries, than the classical Rhetorical School of Gaza orclassical Library of Caesarea Maritima. Yet the disciplines of rhetoric (theart of discourse) and philosophy were central not only to ancient, classicaland post-classical intellectual life but also to the classical heritage of Late
Antiquity Palestine. If the capital city of Palaestina Prima, Caesarea,flourished in Late Antiquity, developing into a Mediterranean centre ofclassicising, learning, theologising and historical writings, theMediterranean city of Gaza became in the course of the late 5th and early
6th centuries the home of a classicising Christian School of Rhetoric(Kennedy, G. 1994: 255). In the School of Gaza, the classical tradition had
become deeply intertwined with the Christian one. Other cities of greater
Palestine, such as Ascalon (‘Asqalan) and Scythopolis (Beisan), were also
profoundly transformed by this post-classical Christian renaissance of Late
Antiquity.
Intellectually and culturally influenced by a mix of diverse Hellenistic
traditions of Alexandria, Caesarea-Palaestina and Athens, as well as by
Christian Neo-Platonism, the extraordinarily relaxed setting and flourishingcultural and intellectual urban environment of Christian-majority Gaza forover two centuries in Late Antiquity brought about the spectacular rise of
the Rhetorical School of Gaza, which was headed by Christian philosophersand rhetoricians including Procopius of Gaza (c. 465–528 AD) (Westberg
2009; Kennedy, D. 2008: 169) and his disciple Choricius of Gaza. The latter
flourished in the early 6th century AD. In the classical tradition, love forrhetoric and love for theatrical performance went hand in hand and in Gaza,
as well as in several other Palestinian cities, a thriving theatre culture arose.
The private and public spaces of Christian-majority Gaza nurtured theatricalperformances and public rhetorical displays in schools, ‘holy theatres’ andeven public ‘baths’ (Champion 2014: 21‒51). This flourishing cultural
space and indeed intellectual revolution in Gaza was described by George
A. Kennedy as follows:
Gaza, on the southern coast of Palestine, was a pleasant and prosperous
city in the Fifth Century which clung to the old traditions. Julian’s
apostasy was greeted there with enthusiasm. Gregory of Naziansus ...
and Libanius thought well of its rhetoric schools ... Christianity may fora time have inhibited classical studies in Gaza, but in the late Fifth andearly Sixth Centuries it was the home of a series of Classicizing sophists
and writers who together constitute what is known as the School ofGaza. The most important of these are Procopius and Choricius, but brief
mention may be made of several others. Aeneas of Gaza was the authorof a surviving dialogue entitled Theophrastus. (Kennedy, G. 2008: 169)
For many centuries prior to Late Antiquity, Gaza and Arab sailors andtraders had been central to the long-distance spice trade route from India tosouthern Arabia and then to the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. Gaza
had also achieved economic and social prosperity, being at the centre of the
traditional King’s Highway from Egypt, with routes running through Naqab
and Transjordan – a highway which confirmed its status as a major port
city. Its port was not only the gateway to the towns and villages of southern
Palestine but also for trade goods arriving from southern Arabia and India
to the Mediterranean (Hirschfeld 2004: 63). Jennifer Hevelone-Harper, in
Disciples of the Desert: Monks, Laity, and Spiritual Authority in SixthCentury Gaza (2005), describes 6th century Gaza as a major economic,
intellectual and cultural centre not only for Palaestina Prima but for thewhole Eastern Mediterranean region:late antique [Antiquity] Gaza was a commanding cultural and economic
center ... the sixth-century city was known for its bustling market-places,
its lavish theater and baths, its resplendent churches adorned withmosaics and all the other amenities of a prosperous urban center. With its

port, Maiouma, a couple of miles away on the coast, Gaza served as a
key commercial center, not only for its own province, Palestine I[Palaestina Prima], but for the entire eastern Mediterranean. The city wasa major destination for spices, silk and luxury goods coming overland by
caravan from the East; these items would then be dispersed by sea to allparts of the western empire. Local products such as wine, dried fruit21
and flax were exported from Gaza to the rest of the Roman world, while
wheat was imported from Egypt to feed the crowded city. Moreover, aroad to the northeast led to Jerusalem, the chief center for Christianpilgrimage, only forty miles away. Visitors to the Holy Land from allover the empire made sure to include a trip to Gaza in their itinerary to
see the ancient biblical city of Samson’s last victory.
In addition to boasting local amenities, the prosperity of late antique
Gaza nurtured remarkable intellectual and cultural developments. The
school of rhetoric in Gaza was famous throughout the Mediterranean
world. Its distinguished orators were instrumental in bringing about arevival of rhetoric in the six century. (Hevelone-Harper 2005: 3)
The Madaba Map – the most famous surviving material evidence for theofficial and administrative use of the name Palaestina in Late Antiquity,which depicts greater Palestine of the 6th century AD – shows seven large
villages and provincial towns between Gaza and Elusa (at one point thecapital of Palaestina Salutaris which had several Arab bishops), 23
kilometres south-west of the city of Beersheba. Also, two important roads
crossed the region in the Byzantine period, including the route of the ‘SpiceRoad’ along which the Nabataean Arabs transported precious cargoes fromthe East (Hirschfeld 2004: 63‒66).
Koine Greek and Latin were the prevalent languages of Late Antiquity
Gaza, although the Ghassanid Arabs, who resided throughout Palaestina
and in Gaza, spoke Arabic and much of the Palestinian peasantry spoke
Aramaic. Procopius (Procopios) of Gaza – who must be distinguished fromthe aforementioned renowned 6th century Palestinian historian Prokopios of
Caesarea-Palaestina – was an original Christian sophist and rhetorician, andone of the most important representatives of the famous Rhetorical Schoolof his native Gaza in Palaestina Prima, a school with a lasting impact on thediscipline of rhetoric. Procopius spent nearly all of his life in Gaza teaching
and writing philosophical and rhetorical tracts. However, what we know

about him comes mainly from his letters and from the encomium (Greek:
enkomion, literally the praise of a person) of his disciple and successor
Chorikios of Gaza. The latter was another major Palestinian rhetorician anda representative of the Gaza School of Rhetoric in the time of Emperor
Anastasius I (491–518 AD). The encomium of what became widely known
as the Gaza School of Rhetoric also refers to the distinct aspects ofrhetorical pedagogy and rhetorical genres of Late Antiquity that developed
and flourished. The surviving works of Chorikios of Gaza, which
encompass the main genres of post-classical Greek rhetoric, are represented
in the elegant style of the Gaza School of Rhetoric with its special featuresand peculiarly persistent avoidance of hiatus. Chorikios’ work became also
known for its panegyrical descriptions of two churches in Gaza,
descriptions which consist of some of the most prominent early examples of
ekphrasis – a graphic, dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art –of church buildings.22
Palestine was brought fully under Islam in 637‒638 by the third Caliph‘Umar, who expanded the Caliphate (khilafah) at an unprecedented rate,conquering the Sasanian Empire and about two-thirds of the Byzantine
Empire. In the 690s the Umayyad Marwanid rulers embarked on a colossal
building programme in Palestine in general and Iliya (Bayt alMaqdis/Jerusalem) in particular. The church architectural styles of
Byzantine Palestine and Bilad al-Sham significantly influenced the Islamicarchitecture of Palestine under the Umayyads, the most celebrated example
of which was the exquisite octagonal structure of the Dome of the Rock
(Qubbat al-Sakhrah), sponsored by Caliph ‘Abdel Malik ibn Marwan in
685‒691 AD. It is the oldest extant Muslim monument in the world andByzantine Palestine influences are evident in its mosaics. Islam and Muslim
Palestine inherited the cultural, material, administrative and intellectual
heritage of Byzantine Palestine. Archaeological excavations at al-Ramla,
the capital of Jund Filastin for over three and a half centuries, discovered
mosaics with animals including lions, birds and donkeys (Petersen 2005).
Islam also absorbed and developed further the Greek Aristotelianphilosophical traditions and Christian Neo-Platonism, a tradition ofphilosophy that arose in the 3rd century AD and persisted until shortly after
the closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens in 529 AD by Emperor
Justinian I. However, Byzantine Palaestina of the 4th‒6th centuries AD
recreated and developed further the Greek traditions in Gaza and Caesarea-

Palaestina. Subsequently the Golden Age of Islam also translated these
traditions into Arabic and developed them further intellectually andscientifically, first in the Abbasid capital city of Baghdad (from the late 7th
century onwards) and later in the Andalus Ummayad capital city ofCordoba (from the 10th century onwards). It is not inconceivable that theextraordinary intellectual, material and scientific heritage of greater
Palestine, that is, Gaza, Caesarea-Palaestina, Ascalon (‘Asqalan),Jerusalem, Scythopolis (Beisan), provided one of the many cultural routes
to the Golden Age of Islam from the 8th to the 13th century.
The Rhetorical School of Gaza was also involved in collating theopinions of commentators of preceding centuries and its work contributed
to palaeography, the study of ancient and historical handwriting and of theforms and processes of writing. The most important development thatconcerned palaeographers was script. This issue is also applicable to thecatenae (Latin for chain) and its relationship to scholia. The term catenae isreserved for annotated biblical texts rather than classical texts and thedistinction made between catenae and scholia is that the former makes anattempt to cite the name of the authority, usually before the quotation. In
catenae the author is more of a compiler and editor with very little to add tothe work.
Historian of Byzantuim N. G. Wilson was the first to suggest thatcatenae come from the Palestine School of Gaza in the 5th century.
Procopius of Gaza describes his method in the following excerpt from ahypothesis: ‘Having been supplied the ability before God, we collected the
explanations which were put down from the Fathers and the others into theOctateuch, combining these things from commentaries and different
sayings’. From this we learn that Procopius took selections from authorities
and added them to the text. This expanded the text but made the corpus ofopinions of the Church Fathers more manageable. Zosimus of Gaza was asophist during the time of Emperor Anastasius. He wrote a rhetoricallexicon according to the alphabet and a commentary on Demosthenes andLysias. According to 11th century Byzantine historian Georgius Cedrenus,
Zosimus of Gaza was put to death during the reign of Zeno in 490 AD. On
the one hand, we may have a Zosimus contemporary with Procopius who
was involved in scholia on classical authors or, on the other hand, there
may have been two of that name. It is possible that the scholiast Zosimus ofGaza flourished in the mid-5th century. In that case, he may have been

responsible for introducing the practice of entering scholia such as is
attributed to a Zosimus (Wilson 1967: 254). The School of Gaza did not
make a distinction between scholia (marginal commentary on classicaltexts) and catenae (marginal commentary on biblical texts). Commenting
on the beginnings of catenae in Gaza, Timothy Seid writes: ‘The evidence
suggests that marginal commentary on biblical texts [by Christiantheologians] had a beginning in the fifth to sixth century and was probablyof Palestinian origins if not the School of Gaza itself’.23
POPULAR RELIGION AND THE RELAXED SETTING OF
GAZA: THE ROSE FESTIVAL OF GAZA
If Christian classicism and Origenism in Caesarea-Palaestina sought todevelop theologies and philosophies of the mind, the classicisingphilosophers and Christian theologians of Gaza sought to combine hightheology and classical rhetoric with popular religion and religious festivals,
the most famous of which was the Rose Festival of Gaza. In the relaxedsetting of Gaza the Christian rhetoricians Procopius and Coricius
participated in the Rose Festival (Kennedy, G. 2008: 171), a spring festivalwith a long classical history and deep pagan roots. Also John of Gaza wrote
two anacreontic poems – imitating verses in metre used by the Greek poet
Anacreon (c. 582–c. 485 BC) in his poems dealing with love and wine –that he says he presented publicly on ‘the day of the roses, anddeclamations by Procopius’. Poetry by Chorikios of Gaza is also set at rosedays (Westberg 2009: 187‒189; Talgam 2004: 223‒224).
In the 6th century, a ‘Day of Roses’ was held in Gaza as a spring festivalthat may have been a Christianised continuation of the Rosalia (Talgam
2004: 223‒224; Belayche 2004: 17). In Greece and Rome, floral wreaths
and garlands and greenery had been worn by both men and women forfestive occasions. Rosaria or Rosalia was a Roman festival of rosescelebrated on various dates, primarily in May. The observance is sometimes
called a rosatio (‘rose-adornment’) or the dies rosationis (‘day of roseadornment’). As a commemoration of the dead, the rosatio developed fromthe custom of placing flowers at burial sites. In classical mythology bloodand flowers were linked in divine metamorphosis. Flowers were traditional
symbols of rejuvenation, rebirth and memory, with the red and purple ofroses and violets felt to evoke the colour of blood as a form of propitiation.

When Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite, was killed by a boar during a hunt, hisblood produced a flower. Their blooming period framed the season ofspring. In some parts of the pagan Roman Empire the Rosalia wasassimilated into floral elements of spring festivals for Dionysus, Adonis andAphrodite (Roman Venus), but rose-adornment as a practice lent itself toChristian commemoration of the dead. The Roman pagan traditions
associated with the Rosalia were reinterpreted into Christian terms andearly Christian writers of Palestine transferred the pagan imagery ofgarlands and crowns of roses and violets to the cult of the Christian saints.
Roses were in general part of the imagery of early Christian funerary art.
Christian martyrs were often described or depicted with flower imagery, orin ways that identified them with flowers. These early Christian traditionsof Byzantine Palestine and Gaza also survived in modern Catholic
traditions of Palestine.
A modern incarnation of the Roman Catholic Rosary is found in the
Arabic name Rahbat al-Wardiyyah (‘Sisters of the Rosary’). In May 2015
the founder of Rahbat-al-Wardiyyah, Sister Marie Alphonsine Danil
Ghattas, a Palestinian nun, was proclaimed a saint at a ceremony in the
Vatican.24 Born in Jerusalem, Maryam Sultanah Danil Ghattas (1843‒1927)– Marie Alphonsine after she joined the Congregation of St Joseph of the
Apparition – founded in 1880 the Rosary Sisters, the first female
congregation of nuns devoted to eradicating illiteracy among womenregardless of faith, education and social welfare in the Holy Land/Palestine.
Today the Christian Arab Sisters of the Rosary, supported by the Latin
Patriarchate of Jerusalem, run forty-two schools in Palestine, Jordan and
Israel. These schools educate both Muslim and Christian Arab students(Jansen 2006: 59).
MONASTIC SCHOOL OF GAZA AND THE MONASTERIES OF
PALAESTINA: THE DESERT FATHERS AND MOTHERS AND
THEIR WORLDWIDE IMPACT
Forgotten, as if you never were.
Like a bird’s violent deathlike an abandoned church you’ll be forgotten,
like a passing love
and a rose in the night ... forgottenwhen I’m forgotten!
(Mahmoud Darwish, Forgotten As If You Never Were25)‘Desert theology’ and the monasteries of the desert of Late Antiquity
Palestine, Egypt and Syria played an influential role in Near Eastern
societies, and the ‘Desert Fathers’ are widely acknowledged today as key
figures in the history of Christian theology, spirituality and doctrinaldevelopments (Binns 1994). If the Mediterranean cities of Caesarea
Maritima and Gaza, with their renowned scholars, libraries andintellectuals, represented Palaestina of the mind, the monastic traditions of
Palaestina represented Palestine of the heart. The latter had a huge impact
on the worldwide monastic traditions of both Christianity and Islam andreligious mysticism in general. According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet
Muhammad met the monk Bahirah (Sergius) in one of the Christianmonasteries in the town of Bosra in the Hauran region, then an integral partof Palaestina Secunda. In the ‘Three Palestines’, Ghassanid Arab Christians
belonged largely to monophysitism. If Gaza of Late Antiquity, with its
classicising Rhetorical School, became a famous centre for philosophy,
rhetoric, drama and law, the region of Gaza also became renowned for its
distinct monastic tradition. Indeed, one of the most spectacular chapters in
the history of Late Antiquity Palestine was the monastic culture andmonastic legacy of Gaza. An intellectual monastic community flourished in
the region of Gaza in Palaestina Prima from the 4th to the 7th century,
creating a distinct Palestinian monastic tradition, shaped by the
Christological intellectual battles of the 5th and 6th centuries, andproducing a wealth of literary works which might be termed the ‘Monastic
School of Gaza’ (Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky 2006).26
The earliest known Christian monasticism appeared simultaneously inthe deserts of Egypt and Palestine around the 3rd century AD. The famousmonastic developments of the Gaza region were intimately connected toboth the Palestinian and the Egyptian experiences (Hevelone-Harper 2005:ix). However, by the 4th century greater Palestine effectively replaced
Egypt as the centre of desert monasticism. Between the 4th and early 7th
centuries Palestine, and in particular the two semi-arid regions of Gaza andeast Jerusalem – which became known as the ‘desert of Jerusalem’ – was‘converted into a city’ and became the centre of the global Christianmonastic movement.

The legendary Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers27 were Christianhermits, monks and nuns who had a major influence on the development of
Christianity and Christian monasticism worldwide. The monasteries ofPalestine were a centre for knowledge preservation and knowledge
production, from the preservation of the ancient technology of wine-making(of Palaestini liquors) to the copying and archiving of ancient manuscripts.
While the art of copying and wide circulation of manuscripts developed
considerably under Islam, little is known about the ways in which Muslim
philosophies of the heart and Sufi asceticism were directly and indirectly
influenced by the desert mysticism of Egypt and greater Palestine.
However, the knowledge of the heart or inner insight into Christianmonasticism corresponds to ‘Ilm al-Ghayb, or ‘Ilm al-Batin – knowledge ofthe concealed, hidden or inner truth – in Sufi Islam, whose original
inspiration appears in the holy Quran (4: 34, 11:49, 12: 52, 12:102, 25:4‒6).
While Origenism and outward-looking Mediterranean cities such as
Caesarea Maritima, Gaza, Alexandria and Antioch provided the classicisingintellectual, rhetorical, speculative and rational underpinnings for early
Christianity, the solitude, poverty, austerity, interior silence and ‘prayer ofthe heart’ (the Jesus Prayer) of the monastic communities of Egypt, theGaza region and greater Palestine became the city of the heart. This
Palestinian monastic movement combined the way of life of Jesus with amodest and secluded life which included fasts, mortifications and spiritual
activities. Above all, at the heart of this Palestine monastic life of simplicity
and ‘desert escapism’ was the desire to shun power and organised religion,and the growing hierarchy of the official, urban-based church.
The early Christian monastic communities in Palestine establishedautonomous egalitarian communities with an abba (‘my father’ in both
Syriac Aramaic and Quranic Arabic) and an amma (mother) in charge of thespiritual and social welfare of their monks and nuns. The English term
Abbot (its female equivalent is Abbess), meaning father, is an ecclesiasticaltitle given to the head of a monastery in various Christian traditions. The
term itself is derived from the Syriac Aramaic abba, which is based on this
Syriac Aramaic Monophysite tradition of Byzantine Palestine. The title
soon became generally accepted in all languages as the designation of thehead of a monastery.
By the end of the 4th century there were dozens of monasteries withthousands of monks in Palestine. Palestine desert monasticism evolved

from detachment from the world to social and practical engagement withsociety. Numerous Palestinian monasteries of monks and nuns were
established in Gaza region, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Eleutheropolis (BeitJibrin), Nazareth and the Galilee with adjacent hospitals and schools to carefor the sick and serve their local communities. The social teaching andethics of these early egalitarian monastic communities survived in modern
Palestinian Christian theology. However, their speculative approach anddetached way of life gave way to a more engaged and applied theology.
This formed the basis of modern contextualised Palestinian liberation
theology with its preference for the poor, marginalised subaltern and its
struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism and the occupation of Palestine(Masalha and Isherwood 2014). Their social teaching also gave rise to thedoctrines developed by the more engaged Christian churches of Palestineon matters of social justice, poverty and wealth, economic and socialorganisations and the role of the state.
In Palestine monasteries evolved into two distinct types: ‘monastery ofhermits’, or lauras (Greek: lavra), and ‘communal monastery of monks’(coenobium28). The first lauras were founded in Palestine and the Greek
term Λαύρα (Greek: path29), which referred to the cluster of caves or cells
used by the hermits for seclusion, with a church as their weekly meeting
centre, was specifically employed from the 5th century for the Palestinesemi-hermitical monastic communities in what became known as the‘desert of Jerusalem’, where thousands of hermits and monks lived anddozens of lauras and communal monasteries were established.
Supported by the Byzantine state, desert monasticism and enlightened
philosophies of the heart encouraged the proliferation of monasteries acrossgreater Palestine (Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina
Salutaris). Crucially under the Christian Byzantines Sinai, the Nagab(Negev), the Nabataean region and northern Arabia (former Roman
Provincia Arabia) were all part of Palaestina Salutaris (Ward 2008: 69). The
monastery of St Catherine was built between 548 and 565 as a Palaestina
Salutaris monastery dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Saint
Catherine’s monastery lies at the foot of Mount Sinai, which was mentioned
in the Quran (Surah al-Tur, Chapter 52, Verses 1–28). For local audiences in
the 6th and 7th centuries, Palaestina Salutaris, Sinai and northern Arabia
were geographically linked and administratively united.

The Jerusalem desert monasteries developed an extensive system ofcisterns built to catch and store rainwater, and, like the Nabataean Arabs
before them, they became known for their great ability in constructing
efficient water collecting methods in the semi-arid and barren environment.
The numerous monasteries of Palaestina Prima included the famous
Euthemius Monastery which was established in 428 to the east of Jerusalem
and named after the Armenian monk Euthemius (377‒475), who was one of
the founders of the ‘Jerusalem desert’ monasticism of Christian-majority
Byzantine Palestine. The monastery of Euthemius would also play animportant role in converting to Christianity the Arab tribes that had settled
in Palaestina Prima in the 4th and 5th centuries (see chapter five). The site
continued to function as a major Christian monastery for centuries under
Muslim rule and the Latin Crusaders expanded it further in the 12th century.
The monastery was abandoned after the expulsion of the Crusaders from
Jerusalem in the late 12th century, and beginning in the 13th century the sitebegan to function as a major Palestinian caravanserai, al-Khan al-Ahmar(the ‘Red Inn’), on the Jerusalem‒Jericho trade road, until its final desertion
at some point during the Ottoman period. A nearby 16th century Ottoman
caravanserai, also named al-Khan al-Ahmar, was built to shelter caravans oftraders.
Many Byzantine Palestinian monasteries continued to flourish after the
Arab Islamic conquest of Palestine in the 630s. Mar Saba’s Monastery is
located south of Jerusalem in the West Bank. It evolved from a Laura to acommunal monastery and continues to function today. Founded in
Palaestina Prima in 484, it is dedicated to Saint Sabbas the Sanctified (439–532),30 a ‘leader of Palestinian monasticism’ whose impact as founder andabbot has endured from the 5th century to the present (Patrich 1995).
Sabbas was a Cappadacian-born Greek monk and priest who lived most of
his life in Palaestina Prima and composed the first monastic rule of church
services, ‘the Jerusalem Typikon’, a monastic book to regulate life inmonasteries and for guidance of all the Byzantine monasteries. Anotherfamous monastery in Palaestina Prima was Saint Hilarion’s, located intoday’s Gaza Strip and dedicated to Saint Hilarion (291–371). A legendary
Desert Father, Hilarion was born in Thabatha, then 5 miles south of Gaza
city, in the Roman province of Syria-Palaestina. After he had lived in thewilderness for twenty-two years, this hermit of Palestine became famousthroughout Syria-Palaestina and beyond and petitioners started to visit his
abode near Gaza seeking his blessing and help.
Sabbas’ Life was written by one of his disciples, Cyril of Scythopolis(525‒559) (modern Beisan) in Palaestina Secunda; also known as Cyrillus
Scythopolitanus, he was a Christian monk and historian of monastic life inPalestine in the early years of Christianity (Kazhdan 1991). Sabbas’ relics
were taken by the Latin Crusaders in the 12th century and remained in Italy
until Pope Paul VI returned them to the Palestinian monastery in 1965 as a
gesture of goodwill towards the Orthodox Church. Mar Saba is currently
being considered by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site).31 The numerous
monasteries have left their mark on the landscape of Palestine. They havealso survived in Palestinian social memory and in some of the modern
Palestinian Arabic toponyms which begin with the word Deir (Monastery),although the Arabic word deir (pl. diyar) also means house.
Today the ruins of Euthemius Monastery are located in the Israeli colony
of Ma’alie Adumim in the West Bank. The memory of the Palestiniancaravanserai was preserved in the name of a small Palestinian Bedouin
village, al-Khan al-Ahmar, located between the Israeli settler-colonies ofMa’alei Adumim and Kfar Adumim. This Palestinian village has been
threatened with destruction by the Israeli state since 2010 in a plan toexpand local Israeli settlements in the West Bank.32

Chapter 5

ARAB CHRISTIAN PALESTINE
The pre-Islamic Arab kings, bishops, poets
and tribes of Provincia Palaestina (3rd‒early
7th centuries AD)

Before the arrival of Islam the Arab Christians of Palestine contributed to
the gradual Arabisation of the country as parts of it were transformed into
Arab statelets under the influence of the Byzantine court. This protracted
process, which began hundreds of years before the rise of Islam, contributed
to the spectacular rise of Islam in the early 7th century. The process began
when Arabs started migrating as individuals and communities in different
waves from the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant region, Palestine included.
These waves of migration continued and increased after the triumph of
Christianity in the 4th century AD when the new religion was officiallyembraced by the Roman Empire. The integration of the Ghassanid Arabmigrant communities into Palestinian society in general and the Palestine
Church in particular was much in evidence. In the Ecclesiastical History of
the 5th century AD the bishop of Gaza, Sozomen, who was born in presentday Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip and who was involved in the introductionof Christianity among the ‘Saracens’ (Arabs), refers to the Ishmaelites(Ghassanid Arabs) in Palestine, who were coming into contact not onlywith Christians but also with Jews and learning from them about theircommon descent from Abraham (Hawting 2004: 38).
The history of the birth of Christianity in Palestine and its massive
spread in Late Antiquity has been written largely by Western academics
either from the perspective of Empire or with the elite Christian (Byzantine)
Hellenistic settings in mind. The official narratives of the ‘beginnings’ ofChristianity in Palestine and its doctrinal orthodoxy were all established in
the 4th‒6th centuries and these narratives have been maintained to this day
by the establishments of the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. Veryrarely was an account of early Christianity and Palestine written from theperspective of the local Aramaic-speaking Christian Arabs or the antiChalcedon Christian Monophysite Ghassanid Christian Arabs of greater
Palestine. Yet early Christianity was extremely diverse. The Arabic- andAramaic-speaking Christian Monophysites and Miaphysites of the ‘Three
Palestines’ and the powerful Arab Christian Ghassanid tribal rulers, bishops
and poets of Palaestina Secunda, Palaestina Salutaris and Palaestina Prima
are a case in point.
In the 4th‒6th centuries the three provinces of Palestine went through a
gradual process of Arabisation and large parts of them were effectivelytransformed into Arab vassal states under imperial Byzantine influence.
Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia all acquired
Ghassanid Arab Christian kings. This process of gradual Arabisation ofparts of Palestine began in the 3rd‒4th centuries with the spread ofChristianity throughout the Near East and the gradual conversion of many
Arabs to Christianity.
Christian Arab communities existed in the ‘Three Palestines’ throughout
the 3rd‒6th centuries (Shahid 1989). The Ghassanid Arabs (Arabic: alGhasasinah) were the biggest Arab group in Palestine. They migrated indifferent waves in the early 3rd century from the Arabian Peninsula toPalestine and the southern Levant region (Bowersock et al. 1999). The
presence of the Ghassanids in what became officially known as Palaestina
Salutaris in the 4th century dates back to the 3rd century. The Arabicspeaking Ghassanids converted to Monophysite Christianity before andafter their migration to Palaestina Tertia and frequently merged with the
Greek-speaking Christian communities of the region. Many of them,adhering to austere Monophysism, were initially hostile to the dominant
Nicene Creed (‘two natures’ of Jesus) and official/elite Chalcedon doctrineof the Orthodox Church. While some Ghassanids converted to Islam fromthe mid-7th century onwards, the majority remained Christian and joined
Melkite and Syriac Monophysite communities of the Levant and greater
Palestine. After settling in Palaestina Tertia and Palaestina Secunda, theGhassanids created client (buffer) states to the eastern Roman (later
Byzantine) Empire and fought alongside the Byzantines against the Persian

Sassanids and Arab Lakhmid tribes of southern Iraq. Both the Romans andByzantines found a powerful ally in the Ghassanid Arabs, who acted as abuffer zone and a source of troops for the Byzantine army and controlled
parts of Palaestina Salutaris and Palaestina Secunda.
However, from the 4th to the early 7th centuries, the Byzantine Empire
constructed a patron‒client system and the title phylarch (φύλαρχος:phylarchus) was granted to important Byzantine Arab allied rulers. In
Greek the terms φυλή and φῦλον meant tribe, clan or race. The Byzantine
title phylarch (from phylé and phylon and archein, ‘to rule’) meant ‘ruler ofa large clan or tribe’. This political title was given to the leading princes of
the Ghassanids and other Byzantine Arab allies. Many Arab tribes led byphylarchs had been encouraged to settle as foederati in the ‘Three
Palestines’. When discussing the Ghassanid Arab communities of Palestine,
historian Prokopios of Caesarea uses the expression Sarakēnós anddistinguishes between the ‘Saracens in Palestine’ and territories‘immediately beyond the boundaries of Palestine held by Saracens’(Prokopios 2005). He also defines phylarch as ‘any leader of the Saracens
federated by treaty to the Romans’ (Peters 1994: 61). Originally thefoederati (sing. foederatus) had been Arab allies identified as one of thegroups or nations bound by treaty (foedus); they were neither Romancolonies nor beneficiaries of Roman citizenship (civitas), but they had been
allowed and even encouraged to settle on Roman territory. They were also
obliged to provide a contingent of military men when trouble arose. From
530 to 585, the individual Arab phylarchs were subordinated to a supreme
Ghassanid phylarch (‘phylarch of phylarchs’) or king (Kazhdan 1991).
These supreme phylarchs were appointed as Arab kings of the ‘Three
Palestines’ directly by the Byzantine Emperors of Constantinople (whowere ‘King of Kings’) in the ‘Three Palestines’: Palaestina Prima,
Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia. The dramatic rise of theGhassanid princes to Arab kings in the ‘Three Palestines’ reveals an
important development in Palestine and the emergence of the Arabs as key
players in the politics of pre-Islamic Palestine. These Ghassanid kings werelater to play a major role not only in the Byzantine‒Persian Wars but also in
the affairs of the Eastern Syriac Monophysite Church.
The first appearance of the Ghassanid kings in connection with greater
Palestine is found in a tomb inscription written in Arabic in Nabataean
script dating to the 4th century AD. Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean

Arabic had been spoken for several centuries before Islam (Fiema et al.
2015: 396‒497). The tomb inscription refers to the Ghassanid King Imru alQais, ‘king of all the Arabs’, who died in Byzantine service in 328 (Sartre
2005: 519). Known in Greek sources as Amorkesos (Αμορκέσος), Imru alQais signed a treaty with the Byzantine Empire acknowledging his status as
foederati and as controlling major parts of Provincia Palaestina. Amorkesos
was appointed by the Byzantine Emperor as supreme phylarch of whatbecame known as Palaestina Salutaris and included the Nabataean region
and the former Roman Provincia Arabia. Indeed, the lure of greater
Palestine for the Ghassanid Arabs is illustrated by the military and politicalcareer of Amorkesos and his rise to power in Palestine. This successfollowed his military achievements and his establishment of a power base in
Arabia, and led to his eventual appointment as the Arab king of the regionof Palaestina Tertia. Amorkesos had defected from the military service of
Sassanid Persia and entered the political service of the Byzantine Empire.
Following a visit to Constantinople and royal treatment by Emperor Leo I(Emperor from 457 to 474 AD), Imru al-Qais returned to Palestine having
concluded a foedus with the Emperor, which endowed him with the overall
phylarchate of Palaestina Tertia (Shahid 1989, 2006a: 61‒81). Amorkesos
preferred to serve in Palestine, eventually becoming king (supreme
phylarch) of Palaestina Tertia, rather than be a king in the Arabian
Peninsula. All these Ghassanid Arab leaders not only flourished andexercised considerable power under the Byzantines but also preferred thesocial and cultural environment of Palestine to their former situation in
Arabia (Shahid 1989, 2006a: 61‒81).
The Byzantine imperial patron‒client system worked in both directions:it cemented the Byzantine‒Ghassanid alliance and it was used by the
Ghassanid Arab rulers to consolidate their domain in greater Palestine. By
the late 5th century the Ghassanid kings had dramatically risen to become
the powerful supreme phylarchs of Palaestina Tertia and Palaestina
Secunda, effectively transforming major parts of two Palestines into two
Palestinian Arab vassal kingdoms. Nominally the two Palestines were still
imperial provinces, but in reality, under Ghassanid military and politicalcontrol, they functioned as client monarchical states, having andcommanding their own Arab armies, enforcing law and order within theirjurisdiction, raising revenue and taxes from the lucrative trade passing

through their territories, providing protection to the holy places in Palestineand dispatching ambassadors to foreign countries.
Abu Karib ibn Jabalah (known in Greek as Abocharabus), the Ghassanid
supreme phylarch, was made by Emperor Justinian the supreme phylarch of
Palaestina Tertia (Shahid 1989: 69, 89; Martindale et al. 1992: 111‒112).
Abu Karib had received the territories of Palaestina Tertia, including the
Negev and parts of the northern Hijaz, from his father Jabalah IV (Gabalas
in Greek sources) (Peters 1994: 62), who ruled in Palaestina Tertia from512 to 529. In 529 AD, Abu Karib was endowed with the phylarchate of
Palaestina Tertia by Justinian for the same reason that inspired the creationof the new province, Palaestina Tertia, in the fourth century’ (Shahid 2002:
303).
The Ghassanids reached their peak under Abu Karib’s brother, theMiaphysite al-Harith V ibn Jabalah (Flavios Arethas, Φλάβιος Ἀρέθας inGreek sources) (Shahid 1995, Vol. 1: 260, 294–297), who reigned from 528
to 569 AD as King of the Ghassanids, was made patrikios and vir
gloriosissimus (‘most glorious’, ἐνδοξότατος) and supported the Byzantines
against Sassanid Persia. Gradually, and under the impact of the dominantNicaea/Chalcedonian creed of greater Palestine, the Ghassanid kings had
begun to shift in the early 6th century from austere Monophysitism toMiaphysitism, a doctrine that was perceived to be more amenable to theofficial creed. Harith V played a major role in the affairs of both Miaphysite
and Monophysite churches in the Levant. In 529 AD al-Harith V was given
by Emperor Justinian I the highest imperial title available to the senatorialaristocracy of the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century (Kazhdan 1991:
163). Al-Harith became King of the Ghassanids and supreme phylarch of
Palaestina Secunda and Arabia Petraea around 528 after leading a
successful military campaign against the Mundhir rulers and their Arab
Persian allies in southern Iraq. In the words of historian Prokopios of
Caesarea Maritima, in Palaestina Prima, a source hostile to the Ghassanid
ruler, al-Harith was promoted by Justinian ‘to the dignity of a king’,
becoming the overall commander of all the Byzantines’ Arab allies(foederati) in the East with the title patrikios (πατρίκιος καὶ φύλαρχος τῶνΣαρακηνῶν, ‘patrician and phylarch of the Saracnes’), although his actualarea of political and military control may initially have been limited to partsof Palaestina Secunda and Arabia Petraea (Shahid 1995, Vol. 1: 84‒85, 95‒

109, 225‒226, 260, 282‒288, 294‒297, 337; Martindale et al. 1992: 111‒
113; Kazhdan 1991: 163; Greatrex and Lieu 2002: 88, 129‒130, 135‒136).
As supreme Arab king-phylarchs of Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina
Tertia, al-Harith and Abu Karib were equal in status, each of themdispatched ambassadors of their own respective vassal states to the
Ethiopian ruler of south Arabia, Abraha (Shahid 2009, Vol. 2, Part 2: 44).
As the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, Abu Karib became very famous androse in stature to the point of becoming a participant in the dispatch of
diplomatic representatives to other countries in the Middle East (Shahid
2006b: 90).
The Diocletiantic enlargement of Palaestina Tertia entailed the additionof the Negev and the part of the Provincia Arabia south of the Arnon
River, including Petra. The enlargement thus made the phylarch of
Palaestina Tertia, Abu Karib, responsible for more spice route ... Of all
the exports of Arabia, the item most significant to the Christian Roman
Empire was Frankincense. After first disdaining it as a symbol of pagan
worship, the church finally accepted Frankincense in the late fourth
century. Produced only in Hadramawt in South Arabia, it was brought toByzantium by Arab merchants and taxed [in gold and silver] at thefrontier by such Arab officials as Abu Karib. (Shahid 2009a, Vol. 2, Part
2: 44, 49)
Saracens (Greek: Σαρακηνός, Sarakēnós; late Latin: Saracenus; possibly
from Arabic: šarqiyyin, ‘easterners’) became in medieval and modern times
a pejorative European term closely associated with Arabs and Muslims.
This European negative connotation may be traced to Prokopios’ somewhat
hostile accounts of the Arab foederati and Ghassanid Arabs and their‘upstart’ foederati Arab kings of the ‘Three Palestines’. Also, Prokopios’
term Sarakēnós may have been largely directed at the non-conformist
Monophysite Christian Arabs of the ‘Three Palestines’. Prokopios’ attitude
also betrays class tensions between the metropolitan (Greek-speaking) eliteof Palestine and the Arab/Sarakēnó (largely subaltern) communities of the‘Three Palestines’, conflicts which have continued to plague the Palestine
Orthodox Church in the modern era. Prokopios’ account also reveals theclass-ridden, stratified society of Provincia Palaestina and the latent classtensions and prejudices that existed in the country. On the one hand, therewere the Greek-speaking urban social elites and ecclesiastical (Chalcedon)hierarchy, and on the other, the Aramaic-speaking Palestinian peasantry, theEastern Arabic-speaking Monophysite (anti-Chalcedonian) Syriac churches,
and the Arab (‘Saracen’) tribes of greater Palestine.
However, with the elevation of al-Harith to king of the Ghassanid
Christians in Palaestina II and Arabia Petraea many Arab tribes joined thephylarchate and he became a very popular character in pre-Islamic history,
folktales and sagas. The Ghassanids retained their powerful positions assupreme phylarchs, or ‘kings’, in Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina
Salutaris until the Byzantine Empire was overthrown by the Muslim Arabs
in the 7th century following the Battle of Yarmuk in 636. In the ancient
Middle East kings conducted autonomous foreign policies and dispatchedambassadors to neighbouring countries. Monumental epigraphic evidence
from the Yemen shows that the Ghassanid Arab kings and phylarchs of
Palaestina Tertia and Palaestina Secunda, Abu Karib and Arithas, pursued
independent foreign policies towards Arabia (Shahid 2009, Vol. 2, Part 2:
44).
Byzantine military-strategic plans with regard to the ‘Three Palestines’
were centred on the army commanded by Dux Palaestinae, militarycommander of all Palestine, whose headquarters were in CaesareaPalaestina, while relying heavily on Ghassanid federate forces which
dominated Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia and formed a key pillarof the Byzantine frontier defence system. Arab federate troops were also
involved in guarding the holy sites in Palestine and the pilgrims’ routes toand from the Holy Land. This provided the Ghassanid Arab federate kingsof Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia huge military resources andstrategic influence over the ‘Three Palestines’, an influence which lasted fornearly two centuries.
The Ghassanid Arabs played a key role in protecting the Holy Land fromraids of the Arab Lakhmids of Iraq – the security of Palestine from such
raids was crucial for the continuation of the pilgrimages on which thethriving economy depended. The religiously devout Ghassanid Arabs
prospered in Palestine economically and flourished religiously andculturally, and they engaged in much religious and public building, as
evidenced by a spread of urbanisation and the sponsorship of several
churches and monasteries. They planted vineyards and other crops, raised
livestock, mined the subterranean wealth of their territories for gold, silverand copper and cultivated horsemanship. Their Arab customs officers raised
taxes from the lucrative regional and trans-continental trade passing throughPalaestina Tertia and Palaestina Secunda. Their economic, social andcultural lives were closely connected to their devout Christianity and close
involvement with the pilgrims to the Holy Land. Their Christian Arabsoldiers in Palestine provided security for Christian holy places in andChristian pilgrims to Palestine (Shahid 2009, Vol. 2, Part 2: 45, 49, 51):
More important than the Byzantine influence in their social life was their
Christianity, which was required of them once they became Byzantine’s
foederat. This factor revolutionized their social life.
The feasts of the Christian calendar and the liturgical year had distinctsocial aspects. As devout Christians, the Ghassanids scrupulously
observed these feasts, which at the same time became social events; thus
these celebrations became part of their cultural life …
As foederati encamped in the Provincia Arabia, Palaestina Secunda,
and Palaestina Tertia, they were physically very close to the Holy Land,some of whose loca sancta they could even see from their military
stations. [Such places were especially visible from Palaestina Secunda,
where Christ performed one of his miracles on the woman with the issueof the blood (Mark 5: 25‒34). From Jabiya (in the Golan Heights) andelsewhere the Ghassanids could see the Sea of Galilee, sites of thelakeside of the ministry of Christ, and Mount Tabor, the scene of theTransfiguration, as well as the Jordan, the river of baptism. A verse in
one of the poems of their panegyrist al-Nabigha may suggest they evenhad a presence in northern Galilee].
In addition, they, together with the Byzantine regular troops, were theprotectors of the Holy Land and its holy sites from the raids andincursions of the Lakhmids [of al-Hirah in Iraq] … This role gave their
Christianity a military tone – they were literally milites Christi.
Just as they were the military protectors of the Holy Land, so too they
were the ecclesiastical protectors of the Monophysite church in Oriens,
which they had resuscitated around 540, and continued to defend andprotect until their own existence as Byzantine phylarchate ended in 636,
after the Battle of Yarmuk. (Shahid 2009, Vol. II, Part II: 63‒64)

In the 5th century, during the Byzantine period, the Golan Heights formed
part of Palaestina Secunda and was populated by Christian ArabGhassanids. At the end of the 5th century AD, the Emperor Anastasius
made use of the Ghassanids, Monophysite Christian Arabs, and they
became the rulers of Palaestina Secunda.
Following the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 Islam not only conquered theGhassanid phylarchates of Palestine, it also inherited the millet concept
which was used for the autonomous communities of the churches of theEast (including the Monophysite Ghassanid) in the Byzantine Empire in the
4th‒7th centuries. Even under the Ottomans the term Millet-i Rûm, theGreek Orthodox (Byzantine) millet, applied specifically to the Orthodox
Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire. The head of a millet – mostoften a religious hierarch – was the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. It is notinconceivable that the Arab Islamic word millah may have evolved from themetaphorical expression milites Christi (soldier for Christ) ,whose
beginnings were in early Christianity and the Ghassanid Arab Christiancommunities of former Provincia Arabia and Provincia Palaestina (Prima,
Secunda and Tertia).
ARABIC CLASSICAL POETRY AND BYZANTINEPALESTINE: AL-NABIGHAH ADH-DHUBYANI(535–604 AD)
By and large Arab pagan society was illiterate, cultivating immensely richoral/aural traditions and epic stories and prizing, in particular, exquisite oral
poetry, the oldest form of Arabic literature. Furthermore, for many centuries
before Islam the spread of Arabic in the predominantly oral culture of
Arabia and beyond, and the Arabisation of parts of the Levant and Iraq,
were carried out through the memorisation of oral/aural traditions, epics,
Arabic poetry and classic poems (for instance, the mu’allaqat). This preIslamic poetry became a major source for the Arabic language and rhetoricand a rich historical record of the political and cultural life of the time. This
communication of powerful pre-Islamic oral/aural traditions and poetry andthe memorisation of epics were transmitted not only by poets and rawis(storytellers) but also by travelling Arab traders, through the annual
pilgrimage to pre-Islamic Mecca and poetry competitions at seasonal
literary markets (a famous example was Souq ‘Ukath, near Ta’if in theHijaz). In this pre-Islamic Arab culture the poet played the role of oral
historian, storyteller, social critic, public intellectual, soothsayer andpolitical agitator.
Arabic poetry and Arabic literacy and the movement from a
predominantly oral/aural culture and oral traditions to a more literate Arabic
setting and book culture was hugely influenced by the spread of Hellenistic
Christianity and later the rise of Islam and by what Islam termed the ‘peopleof the Book’ (ahl al-kitab). Crucially, this gradual movement from illiteracy
and oral/aural traditions to literacy and written culture was also promotedby the Christian Arab courts of the Ghassanid phylarchs of Palestine. These
courts generously patronised the arts, especially Arabic poetry. This
movement to literacy, together with the important tradition of memorisationof epics and classic Arabic poetry, continued to flourish with the spread ofIslam, but crucially it was also accompanied by the reading andmemorisation of the holy Quran as a means of spreading standard Arabic
and establishing Arabisation and Arabic as the lingua franca in the newly
founded Islamic empire. The Arabs of Provincia Palaestina and former
Provincia Arabia, with their predominantly oral/aural culture, were also
influenced by the literary life of the Arabs in the 5th and 6th centuries andby the tradition of memorisation of classic Arabic poetry by poets, rawis
and ordinary people.
In pre-Islamic times, there were Christian Arab courts at Hirah, insouthern Iraq, and Jabiyah, in Palaestina Secunda, and court poets, such as
al-Nabighah adh-Dhubyani (535–604 AD), who played an important role inthe spread of classical Arabic poetry. The Ghassanid tribal kings(phylarchs) of Palaestina Secunda, in particular, patronised the arts andentertained some key Arabian poets such as al-Nabighah and Hassasn ibn
Thabit (a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who died in 674) at theircourts. One possible connection between the Ghassanids of Palestine asprotectors of the Christian holy places in the ‘land of the Gospel’ and thefuture Islamic holy places in Mecca is related to al-Nabighah, acontemporary of the Prophet Muhammad (570–632 AD). Al-Nabighah(literally ‘the genius’) was one of the last great Arab poets in the preIslamic era who spent most of his time at the courts of the Ghassanid kingsin Palestine and the courts of the Christian Arab kings of Hirah, alMundhirs. Like Palaestina Tertia and Palaestina Secunda, Hirah was animportant major pre-Islamic Arab Christian centre, being a diocese of thechurch of the East between the 4th and 7th centuries and seat of the
Nestorian bishopric by 410 AD. Al-Nabighah became known as by his
Christian Arab name ‘Ilyas and later ‘Ilyas from the Land of the Gospel’(Ilyas min ard al-Bishara) or the Holy Land, as
described by Arab historian al-Maqrizi (1364–1442). Greek was one thetwo lingua francas of Byzantine Palestine and Ilyas is the Arabic form of
the Greek Elias, a name common among Christian Arabs today.
Al-Nabighah/Ilyas is one of the six eminent pre-Islamic poets whose
poems were collected before the middle of the 2nd century of Islam, andhave been regarded as the standard of Arabic poetry. These poets havewritten long poems comparable to epic poems, known as Mu allaqat since
they were hung on the walls of the Kaaba (a building at the centre ofIslam’s most sacred mosque in Mecca). The surviving descriptions of theGhassanid urban centres and courts impart an image of luxury and an active
cultural life, with patronage of the arts, music and especially Arab-language
poetry. Warwick Ball, writer, archaeologist and former Architectural
Conservator in the Department of Antiquities in Jordan, comments:
the Ghassanid courts were the most important centres for Arabic poetry
before the rise of the Caliphal courts under Islam, and their court culture,including their penchant for desert palaces like Qasr ibn Wardan,
provided the model for the Umayyad caliphs and their court. (Ball 2000:
103‒105; also Shahid 2006b: 102)Samaritan communities were established in practically all the cities ofRoman Palestine: Neapolis, Sebaste, Caesarea Maritima, Scythopolis,
Ascalon, Ashdod, Gaza, Iamnia, Emmaus, Ashdod and Antipatris (Hjelm
2016), and these communities were also found in most Palestinian cities in
the Byzantine period. In fact, demographically the Greek-speaking
Byzantine Christians and Samaritans dominated the central region of
Palaestina Prima, while the Christian Ghassanid Arabs and Nabataean
Arabs dominated Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia respectively.
However, the Samaritan revolts during the 5th and 6th centuries in
Palaestina Prima were marked by great violence on both sides, and theirbrutal suppression at the hands of the Byzantines and their Ghassanid Araballies (Crown 1989: 72–73; Shahid 2010: 8) contributed to shifting thedemographics of the region, making the Christians the dominant group inthe province of Palaestina Prima for many decades. Also, many Samaritansconverted to Islam from the early 7th century onwards.
The Ghassanid Arabs rose in the 5th century to be become an importantethno-linguistic religious community in Palestine and their Monophysite
Orthodox Church became important in Palestine. In the 5th‒6th centuries
their capital was at Jabiyah in the Golan Heights, located within Palaestina
Secunda. ‘Gabitha’ is mentioned in 520 AD in a Syriac Aramaic letter ofMonophysite Bishop Simeon of Bet Arsham. Following the Battle of
Yarmouk in 636 AD and the Arab conquest of Palestine and Syria, theGhassanid town of Jabiyah became the headquarters of the main militarycamp for the Muslim armies in Syria. Overall the Monophysite Ghassanid
Arabs preferred the Muslim Arab conquerors to the Christian
Chalcedonians (Wigram 2004). Following the Byzantine military defeat at
Yarmouk many of the Ghassanids would have been happy to get rid of the
Byzantine Emperor and the Greek-speaking Chalcedonite Church and ally
themselves with the rising power of Islam.
Derived from the Quranic Arabic term millah, the term millet denoted
the religious community under Islam. The Ghassanid-dominatedMonophysite Orthodox churches may have given the idea of the millet
system to Islam. This became a principle for non-Muslims, who were given
a significant degree of religious and social autonomy within their own
community throughout the history of Islamic Palestine and the Near East.
Furthermore, according to historians Warwick Ball and Irfan Shahid, theGhassanids’ promotion of a simpler and more rigidly monotheistic form ofChristianity in a specifically Arab context can be said to have anticipated
Islam (Ball 2000: 105; Shahid 2006b: 102).
The substantial autonomy achieved by the Ghassanid Arab-populated
settlements of Palaestina Prima was derived from the fact that theirlocalities acquired the status of both phylarchates, headed by a supreme
Arab phylarch (a tribal king), and episcopates, headed by bishops. Petros(or Petrus), a chief of an Arab tribe or group of tribes from Byzantine
Provincia Arabia, whose original name was Aspebetos, was the first to be
simultaneously appointed as phylarch and bishop in Palaestina Prima(Shahid 2006a: 181; Isaac 2003: 450‒451). The colourful career of
Aspebetos was remarkable. He started as a military commander in theservice of the Persian shah. He then defected to the Byzantines and became
the Arab phylarch of Provincia Arabia. He then moved to Palaestina Prima,settling near the monastery of Euthemius, located between Aelia Capitolina(Jerusalem) and Jericho, and served as the Arab phylarch of Palaestina
Prima. He and his son Terebon were then converted to Christianity andbaptised by Euthemius. He also adopted the name Petros (Greek: rock)which became his baptismal name. Butros, the Arabic form of the Greek
name Petros – a name still common among Palestinian and Arab Christians– would be the name used by him and his Arab followers in Palestine.
Petros/Butros became first phylarch-bishop of the Palestinian Parembole inaround 427 AD. This line of Palestinian bishops survived until the middleof the 6th century. Although his bishopric was based in Palaestina Tertia, he
was responsible to the All Palestine Patriarchate of Aelia Capitolina, which
later became known as the Patriarchate of Ilya (Jerusalem) under Arab
Muslim rule from 637 onwards. The conversion of Aspebetos/Butros wasfollowed by the conversion of his Arab tribe and he became a zealous
Christian and for years led his converted Saracen (Arab) Christiancommunity and managed to increase significantly the number of ChristianArabs in Palestine. The climax of his career was his active participation at
the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, where he appears not
merely as a subscription in the conciliar list but as an active participant in
the debates and a delegate of the Council of Ephesus to Nestorius (Shahid
2006a: 46‒48, 181‒184, 528; 2006b: 128). Members of the house of
Aspebetos continued to thrive as the tribal leaders of Arab Palaestina Primaand in the 6th century Cyril of Scythopolis, the historian of monastic life inPalestine, describes Terebon II, Aspebetos’ great-grandson, as ‘therenowned phylarch in this region’: the area between Jerusalem and Jericho(Shahid 1995: 652).
But there were some fundamental differences between the ‘autonomous’
Arab phylarchs-bishops of Palaestina Prima – a core province – and thefairly independent Ghassanid kings-phylarchs of the two ‘frontier
provinces’ of Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia: Abu Karib and alHarith. The latter operated from established and recognised capitals. They
also commanded their own substantial professional Arab armies, and notjust contingent tribal forces. They enforced law and order within their wider
domain and raised revenues and taxes from the lucrative international andregional trade passing through their provinces. They provided protection to
the holy places in Palestine and, crucially, they dispatched their own

ambassadors to foreign countries – ambassadors who acted in their names
rather than representing the Byzantine state.
The year 451 was a turning point for the Church in Palestine. At theCouncil of Chalcedon, 451, the ‘Three in One’ Palestine provinces wereseparated from the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch. The
ecclesiastical separation of the ‘Three Palestines’ from Antioch did nothave an immediate effect on the Arab church of the federates who remained
staunchly Orthodox. With the growth of Monophytism in the Near East in
the 6th century, especially after the impetus given by the Emperor
Anastasius, the Patriarchate of Palestine remained the stronghold of Greekdominated orthodoxy in Palestine and this legacy had a lasting impact on
Arab‒Greek relationships within the Palestine Church (Shahid 2006a: 528).
It also opened up internal conflicts which lasted until today; in the 5th
century AD, these internal divisions within the Palestine Church were also
reflected in symbols and colour codes:
The Arab federates of the three Palestines, at least Prima and Secunda,
remained staunchly Orthodox, while those outside the jurisdiction of thePatriarchate of Jerusalem, were mostly Monophysites, especially thedominant group, the Ghassanids … The division within the Arab church
is reflected in Palestinian historiography, where the image of the [Arab]
Orthodox phylarchs of the Parembole in Palaestina Prima is bright andthat of the Ghassanids of Arabia is dim. (Shahid 2006a: 528)
Somewhat different in background from all Arab phylarchs of Palaestina
Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia was Elias, the ArabPatriarch of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), who became head of the All
Palestine Church in 494 AD. While the others were federate Arab kings,
Elias was a Rhomaic Arab born in Arabia. His ecclesiastical career was noless remarkable. He started as a monk in the desert of Palestine associatedwith Saint Euthymius the Great (377–473), an abbot venerated today inboth Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Elias then drew theattention of Patriarch Anastasius, who ordained him priest of the Church of
Anastasia in Jerusalem; finally, Elias became the Patriarch of the holy city,and engaged in an effective administration of his Patriarchate. He devoted
time to the improvement of the churches and monasteries and laid thefoundation of the Church of the Theotokos in Jerusalem, the spectacularchurch completed during the reign of Emperor Justinian and dedicated in
543. Possibly Elias was also associated with the translation of a simple
liturgy and biblical lectionary into Arabic for the benefit of the various
Christian Arab communities scattered in the ‘Three Palestines’ which cameunder his ecclesiastical jurisdiction (Shahid 2006a: 193‒194).

Chapter 6

THE ARAB PROVINCE OF JUNDFILASTIN (638‒1099 AD)
Continuities, adaption and transformation ofPalestine under Islam

PALESTINIAN SYRIAC ARAMAIC, PALESTINIAN ARABIC
AND PALESTINIAN TOPONYMS
Late Bronze Age Peleset and Hellenic/Roman/Byzantine Palaestina wereadapted by the Arabs and became Filastin under Islam from 638 AD
onwards. In the mid-7th century the population of Palestine waspredominantly Christian, mostly Palestinian Syriac Aramaic-speaking
Christian peasants who continued to speak the language of Jesus throughout
early Islam. However, the earliest Arabic inscriptions found in Palestine goback to the Roman and Byzantine periods, and for several centuries the
Arabs were closely linked with the three Byzantine provinces of Palaestina;
in fact, under the Byzantines Provincia Arabia itself became part of
Palaestina Salutaris, with its capital located in Petra, the old capital of the
Nabataean Arabs. Also after the Arabs took over Palestine in the 7th
century many place names in Palestine that were used by the Greekspeaking Byzantine administration continued to be used by the Arabadministration; hence the emergence of the three Arabic forms of ByzantineΠαλαιστινη: Falastin, Filastin and Filistin (Schiller 2009: 85; Sharon 2003).
The presence of Arabs in Palestine was noted by Herodotus in the 5th
century BC and Arabic inscriptions in Palestine were discovered from the
Roman era. Closely related to Palestinian Arabic is Palestinian Syriac
Aramaic, which was part of the north-west Semitic group of languages andwas the language of ordinary people in the country. Palestinian Syriac
Aramaic continued to flourish at a non-official popular level in Roman andByzantine Palestine and in early Islamic Palestine and became closely
related to the modern Palestinian Arabic colloquial language.
In the 4th‒early 7th centuries the Ghassanid Arabs of the ‘Three
Palestines’ were champions and protectors of the Syriac Monophysite
Church. Their Arabic-speaking poets, bishops and kings (and phylarchs of
Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia) must have beenfamiliar not only with the lingua franca of the Byzantine Empire (Greek),
but also with the Syriac Aramaic dialect of greater Palestine.
Palestinian Aramaic was also spoken by Palestinian Jews during theRoman and Byzantine period (Sokoloff 2003). Today a significant number
of Palestinian Aramaic words are found in both standard Arabic and in thevernacular language of many Palestinian villages. Also interestingly, in theearly 20th century the European Zionist inventors of modern Hebrew, in
pursuit of indigenising and antiquating strategies, borrowed heavily from
Palestinian Aramaic and ancient Greek vocabulary.
Palestinian Aramaic has also survived in a large number of modern
Palestinian and Arab toponyms including:• Ramallah (Aramaic ‘Ram’, meaning height, and ‘Allah’, the Arabic word
for God), a city which is the headquarters of the Palestinian National
Authority.
• Al-Rama (height), a Palestinian town in upper Galilee.
• Al-Ram, a Palestinian town north-east of Jerusalem.
• Al-Majdal (meaning fortress), an Arab village near Tiberias depopulatedby Israel in 1948.
• Al-Majdal (‘Asqalan), the ancient Philistine city.
• Majdal Shams, a Druze Arab town north of the Golan Heights.
• Al-Mujaydil, an Arab village south-west of Nazareth depopulated byIsrael in 1948.
• Al-Tur (mountain), the name of three mountainous place names inPalestine.
THE CONTINUITIES AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE
PROVINCE OF JUND FILASTIN

Historians tend to conflate Arabisation processes in Palestine with theestablishment of Arabic as the lingua franca for Palestine and the Near East.
In fact, Arabisation and Islamisation in Palestine and the transformations ofreligious communities of the country – including the three Palestine
provinces: Prima, Secunda and Tertia – were distinct historical processes
and should not be automatically conflated or synchronised. Historically,
Arabisation processes in greater Palestine (including the existence ofArabic-speaking Palestinian Christians) long preceded Islamisation
processes in the country, although the establishment of Arabic as the lingua
franca of Palestine went hand in hand with the Islamisation of the country.
As we have already seen, over the course of the Iron Age II (1000–6000
BC) the trading cities of old Philistia (Gaza, Jaffa, ‘Aphek, Ekron, Ashdod,
Ascalon) created a flourishing integrated south in Palestine by working
closely with Arab traders and sailors. The Arabs were powerful traders who
linked the distant trade from India and Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean
region via the Red Sea, Nabataea, southern Palestine and the seaports ofPhilistia. This integrated south was maintained under the Assyrian and
Persian empires and in the 5th century BC Herodotus describes in detail thepresence of Arabs in southern Palestine. A century later, the Nabataean
Arabs, who flourished on international trade and local agriculture, began todominate the Naqab/Negev from the 4th century BC onwards and founded
several Palestinian villages and towns, some of which survived until thePalestinian Nakba of 1948.
Al-Khalasa, a Palestinian Muslim village located 23 kilometres southwest of the city of Beershiba and depopulated by Israel in 1948, wasfounded by the Nabataean Arabs in the early 4th century using the Arabic
name ‘al-Khalus’, and the town became part of the Nabataean Arab incense
route. The Greco-Roman historian and geographer Ptolemy identifies it as atown in Idumaea. In the late Roman period it grew to become the principal
town of the western Roman Arabia Petraea province. Under the Byzantines
the Palaestina Tertia town became known as ‘Elusa’, preserving the Arabic
name. It also served as an administrative centre in the Naqab desert and was
the home of one of three classical schools of rhetoric in Byzantine
Palaestina. Under Arab Islam the town continued to function as a majorurban centre and became known by its modern Arabic name al-Khalasa, but
was abandoned sometime during the late Mamluk period in the 15th century
CE. It was repopulated by Palestinian Bedouins in the early 20th century.

After the destruction of the Arab village in 1948 the Israelis renamed it
Haluza (Hebrew: ‘pioneer’), a Hebrew-sounding name based on the Arabic
toponym ‘al-Khalus’; and more recently UNESCO declared thearchaeological site a World Heritage Site, ironically due to its historic
importance but, in fact, without acknowledging the centrality of the site to
the twenty-four centuries of Arab history and heritage in Palestine.
In early Islam, the combination of strategic-military and administrative
considerations for the creation of the four, and later five, Muslim ajnads(provinces) system in Bilad al-Sham were influenced by the previous
Byzantine strategic configuration of the region. The origins of the ajnad
system of Bilad al-Sham under Islam are in dispute. However, Irfan Shahid(1986) sees a Byzantine origin for this system. The provinces, or ajnad,
retained civil and administrative responsibilities for their surrounding
districts, including the raising of taxes (Walmsley 2000: 273). The Arabgovernors of the five ajnad (sing. jund) of al-Sham region, Damascus,
Filastin, al-Urdun, Hims and Qinnasrin, were called amirs and, in one case,the Governor (wali) of Jund Filastin, Suleiman ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, became
the Umayyad Caliph in 715.
Palestine had been brought fully within the Islamic Caliphate in 637‒
638. In the Islamic theory of governance, a Caliph was a supreme ruler who
was chosen by the community to be a successor to the Prophet Muhammad.
As political leader of the entire Muslim community, the Caliph wasprovided with an Islamic reference framework defined by the Quran and the
Hadith (the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) and was
obliged to govern through shura (consultation, deliberation, advice). The
shura, a Quranic principle, created a space that enabled the Islamic
traditions to negotiate social pluralism and inter-cultural exchanges
throughout the vast Islamic empire. In practice, however, many Caliphs
were hereditary rulers and they were only as strong as their armies andpolitical alliances made them. The founders of the Umayyad dynasty werealso acutely aware of the power/knowledge nexus, to echo Michel
Foucault’s famous paradigm. They were powerful, shrewd and pragmatic
Caliphs and sought administrative advice, political shura, scientificknowledge and technological expertise from their Muslim and non-Muslim
subjects alike. With the flexibility of the Islamic tradition firmly
established, in 661 AD the Umayyad Caliphs took over the Islamic stateand made Damascus the capital of the vast Islamic empire.

Material, economic, religious and political evidence shows that under the
Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs,1 who succeeded in expanding the Islamic
empire to an unprecedented size, the two provinces (ajnad) of Dimashq andFilastin were treated as core provinces () of a vast empire, for reasonsof religious dogma mixed with realpolitik. After all, Palestine was morestrategically important and more tightly controlled by the Umayyad rulers
than the deserts of Arabia, as indeed was Syria, so that the centrality andimportance of Palestine and Syria under the Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs
remained paramount. It also helped the process of homogenisation andArabisation of the large empire that the peasants of Palestine spoke a local
version of Aramaic, a dialect much closer to Arabic than any other language
but Hebrew, which had largely been extinct for centuries, so the gradual but
steady move to Arabic as the official lingua franca in Palestine and the Near
East was neither difficult nor protracted.
Moreover, the Umayyad Marwanid revolution and extraordinary
shrewdness and innovation also resulted in the construction by the
Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs of a system of exquisite and large palaces inJerusalem, al-Ramla, near Jericho and near Tiberias which give us a
glimpse into the centrality of Palestine within this vast Islamic empire. The
reforming Marwanid ruler ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (r. 685‒705 AD) iscredited with the transformation of Jerusalem, the construction of the Domeof the Rock in the city and the currency reforms, as well as theestablishment of Arabic as the official language of the Islamic Caliphate(Ochsenwald and Fisher 2004: 57). For the first six decades of Islam in
Palestine, prior to ‘Abd al-Malik’s linguistic and administrative reforms,
much of the local government’s work in Palestine was recorded in Koine
Greek and many prominent positions in the country were held by
Christians, some of whom belonged to families that had served in
Byzantine administrations. The linguistic revolution which began with ‘Abd
al-Malik ibn Marwan and was maintained by subsequent Marwanid Caliphs
meant that Arabic became the lingua franca not only of Palestine but theIslamic empire, which, at the time, included more than 30 per cent of theworld’s population. The linguistic revolution and having Arabic as the
single lingua franca for tens of millions of people from Spain to Central Asa
was also central to the expansion of global trade under Muslim rule.
Throughout the Middle Ages, as in ancient times, regional and distant traderemained a key source for the prosperity of a strategically located Palestine.

Arabic and the Arabisation of Palestine added more cultural layers toPalestine’s already rich and complex identity. The Arabisation of Palestine
benefited from the fact that the predominantly Palestinian Christianpeasantry spoke a Palestinian dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language
closely related to Arabic. However, if under the Romans and Byzantines
Koine Greek was the elite language of Palestine and the Levant andHellenisation was closely associated with cosmopolitanism and highculture, under Islam literary Arabic and Arabisation became a vehicle for
globalisation. Literary Arabic and translation into Arabic became closely
associated with scientific inquiry and cultural innovation, expanding
international trade and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, Byzantine Palestine
had been bedevilled by deep class cleavages reflected in linguistic
divisions. If speaking Greek was a key marker of metropolitan and urban
elite identity and speaking Aramaic was a key marker of identity forordinary people and Palestinian peasantry in Christian-majority Byzantine
Palaestina, Arabic and Arabisation encouraged egalitarianism in Palestineand became key markers of identity for both urban elites and theincreasingly Arabised Palestinian peasantry.
Under Islam, the metropolises of Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo stoodout as imperial centres, but their trade and strategic linkages throughoverland and sea routes tied them to an archipelago of hinterland cities in
al-Sham and Palestine and the whole al-Sham region, including al-Ramla,Gaza, ‘Asqalan, al-Lajjun, al-Quds, Nablus, Acre and Tiberias. Naturally
Arabisation and Islamisation followed trade and political power, and thiscultural and linguistic transformation of Palestine was promoted actively
and assiduously after the Arab Islamic conquest of Palestine. Islamisation
processes in the country followed suit. Filastin became part of the Arab
Islamic state following the Battle of Yarmuk (636 AD) in the course theMuslim conquest of Syria and Palestine.
Although the Arab Islamic military conquest of Palestine took place in
638 AD, the practical Islamisation of Palestine was a gradual but radical
process which went on for many generations. There is also some evidenceof the mass conversion by Samaritans to Islam in Palestine in the course of
the early Muslim period (see Levy-Rubin 2000). However, the powerful
Arab Muslim impact on Palestine has continued for nearly 1400 years, tothe present time. The profound religious, social, cultural and linguistictransformation of the country under Islam is evident throughout the land.

But the gradual processes of Arabisation, homogenisation and Islamisationof the country, from a largely Aramaic-speaking majority Christian country
to a predominantly Arabic-speaking Muslim majority, and from one
monotheistic religion to another – as well as from one Semitic language toanother closely related one – was less traumatic culturally and socially lesspainful than the sudden conversion of a pagan society into a monotheistic
polity.
The archaeological evidence on the early history of Islam in Palestine
debunks the common perception and insidious myth that the Muslim
conquest of Palestine in the 7th century caused a decline in the number of
localities and the overall prosperity of the country (Magness 2003: 1‒3). On
the contrary, the Muslim Arabs ushered in a period of prosperity andreligious toleration and religious and cultural autonomy for Christian andJewish religious communities (Arabic: millah) in Palestine and permitted
the previous administrative organisation to continue (The Encyclopaedia ofIslam 1965, Vol. II: 911). The Islamic states, like the Roman and Byzantine
empires, also applied a patron‒client system in Palestine and this patronage
system allowed the emergence of a degree of local autonomy and powerfulurban elites.
For largely defensive military-strategic reasons greater Palestine under
Islam was reconfigured and reconstituted from two of the ‘Three Palestines’of the Byzantines (Blankinship 1994). This military-strategic
reconfiguration and reorganisation was also reflected in the actual namingof the country: Jund Filastin, the ‘administrative/military province ofPalestine’. This reconfiguration was also aimed at addressing some of thefundamental weaknesses of the Byzantine strategic thinking for defendingthe ‘Three Palestines’ and other regions in Syria. The Byzantine military
was headquartered in the coastal city of Caesarea Maritima and relied
extensively on the Ghassanid Arab allies of the hinterland who had
effectively controlled Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia. The Muslim
Arab commanders, while still using many Ghassanid Christian troops inMuslim armies, preferred to rely on Muslim commanders. Reducing Jund
Filastin from the original Three to ‘Two Palestines’ (Palaestina Prima andPalaestina Tertia) also made sense in military-strategic terms.
The administrative reorganisation of Palestine during early Islam meantthat Byzantine greater Palestine became a combination of a relatively large
Jund Filastin province and a small Jund al-Urdun (Jordan province).

Governed from Tiberias in Galilee, Jund al-Urdun should not be equatedwith modern-day Jordan. With the consolidation of Arab Muslim rule inPalestine and the Levant in the mid-7th century, the region was divided into
Filastin, al-Urdun and Dimashq (Damascus) and the Arabs (like theRomans) opted for a decentralised administration. During the Umayyad
period (661‒750 AD) the al-Sham region was divided into junds or
military/administrative provinces. Jund Filastin was organised soon after
the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 630s. The Umayyads adapted manyof the Byzantine toponymic, monetary and administrative traditions and thisprocess of adaptation was evident in many aspects of the province of Jund
Filastin.
THE EXTENT OF THE ARAB PROVINCE OF JUND FILASTIN:
FROM MARJ IBN ‘AMER TO THE RED SEA
For several centuries Aylah, the present-day Jordanian port city of alAqabah on the Red Sea, was part of the Islamic administrative province ofJund Filastin, whose governors (walis) were also in charge of looking after
the safety of the caravans of Muslim pilgrims from Mecca through Aylah
and al-Ramla to Damascus and beyond. Umayyad numismatic andepigraphic evidence shows that Aylah was an early Islamic town in theprovince of Jund Filastin. Originally a Roman and Byzantine town called
Aelas, now the ruins of Aylah lie within the present-day port city of alAqabah (Ramadan 2010b). ‘Aylah in Filastin’ (‘Aelas in Byzantine
Palaestina’) was also the reason, within the Israeli settler toponymic projectpost-1948, for calling the nearby new Israeli settlement Eilat.
Southern ‘Aelas’ in Byzantine Palaestina, which became ‘Aylah’ inIslamic Jund Filastin, should be clearly distinguished from the northern‘Ilya-Filastin’ (Jerusalem) under Islam (Aelia Capitolina under the Romans
and Byzantine). Aylah (Aelas) was a vibrant Palestinian port town underboth the Byzantines and Muslims and at the centre of the Indian and SouthArabian spice trade. Rising to prominence after the Islamic conquests,
Aylah-Filastin, located strategically on the Red Sea – also known tomedieval European geographers as Mare Mecca, or the Sea of Mecca, andSinus Arabicus, or the Gulf of Arabia – developed into a major trading port
town and benefited hugely from the annual caravans of Muslim pilgrims toand from Mecca (Lev 2006: 591) and from the linking of the al-Shamregion with the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean. Apparently, Umayyad‘Aylah in Filastin’ coins were also minted in Iliya-Filastin for the use in the
Red Sea town and beyond (Ramadan 2010a, 2010b) and 10th century
Palestinian geographer al-Maqdisi, after visiting Aylah-Filastin, described itas ‘a port of Palestine on China Sea’ (Ramadan 2010a, 2010b). The
combination of Arabic written sources, Umayyad numismatic andepigraphic evidence and Byzantine sources gives us a good idea about theway the large Arab province of Jund Filastin emerged out of the
combination of two provinces of Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Tertia. In
this regard, it is worth noting that Palestinian historian Prokopios of
Caesarea Maritima had already written in 560 AD:
The boundaries of Palestine extend toward the east to the sea which iscalled the Red Sea. Now this sea, beginning at India, comes to an end at
this point in the Roman domain. And there is a city called Aelas[modern-day ‘Aqabah] on its shore, where the sea comes to an end, as I
have said, and becomes a very narrow gulf. And as one sails into the sea
from there, the Egyptian mountains lie on the right, extending toward thesouth; on the other side a country deserted by men extends northward to
an indefinite distance; and the land on both sides is visible as one sails in
as far as the island called Iotabe, not less than one thousand stades
distant from the city of Aelas. (Prokopios 2005)
Aylah-Filastin under Islam gives us some indication of the vastness andwealth of the province of Jund Filastin which stretched from the fertile
plain of Marj Ibn ‘Amer in the north – a rich granary in Palestine and aregion which at the time was considered part of lower Galilee – to al-‘Arishin Sinai and to the trading town of Aylah-Filastin on the Red Sea. In fact,
the province of Jund Filastin encompassed most of Palaestina Prima andPalaestina Tertia (Avni 2014: 27). Jund al-Urdun (), ‘theMilitary/Administrative Province of Jordan’, replacing Palaestina Secunda(Blankinship 1994: 84; Avni 2014: 27), was formed with its capital in thePalestinian city of Tabariyyah (Tiberias). Founded in Roman Palestine andknown by its Greek name, Τιβεριάς, the city had been the regional capitalof Galilee at the time of Jesus and would remain a key Palestinian centre of
trade, silk industry and leisure activities for several centuries to come. The
city was also a seat of religious learning for Arab-Judaism and ancientHebrew – then a language of liturgy (lashon hakodesh) rather than a day-to
day spoken language – was codified in Tabariyyah under the globalising
impact of Arabic and Islam. Under Islam the fame of Tabariyyah as amulticultural, hedonistic and leisure city –situated in the proximity of many
natural thermal springs and hot health baths – became so great that the Sea
of Galilee became known in Arabic as the ‘Sea of Tiberias’ (Bahr
Tabariyyah and later Buhayrat Tabariyyah). Like Palaestina Secunda, Jund
al-Urdun included most of the Galilee and some territories in Transjordan.
The overall size of Jund al-Urdun was about one-third of modern
Mandatory Palestine. With some minor changes this administrative divisionof Palestine remained largely unchanged until the Crusader invasion of thecountry in 1099, although under the Fatimids Jund al-Urdun was effectively
ruled from al-Ramla by the Military Governor of Palestine ().
Of course, the medieval Arabs were familiar with the Old Testament and
New Testament. But they opted for the real historical and official
administrative name of the country: Palestine (Filastin) rather than for theideological Old Testament term ‘Cana’an’, and they embraced andcherished the diverse heritage of Palestine and the shared heritage of theLevant. The medieval Arabic toponymy of Filastin was identical to the Old
French term Philistin, which came from Latin Philistina or Philistinus or
Palaestina which, in turn, derived from the Roman name of the province,
Palaestina, based on the ancient name with its memory preserved in the Old
Testament and a variety of ancient languages, the Akkadian Palashtu andEgyptian Parusata.
THE SECULAR AND SACRED CAPITALS OF THE PROVINCE
OF FILASTIN: THE GRANDEUR OF ILYA (BAYT ALMAQDIS) AND AL-RAMLA UNDER THE UMAYYADS
During the season of pilgrimage [Muslim Haj], thousands who cannot
travel to Mecca, come to Jerusalem. They approach the sanctuary [alHaram] and offer sacrifices as is customary. In some years, over 20,000[Muslim] people fulfil the [Haj] law here ... Christians and Jews comehere too, from the land of the Christians. (Nasir Khusro, 1050 AD, citedin Matar 2013: 913)

The Arab Islamic province of Jund Filastin was one of themilitary/administrative provinces of the Umayyad and Abbasid region of alSham, provinces organised soon after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in
the late 630s. The official name, Jund Filastin, was universally adopted
from early Islam onwards by Muslim rulers and Arab governors of Filastin(walis), Arab and Muslim geographers, cartographers, historians,
translators, engravers, coiners, pilgrims and merchants. They all relied on
the classical heritage of Palestine and the Near East. Arab administrators,
historians and geographers also translated and preserved many of theancient place names of Palestine and much of the classical heritage ofGreece and Antiquity in the Levant.
Islamic pilgrimage to Jerusalem began very early and this was enhancedby the grandeur and centrality of the holy city and Umayyad Filastin (661‒749), which can hardly be overstated. The Dome of the Rock was the firstmonumental sanctuary erected by Umayyad Islam between 688 and 691(Murphy-O’Connor 2012: 27). The Umayyads, like the Romans andByzantines, promoted urbanisation in Palestine. They also respected themultifaith and shared heritage of the country and continued many of the
Byzantines’ administrative traditions and architectural styles. For the
Muslim Arabs, as for the Byzantine Christians, Palestine (Holy Land:
Arabic: al-Ard al-Muqaddasah [al-Maqdisi 2002: 135]; Hebrew: Eretz
HaKodesh) and Jerusalem were a special, sacred space. The sanctity andcentrality of Jerusalem is enshrined in its very Arabic name: Bayt al-Maqdis(the ‘house of the holy’) or al-Quds (the ‘holy’). According to the
traditional Muslim view, the Qibla (Arabic: ‘direction’), the direction inwhich the first Muslims had prayed, originally faced the Noble Sanctuary inJerusalem. The sacred city was always a focus of intense Islamic devotion
and pilgrimage.
The governors of the province of Jund Filastin were appointed by the
Caliph. They were in charge of the army commanders, Muslim clergy,
religious officials, tax collectors, police and civil administrators in theprovince. But the Umayyad rulers, especially the Marwani Caliphs, took apersonal interest in Palestine. The Umayyad Caliphs, like the Byzantine
Christian rulers, made a clear distinction between the ‘secular’ (political,
worldly) and ‘sacred’ spheres and between the political(secular/administrative/military) and sacred capitals of Palestine. For the
Byzantine Christians that distinction, formalised at the Nicaea Council in325, produced a rather complicated and confused ecclesiastical arrangement
between the Archiepiscopal See of Caesarea-Palaestina and theArchbishopric of Aelia Capitolina. However, for the Umayyad rulers thedistinction between political/secular/administrative and sacred capitals ofJund Filastin was simpler and more straightforward. Also, subsequentaccounts by Arab geographers from the 10th century lends some weight tothe secular-administrative versus religious capital (‘double capitals’)concept in Palestine suggested in this work.
Aelia Capitolina remained the official name of Jerusalem until 638 AD
when the Arabs conquered the city and kept the first part of it as Iliya. Iliya(later Bayt al-Maqdis and al-Quds) was the sacred/religious capital of the
Umayyad state and of Palestine. The Umayyad Caliphs loved and honoured
Jerusalem, and Mu’awiyah (602–680 AD), founder of the Umayyad
dynasty, was reported to have had himself proclaimed Caliph in Jerusalem(The Encyclopaedia of Islam 1965, Vol. II: 911). The Umayyads devoted agreat deal of effort and resources to its expansion and the prosperity ofJerusalem and other Palestinian cities.
Interestingly, the Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs considered relocating
their capital from the secular capital Damascus to the holy city ofJerusalem. Although the move was abandoned for strategic reasons, in
preparation they symbolically built their large ‘palaces’ adjacent to the alAqsa Mosque. In excavations carried out by Hebrew University
archaeologist Benyamin Mazar in the 1970s, south and south-west of the alHaram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) the remains of six massive buildings
were uncovered; these buildings were not mentioned in any of the Arabic
written sources describing the period. The buildings were labelled ‘palaces’
as they were probably part of the government complex and theadministrative centre of the Umayyad government in Jerusalem. Nothingsimilar or comparable to this government complex in Umayyad Jerusalem
was found in the secular capital of Jund Filastin, al-Ramla. The Marwanid
Caliphs also renewed and enhanced the centrality of Jerusalem in the
Muslim empire. If al-Ramla became the administrative head of Muslim
Palestine, Jerusalem became the religious heart of Muslim Palestine, butalso of the rest of the Umayyad Empire. Now, added to the Christianpilgrims who continued to arrive, were the convoys of Muslim pilgrims
who came to Jerusalem in their thousands from the Maghreb, Iran and evenCentral Asia.

The largest and most impressive palace at the centre of the magnificent
secular Umayyad architecture in Ilya (Bayt al-Maqdis) was near the southwest corner of the al-Haram and was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphs who
visited the holy city on a regular basis. The palace was apparently
constructed during the reign of the al-Walid ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (who ruled
from 705 to 715) and is similar to other fortified Umayyad palaces inPalestine (near Jericho and near Tiberias) and Syria. The palace measured
96 by 84 metres and was surrounded by a 3-metre protective wall,constructed of large, trimmed stones. Two main gates, one facing east and
one facing west, gave access to the palace. A broad, stone-paved courtyardin the centre of the building was surrounded by rows of columns supporting
the roofing of the porticoes. Many of the columns came from Byzantine
churches and buildings in Palestine, as evidenced by traces of engraved
crosses on them. The rooms around the central courtyard were paved withsmall stone slabs and mosaic. Plaster, decorated with geometric designs andfloral motifs, covered the thick walls. A bridge was built from the roof ofthe palace to the al-Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary compound),providing direct access to the al-Aqsa Mosque. The magnificent complex ofMuslim buildings was destroyed by the earthquake of 749; evidence of thisis the fallen columns and collapsed walls.2
The Umayyad undertook monumental building programmes inJerusalem, the centre of which were the Dome of the Rock (completed in
691 AD) and the al-Aqsa Mosque (completed in 705 AD), both still
standing, and both remaining the most potent religious and cultural symbols
of Palestine. The al-Aqsa Mosque itself was constructed on the basis of an
earlier Islamic mosque built within the Haram al-Sharif compound and withreference to a key Islamic tradition, the Isra and Mi’raj. This tradition,according to Islam, involved Prophet Muhammad’s night-time journey toJerusalem, which took place around the year 621 AD. The Umayyads’
magnificent public (secular and religious) rebuilding programmes inJerusalem and al-Ramla and their large palaces in Jerusalem and near
Jericho and Tiberias show the extent to which Palestine had become central
to the Umayyad state and early Islam. But the founding of a completely
new metropolitan city for Palestine also represented a break from the
Byzantine past and a reorientation of Palestine under the Marwanid rulers.
This resulted in the creation of a new capital city for the province ofFilastin, al-Ramla, an administrative capital founded by Suleiman ibn ‘Abd

al-Malik, the Governor of Filastin (705–715 AD) and later Umayyad Caliph(715‒717). But in the end, and especially during the Umayyad period, the
new city of government built at al-Ramla could never rival the location andsplendour of the buildings in Jerusalem, or its religiously rich history – acity which, as we shall see in chapter seven, would, once Salah-al Din had
recovered from the Latin Crusaders in the 12th century, become the centreof the administration of Muslim-majority Palestine.
According to the conventional wisdom, the name Ramla is derived fromthe Arabic word raml, meaning sand (Palmer 1881: 217). But it is more
likely that the new Arab capital was named by Suleiman ibn ‘Abd al-Malik
not for its sand but in memory of Ramla, a remarkable woman who was thedaughter of Caliph Mu’awiyya ibn Abu Sufyan, the founder of the
Umayyad dynasty. Ramla’s reputation among the Umayyad ruling elite wasenhanced by the fact that she also married to a son of Uthman, the third
Caliph of Islam (Roded 1994: 57). The likelihood of a major city being
named in memory of an important Umayyad woman in the history of theruling dynasty could easily have been overlooked by the post-Umayyad
almost exclusively male (Abbasid-leaning) Muslim historians of the Middle
Ages.
In any event, crucially, Suleiman ibn ‘Abd al-Malik continued to residein al-Ramla, and did not move to the imperial capital Damascus after hebecame Caliph in 715 AD (The Encyclopaedia of Islam 1965, Vol. II: 911).
He is also ‘credited with the construction of a palace, a mosque, an
extensive water supply and storage system and the House of the Dyers’;
subsequently, and for several centuries, al-Ramla flourished as a fortified
city with many cisterns and a highly developed system of rainwatercollection and storage (Lev 2006: 590‒591). Moreover, throughout early
Islam the two political/secular and sacred cities of al-Ramla and Jerusalem
were at the heart of a distinct Palestinian Arab province. Combining the
Byzantine provinces of Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Tertia, the Arabprovince of Jund Filastin included most major Palestinian cities and morethan two-thirds of the territory of Mandatory Palestine.
Archaeological finds and place names show the continuities of historic
Palestine with toponymic memory and shared culture. They indicate that the
major Palestinian cities of Byzantine Palaestina – Lydda, Scythopolis(Beisan), Gaza, Tiberias, Neapolis (Nablus), Jaffa, ‘Amwas/Emmuas,
Rafah, Acre, ‘Asqalan, Ilya/al-Quds/Jerusalem, Eleutheropolis (Beit Jibrin)and Caesarea Maritima (Qaysariah) – continued to function as urban centresin this period. a number of new cities and towns were also built, mostnotably al-Ramla (which became the administrative and commercial centreof Palestine for several centuries), located inland, away from potential
Byzantine seaborne attacks and the Mediterranean battleground between
Byzantines and Arabs, while new Arab naval bases and shipyards were
established in Palestine (Nicolle 1996: 47). Jerusalem (like Gaza, ‘Asqalan,
Nablus, Caesarea and Jaffa) was a district (qada) and religious capital of thecountry It was expanded by the Umayyads with new monumental Arab
Islamic architecture and the city flourished as the religious centre of thewhole country as well as a holy city for Jews and Christians. Moreover, thearchitectural forms of urban Palestine and Islamic Jerusalem exhibited
continuities and adaption and a mélange of Arab Islamic and Byzantine
styles.3
According to the 9th century Muslim historian al-Baladuri, the principal
cities/towns of the province of Jund Filastin included al-Ramla, al-Quds,
Gaza, ‘Asqalan, Nablus, Yafa (Jaffa), ‘Amwas, Rafah, Sabastia, Qaysariah,
Tabariyyah, Beit Jibrin, al-Khalil (Hebron), Lid (Lydda) and Yubna,4 thelatter being one of ten towns in Jund Filastin conquered by the Arab army
commanded by ‘Amr ibn al-‘Aas in the 630s (cited in Le Strange 1890: 20).
Back in the 7th century the Arab-Byzantine coinage of the province of Jund
Filastin was minted in Yubna, Jerusalem and Lydda (Goodwin 2004), theinitial and temporary capital of Jund Filastin.
Strategic-military considerations and international trade routes weremajor factors in the conceptualisation of Palestine and in shaping its history
under both Byzantium and Islam. The new capital city of the province ofJund Filastin, al-Ramla, was founded by the Arabs c. 705–715 AD andbecame the capital of Palestine. Al-Quds (Jerusalem) was the religious
centre of Palestine and the Umayyad state. Al-Ramla was chosen as theadministrative centre of Palestine between 715 AD and 940 AD because of
its important strategic location along the historic trade route of the Via
Maris (‘way of the sea’ or ‘way of the Philistines’) via Gaza to Egypt.5 At
Tantura the old Via Maris veered inland to the right and passed throughMarj Ibn ‘Amer and then by Mount Tabor northward towards Damascus.
Under Muslim rule this route connected to al-Fustat (early Cairo), with thecity of al-Sham (Damascus) at its intersection with the road connecting theseaport of Jaffa with holy city of al-Quds (Jerusalem).

However, after the Muslim recovery of Jerusalem from the Latin
Crusaders in 1187 and the elimination by the Ayyubids of the first Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem, the administrative capital of Filastin shifted to alQuds. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem had been a Crusader stateestablished in 1099 after the First Crusade. Following the Third Crusade,the kingdom was re-established in Acre in 1192 and lasted until 1291.
Overall the Latin Kingdom lasted in Palestine nearly 200 years, from 1099
until 1291, when the last stronghold and capital, Acre, was destroyed by theMamluks. The position of al-Quds as both the administrative and religious
capital of Palestine was reinforced by both the Ayyubids and the Mamluks(1260‒1517) in the post-Crusader period.
Earlier under Islam, and for several centuries between the early 8th andlate 11th centuries, al-Ramla was the economic and political hub of theprovince of Filastin and the largest, richest and most powerful trading cityin the country. Al-Ramla was at the centre of the north‒south and west‒east
trade routes and the large number of caravanserais (khans) which dotted thecountry, with a distance of approximately 20 to 30 kilometres between
them, allowed merchants and pilgrims to rest overnight. These khans werealso intended to facilitate the postal service (barid) which had been
introduced to Palestine by the Umayyads (Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 515) anddeveloped further under successive Muslim dynasties. The other historiccities of the province of Jund Filastin in early Islam were al-Quds,‘Asqalan, Gaza, Lydda, Arsuf (Greek: Apollonia),6 Jaffa, Beit Jibrin,Nablus, Jericho and Qaysariah, with ‘Amman east of the River Jordan.
During this period, we can observe both continuities and transformation in
the social, cultural, economic, administrative and geo-political identities ofPalestine.
Throughout the Middle Ages Muslim pilgrims and travel writers
reported that Filastin was equated throughout the Muslim world with thecapital city of the country: al-Ramla (Khusrau 1888; Ibn Battuta 2005: 57).
Indeed, for centuries throughout early Islam the name of the capital city ofPalestine, al-Ramla, became synonymous with the name of the country as awhole, Filastin (Palestine), and the capital city was often called by alRamla-Filastin by medieval Arab travellers, geographers and historians, inthe same way as the former capital city of Byzantine Palestine, Caesarea
Maritima, had become synonymous with the name of the country as awhole, Palaestina, and had often been called Caesarea-Palaestina. Onceagain we see Islam continuing and pragmatically adapting Palestine
traditions and the Byzantine administrative and geo-political traditions ofPalestine rather than replacing them completely. This adaption andtransformation of Byzantine administrative and geo-political traditions was
also influenced by the tendency in Palestine and the Near East as a whole(the Arab Muslim Near East included) to equate countries, provinces orregions with capital cities. For instance:• The capital cities of Gaza and Ascalon and their hinterland became
synonymous with Philistia in the late Bronze Age and throughout the Iron
Age.
• Caesarea Maritima, the capital city of Palaestina Prima under the
Byzantines became synonymous with Provincia Palaestina as a whole.
• Al-Sham became synonymous with the capital city of the Muslim
province of Dimashq (Damascus).
• The first capital of Egypt under Muslim rule, al-Fustat was called Misr
al-Fustat and Fustat-Misr (Fustat-Egypt) and the term Misr or Masr
(Egypt) became synonymous with Masr al-Qadimah, the capital city of
old Cairo.
• As shall we see, the two capital cities of the Latin King of Jerusalem (andLatin Palaestina) under the Frankish Crusaders, first Jerusalem and later
Acre, became associated with Provincia Palaestina.
• As shall we see, the capital city of late Ottoman Palestine, al-Quds, andits province: Kudüs-i Şerif Mutasarrıflığı (the ‘Mutasarrifate of Noble
Jerusalem’), became associated with Filastin as a whole.
International and regional trade was always central to the prosperity ofPalestine, being a transit country. While geographically Jerusalem of theperiod was isolated in a mountainous region, the fact that the secular capitalof the province of Filastin, al-Ramla, was strategically and commerciallylocated on the highway leading to the two great capital cities of Islam, alSham (Damascus) and Misr al-Fustat and Fustat-Misr (Fustat-Egypt),
greatly enhanced the prosperity and international reputation of al-Ramla.
Thus Filastin was not only the official name of the province/country but, forsome medieval Arab historians, the name also became synonymous with thecapital city of al-Ramla. Strategically, geo-politically and in trade terms
located at the centre of the country and linking the holy city of Jerusalem

with Jaffa, the main Mediterranean port of Jund Filastin, al-Ramlaflourished as the administrative, military and trading hub of the country formore than three centuries (Foster 2016a).
In the late 9th century the province of Filastin was probably at its
greatest extent. It was expanded further by the Tulunids, who broke awayfrom the Abbasids and ruled from Egypt as an independent dynasty from868 until 905. The province of Filastin was enlarged for practical purposes
eastwards and southwards, at the expense of Jund Dimashq, to include
Bilad al-Sharat, the highlands and highly fertile region in modern-day
southern Jordan and north-western Saudi Arabia (Salibi 1993: 18‒20; leStrange 1890: 28). Aylah (present-day ‘Aqabah) was the first major town inPalestine to be taken over by Muslim forces under the leadership of Prophet
Muhammad in 630 AD (9 AH). This is hardly surprising: in his teens,
Prophet Muhammad had joined his uncle on Syrian‒Palestinian tradingcaravans and had gained experience in international trade and regional
geography. Later in adult life, the Prophet acquired the reputation of being atrustworthy and very successful trader, and he was involved in international
trade between the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea; the Prophet must havealso been closely familiar with port cities such as Aylah (present-day‘Aqabah), and Gaza, which, at the time, linked the international trade
networks of Palaestina Salutaris and Palaestina Prima. Indeed, throughout
early Islam Aylah became the major trading port of Filastin to Asia andChina (Ramadan 2010a). The port city of Aylah became a centre of
economic activity in southern Filastin and also served as a major stopoverfor Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca (Ramadan 2010a; 2010b). As for the
Bilad al-Sharat region, its principal city is al-Karak, known today for its
Crusader castle, located 140 kilometres to the south of ‘Amman and then asite on the ancient King’s Highway. At its greatest extent, Jund Filastin
extended from the Mediterranean coast to the region beyond the Dead Sea,
to include Bilad al-Sharat, and from al-‘Arish in Sinai to Marj Ibn ‘Amer
and Beisan in the north, with most of Galilee being part of Jund al-Urdun(the ‘military province of Jordan’). Its predominantly Muslim towns
included Gaza, Nablus, Jaffa, Lydda, al-Ramla, Qaysariah, ‘Amwas, Yubna,
Rafah, Sabastiyah (Sebastia) and Beit Jibrin.
The political capital of Filastin, al-Ramla, became famous throughout
the Muslim world for its spectacularly beautiful White Mosque – whoseminaret is still standing – and for the fertility of the soil of the district, theabundance of its fruit trees and ‘tasty fruits’, while the religious capital ofPalestine, Bayt al-Maqdis, was renovated not only for its religious
significance but also for the beauty of its stone buildings and its exquisitearchitecture (al-Maqdisi 2002: 34‒35). While under the Byzantines
Caesarea had for centuries been the largest city in Palaestina, for threecenturies under Islam al-Ramla became the largest metropolitan city in the
country. Al-Ramla was described in the late 10th century by the Jerusalemborn historian and geographer al-Maqdisi as one of the ‘best’ cities in thewhole Muslim regions (al-Maqdisi 2002: 35). He had this to say:
Ar-Ramlah is the capital of Palestine [Arabic: Qasbat Filastin]. It is abeautiful and well built city. Its water is light and plentiful, its fruits areabundant. It encompasses manifold advantages ... situated as it is in the
midst of virtuous landscape, of pleasant villages and lordly towns andnear to holy places. Commerce in it is prosperous and the markers are
excellent. There is no finer mosque in Islam than the one in the city ...
there are no fruits in Islam tastier than in the city and its surrounding
towns ... its hostels are pleasant and its hammams [public baths] areelegant ... its houses are large ... its mosques are good, its streets are wide... its roads lead ... to Bayt al-Maqdis [Jerusalem] road ... Lydda road,
Jaffa road, Egypt road, Dajon toad ... The chief mosque in the capital[Ar-Ramlah], located in the markets, is even more beautiful and gracefulthan that of [the Great Mosque] of Damascus. It is called Al Abyad [theWhite Mosque]. In all Islam there is found no bigger mihrab [prayerniche] than the one here [in Ar-Ramlah] and its pulpit is the mostsplendid to be seen after that of Bayt al-Maqdis; also it possesses a
beautiful minaret built by Hisham ibn ‘Abdel-Malik. (Al-Maqdisi 2002:
143‒144; also cited in Le Strange 1890: 304‒305)
Clearly al-Maqdisi himself was fully aware and indeed proud of his‘Jerusalemite’ identity and Palestinian heritage. Interestingly, however, inview of his extensive travels throughout the Muslim world and his multiple
occupations, he describes the thirty-six names and designations by which he
was called throughout his journeys and these included ‘Jerusalemite[Maqdisi], Palestinian [Filastini], Egyptian, Maghribi, Khurasani ... faqih,sufi ... tourist ... trader, imam ... Iraqi, Baghdadi, Shami ... Hanafi ... teacher,sheikh’ (al-Maqdisi 2002: 41).

Al-Maqdisi’s account also gives us an insight into the construction of amulti-layered Palestinian identity in the 10th century by a highly educatedand extensively travelled individual, a construction which in many ways
echoes the construction of a regional Palestinian identity by al-Maqdisi,
Mujir al-Din al- Ulaymi, Khair al-Din al-Ramli and Salih ibn Ahmad alTumurtashi in the 10th‒17th centuries (see below). The identity begins with
al-Maqdisi’s native city (Jerusalem/Bayt al-Mqdis), a city in theadministrative region of Filastin, which is in the greater region of al-Sham,in the domain of Islam (al-Maqdisi 2002: 41, 143‒144).
JUND FILASTIN AS THE RICHEST PROVINCE OF AL-SHAM
REGIONThe changes in the political/religious regime under Islam contrasted withthe continuity of Palaestina/Filastin as territory/country and the stability of
its economic prosperity and its mainly farming people is striking. For overthree centuries the province of Jund Filastin under Islam was a larger andeven more prosperous country than the combination of Palaestina Primaand Palaestina Salutaris under the Byzantines, in contradistinction tovarious ideological histories presenting this period as one of decline.
Throughout early Islam the administrative province of Filastin maintained
its economic prosperity partly by being strategically located at the centre of
regional and distant trade and partly by developing its own distinct
monetary system, within the wider monetary zone of Islam. Under Islam,dinar coins were minted in gold, dirham coins in silver, while fals (plural
fulus) was a copper coin first produced by the Umayyads in the late 7th
century. The name fals derives from follis, a Roman/Byzantine copper coin.
Various Islamic copper fals were in production until the 19th century. Today
the word fulus (or flus) is still used in Palestinian Arabic vernacular as a
generic term for money and the term has also given rise to the modern
Arabic terms iflas (bankruptcy) and muflis (bankrupt). In the Middle Ages,
the monetary system of the province of Palestine included dinars, dirhams
and fals, which were minted in several Palestinian cities.
Furthermore, in the 9th century, during Abbasid rule, the province ofJund Filastin was described as the most fertile province in the region of alSham. Commenting on the annual tax revenues raised in the province, 9th
century Abbasid postmaster and geographer ibn Khordadbeh, the author ofthe earliest surviving Arabic book of administrative and descriptive
geography, The Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik was
Mamalik, c. 870) recorded in about 864: 500,000 gold dinars of taxes from
Filastin province. By comparison with other provinces of al-Sham, theDamascus province raised 400,000 dinars, the Hims province 340,000, theJordan province 350,000 and the two provinces of Qinnasrin and ‘Awasim
400,000 dinars (Le Strange 1890: 46; Röhricht 1890: 17; Ibn Khordadbeh1865). For another comparison, the tax revenues raised in the whole ofPalestine (the two provinces of Filastin and al-Urdun) in 864 (850,000
dinars) amounted to more than half of (mainly land) taxes raised in thewhole of Abbasid Mesopotamia in 818/819 (Christensen 1993: 42). Theseannual revenues of the province of Palestine is also evident from the tax
figures and revenues collected during this era from the Filastin province
both in absolute terms and in comparison with those taxes collected fromthe other ajnad, including the much smaller Jund al-Urdun and the muchlarger Jund Dimashq (the Damascus province), which included much ofpresent-day Lebanon and territories east of the River Jordan known as alBalqa region (Le Strange 2010: 43‒48; Blankinship 1994: 47‒48, 292, note7). Indeed, Filastin is accounted, by tax figures given in certain sources, tohave been the richest province of al-Sham throughout the late Umayyad
period (Blankinship 1994: 48).
The works of Arab historians and geographers of the Middle Ages arecentral to our understanding of the evolving reconfiguration of Palestineand its environs and of the relatively immense wealth and prosperity of theprovince of Filastin throughout much of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods.
Local Palestinian historians and geographers such al-Maqdisi — who uses
not just the term Palestine () repeatedly but also ‘Palestinian’) — also began to develop an embryonic sense of regional
Palestinian identity. In 985 AD al-Maqdisi, in his work The Best Divisions
for Knowledge of the Regions (Ahsan al-Taqasim Fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim),
gives us a detailed account of all the place names, cities and towns he had
visited in Palestine (al-Maqdisi 1994, 2002). Describing in detail his native
country and the fertility of its land, al-Maqdisi comments in the 10th
century on the agricultural produce and manufactured goods of Palestine:
within the province of Palestine may be found gathered together 36
products that are not found thus united in any other land ... From

Palestine come olives, dried figs, raisins, the carob-fruit, stuffs of mixedsilk and cotton, soap and kerchiefs. From Jerusalem come cheeses,
cotton, the celebrated raison of the species known as ‘Ainuni and Duri,excellent apples, bananas – which same is a fruit in the form of a
cucumber, but when the skin is peeled off, the interior is not unlike thewater-melon – only finer flavoured and more luscious – also pine-nuts
known as ‘Kuraish-bite,’ and their equal is not found elsewhere; further
mirrors, lamp-jars and needles. From Jericho is brought excellent indigo.
From Sughar and Baisan came indigo and dates [and rice], also thetreacle called Dibs. From ‘Amman –grain, lambs and honey. From
Tiberias – carpet stuffs, paper, and cloth. From Kadas – clothes of the
stuff called Munayyir and Bal’isiyyah, also ropes. (Cited in Le Strange
2014: 18‒19; also Le Strange 1890: 16‒19; al-Maqdisi 1994)7
The economy of Palestine was boosted by the country’s strategic
location and its international trade, including its long-distance trade with
India, China and Europe. An extensive long-distance silk trade from China
to the Near East existed from Antiquity. Silk fabric, a natural fibre producedby silkworms, was first developed in ancient China and, because of its
texture and lustre, silk rapidly became a popular luxury fabric in the Near
East. It was made accessible by both Chinese and Arab traders in Antiquity.
Under Islam, Palestine and al-Sham as a whole traded with India and China
via Aylah (‘Aqabah) on the Red Sea, ‘a port of Palestine on China Sea’
(Ramadan 2010a, 2010b). In the Middle Ages, Arab merchants began
importing Asian silkworms (Arabic: dudat al-qazz) and in Palestine the silk
(harir) fabric was woven into textiles and helped develop the country’s own
silk industry. Palestine produced a variety of silk fabrics – including one
coarse type of silk fabric mixed with various types of wool and woven into
coats, which became known as qazz silk, and ‘bi-harir’ – which were
exported to Arabia and various Mediterranean and European countries (Gil,
M. 1997: 238; Goitein 1983: 403, note 141; Lewandowski 2011: 243; Weir
1994: 288). In early modern England, the raw type of silk made in Palestineand known as qazz, became known as gauze or Gaza, the name of thePalestinian city; it was a thin, often transparent woven fabric used inclothing, drapery and surgical dressings (Cannon and Kaye 1994: 196).
Palestine’s foreign export and international trade were key contributors
to the country’s economic prosperity and wealth under Islam. Palestine had

begun exporting olive oil and wine to Egypt in the Chalcolithic Age and theexport of Palestinian olive oil and liquores Palaestini (‘Palestinian wine’)remained important commodities in Antiquity. Although the export ofliquores Palaestini declined under Islam, exports continued throughout the
Middle Ages and camel caravans transported olive oil from Palestine to thecity of Medina in Arabia (Gil, M. 1997: 236). Also, various woven items
and textiles and types of qazz silk mixed with rabbit wool made in Palestine
were loaded onto ships and exported to Mediterranean markets, including
Egypt (Gil, M. 1997: 238). Interestingly, many of these key manufactured
and exported products, such as cotton, oil, soap, glassware, woven,embroidered and silk items, would still play a role in the Palestinian
economy of the modern era.
Also under Islam the religiously autonomous, predominantly urban
Arab-Jews of Palestine played an important part in the culture, commerce
and manufacturing industries of the country. This was particularly evident
in an important international export of Palestine: glassware. Glass-making
in the region dates back to Phoenician times, and the mosaics of Hellenic
and Roman buildings and Byzantine mosaic floors. In the Middle Ages,
Acre, Tyre, al-Khalil (Hebron) and other localities in Palestine becamefamous for glass-making and the Arab Jews of the country and al-Sham as awhole became known as experts at making glass, which would be exported
to various countries including some in Europe (Gil, M. 1997: 238). As weshall see in chapter seven, the industry of exquisite glass-making was
further developed by Muslim industrialists in al-Khalil during the Mamluk
period.
In one of the most famous encyclopaedic geo-political and geoethnographic works of the 10th century, al-Maqdisi describes some of theMediterranean ports of the province of Jund Filastin:
All along the sea-coast of Filastin are the Watch-stations, called Ribat,
where the levies assemble. The war-ships and galleys of the Greeks alsocome into these ports, bringing aboard of them the captives taken from
the Muslims; these they offer for ransom – three for the hundred Dinars.
And in each of these ports there are men who know the Greek tongue,
for they have missions to the Greeks, and trade with them in divers
wares. At the Stations, whenever a Greek vessel appears, they sound thehorns; also, if it be night, they light a beacon there on the tower; or, if itbe day, they make a great smoke. From every Watch-station on the coast
up to the capital (Ar Ramlah), there are built, at intervals, high towers, ineach of which is stationed a company of men. On the occasion of thearrival of the Greek ships the men, perceiving this, kindle the beacon on
the tower nearest to the coast-station, and then on that lying next above
it, and onwards, one after another, so that hardly is an hour is elapsed
before the trumpets are sounding in the capital, and drums are beating in
the towers, calling the people down to the Watch-stations by the sea.
And they hurry out in force, with their arms, and the young men of thevillage gather together. Then the ransoming begins. Some will be able toransom a prisoner, while others (less rich) will throw down silver
Dirhams, or signet-rings, or contribute some other valuable, until at
length all the prisoners who are in the Greek ships have been ransomed.
Now the Watch-stations of this province of Filastin, where thisransoming of captives takes place, are these: Ghazzah, Mimas, ‘Askalan,
Mahuz – (the port of) Azdud, Mahuz – (the port) of Yubna, Yafah, andArsuf. (Cited in Le Strange 2014: 23‒24)
Also in the 10th century, Arab geographer and chronicler Ibn Hawqal – whotravelled extensively in Asia, Europe and Africa in 943‒969 AD and wrote
The Face of the Earth – describes the Arab province of Filastin. Ibn
Hawqal, who may well derive some of his information from earlier Arabic
sources, describes the extent of the province of Filastin: from Rafah in thesouth to the region of al-Lajjun in the north and from the Mediterranean Sea
in the west to ‘Amman in Transjordan (al-Maqdisi 2002: 138).
Located 16 kilometres north-west of Jenin and 1 kilometre south of Tell
Megiddo (also called Tell al-Mutasallim), for many centuries al-Lajjun was
an important strategic Palestinian district town, until the turn of the 19th
century when it was annexed by the Ottomans to the new district of Jenin.
Depopulated and destroyed by Israel in 1948, al-Lajjun was identified withancient Megiddo, which was one of the strongest and most important
Palestinian city-states throughout the Bronze Age and housed one of themost monumental temples of its time in the whole Near East (Wiener, N.
2016). Under the Romans this region was treated as part of the Galilee andin the 18th century al-Lajjun became part of the practically independent
Galilee-based Palestinian state ruled by Dhaher al- Umar. The continuities
between the ancient and medieval Arab heritage of al-Lajjun issymbolically present in the name of the medieval Palestinian Arab town
Lajjun, which is derived from the Roman name Legio, meaning an early
Roman legion camp in the province of ‘Syria Palestinia’. The site, astrategic point on Palestine’s Via Maris and known to Romans as
Caparcotna, remained the base of the Legio Sexta Ferrata (Sixth IroncladLegion), the 6th Roman Legion, between 120 and 300 AD. The Sixth
Ironclad Legion was honoured by the Roman Arab Emperor, Philippus
Arabs (244‒249), who took a close interest in the affairs of the provinces of‘Syria Palaestina’ and Arabia and minted coins with the number of thislegion.8
Under the Abbasids in the 8th‒9th centuries, al-Lajjun was an important
district town, within the province of Jund Filastin. Throughout the long
Mamluk period (1260‒1517) it served as an important station in thecommercial and postal route and during the early Ottoman period it was thecapital of the district (sanjak) in Palestine that bore its name. According tosome Arabic sources, the two major towns of Beisan (former Scythopolis)
and al-Lajjun, were included in the province of Jund Filastin throughout
early Islam (see Gil, M. 1997: 111), yet al-Maqdisi (2002: 138) reports that
Beisan, al-Lajjun, as well as Acre were part of Jund al-Urdun, somethingwhich lends further weight to the argument that, geographically andstrategically, Jund al-Urdun remained for several centuries equivalent to theformer Byzantine province of Palaestina Secunda.
In the 10th century Ibn Hawqal describes the administrative capital of
the province of Jund Filastin, al-Ramla, as the largest town in the country,‘but the Holy City (of Jerusalem) comes very near this last in size’ –something which also lends some weight to the two (political/religious)
capitals notion existing in Palestine for three centuries under the Byzantinesand for nearly four centuries under Islam from the early 8th century until
1099. Ibn Hawqal writes:
Jund Filastin (Palestine) and its subdistricts. Subordinate to this district
were those of the Tih [in north Sinai] and Al Jifar, both lying towards the
Egyptian Frontier ... Filastin is the westernmost of the provinces of [alSham]. In its greatest length from Rafh [Rafah] to the boundary of Al
Lajjun (Legio), it would take a rider two days to travel over; and the liketime to cross the breadth from Yaffa (Jaffa) to Riha (Jericho) ... Filastin
is watered by the rains and dew. Its trees and its ploughed lands do notneed artificial irrigation; and it is only in Nabulus that you find therunning waters applied to this purpose. Filastin is the most fertile of the
Syrian provinces. Its capital and the largest town is Ar Ramlah, but theHoly City (of Jerusalem) comes very near this last in size. In theprovince of Filastin, despite its small extent, there are about twenty
mosques, with pulpits for the Friday prayer. (Cited in le Strange 2014:
28; also Röhricht 1890: 18; Gil, M. 1997: 111)
Although the perception of the boundaries of the province of Filastin didchange over the years, in 1226 the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi,
writing during the Ayyubid period, mentioned that the Arab town of alFuleh (present-day Israeli town of ‘Afula), which was at the heart of Marj
ibn ‘Amer, about 12 kilometres to the north of al-Lajjun, as being ‘a town in
Jund Filastin’ (Le Strange 1890: 441).
COINS MINTED ‘IN-FILASTIN’ (‘’): PALESTINECURRENCY, MONETARY AUTONOMY AND NUMISMATIC
EVIDENCE FROM ARAB ISLAMIC PALESTINE
Numismatic and monetary evidence are important sources of knowledge on
the economy and degree of political autonomy of Roman, Byzantine andmedieval Islamic Palestine. Numismatic evidence of Arab Byzantine
coinage of the province of Jund Filastin (the military/administrative
province of Palestine in early Islam) in the 7th century (Goodwin 2004)shows the continuities of Palestine, the variety of styles and traditions
evolving in the country, as well as some of the distinct traditions evolving
within Palestine.
One of the key indicators of economic prosperity and greater regionaland economic autonomy under empire was the ability of a particular region
or city to issue its own currency. As we have already seen, the earliest phaseof the momentary phenomenon in Palestine began in the late 6th and early
5th century BC and took place in Philistia. This phase continued into the
4th century up to the end of the Achaemenid (Persian) rule over Palestine.
Throughout much of this period the economically autonomous Palestiniancities of Gaza, Ascalon and Ashdod were able to issue their own silver
coins. The monetary phenomenon of silver coinage became widely known
as the coinage of Philistia or Philisto-Arabian coins.

However, in the 1st century AD the Roman Empire granted many cities
in Palestine the right to mint only bronze and copper coins. Minting
prestigious silver coins was confined to a few important cities outside ofRome. Bronze coins were issued by many Palestinian cities, including
Gaza, Caesarea, Joppa (Jaffa), Ascalon, Ptolemais (Akka), Tiberias,
Sepphoris, Neapolis (Nablus), Antipatris, Diospolis (Lydda), Nicopolis(Emmaus), Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) and Eleutheropolis (Beit Jibrin).
Antoninus Pius (Titus Fulvus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius,
86–161 AD), also known as Antoninus, was Roman Emperor from 138 to
161 AD. His name appears on imperial bronze coins struck in Gaza,
Philistia. This tradition of bronze coinage struck in several Palestinian cities
persisted into the Byzantine era.
Islam in Palestine pragmatically adapted and combined the
Roman/Byzantine monetary tradition of coinage with the Achaemenid
silver coinage in Palestine and encouraged the minting of both silver andgold coins in Palestinian cities. Furthermore, the continuation of this ArabByzantine tradition and the continuity of economic growth and prosperous
trade in Palestine under Islam is evident in the widespread presence of
precious metals and minting of gold coinage in Islamic Palestine. Rare andnaturally occurring elements of high economic value and investment,
historically precious metals were important in fine jewellery and coinage as
currency. The best known precious metals were the Arab Islamic coinage
and initially coins were minted in Filastin in copper, and later gold andsilver coins were widely minted in several Palestinian cities.
The key elements of the Islamic coins struck in Palestine – materials,
words, designs, signs and symbols – evolved significantly from the initial
Byzantine-style coinage used in early Islam to the post-reform currency
introduced by Caliph ‘Abdel Malik ibn Marwan around 696 AD into thecoins used during the Abbasid, Tulunid, Ikhshidid and Fatimid periods fromthe 8th to the 11th centuries (Shamma 1969, 1980). After the Umayyads
took over the Muslim Caliphate and made Damascus their capital in 661
AD, the economic and financial stability of their vast Islamic empire wasone of their top priorities. Consequently, the Byzantine-style solidus –originally a Roman weight unit of a relatively pure gold – influenced the
Umayyad gold dinar; the Arabic name of the gold coin derives fromdenarius, a Roman coin. The Arab gold dinar was first issued by thereforming Caliph ‘Abdel Malik ibn Marwan around 696 AD, with his own

image replacing that of the Byzantine Emperor. However, subsequently theimage of the Caliph was removed from the Islamic currency. Greek was theofficial language of the Byzantine Empire and under the influence of
Byzantine-style coinage, the fineness of the gold Arab dinar was measured
in qirat (carat) which derives from the Greek κεράτιον. The carat as a gold
unit of weight still stands today.
The Islamic-style currency reform introduced by this fifth Umayyad
ruler was designed to reinforce Umayyad power and provide a standardised
Arab Islamic coinage that reflected the new politico-cultural reality of thetime (Ramadan 2010b). Using the oldest calligraphic form of the Arabic
script, the Kufi script, in addition to ‘there is no god but God’ and later‘Muhammad is the messenger of God’, gold, silver and copper coins struck
in Palestine added the Arabic name Filastin.
The economic and monetary prosperity of Palestine in early Islam andthe centrality of the coins minted locally in the province of Jund Filastin,
especially in the administrative capital al-Ramla, in the first half of the 8th
century is evident from the origins of the two hoards of post-reform Islamiccoins excavated at Jericho. Currency is about monetary power and thecurrency minted locally in Palestine gives us a sense of the extent of thelocal autonomy exercised in the province of Palestine under Islam. Not
surprisingly, in view of the location of Jericho and the centrality of theprovince of Palestine in the Umayyad period, the provinces of Jund Filastin
and Jund Dimashq ‘provided an almost equal number of coins’ excavatedfrom the Jericho site (Walmsley 2000: 338). Originating from a range ofmints in Bilad al-Sham, the percentage of these coins were as follows:• 32 per cent minted in the province of Jund Filastin;• 35 per cent from the province of Jund Dimashq;• 20 per cent minted in Jund Hims;• 6 per cent from Jund al-Urdun;• 5 per cent from al-Jazirah;• 1 per cent from Jund Qinnasrin;• 1 per cent from Egypt (Walmsley 2000: 336‒337).
These coins were from the following mints:• twenty-seven Jund Filastin (twenty-three from the mint of the capital alRamla; three Lydda; one Iliya [Jerusalem]);• twenty-nine Jund Dimashq (all from the mint of the capital Dimashq);• five Jund al-Urdin (four Tiberias; one al-Urdun);• seventeen Jund Hims (all from Hims mint)• one Jund Qinnasrin (Aleppo mint);• four al-Jazirah (al-Ruha mint);• one Egypt (Alexandria mint) (Walmsley 2000: 338).
Under Islam, especially from the early 8th century onwards, Palestine alsobegan to develop its own distinct Arab Islamic traditions of weights,
measures and coinage; crucially coins were produced in several Palestiniancities with the mint formula ‘struck in Filastin’ (Gil, M. 1997: 257)9 andcirculated locally, regionally and internationally. The earliest numismatic
evidence for the official designation of the country as Palaestina on Roman
coins comes from the period of Vespasian (69 to 79 AD) and subsequently
for the name ‘Syria Palaestina’ from the period of Marcus Aurelius, who
was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. In the 1st century AD the
Roman Empire also granted many Palestinian cities the right to mint bronze
coins. Sir George Francis Hill, the Director and Principal Librarian of the
British Museum (1931–1936), produced the British Museum Catalogue ofPalestine coins showing sixteen Palestinian cities minting their own coins(Hill 1914).
This tradition of economic autonomy and Palestine city-coins came to an
end in the 3rd century AD when the (western) Roman Empire disintegrated,
but it was renewed and expanded in Muslim-ruled Palestine in the Middle
Ages to include the minting of coins in silver and gold in the Palestine cities
of Ilya10 (Bayt al-Maqdis, al-Quds, Jerusalem), al-Ramla, Tabariyyah(Tiberias), ‘Asqalan and others. This autonomous bronze coinage ofPalestine cities under the Romans and Byzantines and silver and gold under
Islam suggests the development of a considerable degree of regional
Palestinian autonomy and of distinct local traditions, away from rigid
imperial control:
The finds of coins indicate that there was an intensive production ofcoins in Palestine in the following places: Jerusalem, Bet Guvrin [BeitJibrin], Ramla, Ascalon, ‘Amman, Gaza, Lod [Lydda], Yavne [Yubna],

Tiberias, Bet Shean [Beisan], Sipphoris [Saffuriyah] and Tyre. Some ofthese mints were already in existence during the Byzantine era, and it
appears that they were again in use during the days of the Damascene
Caliphs after ‘Abdel Malik. The inscriptions on the coins were IlyāFilastin [al-Quds Filastin], ‘Asqalān Filastin, and the like. From the mintof Bet Shean (Beisan), coins were found with Greek inscriptions, but
appear to have been gradually replaced by Arabic. Among those coinsfrom Bet Shean there were some with the Greek inscription‘Skythopolis’ together with the Arabic, ‘Baysān’ or ‘Baysan’ (Gil, M.
1997: 110).
The history of Islamic Palestine is often read through overall Caliphate
chronologies with little consideration for local developments and regional
conditions. Under Islam Filastin developed a substantial measure of
economic and commercial autonomy. It produced its own coinage anddeveloped its own distinct commercial traditions of weights and measures.
Its coins were minted in several Palestinian cities with the inscription ‘inPalestine’, in the same way as the country of manufacture or production isstated on goods today.
Al-Maqdisi devotes an entire section of his work to these distinct
traditions, measures and coins of his native country (Gil, M. 1997: 257).
The minting of Islamic coins (dinar in gold and dirham in silver) in Filastin
began under the Umayyads. It was initially halted by the Abbasids but was
restarted in al-Ramla under the Tulunids, which was the first independent
Muslim dynasty to rule Egypt, Palestine and much of Syria from 868 until
905 AD. Three decades later the Ikhshidid dynasty ruled Egypt andPalestine from 935 to 969 AD:[in the 9th century Palestinian] coins began to appear with the inscription
bi-filastin [‘’, ‘in-Palestine’]. The first of these were produced in
the days of Khumarawayh and his son, Harun, from 890 until 904, andthese were gold dinars with the unusual weight of 3.2 grams. These
practices continued during the period when the Abbasids reconquered
Egypt and Palestine ... The Ikhshidids continued to mint coins in Ramla,
as previously, but unlike the inferior quality of the Palestinian coinsproduced under the Tulunids, Muhammad ibn Tughj, the Ikhshid,ordered the minting of dinars of a finer quality ... The mint in Ramlacontinued working during Fatimid times as well ... The mint in Tiberias
was also active ... After the conquest of most of Palestine by the
Crusaders, the mint in Ascalon [‘Asqalan] was activated. (Gil, M. 1997:
258; see also Album 1998)11
RECONFIGURATION OF PALESTINE UNDER THE FATIMIDS:
THE PROVINCE OF JUND FILASTIN AND THE MILITARYGOVERNOR OF PALESTINE () (11THCENTURY)
The Egypt-based Shi’ite Fatimid state invaded Palestine in 970, conquering
the whole of country in 972. The Fatimid rule of Palestine was marred bygreat turmoil and upheavals. During this period al-Ramla was still theofficial capital of the province of Jund Filastin. But the city suffered badly
from its occupation and pillaging by the Bedouins of Banu Tayy in
Palestine in late 1024 as well as the two devastating earthquakes in 1025
and 1068. Although the city would recover in the middle of the 11th century
and would remain an important strategic and garrison town for many
centuries to come, its decline during the Fatimid rule and its subsequent
replacement by al-Quds as the administrative capital of Palestine under the
Ayyubids would inaugurate a new era in the strategic re-centring ofPalestine in the post-Crusader era.
Political and military-strategic considerations played an important part inshaping the Fatimid regime in Palestine. A combination of political andmilitary-strategic calculations were also factors in the reconfiguration of theperception and boundaries of historic Palestine before, during and after the
Fatimid rule. These considerations, which were present in radicallydifferent historical periods, were evident:• The creation of the new province of Syria-Palaestina by Hadrian in 135
AD following the defeat of the Bar-Kochba rebellion of that year.
• The fact that the Byzantine Dux Palaestinae, the ‘military commander of
all of Palestine’, commanded all Byzantine forces in Provincia Palaestina(Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia) from the 4th
to the early 7th centuries.
• The creation of the military-administrative Ajnads in al-Sham, Jund
Filastin included, under Islam from the 630s onwards.

• The secret Ottoman strategic-military plan of Filastin Risalesi, prepared
for the officers of the Eighth Army Corps in Palestine at the beginning of
the First World War (to be discussed in chapter nine), for the combined
defence of the three Ottoman sanjaks of Palestine.
• The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 between Britain and France
which was designed to carve up the Near East between the two imperial
powers; an agreement which would contribute to the shaping of the
British Mandatory boundaries of Palestine.
Following the deteriorating military‒security situation in Palestine andtribal uprisings in the 1020s, strategic-military considerations by the
Fatimid state seem to have contributed to the creation by the Fatimids of a
new title: Mutawalli Harb Filastin, the ‘Military Governor of Palestine’ (“”).
The extent to which the responsibilities of Mutawalli Harb Filastin wereseparate from those of the traditional civil governor (wali) of the provinceof Jund Filastin is not entirely clear (Lev 2003: 46‒47). But, with echoes of
the responsibilities of the Byzantine Dux Palaestinae, the Military Governor
of Palestine commanded all the Fatimid military forces in the two provincesof Jund Filastin and Jund al-Urdun. Interestingly, a form of this militarystrategic innovation, in the shape of the Military Governor of Palestine,with military responsibilities, did survive the end of the Fatimid rule inPalestine. The titles of mutawalli (military) and wali (civil) are often
conflated during the Ayyubid period and in 1193 the title of mutawalli alharb bi-Bayt al-Muqaddas, the Military Governor of Jerusalem, is found in
Ayyubid Palestine (Humphreys 1977: 78‒79). In any event, however, theconception of the Military Governor of Palestine by the Fatimids and therise of a Palestinian, Muhammad al-Yazuri, to become wazir (chief
minister) of the Fatimid state in 1050‒1058, together with the evidence wehave from the Arab-Jewish al-Fustat Genizah, all give rise to the impressionthat Filastin was perceived to be a key province of the Fatimid state.
Under the Egypt-based Shi’ite Fatimids in the early 11th century Islamin Palestine remained largely Sunni and senior Fatimid officials of theprovince of Jund Filastin resided in the capital city of al-Ramla:
Several Fatimid officials resided in Ramla during the Fatimid period(early eleventh century), including the governor, who is referred to aswali, meaning apparently the governor of Jund Filastin. The governor,
through his military slave[-soldier] (ghulam), controlled the police force
and kept contact with Cairo [Fustat] through the postal service, or the
barid. The town was also the seat of the secret police (ashab al-akhbar)
and the local Fatimid [Shi’ite] propagandist (da’i). Two other officials
whose presence is attested to in the town were the fiscal administrator(‘amil) and auditor (zinumam), both of which were nominated by thegovernment in Cairo. The social composition of the population in Ramla
remains enigmatic, but there was a local Muslim elite made up of
notables, judges and court witness … In Muharram 414/March‒April
1023, Anushtakin [al-Dizbari, an elite Turkish slave-soldier in Fatimid
employ and a former governor of Baalbeck and Caesarea] was appointed
as the governor of Jund Filastin, bearing the title of a military governor(mutawalli harb Filastin). The beginnings of his governorship werepeaceful and, in April 1024, a large caravan of Khurasani [Sunni]
pilgrims from Mecca travelled through Ayla [present-day ‘Aqabah] via
Ramla and Damascus to Baghdad. (Lev 2006: 591)
However, the security situation in the two provinces of Jund Filastin and
Jund al-Urdun deteriorated quickly and, in September 1024, tribal rebellion
erupted over the terms of the tax collection (iqta’a) system, which had been
granted to the Bedouin leader of Banu Tayy, Hassan ibn al-Jarrah, over theBeit Jibrin region in the province of Filastin. In the north of Palestine theBedouins attacked and looted Tiberias, the capital of Jund al-Urdun. They
also occupied al-Ramla, looting property, executing the soldiers of the local
garrison and enslaving women and children. After plundering the city anddestroying its soap and olive industry, Hassan ibn al-Jarrah set fire to thecapital of Palestine: ‘The Bedouin conquest of Ramla was a bleak chapter
in the history of the town’ (Lev 2006: 591). The tribal uprisings in the two
provinces lingered sporadically for five years until 1029 and caused
hardship and famine.
Although resentment of the Shi’ite Fatimid rule in Palestine was notuniversal or even evident among the Sunni ulema of Jerusalem, thisresentment was very strong among the Bedouins of Banu Tayy and theChristian communities – the former for economic reasons and the latter for
religious ones. In the early 11th century the Fatimid rule in the country wasmarred by a series of tribal rebellions, widespread insecurity and faminewhich, in addition to the severe earthquake of 1025, devastated Palestine(Gil 1996: 22, 25‒27). The destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
in Jerusalem and the splendid church of St George at Lydda by the Fatimid
Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah in 1009 was part of general campaign
against Christian places of worship in Palestine and Egypt. Fatimid policies
adversely affected the province of Filastin and these policies became an
impetus not only to local rebellions but also to the invasion of Palestine by
the Seljuks in 1073 and the Latin Crusaders in 1099.
In 1029, five years after the Bedouin occupation of al-Ramla and four
years after the 1025 earthquake, which badly damaged the city, and at theheight of the Fatimid regime in Palestine, the severely affected province ofFilastin was referred to in the old Cairo Genizah, a collection of Arab
Jewish fragments of manuscripts that were found in the storeroom (genizah)of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in al-Fustat, then the capital of Egypt. Written
in various languages, especially Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, the massive
collection, which began during the Abbasid period in 870 AD and covers amillennium, became the largest and most diverse collection of medieval
manuscripts in the world and a testimony to the flourishing culture of ArabJews under Islam. Al-Fustat was also the home of Ibn Maimun(Maimonides, 1135‒1204) the great Andalusian-born Arab-Jewish
philosopher, Rabbi and head of the Arab-Jewish community in Egypt. In
1029 the Jerusalem-based Rabbi Solomon ha-Kohen ben Yehosef, in a letterto his son Abraham in Fustat, refers to the damage inflicted by the Fatimids
on both the city of al-Ramla and the ‘land of Palestine’: Rabbi Solomon
refers to ‘the infliction of famine, for no food is to be found in the land ofPhilistines [i.e. the Province of Filastin] and there are many poor’ (Gil1996: 28‒29).
In 1029, the military commander of all the Fatimid forces in Palestine,
Mutawalli Harb Filastin, Anushtakin al-Dizbari, brought an army from
Egypt, collected local forces in Palestine and decisively defeated the
combined Bedouin army at al-Uqhuwana near the Sea of Galilee (Grainger
2016: 246), an area which was part of the province of Jund al-Urdun. Afterthese military successes, General al-Dizbari was the most powerful Fatimid
governor of the whole region of al-Sham, Palestine included. He became
fairly popular among the local population by forming alliances with thelocal notables and he managed to unite the whole region under a single
Fatimid authority. Medieval Muslim historians have stressed al-Dizbari’s‘just rule and fair treatment of the population in the towns he ruled asgovernor’ (Lev 2003: 55). For the first and last time, all of Palestine and alSham was ruled by a single Fatimid governor. He died in Aleppo in 1042.
Fifteen years later his grave was relocated to Jerusalem.
Although little is known about the political developments in Palestine in
the second part of the 11th century, and prior to the Crusader invasion of1099, letters from the al-Fustat Genizah show that Muhammad Hassan ibn‘Ali al-Yazuri, from Yazur,12 a town east of Jaffa in the province of Filastin,
and a former Governor of al-Ramla, served in the capacity of vizier of theFatimid state, the second most important position after the Fatimid Caliphin Egypt, from 1050 to 1058. He was also personally involved in the affairsof the al-Quds (Jerusalem), the religious capital of Muslim Palestine (Gil1996: 30).13
In the middle of the 11th century Muslim traveller Nasir Khusro(Khusrau), who visited Fatimid Palestine in 1047, produced an account of
his seven-year journey (Safarnama) through the Muslim world of the 11th
century (Diary of a Journey through Syria and Palestine). He wrote:
Sunday, the day of the new moon of the month of Ramadan (the 1st ofMarch), we came to Ramlah. From Caesarea to Ramlah is eight leagues.
Ramlah is a great city, with strong walls built of stone, mortared, of greatheight and thickness, with iron gates opening therein. From the town to
the sea-coast is a distance of three leagues. The inhabitants get theirwater from the rainfall, and in each house is a tank for storing the same,in order that there may always be a supply. In the middle of the Friday
Mosque, also, is a large tank; and from it, when it is filled with water,
anyone who wishes may take. The area of the mosque measures two
hundred paces (Gam) by three hundred. Over one of its porches (suffah)
is an inscription stating that on the 15th of Muharram, of the year 425(10th of December, 1033 A.D.), there came an earthquake of great
violence, which threw down a large number of buildings, but that no
single person sustained an injury. In the city of Ramlah there is marble inplenty, and most of the buildings and private houses are of this material;
and, further, … they do most beautifully sculpture and ornament. They
cut the marble here with a toothless saw, which is worked with ‘Mekkahsand’. They saw the marble in the length, as is the case with wood, toform the columns; not in the cross; also they cut it into slabs. The

marbles that I saw here were of all colours, some variegated, somegreen, red, black, and white. There is, too, at Ramlah, a particular kind offig, than which no better exists anywhere, and this they export to all thecountries round. This city of Ramlah, throughout [al-Sham] and the West
[al-Maghreb], is known under the name of Filastin. (Khusrau 1888: 21‒
22)
In the post-Fatimid period, the first (Crusader) Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem was created in 1099 and lasted until 1187 and occupied much ofPalestine. Yet the conception of Jund Filastin as an administrative province,
as mentioned by the Muslim historian Ibn Shaddad (1145–1234 AD), a
biographer of Salah al-Din (Saladin) and an eye-witness of the Muslim‒
Third Crusade battles, survived until the Mongol invasion of Palestine in
the mid-13th century. Its territory also seems to have been expanded fromthe 10th century onwards both towards the east in Transjordan and in thesouth-east (The Encyclopaedia of Islam 1965, Vol. II: 911; also ibn Shaddad
2002).

Chapter 7

BETWEEN EGYPT AND AL-SHAM
Palestine during the Ayyubid, Mamluk andearly Ottoman periods

PALESTINE ON ARAB AND VENETIAN WORLD MAPS
(12TH‒15TH CENTURIES): THE MAPS OF MUHAMMAD ALIDRISI (1154), PIETRO VESCONTE, MARINO SANUDO ANDFRA MAURO (1450)
The glories of Arab geography and cartography continued well into the late
Middle Ages and in 1154, at the height to the Latin Crusader Kingdom ofJerusalem, Palestine was mentioned on the world map of the Arabic
magnum opus, Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi’khtirāq al-Afaq (translated as The
Pleasure of Him who Longs to Cross the Horizons), produced byAndalusian Arab geographer and cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100–1165), the foremost geographer of his age. Becoming famous in Latin as the
Tabula Rogeriana (Arabic: Kitab Rujar, The Book of Roger) and Opus
Geographicum, al-Idrisi’s masterpiece of geographical information and a
description of the known world included a world map, showing Filastin in
Arabic. Bearing in mind that al-Idrisi was working decades after the
Crusaders’ victory in Jerusalem (he was born a year after), interest in
Palestine was at an all-time high, and maps and literature including thecountry were sought after.
Al-Idrisi had settled in Palermo, then the capital of a rising
Mediterranean power and a centre of Christian and Arab Muslim culturalconvivencia, and had worked on the commentaries and illustrations of themap for fifteen years at the court of the Norman King Roger II, the founderof the Kingdom of Sicily in the first half of the 12th century, with a mixed

cultural heritage, who commissioned the work around 1138 (Houben 2002:
102‒104; Maqbul 1992). Al-Idrisi travelled extensively in Europe, North
Africa and West Asia and gathered information from Muslim travellers,sailors and merchants. Inspired by Ptolemy’s Map of the World (discussed
above), al-Idrisi’s Map of the World was far more advanced and for the next
three centuries geographers treated his map as the most accurate and copied
it without alteration (Scott 1904: 461‒462; Maqbul 1992; Edson 2007: 42‒
43).
An abridged Arabic version of Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi-Ikhtiraq al-Afaq
was published in Rome in 1592 with title: De Geographia Universali(Maqbul 1992; al-Idrisi 1592). Printed by Rome’s academic Medic Press,
this was one of the first Arabic books to be printed. (Hopkins and Levtzion
2000: 104–131). The most complete Arabic manuscript, which includes theworld map and all seventy sectional maps, is kept in Istanbul (Pinto 2006:
140).
A century and a half after Idrisi’s world map was produced, Palestine
was found on another world map, this time by Marino Sanudo (c. 1270–
1343) a Venetian merchant who travelled to Palestine a number of times
and drew maps based on his travels. Sanudo was also a public figure andgeographer who became widely known for his lifelong attempts to revive
the Latin Crusades following the fall of Acre, the last capital of the Latin
Kingdom, in 1291. For the Venetians, money-making, maritime trade andcrusading for the Holy Land went hand in hand. Suddenly, with the loss ofthe considerable wealth of Acre (and much of the Galilean and Lebanese
coasts), the Venetians, and their European allies, had lost lucrative trade,
local harbours, considerable material assets, residential quarters, churches,monasteries and the famous religio-military Orders such as the Templars,
Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights in Acre. By 1307 Sanudo had written abook, Conditiones Terrae Sanctae, effectively a strategic manual for
crusading schemes and for European reconquest of Palestine. A map of
Acre was included in Sanudo’s book (Edson 2004: 133). Also, a world map
appeared in most of Sanudo’s manuscripts of the early 14th century.
Historian Evelyn Edson writes:
The map of the Eastern Mediterranean … which shows the main theatreof operations for Sanudo’s proposed campaign, is a combination of amarine chart and a map of the interior … Lined up along the southerncoast of Asia Minor, and the shores of Palestine and Egypt and the islandof Cyprus, is a series of names of ports. On the coast of Palestine these
are accompanied by indications of distances in miles. In the interior,much more vaguely indicated, are larger features such as the Tigris andEuphrates rivers and the countries of Mesopotamia, Persia and Chaldea.
(Edson 2004: 139)
For nearly three centuries al-Idrisi’s world map was treated by Arab andEuropean geographers, cartographers and historians as the most accurate
and they copied it without alteration (Scott 1904: 461‒462; Maqbul 1992:
156‒174). In the mid-15th century the mappa mundi of Fra Mauro (died1464), an Italian cartographer and monk who lived in the Republic ofVenice but also worked for the Portuguese kings, came to replace al-Idrisi’s
map from the 12th century. In his youth, Mauro had travelled extensively asa merchant and a soldier and became familiar with the Near East regions. In
1450 Mauro completed a world map, which became the most detailed andaccurate map of the world up to that time. Among Mauro’s sources we findclassical authors and Ptolemy’s Geography as well as Arab cartographers
and the 12th century maps of al-Idrisi.
Mauro’s world map mentions Palaestina for religio-political andpractical purposes. If al-Idrisi’s map in the 12th century was commissioned
by King Roger II of Sicily and in the service of a trading Mediterranean
Christian kingdom with religious connections to Palestine, Mauro’s map
was commissioned by King Alfonso V of Portugal in the service of therising global Portuguese Empire. But the ‘land of Jesus’ was central to the
Italian monk and to Christian pilgrims to Terra Sancta. However, the size ofPalestine/Terra Sancta is considerably reduced by having to accommodate
all the other places on the map and Mauro feels he had to apologise for this:‘Those who are knowledgeable would put here in Idumea, Palestine andGalilee things which I have not shown, such as the river Jordan, the sea ofTiberias, the Dead Sea and other places, because there was not enoughroom’ (Edson 2007: 151).
The printing revolution in Renaissance Europe and the spread of thepress from the late 15th century onwards introduced an era of masscirculation of ideas with considerable impact on the mass representation of
the Holy Land/Palestine. In the European and Italian Renaissance era
cartographic representations of Palestine/the Holy Land also increased

sharply. The map of ‘Palestina Moderna et Terra Sancta’ was published in
Florence around 1480 and was included in Francesco Berlinghieri’s
expanded edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Geography). Berlinghieri, an
Italian Renaissance scholar and diplomat, was the first modern European tointerpret, expand upon and republish the works of the 2nd century Greek
geographer. Apparently the ‘Palestina Moderna et Terra Sancta’ map wasbased on the Sanudo‒Vesconte map of Palestine, a map produced by Pietro
Vesconte (who was active between 1310 and 1330) and Marino Sanudo,
first published in Venice around 1320.1 Vesconte was a Genoese
cartographer, geographer and navigational chart-maker who worked in
Venice. He also provided a world map, nautical atlas, a map of Palestineand plan of Acre and Jerusalem for inclusion in Marino Sanuto’s Liber
secretorum fidelium cruces super terrae sanctae recuperatione etConservatione, a work which discusses trade routes and was aimed at
encouraging a new Latin crusading campaign, providing a manual for the
military reconquest of the Holy Land (Edson 2004: 139; Bagrow 2010: 69‒
70). Although gradually ideas of new military crusades began to subside,
the Sanudo‒Vesconte map and the maps of ‘Palestina Moderna et Terra
Sancta’ were destined to project European power and provide modern
representational images of Palestine for the Europeans until the 18th
century.
The European printing revolution made it possible for dozens of detailed
maps of ‘Palestina/Palaestina’ to be published and circulated in Europe
throughout the 18th century. In 1714 Palaestina ex monumentis Veteris
illustrata by Dutch cartographer, philologist and biblical Orientalist
Hadrianus Relandus illustrated the geography of Palestine with maps. In the
Ottoman Empire, the printing of books and maps started only in 1729 andin 1803 the Ottoman Cedid Atlas Tercümesi (A Translation of a New Atlas),published in Istanbul, was partly based on European geographicalknowledge as well as European map-making methods of the day. Publishedwithin the framework of the ‘new system’ of the Ottoman administrativeand military reforms of the time, the New Atlas included a map of Filastin
and bar-Sham (hinterland of al-Sham) with the Arabic term Ard Filastin(‘Land of Palestine’; written in a peculiar way:
) shown inlarge Arabic script on the bottom left of the map. As we shall see below, thepublication of this new Ottoman atlas preceded the publication of ‘JacotinAtlas’, which had a map using the Arabic script for ‘Palestine’ and the ‘landof al-Quds’ () by twenty-three years.
In the 19th century European romantic Crusader revivalism in art,
religious fervour and politics and British actual penetration of Palestine
were repackaged in the form of a ‘peace crusade’ and biblical Orientalism.
This gradual penetration of late Ottoman Palestine culminated in the proZionist Balfour Declaration of November 1917 and the actual British
military occupation of Palestine in 1917.
AYYUBID PALESTINE AND THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF
ISLAMIC JERUSALEM IN POST-CRUSADE PALESTINE: THE
DECLINE OF PALESTINE’S COASTAL CITIES AND RISE OF
THE INTERIOR URBAN CENTRES
The defeat of the Latin Crusaders in the 12th century brought about the reestablishment of Muslim rule in Palestine and once again the reorientationof the country. This lasted for seven centuries and consisted of three distinct
periods: the Ayyubid (1187‒1260), Mamluk (1260‒1517) and Ottoman(1517‒1917) eras. The economic and political reorientation of Palestine
towards Europe under the rule of Dhaher al- Umar in the 18th century, as
well as during the Ottoman reforms of the second half of the 19th century,
all contributed to bringing Palestine into the modern era.
The geo-political and strategic reorientation of Palestine in the postCrusader period away from the Mediterranean coastal region and its
strategic location under both the Ayyubids and Mamluks between the alSham region and Egypt had a lasting impact on its history, culture and arts
as well as identity as a geo-political polity. In medieval Muslim geography,
the al-Sham region consisted of the territories of present-day Syria, Filastin(Israel included), modern Jordan, Lebanon and south Turkey. Of the twopresent-day countries of Egypt and Syria, Palestine’s close historic links
with the al-Sham region were the most enduring historically and mostrooted in modern Palestinian social memory.
The important Ayyubid period in Palestine began with Salah al-Din’s
spectacular victory over the Frankish at the Battle of Hittin in 1187, aturning point in the history of Palestine. Salah al-Din had been the vizier ofthe (Shiite) Fatimid state in Egypt before he brought an end to Fatimid rulein the country. Shortly afterwards the Crusader stronghold of Acre wascaptured by Salah al-Din and in the same year the Ayyubid forces took
Nazareth, Saffuriyah, Haifa, Arsuf, Caesarea, Sabastiyah (Sebastia), Jaffa,
al-Ramla, Gaza, Beit Jibrin, ‘Asqalan and Jerusalem. Most of the Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem fell to the Ayyubids in or shortly after 1187.
However, the Crusaders continued to pose a major threat by regaining
control of parts of Palestine’s coastline in the 1190s and the Frankish
enclave in the coastal city of Acre lasted until 1291.
Within less than a century during their relatively short tenure, the
Ayyubids ushered in a dynamic period of great cultural flowering oflearning (of schools and colleges) and highly original, multi-faceted andmarked technological developments in the country and throughout theregion (Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 512, 520); developments in science,engineering and medicine, education and architecture pioneered in the Araband Muslim world, from the Andalus to Egypt and from Palestine andCentral Asia, were later either copied by the Latin Crusaders and translated
in Europe or inspired further developments during the later Renaissance.
The most crucial development was the removal of the European colonial
and Frankish domination of Jerusalem and the restoration of Muslim rule in
the holy city. The Muslims and Jews of the city had been slaughtered or
driven out by the Latin Crusaders and the Muslim holy places on the Haram
al-Sharif had been desecrated or converted into Christian temples andoffices. The contrast between the behaviour of the Ayyubid and Frankish
rulers can hardly be overstated. The re-establishment of Islamic Jerusalem
allowed Jews and Muslims to return to the city and permitted Christianaccess to and worship at their holy places. Also, crucially, under the
Ayyubids al-Quds permanently replaced al-Ramla as the political,
administrative and cultural capital of Palestine as well as the religious
capital of the whole Ayyubid state. Earlier in this work I suggested thetheory of a secular-administrative versus religious capital (‘double capitals’)
evolving in Palestine under the Romans, Byzantines and Muslim Arabs.
This was illustrated in the cases of Caesarea-Palaestina versus Aelia
Capitolina under the Romans and Byzantines and al-Ramla versus Iliya-alQuds during the first three centuries of Islam in Palestine. This separation
between administrative and religious capitals of Palestine was discontinued
under the Ayyubids. And the Mamluks, Ottomans and British followed the
Ayyubid tradition. The status of Jerusalem as the foremost and capital cityof Palestine was to last for the next seven centuries.

The Ayyubids, furthermore, ushered in a new era of intellectual activity
and economic prosperity in Palestine and in all the countries they ruled.
Islamic madrasahs (schools) had existed in Jerusalem since the early
Islamic period (Gil, M. 1997). However, the earliest madrasahs inJerusalem after the Frankish period were built by the Ayyubids (Galor and
Bloedhorn 2013: 216). The madrasahs and patronage provided by the
Ayyubids led to resurgence in educational, commercial, architectural andartistic activity not only in Jerusalem but in other urban centres of Palestine(Hillenbrand and Auld 2009). A substantial number of ribats (hospices for
Muslim pilgrims) were built during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods(Galor and Bloedhorn 2013: 213). The Crusader period had affected mainly
the urban centres of Palestine; it was ‘merely an episode in the life of muchof the [rural] hinterland which quickly returned to normal conditions withthe end of Christian domination’ and the advent of the Ayyubids (RosenAyalon 1998: 514). The period was also marked by an Ayyubid process ofreinforcing Sunni Muslim domination under their rule by setting up
numerous madrasahs, sufi lodges (zawiyas), ribats, public baths, markets
and caravanserais (khans) in the main cities, especially in Jerusalem. Overtime, nearly a quarter of all institutions and commercial properties inJerusalem belonged to Islamic waqf endowments and Ottoman deed records
show this situation was still evident in the late Ottoman period.2 The
surviving monuments in Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine bear witness
to the dynamism and prosperity of the Ayyubid period in Palestine.
The Crusaders continued to threaten coastal Palestine via theMediterranean Sea. Crucially, the Crusaders’ abilities to utilise siege
techniques and blockade methods to capture Palestine’s and Syria’s greatest
fortifications ‘confirmed the crusaders to contemporaries as successful andterrifying siege warriors’ (Rogers 2002: 39). To prevent attacks from the sea
and pre-empt the eventual return of the Crusaders and siege situations, the
Ayyubids sought to reorient the country strategically from the coastal region
to the hinterland of Palestine and consequently destroyed the walls of anumber of coastal cities (and much of their infrastructure) from Tyre in thenorth to Gaza in the south and dumped the rubble in the water in an effort toblock any possible landing in the ports of these cities:
Obviously, the objective was to prevent any landing from the sea. To that
end, material of every sort was dumped into the water, obstructing accessto the ports. The port of Caesarea is blocked by the debris until today.
Asqalon [sic] was the first city to suffer this fate, the order for its
destruction being given by Salah al-Din himself. The remains of its walls
are scarred not far from where they originally stood. These walls, which– according to all existing evidence – were constructed by the Fatimids,
had continued to serve the Crusaders but fell victim to the Ayyubid
policy of destruction. (Mujir al-Din 1973: 422; Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 515)
However, it is not entirely true to suggest that Palestine’s coastal cities
were completely destroyed by the Ayyubids. In fact, the evidence
contradicts this claim about the existence of a wholesale policy ofdestruction. Writing in the early 13th century during Ayyubid rule the Arabbiographer and geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229) – a highly
educated former slave who traded widely and travelled extensively in
Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Persia and Central Asia and became renowned for
his encyclopaedic writings on the Muslim world, published in Kitab
Mu’jam al-Buldan (al-Hamawi 1861) – describes the province of Filastin
and lists the coastal cities of ‘Asqalan, Gaza, Arsuf and Caesarea among thepremier cities of Filastin, whose capital Jerusalem had replaced al-Ramla.
Yaqut writes:
Filastin is the last of the provinces of [al-Sham] towards Egypt. Its
capital is Jerusalem. Of the principal towns are ‘Askalan, Ar Ramlah,
Gazzah, Arsuf, Kaisariyyah [Qaysariah; Caesarea Maritima], Nabulus,
Ariha (Jericho), ‘Amman, Yafah [Jaffa] and Beit Jibrin. (Le Strange
2014: 29)
Also, crucially, much of the pre-Crusader Arab geographical terminology ofthe province of Palestine continued to be used by Arab geographers during
and after the Crusader period. For instance, the term ‘the province ofFilastin’ was repeatedly used by Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229), who situates the town of the town of Sabastiyah (Sebastia) in the
district of Nablus, in the province of Filastin, whose capital is Jerusalem(Le Strange 1890: 523; also see 441).
However, the Crusader wars and overall insecurities of coastal Palestinebrought about the slow decline of the coastal cities and the rise ofPalestine’s urban hinterland. This period was also marked by the slow

decline of the city of al-Ramla, which had been the political andadministrative capital of the province of Filastin for over three and a half
centuries; the population of al-Ramla decreased and the capital city of Jund
Filastin was devastated during the Fatimid period by two major earthquakes
in the 11th century (Mujir al-Din 1866: 416; Lev 2006: 592). But thecoastal cities of Palestine experienced a more dramatic decline. In fact,coastal cities such as Acre and Jaffa began to recover and experience asocio-economic revival only in the middle of the 18th century. By contrast,
the inland city of al-Quds/Jerusalem became once again the most developed
metropolitan city of Palestine under the Mamluks throughout the 13th‒15th
centuries. In the 18th century regional and global trade in cotton, wheat andtextiles made Acre and Nablus the biggest and most prosperous cities inPalestine and among the largest cities in the al-Sham region (Doumani
1995; Philipp 2001).
THE LEADING ROLE OF AL-QUDS UNDER THE MAMLUKS:
THE CAPITAL OF MAMLUK PALESTINE AND THE ‘CITYWITHOUT WALLS’ (1260‒1517)
Based in Egypt, the Mamluk Sultans maintained and accelerated many of
the innovations ushered in by the Ayyubids in Palestine. In fact, theMamluks were one of the most important Muslim dynasties in the history of
medieval Palestine. They gained fame and legitimacy and produced lasting
impact in stopping the terrifying Mongol advance into the Near East at theBattle of ‘Ain Jalut in Palestine in 1260 – which was the first time that theMongol army had suffered a major defeat – and for eradicating the Latin
Crusader presence in Palestine and elsewhere along the Palestinian,Lebanese and Syrian coasts. The Mamluk’s spectacular military successes
in Palestine came only two years after the Mongol capture and sacking of
Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate.
Although military dynasties are never revolutionary, under the longlasting Mamluk rulers al-Quds was expanded significantly and remained
central to the province of Filastin, which was mentioned by North African
historian Ibn Khaldun, who, in his 1377 Muqaddimah, reported Filastin
province taxes as 310,000 gold dinars plus 300,000 ratls of olive oil (citedin Le Strange 1890, 2010: 45). Rosen-Ayalon describes the pivotal positionof Jerusalem in Mamluk Palestine:

There can be no doubt as to the predominant role of Jerusalem during theMamluk period. For nearly three centuries, life developed harmoniously
in the city, which became an urban center of varied activity ... Jerusalem
became a city of exile to which were banished undesirable [Mamluk]
commanders ... Thus, the city profited from much of their personal
involvement in its affairs. It was transformed into an organized medieval
city, provided with all the necessary installations, services and publicbuildings. Even today, the ‘Old City’ – Jerusalem within the walls –reflects the stamp it acquired during the period of Mamluk domination.
Most of the urban fabric of Jerusalem within the walls dates back to
the Middle Ages, whose numerous surviving monuments bear witness to
the glory of this medieval city ... Apparently, Jerusalem was not enclosedwith walls, or, at most, only sectors of the previous walls and gates(destroyed by the Ayyubids) remained, providing a convenient frame
around the peaceful city. (Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 518)
The Palestinised (mostly ‘exiled’), demonstratively devout Mamluk andhighly enterprising elite in al-Quds – with echoes of Origen and the Greekspeaking elite in Caesarea-Palaestina a millennium earlier – became adriving force in the spectacular rise and phenomenal urban expansion of
Jerusalem in the 13th and 14th centuries.
After the Umayyads, the Mamluks had the most lasting impact on alQuds/Jerusalem, which had, for nearly 300 years, so prospered under
Mamluk rule. The latter brought welcome stability to the region, so that thecity grew and became a ‘city without walls’ – with the exception of thewalls surrounding the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) – something
extraordinary and totally unique for a medieval capital city of the size,
importance and centrality of Jerusalem. After the first major defeat of theLatin Crusaders in 1187 the walls of al-Quds had been largely demolishedby the Ayyubids as a drastic defensive measure designed to prevent anotherdestructive siege of the city by the Crusaders. However, this medieval ‘city
without walls’ grew confidently and spectacularly under the Mamluks in
the 13th and 14th centuries. Although the annual pilgrimage, Hajj, toMecca was always a mandatory religious duty for Muslims, the city of alQuds had long been a focus of intense Islamic devotion and the centre ofIslamic pilgrimage, long before the Crusaders, and in the 10th century alMaqdisi, the Jerusalem-born Palestinian historian, refers to the city as‘virtuous Iliya’ (Iliya al-Fadila) (al-Maqdisi 2002: 135). Subsequently the
Fada’il al-Quds (‘Merits or Virtues of Jerusalem’) literature also played an
important role in the Muslim efforts to defeat the Crusaders and recapture
Jerusalem from them.
The Islamic Fada’il al-Quds literature and the struggle with the Latin
Crusaders heightened the intensity of Islamic devotion, and increased thenumber of Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem. Also, for medieval Muslims,
clean running water and hygiene, bath houses and fountains had always
been among the most important elements in the prosperity of the sacredcity. The Arab bath houses are something the Frankish knights picked up
and took back to Europe. Under the Mamluks, al-Quds underwent an
intensive process of construction and became the focus of urban life andlearning in Palestine, with numerous madrasahs, architectural splendour,bath houses, beautiful fountains, minarets and hostels for pilgrims. The
splendour of Hammam al- Ayn, one of the most exquisite bathhouses inJerusalem and the longest to remain in operation, throughout its 700-year
history, can still be seen today (Asali 1990). Muslim pilgrims flocked to thecity after its liberation from the Crusaders. Architecturally one of the mostspectacular eras of Jerusalem’s history is that of the Mamluk period, and its
distinctive pink, black and white patterned buildings and markets date fromthis era (Irving 2011: 96).
The massive socio-economic and religious growth of the city under theMamluks is evident in the expansion of its marketplaces:
The construction of several markets (suq, plural aswaq), is indicative of
the city’s expanding commercial activity. Some of this construction
expanded earlier installations, those along the north‒south main artery of
the city which had developed out of the Roman and Byzantine Cardo ...
Other markets were a true creation of the Mamluk period. The mostoutstanding example is Suq el-Qattanin with its magnificent portal
opening at Haram al-Sharif. This market, dating from the first half of the
fourteenth century, is so well preserved that it presents the most typical,
classical formula in architectural terms of the Near Eastern covered suq.
In fact, most covered marketplaces initiated this style for several
centuries, as was the case with the nineteenth century ‘White Market’ ofAcre, that followed this same plan exactly. (Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 518)

During this long Mamluk period, leading Palestinian Muslim scholars(ulama) moved freely between Palestine, Egypt and al-Sham not only to
study but also for senior jobs. For instance, Ibn Hajar al- Asqalani (1372–
1449) was a leading medieval Shafi’i Sunni scholar. Born in Cairo in 1372
as Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali, he was the son of the Shafi’i scholar andpoet Nur al-Din ‘Ali, but he became famous as ‘Ibn Hajar al- Asqalani’
because his family had originated in the city of ‘Asqalan in Palestine. Ibn
Hajar studied Islamic jurisprudence in Damascus and Jerusalem and hewent on to be appointed to the position of Egyptian chief judge (qadi). Ibn
Hajar authored numerous works on fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence)
interpretation, history and poetry and Shafi’i jurisprudence, the most
famous of which was his commentary on the Sahih of Bukhari, entitled
Fath al-Bari (Adamec 2009: 136).
THE SEA VERSUS THE MOUNTAIN: SAFAD AS A NEWREGIONAL CAPITAL OF THE GALILEE
The ‘sea versus the mountain’ is a key theme in modern Palestinian poetry,especially the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, cultural writings and ‘nativist’
geo-ethnography (see e.g. Tamari 2008: 95‒98; also Furani 2012). Framing
this cultural discourse in geo-political and historical terms, the roots of thisidea may go all the way back to ancient and medieval Palestine.
Historically, key cities in Palestine were associated with either the sea(Arabic: bahr) or the mountain (Arabic: jabal). The cities of Gaza,‘Asqalan, Jaffa, Caesarea, Arsuf and Acre were associated with theMediterranean Sea, while al-Khalil (Jabal al-Khalil), al-Quds (Jabal alQuds), Nablus (Jabal Nablus) and Safad (Jabal Safad) were all associatedwith mountains in the Palestine interior.
A significant part of the economy of the mountainous regions ofPalestine was the proliferation of thousands of stone quarries and thedevelopment of extensive marble and stone quarry industry which supplied
the local construction industry with stones and other building materials andexporting marble and quarried white-stones to neighbouring countries. The
social memories of the Palestine stone quarry () was immortalised in
Mahmoud Darwish’s 1964 poem: ‘Identity Card’:Record!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks’.
The marble-producing quarries of Palestine and the white-stone quarries of
the Arab province of Jund Filastin under Islam (Gil M. 1997: 230) gave theurban centres of the country (Nablus, al-Quds/Jerusalem, al-Ramla, alKhalil) their distinctive look as ‘cities of stone’. This stone quarry industry
also left a monumental legacy which can be seen in the Dome of the Rock,the 16th century Ottoman Walls of Jerusalem, the 18th century Walls of
Acre and the city of Petra (‘rock’), the old capital of the Nabataean Arabs
and the province of Palaestina Salutaris under the Byzantines.
Furthermore, the construction of monumental mosques, minarets andchurches and the economy of Holy Land pilgrimage went hand-in-handwith the economy of stone quarrying and stone masonry. Historically the
tradition of holy mountains developed greatly during the Greek, Roman andByzantine eras; the notion of holy mountains and mountainous cities(Nablus, Jerusalem, al-Khalil, Safad, Mount Tabor, Mount Gerizim, Mountof Olives, Mount Sinai) versus the relatively more relaxed and secularenvironment of Palestine coastal cities (Caesarea Maritima, Gaza, ‘Asqalan,Jaffa, Haifa, Acre) played an important role in the construction of district
collective religious memory and identity of the country.
The siege and fall of Acre, a chief port and the capital of the Latin
Kingdom, took place in 1291 and resulted in the loss of a Crusader
stronghold and last Crusader-controlled city in Palestine to the Mamluks.
To modern historians fall of Acre was the end of the Crusades, but tocontemporary Muslims, the Latin Crusaders’ threat to Palestine and Syria
from the Mediterranean Sea persisted. In the post-Crusader era, theMamluks continued to consolidate the strategic and defensive reorientationof the country towards the Mountain, a policy which began under the
Ayyubids. The decline of Palestine’s coastal towns and the rise of country’s
urban hinterland, especially under the Ayyubids and the Mamluks, werealso illustrated by the rise Safad in upper Galilee, a town protected by thehigh Galilean mountains.
Following the recovery of Safad from the Crusaders in 1266, theMamluks took steps to shift the provincial power in the Galilee from thecoastal town of Acre westwards and turn the mountainous town of Safad
into the capital of northern Palestine. The fortress town of Safad wasrenovated and expanded under the Mamluks and served as a regional capitalin Palestine for the first time in its history (Luz 2014: 36). Crucially, Safad
remained the capital of northern Palestine for several centuries. It all began
in 1266 when Bilad al-Sham came under Mamluk rule and this vast region
was divided into six large administrative provinces, each called a mamlakat(literally ‘kingdom’) or niabat (‘vice regency’). These provinces were
Damascus, Aleppo, Hamat, Tripoli (modern Lebanon), Safad (Palestine),
Karak (Transjordan). The head of each province (or mamlakah) bore thetitle of naib (viceroy, or ‘little Sultan’). Encompassing much of northern
Palestine and consisting of ten districts, the Mamlakat Safad (,‘Kingdom of Safad’) (Tarawneh 1982) included not only modern-day
Galilee but also Marj ibn ‘Amer, including the towns of al-Lajjun and Jenin– both of which were at the time considered part of lower Galilee – andother territories which today constitute the southern parts of modern-day
Lebanon. When the Ottomans occupied Palestine in the early 16th century
they retained many of the administrative characteristics of the previous
Mamluk rule (as we as many of the social, economic, religious and legal
institutions of the country). However, the Ottomans changed the name of
the administrative province of Safad from Mamlakat Safad to sanjak (orpashalik) of Safad (Arabic: Liwa Safad).
Although the Galilee remained a ‘frontier province’ throughout much of
the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, after 1266 the new administrative statusof Safad brought about urban expansion in the city and the establishment of
new buildings, baths, mosques, markets and caravanserais (Drory 2004).
The new building programme in the city included the Red Mosque, one ofthe oldest Mamluk buildings in Palestine still standing today. The buildingof the mosque in 1276 was attributed to the Sultan Baybars, who ruled theregion from 1260 to 1278 and who apparently embarked on a bridgebuilding programme across Palestine designed to revive its highways andimprove its transport system, according to inscriptions above the wooden
door at the entrance to the mosque. One of the best known Palestinianjudges among the magistrates of Mamluk Palestine was Shams al-Din
Muhammad al- Uthmani (d. 1378), author of the detailed local history
Tarikh Safad, written in 1378, which has survived in only partial form
(Drory 2004: 184). Tarikh Safad gives us important information on thevillages of the Galilee under the Mamluks and a unique glimpse into theinner workings of the religious and Sufi institutions in the region.
THE SOCIAL MEMORY OF PALESTINE DURING THE
MAMLUK AND EARLY OTTOMAN PERIODS: FILASTIN IN
LOCAL MUSLIM SOCIAL MEMORY
The historical writing on Palestine is dominated by imperial chronologies
and colonising methodologies and history ‘from without’ approaches. In asimilar vein, it has been suggested that the term Palestine had been
completely forgotten by local Arabs during the late Mamluk and early
Ottoman periods and that it was only brought back to them in the late
Ottoman period by local Arab Christians in touch with Europe. In her work
A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of theState of Israel, Gudrun Krämer, a German scholar of Islamic history,
astutely observes:
And yet, the widespread view that the term ‘Palestine’ was only revived
at the time of the European Renaissance with its conscious reference to
Greek and Roman antiquity, that it was never used by Jews, that it had
been entirely forgotten by local Arabs, and that it was brought back tothem by Arab Christians in touch with Europe, can no longer be upheld.
(Krämer 2011: 16)
In fact, the memory of historic Palestine was kept alive throughout theMamluk and Ottoman periods by Palestinian Muslim writers and jurists aswell as by Arab and Muslim travellers through Palestine. In the 14th
century under the Mamluks the name Filastin was cited by Arab andMuslim travellers, often also in connection with the city of al-Ramla, theformer capital of the province of Jund Filastin for several centuries under
Islam. Ibn Battuta, the famous Muslim traveller and scholar from North
Africa, travelled through most of the Muslim world and visited Palestine inthe summer of 1326. He later wrote his account as the Rihlah (‘Journey’ or‘Travels’):
I journeyed thereafter from Jerusalem [al-Quds] to the fortress of
Askalon, which is a total ruin. Of the great mosque, known as themosque of ‘Omar, nothing remains but its walls and some marble
columns of matchless beauty, partly standing and partly fallen. Amongst
them is a wonderful red column, of which the people tell that theChristians carried it off to their country but afterwards lost it, when it
was found at its place at Askalon. Thence I went on to the city of arRamlah, which is also called Filastin, in the qibla of those mosques they
say three hundred of the prophets are buried. From ar-Ramlah I went to
the town of Nabulus ... a city with an abundance of trees and perennial
streams and one of the richest in [al-Sham] for olives. The oil of which isexported thence to Cairo and Damascus. It is at Nabulus that the carobsweet is manufactured and exported to Damascus and elsewhere ...
Nabulus has also a species of melon which is called by its name, a goodand delicious fruit ... Thence I went to Ajalun ... passing through the
Ghawr, followed the coast to Akka [Acre] which is in ruins ... Akka wasformerly the capital and port of the country of the Franks [Crusaders] ...
and rivalled Constantinople itself. (Ibn Battuta 2005: 57‒58)
But the social memory and political geography of Palestine were kept alive
perhaps more vividly by indigenous Muslim Palestinian writers living in the
country than by Arab writers travelling through Palestine during theMamluk period. Writing during the late Mamluk period, Mujir al-Din alUlaymi () (1522‒1456), a Palestinian Muslim qadi,
historian and Jerusamelite, in his comprehensive work The Glorious
History of al-Quds and al-Khalil (al-Uns al-Jalil bi-Tarikh al-Quds walKhalil, c. 1495), extensively refers to his native country as Filastin, a term
he repeats twenty-two times. Although he also uses the term Holy Land (alArd al-Muqaddasah), no other geographical names, such al-Sham, arementioned. Mujir al-Din divides the al-Sham region into five distinct
provinces, two of which are connected with historic and modern Palestine:• The first Sham is Palestine with the city of al-Ramla at its centre.
• The second Sham is Hauran with the city of Tiberias at its centre.

• The third Sham is the Ghouta with the city of Damascus at its centre.
• The fourth Sham is Hims with the city of Hims at its centre.
• The fifth Sham is Qinnasrin with the city of Aleppo at its centre.
Mujir al-Din constructs a concept of al-Sham which places his own country,
Filastin, at its centre as the first region of al-Sham. He also puts Palestine
centre stage by proudly quoting other Muslim authors saying: ‘what islacking on earth, increases in al-Sham, and what is lacking in al-Sham,increases in Palestine’ (Mujir al-Din 1973). He describes Filastin as
stretching from a point in the south near al-‘Arish in Sinai to Lajjun in Marj
Ibn ‘Amer in the north. This territorial conception of Filastin echoes theboundaries of the Arab province of Filastin throughout early Islam (Mujir
al-Din 1495; Gerber 2008: 49; le Strange 2014; Khalidi, R. 1998: 216, note25). This amply demonstrates how the incredibly fertile social, cultural andgeographic memories of the medieval Arab Islamic province of Filastin
were nurtured by local Muslim Palestinian judges and writers throughout
the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods.
In view of the fact that the polity of Filastin was preserved in the social
memory and works of two distinguished Palestinian Muslim scholars andjurists, Mujir al-Din al- Ulaymi, (c. 1495) (see below) and Khair al-Din alRamli in the 17th century, it is hardly surprising that the archives of theIslamic Sharia Court of Jerusalem in the 18th century also show that theterms Filastin, ard Filastin (‘land of Palestine’, ‘’) and ahl
Filastin (the ‘people of Palestine’, ‘’) – with specific reference
to the cities of al-Ramla, Lydda, Jaffa, al-Quds, al-Khalil (Hebron) andGaza, and within the wider geographical region al-Sham – remained verymuch alive in local and regional Palestinian Muslim social memory
throughout the Mamluk and Ottoman periods.
THE MOSAICS OF HISTORIC PALESTINE, CONTINUITIESAND TRANSFORMATION: THE PALESTINIAN GLASSWORKINDUSTRY OF AL-KHALIL AND THE SCHOOL OF MOSAICSOF AL-QUDS
The Arabic term for mosaics is fusayfisaa. The Arab term is a transliterationof the Byzantine Greek term Ψηφιδωτό and mosaic art spectacularly
flourished during the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine-style mosaics decorated

the churches, synagogues and temples of Provincia Palaestina (Prima,
Secunda and Tertia) which, from the 4th century onwards, were exquisitely
embellished with wall, ceiling and flour mosaics. Both the Nea Church(Νέα Ἐκκλησία) in Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), erected by Justinian I(527–565),3 and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built as a great
Constantinian basilica, were decorated with mosaics. The original mosaic
floor of the Church of the Nativity, with its typical Roman geometricmotifs, is partially preserved today. As we have already shown, the very
name of the country Palaestina, in Greek (Παλαιστινη), was found on the
famous Madaba Mosaic Map, dated 560‒565 AD, in a town which at thetime was part of the Byzantine province of Palaestina Prima. Similar Arab
Byzantine-style mosaics were found at the Umayyad Hisham’s Palace (Qar Hisham) at Khirbat al-Mafjar, an important early Islamic archaeologicalsite located 5 kilometres north of the town of Jericho. Many of the finds
from the excavations at the site are now held in the Rockefeller Museum(formerly Palestine Archaeological Museum) in occupied East Jerusalem.
The Palestine mosaic (wall, ceiling and floor) industry also flourishedand grew further under the impact of the Ayyubid and Mamluk building
programmes in Jerusalem. The reorientation and re-centring of Palestine in
the post-Crusader era by the Ayyubids and Mamluks towards the interior of
the country and the rise again of the cities of the mountain (al-Khalil, alQuds, Nablus, Safad) as a consequence are reflected in work of Mujir alDin al- Ulaymi, The Glorious History of al-Quds and al-Khalil. Mujir alDin not only repeatedly refers to the term Filastin but also points to theevolution of regional social and cultural identities in Palestine and inparticular Palestinian regional arts and identity linked to the cities of alKhalil (and the area of Jabal al-Khalil) and al-Quds (the area of Jabal alQuds). These close social, economic, cultural and artistic links between thetwo cities, which were formed and flourished during the Ayyubid, Mamluk
and Ottoman periods, have endured for centuries and survived into themodern period; and they point to the way internal Palestinian factors
contributed to the formation of strong regional identities within Palestine,
identities which, like the works of Palestinian Muslim writers and qadis –Mujir al-Din in the 15th century and Khair al-Din al-Ramli and alTumurtashi in the 17th century – contributed greatly to the concept ofPalestine by keeping the history and memories of Filastin alive.

During the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods Palestine came under social,
cultural and architectural influences from Cairo and Damascus. But also the
key Palestinian cities such as Nablus, al-Quds and al-Khalil exported muchof their locally manufactured goods to Damascus and Cairo (see, forinstance, Ibn Battuta 2005: 57). Unfortunately, however, the internal
Palestinian agency and the productive and creative capacities of Palestine
are often ignored or glossed over by historians who are frequently
preoccupied with imperial chronologies and prefer to comment on theexternal influences behind the Islamic art and architecture of Ayyubid and
Mamluk Jerusalem, failing to see Palestinian history from within or theautonomous agency of the Palestinians. For instance, historians often point
to the aesthetics of the Tankiziyyah Madrasah in Jerusalem, whose style
resembles the Tankiziyah Madrasah in Damascus (see e.g. Rosen-Ayalon
2006: 119, 155), but fail to see independent Palestinian schools of arts
emerging within Palestine. Indeed, distinct Palestinian craft traditions andschools of arts developed during the Mamluk period and these are found in
the glass industry of al-Khalil and the Palestinian School of Mosaics. These
traditions have survived into the modern period. In the 13th century during
the Mamluk period al-Khalil developed a flourishing and highly respected
glass industry, including glass jewellery known in Arabic as zujaj al-khalili;
the Old City of al-Khalil still includes a district named the ‘Glass-Blower
Quarter’ and Hebron glass continues to the present time to serve as a tourist
attraction for the city. Traditionally, the glass was melted using local raw
materials, including sodium carbonate from the Dead Sea. Stained glass
windows and great works of art in glass produced in al-Khalil also adorn
the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem (al-Ju’beh 2008). AlKhalil’s glass lamps and glass ornaments were exported to Egypt, Syria,
Arabia and Africa. The city became well known for its glass production
throughout the Arab world and to Western travellers to Palestine in themodern period. It was also represented with glass ornaments at the World
Exposition of 1873 in Vienna.4
As in the glasswork industry of al-Khalil, other continuities of historic
Palestine can be illustrated by the mosaic art which has a long history inPalestine and the Middle East, starting with palaces and temple buildings in
Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. The ancient mosaic art of the
Middle East consisted of patterns and images made from the assembly ofsmall pieces of coloured glass, stone (pebble mosaics) or other materials,

used in decorative arts or as interior decoration. Mosaics with patterns andpictures became widespread in classical times.
Islamic Palestine and al-Sham as a whole inherited the material heritageand Byzantine mosaic art of Late Antiquity and this material and cultural
heritage was deployed widely in the construction of monumental religious
buildings and palaces in Umayyad Filastin and al-Sham. These buildings
included the first great Islamic religious buildings in Jerusalem, the Domeof the Rock, completed in 691 AD, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus,
completed in 715. The Dome of the Rock and the neighbouring Dome of
the Chain also embodied some of the most spectacular Islamic heritage ofPalestine, a heritage which continued to inspire generations of craftsmen
and artists for centuries under the Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans.
Katharina Galor and Hanswulf Bloedhorn comment on the emergence of an
independent Palestinian school of mosaics and glasswork during theMamluk period:
Mosaics of colored and gilded glass, colored paste, turquoise faience,and mother-of-pearl, as well as colored stone and marble, embellishedsome of the ... Mamluk buildings. The most impressive wall mosaic islocated in al-Madrasa al-Tankiziyya. It mihrab is covered with narrow
strips of polychrome marble, flanked by reused Crusader columns withcapitals, clearly analogous to certain features of Umayyad wall mosaics
in the Dome of the Rock, in particular with its mother-of-pearl inlay ... It
appears that this late re-emerging art draw its inspiration from seventhcentury mosaics in the Dome of the Rock. Historical sources indicatethat restorations of wall mosaics were carried out during the Mamluk
period in both the Dome of the Rock and the Dome of Chain. Although
Syria and Egypt have similar types of wall mosaics, Jerusalem appears tohave been the home of a genuine Palestinian school that lasted for
centuries. (Galor and Bloedhorn 2013: 230)
The quality of Palestinian glasswork, mosaics and crafts was tightly
regulated and this legacy of the Mamluk system of regulation has survived
in modern Palestinian vernacular terms such as Hisbe and in Palestinianfamily names such as the Muhtasib, a leading Muslim family in the city of
al-Khalil (Hebron). The quality of Palestinian glasswork, mosaics and crafts
was tightly regulated and this legacy of the Mamluk system of economic

regulation has survived in modern Palestinian vernacular terms such as
Hisbe and in Palestinian family names such as the Muhtasib, a leading
Muslim family in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron). The muhtasib system inIslamic Palestine was part of the pre-capitalist ‘moral economy’ (to borrowan expression by English historian E. P. Thompson), influenced by sharia
principles of social justice and the public good and widely promoted in the
Near East. The muhtasib was an important official appointed by theMamluk sultan whose duties included the regulation of prices andsupervision and inspection of bazaars and trade in Palestine, Egypt and alSham. These varied duties also included ensuring that public business was
conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements of the sharia (Islamiclaw). Recurrent epidemics were a regular phenomenon in the urban centresof the Middle Ages and hygienic conditions and the continuous supply ofclean water, for public baths and public drinking fountains in the cities,
were major achievements of Islamic civil engineering in Palestine
throughout the Muslim world. Relying on written official manuals, themuhtasib supervised the regulation of hygienic conditions in the bazaars,
weights and measures, money, prices of produce and manufactured goods,
safety of public places and food sold publicly. They also ensured thatcraftsmen and builders adhered to the specification set for their craft andconstruction standards (Ibn al-Ukhuwah 1976; Broadbridge 1999; Hill, D.
1984).

Chapter 8

PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD IN THE
18TH CENTURY
Early modernities and practical sovereignty
in Palestine

The Eurocentric analysis of the Arab states has failed to recognise that mostof the Arab countries and their borders are closely based on long (precolonial) historical precedents, including the naming of states. In the case ofPalestine, as in the case of most other Arab political entities, traditionallyand throughout the Middle Ages the name Filastin had indicated both anexact geographic location and the identity of the (predominantly, but not
exclusively) Arab Muslim population. Moreover, the history of modern
Palestine is often studied from and with European, Ottoman and Zionistsettler perspectives; the autonomous agency and voice of Palestine and thePalestinians themselves are seldom recognised. With this imperial andcolonial mindset, historians of the modern Middle East also tend to focus on
the Ottoman Empire and ‘Ottoman reforms’, which is also part of a long
Western tradition of preoccupation with imperial chronologies of the Near
East: Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, British etc. Yet the
dawlah al-qutriyyah, or the country/state – the Arabic term qutr being a‘country’ – as a parachronism, and whether traditionally in the form ofsultanate, emirate, kingdom, khanate, shaykhdom, wilayat, caliphate or any
other name, was one of the most common forms of statehood throughout
Muslim history and in Muslim-majority countries; a statehood which often
enjoyed practical sovereignty. The Caliphate of Córdoba (929 to 1031 AD),the Emirate of Granada (1230‒1492), the Khanates of Central Asia, theSultanate of Oman (1741 to the present), the Beys of Tunis (1705‒1957),

the Emirate of Mount Lebanon (1516‒1841), the first Saudi state (theEmirate of Dir’iyah, 1744‒1818) and the Wilayat of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha
of Egypt (1805‒1948) are only a few examples of how incredibly
widespread this form of statehood was throughout Muslim history. Somedual qutriyyah, such as the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt (1250–1517), were
far more powerful than the Muslim Caliphate of Baghdad during the 11th‒
13th centuries. Far from being an aberration, the dawlah qutriyyah became
common throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, especially after the
decline of the Abbasid Caliphate in the second half of the 9th century AD
and many of these independent states enjoyed a great deal of prosperity andspectacular cultural developments. For instance, the independent Emirate of
Aleppo, which encompassed most of northern Syria and parts of western alJazirah, was founded in 944 by the Hamdanid princes and became the seatof an independent emirate under Sayf al-Dawlah. It enjoyed a period ofgreat prosperity and became home to the greatest Arab poet, al-Mutanabi,
and one of the greatest philosophers of Islam, the polymath al-Farabi, theauthor of The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, also known as
The Perfect State (al-Farabi 1985).
This rich historical legacy of the dawlah qutriyyah, whose modern
equivalent is the dawlah wataniyyah or national state, was a factor in theemergence and construction of a two-tier watani‒qawmi nationalism in the
Arab world and in Muslim-majority Palestine in the early 20th century.
Today the Arab world consists of twenty-one states, or dual qutriyyah,
excluding Palestine. Pan-Arab nationalist ideologues often argue that the
failure of Arab unity schemes and the predominance and durability of aldawlah al-qutriyyah in the Arab world are primarily the product of thecolonial legacy. But this argument is made in disregard of the historicallegacy of statehood under Islam, Arab indigenous agency, the distinct local
and regional traditions and the ancient local roots and historical autonomy
of many Arab societies. In fact, as we shall see below, European
colonialism prevented the creation of a dawlah qutriyyah in Palestine.
Moreover, Arabic toponyms such as Palestine/Filastin, Egypt, Syria,
Libya, Iraq or the Yemen all have deep and ancient historical roots andindigenous legitimacy of self-definition. Furthermore, the indigenous
agency behind the creation of Palestinian statehood, the Emirate of Dhaher
al- Umar, in 18th century Palestine, which was a form of dawlah qutriyyah,
is a case in point. The revival and spread of ancient toponyms such as

Palestine/Filastin in the modern era was derived from the common use of
the name in ancient history (from the Late Bronze Age onwards) andthroughout Classical Antiquity, Byzantine Christianity and Medieval Islam.
Although the colonial legacy and influence of European ideas about the‘nation-state’ contributed to the rise of a two-tier (watani‒qawmi) form ofnationalism in the Arab world, local roots and regional historical legacies
must be part of the mix of factors for the emergence and domination of thedawlah qutriyyah throughout the Arab world.
REVIVALISM AND REDISCOVERY UNDER OTTOMAN
RULE: THE ARAB ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE OF
PALESTINE AND INDIGENOUS MEMORIES OF FILASTIN
UNDER THE OTTOMANS (1517‒1860S)
Under the Ottoman Empire (1517‒1917), Palestine was used both as a
general term to describe the predominantly Arab Muslim country in thesouthern Sham region, and as a social and cultural term among theindigenous people of Palestine. By this stage, Muslim-majority Palestine
had developed a strong tradition of Arab Islamic jurisprudence, one of themost crucial requirements of any sense of autonomous polity. The long
Ottoman period reinforced the already close historic links between Palestineand the al-Sham region, an Arab Islamic geographic term which had beencoined during the early Islamic period and referred to the territories ofpresent-day Syria, Palestine, Jordan and southern Turkey, while al-Shamoften referred to the specific capital city of Damascus (al-Sham). Palestine
was not an official designation under the Ottomans and some Arabs during
this period referred to the area as al-Sham, a term which should not be
conflated automatically or exclusively with present-day Syria and themodern myth of Suriyya al-Janubiyyah or, as some Arab intellectuals
continue to assert,1 ‘Southern Syria’. The term ‘Southern Syria’ wasinvented and popularised in 1919‒1920, and was derived from two modern
currents: (a) a late 19th century Syrian qawmi (nationalist) ideology; and (b)the circumstances surrounding the formation of the pan-Arab nationalist
regime in Damascus headed by Emir Faisal in 1919‒1920 (see below).
Whether or not ‘Southern Syria’ was also related to the ancient Roman
designation Syria-Palaestina is not clear, yet the indigenous, sharedmemories of medieval Arab Islamic Filastin and Byzantine Palaestina were
kept alive throughout the Ottoman period both in Palestine and in Europe.
Modernities in Palestine have multiple beginnings and multiple sources.
Although the social and regional roots and markers of modern Palestinian
identity are found in the pre-modern period, its distinct modern features
evolved gradually, both consciously and unconsciously, from its early
beginnings in the 18th century into the 19th and 20th centuries. Thisevolution was influenced by a range of social and cultural markers
including the social memories and cultural heritage of the medieval Arab
Muslim province of Jund Filastin (Gerber 1998a, 2008).
Palestine’s strong tradition of Arab Islamic jurisprudence and the rootsof the modern social, cultural and geographic consciousness of Filastin as a
distinct polity and ‘regional territorially based identity’ can be traced to theworks of Khair al-Din al-Ramli (, 1585–1671), one of themost extraordinary Palestinian jurists of all times and a prominent 17th
century Islamic jurist, public intellectual and writer in Ottoman Palestine(Tucker 2002; Gerber 1998b). Al-Ramli was a native of al-Ramla, and he
was named for the town which was for centuries the administrative secular
capital of the province of Jund Filastin and a major garrison town in
Ottoman Palestine. Al-Ramli was a landowner and farmer in 17th century
Palestine, and his descendants, the Khairis, remained wealthy farmers andprominent figures in the town for nearly three centuries until the 1948
Nakba. During the British Mandatory period, Mustafa Khairi served for
four years as qadi and a long-time mayor of al-Ramla, and his family
owned the only cinema in the town. In the 17th century Khair al-Din alRamli became well known for issuing a collection of fatwas (religious
edicts) known as al-Fatawa al-Khairiyyah () – compiled into
final form in 1670 – that became highly influential in the Sunni Hanafi
school of jurisprudence (fiqh) not only in Palestine but throughout the Arabregion in the 18th and 19th centuries (Islahi 2008) and his jurisprudence
was highly relevant to family waqf, landownership and agrarian relations in
Palestine.
Filastin itself had developed a strong tradition of Islamic jurisprudence
and one of the founders of the four great Sunni schools of Islamic
jurisprudence, Imam al-Shafi’i (767–820 AD), was born in Gaza (Haddad
2007: 189‒190, 193). A brilliant jurist, al-Shafi’i was known to have beenauthorised to issue fatwas at very young age. In 17th century Palestine al-Fatawa al-Khairiyyah had major practical dimensions and offers acontemporary record of the period, giving a complex view of agrarian
relations in Palestine, as al-Ramli was a jurist, farmer and landowner. He is
known to have amassed a big library. He also imported a variety of seeds
from Egypt and introduced them to the district of al-Ramla (Islahi 2008).
Al-Ramli’s terminology and al-Fatawa al-Khairiyyah would also have been
known to the administrators of the Sharia Courts in Jerusalem in the 18thand 19th centuries.
The way Khair al-Din al-Ramli, Mujir al-Din al- Ulaymi and otherleading Palestinian Muslim jurists and writers used the term Filastin to referto the ‘country’ as Palestine, or to ‘our country’ (biladuna), in the 15th to17th centuries suggests that the territorial notion of Palestine was still verymuch alive in Palestinian Muslim social and cultural memory throughout
the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods. This also contradicts the unfoundedclaim that the term Palestine ‘had been entirely forgotten by local Arabs,
and that it was brought back to them by Arab Christians in touch with
Europe’ (Krämer 2011: 16). Several scholars used the works of Mujir alDin and al-Ramli (for instance, Tucker 2002; Gerber 1998a, 2008: 50‒51)
to trace the pre-modern roots of the emergence of embryonic Palestiniansocial and territorial consciousness. In Remembering and Imagining
Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present Haim
Gerber explains:
The term ‘Palestine’ appears later as well. The next writer to use thename ... lived two and half centuries after Mujir al-Din, an independent
mufti and legal scholar in al-Ramla in the seventeenth century, who left
for posterity a most important collection of fatwas (Islamic legal
discussions of questions posed by members of the public). A fatwa is a
public document, to be read and used (sometimes in courts) by all sortsof people, probably literate, and it is my understanding that the language
employed could not have been invented by the mufti. Nor was Khyar alDin al-Ramli an obscure personality. Quite the reverse: all legal jurists
from Syria and Palestine after the seventeenth century used this material
intensively and unquestionably knew every fatwa in it inside out. All thisinformation becomes important if we bear in mind that on several
occasions Khayr al-Din al-Ramli calls the country he was living in
Palestine, and unquestionably assumes that his readers do likewise. Whatis even more remarkable is his use of the term ‘’the country’ and even‘our country’ (biladuna) possibly meaning that he had in mind some sortof a loose community focused around that term. (Gerber 2008: 50; also
Gerber 1998a)
The Islamic Fada’il al-Quds (Merits of Jerusalem) literature and theworks of Khair al-Din al-Ramli, of al-Ramla-Filastin, and another
Palestinian Muslim compatriot and writer in the 17th century, Salih ibn
Ahmad al-Tumurtashi (died in c. 1715), of Gaza, in Filastin, give us anotherdimension to the multi-linear evolution of the concept of Palestine in thecourse of the late Ottoman period. Al-Tumurtashi wrote during the middle
Ottoman period an Islamic Merits of Jerusalem work entitled: The
Complete Knowledge in Remembering the Holy Land and its Boundaries
and Remembering the Land of Palestine and its Boundaries and al-Sham(Al-Khabar al-Tam for Dhikr al-Ard al-Muqaddasah wa-Hududiha waDhikr Ard Filastin wa-Hududiha wa-Sham) (al-Tumurtashi 1695‒1696; alTurk 1998; Anabsi 1992; Gerber 2008: 50‒51). Al-Tumurtashi uses theterms Filastin, the land of Palestine (ard Filastin), the people of Palestine(ahl Filastin) the boundaries or borders of Palestine (hudud Filastin,) and memory of Palestine (dhikr Filastin,) todescribe his own country. Al-Tumurtashi does not create new knowledge on
Palestine. In his manuscript – of which four copies based on the original
manuscript have survived, including two at the Centre for the Revival ofIslamic Heritage in Ab-Dis (Jerusalem) and one at the Süleymaniye Library
in Istanbul (al-Turk 1998: 2‒4) – he reproduces locally available knowledge
and social memories of Arab Islamic Filastin. In the late 17th century alTumurtashi uses a 15th century work by another compatriot, Mujir al-Din,
Al-Uns al-Jalil bi-Tarikh al-Quds wal-Khalil, in his reconstruction of theboundaries of Filastin, which, according to him and Mujir al-Din, extended
from al-‘Arish/Rafah in the south to al-Lajjun (in Marj Ibn ‘Amer) in thenorth. All this demonstrates that the social, administrative and geographic
memories of Palestine among indigenous Palestinians were very much alivein the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 15th‒17th centuries among local
Palestinians these centuries of lived and living memories of Islamic Filastin
would be far more powerful than the historical memories of Islamic Spain(al-Andalus) among Arabs and Muslims today. These lived memories also
show that the term al-Sham did not displace the indigenous, deeply rooted

idea of Filastin throughout the Ottoman period. In fact, the two
geographical terms coexisted in indigenous Palestinian social and cultural
memories, and, for practical purposes, complemented each other.
In Europe the printing press revolution made sure that the Latin term
Palaestina and English term Palestine increased their circulation at the timeof the European Renaissance. The printing and publication revolution
accelerated during the Age of Enlightenment with conscious reference tothe classical Greek and Roman heritage in general and the classical heritageof Palestine in particular. It has already been shown that during Europe’s
Great Age of Exploration from the end of the 15th century to the 18th
century key classical (Greek and Roman) works, which described thegeography, topography and ethnography of classical and Late Antiquity
Palaestina as a country from Phoenicia in the north to Egypt in the south,
were circulated widely in Europe. The famous classicising Christian
Byzantine intellectuals, philosophers and theologians of Palaestina Prima(of Gaza, Caesarea Maritima and Ascalon) and the religio-cultural heritageof Palaestina were also of interest to Renaissance authors.
In fact, in early modern European collective memory the name Palestine(both in Latin and European vernaculars) became the most common
designation of the country (see, for instance, Plett 2004: 512). The fact thatthe name Palestine remained the most commonly used throughout the earlymodern and modern eras is evident in William Shakespeare’s plays.
Syntagma Musicum (Vols. I‒III) was an encyclopaedic work by Germanmusicologist Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), one of the most versatilecomposers and musical academics of the 17th century. Published in
Wittenberg and Wolfenbüttel in three parts between 1614 and 1620, it is oneof the most commonly used research sources for music theory of the earlymodern period (Herbert 2006: 87). Typical of its period, the second volume,
De Organographia, describes musical instruments and their use, and refers
to early instruments of ‘Palestine, Asia Minor and Greece’ (Vol. II, fol. 4).
Two points are central to modern European mapping of and writing
about Palestine:• Provincia Palaestina remained synonymous with the Christian notion of
Terra Santa, or the Holy Land.
• Like the Roman and Byzantine conceptualisation (but unlike themedieval Islamic idea), the conceptualisation of Palestine was alwayssufficiently wide to include the Galilee and Acre. Indeed, throughout theearly and modern periods (especially from the 17th century onwards)
dozens of maps and books were printed and published in Europe (inmany languages) under the designation ‘Palestine’ or ‘Map of Palestine’and in much of this European literature the country of Palestine included
Acre and the Galilee. It was this European notion of Palestine which
influenced late Ottoman reconceptualisation and the Ottoman military
handbook named Filastin Risalesi (see below).
AL-DAWLAH AL-QUTRIYYAH: PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD
AND THE REGIMES OF DHAHER AL- UMAR AND AHMAD
PASHA AL-JAZZAR IN THE 18TH CENTURY
Scholars of the modern Middle East are often preoccupied with the history
and politics of urban elites and with nationalism and modernities imported
from Europe in the 19th century. This approach tends to focus on urban
centres and reproduce elite narratives, while ignoring peasant and ‘frontiersocieties’ and the subaltern and marginalised. This approach also
contributes to the silencing of much of Palestinian history and divesting thePalestinians of their own sense of identity and collective agency. Palestineand the Palestinian people are rarely allowed to speak for themselves,
argued Edward Said; they have to be represented by authoritative Westernor Israeli scholars – Orientalists, biblical archaeologists, scripturalgeographers (Said 1980) – or they have to be viewed through the prism ofimperial configurations and urban (cosmopolitan) patron‒client systems(Mamluk, Ottoman, British).
HISTORY OF URBAN ELITES VERSUS HISTORY ‘FROMBELOW’: NEW LEADERSHIP, PALESTINE’S COTTON TRADE
WITH EUROPE AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
In the 18th and 19th centuries, wheat and cotton shipments from thePalestinian port of Acre to Italy, southern France (Beheiry 1981: 67) andEngland helped save the growing population of France from famine andfuelled the English Industrial Revolution and the rise of commodity
capitalism in Europe. This brought about the rise of a local bourgeoisie in
urban Palestine (in Acre, Nazareth, Tiberias, Nablus, Jerusalem and Jaffa)

as well as a peasant economy directed towards export to Europe, as thisbecame the more lucrative market. This move during the 18th century
transformed Palestinian agriculture and industry from subsistence towards
production for the international market, and brought about a new
relationship between (larger) cities and towns, and the hundreds of villages
where most people lived and worked. This increasing international tradewith the growing capitalism of Europe, and the insatiable British demandfor cotton for its mills, also ushered in early modernities in Palestine. The
conventional wisdom about modernity in the Arab world focus on the elite
notable (a’ayan) politics, the Napoleonic invasion or the Ottoman state’s
weaknesses as a mix of factors behind the start of modernisation in theregion (Baram 2007a: 16). Furthermore, the conventional wisdom advancedby historians is that early modernities in Palestine were first imported by
European missionaries and biblical explorers in the 19th century or
disseminated by urban elites educated in European-style schools or schools
which operated under Ottoman patronage. The Ottoman Tanzimat (literally‘reorganisations’) – a period of major reforms ‘from above’ that began in1839 and ended with the Ottoman First Constitutional era of 1876 – andtheir impact on Palestine and the wider Arab East have been given mostscholarly attention. Yet the new evidence contradicts elitist, romantic
Orientalist and biblicist approaches to modern Palestinian history. Thisevidence shows, first, that the start of modernities was in 18th century
Palestine; second, that the Napoleonic invasion of Palestine and siege ofAcre in 1799 followed rather than led the European material culture andcommodities (including European textiles) which became widely available
in much of urban and rural Palestine throughout the rules of al- Umar andal-Jazzar (Baram 2007a, 2007b); third, that the ‘new’ economy and new
agricultural tools of Palestine in the mid-18th century had already beensignificantly integrated within the modern international trade and European
capitalist economy which had been ushered in by the British technologicaland industrial revolutions.
Although the European printing and educational revolutions did notcatch up with Palestine until the late 19th century, the English Industrial
Revolution of the 18th century and rise of European capitalism impacted on
the economy of Palestine directly and profoundly. These new forces also
contributed to the reorientation of Palestine towards Europe and creation ofa new political economy and statehood in mid-18th century Palestine, astatehood that was effectively independent of the weakened Ottoman
Empire, and which was headed by Palestinian leader Dhaher al- Umar alZaydani (1689–1775). Natives of Safad, the Zaydanis would have beenfamiliar with the local traditions and social memories of the province of
Safad under the Mamluks: ‘Kingdom of Safad’ (). Backed by aprofessional modern army and most of the Palestinian peasantry, the latterstood up to and defeated the Ottoman army and created a statehood which
managed to impose its power and practical sovereignty on much of modern
Palestine, despite being resented by many of the Palestinian urban elites ofNablus and Jerusalem.
The concept of formal sovereignty has undergone radical transformationin the modern era, from being historically derived from the sovereign(person or ruler) to being linked to the territorial concept of the modern
nation-state. However, state, power and legitimacy remain central to thenotion of sovereignty. In the 18th century the practical sovereignty of alUmar’s regime was not derived from any modern notion of the nation-state,
but from the ability of al- Umar’s regime to impose legitimate power onmuch of Palestine.
In view of these dramatic developments in Palestine, a history ‘frombelow’ and ‘from within’ approach can partly explain the rise of Dhaher alUmar al-Zaydani and early modernities in Palestine rather than theories ofmodernities which focus on metropolitan cultural elites in the 18th and 19th
centuries or European missionary activities in late Ottoman Palestine,
activities which centred on urban Palestine where the majority of thePalestinian Christians resided. Indeed al- Umar can easily qualify as thefounding father of early Palestinian modernities and social renewal, and thesingle most influential figure in the beginning of the modern reorientationof Palestine towards the Mediterranean region. In the 18th century the
majority of the Palestinian population (predominantly Muslim) were
peasants who lived in villages or small towns, with a few large urban
trading centres. The term for ‘modern’ in 18th century Palestine was jadid(new) or tajdid (renewal, innovation), and it began in these small towns andvillages of the Galilee. Powerful local leadership in 18th century Galilee
and modernities manifested themselves in a variety of ways:• The emergence of a new Palestine-based autonomous rule under bothDhaher al- Umar and Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (1720–1804), a ruleindependent of both the Ottoman authorities and urban elites.
• New agricultural and technological innovations in Palestine which
benefited the majority of Palestinian peasantry began in the 18th century– preceding and anticipating the rise of local urban Palestinian bourgeois‘nationalism’ by at least a century – and deeply affected the agricultural
production of Palestine. The considerable growth of international andregional export of Palestinian agricultural produce and urban products
was shown in the export of Palestinian cotton, olive oil, wheat and soap.
• Palestinian state monopoly on the flourishing cotton, wheat and olive oil
export to Europe and the international and regional export of Palestinian
produce and products generated much-needed new capital for investmentin the country.
• The expansions of small towns and villages and construction of ‘new’urban spaces in Palestine in the second half of the 18th century and the
beginning of a distinction between the ‘old spaces’ and ‘new spaces’ (alImarah al-Jadidah) was noted by several authors.
Inspired by the model of the neighbouring and autonomous Emirate of
Mount Lebanon (1516‒1841), al- Umar’s effective leadership, popular
backing by much of the Palestinian peasantry and international trading
relations with the French and British all brought about the creation of adawlah qutriyyah in Palestine, a new state driven by and based on an
indigenous agency, whose authority extended from Lebanon to Gaza, andwhose modern capital was Acre. This Palestinian dawlah qutriyyahtransformed Acre from a small village into a fortified and rich urban
metropolitan centre. Throughout much of the 18th and early 19th centuries
Acre, effectively and to all practical purposes, functioned as the second
capital of modern Palestine. French cotton imports from Palestine andsimilar British imports following the Industrial Revolution and the rise of‘new’ British technologies, with their insatiable demand for cotton, together
with the new regional and international trade in cotton, olive oil, silk andtextiles, all helped transform Palestinian agriculture and urban spaces inmuch of the country. New urban spaces and neighbourhoods were created in
key cities such as Acre and Nablus, making these cities not only into thebiggest and wealthiest centres in Palestine but also among the largest citiesof al-Sham (Doumani 1995; Philipp 2001). The newly expanded port ofAcre (together with the smaller port of Jaffa) remained the main

international gateway to and from Palestine throughout much of the 18thand 19th centuries. After the decline of the Palestine cotton industry, coastal
Acre and Nablus, together with al-Quds/Jerusalem, were still the three mostimportant ‘new’ urban centres in Palestine and were central to the Ottoman
administrative reorganisation of the country in the 1870s, as we shall see
below, the Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem and the Sanjaks of Acre andNablus were central to the new (evolutionary) paradigm shift in thereconceptualisation of late Ottoman Palestine. The British industrial
revolution also contributed indirectly to the emergence of the first modern
Galilee-based ‘state’ in Palestine in the second half of the 18th century.
In Europe throughout the 18th century the perception of Palestine as a
distinct ‘country’, separate from Syria, was widespread and the plethora ofEuropean maps of ‘Palaestina/Palestina’ produced in that century reflected
this growing perception of Palestine. In 1747, in the London Modern
Gazetteer (p. 65), Thomas Salmon, an English geography writer and authorof Modern History, or the Present State of all Nations (1744–1746) – which
provided ‘a short view of the several nations of the world’ – described
Palestine as follows:
PALESTINE, a part of Asiatic Turkey, is sit.[uated] between 36 and 38
degrees of E. Lon.[gitude] and between 31 and 34 degrees of N. Lat.
[itude], bounded by the mount Libanus, which divides it from Syria, on
the N.[orth], by mount Hermon, which separates it from Arabia Deserta,
on the E.[ast], by the mountains of Seir, and the deserts of Arabia
Petraea, on the S.[outh], and by the Mediterranean Sea on the W.[est], sothat it seems to have been extremely well secured against foreigninvasions ... It is generally a fruitful country, producing plenty of corns,
wine, and oil where it is cultivated.2
Crucially, political power and practical sovereignty in the Galilee in the
18th century was not the outcome of the imperial patron‒client system of
the urban leadership, nor did it derive from the central Ottoman authorities;
in fact it evolved ‘from within’ and ‘from below’, and in defiance andactual military resistance to the Ottoman Empire. It was backed by many
Palestinian peasants and resented by some of the Ottoman-backed urban
elites. With the sharp decline of the Ottoman power, new technological andcommercial developments in Europe and indigenous Palestinian struggle

for autonomy emerged from within the Galilee countryside in the mid-18th
century. Several factors contributed to this radical development. One ofthese was due to:[new A]cre’s exceptional status. Politically, it was an enclave – semiautonomous, if not completely independent of the center of empire andits administration. This began when a local chieftain, Daher al- Umar,
established himself as an independent ruler in the city. His self-declared
sovereignty was expanded and interpreted on an even broader scale byhis successor, Jazzar Pasha. (Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 519‒520)
The astonishing modern rise of the city and province of Acre represented
more than anything else the dramatic reorientation of Palestine towards
Europe in the 18th century – a reorientation which, unlike previous
reorientations of the country by imperial dynasties including the Roman,
Umayyad and Ayyubid/Mamluk, was engineered by a powerful indigenous
Palestinian leader. Indeed, Acre became the capital of Dhaher al- Umar alZaydani for nearly thirty years, from 1746 to 1775, and one of two mostpowerful trading cities in Palestine; the other one was Nablus. Not
surprising, Acre also remained the capital of al- Umar’s successor, Ahmad
Pasha al-Jazzar, Governor of the Ottoman Pashalik – in reality, a ‘province’– of Acre from 1776 until his death in 1804. The dominance of Acrecontinued well into the early 19th century. After the death of al-Jazzar the
Ottoman Governors of Acre, Suleiman Pasha al-‘Adil (d. 1819) and‘Abdullah Pasha (d. 1831) ruled much of Palestine and Lebanon andDamascus from their Palestinian capital of Acre.
The spectacular reorientation of modern Palestine towards theMediterranean region/Europe and the dramatic rise of modern Acre in the
18th century began with the emergence and military successes of al- Umar
in Galilee, backed by the Palestinian peasantry. The latter’s achievement ofautonomous power in Palestine was spurred by revolutionary technologicaland industrial developments in Europe. The coastal port city of Acre had
been a famous Crusade stronghold. In the centuries following the Crusades
the city had slipped into oblivion and by the time of the Ottoman conquest
old Acre had become a small fishing village (Philipp 2001: 1). Under theMamluks and throughout the early Ottoman period the town of Safad
replaced old Acre as the administrative capital of the Galilee. Yet in themiddle of the 18th century modern Acre was the first of the major sites
along Palestine’s Mediterranean coast that quickly renewed its function as a‘new’, dynamic, major port city following the sharp decline of the coastal
cities in the post-Crusader period under both the Ayyubids and Mamluks(Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 520; Philipp 2001: 1). But by 1785 modern Acre had
become one of the largest cities in Palestine and the third largest city in alSham, after Damascus and Aleppo (Philipp 2001: 1).
HOURANI’S ‘URBAN’ ELITES PARADIGM?
Writing Palestine into the history of the 18th century, the idea of Palestiniansocial and economic autonomy under the Ottomans was masterfully
explored by Beshara Doumani (1995) with special reference to the social
history of 18th century Jabal Nablus. This was done within the frameworkof Albert Hourani’s paradigm of the ‘urban notables’ (a’ayan): the politicaland economic elites in provincial Arab cities and towns that served as‘patrician’ intermediaries between the imperial capital in Istanbul andprovincial society and governed the provinces of the vast Ottoman Empire.
The urban social elites of Palestine, as in the rest of the Arab East, sought tocontrol regional and distant trade and dominate landownership in the
countryside. However, in late Ottoman Palestine cities were relatively small
and urban social elites were dependent on Ottoman patronage andinterdependent with their surrounding villages and the mass peasantry of
the countryside.
But the history of Ottoman Palestine cannot be confined to the politics ofHourani’s urban notables or other forms of elite politics, whether this iscentred on greedy feudal landlords who exploited the Palestine peasantry
through the Ottoman iltizan land-cultivation system or on benevolent
aristocratic patricians who set up remarkable charitable waqf foundations in
the country. Although these urban elites resisted direct Ottoman rule inPalestine, they were drawn for the most part from the same social classes
and their politics remained family-centred, fiercely competitive and deeply
fractious (Mao’z 1968: 113) and, ultimately, ineffective. Also, the entire
history of Palestine cannot be reduced to one paradigm: the imperial
patron‒client framework and elite politics. Crucially, this social autonomyof the urban ‘ayans’ in Palestine cannot account for the dramatic emergencepolitical autonomy ‘from below’ and ‘from within’ of an almostindependent Palestinian entity in the 18th century, the al- Dhaher al- Umar
state of Palestine, which was the closest Palestine got to a modern
independent state. However, this elite paradigm of local ‘urban notables’
has influenced an entire generation of historians of the modern Middle East.
Historians are often wary of challenging established paradigms and, with somany academic careers depending on them, this partly explains why alUmar’s powerful state in Palestine, which lasted for nearly half a century,
has been studied only marginally.
TAXATION, FRONTIER PROVINCES AND THE RISE OF
AUTONOMOUS POWER IN 18TH CENTURY PALESTINE
Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah’s (1977) seminal work on the
Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the
Late 16th Century, based on a detailed Ottoman register (mufassal defter),
describes these regions as ‘frontier zones’ under Ottoman rule. In 18th
century Palestine, the pashalik of Safad (province of Safad) and Galilee as awhole were a case of ‘frontier province’ and a power base for a rising
Palestinian local power under nominal Ottoman rule.
Appearing first under the Mamluks, the Iltizam taxation system wasinstitutionalised by the Ottomans in the 15th century and was carried out by
the farming of public tax revenues. The Ottoman state would outsource tax
collection by auctioning taxation rights to the highest bidder (multazim),
who would then profit, often profligately, from collecting the taxes locally,
make payments to the state in fixed instalments, while keeping the profit.
This outsourcing of the Iltizam tax system included the farming of landtaxes and urban taxes, the production of certain goods such as wine and salt,
and even the provision of certain public services. The outsourcing of theland Iltizam tax under the Ottomans, which resembled the iqta’a system
under the Fatimids, gave rise to rich local elites and powerful local
chieftains in Palestine and throughout the region. Formally abolished in thecourse of the reforms (Tanzimat) of 1856, but, in reality, continuing until theend of Ottoman rule in Palestine (Yazbak 1998: 72‒73), the ltizam system
was very profitable and highly exploitative and was for many centuries ofgreat benefit to powerful local elites under the Mamluks and Ottomans(Abdul Rahmam and Nagata 1977).

Certain aspects of the impact of the Ottoman tax farming system, withthe growth of local autonomy and rise of powerful chiefs in Palestineespecially within the context of ‘frontier provinces’, can also be seen in theprevious rise of the Ghassanid Arab federate kings (supreme phylarchs) ofthe ‘frontier provinces’ of Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia in the
6th and early 7th centuries and in the rise of the Jarrah leaders of theBedouin tribes of Banu Tayy under the Fatimids, until their military defeat
by Anushtakin al-Dizbari, the Military Governor of Palestine, in 1029 AD.
The spectacular rise of Dhaher al- Umar in Galilee in the 18th century is
also a case in point. His ability to collect taxes efficiently, raise andcommand an army effectively, forge alliances successfully and enforce law
and order, within the context of the ‘frontier province’ of the Galilee, were
all part of the mix which explains his rise to power in 18th century
Palestine.
The closest Palestine got to early modern independent statehood was a
result of both commercial dynamism of Palestine and its legendary leader
Dhaher al- Umar and the continued neglect of the Ottomans. The Zaydani
clan (hamulah) of Dhaher al- Umar emerged from the Palestinian
countryside and periphery of the country, from the pashalik of Safad, a‘frontier province’ under both the Mamluks and Ottomans, not from thetraditional major urban centres of the country or the generally pro-Ottoman
urban social elites of Palestine. Born in the village of ‘Arrabah in central
Galilee, al- Umar did not come from the traditional urban landowningaristocracy of Palestine and, unlike the local notables (‘ayan), he did not
owe his legitimacy to the central Ottoman authorities. Al- Umar’s family
members had served as local multazims (tax collectors) in the provincial
towns of Tiberias and Safad in the pashalik of Safad and he himself had
begun his career as a trader and tax farmer under the Ottoman Iltizam
system (Krämer 2011: 60). But the Ottoman Iltizam land tax system inPalestine had been highly exploitative and oppressive towards the peasantry
and, as we shall see below, al- Umar’s new taxation system and his sociallyenlightened regime were evidently popular among the Palestinian peasantry.
He substantially reduced the power of the urban notables and ‘predatoryclasses’ that had fed upon vulnerable social groups, especially the peasants.
Al- Umar had received some formal education but he appears to have been
largely self-taught and his early career, financial competence and practicalexperience as an efficient tax farmer were of critical value. But it was hispolitical, military, economic, diplomatic and taxation skills which made him
perhaps the most powerful leader in modern Palestinian history. His rise topower began in the Galilee countryside and his first headquarters was
Tiberias in Eastern Galilee, not the traditional urban centres of the country:
Nablus, Jerusalem and Gaza. After rebelling successfully against the
Ottoman state and consolidating his regime, al- Umar became effectively
the sovereign ruler of much of Palestine. Following his military victory at
Marj ibn ‘Amer in 1735, thousands of local people, including many
residents of Nazareth, joined his forces. Apparently among his Galilee
supporters were many local Christians, including Christian women from
Nazareth who provided his troops with food and water (Joudah 1987: 28‒
31). ‘Over the next three decades Zahir al-Umar’s stature became such that
he found it possible to forge temporary alliances with the Russian
government and to cooperate with the Mamluks in Egypt’ (Doumani 1995:
42).
NOMINAL SOVEREIGNTY VERSUS PRACTICAL
SOVEREIGNTY
Today there are many formally sovereign states in the Arab world, but not
all of them are genuinely sovereign or independent when it comes toforeign policy. By contrast, al- Umar’s state in Palestine was sovereign insubstance and reality, while nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire.
However, al- Umar’s state was formally recognised by the Ottomans as anautonomous Emirate and at its peak in 1774 (a year before he was killed
outside Acre) its territory extended from south Lebanon along the entire
Palestinian coast to Gaza and included some regions in northern
Transjordan. He also twice laid siege to the city of Nablus (Doumani 1995:
42). The headquarters of his administration shifted westwards, from his first
capital in Tiberias to ‘Araabah in central Galilee, then to Nazareth, then to
Deir Hanna and finally to the port city of Acre in 1746. In the early 16th
century Tiberias had become a city of refuge for Andalusian Arab-Jewish
survivors of the Spanish Inquisition. These skilled Jewish migrants
eventually contributed both to the expansion of the town’s silk industry andthe growth of Tiberias’ role as a trade centre between Damascus and theHijaz. Al-‘Umar expanded and fortified Tiberias further, but now Acre wasthe capital of the Galilee and the centre of his lucrative international tradewith Europe. Acre remained the centre of his regime for nearly three
decades and subsequently became the capital of another autonomous regime
in Palestine, that of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (the ‘Butcher’), who lived in thepalace built by al- Umar for another two decades from 1776 until 1804. AlUmar’s regime would demonstrate once again the continuinginterdependence of urban centres with their rural contexts in Palestine – acontinuing feature of the history of Palestine, ancient, medieval andmodern. With his Galilee-based Emirate or dawlah qutriyyah, al- Umar
became internationally known in the 18th century as ‘King of Galilee’(Nasrallah 2015: x).
In the mid-18th century the deeply weakened Ottoman regime had tocome to terms with the new power realities in Palestine, a country which
remained only nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1768 the Ottoman
authorities were forced into a humiliating position of having to recognise alUmar’s regime in Palestine in the way the Ottomans had been forced torecognise the emirate of Mount Lebanon and the regime of Emir Fakhr-alDin II a century earlier. The Ottomans granted al- Umar the title of ‘Sheikhof Acre, Emir of Nazareth, Tiberias, Safed, and Sheikh of all Galilee’(Philipp 2015).
Al- Umar’s economic policies, which benefited the Palestinianpeasantry, his military strategies and regional and international alliances(with the autonomous Druze Emirs of Mount Lebanon, Mamluk Egypt andRussia) were partly dictated by his struggle with the Ottoman Empire andpartly by his monopolisation of the flourishing cotton and olive oil exports
to Europe, especially raw cotton to England following its Industrial
Revolution and the expanding British textile industry’s demand for raw
cotton from Palestine and the Near East. Al- Umar’s rise to power in the
18th century was facilitated by the considerable growth of cotton
cultivation in Palestine and the export of this cash crop to France andEngland. The use of cotton for fabric is known to date back to prehistoric
times and cotton had been cultivated in ancient Egypt and Persia, and it wasalso known to the Arabs since Antiquity. For many centuries since theMiddle Ages Palestine and the Galilee had been a major area of cotton
cultivation (Quataert 2002: 27; Le Strange 1890: 16‒19; 2014: 18‒19; alMaqdisi 1994). Already in the 10th century AD Palestinian historian alMaqdisi commented on the fact that cotton was one of the key agricultural

products of Palestine (cited in Le Strange 2014: 18‒19; also Le Strange
1890: 16‒19; al-Maqdisi 1994).
Sizeable cotton cultivation and international trade with Palestine and alSham continued in the course of the Mamluk period but flourished in late
Ottoman Palestine, especially in the 18th century. Today Suq al-Qattanin(‘Market of the Cotton Merchants’) – also known as Suq of Amir Tankaz
al-Nasiri, the Mamluk ruler of Palestine and Syria – in the Old City ofJerusalem is a monumental and toponymic testament to the long history andsignificance of this Palestinian cotton industry. Suq al-Qattanin is locatedon the west side of the Haram al-Sharif. The market dates from 1336–1337
AD and contains some of the most exquisite and richest Islamic architecture
in Jerusalem. In the middle of the Suq there is the signature of one of thecraftsmen who worked on its construction. Written in Arabic naskhi script,
the inscription reads: ‘May God have mercy on him, the work of
Muhammad bin Ahmad bin ‘Alish. The Suq has two entrances, one to thewest and the other to the east, called Bab al-Qattanin (‘Gate of the Cotton
Merchants’), which opens on to the west side of the Haram. Suq al-Qattanin
is considered to be one of the most complete and beautiful medieval suqs
not only in Palestine, but in the whole of the Near East (Burgoyne 1987;
Burgoyne and Abu al-Hajj 1979: 128–129).3
From the time of the Crusades the Levant and north Palestine had
supplied both regional and European textile markets via port cities such as
Acre. The cultivation of cotton in Palestine was maintained throughout the
Ottoman period but grew dramatically in the 18th century under theeffective leadership of al- Umar, who got involved in the world’s mostprofitable commodity at the time: cotton. Al-‘Umar’s rise coincided withthe rise of French and British demand for raw cotton following theIndustrial Revolution in the 18th century. British capitalism and the
manufacturing industries of Lancashire enabled Britain to emerge as theleading exporter of manufactured textiles. From the late 18th century
onwards, the British city of Manchester acquired the nickname‘Cottonpolis’ due to the cotton industry’s predominance within the city, andManchester’s role at the heart of the regional and international cotton trade.
Of course, the incorporation of Palestine into the modern European markets
and British-dominated global capitalist system and import of textiles from
Lancashire to Palestine posed a major challenge to the locally produced
textiles in Palestine (Doumani 1995).

Al- Umar’s rule was of modern creation. His administration grew rich on
foreign export of cotton and olive oil and his rule consolidated andexpanded this lucrative trade with Europe and by the mid-18th century
regional and global trade in cotton and textiles made his capital city of Acreand the Palestinian city of Nablus the biggest and the most prosperous cities
in the country and among the largest cities of al-Sham (Doumani 1995;
Philipp 2001). Despite the massive technological developments in Europe
in the 19th century and subsequent decline of the cotton economy of theGalilee (Heyd 1942), even in the mid-19th century the British Consul inJerusalem James Finn would recall his journeys in central Palestine and the
Nablus‒Jenin‒Tulkarem triangle, and note that the cotton plantations hevisited were ‘beautifully clean and orderly’ (Kamel 2015). In fact, as aconsequence of al- Umar’s policies, for over a century between the 1730s
and 1860s cotton would remain the main export from Palestine to Europe.
Before 1852 Palestine exported its cotton mainly to the al-Sham region,
Italy, France and, to a lesser extent, England. In 1859 it was reported by a
British geographical gazetteer that
Tobacco, lent[ils], olives, cotton and silk, are extensively produced inthis pash.[lik of Acre] [‘a part of Palestine’] … The only manufacturesare silk and cotton fabrics. The situation of this district is highly
favourable to commerce. The exports from Acre and Beirut, its principal
ports, are wool, cotton, silk, tobacco, gums, dried fruits, gallnuts,
madder-root, and skins. The export trade is principally carried on withFrance and Italy … This pash.[lik] is of modern creation. In 1749 it
formed part of the pash.[lik] of Saida or Sidon, when Dhahir, son ofOmar, an Arab Sheikh, having invaded Acre, succeeded in subduing thewhole pash.[lik] to his way.4
However, after 1870 cotton lost its leading role as the key cash crop shippedto Europe, being replaced by the oranges of Palestine (the iconic Jaffa
oranges). Benefiting from new agricultural innovations and new tree
grafting techniques, the Palestine Arab citrus industry became the number
one produce exported to Europe throughout the last quarter of the 19th
century (Lucas 2003: 21‒22). During the second half of the 19th century
modern cotton-spinning machinery was also imported into Palestine and asmall-scale cotton-spinning industry continued into the 20th century.

Interestingly, in the 18th century the high quality of Palestinian andLevantine cotton seeds led to its transferral to the soils of the colonies ofNorth America. But unlike the settler-colonialism of North America, inwhich cultivating and harvesting cotton became the leading occupation ofslaves, the Palestine cotton plantations were cultivated by ordinary farmers.
Yet ‘still, canton production in the Levant during the late eighteenth century
exceeded, by a factor of nearly thirty, that in the American colonies’(Quataert 2002: 27). The expanded port city of Acre became the first‘modern’ Palestinian city in the 18th century to be directly affected by the
new foreign trade, the British Industrial Revolution and England’s demand
for raw cotton.
For a century between 1730 and 1831 the export of highly profitable
cash crops – first cotton and then grain – made Acre the largest centre of
trade and political power on the Palestinian/Lebanese coast. The city alsobegan to play a role in international politics in the last quarter of the 18th
century (Philipp 2001: 3). First under al- Umar and later under al-Jazzar –the Acre-based ruler from 1776 until his death in 1804:[Modern] Acre was the key to the first region in the eastern
Mediterranean that was tied into modern economy ... an important
fortified city of perhaps 25,000 inhabitants [which] was closely
connected with the ever-rising demand for cotton in Europe. (Philipp
2001: 1)
Under the impact of international trade during the rule of both al- Umar andal-Jazzar:[W]ithin a very short period of time, [modern] Acre bloomed into a city
possessing several mosques ... caravansaries ... [public] baths andmarkets. It also boasted fortified walls and an aqueduct to ensure its
water supply. The [Galilee] villages further inland developed most ofwhat was to become the basis of Palestine’s agricultural economy.
(Rosen-Ayalon 1998: 520)
Of modern creation, and perhaps the most monumental symbol of theculture of early modern Palestine is the White Mosque of modern Acre,famously known as al-Jazzar Mosque, which became the most powerful
symbol of the modern capital of northern Palestine. Constructed in 1781,

eighteen years before the Napoleonic invasion of Palestine, and influenced
architecturally by the grand Ottoman mosques of Istanbul, its namesake (theWhite Mosque) evoked memories of the famous White Mosque of alRamla, the capital of Jund Filastin, the province of Palestine throughout
early Islam. The compound of the White Mosque included an Islamic
theological academy, the first college of its kind in Palestine. Modelled on
the al-Azhar university college of Cairo, and departing from the traditional
medieval Islamic schools (madrasahs) of Jerusalem, the mosque/college
compound contained student lodging, an Islamic court and a major public
library, all paid for by Palestinian local taxes and by the flourishing regional
and international trade in cotton and other cash crops of Palestine.
Spectacularly overlooking the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, al-Jazzar
Mosque was also a statement of the reorientation of modern Palestine
towards Europe under the impact of the international trade policies and themonumental building programmes pursued by the two powerful leaders, alUmar and al-Jazzar.
The encouragement of foreign trade, promotion of local agricultural
innovations and export of profitable cash crops such as cotton, grain andolive oil to Europe, which began under al- Umar in the 1730s, continued
until 1830 and the legacy of this foreign trade stimulated the developmentin the Shamouti orange (which became internationally known as the Jaffa
orange). Developed by Palestinian farmers in the mid-19th century,
Shamouti oranges were an almost seedless variety of oranges with a toughskin that made them particularly suitable for international export (Issawi
2006: 127; Gerber 1982). Like the export of Palestine cotton and grain in
the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the Shamouti orange crop was
exported to France and England from the mid-19th century onwards.
Al- Umar’s powerful state ushered in a new dynamic era in Palestine,
after a long period of Ottoman neglect, stagnation and rampant exploitationof the Palestinian peasantry, during which Palestine was turned into afrontier country and an imperial backwater. In this new dynastic period
under al- Umar, the Galilee and large parts of Palestine experienced
effective and fair taxation, urban expansion and economic development.
Many public buildings, fortresses, fortifications, warehouses, khans(caravanserais) – the most spectacular of which is the exquisitely-built
Khan al-Tujjar of Acre; today the site is at the centre of Israeli Judaisation
policies in the Arab city – and numerous places of worship were built

throughout his domain. Many of these sites and monuments can still be seen
today throughout the Galilee. Al- Umar’s state pursued religiously inclusive
policies and encouraged the involvement of religious minorities (Christians,
Jews and Shi’ites) in his administration, finance and economy. Statehoodand early modernities in 18th century Palestine were intertwined:
Under the leadership of Dhaher al- Umar al-Zaidani (1730‒75), a
powerful and protective state was formed in northern Palestine that
fostered development. Security was ensured for agricultural production,
mainly wheat and cotton for export, particularly to France whose agents
resided in the Zaidani capital and port of Acre. Peasants and religious
minorities were protected and thus had a stake in the success of the state.
In 1764‒65, al- Umar established a new town [Haifa] and secured it withwalls. (Seikaly 2002b: 97)
The political stability and effective and fair taxation system provided by
al- Umar in northern Palestine and the expansion and transformation ofhistoric urban centres such Acre, Tiberias and Safad also led to thefounding of ‘modern’ Haifa’ and the transformation of Nazareth from asmall village into a major town in Palestine. Modern Haifa, or the ‘new
Haifa’ (Haifa al-Jadidah), was founded by al- Umar in 1764‒1765. Thiswas done by moving the 250 local inhabitants to the fortified village of
Haifa 2.4 kilometres to the east of the old hamlet.5 This ‘new/modern’
Palestinian Arab village became the nucleus of the modern town of Haifa(Yazbak 1998), today the third largest city in Israel. The new village wasoriginally named in Arabic al- Imarah al-Jadidah (‘the New Construction’),a term applied to modern buildings in Palestine in the 18th century. Local
Palestinians first called the village New Haifa and later simply Haifa. This
new Arab village grew into an Arab town which in the 20th century
developed into the modern city of Haifa (Seikaly 2002a, 2002b; Sharon
2013: 262; Mariti 1792: 318). In a similar vein, the ‘new’ era of al- Umar’s
state symbolised the beginning of the modern history of Palestine.
The new agricultural economy and foreign trade of Palestine led to thetransformation of Nazareth – al-Nasirah in Arabic, retaining the ‘feminine’
endings common to many Palestinian Arabic toponyms of Galilee – by alUmar’s state from a small hamlet into a large town by encouraging

immigration to it. The ‘new town’ of Nazareth played important economic,
religious and strategic roles under al- Umar’s rule.
Al- Umar’s fourth capital was Nazareth and for this purpose hecommissioned the construction of a new government house known as the
Saraya (the ‘Palace’). This historic building was constructed around 1740
and later in the 19th century served as the residence of the local Ottoman
Governor of Nazareth and its subdistrict and subsequently as the city’smunicipal headquarters until 1991. While using Nazareth to secure his
control over the hugely fertile agricultural lands of central Galilee (Yazbak
1998: 15) and Marj Ibn ‘Amer, the rich granary of Palestine, al- Umar
encouraged religious toleration and protected the Christian communities inthe town, which he also used to strengthen his international ties with France(Emmett 1995: 22). Al- Umar also encouraged the Franciscans to purchaseland and build a church in Nazareth in 1730, and enabled the Greek
Orthodox community to build St Gabriel Church in 1767 (Emmett 1995:
220).
Beginning as a market town for the surrounding countryside under
Dhaher al- Umar, today Nazareth is the largest Palestinian city in Israel andthe capital of the Palestinians inside Israel. Today the descendants of alUmar still live in Galilee and Nazareth and are known as the ‘Dhawahri’, inmemory of Dhaher – along with the Fahoums, Zu’bis and ‘Onallas, theMuslim families which constituted part of Nazareth’s urban traditional
Muslim land-owning elite which first rose under al- Umar’s rule andcontinued to dominate the city’s politics throughout the late Ottoman andBritish Mandatory periods and under Israel since 1948 (Srouji 2003: 187).
Modern geo-political representations of Palestine are often located in thelate Ottoman period or in 19th century Palestine and the actual historicallinks between the Palestinian ‘statehood’ created by al- Umar and themodern conceptions of Palestine are complex. However, in history the line
between fact and fiction or myth and reality is often blurred. The practicallyindependent statehood in Palestine lasted nearly half a century from the late1720s until 1775, far longer than the British Mandatory period in Palestine.
READING THE HISTORY OF MODERN PALESTINETHROUGH THE EYES OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

Reading the history of modern Palestine through the eyes of the indigenous
people can shift the emphasis away from hegemonic Ottoman, British andZionist gaze and chronologies and provide new indigenous perspectives.
Modern (new) Acre can be a case study of this perspective. This beautiful
and iconic capital of al- Umar’s state rose from the ashes to become one themost important modern Palestinian urban centres for nearly two centuries.
This was less to do with imperial Ottoman calculations or the ‘Ottoman
heritage’, and more the result of sheer indigenous determination and selfdefinition. However, by the end of the 19th century Acre’s standing had
declined to the advantage of the nearby coastal town of Haifa, as new
powerful steam engines were developed in the West, powering bigger ships;
new trade routes were opened up and the coast of Palestine became part of
the regular route of the major European steamship companies (Seikaly
2002b: 97).
With the rise of anti-colonialist Palestinian nationalism, the emergenceof new approaches to people’s history and the decline of elite narratives, alUmar has emerged as a ‘nationalist’ hero among Palestinians today (Joudah
1987, 2015). Yet al- Umar’s self-governing entity should be seen within thecontext of his age; clearly his aims were dynastic not nationalist:
Anxious to ‘prove’ a historical basis for Palestinian Independence,
Palestinians often refer to the effort of the Palestinian leader Dhaher alUmar to wrest control of much of Palestine from the Ottomans in the lateeighteenth century … But to attribute these challenges to ‘national,
territorially-based consciousness’ is an altogether different and murky
issue. (Abu Lughod 1988: 203)
Nevertheless, al- Umar’s emergence from a relatively humble
background from ‘within Palestine’, his effective leadership, his popularity
among the Palestinian peasantry for getting rid of the oppressive Ottoman
Iltizam system – at least under his rule – his spectacular military successes,
his effective resistance to Ottoman imperial direct rule in Palestine and his
religiously tolerant policies towards Christians, Jews, Druze and Shiites all
combined to give him a mythical status among Palestinians. Real andimagined, al- Umar provided a role model for modern Palestinians.
However, Palestinian national consciousness, as opposed to 18th century
early modernities in Palestine, is a late Ottoman development and there isno historical evidence that a nationalist Palestinian ideology existed at thetime of, or was developed by, al- Umar. Evidently the ‘nationalist’ myth ofDhahir al- Umar as the founder of the first modern ‘Palestinian national
state’ is far more powerful and inspiring than the actual context of thispowerful leader and his age. Yet the historical legacy of his self-fashioned
and self-governing Palestinian entity and the lasting impact of its policies
on modern Palestine are undeniable.
Also, crucially, for much of the 18th century the Galilee-based
autonomous regimes of al- Umar and al-Jazzar, with their close trade links
and military alliances with European powers, Russia, Britain and France inparticular, politically and physically linked the Galilee with the entire
Palestinian coast from Lebanon to Gaza under a Palestine-based single
administration. From the perspective of viewing Palestine as a single geopolitical entity, the impact of this historic legacy of the 18th century would
soon become evident in the way new representations of Palestine evolved in
the 19th century.
European influences on the ‘modernising’ and enlightened
administration of Dhaher al- Umar were much in evidence. These earlymodernisation efforts were facilitated by the fact the conservative religious
authority in the country, which rested with the muftis in the cities ofPalestine, was always subordinate to the political authority. Italianantiquarian, scientist and traveller Giovanni Filippo Mariti, who arrived inAcre in 1760 and resided in the French quarter for two years, writes inTravels Through Cyprus, Syria, and Palestine about the influence ofEuropean ideas on the capital of Dhaher al- Umar, Acre. He describes theswift response of the Governor of Acre to the then raging plague which wasaffecting not only Palestine but also Egypt and Syria. Large and small
epidemics (occasionally combined with famine) had been a recurrent
feature of medieval Palestine with devastating effects in terms of the highdeath toll in the country. Small epidemics also occurred in the
Mediterranean port cities of Palestine during the First and Second World
War. Yet in 1760 the enlightened al- Umar acted decisively, brushing aside
religious superstitions and imposing precautionary measures including astrict quarantine in Acre and measures affecting traders entering and leaving
the city; these measures helped to minimise the effect of the epidemic on
the crowded city and saved many lives:

The governor of Acre checked the progress of this plague, by giving the
inhabitants the means of withdrawing from its ravages; and these means,though contrary to the dogmas of the Mohametan religion, were eagerly
embraced. The Europeans became their models; and the governor, after
deriving them from every necessary information, shut himself up, after
their example, together with his numerous family. The Muphti [mufti,
top religious judge of Acre] alone, born the protector of the Mohametan
law, cannot imitate a conduct which that law condemns. Instead of
shutting himself up with silence in a prudent confinement, he thundered
forth against this new method; reproached the governor for his conduct… The governor, however, only laughed at this pious folly of the Muphti
and sent a detachment of soldiers to impose a fine on him of two
hundred and fifty sequins.6 (Mariti 1792: 200‒201, 203‒204)
Al- Umar, like Muhammad ‘Ali of Egypt (1769–1849) and unlike thePalestinian Ottoman urban elites of Nablus and Jerusalem, was a rulebreaker and a ruler-maker, not a rule-taker, These urban elites were in asubordinate state of affairs where the power dynamic put them at a positionof less influence, authority and significance than their imperial Ottoman‘rule-maker’. By contrast, al- Umar’s effectively independent regime wascreated in direct opposition and as a challenge to the authority of the
Ottoman rule in Palestine, while nominally acknowledging the legitimacyof the Ottoman Caliph. Al- Umar’s authority operated within the context ofIslamic legitimacy and power and Islamic history of Palestine produced avariety of notions of power, authority and legitimacy. Al- Umar’s state has
been referred to by its detractors as a sheikhdom, while the late Albert
Hourani referred to it as a ‘little kingdom’ (cited in Joudeh 2015), but itwould be more appropriate to describe it as a sovereign ‘frontier state’ inmost of Palestine for over a quarter of a century. However, it could be
described as an emirate within the wider historical Islamic context of power
and legitimacy. Historically an emirate was a geo-political entity or statethat was ruled by a Muslim emir, sultan, sheikh, military commander,
governor or prince. Etymologically emirate or amirate (Arabic: imarah) is
the administration of territorial entity of an emir. The Arabic term could
also imply principality. Under Islam, and until recently, emirates were acommon form of governance and actual statehood. The variety of emirates
included the famous Emirate of Córdoba, which was an independent state inAndalusia between 756 and 929, with Córdoba as its capital. Initiallyacknowledging the legitimacy of the Umayyad Caliphs in Damascus, in fact
the Emirate of Córdoba not only grew in direct opposition to the Abbasidstate and rejection of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad, but also evolved andtransformed itself into the Caliphate of Córdoba. With its capital in
Córdoba, this state existed from 929 to 1031 and was at the time one of themost developed countries in the world. Also in Andalusia, the Emirate ofGranada (also known as the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada; Spanish: Reino
Nazarí de Granada), was established in 1248 and aligned with the ChristianKingdom of Castile, and remained a tributary state for the next 250 years. It
was the last state in the Iberian Peninsula to be ruled by Muslims. Several
centuries later, at the height of al- Umar’s power in Palestine in the mid18th century, Kuwait became an emirate in the 1750s, headed by the
Shaykh of Kuwait. In the late 19th century the Emirate of Kuwait became a
British protectorate and it has since evolved into a modern state. Had alUmar’s state survived the death of its founder in 1775 and persisted wellinto the 19th century, today the modern history of Palestine would be read
and written with the eyes of the indigenous people of Palestine, rather than
through Ottoman, British or Zionist perspectives.
The lasting impact of al- Umar’s dawlah qutriyyah and al-Jazzar’s
powerful autonomous regime on both European and late Ottoman thinking
as well as on the modern Palestinian psyche and memories can hardly beoverstated. In the mid-18th century al- Umar shifted the centre of power in
Galilee from Safad (and the Liwa of Safad) to Acre, a town which al- Umartransformed into one of the biggest, wealthiest and most well-fortified citiesof the al-Sham region. It is hardly a coincidence, therefore, that in 1799
Napoleon Bonaparte sought but failed to conquer the city. Seventy years
later, in the early 1870s – as we shall see in chapter nine – the Ottomans
reorganised Palestine and created the sanjak of Acre as one of threeadministrative regions in the country. For nearly five centuries from 1266
until the early 18th century, Safad was the capital of the Galilee and after
1517 the Ottomans confirmed its administrative position in Galilee by
creating the administrative sanjak of Safad. In view of the fact that the
Safad had dominated the Galilee and northern Palestine for centuries underboth the Mamluks and Ottomans, the creation of the sanjak of Acre in thelate Ottoman period should also be counted as one the lasting legacies of
18th century Palestine under al- Umar and al-Jazzar for the late Ottomanperception, and administrative reorganisation, of Palestine. Above all, alUmar’s powerful regime provided an alternative model to the intermediary(patron‒client) elite politics of Palestine and to the family-oriented, fiercelycompetitive and deeply fractious urban elite politics which bedevilled bothlate Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine until 1948.

Chapter 9

BEING PALESTINE, BECOMINGPALESTINE
Rediscovery and new representations ofmodern Palestine and their impact on
Palestinian national identity

We have on this earth what makes life worth living
the aroma of bread at dawna woman’s opinion of men
the works of Aeschylus
the beginnings of lovegrass on a stone
mothers who live on a flute’s sighand the invaders’ fear of memories...
we have on this earth what makes life worth livingon this earth, the lady of earth
the mother of all beginnings
the mother of all endings
she was called Palestine
she came to be called Palestineo lady, beause you are my lady
I am worthy of life
(Mahmoud Darwish, On This Earth1)
NEW REPRESENTATIONS OF PALESTINE, 1805‒1917

For over two millennia, Palestine has been the destination of the threemonotheisms. While some of these men and women offered sacrifices,collected relics, and prayed, others studied fought, preached, excavatedor conquered. A rich granary in the Fertile Crescent, no land has been as
much the focus of religious tourism and piety, pilgrimage andcolonization as Palestine. (Matar 2013: 913)
Modern European travellers, pilgrims, writers, cartographers, geographers,
biblical Orientalists and romance seekers had no historical, geographic orarchaeological evidence or good reason to refer to modern Palestine as‘Cana’an’. They logically reproduced ancient maps of Palaestina, maps
derived from more than a millennium and a half of Classical Antiquity andByzantine Christianity. They also relied on the Hellenistic, Roman, early
Christian, Byzantine and Arab Islamic toponymic memory and heritage ofthe country.
In the 17th and 18th centuries European romantic Orientalist and‘biblical geography’ of Palestine increased phenomenally and voluminous
publications on the historical geography of Palestine began to appear not
only in Latin but in vernacular European languages. This included theworks of Hadrianus Relandus (1676‒1718), a prominent Dutch Orientalist,
cartographer and philologist who made a lasting contribution to research on
the scriptural geography of Palestine (Pailin 1984: 212). His work was
mainly philological-theological in character and included Antiquitates
Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum (1708) and Palaestina ex monumentis Veteris
illustrata (1714), written in Latin, in which he sought to describe thegeography of ‘biblical Palestine’.
WESTERN TRAVELOGUES OF PALESTINE: THE
DISTINCTION BETWEEN PALESTINE/HOLY LAND AND
SYRIA
For many decades in the 18th century the Galilee-based autonomous regimeof Dhaher al- Umar – with its increased trade links with France and Britain
in particular – effectively linked the Galilee with the entire Palestinian coastfrom Lebanon to Gaza. It is not surprising, therefore, that throughout the
19th century the combined effect of European travelogues (‘travels in
Palestine’), guide books, religious treatises, novels, pilgrims’ accounts andmaps made a clear distinction between ‘Palestine’ and ‘Syria’ and treatedhistoric Palestine/Holy Land for all practical purposes as a separate country.
Moreover, throughout the 19th century for European and Russian travellers
and pilgrims Palestine and the Holy Land were synonymous andinterchangeable. This synonymy did not include Syria, which madePalestine sharply distinct from Syria to the north. In the 19th century
religious revivalism, combined with feverish messianic nationalism, ‘backto the Bible’ movements and ‘rediscovery’ of Palestine, swept acrossEurope and Russia. Moreover, in European and Russian Orientalisms of the
19th century ‘Palestine’ and the ‘Holy Land/Terra Sancta/the land of Jesus’
were interchangeable. This religio-political perception of Palestine, steepedin the stories of the New Testament, made Palestine/the Holy Land seem
sharply distinct from Syria and Lebanon and made the Galilee (thebirthplace of Jesus and the scene of many of the stories of the New
Testament) inherently and closely linked with Jerusalem, Bethlehem,
Hebron, Jaffa and Gaza, more than its traditionally close links under Islam
with the vast al-Sham region.
The popularisation of the concept of Palestine was illustrated by themountains of geographical literature on Palestine listed in the 1890
Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae by Gustav Reinhold Röhricht, aGerman historian of the Crusades. Röhricht provided a census of 3515 print
and manuscript accounts dedicated to Palestine literature between 333 AD
and 1878 AD. The work also had a chronological list of maps relating toPalestine. Röhricht’s survey of Palestine literature and publications shows
the following:(a) 333 to 1300 AD: 177 works(b) 14th century: 97(c) 15th century – with the invention of the printing press–: 279(d) 16th century: 333(e) 17th century: 390(f) 18th century: 318(g) 19th century (until 1878) – with the replacement of the handoperated Gutenberg-style presses by steam-powered presses whichallowed printing on an industrial scale –:1915 works. (Shalev 2012: 79)

However, this remarkable survey was far from being exhaustive. Western
travelogues of Palestine in the 18th and 19th centuries included thousandsof books, articles and other materials detailing accounts of the journeys ofEuropean, Russian and North American travellers to the Holy Land. Fuelled
by modern capitalism, new printing technologies and new transport means,many of the travelogues on Palestine treated the country not so much as aland of living histories and shared memories of ordinary people but more ofa memorial to Western Christianity – a Christianity in search of a new
identity in the midst of the raging struggle between scientific rationalism
and scepticism, on the one hand, and literalist evangelist fundamentalism,on the other. Typically, a Church of England journal, The Church Quarterly
Review of 1891, described Röhricht’s book as ‘indispensable’ to students ofPalestinian geography. Röhricht’s survey of Palestine literature is most
revealing with regard to two particular periods: the Renaissance period andthe 19th century. These two periods experienced two major European
technological revolutions with considerable impact on the Palestine
literature: first, the Renaissance printing revolution press from the late 15th
century introduced the era of mass circulation of publications and second,in the 19th century the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-stylepress by the steam-powered press allowed printing and publication on anindustrial scale. This unprecedented industrial scale of production,
circulation and consumption of Palestine/Holy Land knowledge was aided
by the photographic revolution of the 1830s which began to produce masses
of images of the Holy Land for the European, American and Russian
markets.
A few examples of the large amounts of Palestine literature, including
geographic publications on and ‘travels in’ Palestine in the 19th century, inseveral key European languages, include John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travels
in Syria and the Holy Land (1822); Thomas Wright’s Early Travels in
Palestine (1848), which consists of accounts of the early pilgrims toPalestine, and Leslie Porter’s A Handbook for Travellers in Syria andPalestine: Including an Account of the Geography, History, Antiquities,
Inhabitants of these Countries, Part 1 and 2 (1858, 1868), Vital Cuinet,
Syrie, Liban et Palestine: géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive
et raisonnée (1896); Titus Tobler’s Dritte Wanderung nach Palästina(1859); and Bibliographia Geographica Palestinae (1867). John Murray,one of the most important and influential publishers in Britain, produced

Porter’s A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, which treats
Palestine as a separate country. This book describes Palestine in three major
sections: Part I ‘Palestine-Jerusalem’ and ‘Southern Palestine’, which
includes cities from Gaza to Jaffa, and Part 2 with two sections: (a)‘Northern Palestine’, which included the Galilee and Damascus, and (b)‘Northern Syria’. In a similar vein, Joseph Meen’s Geography of Palestine:
Historical and Descriptive (1865) and Walter McLeod’s The Geography ofPalestine, or, the Holy Land, Including Phoenicia and Philistia (1856) weretypical of the large number of books on the historical geography ofPalestine published in Britain and Europe in the middle of the 19th century.
These historical-geographic publications treated Palestine as a distinct
country and a geo-political unit separate from Syria, Egypt and Arabia. It isalso worth pointing out that the expression ‘Southern Syria’, whichappeared briefly in the early 20th century, was never mentioned in thesepublications.
Crucially, in the second half of the 19th century translations of articles
and books into Arabic began to distinguish clearly between Syria andPalestine. For instance, in 1883 George Edward Post’s article ‘Plants of
Syria and Palestine’ was published in the Arabic journal al-Muqtataf(1883), which was founded in 1876 at the Syrian Protestant College, today
the American University of Beirut, before moving to Cairo in 1884. The
same distinction is also found in the Arabic version of Post’s Nabat Suriyya
wa-Filastin wa-al-Qatr al-Misri wa-Bawadiha (Flora of Syria andPalestine and Sinai: A Handbook of the Flowering Plants and Ferns Nativeand Naturalized from the Taurus to Ras Muhammad and from theMediterranean Sea to the Syrian Desert) (1896), an indication that by the
1880s European publications on Palestine geography and their translations
into Arabic were beginning to have an impact on modern Arab perceptionsof Palestine (Foster 2013) and the evolving notion that Palestine was a
distinct geo-political unit.
The work of Guy Le Strange, a scholar of Arabic and Persian at
Cambridge University, on the historical geography of Palestine under Islamin the Middle Ages, added another dimension to British preoccupation with
Palestine in the second half of the 19th century. Guy Le Strange’s Palestine
under the Moslems; A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D.
650 to 1500. Translated from the Works of the Mediaeval Arab
Geographers, was published in London by the Committee of the PalestineExploration Fund (PEF) in 1890. The PEF, founded in 1865, had alreadyfocused on Palestine/the Holy Land. Other antecedents to the PEF also
focused on Palestine/the Holy Land and made a clear distinction between
Palestine and Syria. This included the evangelical British Palestine
Association, established sixty years before the PEF. The formation of thePalestine Association in the early 19th century had been spurred by the
Napoleonic wars and the 1798‒1801 French invasion and campaign in
Egypt and Palestine. Napoleon’s defeat at Acre in 1799 is one of the bestknown episodes of modern world history. The collapse of his siege of Acre
– the city known in Europe as the last capital of the Latin Crusader
Kingdom of Jerusalem – in 1799 with the full support of British maritime
power ushered in a new era in British direct involvement in the region andthe beginnings of British religio-political distinction between Palestine andSyria. This became evident in a long romantic-evangelical poem from 1803,
Palestine, which was composed by a clergyman, Reginald Heber, later
known as Bishop of Calcutta, with the help of Sir Walter Scott. The popular
poem was recited in London theatres and was later published, and set tomusic by the composer William Crotch, a professor of music at Oxford
University. The increasing British evangelical involvement in Palestine also
became evident in the renaming of the Palestine Association, which wasestablished in 1805 shortly after the departure of the French from theregion. This society had initially been founded in March 1805 under thename Syrian Society. A month later, on 24 April 1805, its founders decided
that the Syrian Society ‘shall henceforth be denominated The Palestine
Association’. The Palestine Association was co-founded and led by William
Richard Hamilton (1777–1859), a British diplomat, traveller, antiquarianand Egyptologist who later served as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
The Association was formally disbanded in 1834 and incorporated into theRoyal Geographical Society (Silberman 1982; Kark and Goren 2011).
Le Strange’s Palestine under the Moslems (1890, 2010, 2014) placed theimage of the Dome of the Rock on its cover and contained maps andillustrations. His work, which introduces ‘the mass of information whichlies buried in the Arabic texts of the Moslem geographers and travellers of
the Middle Ages’ (Le Strange 1890: Preface), provided vivid descriptionsof Jund Filastin under Islam on the basis of the accounts of the 10th century
Palestinian Jerusalemite historian and geographer al-Maqdisi and his work,
Ahsan al-Taqasim Fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim (The Best Divisions for Knowledge

of the Regions) (al-Maqdisi 1994, 2002). Le Strange had already translated
from Arabic into English and published in 1886 al-Maqdisi’s famous work
under the title al-Mukaddasi’s Description of Syria and Palestine, and thistitle by Le Strange also underlines the sharp geo-political distinction
between Palestine and Syria in European thinking in the 19th century.
The clear distinction between Palestine/the Holy Land, on the one hand,
and Syria/al-Sham, on the other, was not exclusively European; as we havealready seen, in the 17th century Palestinian Muslim author Salih ibn
Ahmad al-Tumurtashi made that distinction in his work The Complete
Knowledge in Remembering the Holy Land and Its Boundaries andRemembering Palestine and its Boundaries and al-Sham (1695‒1696).
Also, successive generations of medieval and modern Christian pilgrims
referred to geographical subdivision of Palestine, Syria and Arabia. For
educated local Palestinians, familiar with both classical Arab Islamic
writings on Palestine and al-Sham and European publications on Palestine,
and for ordinary Palestinians observing the caravans of European andRussian pilgrims at close quarters, this distinction between Palestine/theHoly Land and Syria would be taken for granted. Western-funded, Roman
Catholic Terra Sancta schools based in the urban centres of Palestine wheremost Palestinian Christians resided began to appear in Nazareth, Jaffa,
Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and for Palestinians educated in the European
and Russian schools at home or abroad the production of the European‘knowledge’ on the historical geography of Palestine/the Holy Land as wellas the mushrooming of European consulates in Palestine would also be amatter of great interest and some concern. From the mid-19th century, with
the improvement of communication and establishment of several European
consulates in Palestine, the ‘Grand Tour’ of the 18th century – thetraditional trip undertaken by mainly upper class European young men ofmeans through Italian cities – was replaced by the ‘Cook Tour’ (organisedby Thomas Cook): middle class early mass tourism and travels in ‘Greece,
Palestine and Egypt’. Thomas Cook arranged for the German Kaiser
Wilhelm II to visit Palestine in 1898. The ‘Cook’s Tour’ and Thomas Cook
Holy Land Tourism also spawned numerous publications in many European
languages on the ‘geography of Palestine’ and the Holy Land, many ofwhich were also accessible to members of the educated Palestinian elite andOttoman officials. On a popular level, European mass tourism in Palestine
impacted on the Palestinian vernacular and, over time, introduced many

French and Italian words into Palestinian Arabic – words such as hotel(otel), chauffeur, douche, beton (baton), mode (moda), canapé (canabai),salon, balcon (balconeh), billet (bolet), farmacia (farmashiyyah), souvenir,
ascenseur, (ascensel), dossier (dusiyyeh), automobile, Benzina (banzin) andgarage (karaj) still commonly in use today.
In the 19th century and early 20th century much of the European
knowledge production on Palestine in books and travel diaries remained
dominated by Biblical Studies, Scriptural Geography, Orientalism in which
the Palestinian Arabs were portrayed as a ‘simple appendix to the ancient
Biblical [landscape] … as “shadows” of the far-off past, “fossils” suspended
in time’ (Kamel 2014, 2015), while the Arab fallahin (peasants) of modern
Palestine were viewed as symbols of the ‘biblical Jews’ (Gil, E. 2006).
However, as early as the mid-19th century, biblical archaeologist andscriptural geographer Edward Robinson (1794‒1863), writing in the early
1860s when travel by Europeans to the Levant became widespread, notes‘Palestine, or Palestina, now the most common name for the Holy Land’(Robinson, E. 1865: 15; see also Robinson 1841; and Robinson et al. 1860).
This observation is also evident from Victor Guérin’s seven-volume
Description géographique, historique et archéologique de la Palestine(1868‒1880; also Guérin 1881–1883). In the 1860s, the British had set up
the Palestine Exploration Fund, which sponsored the Survey of Western
Palestine and mounted geographical map-making expeditions in Palestine.
The PEF was a typical example of the ‘learned societies’ founded in Britain
and was responsible for processing the empire’s notions and theories into
pseudo-scientific Orientalist thinking and argumentation, leading to theshaping of British policy and intentionality which finds its apotheosis in the
Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917. One of the main political motivesof the PEF was clear from its own publication: Names and Places in the
Old and New Testament and Apocrypha: With their Modern Identifications(Palestine Exploration Fund 1889). The Palestine Exploration Fund listed
more than 1150 place names related to the Old Testament and 162 related to
the New Testament. British rule in Palestine formally began on 11
December 1917 when General Allenby officially entered the Old City ofJerusalem. Shortly after the British military occupation of Palestine, theBritish authorities set out to gather toponymic information from the local
Palestinian inhabitants. The European preoccupation with ‘biblical place
names’ and with Jerusalem, and the European and American growth of‘Bible Studies’, had some impact on official Ottoman thinking and on thewritings of some Palestinian nationalist authors. The latter sought toconstruct a counter-Zionist discourse by couching modern Palestinian
nationalism in primordialist terms, rooted in Canaanite roots and the ‘Land
of Canaan’ (see, for instance, Cattan 1969: 3‒4).
PALESTINE-FOCUSED RUSSIAN ORIENTALISM IN THE
LATE OTTOMAN PERIOD
Branch from Palestine
Tell me the Palestine branch:
Where you grew up, where are you blooming?
What kind of hills, some valleys
Your decoration was?
You were the pure waters of the Jordan
East beam caressed you,Night is the wind in the mountains of Lebanon…
You stand, the branch of Jerusalem,
Shrine of the correct time!
Transparent dusk beam lamps,
And the ark of the cross, the symbol of the holy ...
(Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov 1837)2
Palm Sunday is a Christian feast before Easter which commemorates Jesus’
triumphant entry into Jerusalem. The 1837 poem Vetka Palestiny (The Palm
Branch of Palestine) by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814–1841), ahighly influential Russian Romantic poet also called ‘the poet of the
Caucasus’ and the most important figure of Russian poetry after Alexander
Pushkin’s death in 1837, encapsulated Russian Orientalism and late
Ottoman Palestine. With strong echoes of European Romanticism (1800‒
1850), the 1803 romantic poem by Reginald Heber, Lermontov’s romanticevangelical poem evokes the stories both of the Gospels and of Russianpilgrimage to Palestine in the 19th century, three-quarters of whichpilgrimage took place at Easter (Hummel and Hummel 1995). Thisevangelising poetry was inspired by the religious imagination of the country
the poet called ‘Palestine’, although Lermontov had never visited it (Merlo2013). In the 19th century Russian Orientalist Orthodox representations ofPalestine went hand in hand. Crucially, Russian writings on, and politicalactivities in the country had a major impact on the perception, conception
and actual events of late Ottoman Palestine.
Earlier in 1820 Dmitrij Daškov, a diplomat and the second counsellor of
the Russian Embassy in Istanbul, was the first Russian writer who went toPalestine as a pilgrim. He also wrote an essay entitled on his travels (Merlo2013). In fact, many of the Russian historical and literary representations ofPalestine in the 19th century were actual descriptions and narrations of
Russian pilgrims (Hopwood 1969: 10; Merlo 20133). In 1848 Nikolai
Gogol (1809–1852), the leading figure of Russian literary realism, went ona pilgrimage to Palestine. The romantic Orientalist representations ofPalestine by Lermontov and other Russian Romantics of the 19th century
also harked back to the history of early Christianity and of Palaestina underthe Byzantines, a period in which, as we have seen in chapter four, thePalestine Orthodox Church became self-governing and emerged as one of
the top five churches governing Christendom.
Lermontov’s poem had also anticipated Russia’s significantly increasingpresence in Palestine, which began in 1844 with the arrival of the first
Russian Orthodox Archimandrite in Palestine. Also in the 1840s, theRussians obtained permission to build a huge compound in Jerusalem. Thiswas constructed after the Crimean War, in 1860‒1864. Russian efforts
culminated in the founding of the Russian Orthodox Palestine Society in St
Petersburg in 1882. In 1889 the word ‘Imperial’ was added to the name andthe Society became known as the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine
Society (Russian: Императорское православное палестинское общество;Turkish: Rus İmparatorluğu Ortodoks Filistin Cemiyeti; Arabic:) (Hopwood 1969: 150‒154)
and to the Palestinian Orthodox community in Arabic as the Palestinian
Orthodox Imperial Society ().
Spurred by the establishment of the British Palestine Exploration Fund in
1865, and its imperial, quasi-military, scientific expeditions to Palestine in
the 1870s (see below), the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society was
founded by politician and writer Vasili Nikolaevich Khitrovo (1834‒1903),
author of Palestina i Sina (2011), and chaired by the Grand Duke Sergei
Alexandrovich who had visited Palestine in 1881. The Imperial Russian
Orthodox Palestine Society was a scholarly, educational and social

organisation. In addition to promoting and organising Russian pilgrimage tothe Holy Land, it built schools and hospitals in Palestine and acted as apublic body defending Russian interests (Stavrou 1961). The Society
published its own research in two journals: Soobsheniya Imperatorskovo
Pravoslavnovo Palestinskovo Obshestva (Imperial Orthodox PalestinianSociety Reports) and the Palestinskij Sbornik (Palestinian Collections). It
also established a translation and publishing house in Jerusalem partly insupport of its extensive Arabic-language schools and secular teacher
training seminaries in late Ottoman Palestine, the first of their kind inmodern Palestine. These pioneering teacher training colleges paved the way
for modern secular higher education in Palestine and for the Arab College(also known as the Government Arab College), a Jerusalem-based
university college which existed throughout the Mandatory period from1918 until 1948.
Following the 1905 Russian Revolution there was some decline in thebudgets of the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society. After the Bolshevik
Revolution of October 1917 the Society was renamed the Russian Palestine
Society (Russian: Российское Палестинское Общество; Arabic:) and was attached to the Academy of Sciencesof the USSR. During the Mandatory period, severe restrictions were
imposed on the activities of the Society in Palestine by the British and after
1948 Israel confiscated much of its land and property. However, the original
19th century name of the Society, Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine
Society, was restored in 1992 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in December 1991 and the creation of the Russian Federation. Furthermore,
today the Society operates and runs projects in Palestine under its original‘Palestinian’ Arabic name coined in the late 19th century: the Palestinian
Orthodox Imperial Society.
The coat of arms of the Russian Empire, with its double-headed eagle,
was formerly associated with the Byzantine Empire. The rulers of Russia
had long held themselves to be the main protectors of Christian Orthodoxy,especially after most of the membership of the Greek Orthodox churches
from 1460 until Greek rebellion of 1821 fell under the control of the
Ottomans. In the 19th century imperial Russia continued to view itself as
the ‘Third Rome’ and the successor to the Byzantine Empire. It continued
to pose a serious geo-political threat to the Ottoman state. The latter sought
alliances with other European powers, notably the British and French, tokeep Russian ambitions in check. This led to the Crimean War of 1853‒
1856, whose immediate cause involved the European competition overJerusalem and the rights of Orthodox Christian minorities in Palestine. The
Orthodox Christians were the largest group among the Christian
Palestinians. The Russians not only saw themselves as heirs to Orthodox
Christianity and the Byzantine Empire in the East and protectors of the
Orthodox community in Palestine, they were also concerned about the sharp
decline in the proportion of the Orthodox among Palestinian Christians
from 90 per cent in 1840 to about two-thirds in 1880 as a result of theproselyting activities of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches.
In the second half of the 19th century Russia, competing for influence inPalestine with other European powers, took practical steps aimed atconsolidating the Russian presence. The Russian Consulate was establishedin Jerusalem in 1858. This was followed by the setting up of the Committee
for Palestine () (1858‒1864), a body supported by the
Russian Foreign Ministry, and in 1860 the Russian Palestine Society (RPS)
was also founded. The RPS guided Russian pilgrims to Palestine, bought
property and built hospices, churches and schools in Jerusalem andNazareth. This led to the establishment of a Russian colony (‘compound’)in Jerusalem in the 1860s. In 1864 the Committee for Palestine was createdin the Department for Asia of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1864‒1889)(Merlo 2013). In 1890 the imperial Russian government supported andapproved the establishment of Hovevei Tzion, a registered Russian charity
officially known as the Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers andArtisans in Syria and Palestine (Общество по поддержке еврейских
фермеров и ремесленников в Сирию и Палестину).
Subsidised by the Russian government, and passing through Jaffa, by1910 about 8000 Russian (predominately peasant) pilgrims visited Palestine
every year,4 and by the First World War the average annual number rose toabout 14,000. Organised by the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine
Society, this influx of Russian pilgrims had an impact on Ottoman
administrative reorganisation of Palestine in the early 20th century. Russian
writings on, and mass pilgrimage to, late Ottoman Palestine were very
important for a variety of political reasons and had (intended andunintended) consequences:• Russian writings on Palestine inspired early Zionist colonial-settlers:
Hovevei Tzion (‘Lovers of Zion’) who began to arrive from the territoriesof the Russian Empire in the 1880s. In 1890 the establishment of Hovevei
Tzion as a registered Russian charity was officially approved by theimperial Russian government as the Society for the Support of Jewish
Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine (Общество по поддержке
еврейских фермеров и ремесленников в Сирию и Палестину), whichcame to be popularly known among Zionist settlers as the Odessa
Committee. Arabic and French were the two key languages of theeducated classes of late 19th century Palestine and the Russian Society
soon came to be known as ‘Société pour le soutien des agriculteurs et lesartisans juifs en Syrie et en Palestine’. It was dedicated to the practicalaspects of establishing agricultural colonies and its projects included help
in the founding of the early Zionist colonies (moshavot) of Rehovot andHadera.
• The Russian Zionists dominated the World Zionist Organisation createdby Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century.5• The ambitions of the Russian Empire posed the greatest threat to the
Ottoman Empire throughout much of the 19th century.
• As we shall see below, the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church inPalestine, although technically in communion with the Greek-dominatedOrthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, openly championed the local
Palestinian Arab Orthodox community. Backed by the Russianauthorities, the social and educational activities of the Russian Orthodox
Church in Palestine and, more crucially, the Russian Orthodox Palestine
Society founded in 1882 – after 1889 known to Palestinians as thePalestinian Orthodox Imperial Society (see below) – attracted sympathy
from local Palestinian Orthodox Christians as it championed the radical
idea that local Arab clergy should have cultural autonomy and should bepromoted to be bishops and leaders of the Orthodox Patriarchate of
Jerusalem, instead of the latter importing senior clergy from Greece.6 In
late Ottoman Palestine this idea had a galvanising effect on educatedlocal Palestinian Orthodox Christians, many of whom were to become
leading cultural figures, and in the forefront of the Palestinian nationalist
struggle.

• The flourishing cultural and public spaces of late Ottoman Jerusalem andthe reimagining of Palestinian territorial identity and growth of territorial
patriotism and proto-nationalism, promoted by Palestinian Orthodox
Arab intellectuals such Khalil Beidas in the late 19th century (see below),
encouraged Palestinian Arab Orthodox journalists ‘Issa al- Issa (1878‒
1950) and his cousin Yousef Hanna al- Issa to set up the daily newspaper
Falastin (‘Palestine’) in Jaffa in January 1911; with its distinctly
vernacular name, it was based on modern perceptions of Palestine. In late
Ottoman Palestine the construction of a two-tier, Palestinian
Arab/Ottoman, identity based on Ottoman citizenship and equality for all
inhabitants was attempted. As we shall see, the newspaper Falastin(1911‒1967) would also become not only one of the most influential
voices of modern indigenous Palestinian national identity; it would alsofiercely oppose Zionist settler-colonisation. For decades Falastin would
remain dedicated to the cause of Palestine, to Palestinian territorial
nationalism and pan-Arab solidarity, and to the Arab Orthodox
community in its struggle with the Greek-dominated Orthodox
Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
STRATEGIC AMBITIONS AND THE BRITISH PEACEFULCRUSADE: SCIENCE, EMPIRE AND THE MAPPING OF
PALESTINE BY THE PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND
(1865–1877)
We have there [in Palestine] a land teeming with fertility and rich inhistory, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people,
and look! Scattered over the world, a people without a country. (Lord
Shaftesbury, Chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Palestine
Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement for 1875, London, 1875, p. 116)
Central to the Victorian ‘peaceful’ Crusader revivalism of the 19th century
and the successful opening of the ‘Holy Land’ to Europe’s geo-political andcultural-religious penetration was the British Palestine Exploration Fundand ‘Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine’ between 1871 and 1877.
British scientific and technological advances in cartography and cadastral
mapping were fully harnessed for empire and imperial expansionism in the
Middle East. Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency ofBritain and is one of the largest producers of maps in the world. The British
official agency’s name indicates its original military and strategic purposes
and its origins go back to the mapping of Scotland in the aftermath of theJacobite uprising of 1745 and the absence of military maps and detailed
knowledge of the Scottish Highlands. The British were not the first to
conduct instrumental strategic mapping of Palestine. The first modern mapsof Palestine, based on an instrumental survey and using the most developedscientific instruments of the time, had already been produced by Colonel
Pierre Jacotin, a French map-maker and Director of the French Survey
Military Corps during Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt and Palestine, who in
1799, on Napoleon’s orders, prepared dozens of secret maps of Egypt, Sinai
and Palestine. Six of those maps show parts of Palestine, especially theparts of the country through which Napoleon’s army marched in February
to June 1799. Jacotin continued to work on these maps after he returned toFrance and they were eventually published in 1826, and became widely
known as the ‘Jacotin Atlas’, labelling Palestine in French and Arabic as‘Palestine or Holy Land’/‘land of al-Quds’ () (alsoKhatib 2003; Karmon 1960: 155–173, 244–253). This cartographer
representation of Palestine by the French would also find strong echoes inthe establishment and naming of the autonomous administrative province of
al-Quds:(Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem) by the
Ottomans fifty years later, in 1872 (see pp. 259-260). The ‘Jacotin Map ofPalestine’, surveyed during Napoleon’s campaign in 1799, was also later
published by the Palestine Exploration Fund (Kallner 1944). Britishcolonial ambitions in late 19th century Palestine and the lack of detailed
British military maps of the area were two of the key factors behind theformation of the British Palestine Exploration Fund and ‘British Ordnance
Survey of Western Palestine’ in the 1870s.
As we shall see in chapter ten, the Israeli toponymic projects in the post1948 period had their foundations in the de-Arabisation activities of James
Finn and the biblical explorations in the 1870s by members of the Palestine
Exploration Fund whose work, Names and Places in the Old and New
Testament and Apocrypha: with their modern identifications (compiled by
George Armstrong; revised by Sir Charles W. Wilson and Major C. R.
Conder 1889), was central to British colonial toponymic projects in
Palestine in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century.

The systematic mapping, surveying and place-naming projects, whichreached their peak with the British Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine
between 1871 and 1877, were largely strategic. The sacredness of Palestine
was not a sufficiently convincing reason for the British to organise andfinance such surveys. The main motive for mapping the country as a whole
was its strategic and geo-political importance for the British Empire, which
was then engaged in international struggles over the Middle East (Goren
2002: 87–110). However, the surveys and mapping of the British Royal
Engineering Corp in the 1870s led subsequently to the growth of protoJewish Zionism.
The British Palestine Exploration Fund was founded in 1865 by a groupof biblical scholars, scriptural geographers, military and intelligence
officers and Protestant clergymen, most notably the Dean of Westminster
Abbey, Arthur P. Stanley. Its ‘scientific exploration’ was coordinated very
closely with the British politico-military establishment and intelligencecommunity anxious to penetrate Ottoman Palestine, a country ruled by the
Muslim ‘sick man of Europe’. With offices in central London, the PEF
today is an active organisation which publishes an academic journal, thePalestine Exploration Quarterly. In addition, the PEF presents public
lectures and funds research projects in the Near East. According to its
website, ‘Between 1867 and 1870 Captain Warren carried out the
explorations in Palestine which form the basis for our knowledge of the
topography of ancient Jerusalem and the archaeology of the Temple
Mount/Haram al-Sherif [sic]’; ‘In addition to his explorations on, under,
and around the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sherif, Warren surveyed thePlain of Philistia and carried out a very important [military] reconnaissanceof central Jordan’.7 Captain (later General Sir) Charles Warren (1840–1927)
of the British Royal Engineers, one of the key officers of the PEF, who wassent to map the ‘scriptural topography’ of Jerusalem and investigate ‘thesite of the temple’, noted: ‘[British] King Consul [James Finn] rules
supreme, not over the natives of the city, but over strangers; but yet thesestrangers for the most part are the rightful owners, the natives, for the mostpart, are usurpers’ (Shepherd 1987: 127–128). Both Warren and the (abovementioned) long-serving and famous British Consul, Finn, who was a
restorationist Christian Zionist involved with the ‘Mission to the Jews’(Shepherd 1987: 110), apparently ‘literally burrowed’ beneath the Muslim
shrines in Jerusalem to chart the ‘original dimensions’ of the ‘Temple

Mount’. The biblical archaeology and toponymic projects of Warren and theRoyal Engineers have remained basic data for many Israeli archaeologists,
geographers and strategic planners of today (Shepherd 1987: 195;
Benvenisti 2002: 11–27).
Following in the footsteps of the PEF, the British Mandatory authorities
in Palestine set out to gather toponymic information from the local
Palestinian population. The British drive to present European colonialism as
a continuation of an ancient Jewish ownership of the land meant that place
names in Palestine became a site of fierce contest between the European
Zionist settler-colonisers and the indigenous Palestinians. Palestinian Arab
names were (and continued to be) ‘unnamed’ and Hebraicised by theZionists using a colonising strategy based on Old Testament names. Local
Palestinian place names were deemed ‘redeemed’ and liberated when they
were rendered from Arabic into Hebrew (Slyomovics 1998, 2002). The
genealogy of British colonial name commissions and the Zionist Hebrew
renaming project, which began in the 19th century, lingered under the
British colonial system in Palestine (al-Shaikh 2010) and were accelerated
dramatically after the Nakba and the expansion of biblical andarchaeological departments at Israeli universities.
THE HISTORIC AND GEOGRAPHIC MAPS OF PALESTINE:
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The long history and geography of Palestine (ancient, medieval andmodern) are deeply ingrained in the social and cultural memory of Europe
and the Arab world. In 1890 German historian Gustav Reinhold Röhricht,
in Bibliotheca Geographica Palestine, listed 3515 books issued in many
languages between 333 AD and 1878 AD which dealt with the geographyof Palestine. Röhricht’s work also contains a chronological list of maps
relating to Palestine.
Preoccupation with the history, geography and cartography of Palestine
was also evident in the publications of the National Geographic, formerly
the National Geographic Magazine, the official magazine of the National
Geographic Society, based in Washington, DC. The NGS is one of thelargest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Itsinterests include geography, history, archaeology and natural sciences. The
National Geographic has been published continuously since its first issue in1888. The archives of the magazine show a huge focus on the cartography,
history and archaeology of historic Palestine (ancient and modern). The
historic ‘Palestine Maps’ (no mention of ‘Maps of Canaan’) of the National
Geographic (not known to be particularly pro-Palestinian) produced thefollowing titles: ‘Impressions of Palestine’, 1 March 1915 (‘Former British
Ambassador to the U.S., James Bryce, relates his impressions of apredominantly Muslim Palestine’); ‘Jerusalem’s Locust Plague: Being a
Description of the Recent Locust Influx into Palestine, and Comparing
Same with Ancient Locust Invasions as Narrated in the Old World’s History
Book, the Bible’, 1 December 1915 (‘John D. Whiting compares the recent
invasion of locusts in Palestine and Syria with the ancient locust plagues
described in the Bible’); ‘Among the Bethlehem Shepherds: A Visit to theValley Which David Probably Recalled When He Wrote the Twenty-third
Psalm’, 1 December 1926 (‘Shepherd families of Palestine live much as
their ancestors did; often the youngest boy tends the sheep, with flute andstaff in hand’); ‘Changing Palestine’, 1 April 1934 (‘Improved
transportation and communication give Palestine growing room as the small
but strategic land continues its role as a meeting place for East and West’);‘Bombs over Bible Lands’, 1 August 1941 (‘In Syria, Palestine, and Iraq,
where Romans, Babylonians, and Assyrians once battled, Germany andRussia vie for control of the oil-rich nations, disrupting historic lands withbombs, planes, and tanks’); ‘Palestine Today’, 1 October 1946 (‘Under thecontrol of Great Britain, Palestine struggles to cope with immigration.
Growing cities and farms make a strange mix in the ancient land’); ‘An
Archaeologist Looks at Palestine’, 1 December 1947 (‘The author
encounters history at every turn, in an ancient land that has been a cockpit
of unending conflict for many centuries’).
PARADIGM SHIFT IN LATE OTTOMAN PALESTINE (1872‒
1917): HISTORICAL CONTINUITIES AND ADMINISTRATIVEDIVISION OF PALESTINE‘Abdul-Karim Rafeq, a distinguished Syrian historian who pioneered theuse of sharia (Islamic law) court records (sijillat) as sources for social andespecially urban history and wrote extensively on Ottoman Syria andPalestine, came across the Arabic term Filastin on a number of occasions(Rafeq 1990; Gerber 2008: 51). Among Rafeq’s Arabic sources for late

19th century Palestine was an 1879 Arabic manuscript by Damascene
author Nu’man al-Qasatli, entitled: ‘al-Rawda al-Numaniyya in theTravelogue to Palestine and some Syrian Towns’ (Rafeq 1990; Gerber
2008: 51), which provides an 1870s survey of Palestine. This increase in theuse of the Arabic terminology of Falastin and Filastin in the second half ofthe 19th century and the growing perception (local, regional andinternational) that modern Palestine/Holy Land was distinct, if not separate,from modern Syria, were among the multiple indicators of the paradigm
shift in the perception of late Ottoman Palestine. However, with reference tothe textual ‘usage’ of the terms Filastin, Filistin and Falastin in indigenous‘literary-scholarly’ sources in Arabic, the context of the predominantly premodern oral/aural culture of Palestine should always be kept in mind. Also,
crucially, unlike the introduction of printing presses in Europe in the 15th
century – which gradually led to mass literacy and mass publications –Palestine had its first printing presses five centuries later, in the late 19th
century – and subsequently one famous printing press in Jaffa was called‘Palestine Press’, ‘’– therefore, inevitably the volume of‘literary-scholarly’ output on Palestine in Arabic prior to the late 19th
century (in comparison with the mountains of sources in European
languages) was limited.
For a host of reasons (top of which was the European powers’ scramble
for, and actual penetration of, Palestine/Holy Land), the perception of theimportance of Palestine by the rulers of the shrinking Ottoman Empire
began to change radically in the second half of the 19th century. This was a
gradual process and was also reflected in Ottoman Turkish‒English
dictionaries of the early and mid-19th century: the term ‘Holy Land’ wasoften rendered into ‘Filastin’. One such original dictionary was produced in1856 by Sir James Redhouse, An English and Turkish Dictionary, which
was later used as the basis for many Turkish‒English dictionaries,
translated the English term ‘Holy Land’ into the Arabic script as ‘Dar
Filastin’ (), or or ‘land of Palestine’; Redhouse 1856.).8 In
Islamic terminology, with which both Redhouse and Ottoman officials werefamiliar, the Arabic singular form dar may mean ‘house’, ‘place’, ‘land’,‘country’, ‘region’ or ‘territory’. This dictionary was commissioned by theAmerican Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the largest andmost important American missionary organisation in the 19th century. The
Board started a new mission to Palestine in 1819. But Redhouse himself

had worked for the Ottoman government for many years, first as adraftsman in the late 1820s before he returned to England in 1834 to publish
his first Ottoman‒English dictionary. In 1838 Redhouse returned to Istanbul
to work for the Ottoman government as an interpreter to the Vezir-i Azam
(effectively Prime Minister) and the Minister for Foreign Affairs. In 1840
Redhouse was transferred to the Ottoman Admiralty and became a memberof the Ottoman Naval Council. In this capacity, he went to Syria-Palestine
to help with communications between the British and Ottoman fleets whichat the time were blockading the Egyptian forces in the Levant under thecommand of Ibrahim Pasha. After the end of Egyptian rule in Palestine andSyria in 1841 Redhouse received the Sultan’s Imperial Order Iftar Nisani in
1941, one of the chivalric orders of the Ottoman Empire. He remained in
Istanbul until 1853 before returning to London to work for the British
Foreign Office.
Another key indicator of the shift in the perception of the country ofPalestine/Holy Land was the Ottoman administrative reorganisation in
Palestine – reforms which were partly instituted under growing pressure
from the European allies who had backed the Ottoman Empire in its
struggle against the Egyptian occupation of the Levant in 1831‒1840 andduring the Ottoman‒Russian (Crimean) War of 1853‒1858. The ‘sick manof Europe’ was also increasingly falling under the financial control of theEuropean powers, whose penetration of Holy Land/Palestine was
unstoppable. Eyalets (provinces or pashaliks) were a primary administrative
divisions of the Ottoman Empire, a division which lasted from the mid-15th
century until the 1860s, and were headed by senior officials known as valis,or general governor. In 1859, in A Gazetter of the World. Or Dictionary of
Geographical Knowledge (Vol. 1), a member of the British Royal
Geographic Society, described Acre as a pashalik of the Ottoman Empire
and a part of Palestine. In the 1860s the greatly weakened Ottoman Empire
replaced these eyalets with vilayets (Arabic: wilayah). Both the eyalets andvilayets were subdivided into sanjaks or liwas. The sanjaks were divided
into qadas, which in turn were divided into nahiyahs. In the early 1870s the
Ottomans also created a special administrative status for Jerusalem,
together with four other sub-districts, called mutasarrifiyyah (Arabic) ormutasarriflik (Ottoman Turkish) (Büssow 2011: 5; Abu-Manneh 1999: 36).
The administrative ‘reforms’ of the 1860s and 1870s were introduced under
the impact of growing European influence and they followed thedevastating Crimean War (1853‒1856), which involved Russia, Britain,
France and the weakened Ottoman Empire. The immediate cause of the war
centred on the fierce struggle of European powers for Palestine and over the‘rights’ of Christian minorities in the Holy Land. Combined with a power
struggle for the Holy Land and Jerusalem, these cataclysmic events
propelled Palestine to centre stage in both European and Ottoman thinking.
The far-reaching Ottoman administrative changes of the 1860s and 1870s,
combined with intense European rivalry over the Holy Land, not only
produced administrative consequences for Palestine but also contributed toa profound shift in the way Palestine was perceived, reconfigured andexperienced in the late Ottoman period.
The shift began with a change in the perception and reconceptualisationof Palestine in the course the late Ottoman period (Tamari 2011) and wasembodied in the administrative and territorial reorganisation of the country.
Inspired by the creation of the independent administrative Mutasarrifate of
Mount Lebanon in 1861, the autonomous Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem(Arabic:; Ottoman Turkish: Kudüs-i Şerif
Mutasarrıflığı) was established in 1872 and given the special administrative
status of mutasarrıflığı or mutasarriflik. The shift in the perception ofPalestine was partly reflected in the scale of the new Mutasarrifate of Noble
Jerusalem. To begin with it was at least five times bigger than the sanjaks ofNablus and Acre put together. This very large Mutasarrifate was neverintended to be a sanjak but rather a kind of super sanjak, practically awilayah, an independent province completely separate and remarkably
distinct from the historic Ottoman administrative divisions of al-Sham.
Also, the political status of the Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem was
unique in another respect: it came under the direct authority of Istanbul(Büsso 2011; Khalidi, R. 1997: 174).
Crucially these radical and far-reaching administrative reorganisations in
Palestine were carried out with the consent or active support of theinfluential local Palestinian elites (Foster 2016a). No local Palestinian
opposition to administratively separating Jerusalem and much of Palestinefrom the al-Sham region was recorded. The Mutasarrifate of Noble
Jerusalem consisted of, in addition to the district of Jerusalem, four otherlarge districts (qadas): Jaffa, Gaza, al-Khalil (Hebron) and Beersheba. With
its huge size, this made it effectively a new province, at the centre of which
was the holy city of Jerusalem. The latter for many centuries had beencentral to Provincia Palaestina, Byzantine Palaestina Prima and the Arabprovince of Jund Filastin; it became the provincial capital of the
Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem, a new province which was often
conflated or equated with ‘Palestine’. In 1911‒1912 the Governor of the
Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, Cevdet Bey, wrote a letter to the popular Jaffabased newspaper Falastin () calling himself the ‘Governor ofPalestine’ (Foster 2016b; also Kushner 1987).
In 1872 the Ottomans also created the administrative sanjaks of Nablus
and Acre, both of which, together of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, formed
the territorial basis of Mandatory Palestine in 1917-18. However, historians
failed to recognise that both the historical roots of Mandatory Palestine andthe territorial basis of the sanjak of Acre go back to the 18th century and to
the fact that the province (pashalik) of Acre was not a traditional province
created by the Ottoman authorities. The province of Acre was a modern
creation of the mid-18th century. It was effectively imposed on the Ottoman
Empire by Dhahir al- Umar, who militarily defeated the Ottoman army,
occupied Acre in 1749 and made it the capital of his Galilee-based emirate.
The latter, in effect, had replaced the old Ottoman administrative provinceof Sidon. In fact, the weak Ottoman authorities were subsequently forced torecognise al- Umar’s regime in large parts of Palestine and he was officiallygranted by them the title of ‘Sheikh of Acre, Emir of Nazareth, Tiberias,
Safed, and Sheikh of all Galilee’ (Philipp 2015). After al- Umar’s death,
Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, now officially recognised as the Governor of the
pashalik of Acre, continued to rule, as al- Umar, from the same capital,
Acre, from 1776 until his death in 1804. This modern regional,
administrative and power legacy of the 18th century persisted well into the19th century and formed the basis of the sanjak of Acre.
While the Ottomans, with the support of local Palestinian elites, sought
to send a clear message by creating an important administrative distinction
between sanjak (Acre and Nablus) and mutasarriflik (Mutasarrifate of
Jerusalem), some otherwise perceptive authors continued to refer, rather
inaccurately, to the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem as the ‘Sanjak of Jerusalem’(Abu-Manneh 1999). Clearly the naming, size and status of the
Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem meant that it was consciously conceived as a‘super sanjak’ with a particularly eminent status.
Ottoman administrative reorganisation of Palestine in the 1870s also
provides us with some clues as to the unmistakable links between thepolitics and economy of 18th century Palestine and that of evolving late
Ottoman Palestine. Acre and Nablus were Palestine’s most powerful tradeand manufacturing centres throughout most of the 18th and 19th centuries
and both were central to Palestine’s and al-Sham’s global trade in cotton
and textiles. Also, crucially, Acre had been the capital of two practicallyindependent Palestine-based regimes, those of Dhaher al- Umar and Ahmad
Pasha al-Jazzar, for almost half a century from 1746 to 1804. Also,interestingly, when the two sanjaks of Nablus and Acre were established,
they were initially placed under the political authority of the Mutasarrifateof Jerusalem, rather than that of Damascus (al-Sham). This suggests the
beginning of a new conceptualisation of Palestine based on the idea of a
unified Holy Land – an idea which began to shape European thinking in the
19th century and a discourse with which both Ottoman officials in Palestineand local Palestinian elites were acutely aware – subject to direct rule froman Istanbul-appointed mutasarrif. The mutasarrifate and the two sanjaks ofAcre and Nablus were commonly referred to locally and internationally as‘Palestine’.
Images and perceptions are always very powerful and the new south‒
north division of Palestine/Holy Land inadvertently echoed historic south‒
month divisions of the country under both the Byzantines (with originally
Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Secunda) and early Islam (Jund Filastin and
Jund al-Urdun). Paradoxically, however, although the sanjaks of Acre andNablus were soon to be attached to the wilayah of Beirut, mainly in order tocounter persistent Western intervention in the Holy Land/Palestine, thecreation of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem (as well as the two sanjaks ofNablus and Acre) were perceived and actually referred to by the British
consul in Jerusalem as the creation of ‘Palestine into a separate Eyalet’9(Abu-Manneh 1999: 39). The boundaries of this distinct Palestine eyalet, or
unified Holy Land, were (by and large) the territory which became known
as Mandatory Palestine (Foster 2016b).
Officially the Ottoman authorities, deeply concerned about European
interference in the ‘Holy Land’, sought to confine the geographic term
Filastin to the Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem and a 1913 Ottoman
geography textbook (Mekatib-i Ibtida’iye, Juğrafiya-i Osmani, Matbaa-i‘Amire, 1332 [1913/1914], p. 193) had a map showing the Mutasarrifate of
Jerusalem equated with(‘Palestine’).10 However, the combinationof the sanjaks of Acre and Nablus with the province or Mutasarrifate ofNoble Jerusalem produced a radically different perception of Palestine/Holy
Land and the combination of the ‘Three in One’ administrative districts wasreferred to in the register of the Islamic Sharia Court of Jerusalem as‘Eyalet al-Quds’ (the ‘Province of Jerusalem’) (Abu-Manneh 1999: 43).
Historical continuities in the geographic division of Palestine should be
kept in mind. The three-way division of Ottoman Palestine from south(Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem) to north (the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre
respectively) echoes previous divisions of the country under both early
Islam (Jund Filastin and Jund al-Urdun) and the Byzantines (Palaestina
Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris) (Rosen-Ayalon 2006:15). Of course, perceptions are very powerful and with historical hindsight
this perception of late Ottoman Palestine/Holy Land as ‘Three in One’ –‘One mutasarriflik and two sanjaks in one eyalet’, centred on Jerusalem andled by the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem – is not entirely unjustified or
historically unprecedented. Historically, we have already seen this ‘Three inOne’ representation of Provincia Palaestina under the Byzantines in Late
Antiquity, during which period the notion of the Holy Land also emerged
and was consolidated. Of course, the ‘Three sanjaks’ are equivalent to the‘Three Palestines’ (Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, Palaestina Tertia);
they are based on the creative analogy of ‘Three in One’. The Ottomans
were themselves direct heirs to Byzantium and would have been aware of
Byzantine and Arab histories of the Near East and Palestine. After all, theautocephalous and independent ‘All Palestine’ Orthodox Church, based on
the Church of Jerusalem, operated for centuries under the Ottomans and its
Patriarchs were officially approved by the Ottoman government. But from
British imperial or colonial perspectives, we can also see the ‘Three in One’analogy in the way modern Iraq was constituted by the British after the FirstWorld War, and constructed from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad,
Basra and Mosul, with the capital Baghdad providing the focal point formodern Iraq as well as the historical reference to the great Muslim capital
under the Abbasids. In the case of Palestine, for the British (as well as for
all European powers in the 19th century) Jerusalem provided the historicalreference and focal point for the modern conception of Palestine.
Six important and closely related developments in the second half of the
19th and early 20th centuries contributed towards the ‘unifying’ factors of‘Three in One (Palestine) Eyalet’. These Palestine/Holy Land developments

deeply affected the Ottoman reorganisation and actual administration ofPalestine. These developments were:• Large-scale pilgrimage and mass tourism in Palestine.
• The construction of new road systems to accommodate the influx ofChristian pilgrims.
• The establishment of Palestine/Holy Land missions, both diplomatic andecclesiastical.
• The new Palestine/Holy Land photography produced mountains ofimages and played a unifying factor.
• Holy Land knowledge production (scriptural mapping, ordinance surveys
and archaeological excavations).
• Palestine archaeology and famous archaeological discoveries related tothe extent and splendour of Byzantine Palaestina, such as the Madaba
Mosaic Floor Map, discovered in 1884.
The town of Nazareth became very important at the end of the 19th
century as the first modern carriage roads were built to serve the influx ofChristian pilgrims and the main road was constructed in lower Galilee toconnect the Christian holy places of Nazareth, Kafr Kanna and Tiberias(Karmon 1960: 251). The influx of Christian pilgrims and European tourists
to Palestine linked the Galilee very closely with the rest of Palestine. And
this can be seen in the construction of seven European-style clock towers at
the heart of the public spaces of key cities of late Ottoman Palestine (Jaffa,
Haifa, Acre, Nazareth, Safad, al-Quds and Nablus), built between 1900 and
1903 at local initiatives and from stones quarried in Palestine. Designed tocommemorate the silver Jubilee of the reign of the Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd alHamid II, the clock towers served as new symbols of modern time-keeping
and modernity. With the exception of the clock tower of al-Quds — which
was blown up by the British in 1922 — these clock towers have remained
key landmarks of Palestinian modernity. The impact of the industrial-scalepilgrimage and modern mass tourism on the administration of late Palestine
can hardly be overstated. Consequently, and, perhaps not surprisingly, in
1906 the two districts of Nazareth and Tiberias in the Galilee were attachedto the Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem, mainly in order to accommodate
the new mass pilgrimage and tourism from Russia, Europe and the US andfacilitate the issuance of a single tourist visa to Christian pilgrims andtravellers in Palestine (Bussow 2011: 70; Kark 1994: 131).
Not only had they reinforced the links between, and ‘unity’ of, theChristian holy sites of Jerusalem and those of the Galilee (Nazareth andTiberias included). They also began to have a major impact on the political
economy and the new geographical perceptions of the country –perceptions, as we shall see below, shared by European and Ottoman
officials in Palestine as well as local Palestinians.
Of course, throughout the second half of the 19th century Ottoman
officials in Palestine were determined to resist European intervention in the
Holy Land, while making concessions to European powers either underintense pressures or due to shifting Ottoman alliances with European
powers. From the perspective of the changes in late Ottoman Palestine, theperception of the Ottoman administrative rearrangement of Palestine as a‘Three in One’ province, consisting of two administrative sanjaks andmutasarriflik and centred on the Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem,
evidently had a major impact on British imperial thinking during the FirstWorld War but especially after 1918. For instance, in 1921 the first British
High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, established theSupreme Muslim Council which consisted of a president and four members,
two of whom were to represent the former Mutasarrifate of Noble
Jerusalem and the remaining two to represent the former sanjaks of Nablus
and Acre. These two sanjaks and one mutasarriflik corresponded to thethree administrative districts of late Ottoman Palestine (Dumper 1994).
Central to the paradigm shift in late Ottoman Palestine was theperception throughout the late 19th century that the Mutasarrifate of
Jerusalem, together with the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre, unified historic‘Palestine’, or the Holy Land, into a distinct country. This was not confinedto European and Palestinian authors. Politically and strategically thisconception was also evident from an important Ottoman document, Filastin
Risalesi, a military handbook issued for limited distribution to the officersof the Eighth Army Corps in Palestine at the beginning of the First World
War. A demographic and geographic survey of the Palestine province, themanual included topographic maps, statistical tables and a geo-ethnographyof Palestine. It also contained a general map of the country in which theboundaries of Palestine extended far beyond the frontiers of the
Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. In 1872 the boundaries of this mutasarriflik,with its five districts (qadas) of Jerusalem, Jafa, Gaza, Beersheba and alKhalil, had analogies to both the Byzantine delineation of Palaestina Primaand the early Arab Islamic delineation of Jund Filastin. The northernborders of the Filastin Risalesi map included the Litani River and the cityof Tyre. The map encompassed all of the Galilee and parts of southern
Lebanon, as well as the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre (Tamari 2011).
THE REIMAGINING OF PALESTINIAN TERRITORIAL
IDENTITY AND PROTO-NATIONALISM IN LATE OTTOMANPALESTINE: KHALIL BEIDAS AND PALESTINIANCULTURAL NATIONALISM
Palestinian territorial nationalism, like the idea of Palestine, has multiple
beginnings and multiple sources. In Palestinian Identity: The Constructionof Modern National Consciousness (1998), Rashid Khalidi argues that a
distinct Palestinian national identity grounded in the land of Palestine
emerged in the early 20th century. But, at the same time, Khalidi andseveral prominent historians of modern Palestine, including Beshara
Doumani (1995), Ilan Pappe (1999), Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S.
Migdal (1993, 2003), all suggested that before the appearance of political
Zionism in the late 19th century, a local Palestinian national identity had
been in the making (Pappe 1999: 3). This nascent positive Palestinian
national territorial identity in late Ottoman Palestine was not connected toZionism. However, although an incipient local Palestinian national
movement preceded the advent of Zionism in Palestine, this movement wasalso spurred on by Zionist settlement and land-purchasing activities in the
period prior to the First World War.
In late Ottoman Palestine, the population of the three Palestinian
administrative districts (Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre) was overwhelmingly
Muslim and Christian Arab. The Jewish minority numbered about 25,000;
the majority was deeply religious and urban-based. Until the advent ofEuropean Zionism in the late 19th century relations among the Palestinians(Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians and Jews) were peaceful and stable,
forged by centuries of coexistence, shared history and shared country(Khalidi, W. 1984). The memoirs of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1897–1972), a
Palestinian Christian citizen of Jerusalem, The Diaries of Wasif
Jawhariyyeh, provide compelling testimony to the emergence of a two-tierPalestinian Ottoman territorial identity in late Ottoman Palestine and for theco-existence, cultural diversity and intermixing of Ottoman Jerusalem, amicrocosm of late Ottoman modernity in Palestine. In the Palestinian worldof Jawhariyyeh’s youth, boundaries separating the lives of Palestinian
Christians, Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Muslims were fluid.
Jerusalem’s modernity was a feature of internal dynamics in the Ottoman
City and I propose that the social structure of the walled city was much
more fluid than generally believed; further I suggest that the quarter
system signalling the division of the Old City into confessional boundeddomains was introduced and imposed retroactively on the city by Britishcolonial regulations. (Tamari 2006: 28)
In Palestine the printing and publication revolution began in the late
Ottoman period and developed on an industrial scale in the first half of the20th century. This revolution was accompanied by the introduction ofmodern technologies, the growth in secular education and literacy and rapid
urbanisation. Within a short period, and by 1948, more than one-third ofPalestinian Arab society was urban-based. Together with the sharp rise inmodern secular schools in the country, increased literacy broke themonopoly of the small, religiously minded, literate elites in the cities on
education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle and professionalclasses in the cities. The increasing cultural self-awareness of educatedpeople led to the rise of secular proto-nationalism in late Ottoman Palestine.
Embryonic Palestinian cultural nationalism and territorial patriotism
preceded Palestinian political nationalism and this was fostered in schools
and teacher training seminaries in late Ottoman Palestine. In the second halfof the 19th century the bilingual Russian Orthodox schools and teacher
training centres in Palestine played an important role in promoting culturalrenaissance in the country. These schools subsequently came to be among
the best in the country, contributing to this national cultural awakening.
The works of Khalil Ibrahim Beidas, Ruhi al-Khalidi and Khalil alSakakini were the high end of the educational, cultural and literary
revolution of late Ottoman Palestine – a modernist civic revolution which
was dedicated to self-enlightenment, self-improvement, social
empowerment and – politically speaking – self-representation, equalcitizenship and regional autonomy within the Ottoman state. An intellectualand cultural pioneer, Beidas (1874–1949), was a Palestinian Christianscholar, educator, novelist and prolific translator of Russian literary works.
Born in Nazareth, in the Galilee, in 1874, Beidas was educated in Russianfunded bilingual Orthodox schools in the Galilee and studied at the highly
regarded Russian Teacher Training Seminary in Nazareth,11 which was
founded by the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society in 1886, andlater housed in a building which became famously known to Palestinians
throughout the Galilee as al-Maskubiyyah (‘the Moscovite’ compound).
Other Russian compounds created in Palestine, including in Jerusalem andal-Khalil (Hebron), are still referred to by local Palestinians as alMaskubiyyah. The most famous building constructed by the Society inPalestine was the Church of Mary Magdalene, on Mount of Olives inJerusalem, built in 1886. Initially headquartered in Nazareth (between 1882
and 1884), the Society opened four schools in the Galilee and employed
Orthodox Arab and Russian teachers and Arabic translators to translateschool material from Russian to Arabic. By 1899 the Society had twentythree modern ‘Maskob Schools’ in Palestine, and two Teacher Training
Seminaries, including one for women in Beit Jala which opened in 1890;
villages and towns were asked to provide the buildings, but all books,
notebooks, pens and pencils, equipment, sport facilities, administration andteaching were free of charge.12 Most schools were also co-educational,
which added another dimension to the educational revolution introduced by
the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society.
Soon after its arrival in Palestine in the early 1880s the Arabic renditionof the Russian name (Russian Orthodox Palestine Society) would have beentaught in all Russian Orthodox schools in Palestine as Arabic was the
instruction language while Russian was compulsory; other languages suchas French, Turkish and Greek were voluntary. After 1889 the Arabic
rendition of the Russian name became the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial
Society . This Arabic version of the Society’s name would have been used
not only by Beidas throughout his primary and secondary schooling inNazareth in the early 1890s, but has also continued to be used inpublications by Palestinian Orthodox Christians for more than 135 years.13
Not only that. Eventually on 1 April 1902, after a period of negotiations
between the Russian leaders of the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine
Society and the Ottoman authorities, they recognised all thirty-sevenschools and seminaries of the Society (the majority of which were inPalestine, with some in Syria and Lebanon) and the occasion was marked
by public celebrations in Palestine, Syria and Russia.14 The impact of thisimportant official Ottoman recognition of the activities of the Palestinian
Orthodox Imperial Society extended beyond education into theencouragement of Russian mass pilgrimage to Palestine, which was alsoorganised by the same society. In the early 20th century Russian pilgrims
constituted nearly 80 per cent of all foreign Christian pilgrims to the Holy
Land. As we shall see below, this Russian mass pilgrimage forced the
Ottoman authorities to make further administrative adjustments and in 1906the districts of Nazareth and Tiberias were added to the Mutasarrifate ofNoble Jerusalem, mainly to accommodate the new mass pilgrimage from
Russia and the West in facilitating the issuance of a single tourist visa to
Christian pilgrims and travellers in Palestine.
Beidas was a product of the educational and intellectual awakening oflate Ottoman Palestine. He was also utilising local and imperial resources
such as those made available by the Russian Palestinian Orthodox Imperial
Society to articulate a new sense of modern Palestinian identity. Indeed,
many of Beidas’ ideas were also radical and even revolutionary by thestandards of late Ottoman Palestine. After graduating from the Teacher
Training Seminary in Nazareth, Beidas moved to Jerusalem, then thePalestinian intellectual and cultural capital of late Ottoman Palestine. He
worked as a senior Arabic teacher at the Anglican St George’s School in
Jerusalem and as a translator from Russian to Arabic for the Imperial
Russian Orthodox Palestine Society. He also travelled in Russia in 1892.
Beidas’ exceptional linguistic and cultural talents and translations from
Russian into Arabic were influenced by the works of leading Russian
novelists and poets, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol,
Dostoevsky, Leon Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. Some of these authors had
developed radical critiques of autocracy, popular approaches to history,
identification with the lives of ordinary people and emphasis on freedom
and social justice. Tolstoy had an idealistic view of the Russian countryside
and Russian peasantry and this had an impact on Beidas’ positive views of
the Palestinian countryside and peasantry. Beidas had already translated
into Arabic and published in Beirut in 1898 Pushkin’s historical novel The
Captain’s Daughter. Beidas’ weekly periodical, al-Nafais al- Asriyyah(Modern Gems) was founded ten years later in 1908 in Haifa and it began
by serialising the Russian classic novels Beidas was translating. Beidas isconsidered to be the ‘pioneer of the Palestinian short story’ (Raid al-Qissah
al-Filastiniyyah) (Mazza 2015: 188) and in 1909 he published The
Conditions of Tyranny (Ahwal al-Istibdad), one of the earliest criticalaccounts of tyrannical rule to appear in the Arabic language. Edward Said, aclose relative of Beidas, astutely observed that Beidas’ essays, short stories,
historical novels and works of translation in the pre- and post-war periods
played an important role in the construction of early modern Palestinian
national identity (Moore-Gilbert 2009: 182).
The great flowering of Palestinian and Arab literature and poetry, ofnovel translations, journalism, educational experiments and private librarycollections during the late Ottoman period created a living memory of theperiod in Palestine, one much stronger in living Arab culture, than that of
the mediaval al-Andalus period, for example. Beidas’ own personal
Jerusalem library of more than 6000 books was plundered, together withother Palestinian private libraries owned by Khalil Sakakini and other
Palestinian Jerusalemites, by the Israelis during the 1948 Nakba and theepisode was documented in The Great Book Robbery.15 Beidas’ and other
Palestinian library collections can shed a great deal of light on thePalestinian intellectual renaissance and national consciousness in the late
Ottoman period. An illustration of this new consciousness is found in the1898 geographic Preface to Beidas’ translation of Akim Aleksyeevich
Olesnitsky’s A Description of the Holy Land, Vol. 1 (also Foster 2016c) –the original version appeared in Russian in 187516 – by the Imperial
Russian Orthodox Palestine Society. Beidas describes this as a publicationof the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society. Bei Beidas also talks about
the inadequate geographical works available in Arabic on his country‘Palestine’ and about the indigenous ‘sons and daughters of Palestine’(Abnaa Filastin,) and ‘their need for an extensive geographic
work on their country’. Writing to local Palestinian audiences, Beidas knewthat many Palestinians would be closely familiar with the indigenous
connotations of the term
. Beidas describes Olesnitsky’s work
as follows: ‘an extensive book which describes the country of Palestinewith its places, rivers, lakes, mountains and valleys’. He also talks about his
use of idiomatic Arabic and his choice of ‘the simple expression which is
closely related to [our] minds’.
Beidas’ work and activities present a landmark in the emergence ofmodern Palestinian nationalism for a variety of reasons. Nine factors

distinguish the scholarly, cultural and geographic contribution of Beidas tothe modern notion of Palestine and the emergence of new a territorial
national consciousness in late 19th century Palestine:• Beidas, a native of the Galilee, was working from a modern wider
concept of Palestine – and not just from medieval Arab Islamic social
memory associated with the historic province of Jund Filastin.
• Beidas uses the terms Palestinian and Palestine simultaneously andinterchangeably, which is a hallmark of modern Palestinian writing.
• The two-page Preface begins with the Arabic expression al-Hamdu Lillah(‘Praise be to Allah’, the Arabic word for ‘God’), an expression
frequently invoked by Muslims due to its centrality to the first chapter ofthe Quran and the name and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. This
expression is also used by Arabic-speaking Christians. But the
implication is that work is aimed at all Arabic-speaking Palestinians.
• The complete absence of any reference to Zionism – in contrast with
Palestinian national writings a decade later, the most famous examples ofwhich are the newspaper Falastin (1911) and the writings of Ruhi alKhalidi (1913) (see below) – and this points to the emergence of a twotier Palestinian Ottoman identity and the beginnings of the Palestinian
cultural renaissance in late Ottoman Palestine – a renaissance which
preceded the subsequent national preoccupation with Zionism.
• The ease with which Beisas uses the terms ‘Palestine’ and ‘our country’and the ‘Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society’ without the need todefine or explain these terms or introduce this Society. This suggests twothings: (1) Beisas thought that his Arab readers would be familiar withthese terms and have a full understanding of what he meant; (2) theseterms and this Arabic name of the Society were already commonly used
and understood.
• The Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society ran a translation andpublishing house in Jerusalem and after 1889 it operated in Palestine
throughout the 1890s under the Arabic name:, the name Beidas uses in his 1898 Preface.
• This late 19th century modern geographic (territorial) concept of Filastin
advanced by someone educated in the modern schools of Galilee
departed from the traditional regional Islamic concept of Palestinedescribed or referred to by the Muslim scholars al-Maqdisi, Mujir al-Din,
Khair al-Din al-Ramli and Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashiin in the 10th,
15th and 17th centuries respectively. The conception of Palestine
understood by these four Muslim writers and qadis was derived from themedieval Muslim province of Jund Filastin, whose capital was al-Ramla,
but whose territory did not include the Galilee.
• Historically, names of distinguished individuals before and under Islamin Palestine were augmented by adding town names to individual names:
examples of prominent or distinguished Palestinians discussed above
included:• Antiochus of Ascalon, in 2nd century BC Philistia.
• Jesus of Nazareth, in the 1st century AD.
• Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, in 4th century Palaestina Prima.
• Prokopios of Caesarea Maritima, in 6th century Palaestina Prima.
• Al-Maqdisi (of ‘al-Quds’, the ‘Jerusalemite’) in the 10th century
province of Filastin.
• Muhammad al-Yazuri: Muhammad Hassan ibn Ali al-Yazuri, fromYazur, a town east of Jaffa in the Fatimid province of Jund Filastin,also vizier of the Fatimid state from 1050 to 1058.
• Ibn Hajar al- Asqalani (1372–1449), a leading medieval Shafi’i Sunni
scholar whose family originated in ‘Asqalan, Mamluk Palestine.
• Kkair al-Din al-Ramli, ‘of al-Ramla’, in 17th century Ottoman
Palestine.
• On a popular Palestinian level, individual names were also linked to theirhome towns, such as ‘ibn Akka’, ‘son of Acre’, or after their clan: forexample, Dhaher al- Umar al-Zaydani ‘of the Zaydani clan’. The
traditional forms of identification (whether ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ or ‘Julianof Norwich’, c. 1342–c. 1416) were common throughout the world. In his
1898 Preface, the Galilee-born Beidas talks about the ‘sons of Palestine’,a generic term for the ‘people of Palestine’. This distinct territorial formof identification in the late 19th century is a radical departure from allother traditional forms of identification. In the 20th century the traditional
forms of identification did not disappear completely, but they wereaugmented by this new form of territorial identification and patriotic
consciousness (the ‘sons of Palestine’). In the early decades of the 20th
century the collective ‘sons of Palestine’ () also becameknown as Sha’b Filastin (, ‘people of Palestine’) and the‘Palestinian people’ (). But the roots of this new
territorial national consciousness are found in the late 19th century.
• Today the Society operates publicly and runs various social andeducational projects in Palestine and the Near East under the Arabic
rendition of the name cited by Bedas in his 1898 Preface:. In June and July 2012, to mark the130th anniversary of the Society’s foundation and start of its operation in1882 in Palestine, the Society opened the Russian Centre for Science andCulture in Bethlehem and staged various celebrations in Moscow
sponsored by the Russian government. Two years later, on 3 September
2014, a Galilee branch of the Imperial Russian Orthodox PalestinianSociety was officially launched at the Arab Orthodox Centre in Nazarethwhich, despite the change in the circumstances of Nazareth, kept the 132year-old ‘Palestinian’ name intact. Speakers at this official Nazareth
ceremony included Russian official representatives and Hanna Abu
Hanna, of Haifa – author of a recent work in Arabic on The Beginningsof the Palestinian Renaissance – who lectured on the seminal culturalactivities of the Society in late Ottoman Palestine. It is also worth notingthat a significant number of Palestinians educated in ‘al-Maskob schools’
in late Ottoman Palestine later joined Palestinian national parties during
the British Mandatory period; some also joined the Palestine Communist
Party (PCP) during the same period.
‘BEING PALESTINE, BECOMING PALESTINE’ IN MAHMOUDDARWISH’S POETRY
I was born close to the sea to a Palestinian mother / and an Aramaic
father, to a Palestinian mother and a Moabite father, to a Palestinian
mother / and Arab father. (Darwish 1994: 69)
Palestinian ‘national’ poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941‒2008) was inspired by
the incredibly rich social and cultural memories of historic Palestine. His
poetry gave a deep sense of such questions of Palestinian identity and its
continued formation and transformation. While many modern Arabnationalists strive for uniqueness and exclusivity and continuously search

for purity and clarity in constructing their nationalist identities, Darwish, bycontrast, searched for the subtle, mixed and subdued forms of identity
represented by an appreciation of the shadowy and inclusive heritage ofPalestine. This subtle and rich heritage was woven into the fabric of modern
Palestinian national identity and the way this identity was particularly
framed by Darwish. The latter was brought up an internal refugee in the
Galilee after his village, al-Birwa, was destroyed by Israel in 1948. He later
lived much of his adult life in exile. Like many modern Palestinian
intellectuals, Darwish did not emerge from the urban metropolitan elite oraristocratic families of the country, but came from the countryside and the
periphery of Palestine (Galilee). However, Darwish became theembodiment of multi-tiered Palestinian national identity and the mostcelebrated producer of linguistic and cultural memory in modern Palestine.
For Darwish, the multi-layered conception of Palestinian identity is evident
by the fact that it is the product of all the powerful cultures that have passed
through the land of Palestine: the Hellenistic, the Persian, the Roman, theByzantine, the Aramaic, the Arab, the Jewish, the Muslim, the Arab Jewish,
the Ottoman, the British.
However, the oral history and visual and material heritage of Palestineand their natural settings have also figured hugely in Darwish’s ‘national’
poetry. For Darwish, modern representations of Palestinian Arab identity
were deeply rooted in the history, geography and natural boundaries of thecountry, the toponymy and Arabic language and cultures of Palestine and its
evolution within the wider Arab environs. According to a key historian ofmodern nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1991), European vernacularlanguages (replacing Latin) and the mass circulation of images by the press
and in print capitalism played important roles in the way the ‘modern
nation’ as an imagined community has been constructed and spread in
Europe.
In the case of modern Palestine, the introduction of print capitalism in
the late 19th century, the spread modern education, linguistic, cultural andreligious memories, standard Arabic and vernacular (colloquial) PalestinianArabic all became markers of a distinct identity. Perhaps it is not surprisingthat the most influential Palestinian national newspaper of the modern era
was called Falastin (1911–1967) – not Filastin – emphasising the local
colloquial Arabic name for the country, Falastin, as a way of forging a
distinct or separate Palestinian national identity. In addition to thevernacularisation of a nascent national identity, the experience of distinct
geography, living history and cultural, linguistic and religious memories ofmodern Palestine were central to the construction of modern Palestinian
national identity. The Palestinian vernacular was certainly important in thevisualisation of modern Palestine. In 1909 a Manual of Palestinian Arabic,
for Self-instruction was published by H. H. Spoer (Fellow of the American
School of Archaeology and Oriental Research in Jerusalem) and E.
Nasrallah Haddad (teacher of Arabic at the Teacher Training Seminary at
the Syrisches Waisenhaus in Jerusalem,17 also known as the Schneller
Orphanage). This incipient local nationalism was coupled withvernacularisation and interest in local Palestinian folklore, and this wasparticularly evident in the pioneering work of Tawfiq Cana’an (1882–1964),
a physician, ethnographer, anthropologist, prolific author and Palestinian
nationalist. Born in Beit Jala, Cana’an served as a medical officer in the
Ottoman army during the First World War and would later serve as the first
President of the Palestine Arab Medical Association founded in 1944.
Of course, by the 19th century Palestine had been for many centuries
under Islam an Arab land and an Arab country (balad, bilad) with Arabic(vernacular and standard) being a key marker of its cultural identity. Under
the impact of modernisation, vernacularisation and cultural awakening inlate Ottoman Palestine during the second half of the 19th century, literary
Arabic also went through updating and simplification in the curricula ofsome schools. In 1909, Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini (1878–1953)
founded the Dusturiyyah School in Jerusalem and pioneered a modern
progressive education system which not only made the primary language of
instruction Arabic instead of Turkish but also introduced new methods ofteaching Arabic by updating Arabic grammar and simplifying its basic
general rules (Tamari 2003). Later this progressive tradition of simplifying,
updating and bringing literary Arabic closer to vernacular PalestinianArabic continued in the ‘national’ poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
Echoing the Heideggerean notion of the ‘becoming of being’, selfrepresentation and the ‘becoming of being Palestinian’, according toDarwish, are related in some sense to the way modern Palestinian identity
was progressively being uncovered, experienced, visualised andreconfigured.18 For Darwish, the Arabic language and poetry and collective
and social memories of Palestine, in particular, were fundamental to theuncovering and construction of local Palestinian identity. The metres of therhythmical Arabic poetry are known in Arabic as ‘seas’ (buhur). Darwish’s
highly evocative poetry also visualised modern Palestine as a space
between the (Mediterranean) Sea and the (Arabian) Desert, an idea which is
deeply rooted in the medieval Arab Islamic conception and social memories
of Palestine. But for Darwish the ‘Hinterland of Palestine’ (bar Filastin)
and the ‘Sea of Palestine’ (bahr Filastin) – symbolised literally andmetaphorically by the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert –represent
Palestine as a whole. They are also spaces of experiences, of innerconsciousness and subconsciousness and of consciously unveiled personaland collective identities.
VERNACULARISATION, INDIGENEITY AND MODERNREPRESENTATIONS OF PALESTINE IN THE PALESTINIAN
ARAB PRESS: THE NEWSPAPER FALASTIN (1911–1967)
It is widely recognised that the geo-political conception of Palestine
evolved significantly from the experiences of late Ottoman Palestine tothose of the British Mandatory period, or from the notion of the ‘sea to thedesert’ to the modern boundaries of the ‘sea to the river’. In addition,
resistance to Zionist immigration and settler projects from the late Ottoman
period onwards played a large part in the national conceptualisation ofmodern Palestine. Palestinian national opposition to Zionism began to
crystallise around Zionist-settler activities in Palestine in the years before
the First World War.
It is widely recognised that education, print capitalism and the modernpress played a major role in the formation of modern national identities(Anderson 1991). This was also true in the case of the growth of Palestinian
education and the emergence of the Palestinian press in late Ottoman urban
Palestine (Beška 2016b). In January 1911 Palestinian Arab Orthodox
journalists ‘Issa al- Issa and his cousin Yousef al- Issa set up in Jaffa (in the
Mutasarrifiyyah of Jerusalem of late Ottoman Palestine) the daily
newspaper Falastin. Why would one of the earliest modern Arabic national
newspapers in Palestine be called Falastin, the colloquial (used daily) namefor the country, not the standard or literary medieval Arabic names for thecountry: Filastin or Filistin.
Why vernacularise and use the vernacular Arabic form for Palestine for aleading nationalist newspaper, Falastin, rather than using Filastin orFilistin, the traditional standard Arabic names for the country – names
which go all the way back to early Islam? Not only were these literary
Arabic forms, Filastin or Filistin, remembered in the 19th century; in fact
they were used in Palestinian and Arab writings and were synonymous withan administrative geographic unit (Abd al-Hadi 1923: 32). Moreover, thestandard form of Filastin was used by Khair al-Din al-Ramli in the 17th
century, the Islamic Sharia Court of Jerusalem in the 18th century andKhalil Beidas in the 1890s. In the absence of an explanation by thefounding editors themselves, the answer to the adoption of the vernacularform of Falastin is likely to be multi-faceted and contextual: (a) in modern
times, vernacularisation, ‘nation-ness’ and the need to establish a distinctive
national identity can be seen again and again in early modern Europe, inmodern Russia, Turkey, Japan and a whole range of countries across Asia;(b) vernacularisation was seen in late Ottoman Palestine as key to a distinct(and even separate) national identity marker; (c) naming a national
newspaper ‘from below’, the editors adopted the form Falastin as thecommon, most widely spoken and most popularly used term by local
Palestinians and on the streets of Palestine, as opposed to Filastin, which
was largely confined to the writings in Arabic of the educated and cultural
elites of the country. Clearly, the editors and journalists of Falastin wereintent on popularising Palestinian nationalism ‘from below’ and among
ordinary people and not just confining it to educated local elites.
Falastin was also founded in Jaffa, away from the prying eyes of the
Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem, of which early Palestinian nationalists
were deeply suspicious. Both Jaffa and Haifa – which were closely linked
to the Ottoman Hejaz Railway and the rising Palestinian middle classes, andbegan to eclipse the historically powerful port city of Acre from the late
19th century onwards – emerged as major economic and cultural centres inlate Ottoman Palestine, competing with the traditionally most powerfulcultural centre in the country: al-Quds al-Sharif (Jerusalem). This three-way
competition and the dynamic cultural awakening of late Ottoman Palestine
would ultimately ensure the emergence of an amazingly rich and culturally
diverse but fairly unified predominantly Arab country by the First WorldWar.
In Haifa in December 1908, three years before the founding of Falastin
in Jaffa, Palestinian journalist Najib Nassar (1865‒1947) – who had worked
as a pharmacist for the Scottish Hospital in Tiberias, Galilee – founded andedited al-Karmel (named for Mount Carmel in the Haifa district), the first
Palestinian anti-colonial weekly newspaper in Arabic (Beška 2011).19
These early Palestinian newspapers of the coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa
played an important role in the visualisation and textual reconstruction ofmodern Palestinian identity in the late Ottoman period (Beška 2011,2016b). However, it should always be kept in mind that in the conception ofmodern Palestinian Arab identity the growth of Palestinian nationalism andthe growing sense of local Palestinian territorial patriotism were always
intertwined with deep-rooted identification with the surrounding Arabpolitical and cultural environment (Bracy 2005, 2011).20
As we have already shown, indigenous social memory (‘memory of
memories’) of historic Palestine was preserved in the writings of Muslim
authors such as Khair al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) and in the archives of
the Islamic Sharia Court of Jerusalem in the 18th century (Rood 2004), as
well as in the local form of the name, ‘Falastin’. Furthermore, based on
indigenous social memory and Palestinian colloquialism, the choice of thevernacular Palestinian name Falastin for the Jaffa newspaper by the two
Palestinian Arab Greek Orthodox journalists, the al- Issas, reproduced themedieval Arab Muslim designation for the country, Falastin and Filastin. In
an extraordinary leading article, Yousef Hanna al- Issa echoes local social
memories of historic Filastin.
The combative anti-Zionist newspaper Falastin (1911–1967) contributed
significantly to the forging of a new (distinct and separate) Palestinian
identity (Tamari 2014). Falastin’s editorial policy was also ‘progressive’ as
it defended the Palestinian fallah on the land question and fought against
religious fanaticism, sectarianism and ignorance (Tamari 2014; Beška
2016b: 3). The cultural geography of the editors of Falastin espoused
secular Ottoman citizenship and equality combined with local Palestinian
patriotism. They also promoted autonomous cultural-linguistic nationalism
which embraced the Arab religious and cultural heritage of Islam. As forthe political geography of Palestine, al- Issa wrote in January 1912 that theboundaries of his ‘homeland’ (watan) extends ‘from the borders of Egypt tothe Balqa21 and from the mountains of Moab [on the eastern shores of the
Dead Sea] to the Mediterranean’.22 Contrast this late Ottoman Palestinian
nationalist perception of Palestine, which clearly draws inspiration from thememories of historic Palestine, including greater Palaestina under the
Byzantines and the Arab province of Jund Filastin, with post-First World

War Palestinian nationalist representations of the country which have sincethen stuck symbolically to the boundaries of British Mandatory Palestine(1917‒1948).
It is not entirely clear whether Orthodox Yousef al- Issa’s geo-politicalrepresentations of historic Falastin in 1912 was based on Palestinian Arab
Orthodox Christian social and cultural memories which were linked to the
independent All Palestine Orthodox Church of Jerusalem whose
ecclesiastical jurisdiction had been widely recognised and exercised overgreater Palestine (the ‘Three Palestines’, 4th‒7th centuries AD) since themid-5th century AD. This ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which would havebeen known to all educated Orthodox Palestine Christians in the early 20th
century, has continued until today and it includes the whole of present-day
Palestine/Israel and Jordan. In this ecclesiastical context, the remarkablediscovery of the Byzantine Madaba Floor Mosaic Map in 1884 (discussed
in chapter four), covering the area between Egypt to Lebanon and between
the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Arabia desert, and with the name
Palaestina in its Greek inscriptions, and the growing involvement of the
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem in the study of, and local andinternational publicity surrounding the discovery of, the map in the period
between the early 1890s and 1906,23 may be of some relevance to the way
Yousef al- Issa described the boundaries of Palestine in 1912. As for the
Madaba Map itself, the first known representation of the map was, in fact,
created at the Franciscan Printing Press in Jerusalem in 1897, withassistance from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. Moreover,since the late 19th century the Palestine Arab Orthodox community had
been involved in a struggle over the Arabisation of the Palestine Orthodox
Church and the promotion of Arab bishops and senior hierarchs in the
Greek-dominated Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. In fact for decades
under the editorship of the al- Issa cousins, Falastin would remain
dedicated not only to Palestinian territorial nationalism within pan-Arabsolidarity, but also to the Palestine Arab Orthodox community in its
struggle with the Greek-dominated Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
Therefore, the ecclesiastical Orthodox memories of greater Palestine underthe Byzantines cannot be ruled out since it has survived in the rhetoric of
the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem until today. In any event, one thingis clear: historically, and according to Palestine Muslim geographers andwriters, the ‘Balqa region’ – mentioned by al- Issa – which is located north-west of ‘Amman, present-day Jordan’s capital, was not part of the provinceof Jund Filastin of the Middle Ages; in fact, al-Balqa was originally andhistorically part of, and throughout most of the Umayyad period
subordinated to, the Islamic province Jund Dimashq (the Damascus
province), a massive province which incorporated other territories east of
the River Jordan (Le Strange 2010: 43‒48; Blankinship 1994: 47‒48, 292,
note 7).
In any case, the newspaper Falastin became the most widely circulated
and, consequently, most influential Arabic daily in Palestine during the
British Mandate, powerfully shaping the discourse of the Palestine
nationalist political movement as it struggled to resist two foreign forces:
British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonisation (Khalaf 2011; Jeferey
2015: 173), while its discourse after 1918 focused on the geography of
Mandatory Palestine. From its beginnings in late Ottoman Palestine
Falastin also was the Arab country’s fiercest and most consistent critic ofEuropean Zionist settler projects.
THE TERM FILASTIN IN RUHI AL-KHALIDI’S
UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT
Another early Palestinian opponent of Zionism was Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi(1864–1913), a brilliant writer, liberal thinker, Lecturer in Islamic Studies at
the Sorbonne University, diplomat and talented politician at the turn of the20th century (Kasmieh 1992; Khalidi, W. 1984: 74; Beška 2016c). AlKhalidi also served as Consul-General of the Ottoman state in Bordeaux,France, from 1898 to 1908, while at the same time publishing articles in alHilal and al-Manar in Cairo under the pen name al-Maqdisi (theJerusalemite) (Beška 2016c: 181). In 1900 al-Khalidi was a co-founder ofthe family (Islamic waqf) library, al-Khalidiyyah Library, in the Old City ofJerusalem. It is one of the largest and most important Muslim family
libraries in the world and a living landmark to Palestine and the Palestinian
people. Ruhi al-Khalidi was a nephew of the mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf
Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, and in 1908 he was one of three delegates
elected to represent Jerusalem in the new Ottoman government, later
becoming the deputy to the head of the Ottoman parliament (in 1911). AlKhalidi was a close friend of Khalil al-Sakakini, a Jerusalemite progressive

pedagogue and one of the most influential Palestinian educationalists andliterary thinkers of the modern era.
Al-Khalidi’s work was an example of the emergence of a distinct
Palestinian territorial national identity among the educated urban elites in
the country at the turn of the 20th century. Commenting on his Arabcountry of Palestine shortly before his untimely death in 1913, Ruhi alKhalidi had this to say: ‘It is noteworthy that whenever the name of thecountry appears, it is always Palestine, never southern Syria or anythingelse’ (Ruhi al-Khaldi’s unpublished manuscript, ‘Zionism or the Zionist
Question’, al-Khalidiyyah Library, Jerusalem, cited in Gerber 1998a).24
Today al-Khalidiyyah Library houses a large collection of Islamic
historical and fiqh manuscripts, a local collection built by Palestinians, anda unique Arabic manuscript about the history of political Zionism written
by Ruhi al-Khalidi in the late Ottoman period. Al-Khalidi’s undated
manuscript, in his beautiful handwritten Arabic, was composed many
months, perhaps several years, before his death in 1913. I had the chance of
examining the text at the Khalidiyyah Library on 22 April 2017. The
extraordinary manuscript looks like unfinished draft book which Ruhi alKhalidi appeared to have been working on long before his death. Crucially,
throughout the text repeatedly he uses the terms Filastin () and turab
Filastin (‘soil of Palestine’,) to describe Zionist ambitions andsettler-colonisation in his own country of Palestine. The manuscript also
contains a list of Zionist colonies in Palestine, with their Hebrew names andwith the local Palestinian Arabic names they had either replaced or werenamed after. Interestingly, there is no mention in the manuscript of Suriyyah
al-Janubiyyah (‘Southern Syria’) as an alternative way of describing
Ottoman Palestine. Instead Ruhi al-Khalidi mentions ‘Roman Palestine’ andrefers to Filastin under the Ottomans. The manuscript was clearly intended
for publication and overall it gives the impression that the Arabic term
Filastin had been used by Ruhi al-Khalidi and his compatriot for decades.
Muslims coexisted with Christian Arabs and Arab Jews in Muslimmajority Palestine for centuries and Ruhi al-Khalidi was naturally
sympathetic to the idea of Jewish religious attachment to Jerusalem. But hewas highly critical of Zionism as a political project and saw Western Zionist
colonisation schemes as a major threat to the indigenous people ofPalestine. In an interview with the Hebrew periodical ha-Tzvi on 1
November 1909, al-Khalidi, then a member of the Ottoman parliament,expressed concern that Zionist settler-colonisation ‘would inevitably lead tothe expulsion of Arabs from the places they had inhabited for centuries’(Beška 2016c: 183).
Like Ruhi al-Khalidi, former Mayor of Jerusalem Yusuf Diya al-Din alKhalidi (1829‒1907) had strongly objected to the Zionist project inPalestine. Representing Jerusalem in the Ottoman parliament in the 1870s,
al-Khalidi had earlier attended an English school in Malta where he studied
English and French, and then continued to study Semitic languages in the
Oriental Academy of Vienna. In a well-known letter to Zadok Kahn, theChief Rabbi of France and an associate of Theodor Herzl, in early 1899, alKhalidi suggested that the Zionists should find another place for the
implementation of their political project:
In theory, Zionism is an absolutely natural and just idea on how to solve
the Jewish question. Yet it is impossible to overlook the actual reality,
which must be taken into account. Palestine is an integral part of the
Ottoman Empire and today it is inhabited by non-Jews. This country isheld in esteem by more than 390 million Christians and 300 million
Muslims. By what right do the Jews want it for themselves? Jewish
money will not be able to buy Palestine. The only way to take it is byforce using cannons and warships. Turks and Arabs in general
sympathize with Jews. But some of them were affected by the fever of
hatred for Jews, as it happened to the most advanced of the [European]
civilized nations. Also the Christian Arabs, especially the Catholic andOrthodox, hate Jews very much. Even if Herzl obtained the approval of
the Sultan Abdiilhamit II for the Zionist plan, he should not think that a
day will come when Zionists will become masters of this country ...
It is therefore necessary, to ensure the safety of the Jews in the
Ottoman Empire, that the Zionist Movement, in the geographic sense of
the word, stops ... Good Lord, the world is vast enough, there are still
uninhabited countries where one could settle millions of [European] poor
Jews who may perhaps become happy there and one day constitute anation. That would perhaps be the best, the most rational solution to the[European] Jewish question. But in the name of God, let Palestine be leftin peace. (Quoted in Beška 2007: 28‒29)25

Around the same time, important developments in Arab opposition to
Zionism centred on Zionist land purchasing activities in Palestine. Against
the background of Arab (Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese and Iraqi) desire forautonomy, equal citizenship, decentralisation and political reforms (notcomplete independence or sovereignty) within the Ottoman state, the sale ofland to, and settler-colonisation by, European Zionists in Palestine was seen
as a real threat to the indigenous people. The international Zionist
movement and Zionist settlers in Palestine (in sharp contrast to the thenGerman Templar settlers) made it clear that their ultimate objective was theestablishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. According to Charles Smith(1996: 34), in 1897 ‘an Arab commission was formed in Jerusalem, headedby the mufti, to examine the issue of land sales to Jews, and its protests led
to the cessation of such sales for several years’. In reality, however, landsales in Palestine never ceased. Zionist land purchasing activities in theEsdraelon plain and eastern Galilee continued and centred on some of themost fertile land in the country. These activities included the sale of landsof the Arab village of al-Fulah in the Nazareth sub-district to the Jewish
National Fund in 1910. The lands of al-Fulah belonged to Elias Sursuq, aGreek Orthodox banker and absentee landlord from Beirut, who in 1910
reached a deal on their sale with the Zionists. According to Neville Mandel,
this was ‘some of the best agricultural land in Palestine’ (cited in Bracy
2011: 45).
When the local Palestinian peasants refused to vacate their village andpetitioned the Ottoman authorities, they were backed in their resistance by
Shukri al- Asali (1878–1916), the qaimmaqam (district governor) of
Nazareth in Galilee and later a deputy in the Ottoman parliament, whobecame their key supporter in many of his articles in the Arabic press,
including the newspaper Falastin. For al- Asali, who wrote under apseudonym, that of the legendary Salah al-Din who defeated the Latin
Crusaders in the Battle of Hattin26 in eastern Galilee in 1187, the Galilee
was integral to Palestine. Entitled ‘Letter of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi to the
Commander of the [Ottoman] Expedition to Hauran Sami Pasha al-Faruqi’,
one of his 1910 articles pleaded with the Ottoman Governor of Hauran tostand up to Zionist plans in Palestine:
I beg you … to hurry and repel the Zionist threat from Palestine, whose
soil is soaked with the blood of the Prophet’s companions and with theblood of my armies and for the retrieval of which I have sacrificed [thelives] of my brothers, my people and commanders.27
The al-Fulah affair ‘became the subject of an intensive newspaper
campaign which had a powerful impact’ on local Arab public opinion(Beška 2016b: 4). Echoing the political discourses, terminology andresistance literature (Adab al-Muqawamah) of early Palestinian journalism,
the geo-political term Filastin, popularised initially by the newspaper
Falastin, continued to be wedded to the Palestinian national recovery andnation-building in the post-Nakba period. The terminological continuities
were evident in the Palestinian journalistic publications which paved theway for the emergence of the resistance movement in the late 1950s andfounding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the early 1960s.
The first underground magazine of Fateh (Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani alFilastini; ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’), which began toappear monthly in 1959 – under the editorship of Khalil al-Wazir (1935‒1988), a Palestinian refugee from al-Ramla, the old capital of Jund Filastin– was called Filastinuna, Nida al-Hayat (‘Our Palestine, the Call to Life’).
Also, Filastin was the weekly supplement of the pro-Nasserist newspaper
al-Muharrir (meaning the Liberator or the Editor), published in Beirut andedited by Ghassan Kanafani (1936‒1972), a Palestinian refugee from Acre,a journalist, novelist and later a leading member of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) (Rabbani 2005: 275).
HISTORIC CONTINUITIES AND COLONIAL
TRANSFORMATION: PALESTINE AS A SINGLE OFFICIALADMINISTRATIVE AND TERRITORIAL ENTITY UNDER THE
BRITISH (1918‒MAY 1948)
Jerusalem was occupied by British forces in December 1917. The Leagueof Nations formally awarded Britain a Mandate over Palestine in 1922.
Under the British, Palestine was once again a distinct political andadministrative entity for the first time in centuries. The sense of continuity
between the ancient, medieval and modern political geography and naming
traditions of Palestine eventually came into play in the designation of the
British Mandatory Government of Palestine (1918‒1948). This ‘official’designation of the country as Palestine was universally accepted by theLeague of Nations, which came into existence in 1920, and by the United
Nations which was founded in 1945.
Following the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British Mandatory
authorities after 1918 assumed that the Palestinian Arabs (Muslims,
Christians and Arab Jews) had also preserved knowledge of the ancientplace names which could help identify archaeological sites. Furthermore, inthe modern era, and especially during the British Mandate of Palestine, theterm ‘Palestinian’ was used to refer to all people residing in Palestine,
regardless of religion or ethnicity, including those European Jewish settlers
granted citizenship by the British Mandatory authorities.
Fully aware of the destabilising effects of its pro-Zionist commitments
and the need to maintain political stability in the country, in the 1920s the
British Mandatory authorities in Palestine sought to preserve some of thecontinuities of late Ottoman Palestine in the Mandatory system. The British
authorities decided not only to link the local name of the country, Filastin,
to all the official institutions, units and documents produced by the British
Mandatory Government of Palestine (1918‒1948), they also linked some of
the institutions they had helped create in the 1920s with the administrative
structure and districts of late Ottoman Palestine. These official Palestine
institutions and documents included:• The Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine (al-Majlis al-Islamic al-A’ala
bi-Filastin): the SMC was established in 1923 with the support of the
British Mandatory authorities and with authority over all the Muslim
waqfs and sharia courts in Palestine. The composition of the SMC
effectively linked the administrative districts of late 19th century
Palestine with the administration of Muslim-majority Mandatory
Palestine. The SMC consisted of five members: a president and four
members, two of whom were to represent the autonomous administrative
Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem and the remaining two to represent the late
Ottoman sanjaks of Acre and Nablus.
• Palestine Archaeological Museum: continuities of late Ottoman Palestineand Mandatory Palestine are also found in the creation and collections of
the Palestine Archaeological Museum. In 1918, almost immediately after
the occupation of Jerusalem, the British Military Governor Sir Ronald
Storrs took the decision to establish the Palestine ArchaeologicalMuseum in Jerusalem. The cornerstone of the Palestine ArchaeologicalMuseum was laid on 19 June 1930. The museum opened in 1938 as a‘national’ (not biblical) museum and was modelled on modern European
museums. The Palestine Archaeological Museum (renamed by Israel
after 1967 as the ‘Rockefeller Museum’) contains historical artefacts,
jewels and mosaics from the Neolithic through the Byzantine periods,
and through the medieval Islamic and modern periods. Together withancient Neolithic artefacts, the museum has the remains of 8th-century
wooden beams from the al-Aqsa Mosque, and an elaborately carved lintel
from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from the time of the Latin
Crusaders. The Neolithic, ancient, medieval and modern heritage ofPalestine is all encapsulated in this museum. The Palestine
Archaeological Museum absorbed the collections of the Ottoman
Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, the first archaeologicalmuseum to be set up in late Ottoman Palestine, which was founded in1890 and existed until 1930. The latter’s collections continued first with
the British Palestine Museum of Antiquities (1921‒1930) and then with
the Palestine Archaeological Museum. That a 1910 handwritten Ottoman
Catalogue of the Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem has
survived in the library of the Rockefeller Museum, where it is called the‘Pre-War Catalogue of the Palestine Archaeological Museum’ (St Laurent
with Taşkömürl 2013: 22‒23).
• Palestine Passport, Palestine Currency and Palestine Stamps: the British
Mandatory Government of Palestine (with its administrative capital in
Jerusalem) produced Palestine passports, Palestine currency and Palestine
stamps. The stamps were in three languages, with the imprint Palestine,,, showcasing images of ancient and medieval
Palestinian holy sites such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and theNativity Church in Bethlehem. Interestingly, in 1970 the Palestinian
National Liberation Movement, headed by Yasir ‘Arafat, issued acommemorative stamp on the fifth anniversary of its foundation, which
also reproduced the British Mandatory stamps with their imprints in
Arabic, English and Hebrew.
• The Palestine Pound and the Palestine Currency Board: the British
Mandatory Government of Palestine also issued the Palestine Pound(Arabic: Junyeh Filastini,; Hebrew:).
Equal in value to the pound sterling, it was the currency of the British
Mandate in Palestine from 1927 to 14 May 1948. The currency of theState of Israel between 15 May 1948 and August 1948 and between 1948
and 1952 the Palestine Pound continued to be legal tender in Israel. The
Palestine Pound was also the currency of Transjordan until 1949 andremained in usage in the West Bank until 1950. In the Gaza Strip thePalestine Pound circulated until April 1951, when it was replaced by the
Egyptian Pound.
• The Palestine Police Force: set up as a colonial police service established
in Palestine 1920 and operated until 1948.
• The Palestine Railways: a government-owned railway company that ran
all public railways in Palestine from 1920 until 1948.
• The Palestinian Citizenship Order in Council: a law of Mandatory
Palestine governing citizenship in the country. It came into effect on 1
August 1925.
• The Arab Palestine Sport Federation (al-Ittihad al-Riadi al- Arabi alFilastini): a government body operating between 1931 and 1937 andbetween 1944 and 1948. It organised a variety of sports activities,
including football, boxing and weight-lifting (Khalidi, I. 2006, 2014).
• The Palestine Broadcasting Service: it began radio transmissions fromthe new transmitter in Ramallah, with offices in Jerusalem. Staff wererecruited for five hours of daily broadcasts in three languages, English,
Arabic and Hebrew, and training was given by the BBC. In 1942, thetransmissions were split into two stations: for English/Arabic (Radio al
Quds) and English/Hebrew (Kol Yerushalayim).
• The Palestine Citrus Marketing Board: set up by the Mandatory
government of Palestine to regulate all citrus exports from Palestine. In
October 1956, a group of former Palestinian citrus farmers, who had
become refugees in the West Bank in 1948, sued Barclays Bank in a
Jordanian court in Jerusalem for £1 million. The amount represented thetotal value of the citrus crop exported collectively by this group in 1947.
• Palestine Airways: founded by Pinhas Rutenberg in Mandatory Palestinein the mid-1930s; operated under the aegis of British Imperial Airways
from 1937 until 1940 until it was taken over by the British Royal Air
Force as part of the British war effort.
SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE PROLIFERATION OF
PALESTINIAN NATIONALIST ORGANISATIONS: THE

PALESTINIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT DURING THE
MANDATORY PERIOD
As we have already seen above, Palestinian national consciousness did not
emerge out of the blue in the early 20th century. It emerged gradually acrossdecades and through momentous developments which affected Palestineand the wider region in the second half of the 19th century. However theoverall goals of Palestinian nationalism in the post-First World War period
shifted radically from autonomy and equal citizenship under the Ottomans
to anti-colonial struggle, liberation and independence during the British
Mandatory period.28
Crucially, active resistance to the existential threat posed by Zionist
immigration to and settler-colonialism of Palestine during the Mandatory
period became central to the Palestinian nationalist struggle. The context of
post-First World War Palestine had changed radically. The British, who
occupied Palestine in 1917‒1918, had committed themselves to Zionist
settler goals as framed in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. In
1920 the San Remo Conference of the four Principal Allied Powers of theFirst World War decided to include the words of the Belfour Declaration in
the text of the British Mandate over Palestine. In coming face to face withthe existential threat of the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration’s commitments,
the Palestinian nationalist movement, early on, had to grapple with what
was to become a perennial dilemma: whether to emphasise the territorial
Palestinian or pan-Arabist dimensions of Palestinian Arab identity. This
dilemma bedevilled Palestinian nationalist politics throughout the first halfof the 20th century and was carried forward well into the post-Nakba
period.
In the post-First World War period, Palestinian nationalist resistanceorganisations began to proliferate. The Palestinian Revival Society (alNahdah al-Filistiniyyah), a Palestinian nationalist organisation, wasfounded in Damascus in March 1919. Its first president was Salim al-Tibi,
who went from Jerusalem to Damascus in the anticipation of the formationof Emir Faisal’s administration in the city. Al-Tibi had been a senior officer
in the Arab Army of Emir Faisal and his father was the mufti of Tulkarem.
He was later replaced as a president of the society by Salman ‘AbdelRahman, the son of the mayor of Tulkarem (Tauber 2007: 95). Other
leaders of the society were Muhammad Izzat Darwazah from Nablus, ‘Abd

al-Qader al-Muzaffar and Rushdi al-Shawa from Gaza. Al-Shawa travelledfrequently between Damascus, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Gaza, accompanying
al-Muzaffar on his trips to Palestine, smuggling arms and encouraging an
uprising against the British. In 1919 it was reported he took 100 pistolsfrom Damascus to Jerusalem for the members of al-Fida’iyyah (Tauber
2007: 94).
Also in the early days of the Mandatory period the Palestinian Arabnational leadership convened the Palestine Arab Congress (al-Mutamar
al-‘Arabi al-Filastini), a series of national congresses organised by anationwide network of committees and local Palestinian Muslim andChristian associations; between 1919 and 1928 seven congresses were heldin Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa and Nablus (Porath 1974). From 1920 until 1934
the national Executive Committee of the Congress, which coordinated
Palestinian opposition to the Balfour Declaration and British pro-Zionist
policies in Palestine, was headed by Musa Kazim al-Husayni, Mayor of
Jerusalem between 1918 and 1920. The Executive Committee and its local
committees commanded widespread public support but they were neverofficially recognised by the British authorities. The resolutions of the Third
Palestine Arab Congress held in Haifa on 4‒14 December 1920, whichwere subsequently presented to British Colonial Secretary Winston
Churchill in early 1921, were summarised by Ilan Pappe as follows:
The slogan of the conference was ‘Equality with the Mandate of Iraq’.
The text of Iraq’s mandate stipulated that it would have a parliamentelected on the democratic principle of one citizen, one vote. It
acknowledged Iraq as a watani (national entity) that would eventually
become independent. [Sheikh Suleiman al-Taji al-Faruqi] explained tothose gathered that these were the most elementary demands, yet they
had been denied to the Palestinians because of the Balfour Declaration.
(Pappe 2010: 208)
This Third Palestine Arab Congress:
can be seen as the conceptive venue of the Palestine Arab national
movement, meeting in Haifa in mid-December 1920, called on the new
British rulers to establish a government ‘to be chosen by the Arabicspeaking people who had lived in Palestine before the beginning of the[world] war’. It completely, flatly rejected [Zionist] Jewish claims toPalestine. (Morris 2009: 88)Continuities in modern Palestinian national thinking can be seen in someof the institutionalised aspects of the Palestinian national struggle in the
pre-Nakba period which re-emerged in the post-Nakba era. For instance, in
1930, following the 1929 ‘al-Burraq Uprising’ (Habbat al-Buraq) in
Muslim-majority Palestine, the Palestinian leadership set up the Palestine
Arab National Fund (PANF). Established by the Palestine Arab Executive
and led by Fouad Saba, a Palestinian activist and accountant born in Acre,
the PANF took some practical financial steps to discourage land sales toZionist national institutions in Palestine. The PANF was the antecedent to
the much larger and more multi-purpose Palestine National Fund (PNF) set
up by the PLO in 1964 (see below).
Understandably, during the Mandatory (colonial) period some leading
Palestinian personalities continued to view Palestinian identity as part ofwider Arab identity of the al-Sham region and/or pan-Arab identities. But
pan-Arab or al-Sham identities as a whole cannot be understood in isolationfrom their constituent and particular (Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian andJordanian) identities. Furthermore pan-Arab or al-Sham ideologies cannot
negate the existence of historic Palestine or the deeply rooted, distinct andparticular Palestinian identity.
THE SHORT-LIVED NEWSPAPER SURIYYA AL-JANUBIYYAH(1919‒1920)
Palestinian nationalism since 1918 has focused largely on the boundaries of
Mandatory Palestine. However, the emergence of modern nationalism in the
Arab East in the late 19th century spawned the creation of new ideas andseveral myths including that of Syrian Qawmi identity and the idea of‘Suriyya al-Janubiyyah’, or ‘Southern Syria’, as a way of describing aparticular modern Palestinian identity which began to emerge in the late
Ottoman period. However, although the name Syria is as ancient as thename Palestine and the modern term Syria should not be conflated
automatically with the traditional Islamic term of al-Sham, there is noevidence that a Syrian Qawmi identity or a distinct Suriyya al-Janubiyyah

identity had existed or been used by Palestinians before the late 19th
century.
At the same time the rise of modern nationalism in the Arab world has,in fact, resulted the creation of a two-tier Watani/Qawmi nationalism in the
Arab East with two distinct and mutually complementary terms: wataniyyah
and qawmiyyah, the former referring to country-based territorial
nationalism (for instance, Palestine) and the latter to the wider pan-Arabsolidarity and unity schemes. This wider context had direct implications forPalestine, and in the post-Ottoman period Palestinian nationalists sought topromote a dyadic form of secular nationalism which combined a Palestinebased wataniyyah (local patriotic nationalism) with qawmiyyah arabiyyah,a form of pan-Arab solidarity. Some Palestinian intellectuals also
experimented for a short period after the First World War with Syrian
Qawmi nationalism, but this political ideology is today largely extinct.
The short-lived Palestinian newspaper Suriyya al-Janubiyyah was a casein point. Further the invention of new terms, such as Suriyya al-Janubiyyah,
often reflect multiple factors and the creation of the name of the newspaper
Suriyya al-Janubiyyas (‘Southern Syria’) is a classic case in point. The term
Suriyya al-Janubiyyah reflected the convergence of four political andcultural currents: (a) the Arab cultural and linguistic dimensions of modern
Palestinian identity which were always strong; (b) the invention andpropagation of a late 19th century Syrian nationalist ideology; (c) the anticolonial nature of the modern Palestinian national struggle, a struggle
shared with neighbouring Arab peoples; and (d) the particular
circumstances surrounding the hurried formation of the pan-Arabnationalist regime in Damascus in 1919‒1920 headed by Emir Faisal. Boththe term Suriyyah al-Janubiyyah and Faisal’s administration in Damascus
were short-lived. Syrian nationalism – like Palestinian nationalism andArab nationalism – is a modern ideology and Syria as a ‘national,
territorially based idea’ was invented in the late 19th century by Arabwriters such as Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883), a Lebanese Maronite
convert to Protestantism and a key figure in the Arab cultural awakening of
his age, who is considered the intellectual founder of Syrian Qawmi
nationhood (Sheehi 2011). The label Suriyya al-Janubiyyah was a shortlived politically-driven construct manufactured in the early 20th century as
a by-product of the emergence of the Syrian nationalist (Qawmi) ideologyof the period. Al-Bustani and some Arab figures in the Arab Renaissance of

the late 19th century propagated the idea of ‘greater Syria’, partly inresponse to the bloody 1860 Druze‒Maronite Civil War of Mount Lebanon
which spread to Damascus and other Syrian and Lebanese cities withdevastating consequences.
The Palestinian Arab newspaper Suriyya al-Janubiyyah, founded in
Jerusalem in September 1919, does not testify to the weakness of the ideaof Palestine after the First World War but rather points to the strength andclose relations that had existed under Islam for centuries between Palestine
and al-Sham. More specifically, this episode should be seen within thecontext of the political activities of the short-lived regime of Emir Faisal in
Damascus in 1919‒1920. The newspaper only operated for a few months
until its final closure by the British in April 1920, shortly before Faisal’s
regime was removed by the French military. The newspaper was an organof the al-Nadi al- Arabi (the Arab Club), founded in Damascus in 1919, andsupported Palestinian‒Syrian unity under Emir Faisal’s leadership in
Damascus. It was published by a Palestinian lawyer, Muhammad Hasan alBudayri, and edited by ‘Arif al-‘Arif with contributions from, inter alia, Haj
Amin al-Husayni. Although the term Suriyyah al-Janubiyyah has almost
vanished from Arab and collective consciousness or discourse, it isoccasionally resurrected by pan-Arab intellectuals as a way of denying theexistence of the Palestinian people.29
The term Suriyya al-Janubiyyah itself was propagated during and in theaftermath of this brief episode, but it was largely the outcome of thecircumstances surrounding the formation of the short-lived pan-Arabadministration of Faisal in Damascus and the concurrent debate about joint
Palestinian‒Syrian statehood. However, this episode also spawned a certain
amount of literature on ‘Southern Syria’ and a great deal of confusion
among historians, especially those who failed to understand the context andcontingencies surrounding this new term. Some historians added more
confusion by beginning to conflate a new label, Suriyya al-Janubiyyah, with
al-Sham, an old term associated with the Islamic history of the wider
Levant. Other historians also began to translate al-Sham automatically into
‘greater Syria’, thus adding more confusion and little understanding as tothe origin of the term Suriyya al-Janubiyyah.
Yet, in contrast to al-Sham, Suriyya al-Janubiyyah was neither rooted in
the history of Palestine nor found among Palestinians before the First World
War. Also, crucially, the setting up of a newspaper under the name Suriyya

al-Janubiyyah for several months in Jerusalem is not in itself evidence thatthe term ‘Southern Syria’ encapsulated the whole spirit of the age or thelack of a ‘Palestinian national identity’ in 1919. On the contrary, from the
1920s onwards both Haj Amin al-Husayni and ‘Arif al-‘Arif emerged ashighly influential figures in Palestinian nationalism and the term Suriyya alJanubiyyah was not used by either of them after Faisal’s fall in 1920.
Pan-Syrianism was a relatively short-lived ideological phenomenon.
Moreover, during its brief existence, the newspaper Suriyya al-Janubiyyah
advocated Palestinian‒Syrian‒Arab unity schemes with a strong
commitment to Palestinian nationalism and strong opposition to Zionist
settler-colonisation. At the time these political positions were perceived tobe complementary rather than contradictory. However, with the overthrowof Faisal’s administration in Damascus by the French in 1920, the idea of
Suriyya al-Janubiyyah declined sharply and in the 1930s Palestinianpolitical parties often combined strong commitments to Palestinian
nationalism with pan-Arab – rather than pan-Syrian – unity schemes.
One influential current of Palestinian nationalism continued to advocate
Palestinian wataniyyah – Palestine-based patriotic nationalism – closely
allied with ideologies of pan-Arab qawmiyyah persisted throughout the
British Mandatory period. This current strongly argued against the British
pro-Zionist policy of detaching Palestine from its Arab history andenvironment. Well-known representatives of this current were leaders of the
Istiqlal party: ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi (1889‒1970)30 and Muhammad Izzat
Darwazh (1888–1984), who had been one of the leaders of the Palestinian
Revival Society (al-Nahdah al-Filistiniyyah), a Palestinian nationalist
organisation founded in Damascus in 1919. ‘Abd al-Hadi belonged to alandowning family in the Jenin (Nablus) area and Darwazah came from a
middle class family of merchants from Nablus that had long been involvedin textiles and had extensive trade relationships with the Arab merchants ofDamascus and Beirut (Doumani 1995: 59‒61). Both ‘Abd al-Hadi andDarwazah had been educated in the Ottoman period and had been
personally involved in radical pan-Arab political activities during the preMandatory period. ‘Abd al-Hadi had been educated in Beirut, Istanbul andat the Sorbonne University in Paris and Darwazah, a self-taught intellectual(Muslih 1991: 178), had served in the local Ottoman administration as aclerk in the Department of Telegraphic and Postal Services in Nablus andlater as Director of Postal Services in Beirut. In the early 1930s the Istiqlal

party became ‘the only mass-based pan-Arabist party, [which] began tomobilize Palestinian Arabs around an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist
program’ (Tamari 2008: 6‒7). Furthermore, both ‘Abd al-Hadi andDarwazah ‘continued to believe in Palestine’s identity as a component of
the greater Syrian [Bilad al-Sham] homeland’ (Tamari 2008: 7). The Istiqlal
party sought independence for Palestine within Arab unity schemes – panArab schemes which at the time were conceived as a way of empowering
the Palestinian national struggle and resisting Zionist settler-colonisation. In
fact, the leaders of the Istiqlal party saw no contradiction between the
advocacy of pan-Arabism and their active involvement in the Palestinian
national liberation movement. On the contrary, for them the two objectives
were complementary. Also, opposition to Zionist national claims toPalestine and opposition to the Mandatory (colonial) system in the Middle
East, which was the main obstacle to Arab self-determination, wereperceived as intertwined: ‘If the [British] Mandate fell, then the Zionist
project would also collapse’ (Krämer 2011: 256).
‘Abd al-Hadi understood the close linkage at the time between local
Palestinian identity, Arabism and opposition to settler-colonialism inPalestine. In his passionate quest to refute the Zionist claims to Palestine,‘Abd al-Hadi testified before the British Peel Commission in January 1937,
while rejecting British policies which sought to detach Palestine from therest of al-Sham in line with the commitments of the Balfour Declaration of
1917, which stated: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour theestablishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.
‘Abd al-Hadi was, at the same time, a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a
key figure in, and one of the chief spokesmen of, the Palestinian Arabnationalist movement during the Mandatory period. He served as secretaryof the Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress in 1928. He
was also appointed general secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, which
was formed in April 1936 to coordinate the general strike among
Palestinians. The Istiqlal party took part in the Palestinian uprising in 1936‒
1939 and called for an Indian Congress Party-style boycott of the British(Khalidi, R. 2001: 25). The Istiqlal party was subsequently banned by the
British.
As a shrewd countermove to the pan-Arabist orientation of the Istiqlal
party, Haj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem and head of theSupreme Muslim Council, and his supporters formed the Palestinian Arab

Party (al-Hizb al- Arabi al-Filastini), which included key Palestinian
Muslim and Christian leaders (Krämer 2011: 258). This party, whichemphasised the Palestinian agency in, and Palestinian dimensions of, thenational struggle in Palestine and dominated the Arab Higher Committee inthe period 1936‒1948, would subsequently inspire the emergence of thePalestinian National Liberation Movement (Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani alFilastini or Fateh) in the post-Nakba period.
The Palestinian Arab collective agency and Palestinian Arab national
dimensions of the struggle in Palestine were also emphasised by anotherparty created in the 1930s: the Palestine Arab Reform Party (Hizb al-Islahal- Arabi al-Filastin), established by members of the Khalidi family of
Jerusalem in June 1935 (Krämer 2011: 258).
The Palestinian uprising of 1936‒1939 had a major impact on the
consolidation of the particular components of Palestine’s national identity
and national struggle in Palestine. This can be best illustrated andsymbolised by the nationalist poem Mawtini (‘My Homeland’), perhaps themost famous and influential Palestinian poem of all time. It was written by
Ibrahim Tuqan (1905–1941) in 1934 and became a rallying cry against
British colonialism and Zionism in Palestine during the great uprising in the
1930s (Jayyusi and Tingley 1977). Tuqan belonged to a notable Nablusfamily that had, under the Ottomans, dominated the politics of the city formuch of the 18th and 19th centuries. He had been educated in Nablus,
Jerusalem and at the American University of Beirut from 1923 to 1929. Helater worked as a professor at the American University in Beirut and a subdirector of the Jerusalem-based Palestine Broadcasting Service. An excerpt
from the poem, which has since then embodied that indomitable Palestinian
national struggle for self-determination, reads as follows:
The sword and the pen
Not talking or quarrelling
Are our symbols
Our glory and covenant
And a duty to fulfil it
Shake usOur honour
Is an honourable cause
A raised flag

O, your beauty
In your eminence
Victorious over your enemies
My homeland
My homeland.
FROM PALESTINE TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL: THE
PALESTINE COMMUNIST PARTY (PALESTINISHE
KOMUNISTISHE PARTEI)The Israeli Communist Party began as an exclusively Jewish Ashkenazi
party in Palestine in 1923. With Yiddish being the historical and literally the‘mother language’ (mame-loshn) of the Ashkenazi Jews and being alanguage spoken by many East European Jews, the Communist Party wascalled in Yiddish: Palestinishe Komunistishe Partei. With the ‘new Hebrew’
being in ascendancy, the party became eventually known in Israel by its
Hebrew name: Ha-Miflaga Ha-Komunistit Ha-Yisraelit. In Mandatory
Palestine, however, its Arabic name was the Palestine Communist Party (alHizb al-Shuyu’i al-Filastini). In 1923, the PCP was born as a coalition ofleft-wing Zionist settlers and non-Zionist communists among the East
European Jewish immigrants to Palestine. At its foundation and in its earlyyears the party was predominantly Jewish and it remained small but
overwhelmingly composed of East European Jews during much of
Mandatory Palestine (Younis 2000: 117).
Dominated by Stalinists throughout much of the Mandatory period, inlate 1947, following the Soviet Union’s support for the UN Partition
Resolution, the party embraced a Zionist designation for the country, ‘Eretz
Yisrael’ (instead of Palestine) and were instrumental in securing military
assistance from Czechoslovakia for the State of Israel during the toughest
stages of the 1948 war.31 Also in 1948 the leader of the party, Meir Vilner,
was a signatory to the Israeli Zionist ‘Independence Charter’ (Megilat haAtzmaut), which repeatedly described the country as the Land of Israel(Hebrew: Eretz Yisrael). In the post-Nakba period the party promoted acollective memory which contributed to the Israelification of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel, the so-called ‘Israeli Arabs’.
At the same time, during this early Mandatory period, the PalestinianArabs created a labour movement and set up the Palestine Arab Workers

Society (Jam’iyyat al- Ummal al- Arabiyyah al-Filastiniyyah), the main
Palestinian Arab labour organisation, established in 1925 with headquarters
in Haifa, and branches in Nazareth, Jaffa and Majdal ‘Asqalan. From 1937
to 1947 its general secretary was Sami Taha (1916–1947) – born in‘Arrabah, a town near Jenin, his family later moved to Haifa – who was themain Palestinian Arab labour leader during the Mandatory period (Lockman
1996: 259). He was assassinated in Haifa on 12 September 1947.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the Palestine Jewish communists
maintained close relations with the Palestine Arab Workers Society.
In the middle of the Second World War, in 1943, the Palestine
Communist Party, under pressure to accommodate the Middle Easternpolicies of Stalinist Russia, came into conflict with the key aims of thePalestinian national movement. The party split with the more radical antiZionist Palestinian Arab members, who formed the National Liberation
League in 1944. Coming under Zionist left-wing influences, and endorsing
the Soviet notion that Zionism was a form of bourgeois nationalism, the
PCP changed its name to MAKEY, the Communist Party of Eretz Yisrael(‘the Communist Party of the Land of Israel’) – after endorsing the UN
Partition Resolution of November 1947 – embracing a term central toZionist thinking. This was the first time the Palestine communists had used
the Zionist term Eretz Yisrael (‘Land of Israel’). Furthermore, the leader of
MAKEY, Meir Vilner-Kovner, was one of the signatories of the Israeli
Declaration of Independence of May 1948, a document whose Hebrew text
does not mention the term Palestine and talks only about Eretz Yisrael. The
document begins with rehashing some of the founding myths of Zionism:[The Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their
spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they firstattained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal
significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.32
Also, crucially, the party was involved in arms shipments from
Czechoslovakia to the Zionist military organisations in 1948‒1949 –deliveries which radically altered the military balance on the ground in
Palestine in 1948 and proved significant for the establishment of the Israeli
state. Since 1948 the Jewish members of the party have also served in the
Israeli army.

Bedevilled by contradictory tendencies, after 1948 the party took part in
Israeli parliamentary politics and became known as MAKEY. After anotherinternal split in 1965, the main parliamentary faction became known as
Rakah, an acronym for the New Communist List (Hebrew: Reshima
Komunistit Hadasha). By this stage the party was a predominantly
Palestinian Arab party within the Green Line with representation in the
Israeli Knesset (parliament). Historically, and in particular since 1948, theparty’s political platform largely focused on equality and civil rights for thePalestinians within Israel. Today the party is known as Hadash, a Hebrew
acronym for Ha-Hazit Ha-Demokratit Le-Shalom (Democratic Front for
Peace and Equality; Arabic: al-Jabhah ad-Dimuqratiyyah lis-Salam walMusawah), with a political platform committed to the two-state solution.
PALESTINIAN NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND
ORGANISATIONS IN THE POST-NAKBA PERIOD: THE
REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF THE PLO
In the post-Nakba period a large number of Palestinian anti-colonialorganisations and secular institutions were established. Several of theserevolutionary bodies predated and anticipated the founding of the PLO in
1964 and these included the Palestinian Student Union in Cairo (1952), theGeneral Union of Palestinian Students (1959), the first group of Fateh(Palestinian National Liberation Movement), founded in 1959 around anorgan called Filastinuna (Our Palestine), the Palestinian Women’s League(1963) and the General Union of Palestinian Workers (1963).
The national bodies created in the post-Nakba period included:• All-Palestine Government (Hukumat ‘Umum Filastin’) in Gaza on 1
October 1948.
• The Palestinian Student Union set up in Cairo in the early 1950s, led by
Yasir Arafat.
• Fateh (Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini; Palestinian National
Liberation Movement) was founded in 1959. Its first undergroundmagazine which began to appear monthly in 1959 – under the editorshipof Khalil al-Wazir (1935‒1988), a refugee from al-Ramla – was called
Filastinuna, Nida al-Hayat (Our Palestine, the Call to Life).

• The General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), established in Cairo
in 1959, becoming part of the PLO in 1969.
• The Palestinian Women’s League was established in Cairo in 1963; laterin 1965 absorbed into the General Union of Palestinian Women.
• The General Union of Palestinian Workers (GUPW) was established in
Hilwan in Egypt in 1963, becoming part of the newly created PLO in
1965.
• The first Palestinian National Council (PNC) met in (East) Jerusalem on
2 June 1964 and formally founded the PLO. The PNC became thelegislative body of the PLO.
• The Palestine Liberation Organisation was established in June 1964.
• The Palestinian National Charter (al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Filastini) of the
PLO was first adopted in June 1964.
• The Palestinian National Fund was set up 1964 and conformed to Article
24 of the PLO to finance the activities of the PLO. The PNF is
responsible for managing financial aid coming from a variety of sources:
funds from Arab states, contributions from wealthy Palestinians and a‘liberation tax’ levied on Palestinians working in Arab countries.
• The Palestine Liberation Movement (Fateh) was established in 1965 andtook over the PLO in 1968; the official organ of the PLO, Filastin alThawrah (Palestine of the Revolution), was set up in Beirut in 1972.
• The General Union of Palestinian Women was established in 1965 as partof the PLO and with the goal of organising Palestinian women andpromoting an active role for them in Palestinian social, social, economic
and political spheres.
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (al-Jabhah al-Sha
biyyah li-Tahrir Filastin) is a secular Palestinian socialist organisation
founded in 1967 by Dr George Habash (1926–2008), a Palestinian
refugee from Lydda, Mandatory Palestine. It has been the second largestof the groups forming the PLO.
• The Union of Palestinian Women Committees was set up in 1980 toempower Palestinian women and to contribute to the Palestinian national
struggle against the Israeli military occupation. Since 2001 the Union has
been licensed by the Palestinian Interior Ministry.
• The Palestinian National Authority was established following the Oslo
Accords in 1993. Since then it has internally governed a small part of theoccupied Palestinian territories.
• The Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) was established in July
1994 within the jurisdiction of the newly formed Palestinian National
Authority. The PBC has a subsidiary radio station, the Voice of Palestine,
and a satellite channel, Palestinian Satellite Channel. The Palestinian TV
channel first began broadcasting in 1996 in Gaza (Jamal 2005).
• The Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage wascreated by the Palestinian National Authority in 1994. Its long-time head,
Palestinian archaeologist Dr Hamdan Taha, saw it as a revival of thePalestine Department of Antiquities which was established in 1920 underthe British Mandate (Taha 2010).
The revolutionary politics of the PLO experienced sharp decline after the
departure of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982. Since then the PLO and its
national institutions have become largely marginalised after the signing of
the Oslo Accords in 1993, and especially since the creation of thePalestinian National Authority in 1994. However, the historic legacy,
revolutionary politics and symbolic value of the PLO as a Palestinian
national liberation movement, based on popular representation and enjoying
significant support among anti-colonial movements in the Third World, go
far beyond its current weak and dysfunctional organisational structures andvirtual political paralysis.
STUDIA PALAESTINA: PALESTINE STUDIES AND THE
PROLIFERATION OF MODERN RESEARCH SOCIETIES AND
INSTITUTIONS
In modern times Palestine Studies as a scholarly discipline has grownphenomenally across several continents and has continued to expand inrecent decades – although some of the recently founded centres focus
largely on modern Palestine and the Arab‒Israeli conflict. Furthermore,when referring to the ancient history of this region, modern European
scholarship (and early Zionist scholarly societies such as the Jewish
Palestine Exploration Society, founded in 1914) universally andunanimously talk about ‘Palestine’, even when referring to Jewish history.
The opening of the ‘Holy Land’ to Europe’s political, cultural-religious
penetration in the 19th century resulted in mountains of publications on

Palestine.
To
cite
some
of
the
scholarly
societies/centres/projects/museums/journals relevant to Palestine Studies
and the ancient history and heritage of Palestine:• The Palestine Exploration Fund, founded in London in the 1860s with afocus on ancient Palestine; it published the Palestine Exploration
Quarterly.
• The Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society: an organisation established in 1884,the society operated for eleven years and published translations ofmedieval texts relevant to the history of pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Particular attention was given to accounts containing geographical or
topographical information in a variety of languages, including Greek,
Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Old French, Russian and German. Its publications
included Guy Le Strange’s translation from Arabic and annotation of alMuqaddasi’s (al-Maqdisi’s) work under the title: Description of Syria,
including Palestine by Mukaddasi (1986), Nasir-I-Khusrau’s Diary of a
Journey Through Syria and Palestine (1888).
• Deutscher Verein für die Erforschung Palästinas (German Society for the
Exploration of Palestine). The Society’s annual publication was
Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins (Journal of the German
Society for the Exploration of Palestine).
• The Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas (German Association
for the Study of Palestine) was established in 1877 at the initiative of the
Swiss geographer Carl Zimmermann’s association for the promotion of
Bible Studies and research on the history and culture of Palestine. From1877 it regularly published Zimmermann’s Zeitschrift.
• Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (Russian: Императорское
православное палестинское общество) was founded in 1882 as ascholarly and political organisation for the study of Palestine. Following
the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the society was renamed the Russian
Palestine Society (Russian: Российское Палестинское Общество) and
was attached to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Its original
Russian name was restored in ١٩٩٢.
• Zeitschrifl des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins (Journal of the German
Society for Exploration of Palestine) is the official bulletin of the German
Protestant Institute of Archaeology in the Holy Land (Deutsches
Evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenschaften des Heiligen Landes),founded in 1900. It covers topics such as archaeology, topography,
iconography, religion, social anthropology, philology and literature.
• Palestine Archaeological Museum (al-Quds/Jerusalem), was initiated in
1918 and officially opened in 1938; it was renamed ‘Rockefeller
Museum’ by Israel after the 1967 occupation.
• Palestine Folklore Museum (al-Quds/Jerusalem) was set up in al-Qala’ain the 1930s.
• Jewish Palestine Exploration Society was founded in 1914 with a focus
on ancient Palestine; it was renamed after 1948 as the Israel Exploration
Society.
• The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society was published in Jerusalem
by the Palestine Oriental Society from 1920 to 1948 and focused on
ancient history and antiquities.
• The Institute for Palestine Studies, founded in Beirut in 1963, publishes
the Journal of Palestine Studies.
• Palestine Research Centre was founded by the PLO in Beirut in 1965; itpublished a periodical entitled Palestinian Affairs (Shu’un Filastiniyah).
• Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies was founded in 2002; it ispublished by Edinburgh University Press.
• The European Centre for Palestine Studies, Exeter University wasestablished in 2009.
• Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, New York.
• Centre for Palestine Studies (SOAS, London) was established in 2012.
• The Palestinian Museum opened in Birzeit in May 2016.

Chapter 10

SETTLER-COLONIALISM AND
DISINHERITING THE PALESTINIANS
The appropriation of Palestinian place
names by the Israeli state

The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be itright or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present
needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires andprejudices of the 700,000 [Palestine] Arabs who now inhabit that ancientland. (Arthur James Balfour, cited in Nutting 2013)
Zionist settler-colonialism is at the heart of the conflict in Palestine; settlercolonialism is a structure not an episode (Wolfe 2006). Zionist settlercolonialism is deeply rooted in European colonialism. Ignoring theexistence and rights of indigenous peoples, British colonialists often saw
large parts of the earth as terra nullius, ‘nobody’s land’. This (originally
Roman legal) expression was used to describe territory which was not
subject to the sovereignty of any European state – sovereignty over territory
which is terra nullius may be acquired through occupation and/or settlercolonisation.
When in the late 19th century European ‘Zionism nationalism’ arose as apolitical force calling for the settler-colonisation of Palestine and the‘gathering of all Jews’, little attention was paid to the fact that Palestine wasalready populated. Indeed, the Basel Programme adopted at the First Zionist
Congress, which launched political Zionism in 1897, made no mention of a
Palestinian indigenous population when it spelled out the movement’s

objective: ‘the establishment of a publicly and legally secured home inPalestine for the Jewish people’.
Moreover, in the early years of their efforts to secure support for theirenterprise, the Zionists propagated in the West the racist myth of ‘a land
without a people for a people without a land’, a slogan popularised by Israel
Zangwill, a prominent Anglo-Jewish writer often quoted in the British press
as a spokesman for Zionism and one of the earliest organisers of the Zionist
movement in Britain. Even as late as 1914, Chaim Weizmann, who was tobecome the first President of Israel and who, along with Theodor Herzl andDavid Ben-Gurion, was one of the three men most responsible for turning
the Zionist dream into reality, stated:
In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement
wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country whichhappens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on theother hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. Whatelse is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite thispeople with this country? The owners of the country [the Turks] must,
therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage isadvantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, butalso for themselves.1
Neither Zangwill nor Weizmann intended these demographic assessments ina literal fashion. They did not mean that there were no people in Palestine,
but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of
the notions of racist European supremacy that then held sway. In thisconnection, a comment by Weizmann to Arthur Ruppin, the head of thecolonisation department of the Jewish Agency, is particularly revealing.
When asked by Ruppin about the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, Weizmann
replied: ‘The British told us that there are there some hundred thousand
niggers [Hebrew: kushim, negroes] and for those there is no value.’2
In the English language, the word nigger is a White racist slur directed atBlack and African people. Its derogatory connotations echo anotherpejorative English word, philistine, which White Britain borrowed frombiblical prejudices and popularised in daily parlance. However, in the White
racist colonial culture within which Weizmann and co. operated, thereference to the indigenous people of Palestine as nigger would have been

instinctive and natural. Echoing Weizmann’s demographic racism andShaftesbury’s biblical Orientalism, Zangwill himself spelled out the actual
meaning of his slogan with admirable clarity in 1920:
If Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describing Palestine as acountry without a people, he was essentially correct, for there is no Arabpeople living in intimate fusion with the country, utilising its resources
and stamping it with a characteristic impress: there is at best an Arab
encampment. (Zangwill 1920: 104; see also Kamel 2015)
The interplay between British domestic and imperial considerations,Jewish Zionist lobbyists (especially Chaim Weizmann, 1874‒1952) andChristian Zionist prophetic politics would lead to the Balfour Declaration of1917 which promised a ‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine (Anderson, I. 2005:
1, 57‒58). Then an imperial world power, Britain gave sanction for the firsttime to the Zionist campaign for possession of Palestine. This highly
controversial document, dated 2 November, was issued by Foreign
Secretary Arthur James Balfour (later Lord Balfour), in the form of a letterto a prominent British Jewish supporter of the Zionist movement, Lionel
Walter (Lord) Rothschild, declaring British support for political Zionism:
Her Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use theirbest endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil andreligious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or
the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
(Quoted in Said 1980: 3)
Although the Zionist Jewish movement had already initiated a series ofinternational congresses and established small Jewish colonies in the early
20th century Palestine, it was the sponsorship of Zionism by the leading
imperial power of the age that would transform the Zionist project into amajor European settler-colonial project in Palestine.
Balfour’s legacy became inseparable from the pro-Zionist Declaration heissued in 1917. The reasons for the declaration were complex. Balfour’sbrand of Christian Zionism was driven by a great deal of Judeophobia,
hyped perceptions of ‘Zionist Jewish power’ and of fears of mass

immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to Britain. As Prime Minister,
Balfour had passed the 1905 Aliens Act, the main object of which was torestrict the entry into Britain of Jews from Eastern Europe. Brian Klug put
it rather sceptically: ‘Keeping Jews out of Britain and packing them off toPalestine were just two sides of the same antisemitic coin’.3 Here Zionist
historians often chose to ignore the distinction between drivers/motives andjustification and seize upon Balfour’s own post-war Christian Zionist
rhetoric to justify his Declaration. Yet Balfour’s strategic and nationalist
domestic motives and concerns, especially his well-documented efforts andpolicies to stop the influx of Eastern European Jewry into the UK, must be
taken into consideration in any attempt to assess the motives behind the
Declaration as well as the long-term catastrophic consequences forPalestine of that Balfour commitment.
The religio-political roots of this British pro-Zionist commitment go all
the way back to the Protestant Christian Zionist lobby which wasestablished in London in the 1830s by Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley
Cooper; 1801‒1885). Shaftesbury came from the British aristocratic ruling
elite and was for decades at the heart of the Victorian establishment. He
also became well known for advocating socially reformist policies at theheight of the Victorian era. Shaftesbury was a Tory member of theCommons, and later a member of the Lords, the upper house of Parliamentin the United Kingdom. He was the nephew-in-law of Lord Melbourne(Prime Minister through most of the period from 1834 to 1841), and thestepson-in-law of Lord Palmerston (Foreign Minister for most of the 1840s
and early 1850s, and then Prime Minister for most of the period 1855‒
1865) (Merkley 1998: 13). Palmerston (1784–1865) served twice as Prime
Minister in the mid-19th century. For most of 1830 to 1865 he dominated
British foreign policy when Britain was at the height of its imperialist
power. Shaftesbury was offered positions of power by successive British
governments, Palmerston encouraged and financially supported him andboth men were instrumental in the establishment of the British Consulate inJerusalem in 1838 – a Consulate which in the 19th century was dominatedby Christian Zionists and was at the centre of British imperial schemes
which led to the Balfour policy in Palestine (Schölch 1992).
In particular, crusading Protestant Christian Zionist Shaftesbury was themost ardent propagator and lobbyist of the restoration of ‘God’s ancientpeople’, as he styled the Jews (Tuchman 1982). He and the influential circle

he dominated were under the influence of the ‘End of Times’ prophetic
politics – evangelising politics based on the Old Testament’s Book ofDaniel – which they believed would be fulfilled by the ‘literal return’ and‘Restoration’ of the Jews to Palestine. As the demise of the Ottoman
Empire appeared to be approaching, the Protestant advocacy of ‘Jewish
restorationism’ and settler-colonisation of Palestine increased in the UK and
was seen as highly beneficial to the expanding British Empire in the Middle
East. In the mid-to-late 19th century Shaftesbury led the British ChristianZionist lobby which included establishment figures such as Lord Lindsay(Crawford 1847: 71), Lord Manchester, George Eliot, Holman Hunt andHall Caine.
Epitomising Victorian Protestant imperialism, Bible-bashing Shaftesbury
was also a myth-maker. He pushed zealously the myth of ubiquitous andperennial Jewish diaspora longing to ‘return’, and on 4 November 1840 heplaced an advertisement in the Times (London):
RESTORATION OF THE JEWS: A memorandum has been addressed to
the Protestant monarchs of Europe on the subject of the restoration of theJewish people to the land of Palestine. The document in question,dictated by a peculiar conjunction of affairs in the East, and otherstriking ‘signs of the times’, reverts to the original covenant which
secures that land to the [Jewish] descendant of Abraham. (Quoted in
Wagner 1995: 91)
Shaftesbury was directly responsible for the propagandistic slogan ‘A
country without a nation for a nation without a country’,4 later to be becomea key Zionist Jewish myth: ‘A land without a people for a people without aland’ (Masalha 1997; Hyamson 1950: 10, 12; Kamel 2015). Assessing thesignificance of his lobbying efforts on the fortunes of the Protestant Zionist
movement in Britain, Donald Wagner writes:
One cannot overstate the influence of Lord Shaftesbury on the British
political elites, church leaders, and the average Christian layperson. His
efforts and religious political thought may have set the tone forEngland’s colonial approach to the Near East and in particular the holy
land during the next one hundred years. He singularly translated thetheological positions of Brightman, Henry Finch, and John Nelson

Darby [the father of modern premillennial dispensationalism]:5 see
below]5 into a political strategy. His high political connections, matchedby his uncanny instincts, combined to advance the Christian Zionist
vision. (Wagner 1995: 92)
In 1880 F. Laurence Oliphant (1829‒1888), MP, novelist and evangelical
Christian, a follower of Shaftesbury, published a book entitled The Land of
Gilead (named after the biblical ‘land of Gilead’),6 in which he presented aplan of ‘Jewish restoration’ and a detailed project for Jewish settlement eastof the River Jordan. He urged the British parliament to assist Jewish
immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe to Palestine. Not surprisingly
he also advocated that indigenous Palestinian Arabs be removed toreservations like those of the indigenous inhabitants of North America7(Sharif 1983: 68), or hinting at the Bantustan ideology later developed bySouth Africa (Sharif 1983: 68; Wagner 1995: 93).
A combination of Protestant religious and imperialist considerations
drove some Britons to produce Christian Zionist novels, to set up
exploration societies and to advocate the ‘restoration of the Jews toPalestine’ in public and in private.8 Furthermore, a succession ofarchaeological discoveries in the Near East, military adventurism and thegrowing number of travelogues fired the imagination of Protestantmissionaries, European officials and Arabist scholars and led to the direct
involvement European powers in the Holy Land (Shepherd 1987; Osband1989). This European obsession with the archaeological past was marked
by a decided contempt for the indigenous people of Palestine and life inmodern Palestinian villages and towns
At the height of the British Empire and the Victorian era prophetic
politics of ‘biblical restorationism’ went hand in hand with increasing
British colonial involvement in the ‘Orient’. The Holy Land in the 19th
century was an attractive target for several European nations which were
flexing their colonial muscles around the globe. The region was ready forWestern penetration, particularly while the Ottoman Empire was showing
signs of political and economic disintegration. The race for a European
national presence and colonial commercial interests in the East, and in the
Holy Land in particular, was masked by scholarly activities and Oriental
Studies (Said 1978). Coinciding with the European ‘scramble for Palestine’,various sectors of the Western academy, and most of the Western Christianchurches, displayed an increasing interest in Palestine. Invariably foreigninterest took the form of establishing Christian institutions – the Ottoman
reforms after the Crimean War (1853‒1856) granted equal rights, including
property rights, to non-Muslims – thereby uniting Christian missionary
endeavour with national influence. The interests of God and country ran inparallel. The British moved early,9 and were soon emulated by the
Russians,10 Germans,11 Austrians (Wrba 1996) and others, marking the
beginning of extensive Western influence in Palestine, an influence which
the Ottomans feared might be a prelude to attempting to recover Palestine
as a Christian state.12 Such was the degree of Western penetration that theAustrian consul, the Count de Caboga, reported in 1880 that Jerusalem had
become a European city, and Captain (later General Sir) Charles Warren(1840‒1927) of the British Royal Engineers and one of the key officers of
the British Palestine Exploration Fund, who was sent to map the Old
Testament topography of Jerusalem and investigate ‘the site of the temple’,noted: ‘[British] King Consul [James Finn] rules supreme, not over thenatives of the city, but over strangers; but yet these strangers for the mostpart are the rightful owners, the natives, for the most part, are usurpers’(Shepherd 1987: 127‒128).
Protestant Zionists and British imperialists believed that a ‘Jewish
Palestine’ would be convenient for a British protectorate there along themain route to India. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th
century three famous British prime ministers were closely associated with
‘Gentile Zionism’ in Britain: Benjamin Disraeli (1804‒1881), who was
successful in securing for imperial Britain control of the Suez Canal, David
Lloyd George (1863‒1945), whose government issued the Balfour
Declaration of 1917, and Sir Winston Churchill, who for nearly half acentury in and out of office was devoted to political Zionism and the British
Empire (Sykes 1973: 45, 52, 207). Both Disraeli and Lloyd George were
fascinated by the theories of amalgamation or affinity between Christianity
and Judaism (Anderson, I. 2005: 60). Lloyd George, a Protestant Zionist,
was once quoted as saying: ‘I was taught far more history about the Jews
than about the history of my own people’ (quoted by Stein 1961: 142); andDisraeli was baptised a Protestant, but he remained fascinated by his Jewish
background. Describing Protestant Christianity as ‘completed Judaism’, he– like many Christian Zionists – delighted in describing himself as the‘missing page’ between the Old and New Testaments (Johnson, P. 1993:
324). Disraeli’s civilising Christian imperialism combined patronising
attitudes towards the Jews with imperialist foreign policies towards theMiddle East, policies which he justified by invoking paternalistic and racist
theories which saw imperialism as a manifestation of what Britain’s
imperial poet, Rudyard Kipling, would refer to as ‘the white man’sburden’.13
For centuries, and for more than eighty years of political Zionism, thePalestinian Arabs were an absolute majority in Palestine. Balfour was fully
aware of this fact when, on 11 August 1919, he frankly expressed his
typically colonialist views and wrote:
Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long
traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder importthan the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabitthat ancient land … The idea of planting a [European] minority ofoutsiders upon an indigenous majority population, without consulting it,
was not calculated to horrify men who had worked with Cecil Rhodes orpromoted European settlement in Kenya. (Quoted in Talmon 1965: 248,
250)
In 1925 Balfour visited Palestine and was a key guest of honour at the
opening of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was greeted
enthusiastically by the leadership of the small European Zionist Yishuv(settlement) in Palestine, while the majority of indigenous inhabitants ofPalestine welcomed him with black flags.
The key to understanding the contribution of Britain to the Palestinian
Nakba (catastrophe) of the mid-20th century lies in the intensity with whichsome British Christian restorationists embraced the project of a ‘Jewish
homeland’in Palestine; the way in which the Bible and ‘divine rights anddivine promises’ were seen by the likes of British Prime Minister Lloyd
George and his Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour (who issued theBalfour Declaration); and generally the extraordinary appeal political
Zionism had in the West. Although the Balfour Declaration was partly
motivated by First World War calculations, it was not issued in an
ideological vacuum. Its content reflected the Christian Zionist prophetic
politics which became deeply rooted in 19th century imperialist ProtestantBritain (Verete 1970).14 This all meant that, from the beginning, the realityof Palestine and the Palestinians lay outside Western and Zionist
representations of the ‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine.
Furthermore, as Edward Said argued, the ‘site of the Zionist struggle wasonly partially in Palestine’; the crucial site of the Zionist struggle remained
until 1948 in the capital cities in the West, while the reality of Palestine and‘the native resistance to the Zionists was either played down or ignored in
the West’ (Said 1980: 22‒23). By removing the struggle from the Middle
East, the Palestinians (and Arabs) were prevented from representing
themselves, and were deemed incapable of doing so: ‘[T]hey cannot
represent themselves; they must be represented’ (quoted in Said 1980).15 In
making the Zionist movement attractive to Western audiences, its leaders
not only denied the existence of the Arabic-speaking people of Palestine;
they represented the Arabs to the West as something that could beunderstood and managed in specific ways. Between Zionism and the West
there was and still is a community of language and of ideology; Arabs were
not part of this community. To a very great extent this community depends
on a tradition in the West of enmity towards Islam in particular and theOrient in general (Said 1979: 25‒26). A major success of the Christian andJewish Zionists has been their ability to occupy the space from which they
were all to represent and explain the Arabs to the West:[The] Zionists took it upon themselves as a partially ‘Eastern’ people
who had emancipated themselves from the worst Eastern excesses, toexplain the Oriental Arabs to the West, to assume responsibility forexpressing what the Arabs were really like and about, never to let theArabs appear equally with them as existing in Palestine. This method
allowed Zionism always to seem both involved in and superior to thenative realties of Middle Eastern existence. (Said 1980: 26)
Despite such Christian and Jewish Zionist statements, however, theZionist leaders from the outset were well aware that not only were there
people on the land, but that people were there in large numbers. Zangwill,
who had visited Palestine in 1897 and come face to face with thedemographic reality, acknowledged in 1905 in a speech to a Zionist groupin Manchester that ‘Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The
pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United

States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25 percent of themJews’ (Zangwill 1937: 210). Abundant references to the Palestinian
population in early Zionist texts show clearly that from the beginning ofZionist settlement in Palestine, which Zionist historiography dates to thearrival of the members of the Russian Bilu Society in 1882, the PalestinianArabs were far from being an ‘unseen’ or ‘hidden’ presence. Moreover,recent studies have shown that Zionist leaders were concerned with what
they termed the ‘Arab problem’ (Hebrew: Habe’ayah Ha’arvit) or the‘Arab Question’ (Hebrew: Hashelah Ha’arvit). As seen in their writings,
the attitudes prevailing among the majority of the Zionist groups andsettlers concerning the indigenous Palestinian population ranged fromindifference and disregard to patronising superiority. A typical example canbe found in the works of Moshe Smilansky, a Zionist writer and Labour
leader who immigrated to Palestine in 1890:
Let us not be too familiar with the Arab fellahin lest our children adopt
their ways and learn from their ugly deeds. Let all those who are loyal to
the Torah avoid ugliness and that which resembles it and keep theirdistance from the fellahin and their base attributes.
There were, certainly, those who took exception to such attitudes. Ahad
Ha’Am (Asher Zvi Ginzberg), a liberal Russian Jewish thinker who visited
Palestine in 1891, published a series of articles in the Hebrew periodical
Hamelitz that were sharply critical of the ethnocentricity of political
Zionism as well as the exploitation of Palestinian peasantry by Zionist
settler-colonists. Ahad Ha’Am, who sought to draw attention to the fact that
Palestine was not an empty territory and that the presence of another people
on the land posed problems, observed that the Zionist ‘pioneers’ believedthat
the only language that the Arabs understand is that of force ... [They]
behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly
upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and evenbrag about it, and nobody stands to check this contemptible anddangerous tendency. (Cited in Masalha 1992: 7)
He cut to the heart of the matter when he ventured that the colonists’aggressive attitude towards the native peasants stemmed from their anger‘towards those who reminded them that there is still another people in theland of Israel that have been living there and does not intend to leave’.
Another early settler, Yitzhak Epstein, who arrived in Palestine from
Russia in 1886, warned not only of the moral implications of Zionist
colonisation but also of the political dangers inherent in the enterprise. In
1907, at a time when Zionist land purchases in the Galilee were stirring
opposition among Palestinian peasants forced off land sold by absentee
landlords, Epstein wrote a controversial article entitled ‘The Hidden
Question’, in which he strongly criticised the methods by which Zionists
had purchased Arab land. In his view, these methods entailing dispossessionof Arab farmers were bound to cause political confrontation in the future.
Reflected in the Zionist establishment’s angry response to Epstein’s article
are two principal features of mainstream Zionist thought: the belief that
Jewish acquisition of land took precedence over moral considerations, andthe advocacy of a separatist and exclusionist Yishuv (colony) in Palestine.
Following in the footsteps of European settler-colonialists, before theFirst World War some Zionist leaders (notably Theodor Herzl in his Zionist
novel Altneuland), conceived the reality of Palestine, and the material
benefits European Jewish colonisation would bring to Palestine, to be
similar to the supremacist ideology of the ‘white man’s burden’. During the
Mandatory period, however, it became clear to the Zionist leadership that asystematic dislocation and ‘transfer’ of the indigenous inhabitants ofPalestine was the conditio sine qua non of the Zionist enterprise (Wiemer
1983: 26; Masalha 1992).
In his seminal work, Orientalism (1978), Edward W. Said subjected
Western ‘Oriental Studies’ to a devastating critique and exposed theunderlying presumptions of the discipline. He also concluded that BiblicalStudies were part of and an extension of the Western Orientalist discourse,which had been constructed without any ‘Oriental’/Arab/Muslim reader inview. For Said, in this biblical Orientalist discourse the indigenous
inhabitants of Palestine were presented as incapable of unified action andnational consciousness. The biblical scholars, following in the footsteps ofthe Western Orientalists, concentrated on historical and archaeologicalquestions. In The Question of Palestine, which came out two years after
Orientalism, Said also tried to explain the erasure of Palestinians from
history. For him, the deletion of the reality of Palestine centred on three key
issues: first, understanding the representation of Palestine, the Palestinians

and Islam in the West: Said’s book Covering Islam (1981) should be treatedas part of a trilogy which includes Orientalism (1978) and The Question ofPalestine (Said 1980; Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 2001: 125). For Said, therepresentations of Islam in the West are an important part of the question ofPalestine because they are used to silence the Palestinians, the majority ofwhom are Muslims (Said 1980; Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 2001: 128);
second, understanding the ‘contest between an affirmation and a denial’;
third, understanding Western Orientalist attitudes towards Arabs and Islam;Western racial prejudices, and especially the Western narrative of a contest
between the ‘civilising’ forces of the Zionist European settlers and the‘uncivilised’, ‘treacherous’ and degenerate Oriental Arabs (Said 1980: 25‒
28). This biblically framed discourse entails (a) the shaping of history, ‘sothat this history now appears to confirm the validity of Zionist claims toPalestine, thereby denigrating Palestinians claims’ (Said 1980: 8), and (b)the Zionist legitimisation of Zionist settler-colonisation in Palestine, a
process that did not end with the creation of Israel in 1948.
HEBREWISATION: ANTECEDENTS TO ZIONIST TOPONYMY
The reinvention of both the Jewish past and modern Jewish nationhood in
Zionist historiography and the creation of a modern Hebrew nationalist
consciousness have received some scholarly attention (Myers 1995; Ram
1995: 91–124; Piterberg 2001; Raz-Krakotzkin 1993, 1994). Toponymic
and remapping projects were also deployed extensively and destructively by
the European colonial powers and European settler-colonial movements. In
Palestine, the Zionist Hebrew renaming projects were critical to the
ethnocisation of the European Jews and nationalisation of the Hebrew
Bible. These projects were inspired by and followed closely British, Frenchand American archaeological and geographical ‘exploration’ expeditions of
the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. In line withthe reinventions of European ethno-romantic nationalisms, Zionist
ideological archaeology and geography claimed to ‘own’ an exclusive‘national’ inheritance in Palestine; the ‘land of Israel’ was invented andtreated as a matter of exclusive ownership. This process of ethnonationalisation and reinvention of the past intensified after theestablishment of the Israeli state in 1948 as part of the general attempt toethno-nationalise both Jews and the Hebrew Bible (Rabkin 2010: 130).

Since the rise of the Zionist settler movement in the late 19th century,and especially since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the struggle overtoponymic memory and the renaming of sites has developed as an integral
part of the political conflict in Palestine. The indigenous Palestinians haveinsisted on their own comprehensive set of Arabic place names throughwhich they see their own social memory and deep-rootedness in the land ofPalestine. On the other hand, since the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba
and the creation of the Israeli state, a large number of Palestinian Arabic
place names have been Judaised, Hebraicised. Indeed, since 1948 the Israeli
army and Israeli state have sought systematically to replace PalestinianArabic place names, claiming priority in chronology and using modern
archaeology, map-making and place names as their proofs of Jewish rootsin ‘the land of Israel’. In Israel, the significance of place names lies in theirpotential to legitimise ‘historical claims’ asserted by the Zionist settlercolonial movement.
In her book Bible and Sword: How the British came to Palestine (1982),
Barbara Tuchman shows how the two magnets, the Bible and the sword,
have drawn countless British pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, biblicalarchaeologists and conquerors of Palestine and ultimately led to the British
conquest of Palestine in 1918. Central to this book is the assertion that theland conquest narrative of the Bible has been the key text that redeems theEuropean settler-colonisation of Palestine. Outside the Middle East the
Bible has redeemed European empires and European settler-colonialism,
the conquest of the earth and even current American imperialism. As a factof power, the authority of the biblical narrative has also been central toorganised religion and collective memory. As organised memory, theauthority of the Bible became critical to the political theologies of theMedieval Latin crusaders, Spanish conquistadors, in the struggle forcolonial power in Latin America from 1492 until the 20th century, and awhole variety of settler-colonist projects. In fact, in modern times a range ofWestern settler-colonial enterprises have deployed the power politics of thebiblical text and its ‘famous’ land conquest narrative very effectively andwith devastating consequences for indigenous peoples. The narrative of
Exodus has been widely deployed as a framing narrative for European
settler-colonialism and the European mission civilisatrice, while otherbiblical texts have been appropriated and used to provide moral authority

for European ‘exploration’ in, and settler-colonial conquests of, Africa,
Asia, Australia and the Americas (Prior 1997, 1999).
FROM KARM AL-KHALILI TO KEREM AVRAHAM (1855):
JAMES FINN’S COLONY
In the early modern period Palestinian place names contributed to the riseof biblical criticism. In the 17th century the rationalist Jewish philosopher
Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam initiated a critical approach to Scriptural
Studies by looking at place names in Palestine and the Bible. Using
toponyms from Palestine as well as other arguments, he concluded that,
contrary to the standard belief among Jews and Christians, Moses did notwrite the Pentateuch, the five books of the Hebrew Bible.
Palestinian place names attracted the attention of fundamentalist
Christians and European imperialists in the 19th century. Toponymic
projects and geographical replacing of place names in Palestine became
powerful tools in the hands of the European powers which competed topenetrate the land of the Bible. The British were the first to recognise andexploit the power of state-sponsored explorations and began to link
scriptural geography with ‘restorationist’ schemes, excavations and colonial
penetration of Palestine. The first British colony of Kerem Avraham(‘Abraham Vineyard’) began as a small settlement founded in 1855 by the
influential British Consul in Jerusalem James Finn, and his wife Elizabeth
Anne Finn, the daughter of a noted English Hebrew scholar and herself a
Hebrew speaker. James Finn, who served in Ottoman Jerusalem from 1846
to 1863, reigned supreme in the city and he became a central figure in the
mid-19th century European penetration of Palestine. He also combined his
British diplomatic job with Christian missionary activities. His activities
paved the way for the biblical explorations and military mapping ofPalestine by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corp on behalf of the
London-based Palestine Exploration Fund.
James Finn combined biblical ‘restorationist’ ideology and missionary
activities with official British civil service. He and his wife Elizabeth wereoriginally members of the London Society for Promoting Christianity
Amongst the Jews. Also, crucially, he was a close associate of Anthony
Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, a prominent Tory MP, amillennialist Protestant and a key contributor to Victorian Protestant Zionist‘restorationism’, who invented the myth ‘A land without people, for apeople without a land’. In the early 1850s Finn had purchased Karm alKhalili, Arabic for ‘al-Khalili Vineyard’, from a local Palestinian for £250.
Al-Khalil is the indigenous Palestinian Arabic toponym for the (biblical)
city of Hebron, a city which both local Palestinian Muslim and biblicaltraditions link to the Patriarch ‘Ibrahim al-Khalil’ (Abraham); thus Finn
used an indigenous name to link firmly the toponym of the modern colony
in Jerusalem to biblical traditions.
After the 1967 conquests, the Israeli state was bound to base its
conception of Jerusalem upon a mythologised entity, ‘Jerusalem of Gold’,
and to invoke abstract historical and ideological rights in the newly
acquired territories, as well as resting its claim on territorial expansion anddomination and the ‘redemption of land’ through settler-colonisation. The
same process of appropriation and erasure of Palestinian heritage and thesuperimposition of a Zionist Hebrew colonising toponymy on Palestiniansites continued after 1967. Almost immediately after the conquest of East
Jerusalem the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which represented themulticultural identity and shared heritage of Palestine, was renamed theRockefeller Museum. Some items were taken to the Shrine of the Book
(Hebrew: Hekhal Hasefer), a wing of the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem,
which houses parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947‒1956 in the
Qumran caves. The Palestine Archaeological Museum had been located on
Karm al-Shakyh, the ‘Vineyard’ of Shaykh al-Khalili, a hill just outside thenorth-eastern corner of the Old City. The museum had been conceived andestablished during the Mandatory period, with financial support from theRockefeller family. It was opened to the public in January 1938. The
museum housed a large collection of artefacts unearthed in the excavations
conducted in Palestine in 1890‒1948. Also among the museum’s prized
possessions were historical artefacts from the al-Aqsa Mosque and 12th
century (Crusader period) marble lintels from the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre.
Until 1966 the museum was run by an international board of trustees; it
was then taken over by the Jordanian state. Since 1967 the museum has
been jointly managed by the Israel Museum and the Israel Department of
Antiquities and Museums (later renamed Israel Antiquities Authority). The
site is now the headquarters of the Israel Antiquity Authorities. While thePalestine Archaeological Museum of the Mandatory period still represented

the positive diversity of religions and ethnicities that characterised
Jerusalem and Palestine for many centuries, the Israel Museum and Shrineof the Book represent the single-minded determination by the Israel
Antiquities Authority and Israel’s heritage industry to Judaise and coloniseboth the ancient and modern histories of Palestine.
DISAPPEARING PALESTINIAN VILLAGES AND PLACENAMES BEFORE 1948
During the pre-state period the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine developed four
key strategies:• The widespread use of the term Palestine in tandem with Eretz Israel in
Zionism (late 19th century until 1948).
• Appropriation of Arab names, hybridisation of names of Jewish
settlements and indigenisation of the settlers.
• Instrumentalisation of the myth-narratives of the Bible and‘restorationist’ biblical archaeology: Hebrewisation and biblicisation ofPalestinian Arabic toponyms.
• Utilisation of the toponymic lists of the Palestine Exploration Fund andthe works of Western biblical archaeologists.
APPROPRIATION OF ARABIC PLACE NAMES,
INDIGENISATION OF THE EUROPEAN SETTLERS ANDHYBRIDISATION STRATEGIES
Subterfuge and the widespread use of the term Palestine in
combination with Eretz Israel in Zionism (late 19th century
until 1948)
The multi-cultural identity and diversity of Palestine was always in sharp
contrast to the anachronism of mono-cultural Zionism, a latecomer
European settler-colonial movement. A mono-culturalist ideology inspiredby racialised and romantic 19th century European nationalism, Zionism
originated in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century.
Therefore, it is hardly surprising that from its beginning in the late 19th
century and until the creation of Israel in 1948 the Zionist leadership andinstitutions themselves frequently used the term Palestine in their official
discourse and publications, This practice was in common with European
and British official designation of the country as Palestine. However, during
the Mandatory period the Zionists often employed this term Palestine intandem with their imaginary construct of Eretz Israel, while, as I show in
my 1992 work Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in
Zionist Political Thought, 1982‒1948, simultaneously planning todismantle Palestine and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians (Masalha 1992).
Furthermore, the Zionist ‘transfer’ and ethnic cleansing strategies andtoponymicidal practices sought to replace the heterogeneity and mixed
space of Palestine with a ‘pure’ European colony, an Ashkenazi-dominated,mono-cultural space of the Zionist Yishuv until 1948 (Kimmerling 2003).
In a microcosmic and typical fashion the heterogeneity of the thousands-ofyears-old Jaffa was ethnically cleansed and culturally destroyed in 1948.
This historic, culturally mixed Palestinian city was replaced after 1948 andsubsumed by the European ‘pure’ Jewish city of neighbouring Tel Aviv,‘the capital of the pre-state Yishuv’/Colony, subsumed and subordinatedancient Jaffa under the post-1948 Hebrew designation of Tel Aviv-Yafo.
This Zionist memoricidal and toponymicidal project was
institutionally, cognitively, and emotionally built within an exclusionary
Jewish ‘bubble’. The plans for the new Jewish state were similarly
exclusive. The Jewish state was supposed to be purely Jewish and nopolitical and bureaucratic tools were prepared for the possibility,
mentioned in all partition proposals, that large Arab minorities would
remain within the boundaries of the Jewish state. (Kimmerling 2003: 22;
see also Yiftachel 2006: 54; Shafir 1996a, 1996b, 1999)
During the Mandatory period the Zionist organisations in Palestine
employed a variety of methods of subterfuge designed to conflate‘Palestine’ with ‘Eretz Yisrael’. One such example of concealment andsubterfuge was the insertion of the Hebrew abbreviation of Eretz Yisrael (), ‘Land of Israel’, after the Hebrew word for Palestine () onthe official Mandatory government stamps – stamps which would have beenhandled by tens of thousands of Arabs in Palestine and neighbouring
countries, most of them not knowing Hebrew and unable to decipher theZionist Hebrew abbreviation ( ).

Although Palestinian leaders protested in the 1920s at this inclusion of‘Eretz Yisrael’ in the official documents, stamps and currency of the British
Mandatory Government of Palestine – a government which was committed
to the pro-Zionist ‘promise’ of the 1917 Balfour Declaration – they wereincapable of dissuading the Mandatory authorities from pursuing their proZionist policies.
However, the extensive use of the official term Palestine by the Zionist
organisations until 1948 is not surprising for two main reasons:• All governments and millions of people across the world, and especiallyreaders of European languages, identified the country as Palestine or theHoly Land – the only exceptions were the Zionist Jewish advocates, who
also identified the country as Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel):• Following the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration commitments ofNovember 1917, the Zionist settler-colony in Palestine (the Yishuv)
evolved both as ‘settler-colonialism within British colonialism’ and as a‘settler-colony with British colonialism’. This allowed the emerging
European Yishuv to pursue a double strategy of (a) shadowing (andoperating ‘from within’) the official terminology of British Mandatory
system in Palestine; and (b) of creating a parallel autonomous Zionist
Hebrew discourse.
Nonetheless, subterfuge (of Palestine-cum-Eretz Yisrael), euphemism(‘transfer’), alternative facts, and new ‘facts on the ground’ were central to
the newspeak and strategies of the Zionist colony (‘Yishuv’) in Palestineduring the pre-state period and this is evident from the following examples:• The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria andPalestine was a Hovevei Tzion organ established in 1890 with official
support and encouragement of the Tsarist Russian government (Shafir
1996a: 46). The Society was dedicated to the practical aspects ofestablishing Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine and its projects
included help with the founding of the colonies of Rehovot and Hadera.
• The Jewish Agency for Palestine was founded in 1930, and played acentral role in the founding of the Israeli state in 1948; the Chairman of
its Executive Committee from 1935 until May 1948 was David Ben-

Gurion. Only after 1948 did it change its name to the Jewish Agency for
Israel.
• The Palestine Office (German: Palästinaamt) was the name of a Zionist
agency set up by the executive of the World Zionist Organisation in 1908
with its office in Jaffa. Headed by Arthur Ruppin (born in the German
empire; 1876–1943), the Palestine Office served during the Ottoman
period as the central agency for Zionist colonisation activities inPalestine, including land purchases and assisting Jewish immigration.
After the First World War the Zionist name ‘Palestine Offices’ had adifferent connotation and applied to Zionist international missions
charged with the mobilisation and organisation of Jewish immigration toPalestine. The Palestine Offices were subordinated to the Immigration
Department of the Zionist Executive, which worked with the Jewish
Agency for Palestine. The Palestine Offices were run by a Palestine
Commission (Palaestinaamts kommission) composed of representativesof various Zionist parties.
• The Palestine Orchestra (‘Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’; founded inPalestine 1936) and was continuously called the Palestine Orchestra until
1948.
• The Anglo-Palestine Bank: Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi (National
Bank) was originally founded in London as the Anglo PalestineCompany. It was a subsidiary of the Jewish Colonial Trust which was
founded by the Second Zionist Congress and incorporated in London in
1899. It subsequently became officially known as the Anglo-Palestine
Bank and this name continued until 1948.
• The Palestine Electric Company was initially founded in 1923 by Pihnas
Rotenberg as the Jaffa Electric Company. It was later incorporated in
Mandatory Palestine as the Palestine Electricity, Corporation Limited. It
only changed its name to the current one, the Israel Electric Corporation
Limited, in 1961. Today it is one of the largest industrial companies in
Israel.
• The Palestine Post was established in Jerusalem in 1932 as part of theZionist movement and only changed its name in 1950 to the Jerusalem
Post. The newspaper’s targeted audiences were English readers in
Palestine and neighbouring countries and Jewish readers abroad – British
Mandate officials, local Jews and Arabs, tourists and Christian pilgrims.
Zionist organisations considered the Jerusalem Post an effective medium

for exerting influence on the British authorities in Palestine. During its
first year the Palestine Post achieved a daily circulation of about 4000
copies and by 1944 its circulation reached 50,000 copies.16• The Jewish Palestine Exploration Society was founded in 1914 with afocus on ancient Palestine; it was renamed after 1948 as the Israel
Exploration Society.
• The Palestine Football Association was established in 1928 by Zionist
Jewish football clubs; after 1948 it was renamed the Israel Football
Association.
• The Palestine Potash Company was established in 1930. In 1951 thecompany was nationalised by the Israeli government and in 1953 it was
renamed the Dead Sea Works.
• Palestine Citrograph, a monthly journal devoted to the citrus industry inPalestine, was published in Tel Aviv in the 1930s and 1940s by theZionist Yishuv; the name was later changed to the Hebrew Hadar.
• The Palestine Economic Corporation (now the Israel Economic
Corporation) was founded by American Zionist investors in 1922 as apublic company and incorporated in the US. Initially it invested andoperated through another American Zionist organisation, the Central
Bank of Cooperative Institutions in Palestine and a string of Zionist‘Palestine’ subsidiary companies including the Palestine Mortgage andCredit Bank Ltd and the Palestine Water Company. The Palestine Water
Company itself became a subsidiary of the Palestine Economic
Corporation in 1933 and in 1949 it was renamed Mekorot, the Israeli
Water Company, a division of the Histadrut.
• Palestine Endowment Funds was created in 1922 by US Zionist leaders toenable the distribution of funds to selected and approved Zionist
organisations in Palestine. Many years after Israel was established it was
renamed Israel Endowment Funds. Its grants now total over $1 billion.
• The Palestine Automobile Corporation Ltd was founded in 1934 andbegan its activities as a Chevrolet dealer for Tel Aviv and Haifa. In 1937
the company took over the sole distributorship of Ford products,
marketing Ford cars and commercial vehicles manufactured in the US
and in Europe. The company continued to operate under the ‘Palestine’name for several years after the establishment of Israel.

• Flora Palaestina is a publication by the Israeli Academy of Sciences andHumanities, first appeared in 1966. It encompasses the Palaestina planttaxonomic and floristic data in the geo-botanical area between the
Mediterranean coast in the west and the Transjordan deserts in the east,
the mountains of Lebanon in the north and the desert of Sinai in thesouth. An updated version, Distribution Atlas of Plants in the Flora
Palaestina Area by A. Danin, was published in 2004.
APPROPRIATION, HYBRIDISATION AND INDIGENISATION:
THE APPROPRIATION OF PALESTINE PLACE NAMES BYEUROPEAN ZIONIST SETTLERS
From Mahlul to Nahlal
Palestinian place names began to be replaced by biblical and Hebrewsounding names during the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods and small
Palestinian villages began to disappear from the map, although local
Palestinians continued to use the indigenous names for the new Zionist
colonies. These practices of ‘reclaiming by renaming’, while displacing theindigenous names, were pivotal to the colonisation of the land of Palestine
and as a language of creating an ‘authentic’ collective Zionist Hebrew
identity rooted in the ‘land of the Bible’. Referring candidly to the gradualreplacement of Arabic place names (and of Palestinian villages) by Hebrew
place names (and Jewish settlements) during the Mandatory period, Israeli
Defence Minister Moshe Dayan – the author of Living with the Hebrew
Bible (1978) – had this to say in an address in April 1969 to students at theTechnion, Israel’s prestigious Institute of Technology in Haifa:
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not evenknow the names of these villages, and I do not blame you because
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, theArab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul;
Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Hunefis;
and Kefar Yehoshua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single
place built in this country that didn’t have a former Arab population.17
Dayan (1915–1981), who spoke Arabic, considered himself and wasconsidered by his fellow European settlers as a typical sabra. He was born

in Kibbutz Degania Alef in Palestine before his parents moved to Nahlal,founded in 1921. His father Shmuel Kitaigorodsky (who served in the first
three sessions of the Israeli Knesset) was born in Zhashkov, modern-day
Ukraine, immigrated to Palestine in 1908 and Hebraicised his name to
Dayan, Hebrew for a judge in Jewish religious courts. According to Zionist
propaganda the name Nahlal derived from a biblical village (Joshua 19:15).
Yet Moshe Dayan knew and was prepared to acknowledge publicly that thename of his own settlement (moshav), Nahlal, was in fact a Hebrew
rendering of the name of the Palestinian Arabic village name it had
replaced, Mahlul; however, to give it a ‘biblical authenticity’, the Hebrewsounding Nahlal was linked by the Zionists to a name mentioned in the
Hebrew Bible. Also, Kibbutz Gvat, set up in 1926, was a Hebrew renderingof the former Arabic place name, the Palestinian village Jibta; Gvat alsoechoed the Aramaic name Gvata (meaning hill) and a biblical name in the
Galilee.
Central to the construction of Zionist collective identity, andsubsequently Israeli identity, based on ‘biblical memory’ was the Yishuv
toponymic projects established in the 1920s to ‘restore’ biblical Hebrew or
to create new biblical-sounding names of symbolic meaning to Zionist
redemption of the land and colonisation of Palestine (Ra’ad 2010: 189). In
the 1920s the Palestinian land of Wadi al-Hawarith18 in the coastal region
was purchased (‘redeemed’) by the Jewish National Fund from Arababsentee landlords, subsequently leading to the eviction of many Arabfarmers. The Jewish settlement of Kfar Haro’e was established in 1934 onthese lands. The Arabic name was rendered into the Hebrew-sounding
Emek Hefer (the Hefer Valley). In some cases the Zionist Hebrew
colonising toponymy simply translated Arabic names into Hebrew. In the
1920s a JNF Naming Committee was set up to name the newly established
Jewish colonies in Palestine to compete with the overwhelmingly Arabic
map of the country; its renaming efforts were appreciated by the British
Mandatory authorities and were incorporated into the Palestine
government’s official gazette (Benvenisti 2002: 26).
In the pre-1948 period many new Hebrew place names displaced theArabic names: for instance, the first Zionist settlement in Palestine, Petah
Tikva, was originally set up in 1878 (deserted and then re-established in1882), on the lands of, and eventually replacing, the destroyed Palestinianvillage of Mlabbis. Petah Tikva is known in Zionist historiography as Im

Hamoshavot – the ‘Mother of the Colonies’. The Zionist religious founders
stated that the name Petah Tikva came from the biblical prophecy of Hosea(2:17). The land of Petah Tikva was bought from two Arab absentee
landlords based in Jaffa, Salim al-Kassar and Anton al-Tayyan. Six decades
after the Nakba, Palestinian citizens of Israel still call the Jewish city ofPetah Tikva ‘Mlabbis’. The Zionist colony of Rehovot was founded in 1890
and was also called after a name mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, but whichstood at a completely different location in the Negev Desert. Rehovot was
set up by middle class Jewish businessmen and merchants on 10,000
dunums of land purchased from Arab landlords, displacing the Palestinianvillage of Khirbet Duran.
Secular Jewish Zionism was a classic case of the invention of a people inlate 19th century Europe and a project for synthesising a nation. This
invented tradition considered the Jews as a race and a biological group, andborrowed heavily from romantic nationalisms in Central and Eastern
Europe. Political Zionism mobilised an imagined biblical narrative which
was reworked in the late 19th century for the political purposes of a modern
European movement intent on colonising the land of Palestine. As aninvented late modern (European) tradition, Zionism was bound to be asynthesising project. As Israeli scholar Ronit Lentin has powerfully argued
in Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories ofSilence (2000), the Israeli masculinised and militarised nationalism has
been constructed in opposition to a ‘feminised’ Other. The founding fathersof Zionism reimagined the New Hebrew collectivity in total opposition to
the despised Jewish diaspora unable to resist European anti-Semitism which
led to the Holocaust. Zionism’s contempt for diaspora Jews and rejection ofa ‘feminised’ diaspora and its obsession with synthesising a nation isreflected in the fact that its symbols were an amalgam, chosen not only
from the Jewish religion and the militant parts of the Hebrew Bible but also
from diverse modern traditions and sources, symbols subsequently
appropriated as ‘Jewish nationalist’, Zionist or ‘Israeli’: the music ofIsrael’s national anthem, ha-Tikva, came from the Czech national musician,Smetana; much of the music used in nationalist Israeli songs originated in
Russian folk-songs; even the term for an Israeli-born Jew free of all the‘maladies and abnormalities of exile’ is in fact the Arabic word sabar,
Hebraicised as (masculine and tough) tzabar or sabra (Bresheeth 1989:131), the prickly pear grown in and around the hundreds of Palestinianvillages destroyed by Israel in 1948. Even the ‘national anthem of the Six
Day War’, No’ami Shemer’s song ‘Jerusalem of Gold’, was a plagiarised
copy of a Basque lullaby (Masalha 2007: 20, 39). Seeking to create an‘authentic, nativised’ identity, the East European Jewish colonists claimed
to represent an indigenous people returning to its homeland after 2000 yearsof absence; in fact Russian or Ukrainian nationals formed the hard core ofZionist activism.
From Palestinian Fuleh to Jewish Afula
Afula is an Israeli city in the northern district often known as the ‘Capital of
the Valley’ due to its strategic location in the Jezreel Valley (Marj ibn‘Amer). It was founded in 1925 by Zionist settlers after the purchase oflarge tracts (60,000 dunums) of Arab land from the Arab absentee landlordsof the Sursuk family in Beirut by Yehoshua Hankin (1864–1945), theRussian-born activist who was responsible for most of the major landpurchases for the Jewish Colonial Association in late Ottoman Palestine andearly Mandatory Palestine. These tracts became the site of numerous new
Zionist colonies, including Dayan’s Nahlal, Giva, Ein Harod, Kfar
Yehezkel, Beit Alfa and Tel Yosef, settlements which replaced several
Palestinian villages that disappeared from the map, some of which are
mentioned by Dayan above.
The etymology of the Zionist settler toponym Afula is derived from thename of the Palestinian Arab village al-Fuleh, which in 1226 Arabgeographer Yaqut al-Hamawi mentioned as being a town in the province ofJund Filastin. The Arabic toponym al-Fuleh is derived from the word ful,
for fava beans, which are among the oldest food plant in the Middle Eastand were widely cultivated by local Palestinians in Marj Ibn ‘Amer. The
Palestinian village of al-Fuleh itself was depopulated during the Mandatory
period. The 9500 dunums of land of al-Fuleh, which also became the site of
the Jewish settlement of Merhavya, marked the beginning of a bitter
struggle between the indigenous Palestinians and Zionist colonists over therights of Palestine tenant farmers who had been evicted and eventually led
to the eruption of the Palestrina peasant-based rebellion in 1936‒1939.
Reflecting on the internal Zionist ‘transfer’ debates, Berl Katznelson, one of
the most popular and influential leaders of the dominant Mapai party, had
this to say in a debate at the World Convention of Ihud Po’alei Tzion (thehighest forum of the dominant Zionist world labour movement), in August
1937:
The matter of population transfer has provoked a debate among us: Is it
permitted or forbidden? My conscience is absolutely clear in this respect.
A remote neighbour is better than a close enemy. They [the Palestinians]
will not lose from it. In the final analysis, this is a political andsettlement reform for the benefit of both parties. I have long been of theopinion that this is the best of all solutions ... I have always believed andstill believe that they were destined to be transferred to Syria or Iraq.
(Cited in Masalha 1992: 71)
A year later, at the Jewish Agency’s Executive Committee of June 1938,
Katznelson reiterated his support for a wholesale and ‘compulsory transfer’of the Palestinians and added: ‘Regarding the transfer of Arab individuals,
we are always doing this’ (cited in Masalha 1992: 114). In the early 1940s
Katzelson reminded his colleagues in Mapai that the wholesale evacuationof the Palestinians was the continuation of a natural process that had begun
when Zionist settlers had displaced Arab tenant farmers and residents withthe establishment of Kibbutz Merhavya on the land of al-Fuleh which had
led to a small-scale Arab ‘transfer’ (Masalha 1992: 130).
THE PURE ZIONIST SETTLER COLONY AND A
MONOLINGUAL MINDSET: FROM PALESTINIAN ARAB
MASHA AND SAJARA TO ISRAELI KFAR TAVOR ANDILANIYAThe Zionist settlement (moshava) of Kfar Tavor was founded in lower
Galilee in 1909 by the Jewish Colonisation Association for a group of
Ashkenazi settlers from Eastern Europe. The origin of the Hebrew name isneighbouring Mount Tabor (the name taken from Psalm 89:12). Throughout
the Mandatory period this settlement was better known to the Zionist
leadership of the Yishuv as Mescha, which was the Ashekenazi rendering of
the Palestinian Arabic toponym, Masha. The nearby Zionist settlement
Sejera (later renamed Ilaniya) was established a decade earlier, in 1900‒
1902, by the Zionist Colonisation Association. This too was an Ashkenazi
rendering of the Palestinian Arabic name Sajara (Palestinian dialect for‘tree’) for one of the earliest and most important Zionist settlements in
Palestine.
The issue of Hebraicising Arabic toponyms such as Masha was notalways a top priority of some of the fiercely secular early Zionist settler
leaders in Palestine. The establishment of the Technikum in Haifa – now theTechnion – by a secular German Zionist organisation at the beginning of the20th century and the controversy about the language of instruction (German
or Hebrew) marked the ‘War of the Languages’ (Margalit, S. 1994) in theZionist colony (Yishuv) in Palestine. Some leaders of the left-wing secularPo’ale Tzion Zionist movement, such as Ya’akov Zerubavel (born Ya’akov
Vitkin in the Ukraine, immigrated to Palestine in 1910), who was a Zionist
writer, publisher and editor of a Yiddish newspaper, were strong proponents
of Yiddish – a German dialect spoken by the Jewish communities of Central
and Eastern Europe – shared the view of many left-wing secular Zioniststhat Hebrew was the language of only a few Jewish intellectuals andtherefore not suitable for the party’s goal of reaching the primarily Yiddishspeaking masses in Eastern Europe (Chaver 2004: 97). Yiddish is thehistorical and literally the ‘mother language’ (mame-loshn) of the
Ashkenazi Jews, distinguishing it from the ‘holy tongue’ (loshn koydesh),meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. Yiddish takes most of its syntax andvocabulary from German but has loans from Slavic languages and Hebrew
and Aramaic. However, for most early Zionist settler leaders Yiddish wasclosely associated with the despised and feminised diaspora Ashkenazi
Judaism, while modern Hebrew represented the new masculinised settlercolonising Hebrew Man. Even Ya’akov Vitkin changed his family name to
Ya’akov Zerubavel. Thus the ‘War of the Languages’ in the early Yishuv
ended in victory for the ‘new Hebrew’, whose ascendancy was central to
the formulation of the ‘politico-social myths’ of Zionism (Azaryahu 1995),
of political Zionism and the construction of the militant Zionist Jewish‘national’ identity of the Yishuv colony.
Among the early Zionist workers in Sejara was David Grün, who
immigrated to Palestine from the Polish part of the Russian empire in 1906
and who later became known as David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), thefounding father of Israel and its first Prime Minister. The early Zionist
settlers, workers and leaders of Sejara and Mescha, mostly Russian or East
European nationals, created a Jewish defence organisation in Palestine:
Hashmor (Hebrew for ‘the Guard’), which was organised in 1909 bysocialist Zionists. This was disbanded during the Mandatory period after thefounding of the Haganah (Hebrew for ‘defence’) in 1920 from which theIsraeli army emerged in mid-1948. The indigenising and nativisingstrategies of early settlers and leaders of Hashomer included dressing up
like local Palestinian Arabs and cultivating an image of the Sabra, the ‘newJew’ or the New Hebrew Man, rebranded as a ‘native’, self-reliant andarmed Jew ‘rooted’ in the land of Palestine.
Throughout the British Mandatory period Sejara, like Mescha, remained
better known to the settlers and the entire Zionist leadership of the Yishuv
by its Arabic toponym (not its new Hebrew toponym Ilaniya), a place namewhich was based on the Arabic dialect of the adjacent Palestinian Arab
village al-Sharaja (‘tree’ in Arabic). The Palestinian village al-Sharaja wassubsequently destroyed by Haganah forces in 1948 and the Zionist colony
of Sejara is known in Israel today as Ilaniya, which is also the Hebrew
rendering of the Arabic toponym for ‘tree’.
JUDAISATION, HEBRAICISATION AND BIBLICISATIONSTRATEGIESThe Zionist colony of Gedera, located 13 kilometres south of Rehovot, wasfounded by Russian settlers in 1884, and like the colonies of Rehovot,
Afula and Hadera, the purchase of its lands from Palestinian landlords
involved Yehoshua Hankin. The Jewish Colonial Association gave Gedera a
Hebrew-sounding name (Hebrew: ‘wall’) after a site supposedly mentioned
in the Hebrew Bible. The name Hadera, on the other hand, clearlyoriginated from al-Khadra, and al-Khdeira in local Palestinian dialect,Arabic for ‘green’. Although this key Zionist colony (today a major Israelicity) was given a Hebrew-sounding name, this Zionist name makes
absolutely no sense in Hebrew (Bar On 1996: 38). The lands of the colonyof Gedera had been purchased with the help of the French consul in Jaffa,
Poliovierre. Local Palestinians of Qatra had been cultivating the land as
tenant farmers when the Jewish settlers arrived, and they resented the
intrusion onto what they still thought of as their land. Qatra was an ancient
Palestinian centre of political and economic authority that along with thirty
other urban sites in regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea had entered aperiod of decline in the late Bronze Age (Zevit 2003: 94) but flourishedthroughout the Islamic period. Archaeological excavations at Tel Qatra
discovered a pottery workshop for the manufacture of Gaza jars.
Etymologically the naming of Gedera by early Zionist settlers closely
followed Christian scriptural geography and biblical archaeology of the
19th century which worked from the narratives of the Bible. The ‘biblicallocation’ was first suggested by Victor Guérin (1868‒1880, 1881–1883), a
French biblical archaeologist and scriptural geographer who visited
Palestine several times and whose works often referred to passages from the
Hebrew Bible and Jewish sources such as the Mishna and Talmud as well asworks by contemporary scriptural explorers such as Edward Robinson, who– like the medieval Crusaders and pilgrims in Maurice Halbwachs’ La
Topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: étude de mémoire
collective (1941) – using the biblical narratives, decided, largely throughspeculation, that in more than a hundred biblical place names in Palestine,these were the origins of Arabic names used by the Palestinian fallahin(Robinson et al. 1860; Davis 2004: Macalister 1925). Guérin linked thename Gedera to the Palestinian village of Qatra (Fischer et al. 2008) which
was depopulated and destroyed by Jewish forces in 1948. During the British
Mandate of Palestine it was referred to by local Palestinians as Qatrat Islam
to distinguish it from the Jewish colony of Qatrat Yahud (Jewish Qatra) or
Gedera, as it was called by the Zionist settlers themselves. In the 1950s, aneighbourhood called Oriel (light of God) was established on the lands ofArab Qatra for new Jewish immigrants with visual impairments.
Central to the construction of Zionist collective memory – andsubsequently Israeli identity – based on ‘biblical memory’ was the Yishuv’s
memorialising toponymy project which was established in the 1920s to‘restore’ biblical Hebrew or to create new biblical-sounding names (Ra’ad
2010: 189). Both the JNF Naming Committee and the Israeli Governmental
Names Committee of the 1950s were generally guided by the biblicalgeography of Victor Guérin (1868‒1880, 1881–1883) and Edward
Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia
Petraea (1841), in which he had argued that the place names of Palestinianvillages and sites, seemingly Arab, were modern Arabic renderings of old
Hebraic names. An important part of the ‘New Hebrew’ identity was theZionist Hebrew toponymy and the Israeli maps which gradually replaced
the Palestinian Arabic names (Cohen and Kliot 1981, 1992; Kliot 1989;
Azaryahu and Golan 2001; Azaryahu and Kook 2002).

ZIONIST TOPONYMIC METHODS AND STRATEGIES IN THE
POST-NAKBA PERIOD: KEY FEATURES OF THE ISRAELIPLACE NAMES PROJECTS
Until 1948 the Zionists were not in control of the toponymic processes inPalestine. Following the mass ethnic cleaning of the Nakba and the Israeli
assumption of full control of nearly 80 per cent of historic Palestine, thecultural politics of naming was accelerated radically. State toponymic
projects were now used as tools to ensure the effectiveness of the deArabisation of Palestine. One of these tools consisted of the official Israeli
road signs, which are often in Hebrew, Arabic and English. But both the
Arabic and the English are transliterations of the new Hebrew place names– rather than reflecting the original Palestinian Arabic name. Of course theoverwhelming majority of Israelis cannot read Arabic; this is partly toremind the indigenous Palestinians inside Israel of the need to internalise
the new Hebrew place names or perhaps to seek the express approval of thevanishing Palestinian Arab (Shohat 2010: 264), making Arabs complicit in
the de-Arabisation of Palestine.
Key features and methods of Israeli Zionist renaming patterns andcreation of new place name in the post-Nakba period included:• The role of the Israeli Army: the Hebrew Names Committee of 1949 andindigenising of the European settlers.
• State-enforced projects: the Israeli Governmental Names Committee.
• The legendary toponymy of Zionist settlers and the medieval Crusaders.
• Toponymicide and the appropriation of Palestinian heritage; silencing of
the Palestinian past: mimicry, the de-Arabisation of Palestinian place
names and assertion of ownership.
• The creation of a usable past: the power/knowledge nexus.
• Judaisation strategies and the assertion of ownership: the superimpositionof biblical, Talmudic and Mishnaic names.
• Fashioning a new European landscape as a site of amnesia and erasure.
• Transliteration of new Hebrew place names and road signs into English
and Arabic, post-1967 occupation.

THE ISRAELI ARMY’S HEBREW NAMES COMMITTEE OF
1949: INDIGENISING THE EUROPEAN SETTLERS AND
SELF-RENAMING
British Jewish historian Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888–1960), who
immigrated to the UK in 1907, was a long-time Zionist and a close friend
and associate of Chaim Weizmann. He also worked as political secretary for
the Jewish Agency in Palestine (1929–1931). Namier was born Ludwik
Niemirowski in what is now part of Poland, and his devotion to Zionism did
not prevent the Anglicisation of his name. While name changing among
British or American Zionist Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe
became part of the process of Anglicisation or Americanisation, namechanging in Palestine among Zionist settlers began during the Mandatory
period and became an integral part of the Hebrewisation and biblicisation of
the immigrant settlers (Brisman 2000: 129). The initiative was begun by
Yitzhak ben-Tzvi, the second President of Israel, and by a directive written
by Ben-Gurion to army officers that it was their moral duty to Hebraicise
their names as an example. As a result the Army set up a Hebrew Names
Committee to propose Hebrew names to officers and soldiers in the Army.
A booklet was compiled by Mordechai Nimtsa-Bi (1903‒1949), the head of
the Names Committee. The compilers offered four groups of suggested
Hebrew name: family names, names of Taanim19 and Amoraim,20 biblicalnames and Hebrew personal names. A similar list was compiled a few years
later by Yaakov Arikha under the title, Behar likha shem mishpaha ‘Ivri(Select for yourself a Hebrew family name). The booklet, published in
Jerusalem in 1954 by the Israeli Academy for the Hebrew Language (which
had replaced the Hebrew language Committee of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, see
below) included advice on how to change family names, and lists of
Hebrew names serving as an example (Brisman 2000: 129).
HYBRIDITY, HEBRAICISING AND THE MYTH OF
RESTORATION: ELIEZER BEN-YEHUDA, THE COMMITTEE
OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE AND FOUNDING MYTHS OF
MODERN HEBREW
Although Eastern European Jewish settlers claimed to represent an
indigenous people returning to its homeland after 2000 years of absence, infact Russian nationals formed the hard core of Zionist activism. This selfre-indigenisation and copying from the Arabic language and Palestinian
Arab toponyms required a great deal of effort to create the mythological
New Hebrew Sabra Man and construct a new Jewish identity. No wonder,
for the early Zionist settlers were intent not only on ‘inventing a Land, andinventing a Nation’ (Rabkin 2010: 130), but also on inventing a new
language and identity. Reinventing their own new, Hebrew-imagined
biblical identity, the post-1948 period saw top Zionist leaders, army
commanders, biblical archaeologists and authors changing their names from
Russian, Polish and German to ‘authentic’ Hebrew-sounding (biblical)
names.
Despite the Semitisation of European Jews by linguistic and racial
theorists in the second half of the 19th century, in fact modern Hebrew wasinvented by Ashkenazi Zionists in the early 20th century not as a Semitic
language, but rather as a hybrid language, with European vocabulary andstrong European connections, a cultural space with which new settlers of
the Zionist colony (Yishuv) in Palestine felt at home. The Zionist Yishuv(‘pure colony’: Kimmerling 2003: 22) in Palestine became a new form of
exile for which a new, strongly European, new Hebrew provided one of the
key links to the old European cultural space.
However, for early European Zionist leaders, to build a new‘homeland’/state in Palestine required the invention of a new language andthe founding national myths and something altogether different – a new
secular modern Ashkenazi Hebrew language. Many early Zionists called
themselves ‘New Hebrews’ and not Jews, and, as we shall see below,
deliberately changed their European Yiddish, Russian. Polish or Germannames to sound more Hebraic, more biblical; for a well-known example,
David Grün initially became David Green after immigrating to Palestine,and subsequently David Ben-Gurion. However, the key inventor and‘father’ of modern Hebrew was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (formerly Lazar
Perelman) (1858–1922), who became a legendary hero of Zionism on a parwith the founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. As a cultural
Zionist, Ben-Yehuda regarded ‘modern Hebrew’ and Zionism as symbiotic.
He was hugely influential in the fashioning of a new Hebrew collective
identity rooted in an invented ‘ancient consciousness’. This was based on
the transformation of liturgical Hebrew from a dormant (almost dead)language to a new language spoken today by millions of Israelis. TodayBen-Yehuda is revered in Israel as the instigator of the Hebrew language‘resurrection’ and ‘revival’ and the creator of a modern Zionist vernacular.
Today Rehov Ben-Yehuda (Ben-Yehuda Street), in central West Jerusalem,
commemorates the creator of Israeli Hebrew.
But Ben-Yehuda was also the founding father of modern Hebrew and he
was responsible for its two myths:• The myth of Hebrew restoration.
• The myth that modern Hebrew is a Semitic language.
As we shall see below: modern Hebrew was in reality a new language: a
Semito-European hybrid. Ben-Yehuda himself saw himself not only as theinventor of modern Hebrew but also as an inventor of the ‘Jewish people’.21
He wrote: ‘There are two things without which the Jews will not become apeople [‘am]: the country [ha-aretz; i.e. Palestine] and the language [halashon].’HYBRIDISATION AND PATTERNS OF EARLY ZIONISTBORROWING FROM, AND MODELLING ON, ARABIC AND
ARAMAIC
Believing that Arabic and Aramaic have preserved the ancient character ofproto-Semitic language, Ben-Yehuda favoured a strong reliance upon
Arabic and Aramaic in the creation of modern Hebrew in Palestine,
although in reality modern Hebrew became a new Semito-European hybrid
language borrowing many words from Yiddish, Arabic, Aramaic, Ladino,
Latin, Greek, Polish, Russian, English and other European languages.
However, the patterns pursued by Ben-Yehuda, of borrowing from andmodelling on Arabic, built upon previous extensive Hebrew borrowings andmorphological modelling on Arabic that took place during the golden age ofArab Islamic civilisation. Although the influence of Arabic on modern
Hebrew cannot be attributed entirely to Ben-Yehuda or his Hebrew
Language Committee,22 many of the new words coined by Ben-Yehuda
under the influence of Arabic became part of the standard Hebrew languageof today.23 Examples of the Hebrew words coined by Ben-Yehuda on thebasis of Arabic words included qattar (‘locomotive’), which he borrowed
from the Arabic qitar; taarikh (‘date’), from the Arabic taarikh (‘history’,‘dating’); and adiv (‘polite’), which comes from the Arabic adib(‘cultured’).24 Morphological patterns modelled on Arabic are found in themodern Hebrew greeting boqer tov (‘good morning’) and its refrain boqeror (‘morning of light’), modelled after the Arabic sabah al-khair (‘goodmorning’) and saba an-nur (‘morning of light’) (Shehadeh 1998: 60).
It should be borne in mind that the reference here is not only to patternsof direct borrowings from Arabic, but also to loan translation: words
modelled closely after Arabic, consisting of the speech material of Arabic.
As we will see below, this modelling on and loan translation from Arabic
would subsequently have a major impact on the transformation ofPalestinian Arab toponyms into Israeli Hebrew toponyms by the Israeli
Names Committee.
Ben-Yehuda was born Lazar Perelman, in the Lithuanian village ofLuzhky, and attended a Talmudic school in Belarus in the Russian Empire.
A linguistic utopian and a secular linguistic Zionist, the most influential
lexicographer of the Zionist vernacular also borrowed many words fromliterary and colloquial Arabic, Greek, Aramaic and other languages. A
newspaper editor, Ben-Yehuda immigrated to Palestine in 1881 and became
the driving spirit behind this Zionist vernacular revolution (Stavans 2008;
Rabkin, 2006: 54–57; 2010: 132). At that time the Jews in Jerusalem spoke
Arabic, Yiddish and French. Ben-Yehuda set out to resurrect and develop a
new language that could replace Yiddish, in particular, and other languages
spoken by the European Zionist colonists in Palestine. He had studied
history and politics of the Middle East at the Sorbonne University in Parisand learned Palestinian colloquial Arabic. In the four years he spent at the
Sorbonne he took Hebrew classes. It was this experience in Paris, and his
exposure to the rise of French linguistic nationalism at the end of the 19th
century, that inspired Ben-Yehuda (Perelman) to attempt the ‘resurrection’of Hebrew as a practical and Zionist nationalist cultural project.
After arriving in Palestine in 1881, Lazar Perelman changed his name to
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (‘Son of Judah’) and became the first to use ‘modern
Hebrew’ as a vernacular and transform it from a biblical language and alanguage of liturgy (lashon hakodesh) into a ‘secular-nationalist’ modern
language. Ben-Yehuda’s second wife Paula Beila took the Hebrew nameHemda, and he raised his son, Ben-Tzion (‘son of Zion’), speaking only
modern Hebrew by totally isolating him and refusing to let him be exposed
to other languages during childhood.

Ben-Yehuda served as editor of a number of Hebrew-language
newspapers, including Ha-Tzvi (the Deer). The latter was closed down for ayear by the Ottoman authorities following fierce opposition from theOrthodox Jewish community of Jerusalem, which viewed his work as
sacrilegious. Jerusalem was a predominantly Arabic-speaking city, whose
Jewish residents spoke both Arabic and Yiddish and objected to the use ofthe ‘holy tongue’ (lashon hakodesh), Hebrew, for everyday conversation.
Other local Jews ridiculed the new Hebrew as a ‘fabricated’, hybrid
language.
In Jerusalem Ben-Yehuda became a central figure in the establishment of
the Hebrew Language Committee (Va’ad Ha-lashon ha- Ivrit). It was
initially set up in 1890, operated for one year, disbanded and then revived in
1904; Ben-Yehuda was its first president. Ben-Yeduda’s linguistic efforts
were crowned with success when the British colonial authorities inPalestine decided in 1922, under a Zionist Jewish High Commissioner,
Herbert Samuels, to recognise modern Hebrew as one of the three official
languages of British Mandatory Palestine, alongside Arabic and English.
Ben-Yehuda’s committee was replaced by the Israeli Academy of the
Hebrew Language, which was established following an Act of the Israeli
Knesset, passed on 27 August 1953, as ‘The Supreme Institute of the
Hebrew Language’ and located in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As
modern Hebrew became more widely spoken among East European Zionist
settlers in Palestine, the Hebrew Language Committee began to publish
bulletins and dictionaries and coined thousands of words that are in
everyday use today in Israel. The Committee’s President, Ben-Yehuda, also
compiled the first modern Hebrew dictionary. Ben-Yehuda argued that
Arabic, a living fellow Semitic language, rather than European languages,
should fill modern Hebrew lacunae, seeing Arabic as a major source formissing roots and new words in Hebrew (Shehadeh 1998: 61‒62). BenYehuda’s claims, made in a 1914 article entitled ‘Sources to Fill the
Lacunae in our Language’, echoed similar claims put forward by Western
biblical archaeologists and scriptural geographers in the 19th century suchas Edward Robinson and Victor Guérin. He wrote: ‘the majority of the roots
found in the Arabic vocabulary were once part of the Hebrew lexicon, andall of these roots are not foreign, nor are Arabic, but are ours, which we lostand have now found again’ (Ben-Yehuda 1914: 9; see also Blau 1981: 32).

Ben-Yehuda, then head of the Jerusalem-based Committee of the
Hebrew Language, insisted on the relevance of Arabic for reviving the deadlanguage of Hebrew and reinventing modern (Ashkenazi) Hebrew. JoshuaBlau, Professor Emeritus of Arabic Languages and Literature at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and President of the Israeli Academy of the
Hebrew Language (1981‒1993), writes that Ben-Yehuda insisted on theusefulness of living Arabic: ‘In order to supplement the deficiencies of the
Hebrew language, the Committee coins words according to the rules ofgrammar and linguistic analogy from Semitic roots: Aramaic and especiallyfrom Arabic roots’ (Blau 1981: 33).
SELF-INVENTION, SELF-INDIGENISATION AND SELFANTIQUATION: PERSONAL NAME CHANGING BY
MEMBERS OF THE PREDATORY ZIONIST ASHKENAZIELITE OF ISRAEL
The change from a Yiddish family name such as Perelman, to a Hebrew
family name such as Ben-Yehuda, provided many Zionist settlers in
Palestine with a prototype for emulation in a process of self-invention andself-indigenisation. This process also inspired Prime Minister and Defence
Minister David Ben-Gurion who used the Israeli army after 1948 to impose
general Hebraicisation and purification procedures of family and personalnames. Ben-Gurion himself was born David Grün in Russia; his mother wascalled Scheindel and his Russian-born wife was called Pauline Munweis
when she met and married Ben-Gurion in New York (she later changed hername to Paula); after immigrating to Palestine David Grün became DavidGreen; and he subsequently changed his family name to the biblicalsounding, and literally lionised and predatory, name David Ben-Gurion(literally ‘son of the lion cub’). He also chose a biblical-sounding name forhis daughter Geula (‘redemption’) and his son Amos, after a minor prophet
in the Hebrew Bible.
For Ben-Gurion, the invention of a Hebrew tradition and thesynthesising of a nation meant that the Hebrew Bible became not a religious
document or a repository of theological assertions; it was reinvented as anationalised and racialised sacred text central to the modern foundational
myths of secular Zionism. As a primordialist ideaology of secularnationalism, asserting the antiquity of Jewish nationalism (Smith, A. 1986,

1989: 340‒367), and inspired by Eurocentric völkisch and racial ideologies,
Ben-Gurion’s Zionism viewed the Bible in an entirely functional way: thebiblical language, narrative and place names functioned as a mobilising
myth and as an ‘historical account’ of Jews’ ‘title to the land’ – a claim notnecessarily borne out by recent archaeological findings. For Ben-Gurion, it
was not important whether the biblical narrative and place names were an
objective and true record of actual historical events and the past. It is notentirely clear whether Ben-Gurion assumed that the ancient events the
Israeli state was re-enacting had actually occurred. But, as he explains, ‘It is
not important whether the [biblical] story is a true record of an event or not.
What is of importance is that this is what the Jews believed as far back as
the period of the First Temple’ (Pearlman 1965: 227; also Rose 2004: 9).
Like Ben-Gurion, many secular labour Zionists displayed from the outset
a deeply ambivalent attitude towards religion. Although the movement’s
name is derived from the word ‘Zion’, which was originally the name of afortress in Jerusalem, Zionism reinvented Judaism and translated Jewish
themes into political action. Furthermore, Zionism had ambitions to create a
new Hebrew society that would be different from Jewish life in the diasporaand did not see multi-religious and pluralistic Jerusalem as the appropriate
place for the founding of such a new society. Not only was it full of aliens(native Palestinian Arabs), but it was also inhabited by the peaceful ‘old
Jewish Yishuv’, whose members were part of the anti-Zionist ultraOrthodox community. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Zionists preferred
to build the new (and pure) Jewish city of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean
coast, just outside the Palestinian city of Jaffa. Tel Aviv was founded in1910 in a region which, according to the Bible, was ruled by the Philistines(not the Israelites) from the 12th century BC onwards. It was named after aBabylonian city mentioned in Ezekiel (3:15). But the ethno-religious‘purity’ of the European Hebrew colony, the New Yishuv, was best
illustrated by the fact that during the Mandatory period its Zionist leaders
preferred to live in the demographically exclusive Tel Aviv rather than in
multi-religious Jerusalem or Jaffa.
Those Zionist immigrants who chose to live in Jerusalem settled outside
the historic city and built new Jewish neighbourhoods and the first Jewish
university: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tel Aviv remained home tothe (Hebrew) Histadrut and all the Hebrew daily papers, and while Zionist
leaders of the New Yishuv continued to swear by the name of Jerusalem,they did not live there and most of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine,
about 80 per cent, settled along the Mediterranean coast, a region that
(according to Avishai Margalit, of the Hebrew University) had never been
the historic homeland of the Jewish people.25
The invention of a new masculine collective memory was based onhegemonic state power: the ‘New Hebrew’ language, the ‘New Hebrew
Man’, a new and militarised society and an exclusively Jewish ‘Hebrew
City’ (Tel Aviv), a ‘New Yishuv’ settler colony, and the new and armed
Hebrew workers of the Histadrut, the General Federation of Hebrew
Workers in the Land of Israel. Established in 1920, the militarised Histadrut
and military service were central to the Zionist project of conquest. They
represented that newly constructed muscular and militant national identity.
The militarised Histadrut, in particular, dominated both the economic andmilitary-security infrastructure of the Zionist Yishuv and played a majorrole in immigration, land settlement and colonisation, economic activities,
labour employment and military organisation and defence (the Haganah),with trade union activity as only one part of its activities.26 Palestinian
citizens of Israel were not admitted as members until 1959. The Histadrut
became central to this drive designed to create a ‘New Settlement’ of bloodand common descent and redeem the ‘biblical soil’ by conquest. In the
1920s the Zionist Labour leadership also began to develop a boycott
strategy in Palestine. Thus, in 1929, Ben-Gurion wrote of the need for an‘Iron Wall of [Zionist] workers’ settlements surrounding every Hebrew cityand town, land and human bridge that would link isolated points’ and which
would be capable of enforcing the doctrine of exclusive ‘Hebrew labour’(‘avoda ‘ivrit) and ‘Hebrew soil’ (adama ‘ivrit) (Masalha 1992: 24‒25).
Although deeply secular, Ben-Gurion’s Zionism instrumentallyemphasised Jewish religion and Jewish ‘ethnicity’, promoted the cult andmythologies of ancient Israel and biblical battles, promoted the revival of aseemingly dead language, Hebrew, built up what became a powerful army,
surrounded its ‘ethnically’ exclusive, ‘pure’ colony, the Yishuv, with an‘Iron Wall’ (Shlaim 2000; Masalha 2000) and waged a bitter struggle forpolitical independence and territorial expansion throughout the land ofPalestine. In an article entitled: ‘(Re)naming the Landscape: The Formationof the Hebrew Map of Israel 1949–1960’, Israeli political geographers
Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan write:

The importance assigned to Hebrew as the language and culture ofnational revival was also manifest in the emphasis upon Hebrew purity
and Hebraicization procedures. Hebraicization included the introductionof Hebrew nomenclatures in various fields of scientific knowledge e.g.
botany or zoology. Of special political bearing and with far reaching
personal consequences was the Hebraicization of family names ofJewish immigrants. This measure belonged to the construction of a new
Hebrew identity. In the first years of Israeli independence, Ben-Gurion,
the founding father of modern Israel, used his authority to promote
Hebrew family names. In his capacity as a Defence Minister, he madethe Hebraicization of family names obligatory for Israeli officials serving
in representative positions e.g. high ranking army officers and diplomats.
(Azaryahu and Golan 2001: 182)
Anthroponomastics (or anthroponymy) is the study of personal names.
Zionist toponymic and anthroponymic projects were central to Zionist
settler-colonisation strategies in Palestine and these included not only
Hebrewisation, biblicisation and Judaisation of the country, but also selfindigenisation, self-antiquation. Personal names such Allon (oak; Arabic:
ballut) and Aloni (my oak) became very popular in Zionist settlers’indigenising strategies. ‘Palestine Oak’ (, Quercus Calliprinos)
and Pistacia Palaestina are internationally famous, indigenous trees
common to Palestine, the eastern Mediterranean region and the Levant(especially Palestine, Syria and Lebanon). ‘Pistacia Palaestina’ adds
brilliant red to the Galilee landscape. Of the three species of oak found inmodern Palestine, the ‘prickly evergreen oak’ (Quercus Coccifera) is themost abundant. It covers the rocky hills of Palestine with dense brushwoodof trees. And for many centuries the traditional Palestinian plough, used in
preparation for sowing seeds or to loosen or turn the soil, was made of oak
wood. Like the Palestinian olive tree, ‘Oak Palestine’ is another key symbolof Palestine and Palestinian life. The oak tree of Palestine played a majorpart in Palestinian stories for children and generally in Palestinian cultural
memory and folklore.
Within the Zionist strategies, there is a long list of Zionist leaders whoformally changed their names from Russian and East European to Hebrewsounding names. Many changed their names following Ben-Gurion’s
military directives after the establishment of Israel in 1948. While only asmall minority of East European Jews who had migrated to the US or
Britain chose voluntarily to anglicise their names, members of almost theentire Zionist elite of Israel were pressurised after May 1948 to change their
European names to ‘authentic’-sounding biblical ones. In fact this intensepressure was applied almost immediately after the establishment of Israel in
May 1948. It was applied top down by Prime Minister and Defence
Minister David Ben-Gurion, who effectively ordered all senior officers of
the Israeli army to change their European surnames. Yigael Sukenik, chiefof operations and acting chief of staff of the army in 1948, was the first tocomply: ‘On June 28, 1948, Ben-Gurion swore in the members of the IDF
high command, insisting that each one adopted a Hebrew last name. Since
most chose their Haganah code names, Yigael Sukenik became Yigael
Yadin’ (Pasachoff 1997: 220).
The following biblicisation list includes almost the entire political,
military and intellectual Israeli elite, left, right and centre:• David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Israeli Prime Minister and Defence
Minister, used the Israeli army after 1948 to impose general
Hebraicisation and purification of family and personal names. He wasborn David Grün in Russia; his mother was called Scheindel and his
Russian-born wife was called Pauline Munweis when she met andmarried him in New York (she later changed her name to Paula).
• Moshe Sharett was born Moshe Shertok in Russia in 1894; he became
Israel’s Foreign Minister in 1948; he chose to Hebraicise his last name in1949, following the creation of the State of Israel.
• Golda Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev in 1898; later called
Golda Meyerson. Interestingly, she Hebraicised her last name only after
she became Foreign Minister in 1956; she was Prime Minister 1969–1974.
• Yitzhak Shamir27 was born Icchak Jeziernicky in Eastern Poland in 1915;
he was Foreign Minister 1981–1982 and Prime Minister 1983–1984 and
1988–1992.
• Ariel Sharon was born Ariel Scheinermann in colonial Palestine in 1928
(to Shmuel and Vera, later Hebraicised to Dvora, immigrants to Palestinefrom Russia); he was Prime Minister 2001–2006.
• Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi was born in 1884 in the Ukraine as Yitzhak
Shimshelevich, the son of Tzvi Shimshelevich, who later took the nameTzvi Shimshi; he was the second President of Israel.
• Yigal Allon, Commander of the Palmah in 1948 and later acting Prime
Minister of Israel, was born Yigal Peikowitz in the settlement of Masha(Kfar Tavor). His father immigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe in
1890.
• Menahem Begin, the founder of the current ruling Likud party and thesixth Prime Minister of Israel, was born in Brest-Liovsk, then part of theRussian Empire, as Mieczysław Biegun.
• Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi’s wife, Rahel Yanait, born in the Ukraine as Golda
Lishansky and immigrated to Palestine in 1908. She was a labour Zionist
leader and a co-founder of the Greater Land of Israel Movement in 1967.
Apparently she Hebraicised her name to Rahel Yanait in memory of the
Hasmonean King Alexander Jannaeus (Hellenised name of Alexander
Yannai) (126–76 BC), a territorial expansionist, who during a twentyseven-year reign was almost constantly involved in military conflict andwho enlarged the Hasmonean Kingdom. Her two sons, born during the
British Mandatory period, were given biblical names: Amram, named
after the father of Moses and Aaron, and Eli, named after the High Priest
Eli.
• Levi Eshkol was born in the Ukraine in 1895 as Levi Skolnik; he was
Israel’s third Prime Minister, 1963–1999.
• Pinhas Lavon (1904–1976) was born Pinhas Lubianiker in what is now
Ukraine and moved to Palestine in 1929; he was Defence Minister in1954 and labour leader.
• Yitzhak Ben-Aharon (1906–2006) was an Israeli politician who became ageneral secretary of the Histadrut and held a cabinet post. He was born
Yitzhak Nussenbaum in what is today Romania and immigrated toPalestine in 1928.
• Dov Yosef (1899‒1980, an Israeli Labour politician who held ministerial
positions in nine Israeli governments, was born Bernard Joseph inMontreal, Canada.
• David Remez was born David Drabkin in Belarus in 1886; he was
Israel’s first Minister of Transportation.
• Zalman Shazar, the third President of Israel (from 1963 to 1973), who
immigrated to Palestine in 1921, was born in the Russian empire as
Shneur Zalman Rubashov.

• Pinhas Rutenberg (1879–1942), a prominent Zionist leader and thefounder of the Palestine Electric Company, which became the Israel
Electric Corporation, was born in the Ukraine as Pyotr Moiseyevich
Rutenberg.
• Avraham Granot (1890–1962), Director-General of the Jewish National
Fund and later chairman of its board, was born in today’s Moldova as
Abraham Granovsky; he changed his name after 1948.
• Fayge Ilanit (1909‒2002) was an Israeli Mapam politician born in the
Russian Empire as Fayge Hindes, to Sharaga Hindes and Hannah Shkop.
She immigrated to Palestine in 1929.
• Shimon Peres was born in Poland in 1923 as Szymon Perski; he was
Israel’s eighth Prime Minister and in 2007 was elected as its ninth
President.
• Right-wing Russian Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky (1880–1940), thefounder of Revisionist Zionism, changed his name from Vladimir
Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky during the Mandatory period, choosing apredatory name: Zeev (‘wolf’).
• Prominent Labour leader Haim Arlozoroff (1899–1933) was born Vitaly
Arlozoroff.
• General Yigael Yadin (1917–1984), the army’s second chief of staff and afounding father of Israeli biblical archaeology, was born Yigal Sukenik;
he was ordered to change his surname by Ben-Gurion after May 1948.
• Eliahu Elat (1903–1990), an Israeli diplomat and Orientalist and the first
Israeli ambassador to the United States, was born Eliahu Epstein in
Russia and immigrated to Palestine in 1924.
• Yisrael Galili (1911‒1986) was an Israeli government minister. Before
1948 he had served as chief of staff of the Haganah. He was born Yisrael
Berchenko in today’s Ukraine.
• Meir Amit (1921–2009) was an Israeli politician and cabinet minister andhead of the Mossad from 1963 to 1968. He was born in Mandatory
Palestine as Meir Slutsky to settler parents from Russia.
• Meir Argov (1905–1963), Israeli politician and a signatory of the Israeli
Declaration of Independence, was born Meyer Grabovsky born in
Moldova (then Russian empire) and changed his name after 1948.
• Pinhas Rosen (1887‒1978), the first Israeli Minister of Justice and asignatory to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, was born in German

as Felix Rosenbluth and changed his name after 1948.
• Abba Hushi (1898–1969), an Israeli politician and mayor of Haifa foreighteen years, was born Abba Schneller (also Aba Khoushy) in Poland
and immigrated to Palestine in 1920.
• Mordechai Bentov (1900‒1985) was a politician and cabinet minister. He
was born in the Russian Empire as Mordechai Gutgeld and immigrated toPalestine in 1920.
• Peretz Bernstein (1890‒1971) was a Zionist leader, Israeli politician andone of the signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.
He was born in Germany as Fritz Bernstein, immigrated to Palestine in1936 and changed his name after the establishment of Israel.
• Avraham Granot (1890–1962), Israeli politician, chairman of the JNF
Board of Directors and a signatory of the Israeli Declaration of
Independence, was born in (today) Moldova as Abraham Granovsky; heimmigrated to Palestine in 1924, and changed his name after 1948.
• Mordechai Bentov (1900‒1985), Israeli journalist and politician, wasborn Mordechai Gutgeld in Poland and immigrated to Palestine in the
Mandatory period.
• Herzl Vardi (1903–1991), Israeli politician, a signatory of the Israeli
Declaration of Independence and editor of the Israeli daily Yediot
Aharonot, was born Herzl Rosenblum in Lithuania and changed his nameafter 1948.
• Professor Benyamin Mazar, co-founder of Israeli biblical archaeology,
was born Benyamin Maisler in Poland and was educated in Germany; heimmigrated to colonial Palestine in 1929 and Hebraicised his name.
• Yitzhak Sadeh (1890–1952), commander of the Haganah’s strike force,the Palmah, and one of the key army commanders in 1948, was born in
Russia as Isaac Landsberg.
• General Yitzhak Rabin, the first native-born Israeli Prime Minister,
1974–1977 and 1992–1995, was born Nehemiah Rubitzov in Jerusalem
to a Zionist settler from the Ukraine.
• General Yigal Allon (1918–1980), commander of the Palmah in 1948,
government minister and acting Prime Minister of Israel, best known as
the architect of the Allon Plan, was born in Palestine as Yigal Paicovitch.
His grandfather was one of the early East European settlers whoimmigrated to Palestine in the 1880s. After Israel was proclaimed in 1948
he changed his name to the Hebrew Allon (‘oak’ tree).
• Ephraim Katzir (1916–2009), the fourth President of Israel from 1973 to
1978, was born Efraim Katchalski, son of Yehuda and Tzila Katchalski,
in Kiev and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1925.
• Abba Eban (1915‒2002), Israeli Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime
Minister, was born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban in Cape Town, South
Africa, to Lithuanian Jewish parents; in 1947, after immigrating to
Mandatory Palestine, he changed his first name to Abba (Hebrew: father)
Solomon Meir Eban.
• General Tzvi Tzur (1923–2004), the Israeli army’s sixth chief of staff,
was born in the Zaslav in the Soviet Union as Czera Czertenko.
• General Haim Bar-Lev, army chief of staff in 1968–1971 and later agovernment minister, was born Haim Brotzlewsky in Vienna in 1924.
• Ben-Tzion Dinur (1884–1973), Israel’s Minister of Education andCulture in the 1950s, was born Ben-Tzion Dinaburg in the Ukraine andimmigrated to Palestine in 1921.
• General Moshe Ya’alon, former army chief of staff, was born in Israel in1950 as Moshe Smilansky.
• Prominent Israeli author and journalist Amos Elon (1926–2009) was bornin Vienna as Amos Sternbach.
• Yisrael Bar-Yehuda (1895–1965) was an Israeli labour politician who
held a number of ministerial posts; he was born Yisrael Idelson inpresent-day Ukraine and immigrated to Palestine in 1926.
• Israel’s leading novelist Amoz Oz was born in Mandatory Palestine in1939 as Amos Klausner. His parents, Yehuda Klausner and Fania
Mussman, were Zionist immigrants to Mandatory Palestine from Eastern
Europe.
• Gershom Scholem, a German-born Jewish philosopher and historian andthe founder of the modern academic study of Kabbalah (Jewish
mysticism), was born Gerhard Scholem; he changed his name toGershom Scholem after he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1923.
• Moshe Kol (1911‒1989), Israeli politician and a signatory of the Israeli
Declaration of Independence, was born Moshe Kolodny in Pinsk(Russian Empire) and changed his name after 1948.

• Avraham Nissan was a Zionist political figure in Mandatory Palestine
and a signatory to the Israeli Independence Declaration in 1948: He wasborn Avraham Katznelson in 1888 in what is now Belarus and changed
his name after 1948.
• Tzvi Shiloah (1911‒2000), an Israeli Labour (Mapai) politician, who was
one of the founders of the Whole Land of Israel Movement after 1967and served as a member of the Knesset for Tehiya in the 1980s, was born
Tzvi Langsam in the Ukraine and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in1932.
• Ben-Tzion Sternberg (1894–1962), a Zionist activist and a signatory to
the Israeli Declaration of Independence, was born Benno Sternberg in theAustro-Hungarian empire.
• Yigal Tumarkin, a German-born Israeli artist known for his memorial
sculpture of the Holocaust in Tel Aviv, was born in Dresden in 1993 as
Peter Martin Gregor Heinrich Hellberg.
• Israel’s greatest poet, Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) (Hebrew for ‘Praise
my people alive’), was born in Germany as Ludwig Pfeuffer. He
immigrated to colonial Palestine in 1935 and subsequently joined thePalmah and the Haganah. In 1947 he was still known as Yehuda Pfeuffer.
• Amos Kenan (1927–2009), an Israeli columnist and novelist, was born
Amos Levine in Tel Aviv in 1927 and changed his family name after
1948.
• Peretz Bernstein (1890–1971), Israeli politician and one of the signatoriesof the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, was born inGermany as Fritz Bernstein and changed his name after 1948.
• Israeli Jewish communist leader, Meir Vilner (1918–2003), who began
his political life as one of the leaders of the Zionist left-wing group
Hashmer Hatzair and became a signatory to the Israeli Declaration of
Independence in May 1948 under the name Meir Vilner-Kovner, wasborn Ber Kovner in Lithuania and immigrated to Palestine in the late
1930s.
• Abba Kovner, Meir Vilner-Kovner’s cousin, was a well-known Israeli
Zionist poet born in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. Abba Kovner’s
mother, Rosa Taubman changed her name to Rachel Kovner after
immigrating to Palestine.

• Ya’akov Zerubavel, Zionist writer, publisher and one of the leaders of the
Poale Tzion movement, was born Ya’akov Vitkin in the Ukraine.
• Historian Ben-Tzion Netanyahu, a Polish immigrant to the United States
and the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin(Miliekowsky) Netanyahu, was born in Poland as Ben-Tzion (‘son ofZion’) Mileikowsky in 1910.
• Reuven Aloni (1919–1988), founder of the Israel Land Administration,an Israeli government authority responsible for managing land in Israel
which manages 93% of the land in Israel, was born Reuven Rolanitzki.
He was also the husband of Shulamit Aloni, born Shulamit Adler.
• Shulamit Aloni (1928–2014), born Shulamit Adler, was an Israeli
politician and leader of the Meretz party and served as Education
Minister from 1992 to 1993. Adler’s father descended from a Polishfamily.
• Yosef Aharon Almogi (1910–1991), a Labour politician who served as amember of the Knesset between 1955 and 1977 and held several
ministerial posts, was born Josef Karlenboim in the Russian Empire(today in Poland), and immigrated to Palestine in 1930.
• David Magen (born David Monsonego in 1945) is a former Israeli
politician who held a number of ministerial posts in 1990s; he arrived
from Morocco in 1949.
• Zalman Aran (1899–1970) was an Israeli politician. He was born Zalman
Aharonowitz in the Ukraine and arrived in Palestine in 1926.
• Aharon Barak, President of the Israeli Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006
and the Attorney General of Israel (1975–1978), was born Aharon Brickin Lithuania in 1936. His father, Tzvi Brick, arrived in Palestine in 1947.
• Yitzhak Moda’i (1926–1998) was an politician and Knesset member; hewas born Yitzhak Madzovitch in Mandatory Palestine.
• Yehuda Amital (1924–2010) was a Zionist Rabbi, cabinet minister andhead of Yeshivat Har Etzion in the West Bank, established in 1968. Heborn Yehuda Klein in Romania and arrived in Palestine in 1944.
• Ehud Barak (born in 1942) is an Israeli politician who served as Prime
Minister from 1999 to 2001 and earlier as chief of staff of the army. He
was the son of Yisrael Mendel Brog (1910–2002), born to a family which
immigrated from the Russian Empire. Ehud Brog Hebrewised his familyname from Brog to Barak in 1972.

• Yosef (Joseph) ‘Tommy’ Lapid (1931–2008) was born Tomislav Lampel(Томислав Лампел) in Serbia. He was an Israeli journalist, politician andgovernment minister.
• Naomi Chazan (born Naomi Harman in Mandatory Palestine in 1946) is
an Israeli academic and politician. She is the daughter of Avraham
Harman, an Israeli ambassador to the US. Harman was born in London
and immigrated to Palestine in 1938.
• Rachel Cohen-Kagan (1888–1982) was an Israeli politician, and one of
only two women to sign the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.
She was born Rachel Lubersky in today’s Ukraine and immigrated toPalestine in 1919.
• Yehuda Karmon (1912‒1995), Professor of Geography at the Hebrew
University, was born Leopold Kaufman in Poland and moved to Palestinein 1938.
• Hanoch Bartov (died in 2016), a prominent Israeli author and journalist
who also served as a cultural advisor in the Israeli embassy in London,
was born Hanoch Helfgott in Palestine in 1926, a year after his parents
immigrated from Poland.
Evidently many of these name changes took place around or shortly after
1948. During the Mandatory period, it was still advantageous forindividuals to have their original European names.
The above list also shows senior officers and army chiefs of staffs(Hebrew: rav alufs) adopting Hebrew-sounding names in the post-1948
period. Ironically, although in the Hebrew Bible the Philistines areconstructed as the Other and arch enemy of the Israelites, since 1948 aPhilistine term such as seren (a lord) has been used by the Israeli army as arank equivalent to captain. Also, the terms aluf and rav aluf (major generaland lieutenant general, respectively), which have been used for the twohighest ranks in the army, are apparently from the New Testament. In the
New Testament aluf (‘chief’, the one who commands a ‘thousand people’)
was a rank of nobility among the Idumites, identified by some scholars to
be of Nabataean Arab origins, and often depicted as the Israelites’
inveterate enemies whom the Hebrew prophets denounced violently.
Since 1948 the Israeli state has encouraged a conception of an
ethnocentric identity on the basis of the traditions of land and conquest of
the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Joshua, and those dealing with thebiblical Israelites’ origins that demanded the subjugation and destruction ofother peoples. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Book of Joshua isrequired reading in Israeli schools. In fact, the Book of Joshua is a work offiction and the Israelite‘conquest’ was not the‘Blitzkrieg’it is made out tobe in the Book of Joshua. But this book holds an important place in the
Israeli school curricula and Israeli academic programmes partly because thefounding fathers of Zionism viewed Joshua’s narrative of conquest as aprecedent for the establishment of Israel as a nation (Burge 2003: 82).
Although the account of the Israelites’ enslavement in ancient Egypt as
described in the Book of Exodus is generally recognised as a myth, inIsraeli schools and universities this is treated as actual history.
Furthermore, since 1948 Israeli academic institutions have continued thesame colonialist tradition of intelligence gathering and data collection. The
Israeli army and Israeli biblical academy, in particular, have always been
intimately connected to and close partners in nation-building. Engagementin nationalist mobilisation, using the Bible and myth-making throughspurious scholarly activity involves a large number of Israeli academics andsocial scientists, in particular archaeologists, political geographers andOrientalists. The involvement of Israeli academic institutions with theGovernmental Names Committee (below), which has operated since theearly 1950s, and continues to do so, from the Israeli Prime Minister’s
Office, is perhaps the best example of academic complicity in the
production of knowledge through myth-making.
TOPONYMS ‘FROM ABOVE’ AND STATE-SUPERVISEDPROJECTS: THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENTAL NAMESCOMMITTEE
Post-1948 Zionist projects concentrated on the Hebraicisation/Judaisationof Palestinian geography and toponymy through the practice of renamingsites, places and events. The Hebraicisation project deployed renaming toconstruct new places and new geographic identities related to supposed
biblical places. The ‘new Hebrew’ names embodied an ideological drive
and political attributes that could be consciously mobilised by the Zionist
hegemonic project. The official project began with the appointment of theGovernmental Names Committee (Va’adat Hashemot Hamimshaltit) by
Prime Minister Ben-Gurion in July 1949. Ben-Gurion had visited theNaqab/Negev in June and had been struck by the fact that no Hebrew names
existed for geographical sites in the region. The 11 June 1949 entry for his
War Diary reads: ‘Eilat ... we drove through the open spaces of the Arava ...
from ‘Ein Husb ... to ‘Ein Wahba ... We must give Hebrew names to theseplaces – ancient names, if there are, and if not, new ones!’ (Ben-Gurion
1982, Vol. 3: 989).
In the immediate post-Nakba period, Israeli archaeologists and membersof the Israeli Exploration Society on the Governmental Names Committee
concentrated their initial efforts on the creation of a new map for the newly
occupied ‘Negev’ (Abu El-Haj 2001: 91–94). Commissioned to create
Hebrew names for the newly occupied Palestinian landscape, throughout
the documents produced by this committee were reported references to‘foreign names’. The Israeli public was called upon ‘to uproot the foreignand existing names’ and in their place ‘to master’ the new Hebrew names.
Most existing names were Arabic. Charged with the task of erasing
hundreds of Arabic place names and creating Hebrew names in the Negev,
the committee held its first meeting on 18 July and subsequently met threetimes a month for a ten-month period and assigned Hebrew names to 561
different geographical features in the Negev – mountains, valleys, springs
and waterholes – using the Bible as a resource. Despite the obliteration ofmany ancient Arabic names from the Negev landscape, some Arabic names
became similar-sounding Hebrew names: for example, Seil ‘Imran became
Nahal Amram, apparently recalling the father of Moses and Aaron; theArabic Jabal Haruf (Mount Haruf) became Har Harif (Sharp Mountain),Jabal Dibba (Hump Hill) became Har Dla’at (Mount Pumpkin). Afterrejecting the name Har Geshur, after the people to whom King David’s third
wife belonged, as a Hebrew appellation for the Arabic Jabal ‘Ideid(Sprawling Mountain), the committee decided to call it Har Karkom (Mount
Crocus), because crocuses grow in the Negev.28 However, the sound of the
Arabic name ‘Ideid was retained for the nearby springs, which are now
called Beerot Oded (the Wells of Oded), supposedly after the biblicalprophet of the same name. In its report of March 1956 the Israeli
Government Names Committee stated:
In the summarised period 145 names were adopted for antiquities sites,
ruins and tells [Arabic for hills or archaeological mounds]: eight names
were determined on the basis of historical identification, 16 according togeographical names in the area, eight according to the meaning of the
Arabic words, and the decisive majority of the names (113) were
determined by mimicking the sounds of the Arabic words, a partial orcomplete mimicking, in order to give the new name a Hebrew character,following the [accepted] grammatical and voweling rules. (Quoted in
Abu El-Haj 2001: 95)29
In Hidden Histories, Palestinian scholar Basem Ra’ad (2010), citing a
1988 study, Toponymie Palestinienne: Plaine de St. Jean d’Acre et corridor
de Jerusalem, by Thomas Thompson, Francolino Goncalves and J. M. van
Cangh, shows that the Israeli toponymy committees went far beyond their
original mandates:
There was simply not enough [biblical] tradition to go by, so [theproject] could only continue by picking out Biblical or Jewish
associations at random. It had to Hebrewise Arabic names, or in othercases translate Arabic to Hebrew to give the location an ideologicallyconsistent identity. For example, some locations were rendered from
Arabic into the Hebrew phonetic system: Minet el-Muserifa became
Horvat Mishrafot Yam and Khirbet el Musherifa was changed to Horvat
Masref. Sometimes, in this artificial process, the committees forgot
about certain genuine Jewish traditions, as in the case of the totalcancelling of the Arabic name Khirbet Hanuta, not recognising that itprobably rendered the Talmudic Khanotah. This forced exercise of renaming often even went against Biblical tradition, most notably inerasing the Arabic names Yalu and ‘Imwas [after 1967]. Yalu became
Ayallon, while ‘Imwas, Western Emmaus, associated with the Christ
story, was one of the three villages, along with Beit Nuba, razed in 1967.
The old stones from the villages were sold to Jewish contractors to lend
local tradition and age to new buildings elsewhere, and the whole area
was turned into the tragic Canada Park, made possible by millions froma Canadian donor. (Ra’ad 2010: 188–189; Thompson et al. 1988)
THE LEGENDARY TOPONYMY OF ZIONIST SETTLERS AND
THE LATIN MEDIEVAL CRUSADERS

Israeli renaming committees followed the methods of Christian scripturalgeographers and biblical archaeologists of the 19th century such as Victor
Guérin and Edward Robinson who, like the Latin medieval Crusader
pilgrims in Maurice Halbwachs’ La Topographie légendaire des évangiles
en terre sainte: étude de mémoire collective (1941), ‘discovered’, produced
and reproduced particular place names from the myth narratives of the
Bible, Talmud and Mishna.
Toponymicide, mimicry and de-Arabisation: appropriating
Palestinian heritage, erasing the Palestinian past
The Palestinians share common experiences with other indigenous peoples
who had their self-determination and narrative denied, their material culture
destroyed and their histories erased, retold, reinvented or distorted by
European white settlers and colonisers. In The Invasion of America (1975),
Francis Jennings highlighted the hegemonic narratives of the European
white settlers by pointing out that for generations historians wrote about theindigenous peoples of America from an attitude of cultural superiority thaterased or distorted the actual history of the indigenous peoples and theirrelations with the European settlers. In Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith
argues that the impact of European settler-colonisation is continuing to hurtand destroy indigenous peoples; that the negation of indigenous views ofhistory played a crucial role in asserting colonial ideology, partly because
indigenous views were regarded as incorrect or primitive, but primarily
because ‘they challenged and resisted the mission of colonisation’ (Smith,L. 1999: 29). She states:
Under colonialism indigenous peoples have struggled against a Westernview of history and yet been complicit with the view. We have often
allowed our ‘histories’ to be told and have then become outsiders as weheard them being retold ... Maps of the world reinforced our place on the
periphery of the world, although we were still considered part of the
Empire. This included having to learn new names for our lands. Othersymbols of our loyalty, such as the flag, were also an integral part of theimperial curriculum. Our orientation to the world was already being
redefined as we were being excluded systematically from the writing of
the history of our own lands. (Smith, L. 1999: 33)

Although continuing some of the pre-Nakba patterns, Zionist toponymic
strategies in the post-Nakba period pursued more drastic memoricide anderasure and the detachment of the Palestinians from their history. With thephysical destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns during
and after 1948, the Israeli state now focused on the erasure of indigenous
Palestinian toponymic memory from history and geography. The physicaldisappearance of Palestine in 1948, the deletion of the demographic andpolitical realities of historic Palestine and the erasure of Palestinians from
history centred on certain key issues, the most important of which is thecontest between a ‘denial’ and an ‘affirmation’ (Said 1980; Abu-Lughod etal. 1991). The deletion of historic Palestine from maps and cartography was
not only designed to strengthen the newly created state but also to
consolidate the myth of the ‘unbroken link’ between the days of the‘biblical Israelites’ and the modern Israeli state. Commenting on thesystematic silencing of the Palestinian past, historian Ilan Pappe, in The
Ethnic Cleaning of Palestine, deploys the doctrine of cultural memoricide,where he highlights the systematic scholarly, political and military attemptin post-1948 Israel to de-Arabise the Palestinian terrain, its names, spaces,
religious sites, its villages, towns and cityscapes, and its cemeteries, fields,
and olive and orange groves, and the fruit called Saber (cactus), the prickly
pears famously grown in and around Arab villages and cultivated in Arabgardens in Palestine. Pappe conceives of a metaphorical palimpsest at work
here, the erasure of the history of one people in order to write that ofanother people over it; the reduction of many layers to a single layer (Pappe
2006: 225–234).
In the post-Nakba period, some of the features of the Israeli renaming
strategy closely followed pre-1948 practices of appropriation of PalestinianArabic toponyms and mimicry. The historic Arabic names of geographicalsites were replaced by evoked biblical or Talmudic names and newly coined
Hebrew names, some of which vaguely resembled biblical names. It has
already been shown that the replacement of Arabic places and the renamingof Palestine’s geographical sites followed roughly the guidelines suggested
in the 19th century by Edward Robinson (1841; Robinson et al. 1860). The
obsession with biblical archaeology and scriptural geography transformed
Palestinian Arabic place names, Palestinian geographical sites and thePalestinian landscape into subjects of Zionist mimicry and camouflaging(Yacobi 2009: 115). From the 19th century and throughout the first half ofthe 20th century Western colonialist imagination, biblical landscapepainting, fantasy and exotic travel accounts, Orientalist biblical scholarship,
Holy Land archaeology, cartography and scriptural geography have been
critical to the success of the Western colonial enterprise in the Middle East,
recreating the ‘Biblelands’, reinventing ahistorical-primordial Hebrew
ethnicity, while at the same time silencing Palestinian history and deArabising Palestinian toponomy (Masalha 2007; Whitelam 1996; Long
1997, 2003).
Israel’s biblical industry, with its Hebrew renaming projects, wasembedded in this richly endowed and massively financed colonial tradition.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe remarks:[In 1948–1949 the land] changed beyond recognition. The countryside,
the rural heart of Palestine, with its colourful and picturesque villages,
was ruined. Half the villages had been destroyed, flattened by Israeli
bulldozers which had been at work since August 1948 when thegovernment had decided to either turn them into cultivated land or tobuild new Jewish settlements on their remains. A naming committee
granted the new settlements Hebraized [sic] versions of the original Arab
names: Lubya became Lavi, and Safuria [Saffuriyah] Zipori [Tzipori] …
David Ben-Gurion explained that this was done as part of an attempt toprevent future claim to the villages. It was also supported by the Israeliarchaeologists, who had authorized the names as returning the map tosomething resembling ‘ancient Israel’. (Pappe 2004: 138–139)
Jewish settlements were established on the land of the depopulated anddestroyed Palestinian villages. In many cases these settlements took thenames of the original Palestinian villages and distorted them into Hebrewsounding names. This massive appropriation of Palestinian heritage
provided support for the European Jewish colonisers’ claim to represent an
indigenous people returning to its homeland after 2000 years of exile. For
instance, the Jewish settlement that replaced the large and wealthy village
of Beit Dajan (the Philistine ‘House of Dagon’; with 5000 inhabitants in1948) was named Beit Dagon; founded in 1948; Kibbutz Sa’sa’ was built
on Sa’sa’ village; the cooperative moshav of ‘Amka on the land of ‘Amqa
village (Wakim 2001a, 2001b; Boqa’i 2005: 73). Al-Kabri in the Galilee
was renamed Kabri; al-Bassa village was renamed Batzat; al-Mujaydil

village (near Nazareth) was renamed Migdal Haemek (Tower of the Valley).
In the region of Tiberias alone there were twenty-seven Arab villages in thepre-1948 period; twenty-five of them, including Dalhamiya, Abu Shusha,
Kafr Sabt, Lubya, al-Shajara, al-Majdal and Hittin, were destroyed byIsrael. The name Hittin – where Saladin (in Arabic: Salah al-Din) famously
defeated the Latin Crusaders in the Battle of Hattin in 1187, leading to thesiege and defeat of the Crusaders who controlled Jerusalem – was changed
to the Hebrew-sounding Kfar Hittim (Village of Wheat). In 2008 the Israel
Land Authority, which controls Palestinian refugee property, gave some ofthe village’s land to a new development project: a $150 million private golf
resort, which was to have an eighteen-hole championship golf course,
designed by the American Robert Trent Jones Jr. Nearby, the road toTiberias was named the Menachem Begin Boulevard; heavy iron bars wereplaced over the entrance to Hittin’s ruined mosque, and the staircase leading
to its minaret was blocked (Levy 2004).
In Marj Ibn ‘Amer (the Jezreel Valley) Kibbutz Ein Dor (Dor Spring)
was founded in 1948 by members of the socialist Zionist Hashomer
Hatza’ir (later Mapam) youth movement and settlers from Hungary and theUnited States. It was founded on the land of the depopulated and destroyed
village of Indur, located 10 kilometres south-east of Nazareth. Whether or
not the Arabic name preserved the ancient Indur, a Canaanite city, is notclear. After 1948 many of the inhabitants became internal refugees in Israel(‘present absentees’, according to Israeli law) and acquired Israeli
citizenship, but were not allowed to return to Indur. In accordance with thecommon Zionist practice of bestowing biblical names on modern sites andcommunities, the atheist settlers of Hashomer Hatza’ir appropriated theArabic name, claiming that Ein Dor was named after a village mentioned in
Samuel (28:3‒19). However, it is by no means certain that the kibbutz’s
location is anywhere near to where the ‘biblical village’ stood. An
archaeological museum at the kibbutz contains prehistoric findings from thearea.
In the centre of the country the once thriving ancient Palestinian town of
Beit Jibrin, 20 kilometres north-west of the city of al-Khalil, was destroyedby the Israeli army in 1948. The city’s Aramaic name was Beth Gabra,
which translates as the ‘house of [strong] men’; in Arabic Beir Jibrin alsomeans ‘house of the powerful’, possibly reflecting its original Aramaic
name; the Hebrew-sounding kibbutz of Beit Guvrin (House of Men), named

after a Talmudic tradition, was established on Beit Jibrin’s lands in 1949, by
soldiers who left the Palmah and Israeli army. Today Byzantine andCrusader remains survive and are protected as an archaeological site underthe Hebrew name of Beit Guvrin; the Arab Islamic heritage of the site iscompletely ignored.
Examples of appropriation of Arabic toponyms and mimicry
The influence of Palestinian Arabic toponyms on the Israeli toponyms areclear in loan Arabic place names, translations of Arabic place names andmorphological patterns of renaming. Table 10.1 shows new Hebrewsounding toponyms based on, derived from or modelled on the Arabic
toponyms of Palestinian villages depopulated and destroyed before or in
1948.
Table 10.1 Examples of appropriation of Arabic toponyms
Palestinian villages and place names
depopulated before or in 1948

Israeli settlements with toponyms derived
from the names of destroyed Palestinianvillages

Lubya; depopulated July 1948, Arabic: ‘Bean’

Lavi (kibbutz); founded 1948; Hebrew: ‘Lion’

Al-Kabri (in western Galilee); depopulated on
21 May 1948

Kabri (kibbutz); founded in 1949

‘Alma (in the Sadad district); depopulated on 30 ‘Alma (moshav); founded in 1949
October 1948
Biriyya; depopulated on 2 May 1948

Birya (moshav); founded in 1971

‘Amqa (in the Acre area); depopulated in
October 1948

Amka (moshav); founded in 1949

Sajara (lower Galilee); depopulated July 1948,
Arabic: ‘Tree’

Ilaniya; Hebrew: ‘Tree’‘Ayn Zaytun (western Galilee); depopulated;
Arabic ‘Spring of Olives’‘Ein Zeitim (kibbutz); Hebrew: ‘Spring of
Olives’; originally founded in 1891 north of the
Arab village ‘Ayn Zeitun; abandoned during theFirst World War; six Muslims and one Jew wererecorded there in 1931, living in four houses;
the Jewish settlement was re-established in
1946

Palestinian villages and place names
depopulated before or in 1948

Israeli settlements with toponyms derived
from the names of destroyed Palestinianvillages

Indur (Marj Ibn ‘Amer); depopulated in 1948;
Arabic toponym possibly preserves Canaanite
site: Endor

Ein Dor (kibbutz); founded 1948; Hebrew: ‘Dor
Spring’Fuleh; depopulated 1925; Arabic: ‘Fava Bean’Tel ‘Adashim (moshav); established in 1923,
Hebrew: ‘Lentils Hill’Tal al- Adas; Arabic: ‘Lentils Hill’

Afula (town); founded in 1925

Al-Mujaydil (village); depopulated in July 1948

Migdal HaEmek (town); founded in 1952;
Hebrew: ‘Tower of the Valley’‘Ayn Hawd; depopulated in 1948; Arabic:‘Spring Basin’‘Ein Hod (Artists’ colony); founded in 1953;
Hebrew: ‘Spring of Glory’1‘Eshwa, or ‘Ishwa; depopulated in July 1948

Eshtaol (moshav); founded December 1949

‘Aqir; depopulated on 6 May 1948

Kiryat ‘Ekron (town); founded in 1948

‘Ayn Karim’, or ‘Ein Karim’ (west of
Jerusalem); depopulated in 1948; ‘Generous
Spring’‘Ein Karem (Jewish neighbourhood in West
Jerusalem); Hebrew: ‘Vine Spring’Kafr Bir’im (northern Galilee); depopulated in
October 1948; Arabic: ‘Budding Village’

Bar’am (kibbutz); established in June 1949;
Hebrew: ‘Son of the People’

Mahlul; depopulated in the 1920s

Nahlal (moshav); founded in 1921

Jibta; depopulated in the 1920s

Gvat (kibbutz); founded in 1926

al-Bassa (western Galilee); depopulated on 14
May 1948

Batzat (nature reserve); renamed after 1948

Wadi al-Hawarith; Arabic: ‘Valley of
Ploughing’‘Emek Hefer; Hebrew: ‘Valley of Digging’Wadi Sarar or Wadi Surar (west of Jerusalem);Arabic: ‘Pebble Stream’

Nahal Sorek Nature Reserve created in 1965;
Hebrew: ‘Stream of Fruitless Tree’ derived
from the Arabic toponym made to sound like aname from the Midrash, the body of exegesis of
the Torah

Seil ‘Imran (Naqab); Arabic ‘Stream of‘Imran’Nahal Amram; Hebrew: ‘Stream of Amram’recalling the biblical name of the father ofMoses and Aaron

Jabal Haruf (Naqab); Arabic: ‘Mount Haruf’Har Harif; Hebrew: ‘Sharp Mountain’

Jabal Dibba (Naqab); Arabic: ‘Hump Hill’Har Dla’at; Hebrew: ‘Mount Pumpkin’

Ein Ha-Horesh (kibbutz); founded in 1931; wasone of the first Zionist settlements in thenorthern part of Wadi al-Hawarith; Hebrew:‘the Plowman’s Spring’; notable residents
included Israeli historian Benny Morris

Palestinian villages and place names
depopulated before or in 1948

Israeli settlements with toponyms derived
from the names of destroyed Palestinianvillages

Tall as-Safi (north-west of al-Khalil);depopulated in July 1948; Arabic: ‘the White
Hill’

Tel Tzafit National Park

Beit Dajan (south-east of Jaffa); depopulated in
April 1948

Beit Dagon; founded in 1948; Hebrew:

Sa’sa’ (upper Galilee); depopulated October
1948

Sasa; kibbutz; founded in January 1949

Hittin (eastern Galilee); depopulated in July
1948

Kfar Hittim (moshav); established in 1936;
Hebrew: ‘Village of Wheat’

Al-Khadra, or al-Khdeira (central Palestine);
Arabic: ‘Green’

Hadera; established in 1891 as a farming
Zionist colony; today a major Israeli city; Israeli
toponym makes no sense in Hebrew

Meiron or Mayrun (5 kilometres west of Safad);depopulated in 1948; the name is associatedwith the ancient Canaanite city of Merom orMaromaMeron (moshav), founded in 1949

Al-Majdal (a coastal town in the south);
depopulated between November and June 1950

Israeli city; renamed to the Hebrew-sounding
Migdal ‘Ad in 1949 and subsequently to thebiblical sounding Ashkelon; Arabic ‘Asqalan;
Greek: Ascalon

Zir’in (village) in Marj Ibn ‘Amer (Jezreel
valley); depopulated in the summer of 1948;
Arabic: sowing

Mizra (kibbutz) in the Jezreel valley, founded in
1923 (Hebrew: sowing); Mizra hosted thePalmah headquarters, until 1946

‘House of Grain’

Yizre’el (kibbutz); established in August 1948
to the west of the remains of the depopulated
Ziri’nYazur (town), 6 kilometres east of Jaffa;
depopulated in spring 1948

Azor settlement; the historic Palestinian Muslim
mosque/shrine was turned into a Jewish
synagogue and renamed Sha’arey Tziyon,‘Gates of Zion’

Fifty-six years after the Nakba, in March 2004, Israeli journalist Gideon
Levy wrote: ‘The Zionist collective memory exists in both our cultural andphysical landscape, yet the heavy price paid by the Palestinians – in lives, inthe destruction of hundreds of villages, and in the continuing plight of thePalestinian refugees – receives little public recognition’ (Levy 2004). Levy
adds:

Look at this prickly pear plant. It’s covering a mound of stones. This
mound of stones was once a house, or a shed, or a sheep pen, or a school,or a stone fence. Once – until 56 years ago, a generation and a half ago –not that long ago. The cactus separated the houses and one lot fromanother, a living fence that is now also the only monument to the life thatonce was here. Take a look at the grove of pines around the prickly pear
as well. Beneath it there was once a village. All of its 405 houses weredestroyed in one day in 1948 and its 2,350 inhabitants scattered all over.
No one ever told us about this. The pines were planted right afterward by
the Jewish National Fund (JNF), to which we contributed in ourchildhood, every Friday, in order to cover the ruins, to cover the
possibility of return and maybe also a little of the shame and the guilt.
(Levy 2004)
A monumental 1992 study by a team of Palestinian field researchers andacademics under the direction of Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi details
the destruction of hundreds of villages falling inside the 1949 armisticelines. The study gives the circumstances of each village’s occupation anddepopulation, and a description of what remains. Khalidi’s team visited all
except fourteen sites, made comprehensive reports and took photographs.
Of the 418 depopulated villages documented by Walid Khalidi (1992), 293(70 per cent) were totally destroyed and ninety (22 per cent) were largely
destroyed. Seven survived, including ‘Ayn Karim (west of Jerusalem), butwere taken over by Israeli settlers. A few of the quaint Arab villages andneighbourhoods have actually been largely preserved and gentrified. But
they are empty of Palestinians (some of the former residents are internal
refugees in Israel) and are designated as Jewish ‘artistic colonies’(Benvenisti 1986: 25; Masalha 2005, 2012). While an observant traveller
can still see some evidence of the destroyed Palestinian villages, in the main
all that is left is a scattering of stones and rubble. But the new state also
appropriated for itself both immovable assets, including urban residential
quarters, transport infrastructure, police stations, railways, schools,
libraries, churches and mosques, as well as books, archival and photocollections, and personal possessions, including silver, furniture, picturesand carpets (Khalidi, W. 1992).
‘In many of the JNF sites’, Pappe – who analyses several sites
mentioned by the JNF website, including the Jerusalem Forest – observes:

bustans – the fruit gardens Palestinian farmers would plant around theirfarm houses –appear as one of many mysteries the JNF promises theadventurous visitor. These clearly visible remnants of Palestinianvillages are referred to as an inherent part of nature and her wonderfulsecrets. At one of the sites, it actually refers to the terraces you can findalmost everywhere there as the proud creation of the JNF. Some of thesewere in fact rebuilt over the original ones, and go back centuries before
the Zionist takeover. Thus, Palestinian bustans are attributed to natureand Palestine’s history transported back to a Biblical and Talmudic past.
Such is the fate of one of the best known villages, Ayn al-Zeitun, which
was emptied in May 1948, during which many of its inhabitants weremassacred. (Pappe 2006: 230)
In 1948 ‘Ayn Zaytun was an entirely Muslim farming community of
1000, cultivating olives, grain and fruit, especially grapes; the village name
was the Arabic for ‘Spring of Olives’; In 1992 Palestinian historian Walid
Khalidi described the site as follows:
The rubble of destroyed stone houses is scattered throughout the site,which is otherwise overgrown with olive trees and cactuses [cacti]. A
few deserted houses remain, some with round arched entrances and tallwindows with various arched designs. In one of the remaining houses,
the smooth stone above the entrance arch is inscribed with Arabic
calligraphy, a fixture of Palestinian architecture. The well and the village
spring also remain. (Khalidi, W. 1992: 437)
Today the old stone mosque, parts of which are still standing, is not
mentioned by the JNF website. In 2004 the mosque was turned into a milk
farm; the Jewish owner removed the stone that indicated the founding dateof the mosque and covered the walls with Hebrew graffiti (Pappe 2006:
217). Other mosques belonging to destroyed villages were turned into
restaurants, in the case of the Palestinian town Al-Majdal (historic‘Asqalan) and the Palestinian village of Qaysariah (historic CaesareaPalaestina; currently the archaeological, Roman–Crusader Theme Park of
Caesarea which is part of the Israeli settler-colonial Heritage Industry); a
shop in the case of Beersheba; part of a tourist resort in the case of al-Zeeb;a bar/restaurant (called ‘Bonanza’) and a tourist site in the case of ‘Ayn
Hawd (Pappe 2006: 217; Khalidi, W. 1992: 151).
In Eastern Galilee, Lavi, near Tiberias, a religious kibbutz founded in1949 on the fertile lands of the Palestinian village of Lubya, depopulated
during 1948 by the Haganah forces, is another example of the appropriationof Palestinian place names by Israel. Anyone can tell that the source of the
Hebraicised name Lavi is the Palestinian village Lubya; the Zionists,
however, claimed that Lavi comes from the ancient Jewish village thatexisted in the days of the Mishana and Talmud. Yet the appropriation of thePalestinian toponym and choice of the new Hebrew name Lavi (Lion) –rather than Levi, the ancient Jewish last name, and a Levite member of thepriesthood – reflected the self-identity construction of the European Jewish
colonists, the ‘New Jews’, and Zionism’s new relationship to nature,political geography and tough masculinity (Massad 2006: 38). Moreover, at
Lubya the JNF put up a sign: ‘South Africa Forest. Parking. In Memory ofHans Riesenfeld, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe’. The South Africa Forest and the‘Rhodesia parking area’ were created atop the ruins of Lubya, of whose
existence not a trace was left.
Commenting on the gentrification of several former Palestinian villages(like ‘Ayn Karim) and neighbourhoods (like those of Lydda and Safad) andtheir transformation into Jewish built environments, Israeli architect Haim
Yacobi, of Ben-Gurion University, writes:
The Palestinian landscape is a subject of mimicry through which asymbolic indigenisation of the [Zionist] settlers takes place. As in otherethnocentric national projects, such mimicry may be described as ‘anobsession with archeology’, which makes use of historical remains toprove a sense of belonging ... The obsession with archeology and history,
as well as with treating them as undisputable truths, is clearly evident in
the texts that accompanied the design and construction of the gentrified
Arab villages and neighborhoods. In this process, the indigenous
landscape is uprooted from its political and historical context, redefined
as local and replanted through a double act of mimicry into the ‘build
your own home’ sites. (Yacobi 2009: 115)
THE CREATION OF A USABLE PAST: THE
POWER/KNOWLEDGE NEXUS

The creation of political ‘facts on the ground’ together with the
instrumentalisation of cultural heritage is key to all modern settler-colonial
projects. The treatment of the cultural heritage of Palestine as a tool for
Zionist settler purposes is central to Israeli educational policies, the Israeli
biblical academy and the Israeli government’s renaming projects. The
creation of a usable past (Peled-Elhanan 2012: 12) by the Israeli educational
system and the Israeli biblical academy has been examined by several
Israeli academics and authors, including Nurit Peled-Elhanan (2012: 12–47), Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (1992), Shlomo Sand (2011), Meron
Benvenisti (2002) and Gabriel Piterberg (2001, 2008). In Original Sins:
Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel, Beit-Hallahmi (of Haifa
University) comments on Israel’s biblical ‘knowledge’:
Most Israelis today, as a result of Israeli education, regard the Bible as areliable source of historical information of a secular, political kind. The
Zionist version of Jewish history accepts most Biblical legends about the
beginning of Jewish history, minus divine intervention. Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob are treated as historical figures. The descent into Egypt andthe Exodus are phases in the secular history of a developing people, as is
the conquest of Canaan by Joshua. The Biblical order of events is
accepted, but the interpretation is nationalist and secular.
The historicisation of the Bible is a national enterprise in Israel,
carried out by hundreds of scholars at all universities. The starting point
is Biblical chronology, then evidence (limited) and speculation(plentiful) are arranged accordingly. The Israeli Defence Ministry haseven published a complete chronology of Biblical events, giving exact
dates for the creation of the world …
Claiming this ancient mythology as history is an essential part ofZionist secular nationalism, in its attempt to present a coherent accountof the genesis of the Jewish people in ancient West Asia. It provides a
focus of identification to counter the rabbinical, Diaspora traditions.
Teaching the Bible as history to Israeli children creates the notion ofcontinuity. It is Abraham (‘the first Zionist’, migrating to Palestine),
Joshua and the conquest of Palestine (wiping out the Canaanites, just like
today), King David’s conquest of Jerusalem (just like today). (BeitHallahmi 1992: 119)

Reflecting on the tight state control and supervision of the history ofPalestine and ‘biblical knowledge’ in the Israeli educational system,
Shlomo Sand (of Tel Aviv University), further explains:
The teachings of the Bible, used more as a book of national history thansacred religious canons, also became a separate subject in primary andsecondary education in the eyes of the first immigrant [pre-1948 Yishuv]
community in Palestine. Each student in every level of the Hebrew
school system studies the history of their collective past separately fromuniversal history. It was logical that the development of the collective
memory was completed by an adequate university education. The ‘threethousand years of Jewish nation’ had the right to a separate field of
pedagogy and research prohibited to ‘unaccredited’ historians who
would presume to access it. One of the most striking results of thisoriginal approach was that from the 1930s to the 1990s, no teacher or
researcher from the various departments of ‘History of the Jewish
People’ in Israeli universities considered him- or herself to be a nonZionist historian. Historians of general history whose Zionist identity
was not always as confirmed had the freedom to treat questions dealing
with Jewish history, but they were ineligible for budgets, scholarships,
research institutes, chairs or directing doctoral theses relate to Jewish
history. (Sand 2011: 159–160)
Commenting on the production, propagation and dissemination of
biblical geographical and archaeological ‘knowledge of the country’, Meron
Benvenisti, Israeli author and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem (from1971 to 1978), explained that in the state school curriculum and in the army
the subject of ‘knowledge’ of the land of the Bible (yedi’at haaretz) is
obsessional. Furthermore, ‘knowledge of the land’ is both militarised andmasculinised. This obsessive state-directed search for rootedness in the land
by Israeli academia and often Western-funded Zionist research centres, andthe treatment of the Bible as actual ‘history’, is conducted by predominantly
secular Ashkenazi historians, nationalist archaeologists and biblicalacademics. Benvenisti writes:
The Bible became a guidebook, taught by reference to the landscape,less for its humanistic and social message – and not for its divineauthorship. There is nothing more romantic and at the same time more
‘establishment’ than to be connected in some fashion with this cult. Its
priests are the madrichim – guides and youth leaders. An extensive
institutional network sustained yedia’t haaretz [knowledge of the biblicalcountry]: research institutes, field schools, the Society for the
Preservation of Nature in Israel (SPNI), the Jewish National Fund, youth
movements, paramilitary units, the army. (Benvenisti 1986: 20; also
2002)
In Zionism, the selective reconstruction of antiquity and manufactured‘biblical memory’ was part of the historical mission of reviving the ancient
national roots and spirit. ‘[Selective] Antiquity became both a source oflegitimacy and an object of admiration’ (Zerubavel 1995: 25). The
American Israeli academic Selwyn Ilan Troen, of Brandeis University and
Ben-Gurion University, under the subheading ‘Reclaiming by Naming’,
remarks on the continuity of European Zionist colonisation of Palestine and19th century/early 20th century Western Christian archaeologicalexcavations and knowledge production:
Zionism also set out to ‘re-imagine’ and ‘re-constitute’ the country’s
landscape. The process actually began with Christian explorers, andarchaeologists and Bible scholars from Europe and the United States
who visited Palestine from the mid-nineteenth century when the country
was under Turkish rule. Contemporary Arab names were but adaptations
or corruptions of ancient designations found in sacred texts or otherhistorical sources. Zionist settlers continued the process, although forthem it was not merely to recapture the Holy Land of Scriptures. Rather
it was a deeply personal attempt to re-imagine themselves in the land of
their ancestors. As a consequence, in renaming the land they consciously
ignored or set aside many of the physical markers as well as the socialand cultural ones of both Europe and the Arab neighbours … Zionists
celebrated the return to history of Biblical Rehovoth30 and Ashkelon[‘Asqalan] … In addition, thousands of names were given to streets,
public squares and the landscape, with signs in Hebrew everywhere. The
total effect invited observers to appreciate that the settlements were theconcrete manifestation of national revival by a people who could
legitimately claim to be returning natives. (Troen 2008: 197)

ISRAELI BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AS A SECULARRELIGION: JUDAISATION STRATEGIES AND THE
ASSERTION OF OWNERSHIP: THE SUPERIMPOSITION OF
BIBLICAL, TALMUDIC AND MISHNAIC NAMESIn present-day Israel, the claim is obsessively made that the Hebrew Bibleis materially realised thanks to secularising biblical archaeology, giving
Jewish history flesh and bones, recovering the ancient past, putting it in‘dynastic order’ and ‘returning to the archival site of Jewish identity’ (Said
2004: 46). Biblical archaeology was always central to the construction of
Israeli Jewish identity and the perceived legitimacy of the Israeli state. The
debate about ‘ancient Israel’, secularist and nationalist biblical scholarshipand biblical archaeology is also a debate about the modern State of Israel,most crucially because in the eyes of many people in the West, thelegitimacy of Zionist Jewish ‘restorationism’ depends on the credibility ofthe biblical portrait. One facet of that debate is the argument in the publicdomain over the use of the term ‘Israel’ to denote the land west of the
Jordan, both in ancient and modern times. The inevitable outcome of theobsession with the Hebrew Bible in Western biblical scholarship, calling theland ‘biblical’ and with its exclusive interest in a small section of thehistory of the land, has resulted in focusing on the Israelite identity of a landthat has actually been non-Jewish in terms of its indigenous population forthe larger part of its recorded history (Whitelam 1996). This state of affairs
would not exist in any other part of the planet; it is due to the Hebrew Bible
and its influence in the West where an inherited Christian culture supported
the notion that Palestine has always been somehow essentially ‘the land of
Israel’. Traditional biblical scholarship has been essentially ‘Zionist’ andhas participated in the elimination of the Palestinian identity, as if 1400
years of Muslim occupation of this land meant nothing. This focus on ashort period of history a long time ago participates in a kind of retrospective
colonising of the past. It tends to regard modern Palestinians as trespassers
or ‘resident aliens’ in someone else’s territory.
The nationalist obsession with the sacred artefacts of secularisingbiblical archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli secularnationalist collective identity and Zionist nation-building since 1948. To
present European Jewish identity as rooted in the land, after theestablishment of Israel the science of archaeology was summoned to thetask of constructing and consolidating that identity in secular times; therabbis as well as the university scholars specialising in biblical archaeology
were given sacred history as their domain (Said 2004: 45). Abu El-Haj’s
seminal work, Facts on the Ground, explores the centrality of selective
biblical archaeology in the construction of Zionist Jewish collective identity
before and after 1948. The work examined colonial archaeological
exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-19th
century. Abu El-Haj focuses on the period after the establishment of Israelin 1948, linking the academic practice of archaeology with Zionist
colonisation and with plans for the Judaisation and repossession of the landthrough the renaming of Palestinian historic and geographic names. Muchof this de-Arabisation of Palestine is given archaeological justification; theexistence of Arab names is written over by newly coined Hebrew names.
This ‘epistemological strategy’ prepares for the construction of an Israeli
Jewish identity based on assembling archaeological fragments, scatteredremnants of masonry, tables, bones and tombs, into a sort of special
biography out of which the European colony of the Yishuv emerges ‘visible
and linguistically, as Jewish national home’ (Abu El-Haj 2001: 74; Said
2004: 47–48; Bowersock 1988: 181–191).
A large number of Israeli experts on and practitioners of biblicalexcavations – from General Yigael Yadin and General Moshe Dayan toeven General Ariel Sharon – have remarked that biblical archaeology is the‘privilege’ Israeli science par excellence (Said 2004: 45–46; Kletter 2003).
Magen Broshi, a leading Israeli archaeologist, and a current member of theIsraeli Government Names Committee, noted:
The Israeli phenomenon, a nation returning to its old‒new land, iswithout parallel. It is a nation in the process of renewing its acquaintancewith its own lands and here archaeology plays an important role. In thisprocess archaeology is part of a larger system known as Yedi’at haAretz,
knowledge of the land (the Hebrew term is derived most probably fromthe German Landeskunde) … The European immigrants found thecountry to which they felt, paradoxically, both kinship and strangeness.
Archaeology in Israel, a sui generis state, served as a means to dispel thealienation of its new citizens. (Quoted in Said 2004: 46)

The Israeli historians, biblical scholars, archaeologists and geographers,
Meron Benvenisti argues in Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of theHoly Land since 1948, have reinvented and reconstructed a history andchronology of ancient Palestine based on Israeli identity politics,
so as to emphasise the Jewish connection to the land, adding
designations such as the Biblical, Hasmonean, Mishnaic, and Talmudic
periods. From the ‘early Muslim’ period onward, however, they adopted
the nomenclature of the ‘conquerers’ chronology’, since in this way it
was possible to divide the approximately 1,400 years of Muslim-Arabrule into units that were shorter than the period of Jewish rule over the
Eretz Israel/Palestine (which lasted at most for 600 years), and especiallyto portray the history of the country as a long period of rule by a series offoreign powers who had robbed it from the Jews – a period that ended in1948 with the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. It was
thus possible to obscure the fact that the indigenous Muslim Arab
population was part and parcel of the ruling Muslim peoples and insteadto depict the history of the local population – its internal wars, its
provincial rulers, its contribution to the landscape – as matters lacking inimportance, events associated with one or another dynasty of ‘foreign
occupiers’. (Benvenisti 2002: 300)
While the colonial attitudes of European and North American historians
and social scientists towards former colonies of the West has begun to be
re-evaluated critically since the 1960s, the Israelis have chosen to
consolidate the colonial tradition and settler-colonial historiography inPalestine–Israel. In Israel, there has always been an obsession with ‘biblicalmemory’ and the convergence between biblical excavations and Jewish
settler-colonisation has always loomed large, but became most pronounced
after the post-1967 conquests. Furthermore, Israeli biblical archaeology hasremained central to secular Zionist identity politics and Israeli settler
activities – most Orthodox Jews in Israel were and still are indifferent to its
findings (Elon 1997: 38). Meron Benvenisti observes that
British, American, and other academics engaged in the study of thearchaeology and history of their former overseas colonies have begun toreevaluate the attitudes that prevailed during the colonial period. They

have admitted grave distortions that were introduced into the history of
the colonies as an outcome of Eurocentric attitudes, ignoring or erasing
remaining traces of the natives’ past and their material culture. In thewake of this evaluation, Amerindian, Aborigine, and native African sites
were studied and restored, and a new history was written, focusing on
the organic chronicles of those regions, which had been a mere footnote
in the history of the European peoples. The Israelis, by contrast, chose tomaintain the colonial tradition with only minor changes ... The [Israeli]
Antiquities Administration is aware of only two sites in Old Jaffa: the‘Biuim House’ (the first home of this group of early Zionist pioneers in
the country, in 1882) and the first building of the first [Zionist] Hebrew
High School (‘Gimnasiya Herzeliyya’), which have been declared‘antiquities’ in accordance with Article 2 [of Israeli Antiquities Law of1978]. Of course no structure ‘of historical value’ to the Palestinians has
been declared as a protected antiquity under Israeli law. (Benvenisti
2002: 304–305)
Around Jerusalem thousands of acres of pine forests were planted by the
Jewish National Fund, forests which are both intended to camouflage
destroyed Palestinian villages and fashion a new pastoral ‘biblicallandscape’, create a new collective memory and give the impression of an‘authentic’ timeless biblical landscape in which trees have been standing
forever. But this ‘natural landscape’ is a carefully constructed scene to
camouflage the systematically expropriated land of Palestinian villages, thedestruction of cultivated olive groves and the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba.
The underlying intention is to obscure the locations of the Palestinianvillages and prevent any cultivation of the land by non-Jews. The Israeli
architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, commenting on Israeli settlement
and the creation of a pastoral biblical landscape, wrote:
In the ideal image of the pastoral landscape, integral to the perspective ofcolonial traditions, the admiration of the rustic panorama is always
viewed through the window frames of modernity. The impulse to retreat
from the city to the country reasserts the virtue of a simpler life close tonature … the re-creation of the picturesque scenes of Biblical landscape
becomes a testimony to an ancient claim on the land. The admiration of
the landscape thus functions as a cultural practice, by which social andcultural identities are formed. Within this panorama, however, lies acruel paradox: the very thing that renders the landscape ‘Biblical’ or‘pastoral’, its traditional inhabitants and cultivation in terraces, olive
orchards, stone buildings and the presence of livestock, is produced by
the Palestinians, who the Jewish settlers came to replace. And yet, thevery people who came to cultivate the ‘green olive orchards’ and render
the landscape Biblical are themselves excluded from the panorama. The
Palestinians are there to produce the scenery and then disappear … Thegaze that sees a ‘pastoral Biblical landscape’ does not register what it
does not want to see, it is a visual exclusion that seeks a physicalexclusion. Like a theatrical set, the panorama can be seen as an edited
landscape put together by invisible stage hands … What for the state is asupervision mechanism that seeks to observe the Palestinians is for thesettlers a window on a pastoral landscape that seeks to erase them. The
Jewish settlements superimpose another datum of latitudinal geography
upon an existing landscape. Settlers can thus see only other settlements,
avoid those of the Palestinian towns and villages, and feel that they havetruly arrived ‘as the people without land to the land with people’. (Segal
and Weizman 2003: 92)
There are dozens of biblical and archaeological parks in Israel run by the
Israel Nature and Parks Authority (Rashut Hateva’ Vehaganim), a
governmental organisation set up in 1998. Many of these archaeological(biblical and Crusader) ‘national heritage’ parks have been constructed on
the ruins of Palestinian villages and towns destroyed in 1948. The negationof both the ancient Palestinian and Islamic heritage of the land by Israel’s
heritage industry of archaeological theme parks is very much in evidence
today in Palestinian Saffuriyah (destroyed by Israel in 1948) – the heritage
industry geared towards both the retrospective colonisation of the past andthe fashioning of modern Israeli collective identity.
FROM PALESTINIAN MAJDAL- ASQALAN TO BIBLICALASHKELON
In 1948 the towns and villages of southern Palestine, including the towns of
Bir al-Sabi (Beersheba) and al-Majdal, were completely depopulated. AlMajdal was established in the 16th century near the medieval Muslim city

of ‘Asqalan, a city that had a long history and a multi-layered identity
dating back to the ancient Philistines.Its medieval Arab name, ‘Asqalan,preserved its ancient Palestinian name, Ascalon. With one of the oldest andlargest seaport in ancient Palestine, it was one of the five famous cities of
the Philistines: Gaza, Gath, Ascalon, Ashdod (modern Arabic toponym:
Isdud), Ekron (‘Aqir). Al-Majdal/‘Asqalan, on the eve of the 1948 war, had
10,000 (Muslim and Christian) inhabitants, and in October 1948 thousands
more refugees from nearby villages joined them. Al-Majdal was conqueredby the Israeli army on 4 November 1948 and many of its residents andrefugees fled, leaving some 2700 inhabitants, mostly women and theelderly, behind. Orders in Hebrew and Yiddish were posted in the streets ofthe town, warning the soldiers to be aware of ‘undesirable’ behaviour on thepart of the town’s residents. ‘As was customary in such instances’, theIsraeli intelligence officer wrote, ‘the behaviour of the population was
obsequious and adulatory’ (Levy 2000). In December 1948, Israeli soldiers‘swept through’ the town and deported some 500 of its remaining
inhabitants. In 1949 the commanding officer of the Southern Command,
Yigal Allon, ‘demanded ... that the town be emptied of its Arabs’ (Masalha
1997: 9). This was followed by an inter-ministerial committee decision tothin out the Palestinian population; another ministerial committee, ‘onabandoned property’, decided to settle al-Majdal with Jews; the town was
being Judaised, and, with 2500 Jewish residents, it was named ‘MigdalAd’. In December 1949, more Palestinians were deported to vacate morehouses for Jewish settlers, this time for discharged Israeli soldiers. In themeantime, the Israeli army made the life of those Palestinians who
remained a misery, hoping they would leave. The new commanding officerof the Southern Command, Moshe Dayan, returned to the proposal of Yigal
Allon: ‘I hope that perhaps in the coming years, there will be anotheropportunity to transfer these Arabs [170,000 Israeli Arabs] out of the Landof Israel’, Dayan said at a meeting of the ruling Mapai party on 18 June
1950. Dayan also submitted a detailed proposal for ‘the evacuation of the
Arab inhabitants of the town of Majdal’. Both the army chiefs of staff
agreed, and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion authorised the plan on 19 June
1950 (Masalha 1997: 9).
In the summer of 1950, almost two years after the 1948 war, thePalestinian inhabitants of Majdal received expulsion orders and, over a
period of a few weeks, were transported to the borders of Gaza. They wereloaded onto trucks and dropped off at the border. The last delivery of 229
people left for Gaza on 21 October 1950. The Israeli officials distributed the‘abandoned’ houses among new Jewish settlers. To this very day the
Palestinian inhabitants of al-Majdal live in the shacks and shanties of the
refugee camps in Gaza. In 1956, Migdal-Ad changed its name to thebiblical-sounding Ashkelon (Levy 2000). Since then it has been kept as apurely Jewish city. Commenting on Israeli educational policies, Ismael
Abu-Sa’ad, of Ben-Gurion University, writes:
The education system is essential to making the displacement ofindigenous history and presence ‘official’, through texts such as thatquoted from the 6th grade geography curriculum in Israeli schools,
which teaches Palestinian children that the history of the coastal plain
began only a hundred years ago, with the advent of European Jewish
settlement and their transformation of this previously ‘abandoned area’.
In the text, modern (Jewish) Tel Aviv overrides any mention of Arab
Jaffa; modern (Jewish) Ashdod of (Arab) Isdud; modern (Jewish)
Ashkelon of (Arab) al-Majdal[- Asqalan]. Modern Jewish Rishon
Litzion (‘First in Zion’) and Herzliya and numerous other new towns aresuperimposed upon an unacknowledged landscape of Palestinian villages
emptied and demolished in 1948. The indigenous landscape is erased
from the curriculum, while it is simultaneously being erased by the
curriculum, because of its absence from the official historical andgeographical materials being taught about the region. (Abu-Sa’ad 2008:
24–25)The erasure of the heritage of Palestine and the Palestinians, physicallyand culturally, was summarised by Israeli political geographer Oren
Yiftachel in 2008 as follows:
The act of erasure had been led, for many decades, by the Jewish state’s
apparatuses, those that aim to erase the remnants of the Arab-Palestiniansociety that lived in the country until 1948, and to deny the catastrophethat Zionism inflicted on this nation. The erasure that came after theviolence, the flight, the expulsion and the demolition of the villages isvisible in all discourses – in textbooks, the history that Zionist societytells itself, in the political discourse, in the media, in maps and now also

in the names of the sites, roads, and junctions. Palestine, which lays
under Israel, is disappearing from the Israeli-Jewish physical reality anddiscourse.31
THE NEW ISRAELI PLACE NAMES AND LANDSCAPE:FASHIONING A EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE AS A SITE OF
AMNESIA AND ERASURE
In the first two decades of the state Israelis had a deep anxiety about thediscovery of the truth about the 1948 Nakba and the ‘nightmarish’ prospectof Palestinian refugees returning to their towns and villages in what had
become Israel. Facing the Forests, one of novelist A. B. Yehushua’s firstmajor works, was published in 1963. It opens with the destruction of a
Palestinian village in 1948 and the planting of a JNF forest on its ruins. The
novel recounts the story of an Israeli student who is ‘obsessed’ with thehistory of the Latin Crusaders. The student, looking for a break andsolitude, finds a job as a forest ranger. When he arrives at the watch housein the JNF forest he finds an Arab man whose tongue had been cut out andthe man’s daughter. Shortly after his arrival the student begins to sufferfrom nightmares and he is constantly anticipating a catastrophe. As thesummer continues the student begins to desire the man’s daughter. The
tension between the two escalates and suddenly the man sets fire to theforest and the whole forest burns down. At dawn the student ‘turns his gazeto the fire-smoking hills, frowns. There out of the smoke and haze, theruined village appears before his eyes; born anew, in its basic outlines as an
abstract drawing, as all things past and buried’. While the student fails to
see the truths unearthed by his research on the Latin Crusades, the fire
reveals it. The novel ends with the destruction of the forest and the reemergence of the Arab village (Yehoshua 1975: 385).
The JNF’s forests, such as the Carmel National Park, became an icon of
Zionist national revival in Israel and in Israeli Hebrew literature,symbolising the success of the European Zionist project in ‘striking roots’in the ancient homeland and sacred landscape. Children were often named
after trees and children’s Hebrew literature described young trees aschildren (Zerubavel 1996). Names such as Ilan (tree), Oren (pine tree)
Tomer and Tamar (male and female for palm tree), Amir (tree top), or Elonor Allon (oak tree) are very common in Israel. Natural woodlands of‘Palestine Oak’ () covered many areas of historic Palestine,
especially in upper Galilee, Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor (Arabic: Jabal alTur) and other hilly regions. Some local Palestinian Muslim traditions in
Galilee have even attributed holiness to ancient oak trees. The ancient
Palestine Oak tree and its leaves have been seen as a symbol of strength andendurance not only in Palestine but in many countries across the world.
European pre-Christian and medieval Christian traditions of veneration ofPalestine Oak trees are well known. The leaves of the oak were also
traditionally an important part of German army regalia and symbolise ranks
in the US army. In ancient Palestine, this tree had its own cult in local
mythology, derived from local religious traditions; it is associated with life
and is supposed to have grown since the beginning of the world(Niesiolowski-Spano 2011: 132–137).
But the worship of the JNF (European-style) forests in Israel has also
become central to an invented Zionist secular collective memory. Israeli
historian and journalist Amos Elon, who was born in Vienna as Amos
Sternbach and immigrated to Palestine in 1933, changed his name to Amos
Oak. In similar vein, General Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmah in
1948, was born Yigal Paicovitch and changed his name to the Hebrewsounding Allon (oak tree). As we have seen above, this tradition of the‘ancient woods’ and wood worship was derived from central European
notions of romantic nationalism. In 2004 Amos Elon moved to Italy, citing
disillusionment with developments in Israel since 1967. In The Israelis:Founders and Sons, Elon writes: ‘[F]ew things are as evocatively symbolicof the Zionist dream and rationale as a “Jewish National Fund Forest”’(Elon 1983: 200). Israel’s European-style forests and reforestation policies
enjoy Western support. Planting a European-style forest in the ‘sacred soil’and ‘sacred landscape’ confirms the undeniable ethical value of Israel’s(and by extension the West’s) project in the East. Afforestation is also
linked, materially and symbolically, to the European Holocaust, andthousands of trees have been planted in memory of the lost communities
and individual victims (Elon 1983: 200). For Palestinians, however, few
things better encapsulate the notorious role of the JNF since the Nakba(Jamjoum 2010).
FROM YERUSHALAYIM TO ORSHALIM: THE
TRANSLITERATION OF NEW HEBREW TOPONYMS AND

ROAD SIGNS INTO ENGLISH AND ARABIC
The official Judaisation, Hebraicisation and biblicisation schemes whichbegan after 1948 continued into the post-1967 era. Israel began interferingwith Arabic road signs and toponyms in occupied East Jerusalem
immediately after June 1967. In that year it coined a new word, Orshalim,that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem,
Yerushalayim.32 In recent years thousands of road signs became the latest
front in Israel’s battle of accelerating the erasure of the Palestinian Arabtoponymic heritage of the land. The pattern, which began before 1967,
included the transliteration of newly coined Hebrew toponyms and roadsigns into both English and Arabic. In July 2009, the Israeli Transport
Minister Yisrael Katz announced a new road signs scheme for all majorroads in Israel, occupied East Jerusalem and even parts of occupied WestBank to be ‘standardised’ by converting the original Arabic place names
into straight transliterations of the new Hebrew name. Traditionally someroad signs in Israel included names that were rendered in three languages
top-to-bottom: Hebrew (first), English and Arabic. Under the 2009 schemeof the Transport Ministry, which was open about the political motivation
behind its policy, Jerusalem, or al-Quds in Arabic, would be standardised
throughout occupied East Jerusalem as Yerushalayim and transliterated into
Arabic Orshalim; Nazareth, or al-Nasirah in Arabic, would be standardised
into Natzrat; and Jaffa, the Palestinian port city after which Palestine’soranges became famous as Jaffa oranges, would be Yafo. As for Palestinian
Nablus, the ministry was also looking for ways to spell the Hebrew/biblicalsounding name Shechem in Arabic.33 Today all major international airlines
which fly to Ben-Gurion Airport (formerly Lydda airport, which was
created in 1936 during the British Mandatory period and later renamed after
Israel’s first Prime Minister) use the Hebrew transliteration of the Arabic
toponym Yafa (Jaffa) by drawing the attention of their passengers on arrival
to weather in the Yafo-Tel Aviv region.
EPILOGUE: THE PALESTINIAN MULTI-LAYERED IDENTITY,
TOPONYMIC MEMORY AND THE DIVERSE HERITAGE OF
THE LAND

Palestinian responses to forced depopulation and ethnic cleansing from theirvillages and towns are ‘discursively rich, complex and protean’(Slyomovics 2002). In recent decades novels, poems, films, plays,
ethnographic and photographic documentation, maps, oral history archives,
online websites, and a wide range of activities in exiled and internallydisplaced communities have been and are being produced, many with theaim of countering Israeli denial and correcting distortions of omission andcommission that eradicate the Palestinian presence in the land. Also a large
number of books have been produced both inside Israel and at Birzeit
University, all dedicated to villages that have been depopulated anddestroyed. These form part of a large historical and imaginative literature inwhich the destroyed Palestinian villages are ‘revitalised and their existencecelebrated’ (Slyomovics 2002). In the post-1948 period Palestinians
maintained the multiple meaning of their Arabic names and the multilayered Palestinian identity embedded in ancient names (Ashrawi 1995:
132‒134; Doumani 1995).
Palestinian nationalism (both secular and religious strands) however –like all other modern nationalisms – with its construction of national
consciousness, is a modern phenomenon (Khalidi, R. 1998). But this mustnot be automatically conflated with the Palestinians’ social, cultural andreligious identities, which are deeply rooted in the land as well as in theancient history and toponymic memory of Palestine. Furthermore, thePalestinians, until the 1948 catastrophe, were predominantly peasants,
deeply rooted in the physical and cultural landscapes of Palestine. The local
dialect and the names of their villages and towns preserved the multilayered and diverse cultural heritage of the country.
Today the Palestinians are culturally and linguistically Arab and largely
but not exclusively Muslim. The Palestinian Muslim population was mainly
descended from local Palestinian Christians and Jews who had converted toIslam after the Islamic conquest in the 7th century and inherited many of
the social, cultural, religious and linguistic traditions of ancient Palestine,
including those of the Israelites, Canaanites and Philistines (Shaban 1971:
25–161; Donner 1981; Nebel and Oppenheim 2000; Rose 2010; Esler
2011). Furthermore, the similarities between their Arabic language andUgaritic suggests that Arabic was not a late intruder into Palestine from 638
AD onwards, following the Arab Muslim conquest (Ra’ad 2010). Also
many Palestinians are Christian Arabs who have historic roots in Palestineand a long heritage in the land where Christ lived. Commenting on themulti-layered cultural identity and diverse heritage of the Palestinians,
Palestinian sociologist Samih Farsoun (1937–2005) writes:
Palestinians are descendants of an extensive mixing of local and regional
peoples, including the Canaanites, Philistines, Hebrews, Samaritans,
Hellenic Greeks, Romans, Nabatean Arabs, tribal nomadic Arabs, some
Europeans from the Crusades, some Turks, and other minorities; after
the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, however, they became
overwhelmingly Arabs. Thus, this mixed-stock of people has developed
an Arab-Islamic culture for at least fourteen centuries. (Farsoun 2004: 4)
The development of Palestinian nationalism in recent decades hasbrought with it a much greater awareness of critical archaeology andhistorical writing based on critical Biblical Studies and the question of theshared historical heritage of Palestine and the Palestinians (Thompson
2003: 1). Also, interestingly, Palestinian scholar Mazin Qumsiyeh hassuggested, in his Sharing the Land of Canaan, a more realistic and lessdichotomous approach to the debate on Canaanites–Israelites. He argued forcoexistence in Palestine–Israel based on shared historical heritage andcultural and genetic affinities between the ‘Canaanitic people’: Mizrahi
Jews and Palestinian Christians and Muslims (Qumsiyeh 2004: 28‒30; seealso Nebel and Oppenheim 2000).
Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to argue that the modern
Palestinians are more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Philistines(and Israelites) than Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom were European
converts to Judaism. Certainly historically, in contrast to the myth of ‘exile
and return’, many of the original Jewish inhabitants of ancient Palestine
remained in the country but had accepted Christianity and Islam many
generations later. Today, however – in contrast to the mythologised
Ashkenazi Zionist and Arab nationalist historiographies – more and morearchaeologists and biblical scholars are convinced that the ancestors of theIsraelites had never been in Egypt and that the biblical paradigm of amilitary conquest of Cana’an was completely fictional. Indeed, thearchaeological evidence undermines, in particular, the Book of Joshua. If
the Exodus from Egypt and the forty-year desert journey around Sinai could
not have happened and the military conquest of the ‘fortified cities’ ancientPalestine (according to Deuteronomy 9:1: ‘great cities with walls sky-high’)
were totally refuted by archaeology, who, then, were these Israelites,
Philistines or Canaanites?
Palestinian digitally archived oral histories and toponymic memories of
the hundreds of destroyed villages and towns have emerged in recent
decades as a significant methodology not only for the construction of analternative history of the Palestinian Nakba and memories of the lost
historic Palestine but also for an ongoing indigenous life, living Palestinian
practices and a sustained human ecology. In contrast with the Israeli settlercolonial heritage-style industry and a supremacist biblical archaeology, with
its obsession with myth-narratives and assembling archaeologicalfragments, indigenous Palestinians have devoted much attention to theenormously rich sedimentations of village history and oral traditions as areminder of the continuity of native life and living practices (Said 2004: 49;
Masalha 2008: 123–156). Decolonising history and reclaiming andpreserving the ancient heritage and material culture of Palestine and thePalestinians is vital. There is an urgent need to teach the ancient history ofPalestine and the indigenous Palestinians (Muslims, Christians, Samaritans
and Jews), including the production of new and critical Palestinian
textbooks for schools, colleges and universities, as well as for the millions
of exiled Palestinian refugees. This understanding and teaching should
encompass the new critical archaeology scholarship of Palestine and the
new critical understanding of the ancient history and memories of the land.

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NotesIntroduction
1
2

Arabic: sing. balad; plural bilad.
Biladuna Filastin is also an eleven-volume work of reference on the historical geography ofPalestine by Palestinian author Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh (1965 and 1972‒1986). This
important encyclopaedia of Palestine is arranged by region and surveys the cities, towns andvillages of Palestine from geographical, historical, archaeological, botanical and economic
perspectives.
3 See, for instance, Ghalib Muhammad Samrin, Qaryati Qaluniya: Al-ard wa-al-judhur:
Filastinuna fi qissat qaryah (1993 [Arabic]); Fateh’s underground magazine which first appearedin 1959 was called Filastinuna.
4 ‘Azmi Beshara on the existence of a Palestinian People’, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=EOqAGbpoDZc, posted 30 April 2009.
5 http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/1998/1948/378_said.htm
6 Monolatrism (Greek: monos: single and latreia: worship) was belief in the existence of many
gods but with the worship of only one supreme deity. An example of monolatrism was the ancient
Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV who installed himself as a supreme divinity (‘God of gods’) andofficially changed his name to Akhenaten and introduced Atenism during his reign (1348/1346
BC). Under Akhenaten’s successors, Egypt reverted to its traditional polytheism and Akhenaten
himself came to be seen as a heretic.
7 Interview
withWilliamMontgomery
Wattat:
http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/2000_watt.htm
8 Samaritanism is one the four distinct Abrahamic traditions of Palestine. The Samaritan tradition
centres on the belief in the sanctity of Mount Gerizim (Arabic: Jabal Jarizim or Jabal al-Tur), oneof the two mountains in the immediate vicinity of the Palestine city of Nablus. The mountain,
which continues to be the centre of Samaritan religion to this day, is sacred to the PalestinianSamaritans who regard it, not Jerusalem, as having been the location of the holy temple. The
Samaritan scripture is a text of five books written in the Samaritan alphabet. Some 6000
differences exist between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Old Testament.
9 Classical Antiquity is a term broadly applied here to a long period of history (over a millennium)
during which ‘Classical culture’ centred on the Mediterranean region and comprised the intimate
interaction of the civilisations of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome with the ‘Near East’. It is aperiod in which Greek and Roman cultural influences not only flourished but also wielded
enormous influence throughout Southern Europe, South-Eastern Asia, the ‘Near East’ and North
Africa.
10 Arnold
HughMartinJones,‘Palestine’,
Encyclopaedia
Britannica,
http://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine
11 Josephus (Hebrew: Yosef ben Matityahu).calls himself in Greek as Iōsēpos (Ιώσηπος), son ofMatthias.
12 The Palestinian village of Qaysariah was destroyed by Jewish forces in 1948.

Chapter 1
1

2
3
4
5
6
7

8

The Story of Sinuhe is considered one of the finest works of fiction of Ancient Egyptian
literature. Its narrative is set in the aftermath of the death of Pharaoh Amenemhat I who foundedthe 12th Dynasty in the early 20th century BC. The popularity of this story is evident from themany surviving fragments. Egyptologists argue about its composition date; here we take theconservative date of the 14th century BC. It could be earlier, but it is not known to be.
Ramesses II is the most famous of the Pharaohs; in popular legendary imagination he has becomethe ‘Pharaoh of the Exodus’.
The ancient Greek authors give to Africa the name of Libya.
The site most likely of Gath is Tell al-Safi, a Palestinian village 35 kilometres north-west of
Hebron, depopulated by Israeli in 1948.
In Wadi al-Surar (modern Hebrew: Nahal Sorek).
Isdud was a large Palestinian village depopulated by Israel in 1948.
In 677/676 the Assyrian king Esarhaddon conquered Sidon and in 675 BC concluded a treaty
with king Ba’al I of Tyre designed to neutralise the city in the Assyrian struggle with the
Egyptians. Esarhaddon’s Treaty with Ba’al is an Assyrian clay tablet inscription in Akkadiancuneiform describing a treaty between the Assyrian king Esarhaddon and King Ba’al I of Tyre. It
was discovered in Nineveh in the Library of Ashurbanipal and fragments are currently in the
British Museum. The treaty, published K 3500 + K 4444 + K 10235, was identified by Hugo
Winckler in his Altorientalische Forschungen, II (Ancient Near Eastern Studies) in 1898. Under
the terms of the treaty, Esarhaddon entrusted Baal with several settlements, including Acre, Dorand Byblos. The text includes: ‘If a ship of Ba’al or of the people of ur-ri [Tyre] is shipwrecked
off the coast of the land of pi-lis-ti [Pilistu] or anywhere on the borders of Assyrian territory,
everything that is on the ship belongs to Esarhaddon ... These are the ports of trade and the traderoads which Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, granted to his servant Ba’al; toward a-ku [Acre], .du-u-ri [Dor; Tantur], in the entire district of.pi-lis-te [Pilistu]’.
For an extensive discussion of the Palestine Nakba, see Masalha (1992, 1997, 2005, 2012) andKhalidi W. (1992).

Chapter 2123Herodotus(1858),
at:https://archive.org/stream/herodotus00herouoft/herodotus00herouoft_djvu.txt
Encyclopaedia Britannica, at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle/Political-theory
1st century BC Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily), in his multi-volume work
Bibliotheca Historica, indicated that Coele-Syria stretched as far south as Joppa (Jaffa) in
Palestine (Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, XIX, 93; XXIX, 29; translation by Charles
Henry Oldfather.

Chapter 3
1
2
3

See
for
instance,
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
BookIV,
http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph4.htm
Balsam, the name of the fragrant gum of the balsam tree, is derived from the Arabic Balasam; in
Latin: balsamum; Greek: βάλσαμον; Hebrew: bosem.
AppianofAlexandria,‘Preface
of
the
Roman
History’,
Livius.org,
http://www.livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-preface-1/? Also in 150 AD Greco-Romanhistorian Arrianus of Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Turkey), in Anabasis Alexandri, which describes
the campaigns of Alexander the Great, writes: ‘On the right side of the Red Sea beyondBabylonia is the chief part of Arabia, and of this a part comes down to the sea of Phoenicia andPalestinian Syria’ (Arrian 2006: 89).
4 http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm
5 PlinytheElder,NaturalHistory,
Volume1,
Book
V:
Chapter13,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/home.html
6 Pomponius
Mela,
De
Chorographia
Liber
Primus,Thelatinlibrary.com,
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/pomponius1.html
7 See also ibid.
8 ‘Philo Judaeus’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/biography/PhiloJudaeus
9 ‘Every Good Man is Free’, XII.75.
10 In comparison, the total population of Pharisees, the forerunners of modern Rabbinic Judaism,
were estimated by Josephus at 6000 (Flavius 2004).
11 ‘Early Jewish Writings’, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book33.html

Chapter 4
1

Provincia Arabia, or the Roman Arabia Petraea, was the birth place of ‘Philip the Arab’, Roman
Emperor from 244 to 249 AD. Philip went on to become a major figure in the Roman Empire(Bowersock 1994: 122).
2 Peraea (Greek: Περαία, ‘the country beyond’), occupied the eastern side of the Jordan Rivervalley. Subsequently the term was replaced by the Latin Transjordan.
3 The Romans promoted a regime of autonomous city-states in Palestine. A league of ten (oreleven) Hellenised cities in Eastern Palestine and Syria was formed after the Roman conquest in
63 BC; apart from Scythopolis (modern Beisan), all lay east of the Jordan River. The league
survived until the 2nd century AD.
4 The Romans divided Arabia into three regions: Arabia Petraea, Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix(Fertile Arabia), which included the Yemen.
5 Greek: Καισάρεια; the modern Palestinian village of Qaysariah; depopulated and destroyed byIsrael in 1948.
6 Praeses (Latin: praesides), a term used under Constantine the Great (r. 306–337) to refer tospecific class of provincial governors, the lowest after the consulares and the correctors.
7 Arnold
HughMartinJones,‘Palestine’,
Encyclopaedia
Britannica,
http://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine
8 In comparison, the total population of Palestine west of the River Jordan at the height of the
Roman period did not exceed one million (Pastor 1997: 6)
9 Located on coastal dunes 10 kilometres south of Gaza city; the archaeological remains of what is
known in Arabic as Tell Umm al-Amr; built by St. Hilarion (born in southern Gaza in 329 AD),the monk after whom it was named.
10 Miaphysites believe that the nature of Jesus, divine and human, are united in one. Although
Chalcedonian Christianity considered Miaphysitism in general to be amenable to an orthodox
interpretation, they nevertheless perceive it to be a form of Monophysitism.
11 ‘Bowl from Caesarea Palaestina’, http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/bowl-caesareaPalaestinae and http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/la-coupe-de-cesaree-de-palestine
12 ‘Caesarea
Palaestina’,
New
Advent(Catholic
Encyclopaedia),
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03134b.htm
13 The term for an edition of the Old Testament in six versions, an immense word-for-wordcomparison of the Greek Septuagint with Greek translations.
14 ‘Caesarea
Palaestina’,
New
Advent(Catholic
Encyclopaedia),at:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03134b.htm

15 http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_martyrs.htm. St Albina of Caesarea, who died in the
3rd century, is also listed in the Roman Catholic Martyrology.
16 http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2504.htm
17 Originally the title ‘titular see’ applied to patribus infidelium (‘in the lands of the unbelievers’).
In 1882 the Catholic Church, seeking to improve relations with Orthodox Christians and avoid
causing offence to Muslims, abolished the expression in partibus infidelium.
18 Bishop Antiochus represented the city of Capitolias, in Palaestinae Secunda, an ancient city eastof the River Jordan and is identified with the modern village of Beit Ras in the Irbid region.
19 TheSeven
EcumenicalCouncils,
ChristianClassics
Ethereal
Library,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.xi.xv.html
20 The expression is derived from the Classical Greek ἐγκώμιον (enkomion) meaning ‘the praise ofa person or thing’.
21 Local farming in the Gaza region depended largely on the annual rain fall; today Gaza city enjoys
400 mm of annual rain fall, while the more arid region of Rafah, located 20 kilometres to thesouth, gets only 200 mm.
22 Ruth Webb, ‘Rhetorical and Theatrical Fictions in Chorikios of Gaza’, Center for Hellenic
Studies, Harvard University, http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/3259
23 Timothy W. Seid, ‘Origins of Catena in Gaza’, http://legacy.earlham.edu/~seidti/iam/catena.html
24 Le Stampa, 12 May 2015, http://www.lastampa.it/2015/05/12/esteri/vatican-insider/en/whenmuslim-politicians-send-their-daughters-to-convent-schools5xtR7LSxokCjnjuFLHwjAM/pagina.html
25 http://archmemory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/forgotten-as-if-you-never-were.html
26 Among the prominent Christian ascetics of the period was Barsanuphius of Palestine (died c. 540
AD). Born in Egypt, he lived in a Palestinian monastery in absolute seclusion for fifty years(Barsanuphius 2006).
27 St Anthony (251–356), a Coptic monk, became known as both the father and founder of desertmonasticism. The Desert Mothers are less well known because the lives of the early saints were
written by men for male monastic audiences (King 1989).
28 Coenobium is a communal monastery with a number of structures surrounded by a wall and themonks lived in a commune. This term is based on the Greek koinos (common) and bios (life).
29 In Sufi Islam, the tariqah, or ‘path’, metaphor is taken by the mystic towards the inner truth.
30 Sabbas’ Life was written by one of his disciples, Cyril of Scythopolis (525‒559) (modern Beisan)
in Palaestinae Secunda, a Christian monk and historian of monastic life in Palestine in the earlyyears of Christianity (Kazhdan 1991). His work known in English as The Lives of the Monks ofPalestine is one of the main sources of monastic life in Byzantine Palestine.
31 Mar Saba Monastery is one of thirteen Palestinian sites included on the list submitted to
UNESCO following the admission of Palestine to this organisation in 2011.
32 Al-Jazeera, 22 February 2010.

Chapter 6
1
2
3
4
5

The period of the Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs began with Marwan ibn al-Hakam in 684.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jerusalem-architecture-in-the-umayyad-period
This mixture of Islamic and Roman Byzantine styles is also found in the ‘Hisham Palace’/Khirbat
al-Mafjar, Jericho, and in al-Ramla and Tiberias (Khirbet al-Minyar). It is also found in the Arab
Byzantine coinage minted in the towns of Jund Filastin in the 7th century.
This Palestinian town, located 15 kilometres south-west of al-Ramla, with a population of 5420
in 1948, was destroyed by Israel in 1948.
Via Maris is the modern name for an ancient trade and strategic rout dating from the Early
Bronze Age. It connected Egypt with Syria and the Fertile Crescent and followed the coast of

Palestine through the ancient cities of Gaza, ‘Asqalan, Isdud, Jaffa and Tantur before turning east
through Megiddo and the Esdraelon valley until it reached Tiberias, then through the Golan
Heights to Damascus.
6 Arsuf was about 16 kilometres north of Jaffa and 34 kilometres south of Caesarea on the
Mediterranean coast. Under the Byzantines in the 5th‒6th centuries AD it was the second largest
city in the coastal region of Palaestinae Prima, second only to Caesarea. It was populated bySamaritans and Christians and had a prosperous glass industry with products exported toMediterranean countries. Under early Islam the city continued to prosper and large pottery
production was developed (Hütteroth and Abdulfattah 1977: 140).
7 Le Strange commented that al-Maqdisi’s ‘description of Palestine, and especially of Jerusalem,
his native city, is one of the best parts of the work. All that he wrote is the fruit of his own
observation, and his descriptions of the manners and customs of the various countries, bear thestamp of a shrewd and observant mind, fortified by profound knowledge of both books and men’(Le Strange 1890: 5‒6).
8 ‘Legio VI Ferrata’, http://www.livius.org/articles/legion/legio-vi-ferrata/?; Kennedy (1980).
9 ‘Coin/Archives’, http://www.coinarchives.com/w/results.php?search=fals+and+islamic
10 Aelia Capitolina was the official Roman and Byzantine name of Jerusalem until 638 AD whenthe Arabs occupied the city and initially kept the first part of the name as ‘Ilya’ (al-Maqdisi 2002:
43)
11 The collections of the Israeli Municipal Museum of al-Ramla contain a range of medieval Islamiccoins including a hoard of 376 gold dinars and six gold bars discovered in 1964 in the vicinity of
the White Mosque compound. See http://en.goramla.com/category/ramla-museum-1
12 This Palestinian town was depopulated and destroyed by Israel in 1948 and the Jewish settlementof Azor now stands on the lands of the Arab town.
13 ‘Al-Yazuri’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition, edited by P. Bearman, T. Bianqui, C. E.
Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill Online).

Chapter 71234

https://www.wdl.org/en/item/2892/
https://truthaholics.wordpress.com/2017/12/11/records-of-jerusalem-deeds-found-in-ottomanarchives-cause-israel-unease/ A similar proportion of waqf properties (20‒25 per cent) also
existed in the Palestinian city of Acre during the late Ottoman period (Reiter 2010: 110).
The Nea Church was destroyed during the Persian conquest of the city in 614, but its remains
were further used as a source of building material by the Umayyads few decades later (Ben-Dov
1977).
The fair also exhibited the Illés Relief model of the Old city of Jerusalem, a model hand-craftedfrom molten zinc and is hand-painted. It was hand-crafted between 1864 and 1873 by Stephen
Illés, a Hungarian Catholic who lived in Palestine.

Chapter 8
1
2
3‘The Palestinian People is a Colonial Invention’, in Azmi Beshara on the existence of a
Palestinian People, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOqAGbpoDZc, posted 30 April 2009.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lWcChegBF2sC&pg=RA1PA65&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Yusuf al-Natsheh, ‘Suq al-Qattanin (Market of the Cotton Merchants)’, in Discover Islamic Art,
Museum With No Frontiers, 2016, http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?
id=monument;isl;pa;mon01;6;en4
5
6

A Gazetteer of the World. Or Dictionary of Geographical Knowledge. Vol. 1 (Edinburgh andLondon: A. Fullarton and Co. 1959): 38‒39.
The original small settlement was built on the slopes of Mount Carmel in in the late Bronze Age(14th century BC).
The sequin was a gold coin minted by the Republic of Venice from the 13th century until the
takeover of Venice by Napoleon in 1797. Following the Venetian model, similar coins were used
for centuries throughout the Mediterranean, in Palestine and throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Chapter 9123

https://arablit.org/2013/01/15/we-have-on-this-earth-what-makes-life-worth-living/
http://www.all-poetry.ru/stih307.html
The first Russian writer who went to Palestine as a pilgrim was Dmitrij Daškov, a diplomat andthe second counsellor of the Russian Embassy in Istanbul. He wrote an essay entitled ‘Russkie
poklonniki v Ierusalime. Otryvok iz putešestvija po Grecii i Palestine v 1820’ (Merlo 2013).
4 ‘Jerusalem(After1291)’,
New
Advent(Catholic
Encyclopedia),1910,
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08364a.htm; also Hummel and Hummel (1995). Other
accountsput
thefiguresat
15,000in
1910
and12,000in1913:
http://www.josephzeitoun.com/2015/07/
5 The founding father of the Israeli state David Grun (later David Ben-Gurion) was born in the
Russian Empire and immigrated to Palestine 1906. After the First World War broke out, BenGurion, a Russian subject, was deported by the Ottoman authorities from Palestine and hereturned to Palestine with occupying British forces in 1918.
6 ‘Jerusalem(After1291)’,
New
Advent(Catholic
Encyclopedia),1910,
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08364a.htm
7 http://www.pef.org.uk/Pages/Warren.htm
8 https://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=CydMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA155&dq=filastin&hl=en&ei=XuBVTa-bEcEhQfR36C0DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=filastin&f=false
9 The province became known as vilayet in the late 1860s.
10 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1913_Ottoman_Geography_Textbook_Showing_the_S
anjak_of_Jerusalem_and_Palestine.jpeg
11 Mikhail Nu‘aymah (1889‒1988), a Lebanese author and well-known Arab poet, was also
educated at the Russian teachers college in Nazareth in 1902‒1906.
12,
http://www.mansaf.org/orth_society.htm
13 See for example: ibid.
14 http://www.mansaf.org/orth_society.htm; https://arabic.rt.com/news/586864-130
15 http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2012/05/20125915313256768.html(Masalha2012).
16 ‘Святая земля: Отчет по командировке в Палестину и прилегающия к ней страны’ [HolyLand: Report on a Business Trip to Palestine and Adjacent Countries] (Kiev: Kiev Theological
Academy, 1875).
17 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Manual_of_Palestinean_Arabic%2C_for_self-instruction_1909.png
18 The ‘becoming of self’ was often described in Darwish’s poetry as the ‘other self’. However theterm ‘becoming of being’ is based on the insight Martin Heidegger developed in Being and Time(2010). The conception assumes that the ontological truth of being’s becoming (being in theworld, being becomes progressively uncovered and articulated) is mediated by human thinking
and action.

19 Nassar also published in 1911 the first book in Arabic on Zionism, entitled Zionism: Its History,
Objective and Importance, in which he described Zionism as a settler-colonial movement seeking
to displace the Palestinian Arabs in Palestine (Beška 2014a).
20 For a critique of Bracy’s work, see Beška (2012).
21 The historic name applies to the entire area of the eastern plateau of the Jordan valley including‘Amman, then part of the Nablus sanjak.
22 Falastin, 31 January 1912, p. 1.
23 Yiannis Meimaris, ‘The Discovery of the Madaba Map: Mythology and Reality’, at:
http://198.62.75.1/www1/ofm/mad/articles/MeimarisMap.html
24 See aso Khalidi, W. (1988); Kasmieh (1992).
25 To this letter, he received a reply from Theodor Herzl (Beška 2007).
26 Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, a chronicler and advisor to Saladin, was present at the Battle of Hittin
and the subsequent campaign to expel the Crusaders from the Holy Land (al-Isfahani 1888).
27 Shukri al-‘Asali, ‘Kitab min Salah al-Din al- Ayyubi ila qa’id al-hamla al-Hawraniyya Sami
Basha al-Faruqi’, al-Muqtabas, 5 December 1910, cited in Beška (2014b).
28 For further discussion on the leadership and goals of the Palestinian national movement during
the Mandatory period, see al-Hut (1981).
29 See, for instance, Azmi Beshara, ‘The Palestinian People is a Colonial Invention’, in Azmi
Beshara on the existence of a Palestinian People, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=EOqAGbpoDZc, posted 30 April 2009.
30 ‘Abd al-Hadi had been a founding member of the 1909 Paris-based underground al-Fatat(Jam’iyat al-’Arabiyah al-Fatat, ‘the Young Arab Society’), an Arab nationalist organisation
which was devoted to Arab cultural and administrative autonomy and unity within the Ottoman
system. ‘Abd al-Hadi had also served as private secretary of Amir Faisal at the Paris Peace
Conference of 1919.
31 Aryeh Dayan, ‘The Communists Who Saved the Jewish State’, Haaretz, 9 May 2006,
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/the-communists-who-saved-the-jewish-state1.187221
32 Published in the Israeli Official Gazette, No. 1 of the 5th Iyar, 5708 (14 May 1948).

Chapter 10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

A speech delivered at a meeting of the French Zionist Federation, Paris, 28 March 1914, in
Litvinoff (1983, paper 24: 115‒116).
See protocol of Ruppin’s statement at the Jewish Agency Executive’s meeting, 20 May 1936 (inHeller 1984: 140).
Brian Klug, ‘The Other Arthur Balfour “PROTECTOR OF THE JEWS”’, 8 July 2013,
http://www.balfourproject.org/the-other-arthur-balfour-protector-of-the-jews/
Cited
by
Ami
Isseroff,‘BritishSupportforJewishRestoration’,
http://www.mideastweb.org/britzion.htm; Masalha (1992, 1997, 2003).
J. N. Darby, Letters of J. N. Darby, Vol. 2 (London: G. Morrish, n.d.).
Numbers 32:1; Genesis 31:25; Genesis 37:25.
Cited
by
Ami
Isseroff,‘BritishSupportforJewishRestoration’,
http://www.mideastweb.org/britzion.htm.
Ibid.
As early as 1821 the Anglican Church, through its Church Missionary Society and the London
Jews Society (more properly, the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, founded in1808 to convert the Jews to Christianity), was considering the establishment of a post. The
London Jews Society established the first permanent Anglican mission station in Jerusalem in1833, two years after the crisis caused by the capture of the city by Muhammad ‘Ali. In 1841, aProtestant bishopric in Jerusalem was established under joint British and Prussian auspices.
10 Russian interest in the Holy Land increased particularly after the Crimean War, as Russia availed
itself of the opportunity of furthering Russian political concerns through protection of Orthodox
interests in the Ottoman Empire. This was witnessed as early 1860 with the commencement of
the building of a Russian cathedral and of a vast complex of hostels, offices and hospitals for thecare for Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem.
11 German influence was reflected in the German Evangelical Church’s administration of thehospital of the German deaconesses, the Syrian Protestant Orphanage, the Leper Hospital in theGerman colony, and the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer.
12 Not to be outdone, the Church of Scotland mission was established, which, in addition to St
Andrew’s in Jerusalem, provided medical and educational services in several centres in Palestine.
13 This famous poem was written by Kipling in 1899.
14 Cited by Isseroff, ‘British Support for Jewish Restoration’.
15 Here Said uses Carl Marx’s adage: ‘they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’in an epigraph to Orientalism.
16 http://web.nli.org.il/sites/JPress/English/Pages/Palestine-Post.aspx
17 Reported in Haaretz, 4 April 1969.
18 Wadi al-Hawarith was also the name of a Palestinian village depopulated in 1948.
19 Rabbinic sages whose views were recorded in the Mishnah.
20 Jewish Oral Torah scholars.
21 For further discussion of the invention of the Jewish people, see Masalha (2007) and Sand
(2009).
22 Other key reasons behind the influence of Arabic on modern Hebrew include: (1) until theestablishment of Israel in 1948 Arabic was spoken by the overwhelming majority of people inPalestine; (2) during the early stages of its revival Hebrew urgently needed new Semitic words
and patterns and had to rely on a living Semitic language such as Arabic which the newly
invented modern Hebrew found as a readily available rich resource to exploit; (3) Arabic is
closest to Hebrew amongst the Semitic languages (Shehadeh 1998: 62; Chomsky 1967: 217).
23 Much of Israeli research has focused on the abundance of Arabic adjectives in Israeli Hebrew
slang and on the significant impact of Arabic on the ‘non-official’, non-standard, colloquial
Hebrew (Blanc 1954; Shehadeh 1998).
24 However, some words did not catch on. For instance, Ben-Yehuda’s word for ‘tomato’ wasbadora, the Hebrew version of the Palestinian colloquial Arabic bandora; Ben-Yehuda failed to
win this logistic battle and today Israeli Hebrew speakers use the word ‘agvania (Balint 2008) –from the Hebrew root ‘agav which means ‘to love, to desire’. This also reflects the European (andvulgar) ‘love apple’ (Italian: pomo d’oro; French: pommes d’amour) for the Aztec fruit which
was first brought to Italy from South America in the 16th century and to which the Europeans
attributed aphrodisiac powers.
25 Avishai Margalit, ‘The Myth of Jerusalem’, The New York Review of Books 38(21), 19 December
1991.
26 Uri Davis, ‘The Histadrut: Continuity and Change’, paper submitted to the International
Department, Norwegian Trade Union Federation, January 1999.
27 Shamir means flint. The Talmud contains the myth of King Solomon using Shamir in theconstruction of the first temple in the place of cutting tools.
28 Don C. Benjamin, ‘Stories and Stones: Archaeology and the Bible, an introduction with CD
Rom’, 2006, http://www.doncbenjamin.com/pav/docs/archaeology_and_the_bible.pdf, note 78, p.
254.
29 Approximately one-quarter of all geographical names were derived from the Arabic names on thebasis of the similarity of sounds.

30 Founded in 1890, the new Zionist settlement/city of Rehovot was named after a biblical town of asimilar name, Rehoboth, which stood at a completely different location in the Negev Desert.
31 Oren Yiftachel’s Introduction to Noga Kadman’s Erased From Space and Consciousness (2008),
p. 8, cited in Manar Makhoul, ‘Un-erasing the Nakba: Palestinian Identity in Israel since the First
Intifada’, 13 March 2013, http://mondoweiss.net/2013/03/palestinian-identity-intifada/
32 Jonathan Cook, ‘Israel’s Plan to Wipe Arabic Names off the Map’, The Electronic Intifada, 17
July 2009, http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-plan-wipe-arabic-names-map/8351
33 Ibid.

IndexNote: Page numbers followed by n indicate an endnote with relevant number.

Abbasid Palestine, 2, 43, 79, 84, 107, 125, 161, 165, 169, 172–3, 176, 179, 182, 186, 198, 212, 265‘Abd al-Hadi, family of Jenin, 296‘Abd al-Hadi, ‘Awni, 296–7, 429n30‘Abd al-Rahman, Salman, 291
Abdulfattah, Kamal, 226
Abraha, 140
Abraham (Ibrahim), 135, 369–70
Abrahamic traditions, 28, 30–1, 135, 311, 421
Abu Hanna, Hanna, 275
Abu Karib, 139–41, 148
Abu Shusha, 361
Abu-Sitta, Salman, 33
Acre (Akka, Ptolemais): 4, 33, 37–8, 46, 63, 65, 69, 157, 165, 167–8, 174, 177, 190, 192, 194, 197,
200–2, 205, 218–20, 222, 224, 228–34, 236–8, 240, 246, 261–4, 266–8, 274, 280, 287–8, 293,
343, 363, 422n7, 427n2; capital of Dhaher al-‘Umar, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar and Suleiman Pasha
al-‘Adil, 220, 222, 224, 228–9, 234; cotton export to Europe, 230–2; Crusader kingdom, 39, 194–5, 202, 205, 246; economic hub of Palestine, 222, 225, 230–4; epidemics, 237–8; Napoleonicinvasion and siege, 219–20, 233, 240, 246, 255–6; seat of Islamic learning, 233; Pashalik of, 224,
263, 229, 233; regional capital, 233–4, 236, 238, 263 see also Sanjak of Acre
Agatharchides (Agatharchus), of Knidos, 79
Ahad Ha’Am (Asher Zvi Ginzberg), 317
al-Andalus (Andalusia), 37, 113, 217, 272
al-Aqsa Mosque, 163–4, 288, 322
al-‘Arif, ‘Arif, 295–6
al-‘Arish, 160, 169, 217
al-‘Asali, Shukri, 286
al-Balqa, 172, 281–82
al-Dizbari, Anushtakin, 185–7, 227 see also Military Governor of Palestine
Aleppo, 202, Emirate of, 212
Alexander Jannaeus (Alexander Yannai), King, 348
Alexander the Great, 18, 23, 27, 69, 78, 423n3
Alexandria, 41, 48, 79, 85, 87, 90, 92–3, 101, 110, 121–2, 130–1, 180
al-Farabi, Arab philosopher, 212
al-Fuleh, Arab village (‘Afula), 177, 331–2, 363
al-Fustat (old Cairo), 2, 97, 166, 168, 184–7 see also Cairo
al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, Fatimid Caliph, 186‘Ali, Muhammad, of Egypt, 212, 238, 430n9‘Ali, Nur al-Din, of ‘Asqalan, 200
al-Hamawi, Yaqut, 177, 196–7, 331
al-Hilal, magazine, 283

al-Jazzar, Ahmad Pasha, 35, 218, 224, 229, 232–3, 237, 240, 263, 270
al-Jazzar Mosque, 38–9, 233, 39, 233 see also the White Mosqueal-‘Issa, ‘Issa, 10, 254, 279–80
al-‘Issa, Yousef, 10, 254, 279–82
al-Karmel, newspaper, 280
al-Kassar, Salim, 330
Al-Khalasa (Elusa, Haluza), 109, 124, 153–4; first capital of Palaestina Salutaris, 124
al-Khalidi family, of Jerusalem, 283, 298
Al-Khalidiyyah Library, 283
al-Khalil (Hebron): 74, 128, 166, 174–5, 201–2, 205–8, 210, 217, 262, 267, 270, 321, 362, 364; Jabal
al-Khalil, 201, 207; glassware industry, 174–5, 206–10
al-Khan al-Ahmar, 133
al-Khawarizmi, 43, 79
al-Khdeira, Arab village (Hadera), 253, 325, 335, 365
al-Lajjun, 13, 157, 176–7, 203, 206, 217
al-Khalidi, Ruhi, 10, 269, 273, 283–4
Allon, Yigal, 348, 350–1, 378, 381
All Palestine Church (Church of Aelia Capitolina/al-Quds/Jerusalem): 41, 46, 98, 106–9, 111, 113–
14, 117, 119, 147, 143, 149, 254, 265, 281–2 see also Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem
All-Palestine Government, 302
al-Majdal, village (Tiberias region), 152, 361
al-Manar, magazine, 283
al-Maqdisi (al-Muqaddasi), description of Palestine, 10–11, 13, 159, 171, 173, 199, 274, 304
al-Mujaydil, village, 152, 361
al-Mutanabi, Arab poet, 212
al-Muzaffar, ‘Abd al-Qader, 291
al-Nabighah adh-Dhubyani, 144–5
al-Qasatli, Nu’man, 159
al-Ramla: 4, 13, 15, 37–8, 97, 112, 125, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163–70, 175, 177, 180–8, 194–7, 201,
204–6, 214–6, 233, 274, 287, 302, 426n3, 426n4, 427n11; al-Ramla-Filastin, 37, 167, 216; capitalof Jund Filastin, 96–7, 125, 154, 165–70, 175, 177; famine, 186; soap and olive industry, 185
al-Ramli, Khair al-Din, 10–11, 13, 171, 206–7, 214–6, 274, 279–80
al-Raqqa, 107
al-Sakakini, Khalil, 11, 269, 272, 277, 283
al-Shafi’: Imam, of Gaza, 215; Shafi’ jurisprudence in Palestine and Egypt, 200
al-Shajara, Arab village (Sejara, Ilaniya settlement), 334
al-Shawa, Rushdi, 291
al-Tayyan, Anton, 330
al-Tumurtashi, 10–11, 13, 171, 207, 216–7, 247, 274
al-‘Umar, Dhaher: 35, 176, 193, 213, 218, 220–1, 224–5, 227, 229–30, 234–8, 242, 263, 274; andPalestinian statehood, 218–40; Dawlah Qutriyyah of, 211–13; ‘King of Galilee’, 229; ‘Sheikh ofAcre, Emir of Nazareth, Tiberias, Safed, and Sheikh of all Galilee’, 229
al- Uthmani, Shams al-Din Muhammad, 203
al-Wazir, Khalil, 287, 302
al-Yazuri, Muhammad, chief minister of the Fatimid state, 184, 187, 274‘Amman (Philadelphia), 46, 48, 118, 167, 169, 173, 176, 181, 197, 282, 429n21
Anderson, Benedict, 10, 12, 277
Anglo-Palestine Bank (Bank Leumi), 326
Antioch, 41, 78, 89, 101, 105–11, 114, 121, 130, 148
Antiochus, Bishop Capitolias (in Palaestina Secunda), 425n18

Antiochus, of Ascalon: founder of school of philosophy, 92, 274; and Cicero, 92
Antipatris (Surdi fonts/Binar Bashi), 46, 146, 178
Antoninus, Roman Emperor, 178
Aphrodite, cult, 45, 74, 127
Appian, of Alexandria, 85
Arab Palestine Sport Federation (al-Ittihad al-Riadi al- Arabi al-Filastini), 290
Arabia: 41, 50, 138, 140, 155, 423n3; Roman Provincia of, 101–2, 142, 144, 147, 424n1
Arabia Petraea, 97, 102, 140–1, 154, 223, 336, 424n1, 424n4‘Arafat, Yasir, 289
Aristotle, 73, 76–7
Armstrong, George, 256‘Arrabah, 227
Arsuf (Apollonia), 38, 167, 175, 194, 196–7, 201, 426n6
Ashdod (Isdud), 17, 39, 59, 63, 67–9, 92, 146, 153, 178, 378, 379
Asheri, David, 75‘Asqalan (Ascalon, Ashkelon), 4, 17, 38–9, 41, 45, 55–6, 59, 63, 65, 67–9, 74, 76, 90, 92, 94–5, 118,
121, 125, 121, 146, 152–3, 157, 165–8, 178, 181–2, 194, 196, 201–2, 217, 274, 365, 368, 372,
378–9, 426n5 see also Majdal ‘Asqalan
Assyria, 17, 24, 28, 32, 37, 56, 58–9, 60–3, 67–8, 70, 73, 153, 211, 259, 422n7
Athens, 41, 84, 92–3, 100, 119, 121, 122, 125‘Athens of Asia’ (Gaza), 119, 121
Atlit, Crusader fortress, Castello Pelegrino, 38–39‘Awasim, 172‘Aylah Filastin’ (Aelas, ‘Aqabah), 38, 158–60, 169, 174‘Ayn Hawd, 363, 368
Ayyubid Palestine, 115, 167, 177, 183–4, 189, 193–9, 202, 207–9, 224
Azaryahu, Maoz, 346
Baalbeck, 185
Baghdad, 79, 107, 121, 125, 156, 171, 185, 198, 212, 239, 265
Baldwin, Latin King of Jerusalem, 114
Balfour, Arthur James, 307, 309–11, 314–5
Balfour Declaration, 193, 248, 291–2, 297, 309, 314–5, 325
Ball, Warwick, 147
Banu Tayy (Bedouin tribe), 183, 185, 227
Bar Kochba revolt, 82–4, 183
Barnes, Timothy David, 105
Bartov, Hanoch, 354
Basra, 265
Battle of ‘Ain Jalut, 198
Battle of Hittin, 194
Battle of Yarmuk, 141, 143, 157
Baybars, Sultan, 203
Beersheba (Bir al-Sabi), 124, 262, 267, 368, 378
Begin, Menachem (Mieczysław Biegun), 348, 361
Beidas, Khalil Ibrahim, 10, 254, 268–75, 279
Beirut: 231, 254, 272, 286–7, 296, 298, 302, 305, 331; Wilayah of, 264,
Beisan (Baysan, Scythopolis, Bet Shean): 4, 37–8, 40, 46, 63, 96–7, 99, 121, 125, 132, 165, 169,
176–7, 181, 424n3, 425n30; capital of Palaestina Secunda, 37, 40, 97; historians of Palestinianmonasticism, 132–3, 148, 425n30; under the Philistines, 63

Beit Dajan, village, 361, 365
Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin, 269
Beit Jala, 270, 277
Beit Jibrin (Eleutheropolis), 38, 40, 46, 94, 96, 118, 130, 165–7, 170, 178, 181, 185, 194, 197, 362
Ben-Aharon, Yitzhak, 348
Ben-Gurion, David (David Grün), 308, 326, 334, 338–9, 343–7, 349, 356, 361, 379, 428n5
Ben-Tzvi, Yitzhak, 338, 348
Benvenisti, Meron, 369
Ben-Yehuda, Eli’ezer, 338–43, 431n24
Berlinghieri, Francesco, 192
Beshara, ‘Azmi, 15–6
Bethlehem, 130, 207, 243, 247, 258, 275, 289
Bilad al-Sham, 6, 98, 125, 154, 169, 180, 202, 297
Blau, Joshua, 343
Bolshevik Revolution, 251, 305
Britain: 14, 44, 73, 184, 230, 237, 243, 245, 248, 255, 259, 260–1, 287, 308–12, 314–15, 347;
England and Palestine cotton, 174, 219, 229, 231, 232
British Industrial Revolution, 219–20, 222, 224, 229–30, 232
Bronze Age Palestine, 1–2, 4, 11, 16–17, 32–4, 36–7, 39, 42, 47, 49, 55–6, 58–9, 63, 68, 71, 151,
168, 176, 213, 335, 426n5, 427n5
Burckhardt, John Lewis, 244
Butros/Petros (Aspebetos), phylarch-bishop of the Palestinian Parembole, 147
Byzantine Palestine: 6, 16–17, 26, 35, 39–41, 47–8, 65, 71, 84, 88, 94–112, 116–49, 152, 154, 156,
159, 164–5, 167, 177, 207, 214, 262, 266, 288, 425n30 see also Dux Palaestinae; Palaestina
Prima; Palaestina Salutaris (Tertia); Palaestina Secunda
Caesarea Cappadocia, 93
Caesarea Maritima (Qaysariah): 4, 15, 37–8, 40–1, 48, 65, 68, 86, 93–4, 96–103, 105–9, 111–13,
115–16, 120–2, 124–6, 128, 130, 137, 140–1, 146, 158–9, 162, 165–8, 170, 178, 187, 194–5, 197,
199, 368, 424n15, 426n6; capital of Palaestina Prima, 40, 93, 99, 102; first capital Jund Filastin,
96; home of the Founding Fathers of the Church, 100–3, 106–7; largest and most important city
in Byzantine Palestine, 94, 102; library of, 101; seat of classical learning and cultural centre, 48,
94, 99–102 see also Caesarea-Palaestina
Caesarea-Palaestina (‘Caesarea of Palestine’), 4, 37–8, 40–1, 68, 86, 93–4, 96–103, 105–9, 111, 115–
16, 122, 124–6, 141, 162, 168, 195–7, 201–2, 217, 274, 368 see also Library of CaesareaPalaestina; See of Caesarea-Palaestina
Caesarea Philippi (Caesarea Paneas), 93
Caine, Hall, 311
Cairo, 97, 156, 166, 168, 185, 200, 205, 208, 233, 245, 283, 301–2 see also al-Fustat (old Cairo)
Cairo Genizah, 2, 186
Cana’an, 2, 18, 27, 36, 55, 57, 59, 60, 71, 76, 119, 161, 242, 385
Cana’anites, 57, 76
Cana’an, Tawfiq, 11, 277
Cava Syria (Syria-Coele), 77, 78 see also Syria
Cedrenus, Georgius, 126
Chalcolithic Age Palestine, 4, 47, 58, 174
China, 14, 169, 173–4‘China Sea’ (Red Sea), 159, 174
Cicero, 74, 92
Conder, Claude Reignier, 79, 256

Constantine the Great, Emperor, 71, 109, 424n6
Council of Chalcedon, 35, 106, 109–10, 117, 120, 148
Council of Ephesus, 35, 148
Council of Nicaea, 97, 106–7, 109, 119, 139, 162
Choricius of Gaza, 120, 122
Church of Antioch, 41, 106–11, 148
Church of Constantinople, 111
Church of England, 244
Church of Mary Magdalene (Jerusalem), 270
Church of Scotland, 430n12
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 288–9, 322
Church of the Nativity (Bethlehem), 207, 289
Churchill, Winston, 292, 314
Coinage of Palestine: 17; Achaemenid 179; Arab-Byzantine coins, 166, 179, 426n3; coinage ofPhilistia, 2, 17, 39, 67, 69–70, 92, 178; Islamic coinage of Jund Filastin, 2, 18, 178–9, 181–2,
427n1; Philisto-Arabian coins, 39; Roman, 81, 84, 179
Cordoba, 125, 212, 239
Crimean War, 250, 252, 261, 313, 430n10
Crotch, William, 246
Cuinet, Vital, 245
Cyril of Scythopolis, 132, 148, 425n30
Czechoslovakia, 301
Dalhamiya, village, 361
Damascus (al-Sham), 7, 60, 87, 97, 158–9, 163, 165–6, 168, 170, 179, 185, 200, 202, 205, 208–9,
213–15, 224, 229, 239, 245, 264, 282, 291, 294–6, 426n5 see also Jund Dimashq
Damascus Gate (Bab al-‘Amud), Al-Quds, 87
Darwazah, Muhammad ‘Izzat, 291
Darwish, Mahmoud, 12, 128, 201, 428n18
Daškov, Dmitrij, 250, 428n3
Dawlah Qutriyyah, 211–13, 229
David, (king), 23, 28–31, 356, 370
Dayan, Moshe, 328–9, 331, 374, 378–9
Deir Hanna, 228
Djahi, 2, 36, 55–6, 58–9
Disraeli, Benjamin, 314
Dostoevsky, 271
Doumani, Beshara, 225, 268
Durkheim, Émile, 49–50
Dux Palaestinae (Byzantine Military Governor of Palestine), 35, 98, 111, 141, 183–4
Egypt: 7, 22, 26–9, 41, 45, 56, 58–9, 66–8, 70, 73–5, 83–5, 87, 89, 90–1, 97, 99, 101, 118–20, 122–3,
128–30, 166, 168–70, 174, 180, 182–4, 186–7, 189, 191, 193–4, 196–7, 200, 208–10, 212–13,
215, 217, 228–9, 238, 245–6, 248, 255, 281, 289, 302, 355, 369, 385; New Kingdom of, 36
Ekron, (‘Aqir), 59, 63, 67, 363, 378
Elias, the Arab Patriarch of Aelia Capitolina, 149
Eliot, George, 311
Elon, Amos (Amos Sternbach), 351, 381
Emmuas (‘Amwas), 38, 165
Eshkol, Levi, 348
Eusebius, of Caesarea Maritima, 11, 48–9, 100, 102–3, 105–7, 274

Euthemius, monk, 132, 147
Euthemius monastery, 132, 147
Fada’il al-Quds, literature, 216
Faisal, Emir, 214, 291, 294–6, 429n30
Falastin, newspaper: 286, 254, 262, 273, 277–82, 286; Arabic terminology of, 5, 18, 259; Arabic
forms of Byzantine Παλαιστιν, 151
Fanon, Frantz, 19
Fateh (Palestinian National Liberation Movement), 287
Fatimid Palestine, 86, 179, 184–8, 197, 274
Finn, Elizabeth Anne, 321
Finn, James, 231, 256–7, 313, 320–1
Flora Palaestina, 51, 245, 328,
France, 184, 219, 229, 231, 233–5, 237, 242, 255, 262, 283, 284
Fretellus Rorgo, of Nazareth, 115
Fulcher, of Chartres, 114
Galilee, 74, 82, 84, 96–7, 99, 115, 169, 176, 191, 201–3, 218, 221, 223–4, 226–9, 273–6, 280, 285–6,
317
Gath (Jat, Tell al-Safi), 59, 63, 67, 378, 422n4
Gaza (Ghazzah): 4, 13, 27, 37–40, 55, 59, 62–5, 67–8, 73, 84, 89–91, 94, 109, 118, 124, 146, 153–4,
157, 165–7, 169–70, 178, 181, 194, 196, 201–2, 206, 216–7, 222, 228, 237, 243, 245, 262, 267,
291, 302, 303, 378; centre of Islamic jurisprudence, 215; classicising, 40–1, 46, 92, 92, 98–9,
119–26; desert monasteries of, 128–132; jars of, 335; coinage of, 17, 84; port city, 67, 69;
refugees in, 379; regional capital, 37, 68, 168; Rose Festival of, 126–28; silk industry (gauze),
174 see also Monastic School of Gaza; Rhetorical School of Gaza
Gaza Strip, 64, 73, 99, 132, 135, 289
General Union of Palestinian Students, 301–2
George Eliot, 311
Gerard of Nazareth, 115
Ghassanid Arabs, of Palestine, 7, 35, 41, 99, 102, 104, 124, 129, 135–49, 152, 158, 227
Ghattas, Maryam Sultanah Danil, 128
Gibbon, Edward, 3, 94, 104
Gogol, Nikolai, 250, 271
Golan, Arnon, 246
Golan Heights, 40, 93, 97
Goncalves, Francolino, 357
Gorky, Maxim, 271
Governor of Palestine (Wali Jund Filastin), 96
Granot (Granovsky), Abraham, 349
Guérin, Victor, 50, 248, 335–6, 342, 358
Habash, George, 303
Haddad, Nasrallah, 277
Hadrian, Emperor, 79, 82–7, 94, 106, 183‘Hadrian Column’, Jerusalem, 87
Haganah, 345, 249, 368
Haifa: 4, 39, 63, 96, 194, 202, 236, 266, 272, 275, 280, 292, 300, 327–8, 333, 350; ‘new Haifa’(‘Haifa al-Jadidah’), 234–5
Halbwachs, Maurice, 44, 49, 50, 335, 358
Hamilton William, Richard, 246

Hankin, Yehoshua, 331
Hanna, Atallah (Theodosios), 46
Harith V ibn Jabalah (Arithas), 139–41
Hasmonean Kingdom, 374, 348
Herod (Herodes), King, 35, 86, 93–4, 108
Herod’s Temple, 93
Herodotus, description of Palestine, 22, 27, 42, 45, 49, 72–6, 78, 84, 87, 89, 91, 96, 152–3
Herzl, Theodor, 253, 284–5, 308, 318, 339
Herzog, Zeev, 29–30
Hevelone-Harper, Jennifer, 123
Hisham Palace (Khirbat al-Mafjar), 38, 207, 426n3
Hittin, village, 361
Holon, 64
Hourani, Albert, 225, 239
Hunt, Holman, 311
Hütteroth, Wolf-Dieter, 226
Iamani, King of Ashdod, 68
ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, al-Walid, Caliph, 164
ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, Suleiman, Caliph, 96–7, 154, 164–5
Ibn al-Hakam, Marwan, Caliph, 426n1
ibn ‘Ali, Shihab al-Din Ahmad, 200
ibn al-Jarrah, Hassan, 185
Ibn al-Ukhuwah, 210
Ibn Battuta, 204–5, 208
Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani, 200, 274
Ibn Hawqal, 176–7
Ibn Khaldun, 198
ibn Khordadbeh, 172
Ibn Maimun (Maimonides), 24–5, 186
ibn Marwan, ‘Abd al-Malik, Caliph, 155–6
Ibn Shaddad, 188
ibn Tughj, Muhammad, 182
Idumaea, 73–4, 82, 87, 93, 97, 154, 191
Idumites, 73, 108, 354
Iltizam, taxation system in Palestine, 226–7, 237
Ikhshididi Palestine, 179, 182
Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society, 254, 250–3, 270–2, 275
India: 75, 104, 120, 314; spice trade, 122–3, 153, 159, 173
Indur, 364
Iron Age Palestine, 2, 24, 29, 35–7, 39, 62, 63–4, 66, 73, 163, 168
Islam: 4, 6–7, 9, 11, 16, 129, 145, 154, 164, 169, 273, 281, 286, 293, 295, 315, 318, 340; in Filastin,
2, 6, 11, 15, 35, 99, 164, 274, 277, 279, 288, 377, 384–5 see also province of Jund Filastin
Islamic jurisprudence of Palestine, 121, 200, 213–5
Israel Antiquities Authority, 322
Israel Museum, 322
Israel Nature and Parks Authority, 277
Istiqlal party, 296–7
Italy, 78, 133, 219, 231, 381
Jabalah IV, 139

Jabiyah, Golan Heights, Ghasanid capital in the province of Palaestina Secunda, 143, 145
Jacotin’s Map of Palestine (Carte Jacotin, Jacotin Atlas), 34 193, 255–6
Jacotin, Colonel Pierre, 255
Jaffa (Yaffa, Joppa): 4, 38–9, 46, 64, 67–9, 74, 90, 93, 97, 153, 165–6, 170, 177–8, 187, 194, 197,
201–2, 206, 219, 222, 243, 245, 247, 253, 262, 266, 274, 291–2, 300, 326, 330, 335, 344, 365,
376, 379, 383, 423n3, 426n5; expulsion of, 324; Falastin newspaper based in, 254, 279–80;‘Jaffa (Shamouti) oranges’, 332–3, 382; as port in the province of Jund Filastin, 169; Palestine
Press, 260
Japan, 279
Jawhariyyeh, Wasif, 268–9
Jenin, 176, 203, 231, 296, 300
Jericho (Ariha, Riha), 4, 29, 33, 38, 132, 147–8, 155, 164, 167, 173, 177, 180, 197, 207, 426n3
Jerusalem/Al-Quds (Aelia Capitolina, Ilya, Bayt al-Maqdis): 31, 35, 37–8, 40, 86, 107, 207, 426n10,
147, 178, 206–8, 225; All Palestine Church of Aelia Capitolina, 41, 98, 106–13, 117, 162; ArabChristian, 149; centrality of, 87; Herod’s Temple of, 93; Jabal al-Quds, 201; capital of late
Ottoman Palestine, 168, 271, 222, 256, 261–71, 279, 288; Islamic, 35, 38, 96, 112, 118, 124–25,
146, 154–5, 159, 161–8, 173, 195–200, 207, 222, 261–71, 288; Madaba Mosaic Floor Map, 118;
religious capital, 35, 41, 93, 98, 106–13, 117, 162, 168, 195, 207, 216, 256 see also
Mutasarrifiyyah of al-Quds al-Sharif
Jesus of Nazareth (‘Isa), 23–4, 26, 31, 90, 99–100, 103, 117, 130, 136, 151, 160, 191, 243, 250, 274,424n9
Jewish Agency (Jewish Agency for Palestine), 308, 325–6, 332, 337
Jewish Colonial Association, 331, 335
Jewish Colonial Trust, 326
Jewish National Fund, 286, 329, 336, 349–50, 366–8, 371, 376, 380–2
Jewish Palestine Exploration Society (Israel Exploration Society), 304–5
Jordan: 6, 118, 128, 143, 145, 158, 175–6, 193, 203, 213, 257, 281, 289, 290, 293, 322; River Jordan,
1, 32, 39, 56, 58, 63, 69, 73, 167, 172, 191, 249, 282, 312, 373, 424
Josephus, 11, 48, 79, 86–7, 90–1, 93, 422n11, 423n10
Judaea, 67, 87–9, 91, 115
Judaism: 24–5, 28, 30, 53, 64, 82–3, 94, 157, 314, 344, 284; Arab-Judaism, 77, 160, 228, 276; ArabJewish al-Fustat Genizah, 184, 186; Ashkenazi Judaism, 334, 385; Hellenistic, 48, 86–7, 90–1,
93; Maimonides’ conception of, 24
Julian of ‘Asqalan, 41
Jund al-Urdun (Arab-Muslim province of Jordan), 15–7, 154, 158, 160, 161, 169, 172, 177, 180,
184–6, 264–5
Jund Dimashq (province of Damascus), 172, 180, 154
Jund Hims, 154, 180
Jund Filastin (Palestine province under Islam), 2, 6–7, 15–18, 35, 37, 42, 46, 56, 79, 96, 99, 112, 115,
125, 151–54, 158–69, 171–88, 197, 201, 204, 214, 233, 247, 262, 264–5, 267, 273–4, 281–2,
287, 331, 426n3
Jund Qinnasrin, 154, 172, 180, 205
Justine the Martyr, 85
Justinian, Emperor, 104, 109, 110, 118, 125, 139, 140, 149, 207
Kafr Kanna, 266
Kafr Sabt, village, 361
Kanafani, Ghassan, 287
Katznelson, Avraham, 352
Katznelson, Berl, 332

Kenan, Amos, 352
Kerem Avraham, 321
Kfar Adumim, settlement in the West Bank, 133
Khairi, family of al-Ramla, 214
Khairi, Mustafa, 214
Khalidi, Rashid, 12–3, 268
Khalidi, Walid, 366–7
Khan Yunis, 73
Khusro (Khusrau), Nasir, 86, 161, 187
Kimmerling, Baruch, 13, 268‘Kingdom of Safad’ (Mamlakat Safad), province, 203, 220
Kingdom of Sicily, 190–1
Kipling, Rudyard, 314, 430n13
Klug, Brian, 310
Lakhmids, of Iraq, 142–3
Latin Crusaders (Frankish Crusaders), 6, 39, 44, 46, 168, 186, 190, 192–5, 198–9, 202, 205, 286,
289, 320, 358, 361, 380
Latin Kingdom of Acre, 190, 202
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 6, 46, 113, 115, 167, 188–90, 194–5, 202, 246
Latin Palestine 42, 113–6
Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, 126
League of Nations, 287
Lebanon: 3, 6, 36, 55, 57–9, 61, 67–8, 82, 78, 87–8, 91, 105, 172, 193, 202–3, 212, 222, 224, 228–9,
237, 243, 249, 262, 268, 271, 281, 295, 303, 328, 346; Emirate of Mount Lebanon, 212, 222, 229
Lemche, Niels Peter, 57
Lermontov, Mikhail Yuryevich, 249–50
Leo, Emperor, 138
Le Strange, Guy, 6, 245–7, 304, 426n7
Library of Alexandria, 101
Library of Ashurbanipal, 422n6
Library of Caesarea-Palaestina, 40–1, 93, 101–2, 121
Library of Nazareth, 115,
Lloyd George, David, 314–15
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer (Jerusalem), 430n11
Lydda (Lid, Diospolis, Georgiopolis), 38, 46, 96, 165–7, 170, 178, 180–1, 186, 206, 303, 368, 383
Ma’alei Adumim, settlement in the West Bank, 133
Madaba Floor Mosaic Map, 87, 118–19, 123, 207, 266, 281–2
Majdal ‘Asqalan, Arab town, 76, 152, 336, 365, 368, 378–9 see also ‘Asqalan (Ascalon)
Majdal Shams, 152
Maimonides (Ibn Maimun), 24–5, 186
Mamluk Palestine, 7, 116, 154, 175–6, 195, 197–8, 200, 203, 205, 208–9, 230, 274
Manchester, Lord, 311
Mandatory Government of Palestine, 51, 287, 289, 324–5, 327
Mandel, Neville, 286
Marj Ibn ‘Amer (Plain of Esdraelon, Jezreel Valley), 13, 62, 64, 69, 158, 160, 166, 169, 177, 206,
217–8, 230, 235, 331–2, 362–3, 365
Mare Mecca (See of Mecca), 159
Mauro, Fra, 79, 189, 191
Maximus, Bishop of Aelia Capitolina, 107, 110, 119McLeod, Walter, 245
Mecca, 159, 161 see also Mare Mecca
Megiddo (Magiddu, Tell Megiddo, Tell al-Mutasallim): 176, 426n5; city-state 4, 176
Meiron (Mayrun), 365
Mela, Pomponius, 87–90
Melbourne, Lord, 310
Merneptah Stele, 58–9
Mesopotamia, 67, 88–9, 172, 191, 208
Migdal Haemek, 361, 363
Migdal, Joel S., 268
Military Governor of Palestine (Mutawalli Harb Filastin), 35, 184–6
Mlabbis, Arab village (Petah Tikva), 64, 330
Monastic School of Gaza, 128–32
Mount Gerizim, 202, 421n8
Mount of Olives, 26, 202, 270
Mount Sinai (Tur Sina), 25–6, 29, 114, 131, 202, 336
Mount Tabor (Jabal al-Tur), 69, 143, 166, 202, 381, 421n8
Moses (Musa), Genesis story, 27–8, 31, 321, 348, 356, 364
Mosul, 60, 265
Mount Tabor (Jabal al-Tur), 25, 69, 143, 166, 202, 333, 381, 421n8
Muhammad, Prophet, 31, 129, 145, 154, 164, 169, 273, 286
Muhtasib, family of al-Khalil, 209–10
Muhtasib, ‘moral economy’ and state regulations, 210
Mujir al-Din, 10, 13, 171, 196, 205–7, 215, 217, 274
Muslih, Muhammad, 12Mutasarrifiyyah of al-Quds al-Sharif (Mutasarrifiyyah of Jerusalem), as super Sanjak, 35, 168, 263–
7, 271, 279, 288
Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon, 262
Nablus (Neapolis): 4, 26, 37–8, 40, 46, 48, 65, 85, 94, 96, 99, 157, 165–7, 170, 178, 197, 201–2,
207–8, 219–20, 222, 224, 228, 231, 238, 262–4, 266–8, 291–2, 296, 298, 383, 421n8; seat of
Greek philosophy and Platonism, 85; Jabal Nablus, 201, 225; textile and industry, 197 see also
Sanjak of Nablus
Naples, 46
Napoleon Bonaparte: Jacotin’s Map of Palestine, 34, 193, 255; invasion of Palestine 219–20, 240,
246, 255–6, 427n6
Naqab/Negev, 33, 40, 67, 97, 99, 122, 131, 139–40, 153–4, 330, 356, 364
Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, 239
Nassar, Najib, 280, 429n19
National Geographic, 258–9
Nazareth: 4, 82, 115, 130, 152, 194, 219, 228–9, 234–5, 247, 252, 263, 266, 270–1, 275, 286, 300,
361–2; Latin library of, 155 see also Jesus of Nazareth
Nea Church, of Aelia Capitolina, 207
Neo-Platonism, 26, 101, 122, 125
New Testament (Injil), 23, 26, 30, 49, 51, 112, 161, 243, 249, 256, 314, 354
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1
Nimrud, Assyrian city, 60–1
Nora, Pierre, 50
Old Testament (Torah), 2–3, 8, 18, 22–3, 26–32, 44, 49, 51, 54, 57, 62–3, 68, 75–6, 83, 161, 249,
257, 311, 313, 421n8, 424n13

Oliphant, F. Laurence, 312
Orientalism: 18, 21–, 32, 56, 114, 220, 248; Biblical, 19, 21–22, 32, 56, 114, 192–3, 219, 242, 277;
Russian, 243, 249–53
Origen, 85, 100–03, 126, 130, 198
Orthodox Patriarchate of Aelia Capitolina/Jerusalem/Al-Quds, 106–7, 116, 254, 282 see also All
Palestine Church
Oslo Accords, 303
Ottoman Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, 289
Ottoman Palestine, 1, 7, 10–11, 14–15, 19–20, 35, 38–9, 87, 119, 132, 143, 168, 176, 183, 189, 192–
3, 195, 201, 203–4, 206–7, 209, 211, 213–30, 233–9, 240, 248–50, 250–4, 256, 259–86, 288–90,
293–4, 296, 298, 313, 321, 326, 328, 331, 341, 427n6, 428n5, 429n30, 430n10
Palestine:
see Abbasid Palestine; All Palestine Church; al-Maqdisi’s description of Palestine; Bronze Age
Palestine; Byzantine Palestine; Chalcolithic Age Palestine; Dux Palaestinae; Fatimid Palestine;
Herodotus’ description of Palestine; Iron Age Palestine; Jacotin’s Map of Palestine; Jund
Filastim; Madaba Floor Mosaic Map; Mamluk Palestine, Mandatory Government of Palestine;
Military Governor of Palestine; Ottoman Palestine; Palestine Nakba; Palestine Oak, Palaestina
Prima; Palaestina Salutaris (Tertia); Palaestina Secunda; Philistia as a geo-political entity,
Philistines; Philisto-Arabian coinage; ‘Syria Palaestina’; Umayyad Palestine
Palestine Airways, 290
Palestine Arab Congresses, 292, 297
Palestine Arab National Fund, 293
Palestine Arab Workers Society, 275
Palestine Archaeological Museum, 288
Palestine Citizenship Order in Council, 290
Palestine Citrograph, 327
Palestine citrus industry, 231–2, 290, 327, 233, 359, 382
Palestine Citrus Marketing Board, 290
Palestine cities of stone, 187, 201–2, 266, 266
Palestine Communist Party (Israeli Communist Party), 299–301
Palestine Electricity Corporation, 326
Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), 6, 51, 79, 246, 248–9, 251, 255–7, 287, 313, 321, 323
Palestine Football Association, 327
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), 286, 302–3
Palestine Nakba, 44, 63, 153, 214, 258, 272, 286, 291–3, 298–9, 301–2, 315, 330, 336–7, 356, 359–
60, 366, 376, 380, 382, 385
Palestine Oak, 346, 351, 381
Palestine Office, 326
Palestine Police Force, 289
Palestine Pound, 289
Palestine Potash Company, 327
Palestine Orchestra (Israel Philharmonic Orchestra), 326
Palestine Passport, 289
Palestine Post, 326–7
Palestine Railways: 290, 367; Ottoman Hejaz Railway, 280
Palestine Stamps, 289
Palestine stone quarry industry, 201
Palaestina Prima, 6, 15–16, 35, 39, 96–9, 104, 107, 111, 117, 129, 131–2, 136–7, 143, 152–3, 183,
207, 264–5

Palaestina Salutaris (Tertia), 6, 35, 39–40, 96–8, 104, 111, 117, 129, 131–2, 136–7, 139–43, 145,
148–9, 152–3, 158, 183, 207, 227, 265
Palaestina Secunda, 6, 15–6, 35, 39–40, 88, 96–9, 102, 104, 107, 111, 117, 129, 132, 136–7, 139–43,
145–6, 148–9, 152–3, 158, 160, 177, 183, 207, 227, 264–5, 425n18, 425n30
Palestinian Aramaic,151–2
Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, 303
Palestinian National Charter, 302
Palestinian National Authority, 303
Palestinian School of Mosaics, 118, 123, 208–9 see also Madaba Floor Mosaic Map
Peled-Elhanan, Nurit, 369
Palestinian Women’s League, 302
Palmerston, Lord, 310
Pappe, Ilan, 268, 292, 359–60, 367
Pashalik of Acre, 224, 261, 263
Pashalik of Jerusalem, 316
Pashalik of Safad, 203, 226–7 see also Kingdom of Safad
Petah Tikva (Mlabbis), 330
Petra (Raqmu, al-Batra): 40, 46, 69, 202; capital of Nabataea, 40, 69, 75, 97; as hinterland of Gaza,
metropolis of Palaestina Salutaris, 40, 114, 151 see also Arabia Petraea
Philip (Philippus Arabs), Emperor, 102, 176, 424n1
Philistia, as a geo-political entity, 17, 22, 35, 37, 39, 42, 45, 55–70, 186, 245, 257, 274
Philistines, 42, 55–70, 75, 83, 91, 120, 166, 186, 344, 354, 378, 384–5
Philisto-Arabian coinage, 35, 56, 57, 67, 69–70, 92, 120
Philo, of Alexandria, 48, 79, 87, 90
Phoenicia: 3, 22, 44–5, 57–8, 65–9, 72–5, 77–9, 83, 85, 88–91, 93–4, 110, 174, 217, 423n3;
Byzantine, 110; Roman, 82
Phoenician alphabet: and Arabic, 57, 69; ‘proto-Canaanite alphabet’, 57
Piterberg, Gabriel, 52
Plato, 26, 92
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 303
Porter, Leslie, 244–5
Postal service (Barid) in Palestine, 167, 176, 185, 297
Praetorius, Michael, 218
Procopius (Procopios) of Gaza, 122, 124, 126–7
Prokopios (Procopius) of Caesarea Maritima, 11, 100, 103–4, 124, 137, 140–1, 159–60, 264
Ptolemy, Claudius (Batlymus): 43, 72, 77–9, 154, 191–2; Map of the World, 190
Pushkin, Alexander, 250, 271–2
Qadesh, 58
Qatra, Arab village (Gedera, Zionist settlement) 335–6
Quran, 17, 20, 22, 86
Qurdi-Ashur-lamur, 61Ra‘ad, Basem, 357
Rafah, 13, 38, 96, 170, 176–7, 217, 425n21
Rafeq, ‘Abdul-Karim, 259
Rahbat al-Wardiyyah (Rosary Sisters), 128
Ramallah, 152, 290
Ramesses II, 56, 58, 422n2
Ramesses III, 59, 62
Redhouse, James, 260

Red Mosque, of Safad, 203
Red Sea (‘China Sea’): 32, 41, 75, 104, 153, 158–60, 169, 174, 423n3
Relandus, Hadrianus, 192, 242
Retenu, 2, 36, 55, 58–9,
Rhetorical School of Gaza, 40–1, 119–27, 129–30, 154
Robinson, Edward, 50, 248, 335–6, 342, 358, 360
Röhricht, Gustav Reinhold, 243
Roman Palestine: 36, 39, 65, 81–94; Provincia Palaestina, 94
Rothschild, Lord (Lionel Walter), 309
Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam, 15, 16, 198
Ruppin, Arthur, 308
Russia: 229, 237, 288, 243, 250–4, 261, 266, 271, 275, 300, 312–3, 317, 325, 334; pilgrims, 243,
247, 250–1; Orientalism, 243–4, 249–50; Orthodox schools in Palestine, 269–70 see also
Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society
Russian Bilu Society, 316
Russian Orthodox Church, 250, 254
Russian Orthodox schools in Palestine, 269–70
Russian Revolution, of 1905, 251
Rutenberg, Pinhas, 290, 349
Sabaeanism, 28
Safad: 4, 201, 220, 234, 266, 365, 368; capital of Galilee, 201–3, 240; Jabal Safad, 207; Pashalik of
Safad, 226–7; regional capital, 37, 201–3, 224, 226–7, 240 see also ‘Kingdom of Safad’(‘Mamlakat Safad’)
Saffuriyah (Diocaesaraea, Sipphoris), 46, 181, 194, 361, 377
Said, Edward 19–21, 219, 272, 315, 318, 430n15
Saint Albina, of Caesarea, 424n15
Saint Catherine’s monastery, 131
Saint Euthymius, 149
Saint Hilarion, 132, 424n9Saint Jerome, 49, 101, 103
Saint Sabbas, 132–3, 425n30
Salah al-Din (Saladin), 113, 115–16, 165, 188, 194, 196, 286, 361
Salibi, Kamal, 3
Salmon, Thomas, 223
Samaria, 82, 87, 96,
Samaritans, 28, 49, 385, 421n8, 426n6
Samaritan Pentateuch, 27, 49
Samaritanism, 28, 421n8
Samerina, Assyrian province of, 37
Sand, Shlomo, 28, 369–70
Sanjaj of Acre, 240, 263 see also Pashalik of Acre
Sanjak of Nablus, 183, 222, 261–5, 267–8, 288, 429n21
San Remo Conference, 291
Sanudo, Marino, 79, 189, 190–2
Sargon II, 61, 67–8
Sayf al-Dawlah, 212
Schechem, Samaritan city, 47
Scholem, Gershom, 351
Scott, Walter, 246

Sea of Galilee (‘Sea of Tiberias’), 160, 186
Sebastia (Sabastiyah), 46, 170, 194, 197
See of Caesarea-Palaestina, 106, 113, 116, 162
Sennacherib, 61–2
Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 255, 309–12, 321
Shahid, Irfan, 147, 154
Shakespeare, William, 217
Shamir, Yitzhak, 347
Sharett (Shertok) Moshe, 347
Shazar, Zalman, 349
Sidon, 61, 66, 88, 231, 422n7; administrative province, 263
Simeon, Bishop of Bet Arsham, 146
Sinai, 26, 34, 40, 59, 68, 73, 75, 97, 131, 169, 177, 206, 245, 255, 328, 385 see also Mount Sinai
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 358–9
Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine, 253
Socrates, 74
Solomon, king, 28–31, 431n27
Solomon, Rabbi, 186
Soviet Union, 299–300
Sozomen, bishop of Gaza, 135
Spinoza, Baruch, 321
Stanley, Arthur P., 256
State of Israel: 20, 204, 299, 347, 273; appropriation of Palestinian place names, 336–383;
Declaration of Independence, 300; Independence Charter, 300 see also Zionism
Statius, Publius Papinius, 83–4
Strabo, 79, 87–9
Suez Canal, 314
Sufi Islam in Palestine, 130, 171, 195, 203
Suleymaniye Library, 216
Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine, 288
Sursuq, Elias, 286, 331
Sykes–Picot Agreement, 184
Syria, 6–7, 16, 36, 41, 45, 50, 58, 60, 69, 72–4, 76–9, 82–7, 88–91, 93–4, 107, 110, 128, 132, 146,
155, 158, 164, 169, 177, 182, 193, 196, 202, 208–9, 212–3, 214, 216, 223, 226, 230, 238, 242–7,
253, 258–9, 260, 271, 283–5, 293–5, 297, 325, 332, 346 see also Bilad al-Sham‘Syria Palaestina’, Roman province, 79, 82–8, 91, 93, 96, 132, 176, 181, 183, 214
Syriac Monophysites, 137–8, 141, 146, 152
Taha, Hamdan, 303
Taha, Sami, 300
Tantur (Tantura, Tel Dor): 39, 59, 61–3, 64, 67–9, 76, 91, 166, 422n7, 426n5; depopulated by Israelin 1948, 63
Tantur, Assyrian province of, 63
Tel Aviv, 64, 66, 324, 327, 345, 352, 379, 383
Tell al-Ajjul, 4Tell al-Mutasallim, 4, 176 see also Megiddo (Tell Megiddo)
Tell al-Sakan, 4Tell al-Tell, 4Tell Balatah, 46–7
Tell Dothan, 4Tell Taannek, 4Theophilos III of Jerusalem, 117
Thompson, E. P., 210
Thompson, Thomas, 33, 357
Thucydides, 75, 79
Tiberias (Tabariyyah): 4, 38, 96, 152, 155, 157, 164–5, 173, 178, 180–2, 185, 219, 227, 229, 234,
263, 266, 271, 280, 361, 368, 426n5; capital of Jund al-Urdun, 15; codification of Hebrew, 160;
regional capital, 37, 228, 158, 160, 205; seat of Jewish religious learning, 160; silk industry, 228
Tiglath-Pileser III, 61
Timnah, 59
Tobler, Titus, 245
Tolstoy, Leon, 271
Transjordan, 58, 122, 176, 188, 203, 226, 228, 289, 328
Tripoli (modern Lebanon), 202
Tulkarem, 231, 291
Tulunid Palestine, 169, 179, 182
Tuqan family, of Nablus, 298
Tuqan, Ibrahim, 298
Turkey, 7, 41, 79, 83, 93, 193, 213, 223, 279, 423n3
Tyre, 61, 66, 114, 174, 181, 196, 268, 422n7
Umayyad Palestine: 2, 38, 56, 118, 124–5, 146, 154–5, 158–73, 179–80, 182, 199, 207, 224, 239,
282, 246n1, 247n3; Governor of Filastin (Wali Filastin), 96,‘United Kingdom of David and Solomon’, 28, 310
United States, 316, 349
van Cangh, Jean-Marie, 33, 357
Vesconte, Pietro, 79, 189, 192,
Vespasian, Emperor, 46, 87–8, 91, 181
Victoria, Queen, 51
Vilner-Kovner, Meir, 300, 352
Wagner, Donald, 312
Watt, William Montgomery, 24
Way of the Philistines (Via Maris, ‘Way of the Sea’), 67–9, 74, 93, 120, 166, 176, 426n5
Weizmann, Chaim, 308–9, 337
West Bank, 133, 289–90, 353
White Mosque (al-Jazzar Mosque), of Acre, 38–9, 233
White Mosque, of al-Ramla, 170, 427n11
Whitelam, Keith, 20–1, 54
Wilson, Charles, 256
Wilson, N. G., 126
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9Wright, Thomas, 244
Yacobi, Haim, 368
Yadin (Sukenik) Yigael, 349, 374
Yanait, Rahel, 348
Yazur, 187
Yiftachel, Oren, 379–80
Yosef, Dov (Bernard Joseph), 348

Yubna, 166, 170, 175, 181
Zangwill, Israel, 308–9, 316
Zerubavel, Ya’akov (Ya’akov Vitkin), 333, 353
Zikhron Yaakov, 63
Zionism: Christian, 310, 314–5; ethnic cleansing (‘transfer’ schemes), 44, 52, 54, 64, 319, 324, 336;
memoricide, 44, 54; Iron Wall, 42, 345; myth of a ‘land without a people’, 1, 22, 308; political,
256, 314, 308–10, 316–17, 323, 330, 334, 337, 339, 343–4; settler-colonialism, 1, 5, 16, 19, 20,
22, 25, 42–4, 51–2, 54–5, 57, 62, 64, 131, 133, 232, 253–4, 257, 278–9, 282, 284–5, 291, 296–7,
307, 310–11, 317–20, 322–3, 325, 33, 339; toponymy projects, 159, 319–36, 355–83; World
Zionist Organisation, 253, 326; Yishuv, 66, 315, 317, 323–7, 329, 333–4, 336, 339, 344–5, 370,
374; Zoroastrianism (Majusiyyah), 28

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