Palestine Book Summary - Palestine Book explained in key points

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Palestine summary

Name: Palestine
Rating: 4.1 (179 reviews)
Author: Nur Masalha

Nur Masalha

A Four Thousand Year History

4.1 (179 ratings)

30 mins

Topics

Colonialism & Imperialism Culture Ancient History

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Palestine
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What’s in it for me? Discover the 4,000-year-old history of Palestine.

There’s little doubt you’ve heard of Palestine in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict – it’s one of the longest-running political disputes of the modern age.

While the media and politicians alike make the conflict out to be complicated, these blinks seek to paint a simpler picture. The fact is that Palestine has existed for four thousand years as a multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious region of the eastern Mediterranean between modern-day Lebanon and Egypt.

But Palestine’s uninterrupted history came under threat in the nineteenth century. White European colonists called Zionists began trying to create a Jewish state in Palestine. What ensued was the systematic displacement and cleansing of Palestine of its ancestral people and replacement by European settlers. That is the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As the politics of the conflict may be contentious to many, these blinks will seek to paint an accurate, evidence-based picture of historical Palestine. After all, only by understanding history can we move forward toward a brighter tomorrow and attempt to rectify the injustices of the past.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why the biblical land of Cana’an is a synonym for the Phoenician civilization;
how the name of Jerusalem was almost completely forgotten; and
who Dhaher al-Umar al-Zaydani was, and how he founded a sovereign Palestinian state.

Palestine traces its roots back to the Late Bronze Age, nearly 3,200 years ago.

Archaeological discoveries often change the way we view history. This is exactly what happened in 2017 when a 3,000-year old Philistine graveyard was discovered near modern-day Ashkelon in western Israel.

The existence of the ancient people known as Philistines in current-day Palestine and Israel is widely accepted.

Nevertheless, the discovery of the graveyard was remarkable. It helped disprove a theory in Israeli scholarship that argues Philistines were pirates invading from the Aegean Sea. Five inscriptions found at the graveyard clearly debunked this. The inscriptions read “Peleset,” an early written form of “Palestine.” This led archaeologists to the conclusion that the Philistines were indigenous to the land.

What also helps prove the existence of indigenous Philistines – a name that later evolved into “Palestinians” – are a number of ancient texts. One of these is an Egyptian text that is about as old as the 3,000-year-old graveyard. It describes the neighboring peoples against whom the Egyptians fought. In this case, the Philistines.

This, of course, conflicts with the Biblical Cana’anite narrative, cited since the nineteenth century by Zionists who sought to lay claim to the region of Palestine. While it’s technically true that Cana’an did exist as a place, history shows us that Cana’an is only a Biblical term referring to Phoenicia, a civilization corresponding to modern-day Lebanon. And “Cana’an” was only used to describe this region for a brief period, around 1300 BC.

Meanwhile, Philistia refers to the region directly to the south of Phoenicia. And after the eighth and seventh centuries BC, the whole southern Levantine region corresponding to modern Israel, Palestine – and later even southern Lebanon – was no longer referred to as Cana’an or other ancient names, and became known as Philistia.

At the turn of the Iron Age in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, Philistines developed a sophisticated urban civilization. Besides their advanced shipbuilding techniques, they left behind a legacy of artistic craftsmanship in the pottery, metalwork and ivory carvings excavated in archaeological digs all over historic Palestine. During this time, many ancient Palestinian cities were founded, such as Ghazzah, ‘Asgalan and Isdud. These exist today as Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod, though Israel expelled the Palestinian inhabitants of the latter two in 1948.

Archaeological discoveries reveal it’s likely that the city-states of ancient Palestine were similar to the advanced city-states in ancient Greek civilization. The Philistine city-states established extensive trade networks with Egypt, Phoenicia and Arabia. Not only did trade support the economy of ancient Palestine, but it also fostered a multicultural and polytheistic society.

Ancient Palestine continued to flourish under Greek and Roman rule.

By the fifth century BC, the modern cognate of Philistia – Palestina in Greek, and Palestine in Latin – began to appear as the dominant name of the region between modern-day Lebanon and Egypt. This would continue to be the case for the next 1,200 years, until the Islamic conquest in 637 AD.

Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote detailed texts on Palestine, using this term in the fourth century BC. Herodotus, known as the “Father of History,” describes fifth-century BC Palestine as a polytheistic, trade-rich region. The Arabs inhabiting Palestine’s southern port cities controlled the frankincense trade route that stretched all the way to India, endowing Palestine with much wealth and status, as well as eastern spices and luxury goods.

Byzantine Palestine was marked by the growth of Christianity and the ascendance of Arabs to positions of power.

When Christianity became the Roman state religion in the fourth century, Palestine gained new importance. It was, after all, the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth and the spiritual epicenter of Christianity.

In the fourth century, the now-Christian Byzantine Roman empire split Palestine into three new administrative regions – Palestina Prima, Palestina Secunda and Palestina Salutaris. These correspond to central, northern and southern Palestine today. Funnily enough, the naming of these regions was meant to reflect the three-in-one concept of the Christian Trinity. And, like the Trinity, these regions weren’t to be seen as completely separate – unity between the regions continued politically, culturally and religiously up until the Muslim period in the seventh century.

The Muslim conquest of Palestine in 637 AD led to increased prosperity, further Arabization and Islamization.

The conquest of Palestine by Muslim armies profoundly changed the region. It also cemented the use of the Arabic language, which would be spoken by the majority of people in the region for the next 1,300 years.

During this time, Palestine acquired its modern Arabic name, Filastin, which derives from the ancient Philistia. Filastin made up a core province of the new Muslim empire, or “Caliphate,” along with neighboring Dimashq, or Damascus.

After removing European Crusaders, the Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties ruled over Palestine.

European Crusaders had ravaged Palestine from 1147 on, seeking to establish European, Christian supremacy over the Holy Land. Legendary military commander Salah al-Din reversed Crusader victories in the region at the Battle of Hittin in 1187, however, and re-established Muslim rule in Palestine. This rule would continue for the next seven centuries.

There was one exception to Salah al-Din’s military successes – he wasn’t able to retake the well-fortified coastal city of Acre, occupied by French crusaders. His descendants fared better, however, and were able to free it from oppressive crusader rule in 1291. With the restoration of Muslim rule, Jews and Muslims were able to worship freely again without persecution, and desecrated religious sites were restored to their former splendor.

Ottoman rule in Palestine gave way to a Palestinian state in the eighteenth century.

After the Mamluk sultanate gave way to the Turkish Ottoman dynasty in 1517, Palestine continued to connote the Muslim-majority, Arabic-speaking region between Egypt and Lebanon. Not only was it used by the indigenous Palestinians – European cartographers through to the twentieth century continued to use Palestine to describe the area. Even Shakespeare references it!

The Ottoman period proved to be a pivotal moment in Palestinian history – it was the first time that Palestinians formed their own state and identity as a nation. Conventional history represents Palestinian nationalism as a European export in the nineteenth century, combined with westernizing Ottoman reforms. However, a more detailed reading of history paints a different picture.

Modern Palestinian nationalism arose in the early nineteenth century and intensified with the beginnings of Zionism.

Two decades after al-Umar’s death, change was brewing across the Mediterranean in Europe. France’s new emperor Napoleon was making war throughout Europe and North Africa, including a campaign in Egypt and Palestine. But his campaign hit a roadblock after he failed to take the Palestinian coastal city of Acre, where he was defeated in 1799 by an Anglo-Ottoman coalition. This signaled the beginnings of British colonial interest in Palestine.

Over the first few decades of the nineteenth century, British evangelicals flocked to the region, and travel companies such as Thomas Cook began arranging tours of Palestine. British interest was made official when a delegation arrived in 1871 with the purpose of creating detailed maps of Palestine. With the Ottoman Empire at risk of collapse, the British prepared to assume the role of colonial power in the area. They thought that Palestine would be useful as a stopover on the way to British India.

The Zionist project was rooted in European settler colonialism and racism.

The nineteenth century was a time when European colonialism began to intensify around the world. Along with it came the view that European interests always took priority over the interests of colonized indigenous peoples.

The emerging ideology of Zionism was no different than any other form of colonialism. Like British colonialists saw the people of India as uncivilized and unworthy of self-governance, Zionists held the same beliefs concerning the people of Palestine. But Zionism had one defining characteristic that set it apart from British colonialism. British colonialists in India, for example, sought to exploit the country for their own benefit economically. But Zionism was a settler-colonial project, whose goals weren’t simply economic – they aimed to replace the indigenous Palestinian population with non-Palestinian Jews.

The purposeful destruction of Palestinian history by Israel is widespread and well-documented.

Jaffa wasn’t the only city that was cleansed of its original inhabitants. Starting in 1948, the new state of Israel began removing any historical traces of Palestine from their newly colonized lands.

Now in control of the majority of historical Palestine, Zionists began a systematic process of branding Zionism as the return of indigenous people to their homeland after a 2,000-year absence. Key to this was work done by the new Government Names Committee.

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What is Palestine about?

Palestine (2015) chronicles the long history of the land straddling the eastern Mediterranean between modern-day Lebanon and Egypt. By compiling an impressive set of sources both ancient and modern, Nur Masalha presents a nuanced history of the region, from its roots in ancient Philistine civilization to the advent of modern Palestinian nationalism in the nineteenth century, and Israel’s founding in 1948.

Best quote from Palestine

The modern term abbot descends from Palestinian Christians of the Byzantine era. In Aramaic and Arabic, the term abba means my father, used by the regions Christians to refer to the father of a monastery. This term is still used in English and other languages to this day.

—Nur Masalha

Who should read Palestine?

Students of history or politics
Supporters of both Israel and Palestine looking to inform themselves on the region
Palestinians who’d like to learn more about the complex historical tapestry of their land

About the Author

Nur Masalha is a Palestinian academic and professor of history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In addition to being a member of the SOAS Centre for Palestinian Studies, he’s the editor of the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies and has authored numerous books, including A Land Without a People and The Palestine Nakba.

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