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When Jerry Seinfeld said “Palestine doesn’t exist”, the predictable outrage machine did what it always does: it screamed, but Jerry is hardly the first person to notice reality. Of course, the millions of Arabs who call themselves ״Palestinians״ today are not imaginary. They are real people, with real lives, real suffering, real political aspirations, and real agency. But those people are not the indigenous people of “Palestine”, because there has never been a sovereign Arab state called Palestine. There was no Palestinian king, no Palestinian parliament, no Palestinian currency, no Palestinian army, no Palestinian passport, no ancient Palestinian republic, no internationally recognized Palestinian state that Israel came along and “stole.” And awkwardly, some prominent Palestinians used to say this openly. Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO figure, was quoted in 1977 saying: “The Palestinian people does not exist”. He explained that there was “no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese”, and that Palestinian identity was emphasized for “political and tactical reasons” in the struggle against Zionism. So let’s not pretend this argument was invented yesterday by a Jewish comedian. Before 1948, “Palestine” was not an Arab state. It was a geographic and administrative term. Under the British, it meant the British Mandate for Palestine - a mandate created after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with the explicit purpose of facilitating a Jewish national home while protecting the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants. The Mandate was not “the State of Palestine”. It was not created to establish an Arab Palestinian state. It was the legal framework through which the international community recognized the Jewish people’s historical connection to the land and assigned Britain the task of helping build the Jewish national home. And before 1964, the word “Palestinian” was very often associated with Jews. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra? Founded by Jewish musicians and later became the Israel Philharmonic. The Palestine national football team? Dominated by Jews, played Hatikvah, and became the forerunner of Israel’s national team. Palestine Airways? Founded by Zionist Pinhas Rutenberg with Jewish/Zionist institutions. The Palestine Post? Founded by Jews; later became The Jerusalem Post. So when people show old “Palestine” coins, stamps, teams, newspapers, or institutions as proof of an ancient Arab Palestinian state, they often do not realize they are showing artifacts of the British Mandate - and in many cases, institutions built by the Jewish Yishuv. That is why the claim “Palestine existed before Israel” is misleading. Yes, the administrative region existed. No, a sovereign Arab Palestinian state did not. Even most local Arab leaders did not originally describe themselves as members of a separate Palestinian nation. In 1919, Arab congresses in the region argued that Palestine was part of “Southern Syria”. The early political demand was not “Free Palestine” as a separate Palestinian nation-state. It was incorporation into a broader Arab Syrian or pan-Arab framework. This is not a minor detail. It goes to the heart of the issue. For decades, the dominant Arab claim was not “we are a separate Palestinian people entitled to a Palestinian state next to a Jewish state”. It was “this is Arab land, Jews have no right to sovereignty here, and Palestine is part of the Arab nation.” Then came 1948. Jordan occupied and annexed the West Bank. Egypt occupied Gaza. From 1948 to 1967, there was no Palestinian state in either territory. No global campus movement demanded “end the Jordanian occupation.” No UN machinery obsessed over Egyptian rule in Gaza. No Arab armies invaded Jordan to liberate Ramallah. No one demanded that Egypt create an independent Palestine in Gaza. Then in 1964, the PLO was created - three years before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza. And here is the part people do not like discussing: the original 1964 PLO Charter explicitly said the organization did not exercise territorial sovereignty over the West Bank, then under Jordan, or Gaza, then under Egypt. In other words, the PLO was not founded to “end the occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel did not control them. The target was Israel itself. Then came 1967. Israel ended the occupation of the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt in the Six-Day War. Suddenly, the same territories that had not been the focus of “liberation” under Arab rule became the center of the world’s most famous "territorial" grievance. In 1968, the PLO revised its charter. The inconvenient Article 24 disappeared. So was the problem really “occupation”? Or was the problem Jewish sovereignty? This is why “ending the occupation” was never the original goal. The original goal was not a Palestinian state beside Israel. It was no Israel. That position did not disappear. It was simply repackaged. When “Palestine” means Ramallah and Gaza, it sounds like a territorial compromise. When “Palestine” means “from the river to the sea,” it means the replacement of Israel. That is not anti-occupation. That is anti-Jewish existence. It’s not anti-genocide - it’s flat out genocidal. And the demographic story is more complicated than the slogans too. The common narrative presents Jews as foreign arrivals entering a settled, coherent Palestinian Arab nation-state. But much of the land in the 19th century was poor, neglected, sparsely populated, disease-ridden in places, and under Ottoman rule. Jewish agricultural development, drainage, employment, capital, and infrastructure attracted not only Jewish immigrants but also Arab migration from surrounding areas. The Peel Commission itself noted Arab economic gains connected to Jewish development, and other British observations described illegal migration into Palestine from neighboring Arab regions. None of this means every Arab family arrived recently. Many did not. Many had deep roots. And many of them remained after the establishment of Israel and became citizens. But it does destroy the cartoon version: ancient unified Palestinian nation peacefully minding its own state until Jews appeared from nowhere. There was no such state. There were Ottoman subjects. Then British Mandate residents. Jews. Muslims. Christians. Druze. Bedouin. Arabs who often saw themselves as part of Greater Syria or the broader Arab nation. Jews who called the land Eretz Israel while the British called the administrative territory Palestine, of which only 20% of land was owned by anyone. Only then, after Israel was born, “Palestinian” identity hardened into a separate national identity - especially after Arab armies failed to destroy Israel and after Israel took the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, an identity that was all about resisting the Jewish state.. This means the moral accusation against Israel is built on a false premise. Israel did not conquer a sovereign state called Palestine. Israel did not erase a Palestinian government that had ruled for centuries. Israel did not invade an Arab Palestinian country in 1948. Israel accepted partition. The Arab side rejected it and launched a war. Then the Arab states that seized the remaining territories did not create Palestine either. So when someone says “Palestine doesn’t exist”, they are right. And if the only “Palestine” being demanded is one that replaces Israel from the river to the sea, then Seinfeld’s answer is not just right now, but it will be right forever.

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@destinationXIX

Jun 10

The "shrinking Palestine" myth can be debunked with one fact: In Mandatory Palestine, only about *20% of the land was privately owned by anyone*. Not by Jews. Not by Arabs. By anyone. The rest was mostly state land - first Ottoman state land, then British Mandate/Crown land. Hence, the famous "shrinking Palestine" map is fundamentally misleading. You've seen it: Four panels. Green shrinking. White expanding. The message is obvious: "The Jews stole Palestinian land". But the first map does not show Palestinian-owned land. It shows land that was not Jewish-owned - and then pretends that all of it was Palestinian-owned. State land becomes "Palestinian land." Crown land becomes "Palestinian land." The Negev desert becomes "Palestinian land." Public land becomes "Palestinian land." But it wasn't. Only about 20% was privately owned by anyone at all. And just under half of that privately owned land was owned by Jews by the end of the Mandate period. The land Jews did own was purchased legally. Often at premium prices - sometimes double or triple market prices. Often from wealthy absentee landlords living in Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, and elsewhere, that were happy to get rid of the barren, neglected land they owned. Money changed hands. Contracts were signed. Deeds were registered. Land was bought, cultivated, drained, built, and defended. That is not "stolen land". That is purchased land. And the other panels are just as misleading. The second map presents the 1947 UN Partition Plan as if it were an accomplished fact. It wasn't. It was a proposal - one accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by the Arab Higher Committee and the surrounding Arab states, and hence never implemented. No Palestinian Arab state was ever established under that plan because the plan was never implemented. The third and fourth maps then show the results of successive wars. The 1949 armistice lines emerged after the Arab-Israeli war that followed the rejection of partition, while the post-1967 map reflects territory captured by Israel during the Six-Day War. In other words, the maps present the outcomes of wars and failed diplomatic proposals as if they were simple transfers of privately owned "Palestinian" land. They were not. There was a theft of land though. Most people don't know that Jewish organizations also purchased large tracts of land in the Hauran and Golan regions under Ottoman rule, in what is today Syria. The purchases were legal. The deeds existed. The transactions were recognized by Ottoman authorities. Money changed hands. Yet those lands were never given to the Jews or became part of the Jewish homeland when later borders were drawn. The "stolen land" narrative survives because people don't know history, and some will believe just about anything about the Jews. But the "stolen land" exists and is still owed to the Jews who purchased it, and never received it and never were compensated for it.

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