"Palestine": The Political Entity That Never Was an Independent Arab Sovereign State

The narrative framing the Israel-Palestine conflict as Israel displacing an existing sovereign Arab nation rests on a premise that the historical record does not support. There has never been an independent Arab state called Palestine. The following is a factual account of what the region was, and was not, before 1948.

Under the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the region from 1517 to 1917, the area now called Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza was divided among several administrative units (vilayets and sanjaks). The Ottoman administrative structure included:

• Vilayet of Beirut (covering much of what is now Lebanon and northern Israel)
• Sanjak of Jerusalem (a special district covering Jerusalem and the surrounding area)
• Sanjak of Nablus (covering the northern West Bank)
• Sanjak of Acre (covering the Galilee)

None of these administrative units was called Palestine. The Ottomans did not have a province called Palestine.

The word 'Palestine' (from the Roman 'Palaestina', itself derived from 'Philistia') is a geographical term used by European travelers and mapmakers for centuries. It was a geographic description of a region, not the name of a state or a government.

After World War I, the League of Nations awarded Britain a Mandate over the former Ottoman territory. The British named their administrative territory "Palestine," formalizing a geographic term as a political unit for the first time.

The Mandate was explicitly not a Palestinian Arab state. Its terms — the Balfour Declaration incorporated into the Mandate's text — committed Britain to facilitating a Jewish national home in the territory. The Mandate's Article 2 read: "The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home ... and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion." (Mandate text)\n\nCritically, both Jews and Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine were called "Palestinians." Ben-Gurion's pre-state identity papers identified him as "Palestinian." The Palestine Post was a Jewish-owned newspaper. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra was founded by Jewish musicians. "Palestinian" under the British Mandate described anyone living in the territory, Jews and Arabs alike. Jewish institutions such as the Palestine Post used the term, but so did Arabs: the Arab-owned Jaffa newspaper Filastin (founded 1911) addressed its readers as Palestinians, and Arabs were roughly two-thirds of the Mandate population.

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted 33–13 for Resolution 181, which proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as an international city.

Jewish Agency leadership accepted the plan.

The Arab Higher Committee, the Arab League, and every Arab government rejected it. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon declared that they would use force to prevent the partition from taking effect.

When Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies invaded the following day. Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha had warned in an October 1947 interview with the Egyptian paper Akhbar al-Yom that such a war would be 'a war of extermination and momentous massacres which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades' (source history).

This context matters: the 1948 war began as a civil war after the partition vote, and Arab states invaded in May 1948 to prevent a Jewish state — a war those states lost. Historians, including Israeli historian Benny Morris, document that the refugee exodus (roughly 700,000 people) had multiple causes: flight from fighting, Arab leaders' evacuation orders in some places, and expulsions and massacres by Jewish/Israeli forces in others (e.g. Deir Yassin, Lydda and Ramle). The state they were fighting against exists. The Arab state envisioned by the partition plan was never created: Arab leaders rejected partition and lost the war, Israel ended the war holding territory beyond the partition lines, Jordan annexed the West Bank, and Egypt administered Gaza.

Hamas was founded in 1987. The Palestinian Authority was provided for by the 1993 Oslo Accords and established in 1994. Neither organization is the government-in-exile of a state that existed before 1948, because no such state existed.

Population estimates (mostly by foreign observers before 1905) indicate that Jews were the largest single group in Jerusalem by the mid-19th century and a majority by the 1890s — before the British Mandate. An 1844 estimate gives about 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians, i.e. a Jewish plurality of ~46% (table; overview). By the 1890s, Jews were the largest single community in Jerusalem. By 1914, Jews constituted a majority of Jerusalem's population.

The narrative of Jewish settlers colonizing an existing Arab city is historically inverted. Jerusalem had a Jewish plurality before the major waves of Zionist immigration, and before any modern political movement made the city central to competing claims.

Historical newspaper records, including contemporaneous coverage in Arab-language and European press from 1898 to 1933, document significant Arab immigration into Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine following Jewish economic development. Jewish settlers drained swamps, established industries, and created employment. Contemporary observers noted that Arab workers moved into the territory specifically because of the economic activity the Jewish presence generated.

Some Arab in-migration did occur, but its scale is disputed. The thesis that it drove Arab population growth (popularised by Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial) was criticised by historians such as Yehoshua Porath, who, like the British authorities, attributed most Arab growth to natural increase (LRB review; NYRB exchange).