[MeganC]

Palestine is a corruption of ‘Philistine’ and the current day Palestinians do have verified genetic ties to the Libyans and Tunisians. Their common history comes via the Carthaginians who were descendants of the Philistines.

Not to take the side of the Palestinians (who I’d just as soon see frog-marched into the Jordanian desert) but the fact of the matter is that modern day Palestine is no less real or fake than modern day Israel. Both came into existence at the same time. Both are nations of people who hold a nationalistic identity but the difference is that one people, Israel, have land. The Palestinians could easily have land in some Arab country were it not for the fact that most Arabs hate the Palestinians more than the Israelis ever did.

[yank in the UK]

It all goes back to Abraham, and his two sons. Isaac and Ishmael. That is the root of this conflict!

[ontap]

I understood that they were given land along with Israel and Jordan seized it.

[Verginius Rufus]

The United States is one of the oldest nation-states in existence--and 15 years before the Declaration of Independence no one expected that we would renounce our British identity and become Americans. Of the 192 members of the UN, most have independent existence as a nation-state only from some time after 1900, and only a handful from before 1800. Even the United Kingdom has existed as such only since 1707.

Even the peoples with very ancient histories--Jews, Greeks, Italians, Chinese, etc., in most cases became nation-states only in the 19th or 20th centuries.

The Greek nation may take pride in the ancient Greeks but their existence as a modern nation owes more to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution--and their present-day borders date only to 1947.

Most of the African nations are the result of European powers drawing lines on maps in the late 1800s. The Palestinians may have started thinking of themselves as Palestinians rather than Arabs only in the 1960s, but there are plenty of nations that are only slightly older (ca. 1960) and some that are younger (East Timor, South Sudan, Moldova, etc.).