[Capt. Tom]

I have always felt I was pretty good at Geography. a subject unfortunately not taught in many schools today.

Many years ago when I read about he Palestinians , I could not remember a country called Palestine.
So I decided to look up the Palestinian Constitution to see how that country was structured.
Did Palestine have a President , a Sultan, a prime minister, etc?

I could not find anything, because Palestine never existed except in the anti-Israel propaganda,which goes on to this day. -Tom

[babble-on]

Well it was a territory of the Ottoman Empire, right? It wasn’t an independent country, but neither were Iraq and Syria and Lebanon etc. They were all under the Ottomans for the better part of a millenium. Palestine is from the same root as Philistine, I believe. As Samaritans were from Samaria in New Testament times

[Celtic Conservative]

Palestinians are largely Jordanian arabs. The country was originally called Trans-Jordanian Palestine. It’s now Called Jordan. But you’re right that the current “Palestinian” is an artificial construct.

CC

[colorado tanker]

Palestine was never an independent nation. The last time the region was independent was the last Jewish state.

After suppressing several Jewish rebellions, the Romans used the term palestine in their name for the province covering most of Israel.

The region was incorporated in the Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman Empires.

After WWI, the British and French double-crossed the Arabs and reneged on what the Arabs thought was a promise of a unitary Arab state with Damascus as capital, which had been the capital of the Arab empire before moving to Baghdad.

Instead, they entered into the Sykes-Picot secret treaty where the region was divided up between the British and French. Apparently, they didn't think Arabia was worth enough to take.

Britain got modern day Israel, West Bank and Jordan. Since the area had not been independent and was regarded as the southern part of Syria, they invented a name and called it the Palestine Mandate, being a League of Nations Mandate.

The British who had jilted Faisal of his Damascus kingdom, gave him Iraq as a consolation prize, although it was another country they just made up. They cast about for a way to help his brother Abdullah, and came up with idea of hiving off half of Palestine, calling it Transjordan and giving it to Abdullah. That double-crossed the Jews, who had been told in the Balfour Declaration that Palestine would be a Jewish homeland only to see half of it given to the Arabs.

And the British wondered why they weren't universally loved by all who lived in the British Empire.