In a 1959 meeting, Nasser raised the idea of rebranding the mixed bag of migrant workers called “the Arab refugees”—as they had been called for ten years —into “Palestinian refugees,” even though there was nothing Palestinian about them. (No, it was not the KGB that created the “Palestinian” identity).
His model was the then-ongoing, five-year bloody terror rebellion in Algeria against the French (1954-62), which he supported. There, the Muslims had the brains to abandon their religious jihadi vocabulary, which would not win them support in France, and, instead, adopted the identity of patriotic, anti-imperialist freedom fighters. After WWII, there were scores of such colonial uprisings.
After that, it took another decade for the lie of “Palestinians” to gestate. Golda Meir was their inadvertent midwife.
Two years after Israel’s miraculous victory, on June 17, 1969, during an interview with the London Sunday Times, Israel’s new Prime Minister went to war against the growing fashion of speaking of Israel’s enemies not as “the Arabs” but as “the Palestinians.” Golda said, “There never was such a nation,” causing the Jew-haters to exclaim, “How dare she deny the existence of the Palestinians!” And the rest is history.
He applied the term, "Palestinian" to Jews living in the Holy Land before Israeli statehood.
For muslims, he used the term Arab or Bedouin.
But yes, there's no such thing in history as a Palestinian state.