The Palestinians are an imaginary people. Prior to 1948, the only people that call themselves “Palestinians” were the Jews of what became Israel in 1948. If you look at the main newspaper there on the morning after Israel declared independence, it was the Palestinian Post, a Jewish newspaper, which announced it. Up until that time, all of the non-Jews living in and around what became Israel called themselves Arabs. They did not distinguish between Arabs from Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Palestine or Egypt. They were just Arabs, according to their own preference.
There NEVER was a country called Palestine. When the Romans put down the second Jewish Revolt in approximately 135, part of the punishment inflicted upon the Jews was the renaming of their country and their capitol. The Romans insultingly named that province (because at that point the Jews were denied any vestiges of independence) after the Philistines, Israel’s most famous biblical enemy. There was never any distinct people known as Palestinians, nor did such an imaginary people have a language or literature of any kind, quite unlike the Jews. The entire concept of a Palestinian people is a fiction created in the late 1940s and early 1950s to give some international credence to the idea of these Arabs having their own nation.
As an aside, no people or nation has ever claimed Jerusalem as its capitol, except for the Jews in both ancient and modern times. Moslem claims to Jerusalem as the “third holiest city in Islam” because of the presence of the Dome of the Rock originated in the 1920s. They originated do to extreme tensions between the Moslem and Jewish populations in what was then called Palestine at the time. The Moslem leadership understood that the Jews were trying to re-create their own nation, and they did this as a counterweight to Jewish claims to sovereignty. In point of fact, Jerusalem is not mentioned one single time in the Koran, and Mohammed purposely had his followers turn their back toward Jerusalem while praying, because of the Jews had rejected him as their savior. The Dome of the Rock itself, this supposedly holy place, was nearly in ruins in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time during which the Moslem Ottoman Turkish Empire ruled the entire area. That shows how much the Moslems actually cared for the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Crock is a more accurate description of the place.
Very well stated.