The Philistines were a Greek sea peoples. They were invading from the north when the Israelites were invading from the south. The two clashed and the Philistines lost. And that was the last heard of the Philistines in history.
When the Romans conquered Judea and exiled its population, the Romans renamed the territory Syria Palaestina to obliterate any memory of Jewish soverignty. The geographical equivalent of plowing Judean soil with salt to make it barren. Christian hostility toward Jews insured that Palestine remained the name until the founding of the Jewish State.
Until 1967, the term Palestinian was an imperialist insult to southern Syrian Arabs. They considered themselves proud Arabs. Part of the greater Arab “nation.”
Only after 1967 did the southern Syrians begin to recognize that geographical identification as Palestinians trumped ethnic identification as Arabs.
The former imperial powers who were brokering Middle East peace and ever ready to draw lines on maps preferred the name Palestine. Nationality to the Europeans and Americans was geographical. Modern identity as Palestinians had political advantages for the southern Syrians with whom the British French and American foreign policy establishments were sympathetic.
The French academy, august body, hastened to recognize the Palestinians as a distinct ethnicity. And so was born the Palestinian Nation. The proud Palestinian People were now worthy adversaries on equal footing with the five-thousand year old Jews.
If ever, Lord forbid, the Arabs conquered Israel, neither the territory of the Jewish State nor the West Bank nor Gaza would be called Palestine. Dumping that Christian, Western, Imperialist name would be the first act of the new Muslim government.
