Palestine

Critics love to sneer that “Palestine” is just a colonial label, cooked up by Romans and revived by the British. But the truth is older. The name’s root lies in the Philistines, who settled Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath and Ekron in the 12th century BCE. By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus was already calling the region Palaistinē. When the Romans renamed Judea Syria Palaestina in 135 CE, they weren’t inventing something new – they were recycling a name already in circulation. Over time that flowed directly into the Arabic Filastīn, the word Palestinians themselves still use today.

And here’s the irony. “Philistine” later became an insult, lumped in with “Vandal” as shorthand for barbarism. In 19th-century Europe, a “Philistine” meant a boor with no culture, just as a “Vandal” meant a mindless wrecker (remind you of any politicians?). Both were caricatures. The Philistines were in fact traders with their own cities and craftsmanship, and the Vandals governed North Africa for a century. But the slurs stuck, while the actual names carried on in the language of identity.

If you want even deeper roots, look to Canaan, the Bronze Age name for the region, found in Egyptian and Near Eastern records. Palestinians still use it in poetry to assert continuity with a land that long predates Rome or Britain. The British Mandate then normalised “Palestine” on passports, coins and stamps, and today over 130 states recognise the State of Palestine.

So when detractors dismiss Palestine as a colonial fiction, they ignore the direct line from Philistine to Palaistinē to Filastīn – and they repeat the same lazy caricatures that turned ancient peoples into bywords for barbarism. The names are older than most nations at the UN. The real relic isn’t the word “Palestine” – it’s the argument against it.