One of the most influential political narratives of the modern era is repeated so often that it is frequently treated as settled history. It appears in television reports, university lectures, social media campaigns and international resolutions: an ancient and sovereign Arab country called Palestine supposedly existed for centuries until foreign Jews arrived in 1948, displaced its owners and constructed a colonial state on its ruins.
The account is emotionally powerful and politically effective. It is also historically unsustainable. Before 1948, there was no sovereign Arab state called Palestine, no Palestinian monarchy or independent government, no parliament, national army, sovereign currency, internationally recognised borders or capital in Jerusalem. This does not deny the existence of Arab communities in the land, nor the reality of a modern Palestinian national identity. It makes a narrower and essential point: a modern national movement cannot be projected backwards and presented as an ancient sovereign state that left no institutional record of sovereignty.
Flags can be adopted, maps can be drawn and national symbols can develop over time. That is true of many modern nations. What cannot be supplied retrospectively is a historical record of statehood that did not exist. History may be interpreted, but it cannot be created by repetition, a political vote or a viral slogan.
How a Geographical Name Became a Political Claim
The confusion begins with the word “Palestine.” The ancient terms from which the name developed were associated, among other things, with Philistia and the Philistines of the southern coastal plain during the Iron Age. Those Philistines were neither Arab nor Muslim, did not speak Arabic and lived many centuries before the birth of Islam and the Arab conquest of the region. A resemblance between “Philistine” and “Palestinian” does not establish continuous national sovereignty.
Under Roman rule, the province was known as Judaea. After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE, the Roman authorities redesignated the province as Syria Palaestina. The name now frequently used to portray Jews as colonial outsiders was therefore institutionalised by an imperial power after it crushed a Jewish revolt in Judaea. That historical irony deserves more attention than it generally receives.
In the centuries that followed, the region was governed by Romans, Byzantines, Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and the British. Empires changed, administrative boundaries shifted and names evolved. Yet no independent Arab Palestinian state emerged. “Palestine” functioned as a geographical or administrative designation; it was not proof of continuous sovereign statehood. A name on a map is not a title deed, and a province within an empire is not an independent country.
Modern Identity Is Not Ancient Sovereignty
The modern Palestinian national movement consolidated largely during the late Ottoman period and the British Mandate. Earlier Arab inhabitants of the region commonly identified through religion, family, clan, village, city, Ottoman citizenship, wider Arab identity or attachment to Greater Syria. There is nothing exceptional or illegitimate in the development of a modern national identity. Many national movements took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The historical distortion begins when that modern identity is presented as the direct continuation of an ancient sovereign state. To sustain such a claim, the far older and extensively documented Jewish past must be minimised or denied: the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are reduced to mythology, the House of David becomes a legend, the Jewish Temples are treated as political inventions, and the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is recast as a modern manoeuvre. Hebrew, one of the defining languages of this land, is then portrayed as the language of foreign arrivals.
That inversion is central to the campaign against Israel’s legitimacy. Jews, whose name and presence are recorded in the region more than three thousand years ago, are depicted as rootless Europeans who appeared without history in 1948. This is not a balanced reading of the evidence. It is a political narrative that requires the oldest surviving national connection to the land to disappear.
The Evidence Beneath the Soil
The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel does not rest only on religious belief. It is recorded by foreign peoples and rival empires that had no interest in supporting modern Zionism. The Merneptah Stele, carved in Egypt in the late thirteenth century BCE, refers to a people called Israel in Canaan. It was not written by Jews; it was an Egyptian record of enemies and military triumphs.
The ninth-century BCE Tel Dan Stele refers to the “House of David.” It, too, was produced by an adversary, not by a modern Israeli institution. The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve Jewish writings in Hebrew and Aramaic from the Second Temple period. Across Israel, archaeology has uncovered Hebrew inscriptions, Jewish coins, seals, ritual baths, synagogues, burial complexes, settlements, fortifications and water systems from different periods of Jewish history.
These are not merely emotions or inherited stories. They are physical evidence. A coin minted two thousand years ago cannot be dismissed as contemporary public relations. An Egyptian inscription cannot be accused of Israeli bias. Hebrew manuscripts written centuries before the rise of Islam cannot reasonably be attributed to a government established in 1948. The soil itself preserves a continuity that political language cannot erase.
The Jewish people did not arrive in a land without memory. They returned to the one place in which their language, faith, history and national identity were formed.
Jerusalem and the Continuity of Jewish Memory
Jerusalem was a Jewish national and spiritual centre centuries before Christianity and more than a millennium before Islam. It became the capital of the ancient Jewish kingdom and the centre of Temple worship. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and commemorated the plunder of its sacred vessels on the Arch of Titus in Rome.
To claim that no Jewish Temple ever stood in Jerusalem is not a credible alternative interpretation. It requires the rejection of Roman records, Jewish and Christian traditions, and a substantial body of archaeological and historical evidence. The Muslim sanctity of the site need not be denied; the mosques on the Temple Mount are sacred to Muslims. But later sanctity does not erase earlier sanctity, and a later religious structure does not rewrite the history beneath it.
For generations, Jews across the world prayed facing Jerusalem. At Passover they declared, “Next year in Jerusalem.” At weddings they broke a glass in memory of the city’s destruction, and in daily prayer they asked for a return to Zion. Jews in Yemen, Iraq, Persia, Morocco, Ethiopia, Europe and India preserved the same national and spiritual memory. The Jews of Cochin and other Indian Jewish communities prayed towards Jerusalem centuries before political Zionism arose. They were not agents of a European empire; they were part of an ancient people preserving a common homeland in memory and faith.
1947: The State That Was Offered and Rejected
In 1947, the United Nations proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted the principle of partition. The Arab leadership rejected it. After Israel declared independence, armies from neighbouring Arab states invaded. Their campaign was not launched to establish a Palestinian state beside Israel but to prevent the Jewish state from surviving.
After the Arab defeat, responsibility gradually disappeared from the dominant international account. The rejection of partition, the invasion and the declared objective of preventing Jewish sovereignty were pushed aside. In their place came the assertion that Israel had simply stolen an existing Palestinian state. Yet a state cannot be stolen if it never possessed sovereign institutions, and an offer of statehood cannot be rejected by war and later described as though it had already existed and was taken away.
This does not erase the suffering of Palestinian Arabs during the war, nor does it remove the need for serious political solutions today. A firmly pro-Israel position can acknowledge individual loss and human pain. But compassion cannot require the falsification of chronology or the removal of Arab leadership from its own decisions. Peace is not strengthened by a historical account in which only one side is granted agency and the other is assigned permanent guilt.
1948 to 1967: The Missing State
Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Egypt administered the Gaza Strip. For nearly nineteen years, Jordan did not create a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Egypt did not establish one in Gaza, and East Jerusalem did not become the capital of an independent Palestine. These territories were under Arab control, but Palestinian sovereignty was not created.
That period is often treated as a historical blank because it complicates the later claim that the conflict was principally about ending Israeli rule in territories captured in 1967. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was founded in 1964, three years before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza. Its original campaign therefore could not have been directed against an occupation that had not yet begun. It was directed against Israel itself.
After the Arab defeat in 1967, the language changed. A regional war against Israel was increasingly reframed as an anti-colonial struggle; the denial of Jewish self-determination was presented as “decolonisation”, and attacks on civilians were often defended as “resistance.” This political reframing proved highly effective because it translated a complex conflict into categories that Western institutions and activist movements already understood: coloniser and colonised, powerful and powerless, oppressor and victim.
When Political Convenience Replaced Historical Precision
No historical narrative becomes internationally dominant without institutions willing to repeat it. Some governments adopted the Palestinian account because of oil, trade or diplomatic interests. The Soviet bloc promoted it as part of its strategic contest with the West. Universities supplied an academic vocabulary that treated almost every conflict as a struggle between colonial power and oppressed natives. Media organisations often preferred a simple moral drama to a complicated chronology, while international bodies translated political majorities into resolutions.
The result was a remarkable reversal. A geographical designation became an ancient state; rejection of partition became theft; wars launched to prevent Israel’s creation became a story in which the aggressors had no responsibility; and one of the world’s most ancient peoples was recast as foreign to its only ancestral homeland. This did not happen merely because the world lacked information. In many cases, political convenience proved more attractive than historical precision.
Zionism Is National Return, Not Colonialism
Describing Zionism as colonialism reverses the nature of the movement. Classical colonialism involved a metropole sending settlers to a foreign land in order to rule it, exploit it and transfer benefit back to an imperial centre. What was the Jewish metropolis? Which empire sent Iraqi, Yemeni, Moroccan, Iranian, Ethiopian, Indian, Russian or Polish Jews to act in its name? Many of the countries from which Jews came had persecuted them, restricted them or driven them out.
There was no Jewish empire dispatching agents to a foreign colony and no mother country receiving the resources of the land. Jews arrived from different continents, spoke different languages and carried different cultures. What united them was an ancient national memory, a revived ancestral language and an enduring attachment to Jerusalem. They did not return on behalf of another sovereign; they returned as a people seeking sovereignty in the land from which their ancestors had been exiled.
To call that return colonialism is to reward the empires that expelled the Jews. It suggests that a people loses its homeland if it can be kept away long enough. Exile, however prolonged, does not erase national origin. Conquest does not transfer ownership of memory, and survival in dispersion does not turn an indigenous people into foreigners.
Why India Understands Civilisational Continuity
Indian readers are especially well placed to recognise this distinction. India is an ancient civilisation that endured invasions, conquest, renamed cities, destruction of sacred sites and long periods of foreign rule. Yet centuries of foreign domination did not make Indians foreigners in India. A later ruler’s name for a place did not abolish what came before, and the construction of a later monument did not grant ownership over every preceding layer of history.
The same principle must be applied to Israel. The Jewish people lost sovereignty, but not their homeland. They were exiled but did not abandon their identity. They were scattered across continents, yet continued to speak of Zion and pray for Jerusalem. India and Israel are not identical, but both are ancient civilisations that have had to resist efforts to detach them from their own past and portray historical continuity as a political inconvenience.
This is one reason the India–Israel relationship carries significance beyond defence, technology and trade. It connects two civilisations that understand the cost of conquest, the importance of memory and the danger of allowing modern politics to erase ancient identity. A confident India should be able to recognise Israel not as a Western implant but as the restored national home of an ancient people whose history in the region predates the empires that later ruled it.
A Challenge Grounded in Evidence
Every Israeli government may be criticised. Borders, settlements, military decisions and diplomatic strategy may be debated. Palestinian political aspirations can be discussed seriously, and future arrangements must ultimately be resolved through politics. None of this requires accepting the claim that Jews are foreigners in the Land of Israel or that an ancient sovereign Palestinian state was destroyed in 1948.
The author welcomes disagreement with this article, but the disagreement must meet the same standard demanded of the article itself. Anyone claiming that a sovereign Palestinian state existed before Israel is invited to identify its government, institutions, borders, currency, army and capital. Anyone claiming that Jews are foreign to the land must account for the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ancient inscriptions, coins, scrolls, synagogues, archaeological layers and the continuous Jewish orientation towards Jerusalem. Anyone denying the Jewish Temples must confront the Roman record, Jewish and Christian sources and the historical evidence.
Historical claims require historical evidence. A political slogan is not evidence. A map drawn retrospectively is not evidence. Repetition by international institutions does not alter chronology. The author stands absolutely behind the historical facts and conclusions presented here and remains ready to consider any contrary view that is accompanied by serious proof rather than assertion.
The Past Must Not Be Rewritten
Palestine was not an ancient sovereign Arab state. The Arab leadership rejected partition in 1947 and chose war. Jordan and Egypt did not establish a Palestinian state in the territories they controlled between 1948 and 1967. The PLO was founded before the territorial occupation on which much of its later language was based. Israel did not invent the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Zionism did not invent Jerusalem, and the United Nations did not create the Jewish connection to the land.
The Holocaust did not create the Jewish right to self-determination. That right arose from the Jewish people’s history, national identity and ancestral connection to their homeland. The Holocaust demonstrated, with catastrophic finality, the price paid by a dispersed people without the means to defend itself.
Resolutions may be passed, slogans may be shouted and names may be altered on maps. Yet the Merneptah Stele cannot be undone, the House of David cannot be erased, the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be rewritten, the Arch of Titus cannot be transformed into fiction, and Hebrew inscriptions beneath Jerusalem cannot be made to disappear. Political narratives may shape the present, but they do not acquire the power to manufacture the past.
The Jewish people did not steal an ancient Palestinian state. They restored sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. The future of Israelis and Palestinians deserves serious debate, courage and realism. But no durable future will be built by denying the deepest and best-documented truth at the heart of the conflict: the Jewish people belong in the Land of Israel.