Definitions of Palestine

For people who check facts

The terms Palestine and Palestinian have several overlapping (and occasionally contradictory) definitions. They can refer to any of the following:

Table of contents

1 Palestine

1.1 Ancient Palestine
1.2 Palestinian Authority
1.3 Palestine as a state

2 Palestinian

2.4 By place of birth
2.5 By place of origin
2.6 By citizenship
2.7 By ethnic origin

In historical contexts, especially predating the rise of 20th-century Zionism, Palestine was mostly a geographical term, particularly used in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and languages taking their geographical vocabulary from them; it comprised the Roman sub-province of Syria Palaestina, roughly equivalent to ancient Canaan (including the Biblical kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Moab, Ammon, and Philistia) and thus included much of the land on either side of the Jordan River.

Palestinian Authority

Sometimes people use the term Palestine to refer to lands currently under the administrative control of the Palestinian Authority, a quasi-govermental entity which governs but lacks full sovereignty. Since the late 1990s, this has included most of the Gaza Strip and large sections of the West Bank.

Palestine as a state

Modern usage of the term Palestine usually refers to a prospective Palestinian state. Its advocates usually regard Gaza and the West Bank as belonging to this state. The extremists regard all the land west of the Jordan River, including territory of modern State of Israel, as the territory of Palestinian state "from the river to the sea".

The term is also used to convey the sense that Palestine is already a state, either (a) consisting only of Gaza & West Bank or (b) including as well all land held by Israel.

Palestinian

By place of birth

A "Palestinian" can mean a person who was born in the area called Palestine before 1918, or a former citizen of the British Mandate territory called Palestine, or an institution related to either of these.

By place of origin

In probably its commonest usage, "Palestinian" refers to a person whose ancestors had lived in the territory corresponding to British Mandate Palestine for some considerable length of time in the centuries immediately prior to 1918. This definition includes the non-settler inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (including Dom and Samaritans, but excluding most Armenians), the Israeli Arabs (including Druze and Bedouin), the minority of Israeli Jews whose families moved there prior to Zionism, and the Arab refugees from 1948 and their descendants (though not the pre-Nakba non-Bedouin population of Jordan.)

JSource, the Jewish Virtual Library, uses a similar but slightly narrower definition: "Although anyone with roots in the land that is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is technically a Palestinian, the term is now more commonly used to refer to Arabs with such roots...Most of the world's Palestinian population is concentrated in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jordan, although many Palestinians live in Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries." JSource Virtual Library definition of Palestinian

By citizenship

A more specific widespread usage of "Palestinian" sometimes heard is to refer to native residents of British Mandate Palestine who do not have Israeli or Jordanian citizenship, and to institutions outside the Israeli state and territories not incorporated into it.

By ethnic origin

The word "Palestinian" is occasionally used by ethnographers and linguists to denote the specific Arab subculture of the southern Levant; in that sense, it includes not only most of the Arabs of British Mandate Palestine, but also the settled inhabitants of Jordan and the Druze, while excluding both Bedouin (who culturally and linguistically group with Arabia) and ethnic minorities such as the Dom and Samaritans.