PALESTINE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Professor Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and a member of the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London. He is also editor of the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. His books include Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992); A Land Without a People (1997); The Politics of Denial (2003); The Bible and Zionism (Zed 2007) and The Pales- tine Nakba (Zed 2012). PALESTINE A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY NUR MASALHA Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History was first published in 2018 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. www.zedbooks.net Copyright © Nur Masalha 2018. The right of Nur Masalha to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by seagulls.net Index by Nur Masalha Cover design © De Agostini Picture Library/Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978‑1‑78699‑272‑7 hb ISBN 978‑1‑78699‑274‑1 pdf ISBN 978‑1‑78699‑275‑8 epub ISBN 978‑1‑78699‑276‑5 mobi CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. The Philistines and Philistia as a distinct geo‑political entity: 55 Late Bronze Age to 500 BC 2. The conception of Palestine in Classical Antiquity and 71 during the Hellenistic Empires (500‒135 BC) 3. From Philistia to Provincia ‘Syria Palaestina’ (135 AD‒ 81 390 AD): the administrative province of Roman Palestine 4. The (Three in One) Provincia Palaestina: the three 95 administrative provinces of Byzantine Palestine (4th‒early 7th centuries AD) 5. Arab Christian Palestine: the pre‑Islamic Arab kings, bishops 135 and poets and tribes of Provincia Palaestina (3rd‒early 7th centuries AD) 6. The Arab province of Jund Filastin (638‒1099 AD): 151 continuities, adaption and transformation of Palestine under Islam 7. Between Egypt and al‑Sham: Palestine during the 189 Ayyubid, Mamluk and early Ottoman periods 8. Palestinian statehood in the 18th century: early modernities 211 and practical sovereignty in Palestine 9. Being Palestine, becoming Palestine: rediscovery and new 241 representations of modern Palestine and their impact on Palestinian national identity 10. Settler‑colonialism and disinheriting the Palestinians: the 307 appropriation of Palestinian place names by the Israeli state Bibliography 387 Notes 421 Index 433 Acknowledgements Any credit for this book should be shared with a large number people who provided me with documents, archival and material sources, logistics, ideas, comments and moral support. These include Thomas Thompson, Rosemary Sayigh, Hamdan Taha, Hussein Hamzah, Emanuel Beška, Ghalib Anabsi, Maysa Hamzah, Raja Khalidi, Marie Antoinete, Salim Tamari, Sherna Berger Gluck, John Docker, John Rose, Saad Chedid, Gilbert Achcar, Yosefa Loshitzky, Bernard Regan, Ismael Abu Saad, Nahla Abdo, Asia Zrike, Hassan Hakimian, Ehab Masalha, Peter Mayo, Laura J. Khoury, Hatem Bazian, Faiha Abdulhadi, Niels Peter Lemche, Ella Shohat, Nadera Shalhoub‑Kevorkian, Maryse Gargour, Ilan Pappe, Issa Jubrael Sarie, Khalil Nakhleh, Adrian Beidas, Oren Ben‑Dor, Rashid Khalidi, Ghada Karmi, Khalil Hindi, Iman Saca, and Ahmad Sa’adi. My special thanks go to Professors Thomas Thompson and Haim Bresheeth for their extraordinary generosity and insightful comments and to the two anony‑ mous reviewers for their time and helpful advice. My family and friends have also been an ongoing source of inspiration and encouragement and this book could not have been completed without the support my wife Stephanie and my daughter Maryam; to both I owe enormous gratitude. At Zed, I am particularly grateful for the comments and practical help of the Commissioning Editor Kim Walker, Production Director Amy Jordan and Project Manager Linda Auld. Needless to say that, while all the above have contributed directly and indirectly to this work, thus enabling the book to come to fruition, any mistakes or shortcomings in this book are entirely mine. vii Introduction PALESTINE AS A NAME COMMONLY USED THROUGHOUT ANCIENT HISTORY First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name Filastin), is the conventional ,فلسطين :Palestine (Greek: Παλαιστίνη; Arabic name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands. This work explores the evolution of the concept, histories, iden‑ tity, languages and cultures of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the modern era. Moreover, Palestine history is often taught in the West as a history of a land, not as Palestinian history or a history of a people. This book challenges colonial approach to Palestine and the pernicious myth of a land without a people (Masalha 1992, 1997) and argues for reading the history of Palestine with the eyes of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine; their local roots are deeply embedded in the soil of Palestine and their autochthonous identity and historical heritage long preceded the emergence of a local Palestinian nascent national movement in the late Ottoman period and the advent of Zionist settler‑colonialism before the First World War. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that history is always written from and with a particular perspective and the past looks different from different perspec‑ tives, although some perspectives are empirically more truthful or less distorting than others. This work is not aimed at creating a grand narra‑ tive or a metanarrative for Palestine, as a way of mirroring or mimicking the foundational myths of Zionism. However, considering alternative and 1 PALESTINE: A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY critical perspectives and looking for proof and empirical evidence are also central to critical historical writing. Using a wide range of contemporary evidence, testimony and sources, this book applies a multiple‑perspective approach to the history of Palestine across time, while always keeping in mind the realities of the country and its indigenous people. It further argues that multi‑linear evolution of the conceptual experience of Palestine, with its unanticipated twists and turns over time and space, centre on the general and concrete ideas which represent the historical and fundamental characteristics and lived experiences of Palestine and its indigenous people. The geo‑political unit and contextualised representations (and indigenous framing) of Palestine are deeply rooted in the collective consciousness and empirical experiences of the indigenous people of Palestine and the multi‑ cultural and shared ancient past. The name Palestine is the most commonly used from the Late Bronze Age (from 1300 BC) onwards. The name is evident in countless histories, ‘Abbasid inscriptions from the province of Jund Filastin (Elad 1992), Islamic numismatic evidence maps (including ‘world maps’ beginning with Clas‑ sical Antiquity) and Philistine coins from the Iron Age and Antiquity, vast quantities of Umayyad and Abbasid Palestine coins bearing the mint name of Filastin. As we shall see below, the manuscripts of medieval al‑Fustat (old Cairo) Genizah also referred to the Arab Muslim province of Filastin (Gil 1996: 28‒29). From the Late Bronze Age onwards, the names used for the region, such as Djahi, Retenu and Cana’an, all gave way to the name Pales‑ tine. Throughout Classical and Late Antiquity – a term used by historians to describe a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, a transitional period from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean world, Europe and the Near East – the name Palestine remained the most common. Furthermore, in the course of the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods the conception and political geography of Palestine acquired official administrative status. This work sets out to explain and contextualise the multiple beginnings and evolution of the concept of Palestine, geographi‑ cally, culturally, politically and administratively. It also seeks to demonstrate how the name ‘Palestine’ was most commonly and formally used in ancient history. It argues that the legend of the ‘Israelites’ conquest of Cana’an’ and other master narratives of the Old Testament (or ‘Hebrew Bible’) – a library 2 introduction of books built up across several centuries – are myth‑narratives designed to underpin false consciousness, not evidence‑based history which promotes truth and understanding. It further argues that academic and school history curricula should be based on contextualised historical facts, empir‑ ical evidence, archaeological and scientific discoveries, not on conventional opinions or the fictional narratives of the Old Testament and religio‑political dogmas repeatedly reproduced in the interest of powerful elites. The celebrated English historian and Enlightenment author Edward Gibbon, writing in 1776, noted that ‘Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the [collective] memory of mankind’. Gibbon also astutely observed that the Romans, Persians and Arabs wanted Palestine for the extra‑ ordinary fertility of its soil, the opulence and beauty of its cities and purity of its air (Gibbon 1838, Vol. 1: 40; 1840, Vol. 5: 173). Today the idea of a country is often conflated with the modern concept of ‘nation‑state’, but this was