Geographically speaking, Palestine is the name given to an indeterminate region on the Eastern Mediterranean that consisted, or consists, of parts of what are modern Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, and the western parts of Jordan. This is the sense in which Palestine is most often used in ALBERITH.
Politically and in modern times, Palestine refers to the same region but in the context of the struggle for power and ownership between Israelis who claimed the region for themselves in the form of the modern state of Israel in the first half of the 20th Cent and the Arab-speaking residents who descended from those who had lived there since before—or who had moved there from elsewhere from before—New Testament times, but certainly through the entire time the region was occupied by the Ottomans and who remains adamant about their own right to form a state of their own. The modern Palestinians, therefore, have a right to call the land their home as much as any one can all a land their home (certainly more so than the many American Zionist-Christians have a right to call America their home).
The name Palestine is derived from the term Philistine, being the word used by the Septuagint for the Philistines. When the Second Jewish Revolt was finally put down, Hadrian commanded that Judea be renamed Palestine, from which time the use of the term for the region became mundane.
©ALBERITH
060120lch