Palestine (region)

This article is about the region. For the country, see State of Palestine. For other uses of Palestine, see Palestine (disambiguation).

Palestine Παλαιστίνη (Greek) Palaestina (Latin) فِلَسْطِينَ‎ (Arabic) אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל‎ (Hebrew)
Boundaries of the Roman province Syria Palaestina, where dashed green line shows the boundary between Byzantine Palaestina Prima (later Jund Filastin) and Palaestina Secunda (later Jund al-Urdunn), as well as Palaestina Salutaris (later Jebel et-Tih and the Jifar)   Borders of Mandatory Palestine   Borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) which are claimed by the State of Palestine as its borders
Languages	Arabic, Hebrew
Ethnic groups	Arabs, Jews, Samaritans
Countries	Israel Palestine Jordan

The region of Palestine, also known as historic Palestine, is a geographical area in West Asia. It includes modern-day Israel and the State of Palestine, as well as parts of northwestern Jordan in some definitions. Other names for the region include Canaan, the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, or the Holy Land.

The earliest written record referring to Palestine as a geographical region is in the Histories of Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, which calls the area Palaistine, referring to the territory previously held by Philistia, a state that existed in that area from the 12th to the 7th century BCE. The Roman Empire conquered the region and in 6 CE established the province known as Judaea, but then in 132 CE in the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt the province was expanded and renamed Syria Palaestina. In 390, during the Byzantine period, the region was split into the provinces of Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Tertia. Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 630s, the military district of Jund Filastin was established. While Palestine's boundaries have changed throughout history, it has generally comprised the southern portion of regions such as Syria or the Levant.

As the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, Palestine has been a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. In the Bronze Age, it was home to Canaanite city-states; and the later Iron Age saw the emergence of Israel and Judah. It has since come under the sway of various empires, including the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, and the Seleucid Empire. The brief Hasmonean dynasty ended with its gradual incorporation into the Roman Empire, and later the Byzantine Empire, during which Palestine became a center of Christianity. In the 7th century, Palestine was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate, ending Byzantine rule in the region; Rashidun rule was succeeded by the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Fatimid Caliphate. Following the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been established through the Crusades, the population of Palestine became predominantly Muslim. In the 13th century, it became part of the Mamluk Sultanate, and after 1516, spent four centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire.

During World War I, Palestine was occupied by the United Kingdom as part of the Sinai and Palestine campaign. Between 1919 and 1922, the League of Nations created the Mandate for Palestine, which came under British administration as Mandatory Palestine through the 1940s. Tensions between Jews and Arabs escalated into the 1947–1949 Palestine war, which ended with the establishment of Israel on most of the territory, and neighboring Jordan and Egypt controlling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip respectively. The 1967 Six Day War saw Israel's occupation of both territories, which has been among the core issues of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Etymology

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of the name Palestine.

The name is found throughout recorded history. Examples of historical maps of the region that contain the name Palestine are shown above: (1) Pomponius Mela (Latin, c. 43 CE); (2) Notitia Dignitatum (Latin, c. 410 CE); (3) Tabula Rogeriana (Arabic, 1154 CE); (4) Cedid Atlas (Ottoman Turkish, 1803 CE)

Modern archaeology has identified 12 ancient inscriptions from Egyptian and Assyrian records recording likely cognates of Hebrew Pelesheth. The term "Peleset" (transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t) is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people or land starting from c. 1150 BCE during the Twentieth dynasty of Egypt. The first known mention is at the temple at Medinet Habu which refers to the Peleset among those who fought with Egypt in Ramesses III's reign, and the last known is 300 years later on Padiiset's Statue. Seven known Assyrian inscriptions refer to the region of "Palashtu" or "Pilistu", beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c. 800 BCE through to a treaty made by Esarhaddon more than a century later. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.

The first clear use of the term Palestine to refer to the entire area between Phoenicia and Egypt was in 5th century BCE ancient Greece, when Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistínē" (Ancient Greek: Συρίη ἡ Παλαιστίνη καλεομένη) in The Histories, which included the Judean mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley. Approximately a century later, Aristotle used a similar definition for the region in Meteorology, in which he included the Dead Sea. Later Greek writers such as Polemon and Pausanias also used the term to refer to the same region, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Romano-Jewish writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus. The term was first used to denote an official province in c. 135 CE, when the Roman authorities, following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, renamed the province of Judaea "Syria Palaestina". There is circumstantial evidence linking Hadrian with the name change, but the precise date is not certain.

The term is generally accepted to be a cognate of the biblical name Peleshet (פלשת Pəlésheth, usually transliterated as Philistia). The term and its derivates are used more than 250 times in Masoretic-derived versions of the Hebrew Bible, of which 10 uses are in the Torah, with undefined boundaries, and almost 200 of the remaining references are in the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel. The term is rarely used in the Septuagint, which used a transliteration Land of Phylistieim (Γῆ τῶν Φυλιστιείμ), different from the contemporary Greek place name Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη). It is also theorized to be the portmanteau of the Greek word for the Philistines and palaistês, which means "wrestler/rival/adversary". This aligns with the Greek practice of punning place names since the latter is also the etymological meaning for Israel.

The Septuagint instead used the term "allophuloi" (άλλόφυλοι, "other nations") throughout the Books of Judges and Samuel, such that the term "Philistines" has been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land" when used in the context of Samson, Saul and David, and Rabbinic sources explain that these peoples were different from the Philistines of the Book of Genesis.

During the Byzantine period, the region of Palestine within Syria Palaestina was subdivided into Palaestina Prima and Secunda, and an area of land including the Negev and Sinai became Palaestina Salutaris. Following the Muslim conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic. The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English, was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem and was revived as an official place name with the British Mandate for Palestine.

Some other terms that have been used to refer to all or part of this land include Canaan, Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael or Ha'aretz), the Promised Land, the region of Syria, the Holy Land, Iudaea Province, Judea, Coele-Syria, "Israel HaShlema", Kingdom of Israel, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Zion, Retenu (Ancient Egyptian), Southern Syria, Southern Levant and Syria Palaestina.

History

Main article: History of Palestine

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of the Palestine region.

Overview

For a more comprehensive list, see Time periods in the Palestine region.

Situated at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. The region has been controlled by numerous peoples, including ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenids, ancient Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sasanians, Byzantines, the Arab Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Mongols, Ottomans, the British, and modern Israelis and Palestinians.

Ancient period

See also: Canaan, History of ancient Israel and Judah, and Philistines

Kingdoms of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age (c. 830 BCE)

The region was among the earliest in the world to see human habitation, agricultural communities and civilization. During the Bronze Age, independent Canaanite city-states were established, and were influenced by the surrounding civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Minoan Crete, and Syria. Between 1550 and 1400 BCE, the Canaanite cities became vassals to the Egyptian New Kingdom who held power until the 1178 BCE Battle of Djahy (Canaan) during the wider Bronze Age collapse.

The Israelites emerged from a dramatic social transformation that took place in the people of the central hill country of Canaan around 1200 BCE, with no signs of violent invasion or even of peaceful infiltration of a clearly defined ethnic group from elsewhere. During the Iron Age, the Israelites established two related kingdoms, Israel and Judah. The Kingdom of Israel emerged as an important local power by the 10th century BCE before falling to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. Israel's southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah, emerged in the 8th or 9th century BCE and later became a client state of first the Neo-Assyrian and then the Neo-Babylonian Empire before a revolt against the latter led to its destruction in 586 BCE. The region became part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from c. 740 BCE, which was itself replaced by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in c. 627 BCE.

In 587/6 BCE, Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed by the second Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, who subsequently exiled the Judeans to Babylon. The Kingdom of Judah was then annexed as a Babylonian province. The Philistines were also exiled. The defeat of Judah was recorded by the Babylonians.

In 539 BCE, the Babylonian empire was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. According to the Hebrew Bible and implications from the Cyrus Cylinder, the exiled Jews were eventually allowed to return to Jerusalem. The returned population in Judah were allowed to self-rule under Persian governance, and some parts of the fallen kingdom became a Persian province known as Yehud. Except Yehud, at least another four Persian provinces existed in the region: Samaria, Gaza, Ashdod, and Ascalon, in addition to the Phoenician city states in the north and the Arabian tribes in the south. During the same period, the Edomites migrated from Transjordan to the southern parts of Judea, which became known as Idumaea. The Qedarites were the dominant Arab tribe; their territory ran from the Hejaz in the south to the Negev in the north through the period of Persian and Hellenistic dominion.

Classical antiquity

Caesarea Maritima, also known as Caesarea Palestinae, built under Herod the Great at the site of a former Phoenician naval station, became the capital city of Roman Judea, Roman Syria Palaestina and Byzantine Palaestina Prima provinces.

In the 330s BCE, Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great conquered the region, which changed hands several times during the wars of the Diadochi and later Syrian Wars. It ultimately fell to the Seleucid Empire between 219 and 200 BCE. During that period, the region became heavily hellenized, building tensions between Greeks and locals.

In 167 BCE, the Maccabean Revolt erupted, leading to the establishment of an independent Hasmonean Kingdom in Judea. From 110 BCE, the Hasmoneans extended their authority over much of Palestine, including Samaria, Galilee, Iturea, Perea, and Idumea. The Jewish control over the wider region resulted in it also becoming known as Judaea, a term that had previously only referred to the smaller region of the Judaean Mountains. During the same period, the Edomites were converted to Judaism.

Between 73 and 63 BCE, the Roman Republic extended its influence into the region in the Third Mithridatic War. Pompey conquered Judea in 63 BCE, splitting the former Hasmonean Kingdom into five districts. In around 40 BCE, the Parthians conquered Palestine, deposed the Roman ally Hyrcanus II, and installed a puppet ruler of the Hasmonean line known as Antigonus II. By 37 BCE, the Parthians withdrew from Palestine.

Palestine is generally considered the "Cradle of Christianity". Christianity, a religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, arose as a messianic sect from within Second Temple Judaism. The three-year Ministry of Jesus, culminating in his crucifixion, is estimated to have occurred from 28 to 30 CE, although the historicity of Jesus is disputed by a minority of scholars.

Model of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, after being rebuilt by Herod. It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE during the First Jewish-Roman War.

In the first and second centuries CE, the province of Judea became the site of two large-scale Jewish revolts against Rome. During the First Jewish-Roman War, which lasted from 66 to 73 CE, the Romans razed Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. In Masada, Jewish zealots preferred to commit suicide than endure Roman captivity. In 132 CE, another Jewish rebellion erupted. The Bar Kokhba revolt took three years to put down, incurred massive costs on both the Romans and the Jews, and desolated much of Judea. The center of Jewish life in Palestine moved to the Galilee. During or after the revolt, Hadrian joined the province of Iudaea with Galilee and the Paralia to form the new province of Syria Palaestina, and Jerusalem was renamed "Aelia Capitolina". Some scholars view these actions as an attempt to disconnect the Jewish people from their homeland, but this theory is debated.

Between 259 and 272, the region fell under the rule of Odaenathus as King of the Palmyrene Empire. Following the victory of Christian emperor Constantine in the Civil wars of the Tetrarchy, the Christianization of the Roman Empire began, and in 326, Constantine's mother Saint Helena visited Jerusalem and began the construction of churches and shrines. Palestine became a center of Christianity, attracting numerous monks and religious scholars. The Samaritan Revolts during this period caused their near extinction. In 614 CE, Palestine was annexed by another Persian dynasty; the Sassanids, until returning to Byzantine control in 628 CE.

Early Muslim period

The Dome of the Rock, the world's first great work of Islamic architecture, constructed in 691.

Minaret of the White Mosque in Ramla, constructed in 1318

Arab architecture in the Umayyad and Mamluk periods

Palestine was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate, beginning in 634 CE. In 636, the Battle of Yarmouk during the Muslim conquest of the Levant marked the start of Muslim hegemony over the region, which became known as the military district of Jund Filastin within the province of Bilâd al-Shâm (Greater Syria). In 661, with the Assassination of Ali, Muawiyah I became the Caliph of the Islamic world after being crowned in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock, completed in 691, was the world's first great work of Islamic architecture.

The majority of the population was Christian and was to remain so until the conquest of Saladin in 1187. The Muslim conquest apparently had little impact on social and administrative continuities for several decades. The word 'Arab' at the time referred predominantly to Bedouin nomads, though Arab settlement is attested in the Judean highlands and near Jerusalem by the 5th century, and some tribes had converted to Christianity. The local population engaged in farming, which was considered demeaning, and were called Nabaț, referring to Aramaic-speaking villagers. A ḥadīth, brought in the name of a Muslim freedman who settled in Palestine, ordered the Muslim Arabs not to settle in the villages, "for he who abides in villages it is as if he abides in graves".

The Umayyads, who had spurred a strong economic resurgence in the area, were replaced by the Abbasids in 750. Ramla became the administrative centre for the following centuries, while Tiberias became a thriving centre of Muslim scholarship. From 878, Palestine was ruled from Egypt by semi-autonomous rulers for almost a century, beginning with the Turkish freeman Ahmad ibn Tulun, for whom both Jews and Christians prayed when he lay dying and ending with the Ikhshidid rulers. Reverence for Jerusalem increased during this period, with many of the Egyptian rulers choosing to be buried there. However, the later period became characterized by persecution of Christians as the threat from Byzantium grew. The Fatimids, with a predominantly Berber army, conquered the region in 970, a date that marks the beginning of a period of unceasing warfare between numerous enemies, which destroyed Palestine, and in particular, devastating its Jewish population. Between 1071 and 1073, Palestine was captured by the Great Seljuq Empire, only to be recaptured by the Fatimids in 1098.

Crusader/Ayyubid period

The Hospitaller fortress in Acre was destroyed in 1291 and partially rebuilt in the 18th century.

The Fatimids again lost the region to the Crusaders in 1099. The Crusaders set up the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291). Their control of Jerusalem and most of Palestine lasted almost a century until their defeat by Saladin's forces in 1187, after which most of Palestine was controlled by the Ayyubids, except for the years 1229–1244 when Jerusalem and other areas were retaken by the Second Kingdom of Jerusalem, by then ruled from Acre (1191–1291), but, despite seven further crusades, the Franks were no longer a significant power in the region. The Fourth Crusade, which did not reach Palestine, led directly to the decline of the Byzantine Empire, dramatically reducing Christian influence throughout the region.

Mamluk period

The Mamluk Sultanate was created in Egypt as an indirect result of the Seventh Crusade. The Mongol Empire reached Palestine for the first time in 1260, beginning with the Mongol raids into Palestine under Nestorian Christian general Kitbuqa, and reaching an apex at the pivotal Battle of Ain Jalut, where they were pushed back by the Mamluks.

Ottoman period

Further information: History of Palestine § Ottoman period

In 1486, hostilities broke out between the Mamluks and the Ottoman Empire in a battle for control over western Asia, and the Ottomans conquered Palestine in 1516. Between the mid-16th and 17th centuries, a close-knit alliance of three local dynasties, the Ridwans of Gaza, the Turabays of al-Lajjun and the Farrukhs of Nablus, governed Palestine on behalf of the Porte (imperial Ottoman government).

The Khan al-Umdan, constructed in Acre in 1784, is the largest and best preserved caravanserai in the region.

In the 18th century, the Zaydani clan under the leadership of Zahir al-Umar ruled large parts of Palestine autonomously until the Ottomans were able to defeat them in their Galilee strongholds in 1775–76. Zahir had turned the port city of Acre into a major regional power, partly fueled by his monopolization of the cotton and olive oil trade from Palestine to Europe. Acre's regional dominance was further elevated under Zahir's successor Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar at the expense of Damascus.

In 1830, on the eve of Muhammad Ali's invasion, the Porte transferred control of the sanjaks of Jerusalem and Nablus to Abdullah Pasha, the governor of Acre. According to Silverburg, in regional and cultural terms this move was important for creating an Arab Palestine detached from greater Syria (bilad al-Sham). According to Pappe, it was an attempt to reinforce the Syrian front in face of Muhammad Ali's invasion. Two years later, Palestine was conquered by Muhammad Ali's Egypt, but Egyptian rule was challenged in 1834 by a countrywide popular uprising against conscription and other measures considered intrusive by the population. Its suppression devastated many of Palestine's villages and major towns.

In 1840, Britain intervened and returned control of the Levant to the Ottomans in return for further capitulations. The death of Aqil Agha marked the last local challenge to Ottoman centralization in Palestine, and beginning in the 1860s, Palestine underwent an acceleration in its socio-economic development, due to its incorporation into the global, and particularly European, economic pattern of growth. The beneficiaries of this process were Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians who emerged as a new layer within the Arab elite. From 1880 large-scale Jewish immigration began, almost entirely from Europe, based on an explicitly Zionist ideology. There was also a revival of the Hebrew language and culture.

Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom preceded its spread within the Jewish community. The government of Great Britain publicly supported it during World War I with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

British Mandate period

Main article: Mandatory Palestine

Further information: Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, and United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine

Palestine passport and Palestine coin. The Mandatory authorities agreed a compromise position regarding the Hebrew name: in English and Arabic the name was simply "Palestine" ("فلسطين"), but the Hebrew version ("פלשתינה") also included the acronym ("א״י") for Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel).

Metulla

Haifa

Safad

Zikhron
Yaaqov

Nazareth

TelAviv

Nablus

Yibna

Ramle

Jerusalem

Gaza

Hebron

Dead Sea

Rafa

Beersheba

Jebel
Usdum

Nitsana

Ovdat

Nahal
Haarava

Har
Lotz

Har
Omer

Har
Tzenifim

Yotvata

Eilat

Survey of Palestine 1942–1958 1–100,000 Topographical maps. Click on each blue link to see the individual original maps in high resolution.

The British began their Sinai and Palestine Campaign in 1915. The war reached southern Palestine in 1917, progressing to Gaza and around Jerusalem by the end of the year. The British secured Jerusalem in December 1917. They moved into the Jordan valley in 1918 and a campaign by the Entente into northern Palestine led to victory at Megiddo in September.

The British were formally awarded the mandate to govern the region in 1922. The Arab Palestinians rioted in 1920, 1921, 1929, and revolted in 1936. In 1947, following World War II and The Holocaust, the British Government announced its desire to terminate the Mandate, and the United Nations General Assembly adopted in November 1947 a Resolution 181(II) recommending partition into an Arab state, a Jewish state and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. A civil war began immediately after the Resolution's adoption. The State of Israel was declared in May 1948.

Arab–Israeli conflict

Further information: History of Israel and History of the State of Palestine

In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel captured and incorporated a further 26% of the Mandate territory, Jordan captured the regions of Judea and Samaria, renaming it the "West Bank", while the Gaza Strip was captured by Egypt. Following the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, also known as al-Nakba, the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes were not allowed to return following the Lausanne Conference of 1949.

In the course of the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel captured the rest of Mandate Palestine from Jordan and Egypt, and began a policy of establishing Jewish settlements in those territories. From 1987 to 1993, the First Palestinian Intifada against Israel took place, which included the Declaration of the State of Palestine in 1988 and ended with the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and the creation of the Palestinian National Authority.

In 2000, the Second Intifada (also called al-Aqsa Intifada) began, and Israel built a separation barrier. In the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, Israel withdrew all settlers and military presence from the Gaza Strip, but maintained military control of numerous aspects of the territory including its borders, air space and coast. Israel's ongoing military occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues to be the world's longest military occupation in modern times.

In 2008 Palestinian hikaye was inscribed to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage; the first of four listings reflecting the significance of Palestinian culture globally.

In November 2012, the status of Palestinian delegation in the United Nations was upgraded to non-member observer state as the State of Palestine.

Boundaries

Pre-modern period

The boundaries of Palestine have varied throughout history. The Jordan Rift Valley (comprising Wadi Arabah, the Dead Sea and River Jordan) has at times formed a political and administrative frontier, even within empires that have controlled both territories. At other times, such as during certain periods during the Hasmonean and Crusader states for example, as well as during the biblical period, territories on both sides of the river formed part of the same administrative unit. During the Arab Caliphate period, parts of southern Lebanon and the northern highland areas of Palestine and Jordan were administered as Jund al-Urdun, while the southern parts of the latter two formed part of Jund Dimashq, which during the 9th century was attached to the administrative unit of Jund Filastin.

The boundaries of the area and the ethnic nature of the people referred to by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE as Palaestina vary according to context. Sometimes, he uses it to refer to the coast north of Mount Carmel. Elsewhere, distinguishing the Syrians in Palestine from the Phoenicians, he refers to their land as extending down all the coast from Phoenicia to Egypt. Pliny, writing in Latin in the 1st century CE, describes a region of Syria that was "formerly called Palaestina" among the areas of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Since the Byzantine Period, the Byzantine borders of Palaestina (I and II, also known as Palaestina Prima, "First Palestine", and Palaestina Secunda, "Second Palestine"), have served as a name for the geographic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Under Arab rule, Filastin (or Jund Filastin) was used administratively to refer to what was under the Byzantines Palaestina Secunda (comprising Judaea and Samaria), while Palaestina Prima (comprising the Galilee region) was renamed Urdunn ("Jordan" or Jund al-Urdunn).

Modern period

Satellite image of the region

Nineteenth-century sources refer to Palestine as extending from the sea to the caravan route, presumably the Hejaz-Damascus route east of the Jordan River valley. Others refer to it as extending from the sea to the desert. Prior to the Allied Powers victory in World War I and the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, which created the British mandate in the Levant, most of the northern area of what is today Jordan formed part of the Ottoman Vilayet of Damascus (Syria), while the southern part of Jordan was part of the Vilayet of Hejaz. What later became Mandatory Palestine was in late Ottoman times divided between the Vilayet of Beirut (Lebanon) and the Sanjak of Jerusalem. The Zionist Organization provided its definition of the boundaries of Palestine in a statement to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The British administered Mandatory Palestine after World War I, having promised to establish a homeland for the Jewish people. The modern definition of the region follows the boundaries of that entity, which were fixed in the North and East in 1920–23 by the British Mandate for Palestine (including the Transjordan memorandum) and the Paulet–Newcombe Agreement, and on the South by following the 1906 Turco-Egyptian boundary agreement.

Modern evolution of Palestine

1916–1922 various proposals: Three proposals for the post World War I administration of Palestine. The red line is the "International Administration" proposed in the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, the dashed blue line is the 1919 Zionist Organization proposal at the Paris Peace Conference, and the thin blue line refers to the final borders of the 1923–48 Mandatory Palestine.

1937 British proposal: The first official proposal for partition, published in 1937 by the Peel Commission. An ongoing British Mandate was proposed to keep "the sanctity of Jerusalem and Bethlehem", in the form of an enclave from Jerusalem to Jaffa, including Lydda and Ramle.

1947 UN proposal: Proposal per the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 1947), prior to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The proposal included a Corpus Separatum for Jerusalem, extraterritorial crossroads between the non-contiguous areas, and Jaffa as an Arab exclave.

1947 Jewish private land ownership: Jewish-owned lands in Mandatory Palestine as of 1947 in blue, constituting 7.4% of the total land area, of which more than half was held by the JNF and PICA. White is either public land or Palestinian-Arab-owned lands including related religious trusts.

1949 armistice lines: The Jordanian-annexed West Bank (light green) and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip (dark green), after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, showing 1949 armistice lines.

1967 territorial changes: During the Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, together with the Sinai Peninsula (later traded for peace after the Yom Kippur War). In 1980–81 Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Neither Israel's annexation nor the PLO claim over East Jerusalem gained international recognition.

1995 Oslo II Accord: Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian National Authority was created to provide a Palestinian interim self-government in the West Bank and the interior of the Gaza Strip. Its second phase envisioned "Palestinian enclaves".

2005–present: After the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and clashes between the two main Palestinian parties following the Hamas electoral victory, two separate executive governments took control in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Ethnic majority by settlement (present): The map indicates the ethnic majority of settlements (cities, villages and other communities).

Current usage

Further information: Palestinian territories, State of Palestine, Palestinian National Authority, and Palestinian enclaves

See also: Borders of Israel

The region of Palestine is the eponym for the Palestinian people and the culture of Palestine, both of which are defined as relating to the whole historical region, usually defined as the localities within the border of Mandatory Palestine. The 1968 Palestinian National Covenant described Palestine as the "homeland of the Arab Palestinian people", with "the boundaries it had during the British Mandate".

However, since the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, the term State of Palestine refers only to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This discrepancy was described by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas as a negotiated concession in a September 2011 speech to the United Nations: "... we agreed to establish the State of Palestine on only 22% of the territory of historical Palestine – on all the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel in 1967."

The term Palestine is also sometimes used in a limited sense to refer to the parts of the Palestinian territories currently under the administrative control of the Palestinian National Authority, a quasi-governmental entity which governs parts of the State of Palestine under the terms of the Oslo Accords.

Administration

Overview of administration and sovereignty in Israel, the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights

Area		Administered by	Recognition of governing authority	Sovereignty claimed by	Recognition of claim
Gaza Strip		Palestinian National Authority (de jure) Controlled by Hamas (de facto)	Witnesses to the Oslo II Accord	State of Palestine	146 UN member states
West Bank	Palestinian enclaves (Areas A and B)	Palestinian National Authority and Israeli military
	Area C	Israeli enclave law (Israeli settlements) and Israeli military (Palestinians under Israeli occupation)
	East Jerusalem	Israeli administration	Honduras, Guatemala, Nauru, and the United States		China, Russia
West Jerusalem			Russia, Czech Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Nauru, and the United States	United Nations as an international city along with East Jerusalem	Various UN member states and the European Union; joint sovereignty also widely supported
Golan Heights			United States	Syria	All UN member states except the United States
Israel (Green Line border)			165 UN member states	Israel	165 UN member states

Demographics

Main article: Demographic history of Palestine

Early demographics

Year	Jews	Christians	Muslims	Total
First half 1st century CE	Majority	–	–	~2,500
5th century	Minority	Majority	–	>1st C
End 12th century	Minority	Minority	Majority	>225
14th century before Black Death	Minority	Minority	Majority	225
14th century after Black Death	Minority	Minority	Majority	150
Historical population table compiled by Sergio DellaPergola. Figures in thousands.

Estimating the population of Palestine in antiquity relies on two methods – censuses and writings made at the times, and the scientific method based on excavations and statistical methods that consider the number of settlements at the particular age, area of each settlement, density factor for each settlement.

The Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE saw a major shift in the population of Palestine. The sheer scale and scope of the overall destruction has been described by Dio Cassius in his Roman History, where he notes that Roman war operations in the country had left some 580,000 Jews dead, with many more dying of hunger and disease, while 50 of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. "Thus," writes Dio Cassius, "nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate."

According to Israeli archaeologists Magen Broshi and Yigal Shiloh, the population of ancient Palestine did not exceed one million. By 300 CE, Christianity had spread so significantly that Jews comprised only a quarter of the population.

Late Ottoman and British Mandate periods

In a study of Ottoman registers of the early Ottoman rule of Palestine, Bernard Lewis reports:

[T]he first half century of Ottoman rule brought a sharp increase in population. The towns grew rapidly, villages became larger and more numerous, and there was an extensive development of agriculture, industry, and trade. The two last were certainly helped to no small extent by the influx of Spanish and other Western Jews.

From the mass of detail in the registers, it is possible to extract something like a general picture of the economic life of the country in that period. Out of a total population of about 300,000 souls, between a fifth and a quarter lived in the six towns of Jerusalem, Gaza, Safed, Nablus, Ramle, and Hebron. The remainder consisted mainly of peasants, living in villages of varying size, and engaged in agriculture. Their main food-crops were wheat and barley in that order, supplemented by leguminous pulses, olives, fruit, and vegetables. In and around most of the towns there was a considerable number of vineyards, orchards, and vegetable gardens.

Year	Jews	Christians	Muslims	Total
1533–1539	5	6	145	157
1690–1691	2	11	219	232
1800	7	22	246	275
1890	43	57	432	532
1914	94	70	525	689
1922	84	71	589	752
1931	175	89	760	1,033
1947	630	143	1,181	1,970
Historical population table compiled by Sergio DellaPergola. Figures in thousands.

According to Alexander Scholch, the population of Palestine in 1850 was about 350,000 inhabitants, 30% of whom lived in 13 towns; roughly 85% were Muslims, 11% were Christians and 4% Jews.

According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy, the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of whom 94% were Arabs. In 1914 Palestine had a population of 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews. McCarthy estimates the non-Jewish population of Palestine at 452,789 in 1882; 737,389 in 1914; 725,507 in 1922; 880,746 in 1931; and 1,339,763 in 1946.

In 1920, the League of Nations' Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine described the 700,000 people living in Palestine as follows:

Of these, 235,000 live in the larger towns, 465,000 in the smaller towns and villages. Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The minority are members of the Latin or of the Uniate Greek Catholic Church, or—a small number—are Protestants. The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000. Almost all have entered Palestine during the last 40 years. Prior to 1850, there were in the country only a handful of Jews. In the following 30 years, a few hundreds came to Palestine. Most of them were animated by religious motives; they came to pray and to die in the Holy Land, and to be buried in its soil. After the persecutions in Russia forty years ago, the movement of the Jews to Palestine assumed larger proportions.

Current demographics

See also: Demographics of Israel and Demographics of the Palestinian territories

According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 2015, the total population of Israel was 8.5 million people, of which 75% were Jews, 21% Arabs, and 4% "others". Of the Jewish group, 76% were Sabras (born in Israel); the rest were olim (immigrants)—16% from Europe, the former Soviet republics, and the Americas, and 8% from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics evaluations, in 2015 the Palestinian population of the West Bank was approximately 2.9 million and that of the Gaza Strip was 1.8 million. By 2022, the population of the Gaza strip had increased to an estimated 2,375,259, corresponding to a density of more than 6,507 people per square kilometre.

Both Israeli and Palestinian statistics include Arab residents of East Jerusalem in their reports. According to these estimates the total population in the region of Palestine, as defined as Israel and the Palestinian territories, stands approximately 12.8 million.

Flora and fauna

Main article: Biodiversity in Israel and Palestine

Flora distribution

See also: Category:Flora of Palestine (region) and List of native plants of Flora Palaestina (A–B)

The World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions is widely used in recording the distribution of plants. The scheme uses the code "PAL" to refer to the region of Palestine – a Level 3 area. The WGSRPD's Palestine is further divided into Israel (PAL-IS), including the Palestinian territories, and Jordan (PAL-JO), so is larger than some other definitions of "Palestine".

Birds

Main article: List of birds of Palestine

See also

• Cartography of Palestine
• Place names of Palestine
• Levantine archaeology (a.k.a. Palestinian archaeology)
• Palestine Exploration Fund

Bibliography

• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. (1971). The Transformation of Palestine. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Press.
• Abu-Manneh, Butrus (1999). "The Rise of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the Late Nineteenth Century". In Pappé, Ilan (ed.). The Israel/Palestine Question. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-16948-6.
• Adwan, Sami (2006). "Textbooks in the Palestinian National Authority". In Greenbaum, Charles W.; Veerman, Philip E.; Bacon-Shnoor, Naomi (eds.). Protection of Children During Armed Political Conflict: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Intersentia. pp. 231–256. ISBN 978-90-5095-341-2.
• Aharoni, Yohanan (1 January 1979). The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-664-24266-4. The desert served as an eastern boundary in times when Transjordan was occupied. But when Transjordan became an unsettled region, a pasturage for desert nomads, then the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea formed the natural eastern boundary of Western Palestine.
• Ahlström, Gösta Werner (1993). The history of ancient Palestine. Fortress Press. ISBN 978-0-8006-2770-6.
• Alexandrowicz, Ra'anan (2012), "The Justice of Occupation", The New York Times
• Anderson, Perry (2001). "Editorial: Scurrying Towards Bethlehem". New Left Review. Vol. 10. Archived from the original on 1 October 2018. Retrieved 13 March 2015.
• Anspacher, Abraham Samuel (1912). Tiglath Pileser III – via Internet Archive.
• Avneri, Arieh L. (1984). The Claim of Dispossession. Tel Aviv: Hidekel Press. ISBN 978-0-87855-964-0.
• Avni, Gideon (2014). The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-968433-5.
• Bachi, Roberto (1974). The Population of Israel. Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University.
• Belfer-Cohen, Anna; Bar-Yosef, Ofer (2000). "Early Sedentism in the Near East: A Bumpy Ride to Village Life". In Kuijt, Ian (ed.). Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: social organization, identity, and differentiation. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. ISBN 978-0-306-46122-4.
• Bianquis, Thierry (1998). "Autonomous Egypt from Ibn Tulun to Kafur 868-969". In Daly, Martin W.; Petry, Carl F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Egypt. Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 86–119. ISBN 978-0-521-47137-4.
• Biger, Gideon (1981). "Where was Palestine? pre-World War I perception". AREA (Journal of the Institute of British Geographers). 13 (2): 153–160.
• Biger, Gideon (2004). The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947. RoutledgeCurzon. passim. ISBN 978-1-135-76652-8.
• Boas, Adrian J. (2001). Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades: Society, Landscape and Art in the Holy City Under Frankish Rule. London: Routledge. pp. 19–20. ISBN 978-0-415-23000-1.
• Breasted, James Henry (2001). Ancient Records of Egypt: The first through the seventeenth dynasties. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06990-1.
• Broshi, Magen (1979). "The Population of Western Palestine in the Roman-Byzantine Period". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 236 (236): 1–10. doi:10.2307/1356664. JSTOR 1356664. PMID 12338473. S2CID 24341643.
• Brown, Daniel W. A New Introduction to Islam (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Brummitt, R.K. (2001). World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions: Edition 2 (PDF). International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases For Plant Sciences (TDWG). ISBN 978-0-913196-72-4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 January 2016.
• Burns, Ross (2005). Damascus: A History. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-27105-9.
• Büssow, Johann (2011). Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem 1872–1908. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-20569-7.
• Byatt, Anthony (1973). "Josephus and Population Numbers in First-century Palestine". Palestine Exploration Quarterly. 105: 51–60. doi:10.1179/peq.1973.105.1.51.
• Cavendish, Marshall (2007). Peoples of Western Asia (Illustrated ed.). Marshall Cavendish Corporation. ISBN 978-0-7614-7677-1.
• Chancey, Mark A (2005). Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-84647-9.
• Chase, Kenneth (2003). Firearms: a Global History to 1700. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-82274-9.
• Crotty, Robert Brian (2017). The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors. Springer. p. 25 f.n. 4. ISBN 978-981-10-3214-1. The Babylonians translated the Hebrew name [Judah] into Aramaic as Yehud Medinata ('the province of Judah') or simply 'Yehud' and made it a new Babylonian province. This was inherited by the Persians. Under the Greeks, Yehud was translated as Judaea and this was taken over by the Romans. After the Jewish rebellion of 135 CE, the Romans renamed the area Syria Palaestina or simply Palestine. The area described by these land titles differed to some extent in the different periods.
• Crouch, C. L. (1 October 2014). Israel and the Assyrians: Deuteronomy, the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon, and the Nature of Subversion. SBL Press. ISBN 978-1-62837-026-3. Judah's reason(s) for submitting to Assyrian hegemony, at least superficially, require explanation, while at the same time indications of its read-but-disguised resistance to Assyria must be uncovered... The political and military sprawl of the Assyrian empire during the late Iron Age in the southern Levant, especially toward its outer borders, is not quite akin to the single dominating hegemony envisioned by most discussions of hegemony and subversion. In the case of Judah it should be reiterated that Judah was always a vassal state, semi-autonomous and on the periphery of the imperial system, it was never a fully-integrated provincial territory. The implications of this distinction for Judah's relationship with and experience of the Assyrian empire should not be underestimated; studies of the expression of Assyria's cultural and political powers in its provincial territories and vassal states have revealed notable differences in the degree of active involvement in different types of territories. Indeed, the mechanics of the Assyrian empire were hardly designed for direct control over all its vassals' internal activities, provided that a vassal produced the requisite tribute and did not provoke trouble among its neighbors, the level of direct involvement from Assyria remained relatively low. For the entirety of its experience of the Assyrian empire, Judah functioned as a vassal state, rather than a province under direct Assyrian rule, thereby preserving at least a certain degree of autonomy, especially in its internal affairs. Meanwhile, the general atmosphere of Pax Assyriaca in the southern Levant minimized the necessity of (and opportunities for) external conflict. That Assyrians, at least in small numbers, were present in Judah is likely – probably a qipu and his entourage who, if the recent excavators of Ramat Rahel are correct, perhaps resided just outside the capital – but there is far less evidence than is commonly assumed to suggest that these left a direct impression of Assyria on this small vassal state... The point here is that, despite the wider context of Assyria's political and economic power in the ancient Near East in general and the southern Levant in particular, Judah remained a distinguishable and semi-independent southern Levantine state, part of but not subsumed by the Assyrian empire and, indeed, benefitting from it in significant ways.
• "Cuneiform tablet with part of the Babylonian Chronicle (605-594 BC)". British Museum. n.d. Archived from the original on 30 October 2014. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
• DellaPergola, Sergio (2001), "Demography in Israel/Palestine: Trends, Prospects, Policy Implications" (PDF), IUSSP XXIVth General Population Conference in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 18–24 August 2001, archived from the original (PDF) on 2 December 2016
• Doumani, Beshara (1995). Rediscovering Palestine: merchants and peasants in Jabal Nablus 1700–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20370-9.
• Drews, Robert (1998), "Canaanites and Philistines", Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 23 (81): 39–61, doi:10.1177/030908929802308104, S2CID 144074940
• "Early Years of Nebuchadnezzar II (ABC 5)". 1 April 2006. Archived from the original on 5 May 2019. Retrieved 20 January 2019.
• Ehrman, B. (2011). Forged: writing in the name of God. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6.
• Ember, Melvin; Peregrine, Peter Neal, eds. (2001). Encyclopedia of Prehistory, Vol. 8: South and Southwest Asia (1st ed.). New York and London: Springer. p. 185. ISBN 978-0-306-46262-7.
• Ephal, Israel (2000). "Syria-Palestine under Achaemenid Rule". The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 11. Cambridge University Press. pp. 139–. ISBN 978-0-521-22804-6.
• Eshel, Hanan (2008). Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State. Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature (SDSS). Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge and Jerusalem, Israel: William B. Eerdmans and Yad Ben-Zvi Press. ISBN 978-0-8028-6285-3.
• "Estimated Population in the Palestinian Territory Mid-Year by Governorate, 1997–2016". Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. 2016. Archived from the original on 8 June 2014. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
• Evenari, Michael (1982). The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert. Harvard University Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-674-60672-2. As the cradle of Christianity, Palestine became the center of religious worship for a vast empire
• Fahlbusch, Erwin; Lochman, Jan Milic; Bromiley, Geoffrey William; Barrett, David B. (2005). The encyclopedia of Christianity. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-2416-5.
• Farsoun, Samih K.; Aruri, Naseer (2006). Palestine and the Palestinians (2nd ed.). Boulder CO: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-4336-5.
• Feldman, Louis (1990). "Some Observations on the Name of Palestine". Hebrew Union College Annual. 61: 1–23. JSTOR 23508170.
• Feldman, Louis H. (1996) [First published 1990]. "Some Observations on the Name of Palestine". Studies in Hellenistic Judaism. Leiden: Brill. pp. 553–576. ISBN 978-90-04-10418-1.
• Finkelstein, I; Mazar, A.; Schmidt, B. (2007). The Quest for the Historical Israel. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature. ISBN 978-1-58983-277-0.
• Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2002). The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-86912-4.
• Flusin, Bernard (2011). "Palestinia Hagiography (Fourth-Eighth Centuries)". In Efthymiadis, Stephanos (ed.). The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography. Vol. 1. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7546-5033-1.
• "Full transcript of Abbas speech at UN General Assembly". Haaretz. 23 September 2011.
• Gawerc, Michelle (2012). Prefiguring Peace: Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Partnerships. Lexington Books. p. 44. ISBN 978-0-7391-6610-9.
• Gelber, Yoav (1997). Jewish-Transjordanian Relations 1921–48: alliance of bars sinister. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7146-4675-6.
• "General Assembly Votes Overwhelmingly to Accord Palestine 'Non-Member Observer State' Status in United Nations". United Nations. 2012. Retrieved 13 August 2015.
• Gerber, Haim (1998). "Palestine and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 30 (4): 563–572. doi:10.1017/S0020743800052569. S2CID 162982234.
• Gerson, Allan (2012). Israel, the West Bank and International Law. Routledge. p. 285. ISBN 978-0-7146-3091-5.
• Gil, Moshe (1997). A History of Palestine, 634–1099. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-59984-9.
• Gilbar, Gad G. (1986). "The Growing Economic Involvement of Palestine with the West, 1865–1914". In Kushner, David (ed.). Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: political, social and economic transformation. Brill Academic Publishers. pp. 188–210. ISBN 978-90-04-07792-8.
• Gilbar, Gad G., ed. (1990). Ottoman Palestine: 1800–1914: studies in economic and social history. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-07785-0.
• Gilbert, Martin (2005). The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-35900-9.
• Goldberg, Michael (2001). Jews and Christians: Getting Our Stories Straight. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-57910-776-5.
• Grabbe, Lester L. (2004). A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period: Yehud – A History of the Persian Province of Judah v. 1. T & T Clark. p. 355. ISBN 978-0-567-08998-4.
• Grief, Howard (2008). The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel Under International Law. Mazo Publishers. ISBN 978-965-7344-52-1.
• Grisanti, Michael A.; Howard, David M. (2003). Giving the Sense: understanding and using Old Testament historical texts (Illustrated ed.). Kregel Publications. ISBN 978-0-8254-2892-0.
• Großer Atlas zur Weltgeschichte [Atlas of World History] (2nd ed.). Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag. 2001. ISBN 978-3-07-509520-1.
• Hajjar, Lisa (2005). Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. University of California Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-520-24194-7.
• Hansen, Mogens Herman, ed. (2000). A Comparative Study of Thirty City-state Cultures: an investigation. Copenhagen: Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. ISBN 978-87-7876-177-4.
• Harris, David Russell (1996). The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-85728-537-6.
• Hayes, John H.; Mandell, Sara R (1998). The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity: from Alexander to Bar Kochba. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0-664-25727-9.
• Herodotus (1858). Rawlinson, George (ed.). The Histories, full text of all books (Book I to Book IX).
• "Herodotus, The Histories, book 3, chapter 91, section 1".
• Hughes, Mark (1999). Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East, 1917–1919. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7146-4920-7.
• Ingrams, Doreen (1972). Palestine Papers 1917–1922. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0-8076-0648-3.
• Jacobson, David (1999). "Palestine and Israel". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 313 (313): 65–74. doi:10.2307/1357617. JSTOR 1357617. S2CID 163303829.
• Jacobson, David (2001), "When Palestine Meant Israel", Biblical Archaeology Review, 27 (3)
• "Jews, by Continent of Origin, Continent of Birth & Period of Immigration". Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2016. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
• Jobling, David; Rose, Catherine (1996). "Reading as a Philistine". In Brett, Mark G. (ed.). Ethnicity and the Bible. BRILL. ISBN 978-0-391-04126-4.
• Johnston, Sarah Iles (2004). Religions of the Ancient World: a guide. Cambridge, MA: MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01517-3.
• Joudah, Ahmad Hasan (1987). Revolt in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: The Era of Shaykh Zahir Al-ʻUmar. Kingston Press. ISBN 978-0-940670-11-2.
• Kaegi, Walter Emil (1995). Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Reprint, illustrated ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-48455-8.
• Karpat, Kemal H (2002). Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-12101-0.
• Kårtveit, Bård (2014). Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians. BRILL. p. 209. ISBN 978-90-04-27639-0. is widely regarded as the cradle of Christianity
• Khalidi, Rashid (1997). Palestinian Identity. The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-10515-6.
• Khalidi, Rashid (2007) [1st ed. 2001]. "The Palestinians and 1948: the underlying causes of failure". In Rogan, Eugene L.; Shlaim, Avi (eds.). The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-69934-1.
• Killebrew, Ann E. (2005). Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines and Early Israel 1300–1100 BC. Society of Biblical Literature. ISBN 978-1-58983-097-4.
• Kimmerling, Baruch; Migdal, Joel S (1994). Palestinians: The Making of a People. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-65223-1.
• Kimmerling, Baruch; Migdal, Joel S. (2003). The Palestinian People: A History. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01129-8.
• Kirk, J Andrew (2011). Civilisations in Conflict?: Islam, the West and Christian Faith. OCMS. ISBN 978-1-870345-87-3.
• Kliot, Nurit (1995), The Evolution of the Egypt-Israel Boundary: From Colonial Foundations to Peaceful Borders, vol. 1, International Boundaries Research Unit, ISBN 978-1-897643-17-4
• Köchler, Hans (1981). The Legal Aspects of the Palestine Problem with Special Regard to the Question of Jerusalem. Vienna: Braumüller. ISBN 978-3-7003-0278-0.
• Krämer, Gudrun (2011). A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15007-9.
• Kretzmer, David (2012). "The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel" (PDF). International Review of the Red Cross. 94 (885): 207–236. doi:10.1017/S1816383112000446. S2CID 32105258.
• Kurz, Anat N (2005). Fatah and the Politics of Violence: the institutionalization of a popular Struggle. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. ISBN 978-1-84519-032-3.
• Lassner, Jacob; Troen, Selwyn Ilan (2007). Jews and Muslims in the Arab world: haunted by pasts real and imagined (Illustrated ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-5842-7.
• Lehmann, Clayton Miles (Summer 1998). "Palestine: History: 135–337: Syria Palaestina and the Tetrarchy". The On-line Encyclopedia of the Roman Provinces. University of South Dakota. Archived from the original on 11 August 2009. Retrieved 24 August 2014. In the aftermath of the Bar Cochba Revolt, the Romans excluded Jews from a large area around Aelia Capitolina, which Gentiles only inhabited. The province now hosted two legions and many auxiliary units, two colonies, and--to complete the disassociation with Judaea--a new name, Syria Palaestina.
• Levin, Yigal (24 September 2020). "The Religion of Idumea and Its Relationship to Early Judaism". Religions. 11 (10): 487. doi:10.3390/rel11100487. ISSN 2077-1444.
• Lewin, Ariel (2005). The Archaeology of Ancient Judea and Palestine. Getty Publications. ISBN 978-0-89236-800-6.
• Lewis, Bernard (1954). "Studies in the Ottoman Archives—I". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 16 (3): 469–501. doi:10.1017/s0041977x00086808. S2CID 162304704.
• Lewis, Bernard (1993). Islam in History: ideas, people and events in the Middle East. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8126-9518-2.
• Loftus, J. P. (1948). "Features of the demography of Palestine". Population Studies. 2: 92–114. doi:10.1080/00324728.1948.10416341.
• Louis, Wm Roger (1969). "The United Kingdom and the Beginning of the Mandates System, 1919–1922". International Organization. 23 (1): 73–96. doi:10.1017/S0020818300025534. S2CID 154745632.
• Macalister, Robert Alexander Stewart; Cook, Stanley Arthur; Hart, John Henry Arthur (1911). "Palestine" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 600–626.
• Makdisi, Saree (2010). Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-33844-7.
• Malamat, Abraham; Tadmor, Hayim (1976). Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel (ed.). A History of the Jewish People. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-39731-6.
• Mandel, Neville J (1976). The Arabs and Zionism Before World War I. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02466-3.
• Maniscalco, Fabio (2005). Protection, conservation and valorisation of Palestinian Cultural Patrimony. Massa Publisher. ISBN 978-88-87835-62-5.
• Martindale, John R.; Jones, A.H.M.; Morris, John (1992). The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Volume III: AD 527–641. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-20160-5.
• Masalha, Nur (2007). Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel. Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-84277-761-9.
• McCarthy, Justin (1990). The Population of Palestine. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-07110-9.
• Metz, Helen Chapin, ed. (1989). "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan". Jordan: A Country Study. GPO for the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-16-033746-8.
• Metzer, Jacob (1998). The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine. Cambridge Middle East Studies, Series Number 11. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46550-2.
• Meyers, Eric M.; Chancey, Mark A. (25 September 2012). Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. III. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-14179-5.
• Mezzofiore, Gianluca (2 January 2015). "Will Palestinians outnumber Israeli Jews by 2016?". International Business Times. Retrieved 18 May 2016.
• Mills, Watson E (1990). Mercer Dictionary of the Bible. Mercer University Press. ISBN 978-0-86554-373-7.
• Miskin, Maayana (5 December 2012). "PA Weighs 'State of Palestine' Passport". Arutz Sheva. Archived from the original on 7 December 2012. Retrieved 8 June 2014. A senior PA official revealed the plans in an interview with Al-Quds newspaper. The change to 'state' status is important because it shows that 'the state of Palestine is occupied,' he said.
• Morris, Benny (2001) [First published 1999]. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-74475-7.
• Neusner, J. (1983). "Jews in Iran". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3 (2); the Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-24693-4.
• Noth, Martin (1939). "Zur Geschichte des Namens Palästina". Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins. 62 (1/2). Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas: 125–144. JSTOR 27930226.
• O'Mahony, Anthony (2003). "The Christian Communities, religion, politics and church-state relations in Jerusalem: an historical survey". The Christian communities of Jerusalem and the Holy Land: Studies in History, Religion and Politics. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-1772-3.
• "Palestine", Jewish Encyclopedia, Funk & Wagnalls, 1906
• "Palestinians win implicit U.N. recognition of sovereign state". Reuters. 29 November 2012. Retrieved 29 November 2012.
• Pappé, Ilan (1994). "Introduction". The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-85043-819-9.
• Pappe, Ilan (1999). The Israel/Palestine Question. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-16948-6.
• Pastor, Jack (1997). Land and Economy in Ancient Palestine. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-15960-9.
• Phillipp, Thomas (2013). Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730–1831. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-50603-8.
• "Population, by Population Group". Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2016. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
• Porath, Yehoshua (1974). The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929. London: Frank Cass. ISBN 978-0-7146-2939-1.
• Redmount, Carol A (1999). "Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt". In Coogan, Michael D. (ed.). The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-508707-9.
• Robinson, Edward (1865). Physical geography of the Holy Land. Boston: Crocker & Brewster.
• Rogan, Eugene L (2002). Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-89223-0.
• Room, Adrian (2006). Placenames of the World: origins and meanings of the names for 6,600 countries, cities, territories, natural features, and historic sites (2nd, illustrated ed.). McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-2248-7.
• Rosen, Steven A (1997). Lithics After the Stone Age: a handbook of stone tools from the Levant. Rowman Altamira. ISBN 978-0-7619-9124-3.
• Sachar, Howard M. (2006). A History of Israel: from the rise of Zionism to our time (2nd ed.). Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-76563-9.
• Said, Edward (2003). Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said. Pluto Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-7453-2017-5.
• Said, Edward; Hitchens, Christopher (2001). Blaming the Victims: spurious scholarship and the Palestinian Question. Verso. ISBN 978-1-85984-340-6.
• Saldarini, Anthony (1994). Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-73421-7.
• Salibi, Kamal Suleiman (1993). The Modern History of Jordan. I.B.Tauris. pp. 17–18. ISBN 978-1-86064-331-6.
• Sanger, Andrew (2011). "The Contemporary Law of Blockade and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla". In Schmitt, M.N.; Arimatsu, Louise; McCormack, Tim (eds.). Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law - 2010. Vol. 13. p. 429. doi:10.1007/978-90-6704-811-8_14. ISBN 978-90-6704-811-8.
• Schäfer, Peter (2003). The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-30585-3.
• Schiller, Jon (2009). Internet View of the Arabic World. PublishAmerica. ISBN 978-1-4392-6326-6.
• Schlor, Joachim (1999). Tel Aviv: From Dream to City. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-86189-033-7.
• Schmelz, Uziel O. (1990). "Population Characteristics of Jerusalem and Hebron Regions According to Ottoman Census of 1905". In Gilbar, Gar G (ed.). Ottoman Palestine: 1800–1914. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-07785-0.
• Scholch, Alexander (1985). "The Demographic Development of Palestine 1850–1882". International Journal of Middle East Studies. XII (4): 485–505. doi:10.1017/S0020743800029445. JSTOR 00207438. S2CID 154921401.
• Schrader, Eberhard (1878). Keilinschriften und Geschichtsforschung ("KGF", in English "Cuneiform inscriptions and Historical Research") (in German). J. Ricker'sche Buchhandlung – via Internet Archive.
• Scobbie, Iain (2012). Wilmshurst, Elizabeth (ed.). International Law and the Classification of Conflicts. Oxford University Press. p. 295. ISBN 978-0-19-965775-9.
• Segev, Tom (2001) [Original in 2000]. "Nebi Musa, 1920". One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Trans. Haim Watzman. London: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-6587-9.
• Setton, Kenneth, ed. (1969). A History of the Crusades. University of Wisconsin Press. In six volumes: The first hundred years (2nd ed. 1969); The later Crusades, 1189–1311 (1969); The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (1975); The art and architecture of the crusader states (1977); The impact of the Crusades on the Near East (1985); The impact of the Crusades on Europe (1989)
• Shahin, Mariam (2005). Palestine: a Guide. Interlink Books. ISBN 978-1-56656-557-8.
• Shapira, Anita (2014). Israel a history, translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-61168-352-3.
• Sharon, Moshe (1988). The Holy Land in History and Thought: papers submitted to the International Conference on the Relations between the Holy Land and the World Outside It, Johannesburg, 1986. Brill Archive. ISBN 978-90-04-08855-9.
• Shiloh, Yigal (1980). "The Population of Iron Age Palestine in the Light of a Sample Analysis of Urban Plans, Areas, and Population Density". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 239 (239): 25–35. doi:10.2307/1356754. JSTOR 1356754. S2CID 163824693.
• Sicker, Martin (1999). Reshaping Palestine: from Muhammad Ali to the British Mandate, 1831–1922. New York: Praeger/Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-275-96639-3.
• Silverburg, Sanford R. (2009). "Diplomatic Recognition of States in statu nascendi: The Case of Palestine". In Silverburg, Sanford R. (ed.). Palestine and International Law: Essays on Politics and Economics. Diplomatic Recognition of States. ISBN 978-0-7864-4248-5.
• Sivan, Hagith (2008). Palestine in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-19-160867-4.
• Smith, Morton (1999). "The Gentiles in Judaism". Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 3. CUP. p. 210. ISBN 978-0-521-24377-3.
• "State of Palestine name change shows limitations". AP. 17 January 2013. Archived from the original on 10 January 2013. Israel remains in charge of territories the world says should one day make up that state.
• Tamari, Salim (2011). "Shifting Ottoman Conceptions of Palestine-Part 1: Filistin Risalesi and the two Jamals" (PDF). Jerusalem Quarterly (49): 28–37.
• Taylor, Joan E. (15 November 2012). The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-955448-5. Up until this date the Bar Kokhba documents indicate that towns, villages and ports where Jews lived were busy with industry and activity. Afterwards there is an eerie silence, and the archaeological record testifies to little Jewish presence until the Byzantine era, in En Gedi. This picture coheres with what we have already determined in Part I of this study, that the crucial date for what can only be described as genocide, and the devastation of Jews and Judaism within central Judea, was 135 CE and not, as usually assumed, 70 CE, despite the siege of Jerusalem and the Temple's destruction
• "Temple of Jerusalem | Description, History, & Significance | Britannica". Retrieved 28 February 2022.
• Tessler, Mark (1994). A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20873-6.
• Tucker, Spencer C.; Roberts, Priscilla, eds. (2008). The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Political, Social, and Military History. ABC-CLIO. p. 1553. ISBN 978-1-85109-842-2.
• UN News Centre (2012). "Lack of sufficient services in Gaza could get worse without urgent action, UN warns". UN Publications. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
• Vermes, Géza (2014). The True Herod. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-567-48841-1.
• Walmsley, Alan (2000). "Production, exchange and regional trade in the Islamic Wast Mediterranean: old structures, new systems?". In Hansen, Inge Lyse; Wickham, Chris (eds.). The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-11723-5.
• Weill, Sharon (2014). The Role of National Courts in Applying International Humanitarian Law. Oxford University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-19-968542-4.
• Wenning, Robert (2007). "The Nabataeans in History (Before AD 106)". In Politis, Konstantinos D (ed.). The World of the Nabataeans: Volume 2 of the International Conference the World of the Herods and the Nabataeans Held at the British Museum, 17-19 April, 2001. Oriens Et Occidens. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 978-3-515-08816-9.
• Whitelam, Keith W. (1996). The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-79916-0.
• Yazbak, Mahmoud (1998). Haifa in the Late Ottoman Period, A Muslim Town in Transition, 1864–1914. Brill Academic Pub. ISBN 978-90-04-11051-9.
• Zeevi, Dror (1996), An Ottoman century: the district of Jerusalem in the 1600s, SUNY Press, ISBN 978-0-7914-2915-0
• Zissu, Boaz (2018). "Interbellum Judea 70-132 CE: An Archaeological Perspective". Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum 70‒132 CE. Joshua Schwartz, Peter J. Tomson. Leiden, The Netherlands. p. 19. ISBN 978-90-04-34986-5. OCLC 988856967.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

External links

Palestinian territories travel guide from Wikivoyage