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Where do the words "Palestine" and "Palestinian" come from — and why did they mean something different before 1948?

Short answer: the name is far older than most people think, and it has meant different things in different eras — which is exactly why it's so confusing. "Palestine" is pre-Roman (the Greek Palaistinē, used by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, ultimately from the Philistines). The Romans did not invent it — Emperor Hadrian renamed the province Judea → "Syria Palaestina" around 135 CE (the 2nd century, after the Bar Kokhba revolt), widely read as an act to sever the Jewish name from the land. And before 1948, "Palestinian" was a civic term for everyone in Mandatory Palestine — prominently including Jews (the Palestine Post, the Palestine Symphony, the Anglo-Palestine Bank were all Jewish institutions). Only after 1948, when the Jews of Palestine became "Israelis," did "Palestinian" narrow to mean the Arabs of the former Mandate. None of this settles the modern question of peoplehood — for either side.

1. The name is pre-Roman

The root traces to the Philistines: Egyptian records name the "Peleset" from around 1150 BCE (reign of Ramesses III), and Assyrian records carry cognate forms ("Palashtu/Pilistu") [VERIFIED]. The Greek "Palaistinē" appears in Herodotus (The Histories, 5th century BCE) — "a district of Syria, called Palaistinē" — roughly 600 years before Hadrian [VERIFIED]. Whether the Greek derives directly from "Philistia" is a scholarly debate (it's a cognate, not a simple copy), but the term's antiquity is not in dispute. So "the Romans created the word" is imprecise — Rome later applied an already-ancient name as an official province name [DISPUTED as to the exact derivation; VERIFIED as to pre-Roman antiquity].

2. What the Romans actually did: Hadrian, ~135 CE

Rome renamed the province Judea → "Syria Palaestina" around 135 CE — the 2nd century, right after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE). The dating is pinned by artifacts: Hadrian's coins before the revolt still say "Judaea," while a military document from 139 CE already uses the new name [VERIFIED].

The common claim that this was a deliberate act to sever the Jewish tie to the land is the majority scholarly reading — it is often cited as the only known case of a province renamed as punishment for a revolt — but it is not settled fact: the same scholarship notes that "the precise date and motivations behind the name change remain uncertain," resting on circumstantial evidence [DISPUTED as to intent]. Both over-claims fail: Rome did not invent the word, and the renaming was not merely routine administration.

3. Then: Byzantine subdivisions, and an Ottoman gap

Byzantine administration split the region into Palaestina Prima, Secunda, and Tertia (Salutaris) [VERIFIED]. Under the Ottomans, there was no single administrative unit called "Palestine" — the area was divided across sanjaks and vilayets (the Sanjak/Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, plus districts under the vilayets of Beirut and Damascus). "Palestine" survived in this era as a geographical and cultural name, not an administrative one [VERIFIED].

4. The British Mandate (1920–1948): "Palestinian" meant everyone — Jews included

Under the British Mandate, "Palestine" was the official name of the territory, and "Palestinian" was a legal, civic status for all its residents [VERIFIED]. The Palestinian Citizenship Order of 1925 granted citizenship with no test based on race or religion — and Article 7 of the Mandate itself required facilitating "the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine." By law, "Palestinian" was a status Jews acquired too [VERIFIED].

And the Jewish community used the name prominently — the under-appreciated part of the story:

  • The Palestine Post — a Jewish/Zionist newspaper (founded 1932), renamed The Jerusalem Post in 1950 [VERIFIED].
  • The Palestine Symphony Orchestra — founded 1936 by Bronisław Huberman, staffed largely by Jewish musicians who had fled Europe; renamed the Israel Philharmonic in 1948 [VERIFIED].
  • The Anglo-Palestine Bank — founded 1902 as an arm of the Zionist movement; today Bank Leumi [VERIFIED/DOCUMENTED].
  • The Palestine pound — the shared Mandate currency (1927–1948), carrying both Arabic (junayh filastini) and Hebrew (lira palestina'it); it remained Israel's currency until 1952 [VERIFIED].
  • Jewish residents of the Yishuv were routinely called "Palestinian Jews" [DOCUMENTED].

One honest caveat, so this isn't one-sided: the term was shared, not exclusively Jewish. Arabs used it too — the influential Arabic newspaper Filastin ("Palestine") was founded in Jaffa in 1911, and Palestinian Arab national identity was forming through the Mandate period [VERIFIED]. The surprising part — the part most people don't know — is the Jewish usage; but "Palestinian" before 1948 covered both communities.

5. The post-1948 shift

After Israel's establishment in 1948, the Jews of Palestine became "Israelis," and "Palestinian" narrowed to mean the Arabs of the former Mandate. The institutional renamings all run in one direction and track the shift exactly: Palestine Post → Jerusalem Post; Palestine Symphony → Israel Philharmonic; Anglo-Palestine Bank → Bank Leumi; Palestine pound → Israeli pound. Even UNRWA's 1949 "Palestine refugee" definition initially covered both Arabs and Jews displaced from the Mandate, ceasing to apply to those who became Israeli citizens — a concrete marker of the word detaching from Jews [VERIFIED/DOCUMENTED].

Why it all gets confusing — three layers in one word

The confusion is real, and it has a precise cause: the same word carried three different layers that get collapsed into one —

  1. The ancient geographic name (Philistine → Greek → Rome's province).
  2. The Mandate civic term (1920–48) — everyone who lived there, Jews included.
  3. The modern national identity (post-1948, especially post-1967) — the Arab people of the land.

Arguments are often built by quietly sliding between these three.

The one standard on this

The name's ancient, external origin and its pre-1948 Jewish usage are real and genuinely interesting — and they are commonly over-extended into "there is no Palestinian people; it's invented." One standard flags that leap:

  • A name's history is a fact about a word, not a verdict on a people. A label being ancient, borrowed, or shared does not settle whether a modern people exists.
  • Modern Palestinian identity is a 20th-century construction — and so is modern Israeli/Hebrew national identity. Under the standard framework for nationalism (Anderson's Imagined Communities), effectively all modern nations are recent constructions that revive older symbols: Zionism revived ancient Hebrew symbols and a liturgical language into a national one; Palestinian nationalism drew on Arab, Islamic, and local layers. Newness is symmetric — "it's a modern construct" cannot be aimed at one side only.
  • The naming history does not erase the Arab population's long rootedness in the land, whatever the administrative unit was called at any given century.

State the terminology precisely — it's fascinating and true — and stop before the leap that a tangled label settles the modern question of peoplehood. It doesn't, for either side.

Go deeper: Palestinian Identity · Are Jews indigenous to the land, or colonizers? · Was Palestine ever a country? · Why was there no push for a Palestinian state from 1948 to 1967? · Is it the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, or occupied territory?