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The terms Palestine and Palestinian have several overlapping (and occasionally
contradictory) definitions. They can refer to any of the following:
Palestine
Ancient Palestine
In historical contexts, especially predating the rise of 20th century
Zionism, Palestine was mostly a geographical term, particularly used in Greek,
Latin, Arabic, and other 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.
See also: History of Palestine, British Mandate of Palestine.
Palestinian Authority
Sometimes people use the term Palestine to refer to lands currently under the administrative control of the Palestinian Authority, a quasi-governmental 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.
Mandate definition
Britain used the term "Palestinian" to refer to all persons legally
residing in or born in the boundaries of the British Mandate of Palestine without regard to their ethnicity, religion, or place of
origin.
By place of origin
In its common 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 1948. This definition includes the
inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (including Dom and Samaritans, but excluding Israeli settlers and 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 (1948) non-Bedouin
population of Jordan.) This usage excludes people who immigrated into the area during
the twentieth century.
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.
Somewhat ironically, the word Palestinian gained some popularity in Germany around the end of the 18th Century to refer to Jews when discussing
them as a nation, not their religion. For instance, Kant wrote in 1798 in "Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View", a (rather anti-Semitic) chapter entitled "On Mental Deficiencies in the Cognitive Power", which
begins: "The Palestinians living among us". He is clearly referring to Jews, not
Arabs. This use of Palestinian to describe the Jewish nation was adopted by
non-religious Zionists who emigrated to Palestine from Europe, to refer to themselves. This use of the word
seems to have completely died out, as the term Palestinian is now used almost exclusively to refer to Arab inhabitants of the region.
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