The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Few words in modern political discourse carry as much distortion as “Palestine.” Today, the term is wielded not as history but as a weapon — designed to delegitimize the Jewish State and recast Jews as foreign colonizers in their own homeland.

Take away the propaganda, however, and one unshakable truth remains: the Jewish people are the indigenous nation of the Land of Israel. The Arab claim to “Palestinian indigeneity” simply does not line up with history.

The Jewish people trace their roots back over 3,000 years to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who lived in the land of Canaan — later Israel. By the time of King David, Jerusalem was the capital of a united monarchy, and Solomon’s Temple stood as the spiritual and political center of Jewish life. Even after the Babylonian exile, Jews returned, rebuilt, and re-established their national life in Judea.

Despite invasions, destruction, and exile, Jews never abandoned their homeland. They remained in Jerusalem, Galilee, Hebron, Safed, and along the coast. Their prayers, rituals, and festivals kept the bond to Zion alive. This is not the story of outsiders — it is the story of the land’s first and most enduring nation.

Rome tried to sever that bond by force. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century, Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea as Syria Palaestina , borrowing the name of the long-vanished Philistines, and turned Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina. It was an act of erasure, meant to punish the Jews by striking even their name from the map.

But the attempt failed. Jews continued to live, pray, and return to their ancestral soil. A new label could not undo thousands of years of rootedness.

The Arab story is very different; their origins lie in the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest records available to us describe nomadic tribes in Arabia and the Syrian desert. Their cultural centers were Mecca, Medina, Yemen, and Petra. It was only in the 7th century, with the rise of Islam, that Arab armies exploded out of Arabia and conquered the region. By 636 CE, they had invaded Byzantine Judea; within a century they ruled from Spain to Persia. Their presence in Judea was the result of conquest, not continuity.

For over a thousand years, under successive empires — Umayyad, Abbasid, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and finally British — the local Arab population never called itself “Palestinian.” They identified as Arabs, Muslims, Christians, or by their city and clan. In fact, during the British Mandate, the word Palestinian referred almost exclusively to Jews: the Palestine Post was a Jewish newspaper, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra was Jewish, and the Palestine Brigade that fought in World War II was Jewish.

Many Arabs in the region rejected the label, insisting instead that they were part of greater Syria or the wider Arab nation.

Only in the mid-20th century, particularly under Yasser Arafat and the PLO, did a separate “Palestinian” identity emerge. It was born not from centuries of shared history but from a political need: to create a narrative that could challenge Jewish nationhood and delegitimize Israel. It was, and remains, a tool of war by other means.

This is the historical bottom line: Jews are the only people with an unbroken, 3,000 year bond to the Land of Israel. The name Palestine was a Roman punishment, not an Arab heritage. Arabs arrived in the 7th century as conquerors from Arabia. The idea of a Palestinian people is a modern invention, forged in the 20th century as part of a political campaign against the Jewish State.

Israel is not a colonial project. It is the restoration of an ancient nation to its ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreigners in Judea; they are Judea’s people. By every measure — historical, cultural, and even genetic — the Jewish nation’s claim is authentic, continuous, and undeniable.

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.