The Jewish (and Not-So-Jewish) History of the Word “Palestine”

My previous column dealt with linguistic evidence for Israelite sailors’ having reached India from Palestine in the time of King Solomon. About it, Anson Laytner writes:

In Solomon’s day there was no Palestine, so the trip would have been impossible! Seriously, though, if Mosaic’s own team misuses terminology, what about the rest of us? Perhaps it is time for you to write something on the geographical names Judah, Israel, Judaea, Palestine, etc.

Seriously, this is a subject that I have written on—and more than once during my years as a Jewish-language columnist. And yet, although I dislike having to repeat myself, perhaps Anson Laytner is right that it deserves to be written about again. Few place names these days arouse quite as much passion as does “Palestine,” nearly all of it directed against Israel. To any Jew who was old enough to read at the time the state of Israel was created, this can only seem grimly ironic, because “Palestine” was once a Jewish word, too. I can’t watch a news clip of anti-Israel demonstrators chanting “Palestine will be free/ From the river to the sea!” without remembering the blue-and-white Jewish National Fund collection box that stood in the kitchen of my parents’ New York apartment in 1947-48, when I was a boy of eight or nine. On it, across a map of the Jewish homeland, was written in flowing letters: “Fight for a Free Palestine!”