Palestine

Palestine, region of Southwest Asia along the eastern Mediterranean, generally regarded as consisting of the southern coastal area between Egypt, where Asia meets Africa, and Tyre, which in ancient times was the most prominent of the Phoenician city-states.

History of the term

The term Palestine has been associated variously and sometimes controversially with this small region, which some have asserted also includes Jordan. Both the geographic area designated by the name and the political status of it have changed over the course of some three millennia. The region is also known as the Holy Land and is held sacred among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Since the 20th century, Palestine has been the object of conflicting claims of Jewish and Arab national movements, and this strife has led to prolonged violence and, in several instances, open warfare.

The word Palestine came into English from Greek (via Latin). The earliest incontrovertible use of the term is attested in Herodotus’s History. The Greek word may have been derived directly or indirectly from more-local sources: earlier Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions refer to a people called some variant of Peleset or Palastu, respectively, but whom these terms refer to remains uncertain. The Hebrew Bible later used a similar term, Peleshet, to refer to the Philistines, a people of Aegean origin who settled on the southern coast in the 12th century bce. In the 2nd century ce the name was first used administratively by the Romans in the term Syria Palaestina, designating the southern portion of the province of Syria. In the Byzantine era the name was used for the provinces of Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Salutaris (or Tertia). Palaestina Prima was then administered as a jund (military district) by the Arabic name Filasṭīn in the early Islamic era. After the Crusades the name remained in informal use as a geographic designation, but it had no official status until after World War I and the end of rule by the Ottoman Empire, when it was adopted for one of the regions mandated to Great Britain. In addition to an area roughly comprising present-day Israel and the West Bank, the mandate included the territory east of the Jordan River now constituting the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which Britain placed under an administration separate from that of Palestine immediately after receiving the mandate for the territory.

The term Palestine often overlaps with the term Canaan, although the latter is historically less defined in relation to its location than in relation to its people. It derives from the self-name of the Canaanite peoples, called Phoenicians by the Greeks, and roughly corresponds to Phoenicia. In some historical sources, Canaan sometimes refers to an area encompassing all of Palestine and Syria, sometimes to the land west of the Jordan River, and sometimes just to a strip of coastland from Acre northward. In English use of the term, Canaan is generally restricted to biblical discourse, and the term Phoenicia is used in discussions of history.

The name Palestine has long been in popular use as a general term to denote a traditional region, but this usage does not imply precise boundaries. The perception of what constitutes Palestine’s eastern boundary has been especially fluid, although the boundary frequently has been perceived as lying east of the Jordan River, extending at times to the edge of the Arabian Desert. In contemporary understanding, however, Palestine is generally defined as a region bounded on the east by the Jordan River, on the north by the border between modern Israel and Lebanon, on the west by the Mediterranean Sea (including the coast of Gaza), and on the south by the Negev, with its southernmost extension reaching the Gulf of Aqaba.

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A View of the Middle East

Land

The strategic importance of the area is immense: through it pass the main roads from Egypt to Syria and from the Mediterranean to the hills beyond the Jordan River.

Settlement depends closely on water, which is almost never abundant. Precipitation, which arrives in the cool half of the year (October–April), decreases in amount in general from north to south and from the coast inland. Perennial rivers are few, and the shortage of water is aggravated by the porosity of the limestone rocks in much of the land.

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Coastal lowlands of varying widths front the Mediterranean. The most northerly is the Plain of Acre, which extends with a breadth of 5 to 9 miles (8 to 14 km) for about 20 miles (32 km) from the Lebanon border in the north to the Carmel promontory, in Israel, in the south, where it narrows to a mere 600 feet (180 meters). Farther southward the lowland opens out rapidly into the Plain of Sharon, about 8 miles (13 km) wide and extending south to the latitude of Tel Aviv–Yafo. Once covered with marshes, the Sharon plain was reclaimed in the post-Exilic and Hellenistic period and is now a settled area. Fields and fruit groves are laid out between scattered sandstone ridges, on which villages have grown up. South of the spur of low hills that approaches the coast at about Jaffa, the plain widens into a fertile region known in biblical times as Philistia, a district of orange groves, irrigated orchards, and fields of grain.

Farther northward the Jezreel Valley (Marj Ibn ʿĀmir), formed by subsidence along lines of faults, separates the hills of southern Galilee from the mountains of Samaria. The plain, 16 miles (26 km) wide at most, narrows to the northwest, where the Qishon (Al-Muqaṭṭaʿ) River breaks through to the Plain of Acre, and to the southeast, where the Jālūd (Harod) River—which rises at ʿAyn Jālūt (the Spring of Harod)—has carved the plain into the side of the Jordan Valley. Covered with rich basaltic soils washed down from the Galilean hills, the Jezreel Valley is important both for its fertility and for the great highway it opens from the Mediterranean to the lands across the Jordan. The maritime plain connects with the Jezreel Valley by Wadi ʿĀrah and several lesser routes between the mountain spurs of Carmel and Gilboa.

The hill country of Galilee is better watered and more thickly wooded than that of Samaria or Judaea. North of the Bet Netofa Valley (Plain of Asochis) is Upper Galilee, with elevations of 4,000 feet (1,200 meters), a scrub-covered limestone plateau that is thinly populated. To the south, Lower Galilee—with its highest peak, Mount Tabor (1,929 feet [588 meters])—is a land of east-west ridges enclosing sheltered vales like that of Nazareth, with rich basaltic soils.

Samaria, the region of the ancient kingdom of Israel, is a hilly district extending from the Jezreel Valley to the latitude of Ramallah. Its mountains—Carmel, Gilboa, Aybāl (Ebal), and Al-Ṭūr (Gerizim)—are lower than those of Upper Galilee, while its basins, notably those of the ʿArrābah Plain and Nablus, are wider and more gently contoured than their equivalents in Judaea. Samaria is easily approached from the coast across the Plain of Sharon and from the Jordan by the Fāriʿah valley. The city of Jerusalem has expanded rapidly along the mountain ridges.

From Ramallah in the north to Beersheba in the south, the high plateau of Judaea is a rocky wilderness of limestone, with rare patches of cultivation, as found around Al-Bireh and Hebron (Al-Khalīl). It is separated from the coastal plain by a longitudinal fosse and a belt of low hills of soft chalky limestone, about 5 to 8 miles (8 to 13 km) wide, known as the Judaean Foothills (Shefela). The Judaean plateau falls abruptly to the Jordan Valley, which is approached with difficulty along the wadis Qelt and Muqalliq.

The Jordan Valley is a deep rift valley that varies in width from 1.5 to 14 miles (2.5 to 22 km). In its northern section the bed of the drained Lake Ḥula and of Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee) are blocked by natural dams of basalt. Descending to about 1,310 feet (400 meters) below sea level—the lowest land depth on the Earth’s surface—the valley is exceedingly dry and hot, and cultivation is restricted to irrigated areas or rare oases, as at Jericho or at Ein Gedi by the shore of the Dead Sea.

The Negev, a desertlike region, is triangular, with the apex at the south. It extends from Beersheba in the north, where 8 inches (200 mm) or more of precipitation falls annually and grain is grown, to the port city of Eilat on the Red Sea, in the extremely arid south. It is bounded by the Sinai Peninsula on the west and the northern extension of the Great Rift Valley on the east.

People

The social geography of modern Palestine has been greatly affected by the dramatic political changes and wars that have brought this small region to the attention of the world. In the early 21st century, Israeli Jews constituted roughly half of the population west of the Jordan River (primarily in Israel but also including Israeli settlers in the West Bank), and Palestinian Arabs—Muslim and Christian—and other smaller minorities, such as the Druze, accounted for the rest (especially in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also as a large minority within Israel). Although for much of the 20th century the Jewish population was predominantly composed of migrants who were born elsewhere, by the end of the century the majority had been born in Israel. The Arab population is descended from Arabs who lived in the area during the mandate period and, in most cases, for centuries before that time. The majority of both Jews and Arabs live in urban centers.

According to Jewish nationalists (Zionists), Judaism constitutes a basis for both religious and national (ethnic) identity. Palestinian nationalists usually emphasize that their shared identity as Arabs transcends the religious diversity of their community. Both Muslim Arabs, constituting about 18 percent of the Israeli population, and Christian Arabs, less than 2 percent, identify themselves in the first instance as Arabs.

The Arab majority resident in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the still larger number of Arab Palestinians living outside the area (many in nearby countries, such as Lebanon) have strongly opposed Israeli control and feared an eventual annexation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. Many ideological Jewish Israeli settlers support such an annexation and think those lands properly belong to Israel. In 2005 Arab concerns were partially assuaged when Israel completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and handed over control of the territory to the Palestinians. But the Israeli settlement population in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) more than doubled between 2005 and 2020. Moreover, discussions of annexing parts of the West Bank took place in the 2020s, and the Israel-Hamas War led the Israeli military to reenter the Gaza Strip in 2023.

Both Zionists and Palestinian Arab nationalists have at various times since the 19th century claimed rightful possession of the area west of the Jordan River. The rivalry between the two groups and their claims have been major causes of the numerous Arab-Israeli conflicts and the continuing crises in the region. Some members of each group still make such sweeping and mutually exclusive claims to complete control of the area, whereas others are more willing to seek a peaceful compromise solution.