I keep seeing the same claims repeated in these threads. "Palestinians were invented in the 1960s." "They're just Arab colonizers from the 7th century." "Palestine is a name the Romans made up to punish Jews." I've spent a lot of time going through the actual academic literature on this. Genetics studies, medieval Arabic texts, ancient inscriptions, international legal frameworks. Here is everything in one place.

Part 1: The Genetics

This is where the science is clearest and hardest to argue with. Although Indigenous isn't necessarily proved with DNA. We can prove they have always been there.

A 2020 study published in Cell by Agranat-Tamir et al. analyzed genome-wide DNA from 73 Bronze Age individuals excavated from sites across the southern Levant including Megiddo, Ashkelon, and 'Ain Ghazal. They used qpAdm, which is the gold standard formal admixture modeling tool in population genetics. Unlike consumer DNA tools or G25 calculators, qpAdm can statistically reject bad models. The researchers found that modern Palestinians derive 81 to 87 percent of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantine populations. The remainder is small amounts of European, East African, and Arabian admixture that entered over the last three thousand years.

To put that in perspective, 85% genetic continuity over 3,500 years is exceptionally high by global standards. It means the Arab conquest of the 7th century changed the language and religion of the population but did not replace the people. If Arabs had actually replaced the local population, Palestinians would cluster genetically with Saudi Arabians. They cluster with Bronze Age Canaanites.

A corroborating 2017 study by Haber et al. in the American Journal of Human Genetics sequenced whole genomes of five Bronze Age Canaanite individuals from the Sidon excavation in Lebanon and compared them with 99 present-day Lebanese. Results showed over 90% genetic continuity between Bronze Age Canaanites and modern Lebanese.

Both studies show the same thing. Despite millennia of imperial conquests, the indigenous genetic profile of the Levant remained the dominant component of the local population.

Sources:

Agranat-Tamir et al. (2020). "The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant." Cell. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10212583/

Haber et al. (2017). "Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences." American Journal of Human Genetics. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5544389/

Cambridge University press release on Haber et al.: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/genetic-study-suggests-present-day-lebanese-descend-from-biblical-canaanites

Part 2: The Name “Palestine” Is 3,200 Years Old

One of the most common claims used to delegitimize Palestinians is that the name “Palestine” was invented by Emperor Hadrian in 135 CE as a punishment after the Bar Kokhba revolt. The historical record does not support that. Hadrian may have formalized Syria Palaestina as the Roman provincial name after the revolt, and many scholars do see that renaming as punitive, but the word itself long predates Rome.

The oldest attested root appears in Egyptian records from the reign of Ramesses III, where the Peleset are named among the groups active in the southern Levant in the 12th century BCE. That is not yet the full later regional term “Palestine,” but it shows that the name-family is far older than Rome.

Importantly, even in these early Egyptian materials, the term was not limited forever to a people alone. Later evidence shows an early transition from an ethnonym to a territorial designation. Records associated with the Padiiset statue refer to neighboring lands including Peleset, and Papyrus Harris I describes the Peleset in connection with “their lands.” That matters because it shows the name beginning to function geographically, not merely ethnically, long before Rome.

By the Neo-Assyrian period, related forms such as Palashtu and Pilistu were already used for the Philistine area in the southern coastal Levant. In other words, the name had moved beyond a single Egyptian inscription and into imperial usage centuries before Hadrian.

By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus was already using the Greek form Palaistine for the region between Phoenicia and Egypt. Scholars may debate the exact scope he meant in each passage, but that does not change the central point: the term was in Greek geographic use roughly six centuries before Hadrian renamed Judaea.

So the honest version is not that “Hadrian invented Palestine.” It is that Hadrian took an already existing name and made it the official Roman provincial label. Whether he did that partly to reduce the specifically Jewish association of Judaea is a separate question from whether the name itself existed before him. It did.

Nor did the term disappear when Roman rule ended. After the Muslim conquest, the name continued in Arabic as Filastin, including in the administrative district known as Jund Filastin. That shows continuity of the regional name into the early Islamic period rather than a Roman invention that vanished with Rome.

The same continuity appears in Jewish scholarly usage. Major reference works describe the Jerusalem Talmud as the work of Jewish scholars in Palestine, and also note the long-standing scholarly label “Palestinian Talmud.” It shows that “Palestine” functioned as a normal and intelligible geographic term in Jewish as well as Christian and Muslim contexts.

What the evidence actually shows is straightforward: Hadrian may have politically exploited an older name, but he did not invent it. The name-family behind “Palestine” is attested long before Rome, appears in Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek sources centuries earlier, and continued through Roman, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic usage into the medieval era. None of this requires claiming that ancient Philistines and modern Palestinians are the same people in any direct ethnic sense. The point is the antiquity and continuity of the name, not ethnic sameness across three millennia. So the claim that “Palestine” was merely a Roman insult fabricated in 135 CE is historically false. At most, Rome repurposed an older regional name for imperial ends, but the name itself was already real, already geographic, and already centuries old.

Sources:

Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Palestine: Roman Palestine." https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/Roman-Palestine

Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Palestine." https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine

Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Jerusalem Talmud." https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jerusalem-Talmud

Rendsburg, Gary A. "Philistines." Rutgers University. https://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/images/documents/faculty/Rendsburg/philistines-odjr.pdf

ToposText. "Herodotus, Histories." https://topostext.org/work/22

The Walters Art Museum. "Statue of Pa-di-iset." https://art.thewalters.org/object/22.203/

Wikipedia. "Timeline of the name Palestine.", Zed Books.

Part 3: The Place Names Survived for Thousands of Years

If the Arab conquest had brought anything like a wholesale replacement of the local population, we would expect a much more complete overwriting of the landscape. That is often what happens when a population is thoroughly displaced and replaced. Instead, across much of Palestine, ancient place-names survived in Arabic through phonetic adaptation and local continuity. The Philistine Pentapolis offers a clear example: Gaza became Ghazzah, Ashkelon became ‘Asqalan, Ashdod became Isdud, Gath became Jat, and Ekron became ‘Aqir. Other major ancient centers followed the same pattern, as with Beth-shean, which survived as Beisan. These were not isolated coincidences. They were part of a broader pattern in which older Canaanite, Philistine, Aramaic, Greek, and other place-names were absorbed into Arabic pronunciation while remaining tied to the same local sites.

The documentary record of these cities goes back deep into antiquity. The Ebla and Mari tablets from the third millennium BCE contain some of the oldest known references to major cities of the region, while the Amarna Letters from the fourteenth century BCE preserve diplomatic correspondence from Canaanite rulers, including Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, documenting the political geography of the land in considerable detail. What matters here is not that every name remained unchanged, because of course names shift across languages and centuries, but that so many of them remained recognizable through local usage.

This continuity was not lost on later scholars. Nineteenth-century surveyors from the British Palestine Exploration Fund relied heavily on local Palestinian Arabic place-names when identifying biblical and ancient sites, precisely because these names were understood to preserve older phonetic forms. That does not prove that every modern inhabitant was ethnically identical to every ancient inhabitant. It proves something narrower but still important: deep continuity of local geographic memory. A society with no rooted connection to the land would be far less likely to preserve, across centuries, the names of obscure villages, springs, wadis, ruins, and hills with such consistency.

After 1948, Israeli state-sponsored naming committees systematically replaced approximately 2,780 Arabic place names with Hebrew designations. 340 villages and towns, 1,000 ruins, 560 wadis and rivers, 380 springs, 198 mountains and hills, 50 caves, and 28 castles. The fact that these names had to be deliberately erased is itself evidence of how deeply rooted they were.

Sources:

Masalha, Nur (2015). "Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory." Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/hlps.2015.0103

Wikipedia. "Place names of Palestine." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_names_of_Palestine

Wikipedia. "Hebraization of Palestinian place names." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebraization_of_Palestinian_place_names

Part 4: Palestinian Identity Goes Back Over a Thousand Years

The claim that Palestinians were “invented in the 1960s” ignores a substantial documentary record. What follows is not an argument that medieval or early modern people thought in exactly the same national terms as the twentieth century. It is a much narrower and stronger point: people used Filastin / Palestine as a meaningful territorial identifier for centuries, and in some cases explicitly identified themselves with it. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

764–854 CE: Abu Khalid Thawr Ibn Yazid al-Kala'i. An early religious scholar whose texts defined Palestine as a meaningful territorial unit within Syria: “the holiest place in Syria is Palestine; the holiest place in Palestine is Jerusalem.” That is clear regional consciousness, centuries before modern nationalism.