Israel and Palestine are two ways of looking at the same reality.

There are many things that trigger Jewish anxieties. Statistics showing rising antisemitism, terms such as genocide and apartheid, being expected to take a position on Israel to name but a few. There is however an underlying fear that I think is worth examining. It is the word Palestine. And what it represents. On hearing it, especially accompanied by the word ‘free’, Jews are liable to hear a call for the destruction of the state of Israel, which many elide with a call to murder Jews. So the term itself is frequently considered to be antisemitic. People might be slightly less worried if the term used was ‘the Palestinian territories’, as this explicitly refers to the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but ‘Palestine’ alone remains deeply threatening.

This is a strange state of affairs. Because for many years, Jews lived in Palestine, and considered themselves Palestinian Jews. This certainly applied during the late Ottoman era and the period of British rule from 1917-1948. Zionists founded organisations such as the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (established in 1924), the Anglo-Palestine Bank (founded in 1902, the predecessor to Bank Leumi), and the much beloved Kiddush wine company Palwins – the Palestine Wine Company. Jews living in the land many called Eretz Yisrael were formally citizens of Mandate Palestine. Even after the State of Israel was created in 1948, many organisations continued to use Palestine in their names – such as the Joint Palestine Appeal which did not become the Joint Israel Appeal (later merged into the UJIA) until 1973. The cute parody version of Puff the Magic Dragon – Puff the Kosher Dragon – recounted how Puff ‘lived in Palestine’, despite being released in the 1970s. Clearly there was nothing inherently threatening about Palestine then.

The history of Palestine – and of Jewish residency in it – goes back a long way. In his book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History Palestinian historian Nur Masalha has no difficulty proving that the word ‘Palestine’ was the most commonly used descriptor for the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea for thousands of years. It was even used by Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian sometimes described as the father of history, in the 5^th century BCE. It’s a version of Phoenicia – or Philistina (though the Phoenicians were primarily associated with the southern Mediterranean coast whereas Palestine came to be used to describe the entire land). Even though Masalha doesn’t take the Bible seriously as a work of history, the Hebrew Bible often used the term Peleshet, which is cognate with Philistina/Phoenicia/Fillastin/Palestine. ‘Hil achaz yoshvei p’leshet’ says Exodus 15:14 as part of the song of the sea – ‘agony grips the dwellers in Philistia’.

Some hasbaraists like to say that there has never been a country called Palestine, an inane point seeing as most countries as we understand them today were born in the twentieth century; the pre-existing norm was multi-national, multi-ethnic empires. It is even more laughable given that Palestine is one of the few places that has been recognised as a distinct territory with its own culture, customs and often a high degree of autonomy, for millennia. Masalha shows that in the 18^th century local ruler Shaykh Zahir al-‘Umar gained an extensive degree of autonomy from the Ottoman empire, creating a locally governed Palestinian state for the best part of a century. Palestine entered modernity as a distinct country with a language, culture and way of life, even if it was usually, like most of the world, subject to imperial rule.

None of this was a surprise to early Zionists, especially the ones who spent time in Palestine rather than writing exclusively in Europe. They understood perfectly well that the land was already inhabited, that there was an existing society there (even if they believed it was not one ‘developed’ enough to warrant the title ‘nation’) and that if they were to fulfil their vision of a Jewish state, they would need to replace it. Initially this took place via colonisation: Zionist organisations would buy land from Arab absentee landlords and then evict the tenant farmers, bringing in Jewish immigrants in their place and building new settlements in the place of Arab villages. Such practices gained the Yishuv plenty of land but could only go so far and on the eve of the War of Independence Jews remained a minority of the population and held a minority of the land. In other words, Palestine continued to exist, although it was a site of fierce competition between Arabs and Jews, with the British authorities usually siding with the latter, in accordance with the Jewish National Home policy. It was only in 1948, when around 750,000 either fled or were driven out by Zionist forces, that Palestine meaningfully ceased to exist and was replaced by the new State of Israel. Palestine staggered on in the West Bank and Gaza, subject to Israeli incursions and attacks, under Egyptian and Jordanian control (where Palestinians were given the vote in those countries’ elections), but this changed after 1967, when those territories became occupied by Israel. In contrast to the fears of Israel being destroyed, it was in fact Palestine, a functional country and legal state in the Mandate period, which was wiped off the map. It ceased to exist, most of its population were exiled, and those that remained subject to military rule for the first 16 years of Israel’s existence. The new state did its best to erase all memory of Palestine, expropriating property, bulldozing villages, building forests over them and renaming towns and villages with Hebrew names. The new discipline of Israeli archaeology attempted to find ancient Israelite ruins buried deep in the soil, bypassing Byzantine, Sassanian and Ottoman strata, especially buildings related to Islam. Still, much remained if one knew where to look. It was as if Palestine remained as Israel’s shadow and needed to be constantly denied or crushed to prevent it re-emerging. It is tempting to suggest that the pervasive Israeli and Jewish fear of Israel being destroyed arises out of guilt that this was precisely what happened to Palestine.

In contemporary Zionist discourse, Israel is presented as being permanently at risk of being ‘wiped off the map’ – of ceasing to exist as a state. This is an inversion of reality, Israel is incredibly strong and has in fact wiped Palestine off the map, preventing any genuine Palestinian state from emerging being official Israeli government policy. It’s worth, however, considering what the implications are supposed to be of Israel ceasing to exist, a demand, apparently directed at no other country. Many countries have ceased to exist, undergoing both a constitutional transformation and a name change: Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, East Germany, the West Indies Federation, the USSR and Tibet to name a few. Many more have been fundamentally transformed while keeping the same name: South Africa, Japan, Argentina, Chile and Iraq. Fears that a population could be expelled or killed (as in Gaza) are legitimate, but a constitutional transformation or name change can hardly be equated with such atrocities. So what is at stake in the demand that Israel continues to exist? Presumably a call for ongoing discrimination; that the country retains a Jewish majority via a discriminatory immigration policy which welcomes as many Jews as possible while barring Palestinians even if they were born there. Continuation of various discriminatory laws that deny citizenship to all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, allow various localities to prevent Arabs from living there and ban any markers of Palestinian identity. But what of the Liberal Zionists who claim to oppose such discriminatory measures? If they support equality, then is it simply the name Israel they are holding onto? Surely the point is to move beyond names towards constitutional structures. If there is equality for all citizens, it should matter far less what the country is called, and what its flag and anthem are.

There’s also a pervasive tendency to treat Israel and Palestine as two independent locations, as if the Oslo process had led to a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In this view, ‘Palestine’ means only those places, and Palestinians are seen as extreme, if not antisemitic, if they seek any form of return to, or connection with, the territory of Israel’s pre-1967 borders. But this is a very recent position. Until 19848 the whole land was Palestine. It was an inclusive country, made up of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Samaritans, Druze and others. The 2-state prism, which Palestinians were pressured into adopting by the West, turns the putative Palestinian state in to a mirror of Israel, an ethno-state for Palestinian Arabs. The single democratic state, the original vision of the PLO and of intellectuals like Edward Said, is a far more inclusive dream, allowing Israelis to return to being Palestinian Jews alongside Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims.

Israel and Palestine are not two separate locations. They are two ways at looking at the same reality; two ways to describe the same piece of land between the river and the sea. If Israel was to cease to exist, by means of a constitutional transformation analogous to that of South Africa in the 1990s, Israelis would not go anywhere. They would become citizens of a (free) Palestine, with rights protected by a constitution and a high court like that of South Africa’s. Negotiating this, rather than obsessing over the continuation of Israel in its current form, ought to be the priority.

Even if you reject this vision and believe that some variety of the two state solution remains possible, you still need to make your peace with the idea of Palestine. In the very best-case scenario (from a Liberal Zionist viewpoint), one of the two states is going to be called Palestine. The chances are that there would need to be at least some overarching agreements between the two countries. Or there might be some kind of confederation – such as envisaged by the Two States One Homeland organisation. In this model, Jews and Arabs would have autonomy within given territories, but there would be freedom of movement so people would be free to live anywhere they choose between the river and the sea (while remaining citizens of their respective nations). In either case the whole territory would probably be called (and be represented in international institutions) as Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel. The name Palestine is going to be part of the name of the country come what may. It was a home to Jews for hundreds if not thousands of years. It’s time we stopped being afraid of it.