Who called Palestine, “Palestine” in the 1870s?
The word Palestine appears regularly in Ottoman archival documents, published texts, atlases & maps from the the 1870s onwards.
I posted a thread on Twitter X this past week documenting usage of the word ‘Palestine’ in Arabic in the 1870s and 1880s:
It got a lot of likes. So let me say a brief word about it.
The thread was basically a bunch of screenshots of sources from Arab writers in the 1870s and 1880s writing about Palestine. The point I want to make here is that most of the sources were open access & freely downloadable online. No travel necessary, no library or archive trips & no paywalls. For example, al-Muqtataf, al-Jinan, popular Arabic magazines from the 1870s-1950s, are available in full. Anyone can write history these days. The sources are more accessible than they ever have been.
Now …. Drum Roll…
We talked about the Arabs, and whether or not they called the place Palestine in the 1870s and 1880s…What did the 🇹🇷 Ottomans 🇹🇷 call the place?
The Ottomans
TLDR The word Palestine appears regularly in Ottoman archival documents, published texts, atlases & maps from the the 1870s onwards.
—> Many Ottoman state archival documents from the 1870s or earlier call the place Palestine. Here’s an example:
Proposals for a Palestinian Flag sent to the newspaper Filastin in 1929
Reply to this email & I’ll send you some more of these if you like. 😀
—> Ottoman travelers, historians and mapmakers like Mahmud Raif Efendi and Ali Cevat also used the term. Here’s how the Ottoman Foreign Minister, Mahmud Raid Effendi depicted Palestine in his 1804 map of the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly, he spells Palestine فلاستان , which I discuss in greater detail here:
Published in El-Ucaletü l-Coğrafıyye (Istanbul, 1804). Source.
—> The Ottoman government even debated creating a district called “Palestine” in the 1870s, but abandoned it out of fear of encouraging more foreign interest [instead, Ottoman Palestine was divided into 3 districts: the Jerusalem District, the Nablus District and the Acre District].
In short, “Palestine” was a known thing to the Ottomans that ruled over it from the 1870s onwards.
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Best Palestine Stand-Up of the Week
This very short clip has been making the rounds, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s a true delight:
Best Palestine Meme of the Week
This past week, Israel’s most racist cabinet member, Itamar Ben-Gvir said on TV that “my right, my wife’s right, my kids’ right to move around freely on the roads of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is more important than that of the Arabs.” Lots of epic memes, like this one:
"Sorry Muhammad, but my right to live in your house takes precedence over your right to live at all"
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