Palestine Resists Revisionism and Propaganda

This article is meant as a reply to the piece “Palestine Doesn’t Exist” (link to the article), challenging its central claim and exposing its simplistic, Catholic-revisionist approach, which flattens historical complexity into a partial and politically motivated reconstruction.

The piece opens with the argument that the name “Palestine” is a Roman fiction—an administrative imposition by Emperor Hadrian after the Bar Kokhba revolt (the Third Jewish–Roman War, won by Rome). That is a mistake. “Palestine” did not originate with Hadrian, nor was it the product of Roman cartographic imagination: it was a place-name already circulating for centuries in the Greek world, attested in the fifth century BCE by Herodotus, who spoke of “Syria called Palestine,” and echoed in the fourth century BCE by Aristotle, who mentions a “lake in Palestine,” most likely referring to the Dead Sea. Hadrian, then, did not invent a territory out of thin air; he simply adopted a familiar term and turned it into an administrative label, as empires routinely do.

Peoples, after all, are formed through centuries of slow and profound transformation: urbanization, shared practices, linguistic exchange, religious networks, migrations. This is precisely what happens in the case of modern Palestinian identity, which begins to take shape through deep changes under Ottoman rule, accelerated by the Young Turks’ press liberalization in 1908, the expansion of education, and the spread of a shared vocabulary that, already by the late nineteenth century, starts speaking of “Palestinian society,” of “the inhabitants of Palestine,” of the “sons of Filastīn.” Prominent intellectuals of the period such as Khalil Beidas used the adjective filastīnī, as did the newspapers that emerged in Jerusalem and Jaffa at the time. Even from this alone one can see the sedimentation of a Palestinian collective consciousness—certainly not yet crystallized into a fully articulated national doctrine, but already equipped with its own lexicon, shared references, and the awareness of belonging to a distinct community within the Arab and Ottoman context.

This process becomes more explicit under the British Mandate, which between 1920 and 1948 introduced a legal definition of Palestinian citizenship within an internationally recognized entity. It is in those years that “Palestinian” becomes, in every sense, a juridical and political category: the parties, uprisings, and social mobilizations of the period offer the portrait of a society in ferment, building a national consciousness through daily confrontation with British colonialism, with growing Zionist immigration, and with the broader debate on Arab identity in the Levant.

Another decidedly fanciful and bizarre thesis advanced in the article is that there once existed a political-identity project aimed at unifying the populations of the Levant (Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Greeks, Latins) into some kind of Levantine pseudo-entity. This reconstruction is obviously tendentious and baseless: no source accredits the existence of a shared Levantine identity, nor is there any trace of a cultural or political movement aspiring to forge a unified community among the region’s different groups. Medieval sources, on the contrary, describe societies marked by deep confessional fractures, by dynastic and religious authorities exercising power through vertical and separate logics, and by momentary alliances—certainly not inclusive ones. Across the twelfth to sixteenth centuries there is no sign of any identity-unifying project among Levantine populations. The Crusader states—above all the Kingdom of Jerusalem—remained strongly segregated entities: the Latin aristocracy maintained a clear separation from Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and the legal system itself rigidly distinguished Franks, Syrians, Greeks, and Jews, excluding the indigenous population from power. Saladin, though known for clemency in certain circumstances, promoted no integrative model: his authority rested on Islam and jihad, and any respect he showed for certain holy places and religious orders was dictated by pragmatism, not by some interconfessional consciousness. The Mamluks, his successors, reinforced Islamic supremacy through a clearly codified confessional hierarchy; whatever tolerance they practiced was administrative in nature, aimed at social stability, not at cultural fusion.

With the Ottomans’ arrival in the sixteenth century the region was incorporated into a vast and complex empire, yet even in this context no shared “Levantineness” emerged. Ottoman administration guaranteed religious and legal autonomy to confessional communities without ever proposing their assimilation; Levantine cities such as Aleppo, Damascus, or Smyrna retained a multicultural character, but that pluralism did not translate into a political identity. The only common denominator was loyalty to the sultan’s authority and compliance with an imperial order in which religion continued to be the primary line of demarcation between groups. The very notion of a “Levantine people” is absent from medieval sources. Latin, Byzantine, and Arabic texts insist on the difference between “us” and “them,” and where interactions exist they are described as occasional and utilitarian practices, never as forms of shared belonging. Even the Latins born in the East did not abandon their sense of belonging to Christian Western Europe, continuing to enjoy special laws and legal privileges. When alliances occurred between Christians and Muslims—as sometimes happened between certain cities and local powers—they were tactical, not the expression of a common identity. The conviviality some modern historians describe was real but limited: a kind of tolerance useful for trade and stability, which in no way proves the existence of a shared political horizon.

Equally groundless is the claim that Saladin maintained Crusader religious orders to avoid a religious revolt. His policy was shaped by consolidating power and applying the principles of the shariʿa: the protection of dhimmis, the re-Islamization of Jerusalem, the execution of Templar knights, and a selective tolerance toward Eastern Churches. He did not fear an identity-based uprising; he aimed to keep peace in cities, secure the consent of local religious elites, and guarantee fiscal continuity. No contemporary chronicler—Christian or Muslim—speaks of a shared collective consciousness across faiths or ethnicities in the region.

From the nineteenth century onward, some nationalist readings have attributed to the Ottoman Empire an intent to “de-Levantinize” the region, meaning to erase its cosmopolitan and plural character. Yet this thesis, too, appears historiographically unfounded: for centuries the Ottomans preserved the autonomy of religious communities and the ethno-linguistic multiplicity of major Levantine cities. Local institutions kept functioning, and commercial relations with Europe fostered the rise of a cosmopolitan mercantile class, often composed of Greeks, Armenians, Sephardim, and families of mixed origin. The true paradigm shift came only with the Tanzimat reforms (modernization reforms in Ottoman society) in the second half of the nineteenth century, which introduced a modern “Ottoman” identity intended to counter the rise of European nationalisms; but even in this case modern historiography agrees that it was not a process of forced cultural homogenization. It was French and British colonial policies in the twentieth century that shattered earlier equilibria, removing or marginalizing cosmopolitan elites and laying the groundwork for new identity conflicts.

If one wants to understand the origin of the expression “Levantine identity,” one must move from history to language: the term begins to be used only in the nineteenth century, in a markedly Eurocentric context, to indicate individuals of European origin born in the Ottoman Levant, often engaged in commercial activity in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. These people did not define themselves as Levantine in an identity sense; they recognized themselves through citizenship, religion, or family ties. Only in the twentieth century, after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the disappearance of cosmopolitan societies, does “Levantineness” get recovered as a cultural or memorial category—a remembrance of a vanished multicultural past. Thus the idea of a Levantine identity as a historical category in the Middle Ages and early modern period, as presented in the article, simply never existed.

Another contradiction in the article emerges where it argues for the nonexistence of Palestinian identity on the basis of the region’s political and cultural fragmentation, while attributing an identity unity to the Levant. But if the presumed “Levantine identity”—as has been shown at length—never had any concrete historical depth, how do we explain the survival of state entities such as Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan? Why should Palestine be excluded from the possibility of constituting itself as a nation, while other states in the region—born out of very similar historical processes and belonging to the same geographical space—are treated as legitimate?

The truth is that Palestine does not yet have a state not because it lacks internal cohesion, but because of external pressure, permanent occupation, and the systematic denial of the right to self-determination. It is a history of interference, invasion, and claims by foreign powers—from Rome to the British Empire, up to Israeli Zionism; and the fact that a collective has not yet managed to constitute itself as a nation-state does not imply that it cannot do so in the future. The idea that a nation can exist only if it has a religiously, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous population is contradicted by countless cases around the world. Palestine, despite its complexity, has a shared language, a shared historical memory (linked above all to the past of the diaspora, to resistance against Israeli occupation, and today to the genocide it has endured), unique traditions—such as the characteristic embroidery (tatreez)—not to mention culinary and musical ones.

Beyond these theories about Levantine origins, the article claims that Palestinian political and military organizations do not share a common political project. There is some truth here: the Palestinian political landscape is marked by contradictions, internal fractures, strategic divergences, and even armed conflict among the various organizations that make up its mosaic. The rift between Hamas and Fatah, ideological distance over the future arrangement of the territory (with Hamas opposed to the two-state solution), and the internal struggles that have marked the most critical phases of Palestinian politics cannot be ignored. But it is equally true that shattering events like the Nakba, and the genocide in Gaza after October 7, draw unmistakable historical lines of rupture—passages so violent that they redefine the coordinates of what is possible—creating even greater national unity among Palestinians against a common enemy: Zionist ideology.

In its attempt to delegitimize Palestinian historical identity, the article offers a caricature of Hamas as an obscurantist force that “Islamized” Gaza at the expense of coexistence, while entirely ignoring the historical and human context in which such radicalization took root. It is far more useful to ask why Gaza, across generations, became fertile ground for radical movements. It is often forgotten that Gazans have lived under permanent illegal occupation since 1967, with a large portion of the population residing in refugee camps and depending economically on humanitarian aid to survive. Doesn’t that sound like a powerful reason for radicalization? Instead of analyzing these factors, revisionist narration prefers to shift attention to Islam, thereby removing any colonial responsibility and implicitly legitimizing the status quo.

Painting Palestinian leaders as “terrorists” has become routine. Yet if one rejects Zionism as a colonial project—as the author of the article himself claims to do—then one should speak of organizations or parties of national liberation, Hamas included. Equally invented, and revealing both ignorance and distance from reality, is the notion that Palestinians in the diaspora and those living within the State of Israel have done nothing for the Palestinian cause. In Europe and the United States, massive demonstrations—along with boycotts and fundraising—are in most cases organized by Palestinian associations and movements; some of these, moreover, have been declared illegal by European governments and are flagged by Israel as terrorist organizations, which only underscores the existence of a living political consciousness willing to express dissent. As for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, the repression they face should suggest at the very least a measure of caution before passing judgment: it is easy to pontificate from the couch without knowing what risks one runs by organizing a demonstration in solidarity with Palestine inside the State of Israel.

At this point, what is the purpose today of portraying Palestine as an originally Christian space, as a region “distorted” by Islam, as a territory that supposedly should have unified under a Levantine umbrella that never existed? The answer is political: to delegitimize the Palestinian cause, while leaving open another claim—Christian appropriation of the land—as if the solution to Zionist colonialism were a new colonialism of the opposite sign, blessed by nostalgia for a Papal State projected onto the Levant. If one truly wants to support the Palestinian cause, then the same energy and meticulousness should be used not to deny the existence of a people, but to dismantle Zionist ideology with the same radical force with which one claims to dismantle Palestinian identity.

Those who support this cause do not need to hide behind a nostalgic revival of the Crusades. They need to face the present—and call things by their name.

Palestine resists revisionism and propaganda

Written by Francesco Marchetti and Maria Sole Pacini

On behalf of all of L'Idiot Digital