Who Was First, Israel or Palestine?
It sounds like a simple question. It isn't and often, the way it gets asked is designed to erase the answer that matters most.
Here's the first thing to untangle: ancient peoples, geographic regions, and modern nation-states are not the same thing. The State of Israel was established in 1948. Palestine, as the name of this land, had already been in continuous use for centuries through Ottoman rule, through the British Mandate, through generations of Palestinian life. The people living there before 1948 didn't appear out of nowhere. They were already there. Towns, villages, cities, farms, ports, schools, mosques and churches a living society, built over centuries, not a blank space waiting for a country to be drawn onto it.
That's the part of this history that keeps getting left out.
A Name Older Than the Argument
"Palestine" is not a twentieth-century invention. Versions of the name have described this land for centuries, across different empires and eras. When Britain took control after the First World War, the territory was formally administered as Palestine recognized as such by the League of Nations in 1922.
By the mid-1940s, Palestinian Arabs were still the clear majority in their own homeland. Jaffa had a thriving port and a citrus industry known across the region. Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Nablus, Acre, and hundreds of villages made up a society that had grown and endured for generations not a footnote waiting to be overwritten.
So when someone asks "who was here first," the honest answer refuses to be flattened into a soundbite. Ancient Israelite kingdoms existed in this land thousands of years ago that's real, and no one needs to deny it to tell the truth about what came after. But Palestine, as the name and identity of the land and its people, also predates the modern State of Israel by centuries. And in the years that actually decided this land's fate the 1940s it was Palestinians, in overwhelming numbers, who were living, working, and building their futures there.
1947–48: A Plan Imposed, Not Chosen
In 1947, with Britain stepping back, the United Nations proposed carving Palestine into two states despite the fact that Palestinians made up roughly two-thirds of the population and owned the vast majority of the land. Palestinian leadership rejected a plan that handed away their homeland without their consent. That rejection is often framed as the moment Palestinians "missed their chance." It's worth asking instead: why should any people be expected to vote away the majority of their own country?
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. What followed for Palestinians is remembered as the Nakba the catastrophe. Somewhere around 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled in fear during the fighting. More than 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed. Families locked their doors expecting to return in weeks. Many are still waiting, three generations later, in refugee camps across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Israel became a state. The independent Arab state promised in the same UN plan never came into being. And the people who were supposed to inherit it became the largest and longest-running refugee population in the world.
The Question Underneath the Question
"Who was first" is often asked as if it settles something as if ancient claims can override the lives of the people who were actually there when it mattered. But history isn't a competition where the oldest story wins the right to erase everyone else's.
The more honest question is this: who was living there, building lives and communities, when that world was taken apart?
And the answer is unmistakable. Palestine was home. Not empty, not waiting, not a footnote home, to hundreds of thousands of people whose descendants still carry the keys to houses they were never allowed to return to.
Remembering that isn't about rewriting history. It's about refusing to let it be rewritten in the first place.
Carry the history forward
Our Rooted in Dignity t-shirt was created around that idea roots, memory, and the unbroken connection between the Palestinian people and the land they call home.
Every purchase supports Days Gone By, with a portion going directly to people in Palestine today.
Because remembering isn't just about looking backward. It's about refusing to let a people's story be erased.
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