{"id":5869,"date":"2026-05-24T16:33:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/?p=5869"},"modified":"2026-06-01T15:59:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:59:22","slug":"when-and-how-was-palestine-created","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/when-and-how-was-palestine-created\/","title":{"rendered":"When and how was Palestine created?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The concept of Palestine as a modern state has existed for only 60 years. The very purpose behind the creation of the Palestinian independence movement was to\u00a0<\/span><\/b> \u201dliberate \u201d the territory that constituted the State of Israel \u2014 in other words, to eliminate the State of Israel.<\/b><\/p>\n

The Roman expulsion of Jews from Judea took place through two major Roman-Jewish wars nearly two thousand years ago, which led to genocide, mass slavery, and a large Jewish diaspora primarily in Europe and the Arab world. The Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea to Syria Palaestina<\/i>, renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina<\/i>, and erected a temple to the Greek god Jupiter on the Temple Mount, in order to insult the Jews and suppress Jewish national identity. The port city of Caesarea Maritima was made the administrative center instead of Jerusalem, which never became a capital of the Roman province.<\/p>\n

Even when occupying powers such as the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and British later controlled the area, Jerusalem remained largely an insignificant and neglected city, while Palestine never existed as an independent country.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After the Arab world<\/strong> rejected the UN partition plan of 1947 and attacked the newly established Jewish state in May 1948, Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip while Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria. In 1959 Egypt incorporated Gaza into Egypt, and in 1950 Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, which became known as the West Bank, referring to the western bank of the Jordan River. Jordan did not renounce this claim until 1988.<\/p>\n

The modern Palestinian national identity was first created in the 1960s when Moscow abandoned Israel in favor of the Arab world. When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) wrote its charter in May 1964, it made no territorial claims to the West Bank or Gaza \u2014 which were occupied by Jordan and Egypt \u2014 but primarily to Israeli territory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The PLO was formed with support<\/strong> from Egypt and the Soviet Union with the goal of\u00a0<\/span> \u201dliberating \u201d the territory that constituted the State of Israel. Only in 1968, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, was the Arab population\u2019s independent national identity emphasized through calls for the\u00a0<\/span> \u201dliberation of our homeland \u201d by armed struggle.<\/p>\n

The charter described the State of Israel as\u00a0<\/span> \u201dentirely illegal \u201d and regarded the original borders of the British Mandate as the indivisible homeland of the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n

In Cairo in June 1974, the PLO adopted a program calling for a national authority\u00a0<\/span> \u201dover every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated \u201d with the aim of completing the liberation of the entire territory. Armed struggle did not exclude diplomatic compromises if they served the goal of\u00a0<\/span> \u201dcompleting the liberation of all Palestinian territory. \u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In April 1996, the PLO decided<\/strong> to amend its charter as a result of the Oslo Accords, but as late as 2009 PLO officials confirmed that the charter remained unchanged.<\/p>\n

On Radio Monte Carlo, a little more than a week after the Oslo agreement, Arafat claimed that the Oslo Accord was part of the PLO\u2019s 1974 plan, which had the destruction of Israel as its goal.<\/p>\n

The Israeli daily Ynet News<\/i> described in November 2016 how secret KGB documents revealed the Soviet Union\u2019s deep involvement in Palestinian terrorist attacks directed against Israel and the West from the late 1960s onward.<\/p>\n

Through Palestinian terrorist organizations, the Soviet security service KGB conducted a kind of\u00a0<\/span> \u201dshadow war \u201d against Israel.<\/p>\n

The KGB recruited Yasser Arafat and his Fatah faction early on. At the same time, the KGB placed an agent with one of Arafat\u2019s close advisers. The KGB\u2019s recruitment of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, began around 1979 when Abbas arrived in Moscow to study at Lumumba Peoples\u2019 Friendship University.<\/p>\n

Abbas was admitted to the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow to pursue doctoral studies, and when he returned to Lebanon he spread Soviet propaganda developed by the KGB and the East German Stasi.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\u201dYasser Arafat is still the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania\u2019s intelligence service, \u201d wrote former Securitate chief Mihai Pacepa in The Wall Street Journal<\/i> on January 12, 2002.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking<\/strong> intelligence officer ever to defect from the former Soviet bloc, became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, during the period when Arafat was financed and manipulated by the KGB.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\u201dDuring the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union\u2019s Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A few months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, General Alexander Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had tasked the KGB with \u2018repairing the prestige\u2019 of \u2018our Arab friends\u2019 by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The KGB\u2019s principal asset in this joint enterprise was a \u2018devoted Marxist-Leninist\u2019 \u2014 Yasser Arafat, \u201d wrote Mihai Pacepa in The Wall Street Journal<\/i>, continuing:<\/p>\n

\u201dGeneral Sakharovsky asked us in Romanian intelligence to help the KGB secretly transport Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters to the Soviet Union through Romania, so they could be indoctrinated and trained. That same year, the Soviet Union maneuvered to have Arafat appointed chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with the help of Egypt\u2019s ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The concept of Palestine as a modern state has existed for only 60 years. The very purpose behind the creation of the Palestinian independence movement was to\u00a0 \u201dliberate \u201d the territory that constituted the State of Israel \u2014 in other words, to eliminate the State of Israel. The Roman expulsion of Jews from Judea took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5828,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historic-flashback"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5870,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5869\/revisions\/5870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}