Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”

The Palestine region has been controlled by numerous different peoples, including the  Israelites, Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, ancient Greeks, Byzantines, Muslims, Ottoman Turks, the British, Jordanians (on the West Bank), and Egyptians (in Gaza). The Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) The Arabic word Filastin is derived from this Latin name.