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FACT CHECK
Palestine (territory)

Fact check: References to Palestine are ancient; term didn't originate with Yasser Arafat

Kate S. Petersen
USA TODAY

The claim: The ancient land of Palestine was first referenced by Yasser Arafat 57 years ago

Yasser Arafat served as the first president of the Palestinian National Authority, a governing body established by the Oslo Accords to grant partial sovereignty to Palestinian inhabitants in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

Some social media users are sharing a meme that claims Arafat was the first person to ever reference the land of Palestine.  

"The first ever mention of an ancient land called Israel was by an Egyptian Pharoah (sic), Merneptah, 3429 years ago," reads the meme in a Sept. 12 Facebook post. "The first ever mention of an ancient land called Palestine was by an Egyptian opportunist, Yasser Arafat, 57 years ago.”

The post garnered nearly 1,400 interactions in six weeks.

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But the meme is wrong. The meme places his purported "mention" of Palestine in the mid-1960s, but Palestine existed and was referenced long before that, according to scholars.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the post for comment.

Palestine mentioned in antiquity

The claim that Arafat was the first to mention the ancient land of Palestine is "certainly not true," Jodi Magness, an archaeologist specializing in ancient Palestine and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told USA TODAY. 

For instance, a Roman emperor changed the name of a Roman province from Judea to Palestine in the second century A.D., she said. 

Judea had been settled by Jewish people, who referred to it as Judah, prior to the Roman Empire's takeover, she explained. After a major Jewish revolt, the name of the province was changed to Syria-Palestina, or Palestine.

"The province from this point on becomes known as Palestine," said Magness. "It remained the name of the province ... right up until the 20th century."

Thus, Palestine is mentioned in many – perhaps hundreds of thousands of – historical documents spanning the centuries since that time, she said. 

Palestine is also mentioned in the League of Nations' British Mandate of Palestine, which granted control of the area to the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Ian Lustick, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, told USA TODAY. 

Palestine is mentioned numerous times in the text of the mandate, which was approved by the League of Nations in 1922, before Arafat was born. 

Another ancient reference to Palestine dates to the 5th century B.C., Eric Cline, an archaeologist and professor at George Washington University, told USA TODAY in an email. The Greek historian Herodotus references the area in his text, "The Histories."

In this context, Herodotus refers not to the Roman territory of Palestine, but to a coastal region that was settled by the Philistines around 1200 B.C., said Magness. The area was technically called Philistia, but the name "Palestine" is derived from that term. 

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Egyptian slab references people called 'Israel,' not an ancient land

The meme's claim about the Egyptian reference to an "ancient land called Israel" also isn't quite right. 

There is a reference to "Israel" on the Merneptah Stele, an engraved stone slab dating to the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh, Merneptah, around 1200 B.C. However, the slab references a people or population called Israel, not a land or nation called Israel, according to Cline. 

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Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that the ancient land of Palestine was first referenced by Arafat 57 years ago. References to Palestine pre-date Arafat and are found in an array of ancient documents, according to scholars. 

Our fact-check sources:

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