The Invention of Palestine

Unmaking Israel: Palestinianism as Civilizational Jihad

Orwell’s statement, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” is emblematic of totalitarian epistemology. It conveys how control over facts and memory, even collective memory, enables authoritarian regimes to rewrite historical reality and manipulate future trajectories. In the context of my forthcoming book The Temple and the Sword: Why Israel Became the Battlefield of a War That Can Not Be Won, Orwell’s prescience becomes the axis upon which the entire thesis rotates. I argue that the Israel–Arab Muslim conflict (so-called Palestinian; better stated, Israeli-Islamic conflict), often misrepresented as a modern territorial dispute, is actually rooted in theological metaphysics and Islamic supersessionism: the belief that Islam nullifies all previous Abrahamic covenants, including God’s promises to the Jews, where the past, especially Jewish historical claims of indigeneity, is methodically erased to legitimize a pan-Islamic claim to the land eternally.

In The Temple and the Sword, I demonstrate that the conflict between Israel and the Arab Muslim world is not a conventional geopolitical dispute (this is a canard) but a war over eternal sacred covenants: chosenness (Jews) abrogated by conquering (Muslims). The nexus of this religious ratification is the rehashing of the Orwellian Room 101, in which 2 + 2 = 5 to a geographical Palestine in which Arab + Refugee = Palestinian. This is the 1960s version of Room 101, the neo-reality in which Arafat and the KGB version of “who controls the present controls the past” is the claim that so-called Palestinians (who did not and never did exist before this renaming) surreptitiously emerges by sleight-of-hand propaganda, and voila, the facts of the British Mandate for a homeland for the Jews disappeared overnight.

Central to this argument is the concept of Palestinianism, a modern ideological construct that reimagines history by erasing Jewish indigeneity, the historical and ancestral presence of Jews in the Land of Israel, and replacing it with a fictional, homogenized identity of the so-called Palestinian people; many of whom were immigrant Arabs themselves. This identity, invented and institutionalized primarily in the 20th century, serves as a theological and political weapon for Islamic propaganda, the systemic dissemination of disinformation rooted in Islamic supersessionism. I argue that the Israeli–Islamic conflict is primarily based on an intractable religious contention disguised as a struggle over territory. This contention is exacerbated by the systematic erasure of the memory of Jewish indigeneity in the region, promulgated by Islamic propaganda (Palestinianism).

The result is a form of historical revisionism whereby Jewish ties to Jerusalem, Hebron, and Judaea–Samaria are expunged from educational, media, and diplomatic records, replaced by the language of colonialism and occupation. This constitutes a modern epistemological assault on memory and truth itself, what Orwell presciently warned would become the battleground of totalitarian regimes seeking to dictate the future through manufactured memory. My book exposes this process as not only ideologically motivated but also metaphysically intractable, as it arises from theological doctrines that render compromise impossible. It is not merely a war over land, but over reality itself.

Orwell understood that truth is not simply what happened, but what is permitted to be remembered. The erasure of Judaea and its renaming as “Palestine,” the invention of a displaced Palestinian Arab indigeneity, and the weaponization of refugee grievance (refugeeism) are not isolated propaganda tactics; they are manifestations of a deeper battle to redefine history. In this war, control over the historical narrative becomes the means to dictate legitimacy, to assign victimhood, and to justify violence. The Orwellian nature of this struggle is not metaphorical; it is real. Language is manipulated, maps are redrawn, and history is falsified to wage war in the present and claim dominion over the future. Orwell’s incisiveness serves not merely as a warning, but as a diagnosis of the cognitive battlefield upon which Israel has been forced to fight.

Orwell’s incite serves more than aesthetic provocation. It encapsulates the central thesis of both this article and my forthcoming book: that the Israeli–Islamic crisis is not merely about territory or politics, it is about the weaponization of memory. Language is not just used to describe truth; it is used to replace it. To name a people that never existed, to erase a people whose history is older than Rome, and to fabricate a narrative of victimhood rooted in conquest, all of this constitutes a war not just on the Jewish state, but on truth itself. Orwell diagnosed the very process we now witness: the institutionalized lie masquerading as historical justice.

The Invention of a People, the Murder of a Past

This article offers a distilled glimpse into the arguments presented in my forthcoming book, which investigates five interwoven domains: history, theology, law (lawfare), geopolitics, and propaganda, to expose the profound falsehood at the heart of the Israel–so-called Palestinian Arab conflict. I not only summarize the historical and theological invention of “Palestine,” but also integrate the epistemological foundation laid out in my Truth Claims series. In these Articles, I am building an argument that truth is not a luxury, nor a philosophical abstraction, but the precondition for peace and the only legitimate basis for ethical judgment. As I wrote in Truth Claims I, “truth is our only resistance to propaganda’s seductive ease.” The lie of “Palestine” is not merely a mistake; it is a deliberate deception used to justify religious violence, diplomatic sabotage, and civilizational inversion.

Part I: The Fabrication of a People That Never Were

Truth and the Ethics of Naming

To call something “Palestine” is not neutral. It is to invoke a name designed to erase another. The Roman Emperor Hadrian’s renaming of Judaea to Syria Palaestina in 135 CE, following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, was an act of ideological colonization. As noted by Goodman (2007), this was not a geographical update but a punitive effacement of Jewish history.

As I argued in Truth Claims I, “to speak falsely about the past is not just error, it is ethical failure.”

The modern use of the term “Palestinian” to describe a so-called indigenous Arab people is a continuation of that ethical failure. Before the 20th century, there was no national movement of Palestine (from which emerges the erasure concept of “Palestinianism”), no distinct Palestinian language, and no ethnogenesis tied to the land. The Arabs of the region identified as Southern Syrians, Greater Syrians, or Muslims, never as “Palestinians.” As Hood (2024) documents, it was only in the 1960s, under the ideological guidance of Soviet-influenced anti-Zionism, that this myth was formalized.

Naming is power. As John Cooper observes, “To name something is to call it into being. To rename it is to unmake what came before” (Cooper, 2015, p. 38). By accepting the nomenclature renaming of Judaea: “Palestine” as a legitimate term, we allow a manufactured people to claim indigenous status while relegating the actual indigene, the Jew, to the role of occupier.

Part II: Naming, Erasure, and the Theft of Memory

Manufactured Certainty and the Cognitive Capture of the West

In Part I of my book, I reveal how history was falsified, and in Part II, I explain why that falsification was believed. In Truth Claims II, I explore how educational systems, media institutions, and global NGOs conspire, intentionally or not, to embed false narratives as unassailable truth. The concept of so-called Palestine has become what Nisbett calls a “cognitive heuristic”—a shortcut belief, absorbed without critical reflection (Nisbett, 2015).

As outlined in Chapters 1.2 and 2.1 of my book, the lie of a “Palestine” is sustained by strategic historical amnesia. The West forgets that Israel accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan, while Arab nations rejected it and declared war on the fledgling rekindled state of Israel, literally the next day. The West forgets that after the re-establishment of Israel, over 850,000 Jews were expelled and ethnically cleansed from multiple Arab lands.

The West forgets that so-called “Palestinian” refugees (Arabs) were created not by Zionist colonization but by order of their own Arab leaders; an example of pan-Arab hutzpah. The so-called “Nakba” (disaster) initially referred to the fact that the Arab League lost a war they started against a group of people, the Jews, considered in all intents and purposes anathema to Islam. This intended etymology of Nakba soon evolved into the lie that the Arabs who fled and who did so on the promise of a speedy return were turned into refugees. Not just any refugee, but generational and permanent, and represented by a designated UN organization, UNRWA.

These are not innocent mistakes. They are theft of memory, repackaged as a moral cause.

In Truth Claims II, I wrote:

“When lies are repeated with institutional force, they become moralized. The public no longer remembers that they were taught, it simply believes that it knows.”

This is how the falsehood of so-called Palestine operates. It is no longer even interrogated. To question it is to risk exile from polite discourse. As Orwell warned, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Part III: Theology, Supremacy, and the Fiction of Victimhood

Aporia as Resistance to Totalitarian Memory

The final pillar of the so-called Palestine lie is not secular; it is theological. The Islamic doctrine of waqf holds that once land is conquered for Islam, it remains Islamic land in perpetuity. As Bat Ye’or (2001) demonstrates, this doctrine underwrites the rejection of Jewish sovereignty not merely in Judaea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank), but in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and all of Israel.

Islamic antisemitism is not peripheral; it is foundational. As documented in Chapter 2.5 of the book, the Hamas Charter explicitly invokes Hadith passages calling for the extermination of Jews. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, routinely speaks of Israel as a “cancer” to be eradicated. This is not resistance; it is eschatological genocidal intent.

Yet the West has been cognitively paralyzed. Here, I invoke Truth Claims III, in which I argued that aporia, conceptual perplexity (but in reality, if sentient, a preparedness for the contingent), is the only antidote to such paralysis. In an age of pre-packaged moral outrage, we must reclaim the ability to dwell in uncertainty, ask difficult questions, and resist emotional propaganda.

“Aporia is not doubt for doubt’s sake—it is resistance to narrative capture. It is the refusal to call something true merely because it is fashionable to believe it.” (Truth Claims III)

The “Palestine” myth survives because it appeals to the modern West’s fetishization of victimhood. But this victimhood is weaponized, not wounded. It is the cloak beneath which genocidal theocrats (Hamas) pose as civil rights activists.

The War That Cannot Be Solved

The principal thesis of The Temple and the Sword is that the Israeli–Islamic crisis is not merely a conflict; it is a theologically grounded, metaphysically rooted, and epistemologically falsified war. It cannot be solved with diplomacy alone, because it is not based on negotiable grievances. It is based on cosmic religious grievance, a belief that Jewish sovereignty is a blasphemy against divine Islamic order. Yet, something can be done. The truth can be named. The falsehoods can be dismantled. The metaphysical inversion can be reversed, and Islamic absolutism can be shown to be the ethical elephant in the room. I hope to achieve this in my book.

To do so requires not only history, law, and theological nous but also courage, clarity, and a disciplined commitment to aporia; the refusal to call the lie truth simply because it is dominant.

Orwell’s axiom—“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”—encapsulates the very mechanism by which Islam’s supremacist project seeks to eradicate Israel. By falsifying Jewish history, renaming Jewish land, and manufacturing the fiction of a Palestinian indigeneity, Islam asserts control over memory itself. This is not merely a political maneuver; it is a theological imperative. To control the past is to erase the Jewish claim; to control the present is to enforce that erasure through propaganda, diplomacy, and violence; and to control the future is to ensure that Israel, as a sovereign Jewish state, is unthinkable; illegitimate in both history and eternity.

References

Cooper, J. (2015). Naming and Unnaming: On Power, Language, and the Lost Art of Distinction. Oxford University Press.

Goodman, M. (2007). Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Penguin.

Hood, S. (2024). The Lie of Palestine [Video]. JTV.

Khalidi, R. (1997). Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Columbia University Press.

Küntzel, M. (2007). Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. Telos Press.

Nisbett, R. (2015). Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Orwell, G. (2021). Nineteen eighty-four. Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1949)

Ye’or, B. (2001). Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.