http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov2.htm

The ancient Romans gave the name ‘Syria-Palestina,’ in the second century, to land that previously had included the Roman province of Judea (land of the Jews), and before that independent Judah (land of the Jews). Why the name change? Because the Romans were wiping out the Jews: exterminating them. Why? Because the Jews were defending the oppressed masses whom the Romans daily brutalized.

At the time of the name change from Judea to ‘Syria-Palestina,’ the Roman Empire had brought to completion a great genocide of the Jewish people, which lasted some 150 years. This required, naturally, many episodes of mass killing, but historians usually make reference only to the biggest three: the ‘First Jewish War,’ the ‘Diaspora Revolt,’ and the ‘The Second Jewish War.’ A historian of Western antisemitism, James Carroll, writes:

“…[in] the climactic war of 66-73 CE [‘First Jewish War’], …Jerusalem was laid waste and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed, (Josephus and Tacitus put the number of Jewish dead in this first war at around 600,000; in the second ‘Jewish war’ sixty years later, the tally of Jewish victims is put at 850,000)… Whatever the actual totals. . .the vast number of victims were killed without the mechanized methods that make modern wars so lethal, which is why analogies between Rome and the worst of twentieth-century dictators [i.e. to Adolf Hitler] may not be misplaced here. . . .if the [Roman] legions had had machine guns, bombs, railroads and [poison] gas at their disposal, who is to say any Jew would have survived the second century?”

Well, in fact very few Jews did survive the second century. As historian Robert Wolfe explains,

“There were close to 1 million Jews in Egypt alone at the start of this period, yet hardly any remaining by the end of the 2nd century CE. The large Jewish communities in Syria and Turkey were likewise decimated. . . By the end of the 2nd century CE, only 750,000 Jews remained in Judah, home of something like 4 million Jews prior to the Roman onslaught.”

Just as most Jews in Hitler’s occupied Europe were exterminated, adds Wolfe, “most Jews within the Roman empire had been either killed or enslaved” by the end of the second century.

Now, the Jewish population before the Roman genocide was not a marginalized minority but one of the largest and fastest-growing populations in the Mediterranean, with multitudes of sympathizers and defenders among non-Jews. This means that the first and second century Roman extermination of the Jews may well have been, in proportional terms, a bigger Catastrophe even than the Nazi crime. So James Carroll should hardly be appealing to the Roman lack of “machine guns, bombs, railroads and gas,” as if there were a need to explain why the Roman Final Solution was smaller than the Nazi version; because it wasn’t smaller.

This horrific mass killing of Jews began with Augustus’ massacres at the turn of the first century and came to a close with the defeat of the Jewish Bar Kochba revolt in the second century, under Emperor Hadrian. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson summarizes how this last chapter played out:

“Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages, and agricultural settlements [also were]. [The ancient Roman author] Dio [Cassius] says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judea was laid waste.’ In the late fourth century, St. Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.

[The emperor] Hadrian relentlessly carried through to completion his plan to transform ruined Jerusalem into a Greek polis. He buried the hollows of the old city in rubble to level the site. Outside the limits he removed the debris to get at and excavate the rock below to provide the huge ashlars for the public buildings he set up on the leveled site… The city he built was called Aelia Capitolina. Greek-speakers were moved in to populate it and the Jews were forbidden to enter on pain of death.”[9]

After finishing this great extermination of the Jewish people, emperor Hadrian was attempting to cleanse remaining Jews from their own land. To this effect he forbade entry to Jews and changed the name of the Jewish capital (which he had pulverized) to Aelia Capitolina. Something else that Hadrian did was…change the name of the place from Judea to ‘Syria Palestina.’

So, the name ‘Palestine’ was invented by the Romans as part of an effort to wipe out the Jewish people and erase any connection between them and their homeland. I think this is rather interesting.

The Roman exterminators chose ‘Palestine’ in order to allege that this was the land of the Philistines (that’s what ‘Palestine’ means: land of the Philistines), as opposed to the land of the Jews.

It is significant that the land which the Philistines at one time occupied is much smaller than any of the definitions of ‘Palestine’ — even the Roman.[10a] And it is also significant that the Greeks, from whom the use of the name ‘Palestina’ is supposedly taken, did not call this general area ‘Palestina’ when they ruled it. When the Ptolemaic Greeks ruled this general area they called it ‘Syria and Phoenicia,’ and scholars refer to this Ptolemaic possession as ‘Coele Syria.’

But the most important question for us is this: can this name, picked by the ancient Roman exterminators of the Jews, be applied for cultural or ethnic reasons to any Arabs? The answer is no. The Philistines, who no longer exist, were not Arabs. In fact, the Philistines were not even Semites, having been most closely related to the Greeks. Perhaps even more significantly, since the very name ‘Palestine’ fell into ambiguous use/disuse for a long time, it is quite impossible that a group of Arabs lived there who defined themselves as ethnic ‘Palestinians’ across the ages.

So, to see where ‘Palestine’ might be found, with respect to the claims of modern Arabs, we must turn to the question of how and when this name came back into use, in recent times. Read more: http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov2.htm