Palestine Is Israel. Persia Is Iran. And Cows Eat Hay.

Palestine is to Israel what Persia is to Iran.

That simple parallel exposes one of the greatest identity distortions in modern history.

Persia = Iran. Palestine = Israel.

Different names. Same land.

And in both cases, the name used by outsiders obscured the name by which the people themselves understood their country.

For centuries, Europeans called Iran Persia.

The name came through the ancient Greek Persis, associated with Pārsa and the region of modern Fars. Greeks used it. Romans used it. Western civilization inherited it.

But the country itself was Iran.

The name Iran has ancient Iranian roots and is traditionally understood as meaning the land of the Aryans.

Aryan, meaning “noble,” was an ancient Indo-Iranian self-designation, later transformed by 19th- and 20th-century European racial theorists and ultimately adopted by the Nazis as a supposed biological racial category representing a “master race.”

Whatever the history of the competing names, the historical point is simple:

Persia was the foreign name. Iran was the native name.

In 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi formally requested that foreign governments use Iran rather than Persia in official international communications.

Iran did not suddenly appear in 1935.

The Iranian people did not suddenly appear.

The land did not move.

The civilization did not disappear.

And everyone understood what happened:

The old name did not create a different country.

The new name did not create a new people.

It simply restored the country’s native name to international usage.

Now Look at Palestine

The same principle applies to Palestine.

The ancient Greek Palaistinē was used for the land. The Romans adopted Palaestina. Western civilization inherited the name.

But the Jewish people had their own name for their homeland:

Eretz Yisrael — the Land of Israel.

That name did not originate with political Zionism.

It did not appear in 1948.

It did not appear in the nineteenth century.

It reaches back to the Bible, Jewish prayer, Jewish law, Jewish literature, Jewish memory, and Jewish identity.

For Jews, this was never an abstract geographical label.

And there is a remarkable fact that modern history has largely forgotten:

Before Israel was established in 1948, Jews in the land proudly called themselves Palestinians.

They were Palestinians.

Their institutions were Palestinian.

Their newspapers were Palestinian.

Their organizations were Palestinian.

Their schools were Palestinian.

Their sports teams were Palestinian.

Their political representatives were........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)