Why Israel Should Adopt “Palestine” as Its Official Exonym

There is a word Israel has gradually allowed its opponents to monopolize: Palestine.

In much of today’s political discourse, Israel and Palestine are presented as mutually exclusive concepts—Israel representing its citizens and Palestine representing UNRWA clientele, Israel representing the existing state and Palestine representing its replacement. Once that vocabulary is accepted, much of the argument has already been framed.

But Israel does not have to accept that framework. Instead of fighting the word Palestine, Israel should reclaim it.

Imagine that Israel legally adopted Palestine as an official exonym, while retaining Israel as its Hebrew endonym and primary national name. Israel would remain Israel: its government, sovereignty, citizenship, institutions, and borders would not change. It would simply establish that Palestine is also a legitimate name for the country.

This would be an extraordinary rhetorical move, but its value would be more than rhetorical. It could change the vocabulary through which Israel’s history, sovereignty, and relationship with the land are understood.

Reclaim the Word Instead of Surrendering It

Israel’s traditional response has essentially been: We are Israel now; Palestine ceased to exist as a political entity in 1948. But that response accepts the premise that Palestine necessarily denotes a political entity separate from Israel.

Why accept that premise?

The historical record shows that Jews living in the land themselves used the name Palestine. The Palestine Post, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the Palestine Electric Company, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra are just a few familiar examples. Jewish institutions did not regard the word as incompatible with Jewish presence or Zionism. They operated in Palestine.

This matters because the modern political meaning of Palestine is often projected backward, as though the word always represented an exclusively Arab national project. It did not. In fact, Arabs once rejected the term precisely because they associated it with Zionism. What is now presented as an inherently Arab name was not always understood that way.

By adopting Palestine as an exonym, Israel could reclaim this history rather than allowing others to use it exclusively against Israel.

The message would not be that Palestine does not exist. It would be that Palestine and Israel are one and the same.

One Country, More Than One Name

There is nothing unusual about a country being known by more than one name. The distinction between an endonym—the name used within a country—and an exonym—the name used by outsiders—is a normal feature of geography and international language.

India provides a clear modern example. Its Constitution recognizes both India and Bharat as names of the same country: “India, that is Bharat.” Neither name makes the other illegitimate, and using one does not imply that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)