Narrator: In 1969, the celebrated Israeli general Moshe Dayan stood before a group of students and made a startling admission. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages," he said. "You do not even know the names of these villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either." This statement cuts to the heart of a conflict that is not just about land, but about memory, identity, and the very existence of a history. It raises a fundamental question: what was there before? Was the land truly empty, a blank page waiting for a new story, or is there a deeper, longer history that has been systematically buried?

In his book, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, historian Nur Masalha takes on this question directly. He argues that the narrative of an empty land is a colonial myth. Instead, he unearths a rich, continuous history of a place and a people, a history that stretches back millennia and has been deliberately obscured. The book is an act of historical excavation, challenging us to see the land not as a modern invention, but as an ancient entity with a story of its own.

Narrator: A central claim used to delegitimize Palestinian identity is that the name "Palestine" is a modern, artificial construct. Masalha dismantles this by tracing its usage deep into the ancient world. The name, he shows, has been the most common and continuous designation for the region for well over two millennia.

The journey begins with the ancient Greeks. In the 5th century BC, the historian Herodotus, often called the "Father of History," traveled the region. In his famous work Histories, he documented the lands between Phoenicia and Egypt, consistently referring to this district of Syria as "Palaestine." He described its geography, its ports, and its people, whom he called the "Syrians of Palestine." A century later, the philosopher Aristotle also referenced the region in his scientific work Meteorology, mentioning a unique lake in "Palestine"—what we now know as the Dead Sea. For these foundational thinkers, Palestine was not a vague concept but a real, recognized geographical entity.

This recognition was formalized by the Roman Empire. After crushing the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 AD, Emperor Hadrian sought to reorganize the territory and suppress further unrest. He merged the province of Judaea with Galilee and the coastal plain, creating a new, larger administrative unit. The official name he chose was Syria Palaestina. This wasn't a punitive invention, but the adoption of a name already in widespread use. For the next thousand years, through the Roman and subsequent Byzantine eras, the region was officially administered as Palestine, first as a single province and later as the "Three Palestines." This long history of official, administrative, and intellectual use demonstrates that the name is not a recent political tool, but a term with deep historical roots.

Narrator: Challenging the colonial slogan of "a land without a people," Masalha demonstrates that Palestine was not only continuously inhabited but also a thriving and well-administered region for centuries. When Arab Islamic rule began in the 7th century, the new rulers did not erase the existing structures; they adapted them.

The Byzantine province of Palaestina Prima was renamed Jund Filastin—the military district of Palestine. This was not just a name, but a functioning administrative and economic heartland. Far from being a desolate backwater, Jund Filastin was the richest province in the entire region of al-Sham. Ninth-century Abbasid records show it generated more tax revenue than the provinces of Damascus or Jordan. Its capital, al-Ramla, was a bustling metropolis, praised by geographers for its beautiful mosques, wide streets, and prosperous markets.

This prosperity was built on a vibrant economy. Palestine was a center for producing olive oil, soap, and glass, with cities like al-Khalil (Hebron) becoming famous for their distinctive glasswork. The province even minted its own coins, bearing the inscription "Filastin," a clear sign of its distinct economic and political identity within the wider Caliphate. This evidence paints a picture of a developed, prosperous, and self-aware society, a direct contradiction to the myth of an empty, undeveloped land waiting to be civilized.

Narrator: The narrative of Palestine often presents it as a land perpetually ruled by foreign empires, lacking any history of self-governance. Masalha uncovers a powerful counter-example in the 18th century with the rise of Dhaher al-ʿUmar, a local Arab leader who carved out a de facto independent state in northern Palestine.

In the mid-1700s, as the Ottoman Empire's central control weakened, al-ʿUmar seized the opportunity. Based in the fortified port city of Acre, he built a powerful state that was, in practice, sovereign. He established a professional army, collected his own taxes, and pursued an independent foreign policy, even forming alliances with regional powers against the Ottomans.

His rule was not just a military conquest; it was a project of state-building. He brought security and stability to the Galilee, implementing a fair taxation system that protected the peasantry from exploitation. This encouraged agricultural production, and under his leadership, Acre became a major international port, exporting Palestinian cotton and grain to the booming factories of Europe's Industrial Revolution. He fostered a climate of religious tolerance, protecting Christian and other minority communities, who in turn had a stake in the success of his state. Al-ʿUmar's emirate was a clear demonstration of indigenous agency and a historical precedent for Palestinian statehood, long before the 20th century.

Narrator: The book's final and most searing argument is that the conflict over Palestine is a clear case of settler-colonialism, a structure defined by the logic of elimination. This logic seeks not just to control the land, but to erase the indigenous people and their history from it. One of the most powerful tools in this process has been the war on names.

Masalha argues that from its inception, the Zionist project was aware of the indigenous Arab population but chose to ignore or dismiss them. This was encapsulated in the myth of "a land without a people for a people without a land." When the reality of the Arab presence could no longer be ignored, the goal shifted to what was termed "transfer"—the euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

After the 1948 Nakba, which saw the mass expulsion of Palestinians, this erasure became state policy. A systematic campaign began to replace Arabic place names with new, Hebraicized ones. The Palestinian town of al-Majdal, with a history stretching back to the Philistines, was depopulated and eventually renamed Ashkelon. The village of al-Fuleh was destroyed and replaced by the Israeli city of Afula. Hundreds of other villages were wiped off the map, their ruins often covered by forests planted by the Jewish National Fund, creating a new European-style landscape over the old Palestinian one. This practice, which Masalha terms "toponymicide" or the killing of names, was a deliberate strategy to sever the connection between the land and its indigenous history, creating a new map for a new people and making the past, as Moshe Dayan admitted, disappear.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History is that the history of Palestine is not a void that began in the 20th century. It is a deep, layered, and continuous story of a land and its indigenous people that has been deliberately and systematically erased. Nur Masalha's work is a powerful act of recovery, challenging the foundational myths that underpin the modern conflict.

The book leaves us with the profound understanding that the struggle over Palestine is not merely a dispute over territory; it is a battle over the very right to have a history. It forces us to ask a difficult question: What does it mean when one group's national identity is built upon the erasure of another's? Recognizing this war on memory is the first step toward understanding the true nature of the injustice and the depth of the loss.