Not neutral · November 2026
“We were there first” is used to justify taking land, and taking lives. This page says it is a silly excuse, whoever says it.
Three short reasons: the name Palestine is in the book and on the maps, nobody alive was first anyway, and the last hundred years matter more than the last three thousand.
1 · It says in the book
The 1611 King James Bible, the English Bible for centuries, uses the word Palestina. The Hebrew is Peleshet, the land of the Philistines on the coast. Modern translations say Philistia. The point is not who descends from whom. The point is that the name is old, and it is in the book.
Isaiah 14:29
“Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken”
Isaiah 14:31
“Howl, O gate; cry, O city; thou, whole Palestina, art dissolved”
Exodus 15:14
“The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.”
Joel 3:4
“Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine?”
2 · It says on the map
Long before modern politics, Palestine was the ordinary name for the region in Greek, Latin and European writing, including Bible maps made for Christian readers.
The Greek historian Herodotus writes of the “Palestine” part of Syria.
Rome renames its province of Judaea Syria Palaestina.
Thomas Fuller publishes A Pisgah-sight of Palestine in London, a large book of Bible geography and maps.
Family Bibles and Bible atlases routinely include a coloured map titled “Palestine” or “Palestine, or the Holy Land”.
Palestine (region), Wikipedia · Syria Palaestina · “Palestine” in the David Rumsey Map Collection
3 · Who was first, really?
Go back far enough and every “first” has someone before it. Canaanites before the Israelites. Farmers and hunters before them. Early humans in the caves of Mount Carmel before them. Humans walked out of Africa through this land, which means almost everyone's ancestors were there once.
Genetics agrees: Jews and Palestinians share much of their ancestry. If “first” wins, it wins for cousins.
If “we were there first” settled anything, Africa would own the planet.
UNESCO: human evolution sites at Mount Carmel · Hammer et al., PNAS 2000: Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome haplotypes
4 · The last hundred years
Ultra brief and not even trying to pretend to be complete
2 November 1917
A one-paragraph letter from the British Foreign Secretary supports “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, adding that nothing should “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities”. Those communities were around nine in ten of the people living there. Britain made the promise before its army had taken Jerusalem.
1939–1945, Second World War
Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews. Survivors had lost homes, families and whole communities, and many countries kept their doors shut to Jewish refugees. The case for a Jewish state became, for much of the world, urgent.
1947 UN partition plan · 14 May 1948
The UN votes to partition Palestine. Israel declares independence and war follows. More than 700,000 Palestinians flee or are driven from their homes and are not allowed back. Israelis call it the War of Independence. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. Both are true for the people who lived it.
1948 to today
Wars, occupation, settlements, attacks, sieges. Not on this page. This page is about one excuse.
So
Who was first is the wrong question. Who lives there now, and are they equal?
Millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians live between the river and the sea today. Both are there now. Humans are human, and both have the right to live.
And for anyone who answers “it says in the book”: every tradition already says people are people.