Question 2. Who are the indigenous people of the area? Many people, fed a diet of misinformation, will say “the Palestinians”, however they do not stop to think who are the Palestinians. The correct answer to the question is the Jews. There is more than 3,000 years of recorded history of Jews in the area. This includes periods when they ruled themselves – the area was known as Judea. These kingdoms were conquered, however there was always a Jewish presence there. The name Palestinian was used by the Romans as an insult to the Jews. The first record of Arabs in the area dates to 450 BC, and they did not have a significant presence or an Arab state in the area until recently. When it was conquered by the Ottomans, it remained a poor, desolate province of the empire. When Jews started purchasing land and creating farms in the 19th C. Arabs came in search of work. When the Ottoman empire was conquered in World War I, the area became the British Mandate of Palestine. The British referred to the people there as Palestinians, however the word was mainly used for the indigenous Jews, as Arabs considered it to be an insulting term. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Arab League armies conquered part of the area (the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem), which they ethnically cleansed of Jews and gave the homes to Arabs. The war against the Jews continued in other ways, including terrorism and a propaganda war. In pursuit of the latter, in the 1960s the Russian KGB convinced Yasser Arafat, the then head of the PLO, to change the name of the Arabs in the area to Palestinians, which was done in 1964. The Arabs then started usurping Jewish history, claiming it to be theirs. Unfortunately, this false narrative, made to delegitimise the true indigenous people of the area, has taken hold in much Western discourse. [Photograph: The geographical survey by Adriaan Reland, published 1714, does not mention an Arab presence in the area]