Critics of Israel try to rewrite history, claiming that the state of Palestine has existed for 4,000 years or longer, showing maps, coins, passports and other documents with the word “Palestine” on them. This is false evidence. The fact is that there never was an independent non-Jewish state of Palestine. In ancient times it was invaded by various people, including the Romans who gave it that name, and later by the Ottomans who considered it as a province of Syria. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire the area, which includes today’s Israel, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, became the Palestinian Mandate which was administered by Britain. Many of the coins and documents mentioned above are in fact British from this period, and many have the words “Land of Israel” in Hebrew. Israel’s critics, human rights organisations and the media are complicit in this appropriation of Jewish history by predominantly Arab colonisers who appropriated the name in 1964 for propaganda purposes, an idea given to them by the USSR’s KGB. [Photograph: British Mandate coin. Note the Hebrew inscription on the left side of the third line, “Land of Israel”.]