#also litigating who came from where first is a pointless endeavor

[deqdyke]

^^^

This is specific to the part where OP mentioned Arab immigration/settlement from surrounding regions, and that my primary area of knowledge is the Syria/Iraq/Turkey borderlands, not Palestine, but from my past conversations with Palestinians, it's similar. Palestinians please feel free to let me know about any distinctions/differences I miss.

It's important to note that even in discussions critical of Arab Imperialism, a very crucial detail that needs to be understood is that most Arabs did not migrate to their current homelands. Speaking of Iraqis here specifically, but they were largely groups local to the area that Arabized as part of Arab conquests and Islamization. They intermarried with occupying Arabs and reidentified as Arabs, which certainly affected their relationship with their neighboring cultures, but that doesn't mean they weren't from there originally.

It's part of why I talk about the issue with the usage of Palestinian and Arab being synonymized and made distinct to support people's specific political aims. Israeli colonizers synonymize them to orientalize Palestinians as foreign "Arab" invaders of the land while Arab and Muslim states synonymize them to foster unity internally and rile up their internal population/support pan-Arabist and pan-islamic narratives while distancing themselves from the diplomatic blowback that comes with Palestinian resistance efforts.

I believe the word Palestine was first written in 5 BCE to refer to a part of Syria specifically. So I was curious about you saying how "Palestine" as a nation goes back 4000 years? From what I've read, the land was called Judaea in pre-biblical times, and then was renamed Syria Palaestina when it was corporated as a Roman province. The people who are from what is today variously Syria/Jordan/Lebanon/Iraq and migrated to the land only began to identify as Palestinian in the 1960s for the national resistance movement (because it had been known as Mandatory Palestine in the 1900s under the British) -- however even pre-British rule, under the Ottoman Empire it was referred to as "Southern Syria" by many who migrated and lived there over hundreds of years, and/or had varying names because the land (known as "Palestine" now) was divided with no one centralised administrative control. I'm in no way saying this delegitimises the liberation struggle for people known as Palestinian today obviously (and I grew up with a friend from there, whose family fled from Israel, who identified as Palestinian + Lebanese simultaneously for political/personal reasons which adds to my understanding of this) Saying Palestine has 4000 years of history seems to me like saying any country has 4000 years of history just because the land existed at all, even though the term is relatively recent & was only ever first used within the common era, and the land had multiple other earlier names, even during the Ottoman rule right before the British gave the name of "Mandatory Palestine" to specified territories within the last century.

This is not true actually, palestine was referred to as palestine in Assyrian transcriptions and among greek scholars. I really recommend reading "Palestine: a 4000 year history" by nur masalha. It dates the use of the word Palestine and describes how zionists often manipulate archeology to align with biblical stories. He also goes more specifically into the names of different regions (Gaza, Askelon, etc) and describes their relevance to identifying Palestine.

Now I feel like I was misunderstood a little that Palestine was a "nation" because in arabic there are 2 words to describe this, "watan" which is more contemporary and used in the 18th century i believe and "balad" which is far far older. Both terms have different implications. I can't exactly describe it but when I say "nation" I'm not speaking contemporarily. Masalha discusses this too.

But yeah he also discusses how Philistines were not a seafaring people as commonly thought but archeological finds suggest that we're indigenous to the geographic area of Palestine.

There's more but even just the introduction summarizes the history of the word "Palestine" and the colonial implications of denying its relevance. Really recommend a lot of Masalha's books actually.