One of the most maddening, because most effective, propaganda devices of the Arabs in their Jihad against Israel is  their exploitation of ignorance. For they not only invented the "Palestinian people" after the Six-Day War but have managed to convince almost everyone that there always was a "Palestinian people" which was somehow sufficiently distinct, in ways unspecified (surely not in language, religion, culture, or in any other way that counts) to be considered a separate people deserving, therefore, of a separate and distinct political expression. But the larger ignorance was about the toponym "Palestine." The word was in continuous existence in the Western world to refer to the Holy Land of Christianity, the place where the Jews lived, and created the Old Testament,  where Jesus was born and lived, and where the New Testament was composed. But this "Palestine" became a virtual place, during the period of Muslim conquest, and there was no separate administrative unit under the Arabs, or the Seljuk Turks, or the Ottoman Turks. The area known as "Palestine" in the West was parcelled out, allotted to several Ottoman vilayets and a separate sanjak for Jerusalem.

It is true that people continued to write, in the West, of travels "in Palestine" and Jews began to talk of buying land "in Palestine" or settling "in Palestine." But that "Palestine" was never, under Muslim rule, aseparate unit or country, and it only became one in the making in 1922, when the Mandate for Palestine -- set up for the sole and exclusive purpose of creating what was then called the Jewish National Home -- was entrusted to Great Britain as the Mandatory authority, the power responsible for seeing that the terms of the Mandate, such as the need to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land" were indeed met. by the possessor of the Mandate.  

One has to be careful to refer, for the period 1922-1948, to Mandatory Palestine, not to "Palestine." It is as important as insistently putting quizzical quotation marks, or doubtful ones, around the phrase "Palestinian people," to signal one's skepticism about the phrase and the implausible but cleverly premeditated concept  behind it.

I have come unwilingly to realize that ignorance of the history of toponyms is widespread, and often a single callow copy-editor without any historical sense is enough to produce results that should -- but unfortunately often do not -- invite ridicule.

The latest example was one I found today in the historian Norman Cantor's "In the Wake of the Plague." On p. 193 was this:

"Justinian's successors were not able to hold back the Muslim armies from Saudi Arabia in the mid-seventh century...."

The Al-Saud family would be delighted to see this nunc-pro-tunc backdating in their family's favor. But what about us? Why should we be delighted? Why should we be anything except horrified?