The former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and current Republican presidential candidate said yesterday that "there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places."
Everyone from the PLO to a Mitt Romney spokesman jumped on Gingrich for this assertion, but he happens to be absolutely correct: no Arabic-speaking Muslims identified themselves as "Palestinian" until 1920, when, in rapid order this appellation and identity was adopted by the Muslim Arabs living in the British mandate of Palestine.
For details, see a long article of mine from 1989 on the topic or a short one from 2000. (December 10, 2011)
Feb. 23, 2015 update: Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, agreed with a comment that there's really no such thing as Palestinians. He said: "The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true." As my article above establishes, he is exactly correct.
Mar. 20, 2023 update: Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that there is "no such thing as Palestinians because there's no such thing as the Palestinian people."
