Palestine is also one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. On the temple of Medinet Habu near Thebes there is inscribed in hieroglyphs the name of the people who had invaded from the North who the Egyptians knew as the ‘Peleset’. The inscription dates from the time of Pharaoh Ramses III, and was carved in 1186 BC. The cuneiform inscriptions of the Assyrians mention the ‘Palashtu’ who lived on the southeastern Mediterranean coast from about 800BCE. The Book of Genesis in 21:34 says clearly that after migrating from the city of Ur, that the Patriarch Abraham lived “in the land of the Philistines.” Herodotus, the Father of History, describes the same area as “Syria Palestina” (Παλαιστίνη) around 480BCE.

To answer your second question, I have covered and written about the region both as a journalist and historian for forty years. In the 1990s I walked and hitched from Mount Athos to the Kharga Oasis in Egypt writing about the fate of the Christian communities I passed through, living for a while in Jerusalem, an experience I turned into my award-winning book, From the Holy Mountain. To date I've written more about the Armenian Genocide and the 1947 Partition of India than the Nakba, but since the beginning of the mass-slaughter of Palestinians, including some 22,000 children, I feel it's my duty to speak out. As my brave and brilliant friend Ben Moser said in the Guardian this morning, .“I think that at a time of genocide, you can either sit on the sidelines and exempt yourself from criticism. Or you can, as they say in Brazil, give your face to be beaten.” Now it is my turn to ask you a question. What is the reason for your total indifference to Palestinian suffering and death and your readiness to dismiss it and recycle on your feed any nonsense that diminishes it? Should I assume you don't really regard them as fellow human beings with the same rights as yourself, or is there another reason for your lack of humanity in this matter?

"Q. How democratic is the Israeli vote – and who is being disenfranchised? A: About 15 million people live in areas under Israeli control. Just over 7 million Jewish Israelis and 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel live within the country’s pre-1967 borders, known as the “green line”, and have full voting rights. In the occupied West Bank, more than 500,000 Israeli settlers can vote. They live among 3.1 million Palestinians who are subject to military rule and do not have the right to vote. In occupied East Jerusalem more than 230,000 Israelis with voting rights live among 350,000 Palestinians who cannot vote. Two million Palestinians in Gaza, who live under Israeli military occupation, according to the international court of justice, also have no vote." theguardian.com/world/2026/o…

I have literally spent the last month trekking around Jordan interviewing elderly Nakba survivors and hearing their harrowing stories- and just completed a three hour video interview on Saturday night. No one I talked to left before multiple neighbours or family members had been shot and killed. Few of them had any weapons of any sort to protect themselves and if they did they were ancient Turkish muskets. Their opponents were armed with modern, newly-imported Czech rifles and many had been trained and drilled by the British. It became simply suicidal to remain, though many old people tried to so. The guy I interviewed on Saturday fled with his mother after their village was bombed. Their father remained and was loaded onto a truck to Gaza, at gunpoint, by the Haganah. Many of the family members that remained in Gaza have been killed in the last two years