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Palestine is a colonial name for the land of Israel. Full stop. Not metaphor. Not emotion. History. In 135 CE, after Rome crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Emperor Hadrian renamed Judaea “Syria Palaestina.” Why? Because Rome wanted to humiliate the Jews and sever the Jewish connection to the land. Classic empire behavior. Conquer the people. Rename the place. Pretend history started when you showed up with roads, aqueducts, and a god complex. And here is the part people love to skip. The Ottomans ruled the land for four centuries, and even they never established a Province, Vilayet, or State of Palestine. There was no Ottoman “State of Palestine.” No Ottoman “Province of Palestine.” No Ottoman “Governor of Palestine.” The region was split into administrative districts like Jerusalem, Nablus, Acre, Beirut, and Damascus. Then came the British. And of course the British used the old colonial name “Palestine.” Why wouldn’t they? They were a colonizing empire. Using colonial names was practically their national hobby, right after tea, maps, and drawing borders that caused problems for the next hundred years. And let’s talk language for a second. Classical Arabic has no native “P” sound. That is why “Palestine” becomes “Filastin” in Arabic. So the allegedly indigenous name has to be translated through a language that did not originate in the land and cannot even pronounce the original Roman colonial word without changing the first letter. Meanwhile, Hebrew is native to the land of Israel. The language of our prophets. The language of our kings. The language of our prayers. The language carved into stones they keep pretending are controversial. Even “Jerusalem” is the westernized name. In Hebrew, it is Yerushalayim. Not a slogan. Not a rebrand. Not a political invention. Yerushalayim. The name Jews prayed toward in exile. The name we whispered at weddings. The name we cried over at Passover seders. The name we never stopped saying, even when empires told us to forget. So here is the question nobody seems eager to answer: If “Palestinians” are the indigenous people, why did they embrace Rome’s colonial branding? Why not Judea? Why not Israel? Why not Zion? Why not Yerushalayim? Because “Palestine” was not an indigenous national identity. It was a foreign imperial label, recycled through Rome, ignored as a sovereign name by the Ottomans, revived through empire, formalized by Britain, and weaponized by modern politics. And somehow the Jews, whose language, prayers, holidays, archeology, kingdom, temples, prophets, and national memory are rooted in that land, are called the colonizers. That is Olympic-level chutzpah. Antizionism loves colonial language until you ask who actually did the colonizing. Then suddenly everyone gets very quiet. The Jews did not name Jerusalem. We remembered Yerushalayim. We did not invent Zion. We prayed toward it. We did not colonize our ancestral homeland. We came home. We decolonized Palestine. History has receipts. Rome left ruins. The Ottomans left records. The British left borders. The Jews are still here.