the Arab League summit

[T-Rock]

The Romans named the people and the region while trying to drive out the Jews.

It’s a fascinating topic of study.

Found the following on Cornell’s .edu history site some time ago, however it has since been moved or taken down:

Palestine" instead hosted the independent nation-state known as Judea, successor entity to the northern biblical kingdom of Israel and to the southern biblical kingdom of Judah; and it was inhabited, not by Arabs, but by Jews.

Several hundred years later, in 135 CE (Common Era), after having long-become a province of the Roman Empire, Judea’s third and final revolt against Rome was crushed by Emperor Hadrian; but Rome's army also suffered devastating losses, including the complete annihilation of its illustrious XXII Legion. In furtherance of Rome's costly victory, Hadrian -- in a blatant propaganda effort to delegitimize further national Jewish claims to the Land -- renamed the province Palestine after the Philistines, a long-extinct Aegean people who had disappeared from History more than 700 years earlier after being extirpated by the Babylonian Empire.

However, although the province had been converted from Judea, the Latin-language word for which was Iudaea, meaning Land of the Jews, to Palestine, the Latin-language word for which was Palaestina, meaning Land of the Philistines, and although a vengeful Rome massacred and expelled much of the Land's Jewish inhabitants, it nonetheless continued to be populated by Jews, together with substantial populations of other ethnic groups, but hardly any Arabs, at least until the great Islamic Arab invasion of 638.

However, even under the rule of the Arab and all subsequently superseding empires, the Jewish people nevertheless maintained a continuous national presence in "Palestine" -- right up until the resurrection therein of the Jewish nation-state of Israel in 1948.
http://www.people.cornell.edu/redirect.html

[rdret1]

With the historical evidence, I really don't understand why there is such a controversy over what is actually a non-issue. Palestine was an artificially created state, similar to many of the Baltic nations after WWI and WWII. Israel is a nation of historical significance established well before Palestine was even thought of.