#canaan

as these puppies!

are we still all into toxic yuri?

(multifandom amv to Toxic by Britney Spears)

Anat the Canaanite goddess of sexual love, war, and hunting. Progenitress of heroes, lady of Palestine.

Info on each sketch below:

TL;DR: Palestine is a colonialist name from a group trying to deny an indigenous group's indigenousness as part of a genocidal campaign. It may have acquired other meanings, but the etymology is still linked tightly to that, and it still carries that past with it. Anyone who considers themselves pro-indigenous should not use the term.

Let's rewind. The word Palestine is related to "Philistine"; indeed, it comes from them. So who were they?

In short, a bunch of Greeks who created a syncretic culture in what is now, roughly, Gaza. They mixed with the native people, called Canaanites. (We don't know what they called themselves - Philistine itself derives from a Biblical term.)

They vanished pretty fast, and then, a while later, the Romans came.

The indigenous population rebelled too much, so they embarked on a campaign of genocide. They killed people, of course. But they also raped enough women that Judaism is matrilineal. They sold people as slaves, barred them from their holy city and capital, Jerusalem (which they renamed). They destroyed the Jewish holy temple, the Second Temple (there is now a mosque on top of it).

And then they tried to deny that the indigenous population was, in fact, indigenous. They renamed the region Syria Palestina. Why? Because Philistines weren't around anymore. They could pretend there weren't any indigenous people to displace.

Over time, that word, Palestina, moved. It moved to Arabic, where it became Filastin. It moved to English, where it became Palestine.

But the indigenous name for the region (except, arguably, for Gaza, give or take) has never been Palestine.

We don't know what the Neanderthals, the first group there, called it.

But we know what many of the indigenous people call it. Eretz Yisrael. Or, in English, the Land of Israel.

("But wait!" you say. "You just said that in Arabic it was Filastin. Palestinians are native and speak Arabic!"

But they didn't speak Arabic back then. Arabic came with the Arab conquerers (who Palestinians aren't super related to, FYI). Arabs spread vastly during the Islamic conquests, but before that, they were primarily a desert people, whose homeland corresponded to roughly Saudi Arabia, although it extended to places like Syria and Oman. There are majority-Arab countries and places today that range from Morocco to Mauritania, Sudan to Iraq, Egypt to (parts of) Iran. Arabs are not indigenous to any of those places, and neither is Arabic.)

You may not support the Roman genocide. I hope you don't. But you are still using a term European colonialists used to erase indigenous identity as they genocided them, and it still carries that baggage.