Is Palestine now Israel

Answer 1

No.

Israel is Israel and Palestine is Palestine. Confusion occurs because both things refer to an extant piece of land with people living on it, a nationality, an ethnicity, and a prior piece of land which no longer exists.

Israel is a Jewish State that contains territory from the former British Mandate of Palestine. The remainder of the British Mandate of Palestine belongs to the modern Palestinian State. Israel is a majority Jewish population who returned from their Exile in Europe and the Middle East. Palestinians are a majority Arab population whose families lived in the region for centuries. Palestinians did not simply become Israelis (except for those who did not flee during the Israeli-Arab War of 1948-9) or vice versa.

Answer 2

No. Prior to 1988 when the State of Palestine was declared in absentia, there had never been an independent country in the southern Levant since the Hasmonean Kingdom over 2000 years ago with the exception of the Modern State of Israel.

While Arabs had ruled over the area, there was never any special recognition given to the area, it was not called Palestine (it was called southern Syria or Jerusalem), and it remained an economic and social backwater. It should be no surprise that the population of the future British Mandate of Palestine was less than 700,000 people in 1900. (The current population of Israelis, Palestinians, and Palestinian Refugees is now 11.5 million people.)

Answer 3

The southern Levant was, in ancient time, home to several nations. The Philistines occupied the coastal strip and foothills from the Egyptian border, north to about where Tel Aviv is now. The Canaanite people occupied the coastal strip north from here, although some cities were ruled by other sea people until, first the Israelite invasions under Kings Ahab and Omri, then the Assyrian conquest. Israel occupied the northern hinterland and Jezreel Valley from about 1250 to 722 BCE, while the southern Hebrew Kingdom of Judah occupied the mountainous hinterland around Jerusalem.

The ancient Greeks named this region Palestine, sometime before 500 BCE, after the Philistines, who they thought occupied the entire region, unaware of the existence of Judah further inland.

The Romans Latinised name of Judah as Judea, and the administrative boundaries of Judea waxed and waned according to circumstances. After the Second Jewish War, the Romans formally renamed the entire province as Palestine.

Palestine continued to be the name of the territory under the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, then under the British, but the Palestinians never again achieved independence. From the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, much of Palestine became the modern nation of Israel.