On June 9, 2026, actor and comedian Jerry Seinfeld laughed off a social media influencer who ambushed him at Madison Square Garden, where Seinfeld had come to watch Game 4 of the NBA Finals.

The Kick streamer, named FinesseFave, demanded Seinfeld chant “Free Palestine” as he walked out of the arena. The comedian chuckled and said, “It doesn’t exist,” then kept walking.

The comment drew wide backlash online, but Seinfeld is 100% correct.

“Palestine” Was Never a Sovereign Arab State

The name “Palestine” does not come from Arab history. It comes from Rome. After Jewish uprisings in the first and second centuries AD, the Roman Empire renamed the region “Syria Palaestina” specifically to erase the Jewish connection to the land. From that point on, through centuries of Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule, “Palestine” was never the name of an independent country. It was simply a geographic label, like calling a region “the Midwest.”

The Arab inhabitants of the area during those centuries did not think of themselves as “Palestinians” in any national sense. Their identity was rooted in tribe, clan, religion, or city. Someone from Nablus was “Nabulsi.” Someone from Hebron was “Khalili.” Many identified broadly as Arab or Syrian. In the early 20th century, prominent Arab leaders themselves routinely referred to the region as southern Syria, not Palestine.

During the British Mandate period (roughly the 1920s through 1948), the word “Palestinian” was actually used most often to describe Jews living there. The Palestine Post was a Jewish newspaper, and the Palestine Philharmonic was a Jewish orchestra.

When the British withdrew in 1948 and Israel declared independence, the surrounding Arab states attacked Israel. They lost. Judea and Samaria was annexed by Jordan and renamed “the West Bank”; Gaza came under Egyptian control. No independent Arab state called Palestine was established. Arab leaders had rejected earlier partition proposals that would have created one.

The Only Unbroken Presence in the Land for 4,000 Years Is Jewish

If any people can claim continuous, documented residence in the land of Israel, it is the Jews. This is one of the most thoroughly documented cases of continuous national and religious connection to a specific piece of land in all of human history.

Jewish presence in the land of Israel begins in recorded history around 2000 BC, with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose stories are documented in the Bible and corroborated by archaeology. The Israelite kingdoms ruled the land from roughly 1000 BC onward. Jerusalem served as the Jewish capital and the site of the Temple, the central institution of Jewish religious life, for nearly a thousand years before the Common Era.

Byzantine rule, Arab conquest in the 7th century, the Crusades, Mamluk rule, and five centuries of Ottoman control — through all of it, Jewish communities maintained a continuous, documented presence. The great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides wrote about Jewish life in the land. Jewish pilgrims and scholars traveled to and from it. Census records, traveler accounts, religious documents, and archaeological evidence all confirm that Jews never disappeared from the land even in the centuries when their numbers were at their lowest.

Judea and Samaria specifically — Israel’s heartland — have Jewish archaeological and historical significance dating back millennia. Hebron is the site of the Cave of Machpelah, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are buried. Shiloh was the location of the Tabernacle before the Temple in Jerusalem. Jewish communities lived in Hebron continuously until the 1929 massacre, when Arab rioters killed 67 Jews and the British evacuated the survivors. The notion that Jews are foreign settlers in these areas inverts the actual historical record.

No comparable Arab claim exists. Arab tribes did migrate into the region, most significantly after the Arab conquests of the 7th century AD, roughly 2,500 years after Jews first settled the land. Arab and Muslim rule of the region lasted for stretches of the medieval period, but Arab presence is substantially more recent and was never characterized by a distinct “Palestinian” national identity. The population of the region fluctuated considerably under various empires; waves of Arab immigration into the area actually increased significantly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, drawn by economic opportunities created by Jewish agricultural development and, later, by the British Mandate’s economic activity. Many families now identified as “Palestinian” have roots in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula going back only a few generations.

The Soviet Operation That Built “Palestinian” Identity

After the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel defensively defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in under a week, the Soviet Union faced a crisis. Its Arab client states had been humiliated, and Soviet prestige in the region was badly damaged. The KGB’s response was a covert long-term campaign called Operation SIG — short for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, meaning “Zionist Governments.”

Before the campaign, the Arab residents of the region did not widely identify themselves as members of a distinct “Palestinian nation.” The KGB systematically promoted and amplified this identity, framing it as a national liberation struggle against “Zionist occupiers” — deliberately borrowing the language of anti-colonial movements that were fashionable globally at the time. The goal was to recast Jewish historical ties to the land as illegitimate and to position Israel as a colonial power rather than a national homeland.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, which became the face of Palestinian nationalism globally, was shaped with heavy KGB involvement. The PLO’s founding charter — which called explicitly for Israel’s destruction — was drafted in Moscow. Yasser Arafat, who would go on to become the most recognized face of the Palestinian cause, was born in Cairo, not Jerusalem. He was recruited, trained, and had his personal biography altered to make him appear more authentically “Palestinian.” The KGB also placed thousands of agents across the Arab world to spread the new narrative. Mahmoud Abbas, who later led the Palestinian Authority, wrote his doctoral dissertation at a Soviet university and maintained ties to Soviet-aligned networks.

Operation SIG was not a standalone project — it was part of a broader Soviet strategy of funding and directing “national liberation” movements around the world, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East. The specific tools included promoting Holocaust minimization, drawing comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa, and introducing vocabulary — “settler-colonialism,” “genocide,” “occupation” — that would frame the conflict in terms that resonated with Western left-wing audiences. These buzzwords, introduced deliberately as propaganda, remain in widespread use today.

In other words, the transformation of local Arab grievances into a globalized, coherent, perpetual “Palestinian national cause” — with a brand-new identity, a victim narrative, an international support base, and a revolutionary organization — was not organic. It was engineered in Moscow and exported worldwide.

Why There Is Still No Palestinian State Today

Pro-Palestinians often point out that over 140 countries have formally recognized a “State of Palestine.” But that recognition is largely symbolic and does not reflect the reality on the ground.

The Palestinian political situation today is deeply fragmented. “Palestinians” in Judea and Samaria are governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), while Gaza has been controlled by Hamas since 2007. The two factions are rivals, not partners. There are no agreed-upon borders. There is no single unified government. The Palestinian economy depends heavily on international aid. And by the standard international definition of a state — the Montevideo Convention, which requires a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the ability to enter relations with other states — the criteria are not met.

Perhaps most significantly, Palestinian leadership has rejected multiple concrete offers of statehood. These include proposals made at Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001, and the Olmert offer of 2008, all of which would have established a Palestinian state on the vast majority of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. Arabs rejected each one.

That pattern is consistent with the original Soviet-era goal: not building a Palestinian state, but dismantling the Jewish one. The slogan “from the river to the sea” — meaning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, the entirety of modern Israel — remains a rallying cry in Palestinian political culture, which critics say reflects a continuation of the rejectionist posture that has defined the movement since its founding.

Bottom Line

Jerry Seinfeld understands that “Palestine” has never existed as a sovereign, independent Arab state. It was always a geographic region within larger empires, and the people who lived there identified in ways that did not constitute a distinct Palestinian nation in the modern sense. Second, the specific political identity of “the Palestinian people” as a cohesive national group defined by opposition to Israel was deliberately constructed and amplified by Soviet intelligence as a Cold War proxy weapon, and this manufactured narrative continues to shape the conflict today.

Sources

Israel Truth Network, Times of Israel, Shpak Lissak, 2021, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem Post, World Jewish Congress, Honest Reporting, Informing Science, Grokipedia, Britannica, BESA Center