`:::::Nishidani  between the time when the Philistines lost their distinctive cultural identity and assimilated into the general surrounding ``Canaanite`` population (i.e. before 500 B.C.) and the 20th century, there was no Palestinian people in the sense of a group which had a reasonably strong exclusivist/nationalistic/separatist self-identity under the name פלשת / Παλαιστινη / Palaestina / فلسطين.  Rather, during that long period ``Palestine`` was merely one of a number of geographical terms used in the Levant  sometimes (only after 135 A.D.) used as the name of a province of an empire, often not.  The word had somewhat a somewhat fluctuating and variable geographical denotation, originally referring only to the southern coastal plain (roughly Joppa to Gaza), and subsequently expanding and contracting in definition as empires reorganized their provincial boundaries etc.  Generally, people considered their religion and their lineage or clan or village or tribe to be far more important in defining who they were than the fact that they happened to live in a region called Palestine.  So there may be quite a bit of continuity with respect to inhabitants of Palestine having ancestors who also lived in Palestine, but there's no continuity of a Palestinian identity  or in the definition of the word ``Palestinian``  down the centuries.  In fact, the borders of the British Mandate were determined in 1917-1923 by European colonialists drawing semi-arbitrary lines on a map without much consultation with the inhabitants of the area  and the British Mandate was different from any previous definition of Palestine.  All this means that modern-day Palestinians may have very deep historical roots in one sense, yet an organized separatist Palestinian national identity only came into existence quite recently  in historical terms  and it also means that equivocating between very different meanings of the word ``Palestinian`` to produce incongruous anachronisms such as effectively claiming that Jesus was an Arab (which is the only way to claim that Jesus was a ``Palestinian`` in the modern sense of the word relevant to this article) is really quite absurd and nonsensical...     ::::`