G: Yep, this one came through cleanly. I got the whole message, including the bit about the server error eating the first draft.

Fire away with the hypotheticals.

G: I’m going to separate this into two factual tracks: first, what Netanyahu actually said and the historical “return/transfer the territories to neighboring states” idea; second, whether fear of legal/accountability exposure is a documented reason Israeli governments resist relinquishing control, as distinct from a plausible inference.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: One important correction already: the territories did not all “come from Egypt.” Immediately before the 1967 war, Egypt administered Gaza, while Jordan controlled (and had annexed) the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan formally severed its legal/administrative claim to the West Bank in 1988, which is a major reason “just give it back to Jordan” stopped being a straightforward restoration proposal.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. Once the questions are disentangled, there are really three of them:

1. Did Netanyahu actually say that no Palestinian state would exist while he is prime minister?
2. If Palestinian statehood is ruled out, has the alternative of putting Gaza under Egypt and the West Bank under Jordan ever seriously existed?
3. Could one reason the present Israeli government resists surrendering territorial control be that outside control would make investigation and documentation of alleged Israeli crimes much easier?

The answers are yes; yes, but the historical situation makes it much less available today; and possibly at the margins, but I cannot substantiate it as a major causal explanation.

First, you remembered Netanyahu correctly

On August 9, 2026, Netanyahu said at the opening of an Israeli government meeting:

“As long as I am Prime Minister, a Palestinian state will not be established, neither in Gaza nor in Judea and Samaria.”

That's from the Israeli Prime Minister's Office itself, so there isn't much interpretive uncertainty about what he meant. citeturn919518search25

He said it while rejecting the latest U.S.-backed Gaza plan. That plan contemplates Hamas disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, an international stabilization force, Palestinian policing, and eventually Palestinian political control. Netanyahu is presently refusing withdrawal until Hamas is completely disarmed and is separately ruling out Palestinian statehood. citeturn226029news39turn919518news26

So your compression—“if Netanyahu's stated position became permanent Israeli policy, there isn't a route to a Palestinian state through the territories Israel presently controls”—is fair. The qualification “while I am prime minister” matters politically, but it doesn't alter what his government's current position is.

The Egypt/Jordan idea is real—and has a name

What you independently reinvented is usually called the Jordanian option, the Egyptian-Jordanian option, or sometimes the three-state solution.

But the geography is:

Gaza → Egypt.
West Bank/East Jerusalem → Jordan.

After the 1948 war, Egypt administered Gaza while Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan actually annexed the West Bank in 1950. Israel captured both territories in the 1967 war. citeturn615893search4turn615893search0

And this wasn't merely something commentators imagined afterward. In the years immediately following 1967, returning most of the West Bank to Jordan was an extremely serious diplomatic possibility. Declassified U.S. records from the period explicitly discuss negotiations through which Jordan might recover “a major part of West Bank,” and American diplomats warned that Israeli settlement and economic integration were creating “facts” that might eventually make such a solution impossible. citeturn615893search8turn615893search16

That's particularly interesting in light of your question: diplomats were identifying in the early 1970s essentially the mechanism we're still discussing—physical Israeli changes on the ground progressively eliminating political alternatives.

Gaza's history is a little different. Egypt administered it before 1967, but Egypt did not subsequently pursue sovereignty over Gaza the way it pursued restoration of the Sinai.

At Camp David in 1978, Egypt demanded Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, including Gaza and the West Bank. Israel resisted withdrawal from those two territories and instead proposed Palestinian autonomy. The eventual Egypt-Israel peace treaty restored the Sinai to Egypt but did not restore Gaza to Egypt. citeturn615893search28

So “give Gaza back to Egypt” sounds more historically symmetrical than it actually is.

And then something extremely important happened in 1988

Jordan said, effectively, the West Bank isn't ours anymore.

King Hussein formally severed Jordan's legal and administrative ties to the West Bank in July 1988. The subsequent Palestinian declaration of independence explicitly followed that development. citeturn615893search1turn615893search21

From there, international diplomacy increasingly treated the problem as one of Palestinian self-determination, not restoration of Jordanian sovereignty. Madrid and then Oslo cemented the shift toward direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. citeturn615893search24

That creates the largest problem with resurrecting the old solution today:

Egypt and Jordan don't want the territories.

Jordan's official position rejects reassuming sovereignty over the West Bank; among other things, it would undermine the Palestinian claim to statehood and create enormous internal political and demographic problems for Jordan. citeturn507758search5turn507758search9

Egypt likewise insists on a Palestinian state incorporating Gaza rather than Egyptian annexation of Gaza. Its repeated rejection of schemes moving Palestinians into Egypt is partly driven by exactly that concern: Cairo regards absorbing Gaza or Gazans as helping eliminate the Palestinian national claim rather than solving it. citeturn507758search18turn507758news42

So there is an odd historical reversal here:

In 1967, “territory for peace with Egypt/Jordan” was an obvious framework.
By 2026, Egypt and Jordan themselves are among the strongest opponents of replacing Palestine with Egypt and Jordan.

They want a Palestinian entity between them and Israel, not additional territory and millions of new citizens/responsibilities.

And there's another fundamental problem: Palestinians themselves are now recognized internationally as a people entitled to self-determination. Even if Israel offered Gaza to Egypt tomorrow, Israel can't simply transfer Gazans politically to Egypt like conveying real estate. Egypt would have to accept it, and the political rights of the Palestinian population remain involved.

So yes, your proposed alternative has been explored extensively. What has largely killed it isn't that nobody thought of it; it's that the parties who would have to receive the territories have spent decades rejecting that role.

Now your more interesting second hypothesis: does relinquishing control risk opening the cupboards?

There are two different propositions here, and they have very different evidentiary strength.

The first is:

Israeli authorities have reasons to fear independent international investigation of conduct in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

That is demonstrably true.

Israel has aggressively contested ICC jurisdiction over Palestine. The ICC nevertheless issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity connected with Gaza. Israel's formal position is that the court lacks jurisdiction and that its proceedings are politically motivated. citeturn615893search2turn818382search8

Separately, in its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful and that Israel must cease new settlement activity and evacuate settlers from the occupied territory. citeturn615893search3turn615893search7

That also gives us a useful terminology correction concerning your “invaders” formulation. International law does not generally label individual Israeli settlers “invaders.” The legally important proposition is stronger and more precise: the ICJ regards the settlements as unlawful and Israel's transfer of its civilian population into occupied territory as contrary to international law. Individual settlers can of course separately commit ordinary or international crimes, including violent attacks. citeturn615893search7

And the settler-violence problem isn't merely an allegation against unidentified Israelis. U.S. human-rights reporting has documented unlawful killings, physical abuse, violence and threats by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank. citeturn818382search11

So your underlying premise—that there is potentially incriminating conduct worth investigating involving particular Israeli officials, military operations, government policies and violent settlers—isn't speculative.

There's also a practical access issue. Israel has severely restricted independent foreign-journalist access to Gaza, which has produced sustained criticism precisely because unrestricted physical access would improve independent verification and accountability. citeturn818382search32

So control of territory absolutely can affect the ability of outsiders to investigate what happened there.

But now comes the second proposition:

Netanyahu's government is therefore refusing Palestinian/Jordanian/Egyptian control substantially because surrendering the territory would expose Israeli crimes.

I went looking for evidence for that proposition, and I don't have enough to tell you that.

I found evidence of Israeli resistance to ICC jurisdiction; resistance to outside scrutiny; restrictions on independent access; immense potential legal exposure; and a substantial existing international record concerning settlements and military conduct. citeturn818382search1turn818382search8turn615893search7

I did not find persuasive documentary evidence—cabinet papers, credible insider reporting, Israeli officials privately discussing it, etc.—showing that preservation of territorial control is being driven significantly by a need to keep investigators away from evidence.

And there is a fairly important reason not to make that the primary explanation without evidence:

Netanyahu and the Israeli far right already give us several much more directly documented motives.

The current dispute itself shows one: Netanyahu says continuing Israeli military control is necessary until Hamas is disarmed. His far-right coalition partners oppose withdrawal and favor settlement expansion. Reporting on the current rupture with the United States describes those coalition pressures quite explicitly. citeturn507758news35turn818382news28

Then there is the much older ideological territorial project. Israeli settlement expansion and gradual integration of the West Bank didn't begin after the current Gaza war, when fear of prosecution might explain it. American diplomats were describing Israeli creation of irreversible “facts” in the West Bank more than fifty years ago. citeturn615893search8

That chronology matters enormously.

If behavior A existed for decades before incentive B became acute, B probably isn't the fundamental explanation for A.

But there's a narrower version of your hypothesis that I think survives quite well

Rather than:

“They can't give up the territories because investigators would discover the crimes.”

the evidence supports something closer to:

“For officials already exposed to serious international legal scrutiny, surrendering physical and administrative control would also mean surrendering considerable control over access, records, sites, witnesses and the narrative surrounding what happened there. That creates an additional incentive against relinquishing control—even though there is presently insufficient evidence to call it a principal motive.”

That's a meaningful distinction.

If tomorrow a genuinely independent Palestinian government or international administration controlled Gaza, investigators might get freer access to destroyed sites, governmental records, witnesses, graves, former detention locations and other physical evidence. Some forms of inquiry would unquestionably become easier.

But it wouldn't be the dramatic opening of a previously sealed evidence vault your original formulation perhaps suggests. A very large evidentiary record already exists. Palestinians, Israeli organizations, journalists, NGOs, UN investigators, satellite imagery, intercepted communications and digital evidence have already produced enormous quantities of material, enough that international courts are already operating. citeturn818382search14turn615893search6

So relinquishing territorial control could produce additional evidence and much freer verification, but it isn't what makes accountability possible in the first place.

And that actually makes your question slightly more interesting: the potential institutional cost isn't simply “they'll find out what happened.” A great deal is already known or alleged.

It's losing the ability to control the environment in which what happened is independently reconstructed.

That is a real consequence of relinquishing control. What we currently lack is evidence that Netanyahu or the Israeli government is making policy because of that consequence.

Finally, your distinction between Israel, the Israeli government, the Israeli military, the Israeli far right, and Israeli settlers who commit violence is important here rather than cosmetic. The evidence supports different propositions about each of them. Saying “Israel wants X because Israel committed Y” would collapse citizens, institutions, political factions and individual actors into a single moral agent—and in this particular question that would actually make the causal analysis worse, not merely the wording less polite. citeturn507758news35turn818382search11

navlistCurrent developments behind Netanyahu's statementturn507758news35,turn226029news39,turn818382news28

I can also keep an eye on whether credible reporting emerges about why Netanyahu's government is resisting the current Gaza handover/withdrawal plan, particularly any evidence involving fear of investigations or legal exposure. Want me to set that up?

G: I think I can pin down the structure pretty cleanly. The “third area” you’re reaching for is almost certainly the Golan Heights, and the 1988 Jordan question turns out to be especially useful because it shows Palestinian national identity was already politically organized enough that Jordan’s disengagement was more a culmination than a surprise.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: There’s also one place where I’d revise the earlier Palestinian-identity model rather than merely add a caveat. It’s fair to say Palestinian nationalism is a modern national identity and was less state-centered historically than Ukrainian identity; it is not well supported to describe “Palestinian” historically as basically a residual bin for people whom larger groups would not absorb. The local population and a Palestine-centered identity predate 1948, although that identity hardened and spread dramatically through the Mandate, 1948, occupation, exile, and conflict.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: iturn565023image0

Your mental map is basically coming back into focus correctly. Gaza is the little coastal strip adjoining Egypt; the West Bank is the much larger territory on Israel's eastern side adjoining Jordan; and the third territory you're probably remembering is the Golan Heights, up north against Syria. The Golan is important, but it belongs to a somewhat different dispute because its pre-1967 population and sovereignty were Syrian rather than Palestinian. citeturn377181search2turn421662search15

And I think several of the things you just raised benefit from being separated, because otherwise about four different historical eras bleed into one another.

Before World War II, there wasn't a Gaza Strip and a West Bank in the modern political sense

If you freeze the map around 1938, immediately before WWII, both were simply parts of British Mandatory Palestine. They were not little substates belonging loosely to Egypt and Jordan. Britain administered the whole territory west of the Jordan River under the League of Nations Mandate. citeturn916449search8turn916449search2

Before the First World War, the same territory was within the Ottoman Empire. And this is where your instinct about old maps is useful: Ottoman administration did not map neatly onto today's nation-state boxes. Different portions were administered through Ottoman districts and subdistricts; there wasn't a sovereign country called “West Bank” or “Gaza.” Those modern territorial categories largely crystallized because of what happened after 1948. citeturn377181search10turn377181search19

The clean chronology is therefore:

• Before 1917: Ottoman Empire.
• Roughly 1920–1948: British Mandatory Palestine. Gaza and what we'd later call the West Bank were pieces of the same mandated territory.
• 1948 war: the Mandate disappears without the proposed Arab Palestinian state actually coming into existence. Israel controls most of the former Mandate; Jordan controls the territory that acquires the name West Bank, while Egypt administers Gaza. citeturn916449search15turn916449search34
• 1950: Jordan formally annexes the West Bank. Egypt does not comparably annex Gaza—it administers it. citeturn421662search15turn916449search34
• 1967: Israel captures the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. citeturn421662news38turn377181search2

That last distinction fixes something from my previous answer: saying Gaza might be “given back to Egypt” is convenient shorthand, but historically “returned to Egyptian administration” is more accurate than “returned to Egyptian sovereign territory.” Jordan has a stronger literal “give it back” history because it actually annexed the West Bank.

The Golan Heights did, in a sense, undergo the absorption process you were wondering about

Israel captured most of the Golan from Syria in 1967. In 1981, Israel extended Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration over it—generally treated internationally as an annexation, despite Israel's preferred legal terminology. Most countries have continued to regard the Golan as occupied Syrian territory. citeturn377181search2turn916449search44

It has consequently been considerably less politically ambiguous inside the Israeli system than the West Bank: Israel governs the occupied Golan essentially as Israeli territory rather than maintaining the West Bank's strange combination of occupation, settlements, Palestinian Authority enclaves and different legal regimes. The United States recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan in 2019; almost the entire international community did not follow it. citeturn377181search2

And there has been a very recent complication. After Assad's Syrian government collapsed in December 2024, Israeli forces moved beyond the previously Israeli-held Golan into the UN-monitored buffer zone and additional Syrian territory. Those forces remain an issue in current Israeli-Syrian negotiations; Syria wants Israel back behind the old disengagement line, while Israeli officials have resisted relinquishing the newer positions. citeturn377181search11turn377181search14

So “calm” is only relative. The older Israeli-held Golan has been much quieter than Gaza or the West Bank for long periods; the Syrian side of that frontier has become considerably more active again since 2024.

There's actually an almost eerily relevant contemporary wrinkle to your terminology complaint: a fringe Israeli religious-nationalist group has recently been crossing into Syria trying to establish unauthorized Jewish outposts there. The Israeli military has been removing them and says they're endangering soldiers, although some Israeli government ministers sympathize with the movement. So even here, “Israel is doing X” would obscure a rather important three-way distinction between fringe activists, sympathetic politicians, and the Israeli military trying to stop the activists. citeturn377181news39

1988 was not Jordan suddenly abandoning bewildered West Bank Palestinians

This is the part where your question about what happened “under the table” changes the picture substantially.

By 1988 Jordan's claim to represent the Palestinians had already been eroding for fourteen years. In 1974, the Arab League recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. That greatly weakened King Hussein's political basis for saying, in effect, I'll negotiate for the West Bank because those people are my subjects. citeturn421662search18turn421662search27

Then the First Intifada began in December 1987. It was a Palestinian uprising originating inside the occupied territories, and it demonstrated in a particularly unmistakable way that an autonomous Palestinian political constituency existed there rather than merely a population waiting for Jordan to resume control. That development was one of the pressures pushing Hussein toward disengagement. citeturn421662search11

Hussein's own July 31, 1988 explanation is unusually helpful. He explicitly connected his decision with PLO wishes, Arab recognition of Palestinian self-determination, and the Palestinian demand for an independent state. He described Jordan as responding favorably to the PLO's position rather than springing an unwanted divorce on it. citeturn916449search4turn421662search7

The sequence was deliberate enough that he didn't simply announce one spectacular decree. On July 28 he terminated a large Jordanian West Bank development program, specifically saying this would allow the PLO greater responsibility. Two days later he dissolved parliament, which ended West Bank parliamentary representation. Then on July 31 came the formal severing of legal and administrative connections. citeturn916449search6turn421662search8

And then the Palestinian National Council declared the State of Palestine on November 15, 1988—three and a half months later. Contemporary UN accounts explicitly describe Jordan's disengagement as one of the developments motivating the Palestinian declaration. citeturn916449search24

So I would characterize the relationship as:

Not “Jordan kicked them loose and the Palestinians hastily invented a country.”
Closer to “the Palestinian national movement had progressively displaced Jordan as the claimed political representative of the West Bank, and Hussein finally formalized that reality.”

That doesn't mean every West Bank Palestinian wanted it. No population of that size had one opinion, and there were people with strong Jordanian attachments, Jordanian citizenship, economic dependence on Jordan, hostility toward the PLO, or combinations of those things. The decision also caused very real institutional and economic disruption because Jordan had continued paying salaries, supporting institutions and maintaining administrative connections even after losing physical control in 1967. citeturn916449search10turn421662search18

But at the organized Palestinian political level, this wasn't an unwanted bolt from the blue.

I would modify our old Palestinian-identity model

I think your Ukraine comparison contains a useful distinction, but it's currently carrying more weight than the historical evidence supports.

You're right about one major thing: there was no ancient or medieval sovereign Palestinian nation-state whose political institutions simply persisted into modernity. Palestinian nationalism is a modern nationalism. The Ottoman population could simultaneously understand itself through village, city, clan, religious, Arab, Syrian, Ottoman and local Palestinian attachments. Those categories weren't mutually exclusive in the modern passport-nationality sense. citeturn377181search15turn377181search16

But that's considerably different from saying Palestine was essentially the residual category for people who couldn't fit somewhere else.

Historians find a developing Palestine-centered collective identity already in the late Ottoman period, including Arabic newspapers, political organizations and petitions describing the country and its population in specifically Palestinian terms. Scholars disagree about exactly when it deserves the fully developed label “Palestinian nationalism,” but serious historical treatments put its emergence before 1948 and in some cases before WWI. citeturn377181search4turn377181search7turn377181search18

Then the British Mandate accidentally supplied something nationalism loves: a bounded administrative territory and a common political problem. Its inhabitants were now living inside an entity officially called Palestine, confronting British rule and growing Zionist immigration and institutions. That helped broaden what had initially been a relatively elite/local identification into mass political nationalism. citeturn377181search10turn377181search15

And 1948 made the identity vastly stronger still. Dispossession, refugee communities and separation into Israel, Jordanian West Bank, Egyptian-administered Gaza and diaspora communities gave previously diverse local populations a massive common political experience.

So I'd put your Ukraine comparison this way:

Ukraine possessed much deeper antecedents for territorially specific political identity and statehood. Palestinian nationalism had shallower and more overlapping antecedents and became a mass national identity comparatively late.

That is defensible.

But “there wasn't really a Palestinian people until Israel treated these miscellaneous people as one” goes too far. Israel/Palestinian conflict enormously strengthened and consolidated the identity; it didn't manufacture it ex nihilo. citeturn377181search4turn377181search7

There's also a little danger in the Kyiv comparison specifically. A recognizable historical Ukraine certainly has deep roots, but the people of Kievan Rus' in the medieval period weren't walking around possessing a modern Ukrainian national consciousness either. Modern Ukrainianness, like modern Frenchness, Italianness, Zionism or Palestinian nationalism, is partly the later organization of older linguistic, geographic, historical and cultural materials into a nation. The depth and abundance of the material can differ enormously without one identity being “real” and another invented.

Your settler terminology problem is legitimate, but there isn't one perfect replacement

“Settler” is frustrating because in ordinary American English it can sound like somebody peacefully staking out an empty patch of Nebraska.

International-law usage isn't conveying that moral implication. “Israeli settlement” and “Israeli settler” identify a legal/geographic phenomenon: Israeli civilian communities established in occupied territory. The ICJ and most of the international community regard those settlements as unlawful. That doesn't mean every person living in one has individually committed a crime, and it doesn't mean violent land seizures by particular settlers become morally neutral because the noun is “settler.” citeturn421662news38

For the subgroup you're actually talking about, I'd probably use “violent settlers,” “settler militants,” “settler extremists,” or where the facts support it, “people establishing unauthorized outposts on occupied land.” “Invader” captures the coercive intuition but also implies a legal status that international law doesn't automatically assign to each civilian resident.

And your bar-gang analogy works rather well for explaining why the umbrella noun shouldn't do the moral work. A patron peacefully having a beer, somebody occupying the building illegally, and somebody beating the owner in the back room could all physically be “people in the bar.” That's true but useless for assigning responsibility.

And yes: the information tactic you were reaching for actually has a name

“Limited hangout” is very close.

It means revealing or conceding some damaging truth—especially damage that can no longer realistically be concealed—in a way that protects a more damaging remainder and hopefully satisfies the appetite for investigation. The phrase came out of intelligence/political jargon and became famous during Watergate. citeturn816030search0

So your hypothetical isn't:

Everybody knows horrible things happened, therefore perhaps nothing worse happened.

It's almost the inverse:

Once some horrible conduct is unavoidable and public, that known horror could become a psychological stopping point: investigators and the public feel that they have already discovered “the scandal,” while some separate and worse material remains concealed.

That mechanism is perfectly coherent. What we still don't have evidence for is the next step—showing that Netanyahu's government is deliberately practicing such a limited hangout regarding undiscovered atrocities, or that retaining Gaza/West Bank control is substantially motivated by keeping those things undiscovered.

And I think your “asymptotic spike” point is important here. A motivation needn't explain most of someone's policy preferences to become decisive at the final decision margin. Suppose ideological attachment, coalition survival and security policy already make Netanyahu 90% opposed to giving up control. If surrendering control also created even a 10% perceived probability of uncovering personally catastrophic evidence, that secondary consideration could turn strong opposition into absolute opposition. In that sort of decision structure, calling the factor “marginal” in explanatory weight doesn't mean it is marginal in decision effect.

That's the version of your hidden-evidence hypothesis I'd preserve. We don't presently have evidence that it's happening. But the fact that other motives already explain most of the government's behavior does not logically dispose of it as a potentially decisive additional motive. That is a genuinely different question from asking what primarily produced the territorial policy in the first place. memcite

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. Your last clarification makes the precise historical proposition much clearer, and I think there are two places where you're substantially right and one where I'd move the line earlier than you are moving it.

First, though, one geographical point from your opening is important.

image_group{"layout":"carousel","aspect_ratio":"16:9","query":["Israel West Bank Gaza Golan Heights political map Jordan River Mediterranean Sea","West Bank Israel map narrow waist Tel Aviv Jerusalem Jordan Valley"],"num_per_query":2}

The West Bank really does change the security problem

Your rediscovered intuition isn't imaginary. On a map, the West Bank isn't another Gaza. Its western edge comes remarkably close to Israel's Mediterranean population and infrastructure corridor, while its eastern edge runs along Jordan. Historically, Israeli security arguments about retaining territory, controlling the Jordan Valley, demilitarization, early warning, etc., have been heavily influenced by precisely that geography.

So there are two propositions that sometimes get compressed into one:

“The occupation should end” is a political/legal proposition.

“Israel can safely withdraw every military capability to the 1949 armistice line tomorrow, without replacement security arrangements” is a military proposition.

The first doesn't establish the second. A two-state settlement can therefore involve withdrawal while simultaneously involving demilitarization, international guarantees, early-warning arrangements, border forces, territorial exchanges, phased withdrawal, etc.

And the phrase you were reaching for is “from the river to the sea”—the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. It's politically explosive because different users mean substantially different things by it, ranging from equal rights throughout the territory to the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. I wouldn't infer the maximalist meaning from every person chanting it, but someone who literally doesn't know which river and which sea they're talking about is obviously missing a rather consequential feature of what they're demanding.

The new Israeli positions in Syria actually illustrate your Israel/government distinction remarkably well

The current Israeli government's justification is essentially strategic depth/buffer territory. After the Assad regime collapsed, Israeli forces occupied the former UN buffer zone and the Syrian side of Mount Hermon. Netanyahu's government argues that Israeli forces cannot allow hostile forces to establish themselves immediately adjacent to northern Israel.

That isn't completely nonsensical militarily. High ground and physical distance from your population centers are genuinely useful.

The problem is what happens next.

As of July 2026, Syria's new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is publicly seeking a security agreement and potentially eventual comprehensive peace with Israel, while insisting Syria won't relinquish its claim to the Golan. Israel nevertheless remains beyond the previous disengagement line. citeturn0news54

And this isn't occurring in isolation. Israel now maintains newly created buffer/security zones in Gaza, Syria and, since March 2026, southern Lebanon. Netanyahu himself recently described those zones collectively as a new Israeli security “paradigm.” citeturn0news53

That makes your question—what exactly is the endpoint?—quite legitimate.

A temporary buffer while the Syrian government is collapsing has an obvious security rationale. Indefinite occupation after a neighboring government is offering security negotiations requires a different justification. And Israelis themselves disagree about this approach. Israeli veterans of the previous southern-Lebanon occupation are currently arguing that these buffer zones can become self-perpetuating: occupation produces resistance → resistance demonstrates danger → danger justifies occupation. citeturn0news53

So “Israel wants expansion” would erase a substantial Israeli argument over whether Netanyahu's government's approach actually makes Israel safer.

Now the PLO question—and here your suspicion is justified

You noticed something real in the name.

The entity["organization","Palestine Liberation Organization","Palestinian nationalist umbrella organization founded in 1964"] was not founded as a neutral proto-government whose overriding purpose was to construct a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Its 1968 charter is spectacularly unambiguous. Article 9 declares armed struggle the only way to liberate Palestine and describes it as the overall strategy rather than a temporary tactic. Article 10 makes guerrilla warfare the nucleus of a Palestinian war of liberation. citeturn0search7

So when the Arab League recognized the PLO in 1974, asking whether this represented peaceful state-building or continuation of the conflict presents a false choice.

It was both Palestinian nation-building and legitimization of an organization still committed to armed struggle against Israel.

And the actual 1974 Arab League resolution makes that combination extraordinarily visible. It recognizes Palestinian self-determination and an independent Palestinian national authority under the PLO—but simultaneously describes Palestinian armed struggle against the “Zionist enemy” approvingly and talks about continuing the struggle and “liberation.” citeturn0search0

So I would not retroactively describe Rabat as Arab leaders wisely laying the institutional foundation for the peaceful Palestinian state everybody hoped would eventually live alongside Israel.

That wasn't what they were doing.

But something interesting was already changing.

The PLO had adopted a program in 1974 allowing establishment of a Palestinian national authority on any portion of Palestinian territory that was liberated. That was enormously controversial within the Palestinian movement because some factions correctly perceived that it potentially opened a door to territorial compromise. Over subsequent years the PLO increasingly developed diplomatic activity alongside armed struggle. Contemporary accounts were already describing that evolution by the 1980s. citeturn0search5

Eventually that road leads to Arafat recognizing Israel's right to exist and renouncing terrorism in 1988, and ultimately to Oslo.

So there's a fascinating institutional evolution:

PLO as liberation movement → PLO as liberation movement + diplomatic representative → PLO as would-be government → PLO recognition of Israel → Palestinian Authority.

The name increasingly became an anachronism describing the organization's origin rather than everything it actually did.

And King Hussein: I think you've identified a genuine lost alternative, but it had a huge problem

Your counterfactual is something like:

What if Jordan had remained the institutional anchor for the West Bank, giving Palestinians an existing state structure and identity around which political life could organize instead of allowing national identity to crystallize principally around resistance?

That's not silly at all. It's essentially a version of the old Jordanian option, and Israeli, Jordanian, American and Palestinian actors spent years arguing about variants of it.

King Hussein himself initially fought very hard against being displaced by the PLO as representative of West Bank Palestinians.

There's also an enormous event sitting between Jordan and the PLO that we haven't mentioned yet: Black September, 1970–71.

The PLO had become powerful enough inside Jordan that Palestinian guerrilla organizations were operating increasingly independently of Hussein's government. There were armed confrontations, hijackings, and ultimately something approaching a state-within-the-state. Hussein's army crushed the Palestinian organizations and expelled the PLO leadership from Jordan.

So from Hussein's perspective, this wasn't:

“Wouldn't it be nice if Palestinians had their own representative?”

It was partly:

“There is another armed political organization claiming authority over a huge portion of my population and territory, and we've already fought a small civil war over who actually governs Jordan.”

That radically complicates the attractive counterfactual in which Jordan becomes Palestine's stabilizing institutional parent.

By 1974 the Arab League's recognition of the PLO essentially settled that contest against Hussein. Jordan officially acquiesced. A Jordanian representative subsequently told the UN that Jordan's role had been altered “with our agreement” by the unanimous Rabat decision. citeturn0search10

But it took another fourteen years before Hussein finally cut the West Bank loose legally in 1988.

And here's the really interesting thing in relation to your hypothesis: Hussein explicitly said that Jordan had intentionally maintained institutional connections with the occupied West Bank after Rabat in order to support its inhabitants. Only in 1988 did he conclude that those connections were interfering with the independent Palestinian political project and accede to the PLO's request to sever them. citeturn0search1

So the stabilizing bridge you're imagining actually existed for quite a while.

History simply moved increasingly against it.

Now your 1900 Palestinian test

This is where I think your Native-American analogy is excellent as a test, but produces a different answer than you expect.

Your proposition is now very precise:

I'm not saying the ancestors of today's Palestinians weren't there. I'm saying that around 1900, those people would not normally have answered “Palestinian” when asked who they were, in anything resembling today's national sense.

For a great many people, yes.

Someone living in Nablus in 1900 might have foregrounded being Muslim, Arab, Ottoman, Nabulsi, membership in a particular family/clan, or some combination. Identity was layered rather than our modern assumption that everybody has one overriding nationality.

So your underlying model—don't project today's fully developed Palestinian nationality backward unchanged into the Ottoman period—is correct.

Where your Indian analogy breaks is the categorical statement:

“They never would have called themselves Palestinian or anything antecedent to Palestinian.”

We actually start encountering evidence against that surprisingly early.

By the late Ottoman period, Filastin/Palestine was already a recognizable geographic-political category among inhabitants of the region. Ottoman officials themselves sometimes used “Palestine”; one governor of Jerusalem in 1911–12 actually called himself the “governor of Palestine,” even though that wasn't his formal administrative title. citeturn1search11

Then in 1911, Arab Christians in Jaffa founded a newspaper literally called Filastin—“Palestine.” It discussed local affairs, Zionist immigration and the welfare of the population. citeturn1search2turn1search0

And by 1911 historians find things like a countrywide political mobilization encompassing Muslims and Christians that some scholarship identifies as evidence of an emerging specifically Palestinian—as opposed simply to Ottoman or pan-Arab—identity. citeturn1search10

By 1914, Palestinian newspapers are publishing material that historians explicitly analyze as evidence of an emerging collective Palestinian identity. citeturn1search6

Notice the dates, though.

They're actually helpful to your larger argument.

This isn't evidence of an ancient fully crystallized Palestinian nation. It's evidence that the crystallization was underway immediately before World War I.

So if you transported yourself to 1900 and randomly interviewed 1,000 Arabic-speaking inhabitants, I would absolutely not expect something resembling:

“Nationality?”
“Palestinian.”

to dominate the answers.

But transport yourself forward only 10–20 years, especially into literate urban political circles, and the Palestinian identification is becoming visible enough that we can literally point to organizations, newspapers and political mobilization using Palestine as their frame.

That's substantially different from your Native-American analogy. There was never a pre-Columbian indigenous collective identity called “Indian,” because Indian is entirely an outsider's category generated by Europeans.

“Palestinian” developed partly from within the population itself, while those people simultaneously possessed Ottoman, Arab, Syrian, religious, familial and local identities.

A better analogy might therefore be “Italian” in the nineteenth century, though the histories obviously aren't interchangeable. A Sicilian peasant could have a powerful local identity and very little subjective attachment to some abstract Italian nation. That doesn't mean the later Italian identity was retroactively fabricated; it means a broader geographic-cultural category was being converted into a mass national identity.

Which gets us to your deeper point

I think the useful distinction you've been trying to articulate is:

A population can have a history without yet possessing a mass national identity organized around that history.

That's absolutely right.

And Palestinian national consciousness consolidated unusually late and under enormous external pressure—Ottoman collapse, British administration, Zionism, 1948, refugee displacement, Jordanian/Egyptian administration, 1967 occupation, and eventually the PLO.

Where I'd reject the Walking Dead/enclave model is that by the time Islamism becomes the major force you're talking about, Palestinian nationalism was already extremely well developed and was overwhelmingly led by secular nationalists.

That's actually a crucial chronological problem for the religious explanation.

The dominant Palestinian organization for decades was Fatah/PLO—not Hamas. Fatah was a secular nationalist movement. Palestinian Marxist organizations such as the PFLP were also enormously influential. Palestinian Christians participated heavily in Palestinian nationalism; George Habash, founder of the PFLP, was himself Christian.

Hamas isn't founded until 1987.

So political Islam did not fill a vacuum where Palestinian national identity failed to develop. It rose after Palestinian nationalism was already mature, partly by offering a religious alternative to secular Palestinian organizations that increasingly appeared corrupt, ineffective, compromised or incapable of delivering liberation/statehood.

That substantially changes the causal model.

You can still argue that religion provides a deeper transhistorical identity reservoir than modern Palestinian nationalism does. Absolutely. Islam reaches backward vastly farther than Palestinian nationalism. But the rise of Hamas can't really be explained as “there wasn't enough Palestinian identity, so Islam supplied one.”

The chronology fits something more like:

local/Ottoman/Arab/Palestinian overlapping identities → increasingly explicit Palestinian nationalism → catastrophe/dispersion strengthens it → secular revolutionary nationalism becomes dominant → PLO institutionalizes it → repeated political and military failures discredit parts of the secular establishment → Islamist nationalism becomes a powerful competitor.

And that brings us all the way back to your original intuition about Jordan.

The tragic counterfactual isn't really that Palestinians lacked an attractor point.

They eventually acquired an extremely powerful one.

The problem is that the attractor became national liberation from Israel rather than attachment to an already functioning neighboring state. By the time Hussein formally stepped aside, the PLO had spent decades becoming the institution around which that identity organized. Arab governments recognizing it in 1974 didn't create that development from nothing—but they very decisively chose Palestinian independent nationalism over the Jordanian alternative.

Whether that was ultimately wise is a much harder counterfactual. But you're correctly identifying 1970–74 as one of the major historical forks where the Jordan-centered future progressively closes and the independent-Palestinian-national-movement future wins. citeturn0search0turn0search1

And knowing about Black September makes that decision considerably less mysterious than it looks when starting the story in 1988. memcite

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: The origin story clears up the biggest ambiguity: the PLO did not begin with a quarrel against Jordan and later discover Israel as a unifying enemy. It was explicitly created around the Palestine/Israel conflict. The Jordanian civil-war problem came afterward, when Palestinian guerrilla organizations accumulated enough independent armed power inside Jordan to challenge Hussein’s sovereignty.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: The Daily Show comparison actually works rather well after one major correction: Craig Kilborn was the original host; Jon Stewart inherited an existing show and transformed what it was. Something structurally similar happened with the PLO, except the transformative newcomer was Fatah under Yasser Arafat. The crucial correction is that both versions were already centered on the struggle against Israel. The PLO did not start as some unrelated Palestinian/Jordanian movement and later discover Israel as its organizing enemy. citeturn382374news80turn382374search0

The cleanest chronology is this. After 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were refugees or displaced, while the territory that Palestinian Arab nationalists regarded as their homeland had been divided among Israel, Jordan and Egyptian-administered Gaza. During the 1950s, Arafat and several associates created Fatah independently of the Arab governments. Their basic conclusion was that the Arab states had failed Palestinians and that Palestinians themselves needed an armed national movement to recover Palestine. Fatah's first attempted guerrilla operation against Israel came in January 1965. citeturn382374news80

Separately, in 1964 the Arab League sponsored creation of the PLO, initially under Ahmad Shukeiri. There was actually an element of containing independent Palestinian militancy in this: Nasser and other Arab governments wanted a Palestinian representative organization, but one they could influence rather than allowing free-ranging guerrilla organizations to dictate when Arab states would get dragged into war. The original PLO therefore wasn't simply Arafat's organization under another name. Fatah existed independently, and initially somewhat suspiciously, alongside it. citeturn382374search0turn382374news80

And the original PLO's objective unquestionably concerned Israel. Its charter defined Palestine essentially by the former British Mandate boundaries and made “liberation” the organization's purpose. The later 1968 charter, adopted after Fatah and the guerrillas gained dominance, became even more explicit: armed struggle was declared the strategy for liberation. citeturn542226search0turn382374search14

Then comes your Jon-Stewart moment.

After Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967, the prestige of the Arab governments collapsed while Palestinian guerrilla organizations gained credibility. Fatah in particular benefited enormously from the 1968 Battle of Karameh in Jordan, where Palestinian fighters and the Jordanian army fought an Israeli incursion. The military result was complicated, but politically Arafat emerged enormously strengthened. Fatah then took over the PLO machinery, and Arafat became PLO chairman in 1969. citeturn382374news80

So roughly:

Arab-government-created PLO (1964) → independent guerrilla movements become more prestigious → Fatah captures the PLO (1968–69) → Arafat's PLO becomes the organization most people subsequently mean by “the PLO.”

That is very close to your Daily Show analogy.

Where Jordan enters is not as the PLO's original enemy but as collateral damage from the PLO's method of operating.

After 1967, Jordan contained enormous numbers of Palestinians and Palestinian refugees, and guerrilla groups used Jordanian territory as a base for operations against Israel. Gradually, some fedayeen organizations behaved less like guests under Jordanian sovereignty and more like an autonomous revolutionary authority. They established checkpoints, carried weapons openly, challenged Jordanian officials, and in some cases openly contemplated replacing the Hashemite monarchy. By 1970 Hussein was dealing with what amounted to competing armed sovereignty inside his own state. citeturn382374search4turn382374search16

That's what produces Black September.

So I would alter your proposed causal chain from:

internal Palestinian/Jordanian struggle → discovers anti-Israel cause → becomes PLO

to:

Israel/Palestine dispossession conflict → produces Palestinian armed nationalism → armed nationalist organizations establish themselves inside neighboring Arab countries → their refusal to subordinate themselves fully to those governments creates secondary conflicts with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, etc.

That distinction matters a lot. The movement wasn't searching for something to hate and eventually grabbing Israel. Israel was the central target before the PLO ever fought Hussein.

I would also separate anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism and rejection of Israel here, particularly when we're trying to build the historical causal model rather than make a moral assessment. Anti-Semitism certainly existed within Palestinian and wider Arab politics, sometimes grotesquely. But the founding political proposition of Fatah/PLO was more specifically that Israel had been established on Palestinian Arab homeland and should be undone through national liberation. Calling that simply an innate grip of anti-Semitism obscures why a secular Christian Palestinian revolutionary, an Arab nationalist Muslim, a Marxist Palestinian and an Islamist could all oppose Israel for substantially different ideological reasons.

And that leads directly to your religion hypothesis, because there's another fairly important correction:

The vine didn't originally grow around an Islamic pole

The early Palestinian revolutionary movement was strikingly secular.

Fatah was nationalist rather than Islamist. Arafat was certainly Muslim culturally and personally, but Fatah's political program wasn't “Islam must recover Jewish-held holy land.” The PLO deliberately presented Palestinians as a national people containing Muslims and Christians. Its major constituent organizations included Marxist and socialist groups. George Habash, who founded the highly militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was a Palestinian Christian.

That makes Islam a poor candidate for the pole around which early Palestinian nationalism wound itself.

A better picture is almost the reverse:

Palestinian secular nationalism constructs the trellis first. Islamist nationalism grows up it later.

Hamas isn't founded until 1987, more than twenty years after the PLO and almost forty years after 1948. By that point Palestinian national identity was anything but embryonic.

Your puberty analogy actually captures one part of the later split rather well. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Arafat's PLO had traveled through the whole revolutionary arc: armed liberation, spectacular violence and terrorism by constituent factions, exile after exile, failed attempts to alter the military balance, increasing diplomacy, recognition that Israel wasn't going away, and eventually bargaining over what portion of the original objective could actually be achieved. The 1988 shift toward recognition and then Oslo in 1993 were enormous departures from its original program. citeturn542226search15turn382374news80

Hamas arose partly in opposition to precisely that evolution. It fused Palestinian nationalism with Sunni Islamist ideology and rejected the PLO's movement toward permanent partition and recognition of Israel. So “the next generation concluded that the old revolutionary strategy hadn't failed because it was fundamentally unworkable; it had failed because its practitioners had compromised” is a much better approximation of Hamas's historical niche than saying religion created Palestinian nationalism in the first place.

Religion then gives that renewed rejectionism something the old secular PLO didn't possess: a transcendent justification that makes compromise harder. A nationalist can theoretically bargain over borders: we wanted 100%, reality permits 22%, take the state. If the territory is instead understood as sacred Islamic trust and conflict as religious obligation, the concession can become not merely undesirable but illegitimate. That really can warp the bargaining landscape in the direction you're describing.

On Palestinian identity, I think we're now arguing mostly about the word “coherent”

Your Richmond analogy gets at exactly the distinction.

There are at least three different things that can exist separately:

A geographic label: “Palestine is this region.”

An adjective of provenance: “Someone from this place is Palestinian.”

A national identity: “These other people and I constitute the Palestinian people, and that membership carries common political meaning.”

You can have the first two without the third being socially dominant.

And yes: the fact that intellectuals, journalists and political activists are explicitly trying to construct or popularize Palestinian collective consciousness around 1908–1914 is itself evidence that this consciousness wasn't yet universally self-evident. Rashid Khalidi's historical treatment emphasizes overlapping Ottoman, Arab, religious, local and increasingly Palestinian loyalties rather than pretending everybody awakened one morning in 1900 already possessing twentieth-century Palestinian nationality. One revealing example is Filastin's editor, Isa al-Isa: his own retrospective account describes his political concerns evolving from the affairs of his Arab Orthodox Christian community outward into broader Palestinian questions. citeturn382374search6

So I think this formulation captures what you've been saying without claiming more than the evidence allows:

Around 1900, the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Palestine constituted a recognizable regional population, and “Palestine” was a known geographic designation, but a specifically Palestinian national identity was still emerging and competed with stronger or equally strong local, religious, Ottoman and broader Arab identities. Over the following decades, political events progressively transformed Palestinian from a geographic identity into a mass national one.

I would be comfortable with that.

Where I still wouldn't go is “most would never have called themselves Palestinian.” That's extremely hard to demonstrate because, exactly as you point out, surviving newspapers and political documents disproportionately represent literate elites. We don't possess a Gallup poll of Ottoman peasants from 1900 asking them to rank their identities. So the strongest warranted conclusion is that Palestinian nationality wasn't yet the overwhelmingly dominant organizing identity, not that we can quantify how rarely an ordinary person might use the geographic identification.

And your observation about emergence is exactly right in a developmental sense: if historians talk about a national consciousness emerging, something less consolidated necessarily preceded it. That's not a semantic trick. National identities routinely develop by reorganizing pre-existing geographic, cultural, religious and political affiliations into something people increasingly treat as a common national membership.

And no, the British didn't invent “Palestine”

You were remembering the Philistine → Palestine genealogy, but you've moved the coinage forward by roughly seventeen centuries.

The name goes back to antiquity. Greek writers used forms related to Palaistinē, drawing ultimately on names associated with the Philistines. Under the Roman Empire, after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE, the province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina. The terminology continued in various geographical usages through Byzantine, Islamic and European history. Britain inherited and formalized Palestine as the English name of its Mandate after World War I; it didn't invent the geographic term. citeturn542226search5turn382374search8

Incidentally, this reinforces rather than destroys part of your identity argument. A very old place-name doesn't imply an equally ancient national identity. “Africa” is an ancient geographical name; that doesn't mean someone in Mali in 1400 primarily conceived of himself nationally as “African.” Place-name continuity and national-consciousness continuity are completely different questions.

And that's perhaps the cleanest synthesis of this whole branch of our discussion:

The geographic concept Palestine is ancient.
The population from which modern Palestinians descend is old.
A specifically Palestinian mass national consciousness is modern.
The PLO didn't create that consciousness, but it became its most important twentieth-century political institution.
And the PLO's armed conflict with Jordan was a consequence of its Israel-centered liberation strategy colliding with Jordanian sovereignty—not the forgotten origin from which hostility toward Israel subsequently emerged. citeturn542226search2turn382374search6

That last correction substantially changes the model; the rest of what you're doing—distinguishing a population, a geographic label, and an actually internalized national identity—is a useful distinction rather than a linguistic technicality. memcite

G: Yes—with one important distinction. A Greek-origin word could be externally coined without remaining an outsider label.

The eastern Mediterranean was exactly the kind of environment where our modern inside/outside distinction gets fuzzy. Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Aramaic-speaking peoples, Jews, later Romans, and others were trading, migrating, conquering, intermarrying, translating, and borrowing vocabulary from one another for centuries. A name recorded in Greek doesn't necessarily mean some distant foreigners arbitrarily invented a category and imposed it on people who had never encountered it.

In the Palestine case, it's fuzzier still because Greek Palaistinē probably wasn't invented from scratch by Greeks. It's generally connected to older regional names such as Egyptian Peleset and Hebrew Peleshet, associated initially with the Philistines and their territory. Greek usage then broadened geographically beyond the original Philistine coastal area.

So I'd distinguish three things:

Exonym: a name used by outsiders for a people/place. “Germany” in English versus Deutschland is an innocuous modern example.

Imposed exonym: outsiders create/apply a category that the people themselves don't recognize—your “Indian” example is much closer to this.

Borrowed/adopted geographical name: terminology may originate in another language but circulate so extensively that asking whether it's still “foreign” eventually becomes almost meaningless.

“Palestine” has elements of the first and third, across an extraordinarily long history. It isn't analogous to Europeans arriving in America and mistakenly calling unrelated indigenous peoples Indians.

And there's another wrinkle: we're talking about a place-name, not originally an ethnonym meaning the modern Palestinian people. Herodotus could describe a region using Palaistinē without thereby asserting, “These inhabitants constitute one nation called the Palestinians.” That's exactly the geographic/national distinction we were working out earlier.

Your Mediterranean intuition therefore points toward a broader historical problem: modern national borders encourage us to imagine ancient cultures as discrete containers when the Mediterranean often functioned more like a network. A coastal city could be politically subject to one empire, speak several languages, worship gods imported from somewhere else, use another people's commercial practices, and have names transmitted through still another language.

image_group{"layout":"carousel","aspect_ratio":"16:9","query":["ancient Mediterranean trade routes map Phoenician Greek Levant","ancient eastern Mediterranean map Greece Phoenicia Egypt Levant trade"]}

That's particularly true of the Levant because it's simultaneously a Mediterranean coastline and the land bridge connecting Egypt with Syria/Mesopotamia. It has spent an almost absurd amount of history being crossed, traded through, conquered and culturally recombined.

And I agree with your Dickens analogy concerning the earlier discussion. That's not really an argument that our historical evidence is worthless; it's an argument about sampling bias. We have disproportionately preserved the people capable of leaving durable evidence: governments, institutions, wealthy people, educated political activists, journalists, clergy, merchants, etc. The Palestinian newspaper editor consciously discussing Palestinian identity in 1911 is excellent evidence that the concept existed. He's much weaker evidence for estimating what percentage of agricultural laborers around Nablus would spontaneously have answered “Palestinian” to “What are you?”

Those are genuinely different evidentiary questions. For the second one, the honest historical answer may permanently remain something like “we know the identity was developing, but we cannot reconstruct its population-level subjective prevalence with modern polling precision.”

That isn't merely missing a few documents. The measurement instrument we'd really want—systematic questioning of representative ordinary people—essentially wasn't being used. memcite