"Thank you, Prof Howayda
We are fortunate to have you as the founding Director of PLSC.
I hope under your directorship, PLSC will be the hub of dynamic, powerful and effective scholarship about the Land and people of Palestine
and will be a shining light in the imposed darkness about Palestine’s just cause."
Historically, Palestine has been, and still is, the center of the world’s attention.
Many foreign invaders came and left, the Romans, the Greeks and the Crusaders. The People of the Land remained essentially the same. Some may have changed their religion and language, but they maintained their bond to the land, immortalized in their worship places, shrines and sacred land features.
Invaders left few traces of their presence. The people of the land absorbed them and they remained entrenched in the land. There are few countries in the world that had been subject to so many invasions. They were all gone, except, for now, the Zionist invasion. That is because we have not yet seen the coming end of this violent history. Like all unnatural events, epidemics and historical aberrations, it will no doubt vanish.
With this long trail of invaders, Palestine became the most well-documented country in the world. It surpasses many capitals of Europe. Unlike other histories, Palestine was inflicted with the largest and longest campaign of misinformation, forgery and deception. This forgery and deception are still going on today, only with more sophisticated but spurious scholarship and shady ideology, assisted by well-oiled lobby campaigns.
Palestine is the homeland of Jesus Christ. On its soil he walked, in its villages he dwelt. Because of him, Palestine was immortalized as the Holy Land. This is how it was shown in the Roman history.
With the departure of the Romans, Byzantine Christian Palestine recorded the early history of Christianity. We are indebted to a Palestinian Bishop, known by his Hellenistic name, Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestinae (260-339 AD). He was baptized and ordained at Caesarea in about 313 AD. He is credited with writing an account of the first centuries of Christianity.
His most important work, used in our study, is the Onomasticon. It was compiled as a directory of place names, or "gazetteer", for pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. It also provided historical geographers with contemporary knowledge of 4th-century Palestine.
His text was converted to maps like this:
We made a full study of the Bishop’s book. By comparison of names in his book with our modern Atlas of Palestine, we identified at least 139 village names and 50 place names, known to us today. Here are their Byzantine names with the phonetically similar modern names in the same locations. Those same names existed 17 centuries ago.