In 1925, Arab leaders in Palestine were very upset over those two letters, so they went to court.
From the Palestine Bulletin, October 13, 1925:
As already reported, the Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Haycraft, and Mr. Justice Corrie, heard on Saturday last the complaint preferred by Mr. Jamal Husseini against the Palestine Government. The plaintiff demanded that the Court should oblige the Government to remove on "stamps" and other official documents the Hebrew letters "E-I" (being the initials for the Hebrew word, "Eretz-Israel," leaving only the word "Palestine" in Hebrew.That last sentence says volumes.
Counsel for the plaintiff based his prosecution on Article 22 of the British Mandate for Palestine that states that anything inscribed in one of the official languages must be transcribed into the other two languages. The initials "E-I" (Eretz Israel) were inscribed in Hebrew only, in contravention to the provisions of the Mandate. The Chief Justice asked Counsel whether he would agree that the initials "E-I" be also inscribed in Arabic and English. Counsel replied in the negative. Their Honours then pointed out that the initials "E-I" was the translation of Palestine. Counsel contended that "E-I" was not the right translation of "Palestine" their meaning being "The Land of the Jews." He said that "Palestina" was already inscribed, and that the affixing of the initials "E-I" was tautological. He was of opinion that their addition constituted a political point to prove that the land was that of the Jews. The Philistines and the Jews were two separate nations, existing at separate times, and the meaning of one did not apply to the other. He requested the Court therefore that: it should order the deletion of the initials "E-I" from stamps and other official documents in Palestine - or alternatively, to order the inscription of the words "Suria El Jenobia" (Southern Syria), Palestine's Arabic cognomen.
Jamal Husseini, who was one of the architects of the 1929 massacres of Jews and remained a major Arab leader in Palestine through the 1940s, felt that in order to keep things equal, Arabs should be able to officially use their own name for Palestine just as the Jews were using Eretz Yisrael.
And what name is that? Southern Syria!
This is already several years after Arab leadership officially abandoned their desire to integrate Palestine into Syria, but it shows that Arab masses clearly still considered Palestine to be a mere district of a larger Arab nation, not a nation of its own.
Notice also that Husseini regarded the Arabs of Palestine at the time to have been descended from the Philistines, not the Canaanites, as today's Arab leaders pretend.
Also, Jamal Husseini admitted that the Jewish people are a nation - something strenuously denied by Palestinian Arab leaders today.
This little episode shows that Palestinian nationalism is a fiction. It only exists as a means to destroy Jewish nationalism, and if it wasn't for Zionism there would never have been any desire on the part of Arabs to have an independent Palestinian state.
It shows that Palestinian Arabs have changed their supposed history as a people in reaction to whatever the contemporary political climate allows.
There is one more lesson from this episode as well.
The Palestine Bulletin article was reproduced in the Macquarie University law school archives. But their version engaged in a little political correctness replacing the word "Philistines" with "Palestinians" and "Palestina" with "Palestine." Because it is not fashionable for modern Westerners to acknowledge that there were no "Palestinian" nation, ever. The idea that a law school would silently change the text of a 1925 newspaper article in order to align it with today's zeitgeist is but a tiny indication of how history itself has been distorted by today's universities for political purposes.
You can learn a lot from a stamp, if you are willing to keep your mind open.
