Coming Soon to Your Home-Town: Palestine, USA

Last month, the Arab-American Business and Professional Association (ABPA) unveiled the first of its "Welcome to Little Palestine" signs in Bridgeview, a suburb 15 miles southwest of Chicago. The sign was erected at 83rd Street and Harlem Avenue, welcoming visitors to an area stretching from 79th Street to 113th Street that ABPA calls one of the largest Palestinian-American communities in the United States. A second sign followed at Westfield Plaza on 87th Street. ABPA president Rush Darwish declared at that unveiling: "This unveiling is more than a sign -- it is a declaration of who we are."

The designation came after Illinois lawmakers advanced House Joint Resolution 46, which designates Harlem Avenue as "Little Palestine Way," running through Bridgeview, Burbank, Chicago Ridge, Palos Hills, and Worth. The resolution passed the Illinois House in November 2025 by a vote of 76 to 33 and is pending further consideration in the state Senate. Cook County officials went further still, proclaiming April 7 as "Little Palestine Day."

The corridor is, by any measure, a substantial Arab-American commercial presence. According to local business owners, the area is home to more than 200 Arab-owned businesses. One of them, Waseem Al-Wawi, co-owner of Milk Cake Bakery at 9150 S. Harlem Ave., described the district as a place where "you can find anything you want" as a Palestinian. Across the street, M'dakhan restaurant owner Muhammad Baste, a lifelong Bridgeview resident, called the sign "an honor and a responsibility at the same time."

What the press releases did not mention is that the branding exercise is part of a deliberate, multi-year campaign. ABPA's "Little Palestine Project" aims to promote tourism, verify and highlight Arab-owned businesses, and position the area as an economic and cultural destination. It is not a formal municipal renaming -- Bridgeview remains Bridgeview -- but the symbolic weight of government-backed signs declaring a piece of American soil "Little Palestine" carries a meaning that goes far beyond restaurant directories.

Bridgeview is not even the first American community to plant a "Palestine" flag -- literally. In Paterson, New Jersey, a city with a substantial Arab-American population concentrated in South Paterson, Mayor Andre Sayegh has publicly called the city "the capital of Palestine in the US." In 2022, Paterson officially renamed a five-block stretch of South Main Street "Palestine Way." The city raised the Palestinian flag at City Hall and established a sister-city relationship with Ramallah. 

The sister-city relationship with Ramallah carries its own baggage. Ramallah serves as the administrative headquarters of the Palestinian Authority -- the same PA that, according to Israeli and American analysts, "allows Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups to operate in the West Bank without significant limitations" and continues to provide welfare payments to convicted terrorists and their families. 

IDF forces have conducted raids directly in Ramallah's city center to dismantle Hamas financial networks, storming currency exchange offices used as fronts to launder money and funnel funds to Hamas terrorists. Hamas, for its part, contemptuously dismisses the PA itself as "the Ramallah Authority," competing with it for dominance over the same population. Paterson, New Jersey -- a city in the United States of America -- has made this seat of dysfunction and terror financing its sister city. 

Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist massacre of 1,200 Israelis, the Paterson city council passed an anti-Israel resolution calling for a ceasefire, and Palestinian flags multiplied throughout the neighborhood.

The cumulative effect across both states is the carving of American urban and suburban geography into symbolic extensions of a political movement -- a movement whose name, ironically, is borrowed.

Illinois already has a Palestine -- a real one, a historic one -- and it has nothing to do with Arab nationalism.

When French explorer Jean LaMotte first came upon the region in 1678, he named it Palestine because it reminded him of the biblical land of milk and honey. The town was officially recognized in 1811, over 150 years before Yasser Arafat rebranded Arab refugees as a distinct nation. 

Palestine, Illinois, sits in Crawford County, and its name was drawn from the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), specifically from the Roman-era Latin corruption of Pelishtim -- the Philistines -- a name the Roman emperor Hadrian imposed on the land of Israel in the 2nd century CE specifically to erase Jewish presence after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt.

Palestine, Texas, in Anderson County, was named after Palestine, Illinois, by preacher Daniel Parker, a minister of Pilgrim Church who had migrated with other settlers from that town. The Texas Legislature formally established it as the county seat of Anderson County in 1846. Palestine, Texas predates the PLO by 118 years.

Both American Palestines took their names from the biblical geography of the Jewish people -- the same land the Almighty promised to Avraham Avinu (Abraham our father): "On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: 'To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.'" (Genesis 15:18). The American Palestines were named for the Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) of scripture, not for a modern political movement that did not exist until the 1960s.

While the earlier municipal designations were biblically oriented, the new "Little Palestines" are decidedly political and a bit anachronistic, emphasizing the fact that Palestine has never been an independent Arab nation. 

During the British Mandate in Palestine of 1920-1948, Arabs rejected the title of "Palestinian" as it emphasized British rule. Jews, however, embraced the term as a recognition of their connection to the land.  The term was adopted by Arabs in the region after Yasser Arafat, with substantial Soviet assistance, established the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. The PLO carried out terrorist attacks targeting Jews worldwide. In 1993, the Oslo Accords established the PLO as the governing body of Judea and Samaria.

According to former Romanian Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1960s. He states that the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow.

Arafat himself, quoted by journalist Alan Hart in his 1984 biography, is reported to have said: "The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."

The 1964 PLO charter itself defined the Palestinians as "an integral part of the Arab nation," rather than a distinct nationality, and vowed allegiance to pan-Arab unity. There was no pretense of a unique "Palestinian" people -- that came later, as a strategic rebranding.

Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, was candid about it in 1977: "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people."

Pacepa explained how Arafat was shaped for the role. The KGB trained him at a special school in Balashikha, east of Moscow. It then destroyed the official records of his birth in Cairo and replaced them with documents stating he was born in Jerusalem -- making him a "Palestinian" by a manufactured birth certificate.

The name "Palestine" in the American landscape was always a reference to the biblical Eretz Yisrael -- the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the land of Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses our teacher), the land that the Almighty designated for the Jewish people. 

When a French explorer named a piece of the Illinois prairie after the biblical land of milk and honey in 1678, he was thinking of the Hebrew Bible. When a Baptist preacher carried that name to Texas in 1846, he was thinking of scripture. Neither of them was thinking of a Soviet-engineered political identity assembled in Moscow in the early 1960s by a Cairo-born operative whose birth records had to be falsified to make his story work. 

The signs going up in Bridgeview are not a celebration of ancient heritage. They are the latest installment of a decades-long rebranding campaign -- and the irony is that the town they are using as a backdrop already belongs, in name, to a history that predates the entire enterprise by centuries.

Originally published at Israel 365 News