The Overton Window and the Battle for Palestine

How Language and Narrative Turned the Meaning of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” Upside Down

Most people think history is shaped by battles and treaties.

Those certainly matter. But before political reality changes, something less visible often changes first: the language people use to describe that reality.

Ideas once dismissed as absurd gradually become acceptable. New terminology appears. Old meanings fade. Eventually, people forget that the words they use ever meant anything else.

Political scientist Joseph Overton described this phenomenon through what later became known as the Overton window—the range of ideas considered socially acceptable to discuss at a given time. Although Overton formulated the concept in the 1990s, the process itself is much older. Throughout history, societies have repeatedly shifted the boundaries of what seemed obvious, reasonable, or unquestionable.

The history of the words Palestine and Palestinian provides an illuminating example of how such shifts can transform public understanding.

The Overton Window

The Overton window does not determine what is true.

It describes the range of ideas that society considers acceptable to discuss, endorse, or implement at a given moment.

Ideas outside that window are often dismissed as unthinkable or extremist. Ideas inside it are regarded as reasonable, mainstream, or even self-evident.

As public attitudes evolve, the window itself shifts. An idea once considered beyond the pale may gradually enter mainstream discourse. This evolution is often illustrated as a progression:

Unthinkable → Radical → Acceptable → Sensible → Popular → Policy

The labels vary among different authors, but the underlying principle remains the same: ideas can migrate from the fringe to the mainstream.

As familiarity grows, resistance declines. Once an idea is embraced by journalists, academics, educators, politicians, and international institutions, it eventually becomes part of conventional wisdom—and may ultimately be reflected in public policy.

People often assume that public opinion changes because new facts emerge.

More often than facts themselves, it is the interpretation of facts through language and narrative that reshapes public opinion.

Words Shape Reality

Political conflicts are fought not only over territory but also over vocabulary.

Changing a word changes the assumptions attached to it.

When a familiar word acquires a new meaning, the transition often goes unnoticed because the word itself remains unchanged.

The map looks the same.

The dictionary entry looks familiar.

Yet the underlying concept has been replaced.

This process may be called semantic capture: preserving a word while replacing its historical referent.

Once semantic capture succeeds, later generations often assume the new meaning always existed.

Palestine Before the Shift

For centuries, Palestine referred primarily to a geographic region.

During the British Mandate, Palestinian was likewise a geographic designation.

Jewish institutions openly used the name:

• The Palestine Post
• The Palestine Symphony Orchestra
• The Anglo-Palestine Bank
• The Palestine Electric Corporation

Internationally, “Palestinian” was overwhelmingly associated with the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine.

Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the region, by contrast, identified themselves primarily through religion, locality, family, or as Arabs or Southern Syrians. A distinct Palestinian Arab national identity had not yet been invented, and many Arab political leaders rejected the label “Palestinian” because it was closely associated with the Zionist institutions and the British Mandate.

The word itself was not yet the object of political competition.

The First Shift

As the twentieth century progressed, terminology slowly evolved.

Instead of speaking simply about Arabs living in Palestine, public discourse increasingly referred to Palestinian Arabs.

At first glance, this appeared to be only a descriptive phrase.

In reality, it subtly changed the role of the adjective.

“Palestinian” was no longer merely geographical.

It was becoming ethnic and national.

The Overton window had begun to move.

The Second Shift

The next transformation was even more significant.

Gradually, the qualifier disappeared.

Palestinian Arab became simply Palestinian.

The adjective became a noun.

The geographic description became a national identity.

Eventually, expressions such as the Palestinian people, Palestinian nation, and Palestinian homeland entered mainstream political language.

Whether one views this development as the construction of a new national narrative or as political rebranding, the linguistic transformation is unmistakable.

The meaning of an old word had changed.

Refugees and Reframing

The same pattern can be observed in the language of refugees.

Before the establishment of Israel, the term “Palestine refugees” had a straightforward geographic meaning: a refugee in Palestine. Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe and later from Arab countries arrived there and were, in that sense, Palestine refugees.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, international discussion increasingly focused on the Arab refugees who left or were displaced from Mandatory Palestine.

Over time, the expression “Palestine refugees” became closely associated with those Arab refugees, especially after the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The agency deliberately excluded Jews from the definition of Palestine refugees, including those who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries.

Eventually, Palestinian refugees came to signify members of a fabricated Palestinian Arab national identity, and the adjective “Palestinian” itself had acquired an entirely different political meaning.

Again, the vocabulary remained familiar.

The concepts behind it had changed.

Other Narrative Shifts

Vocabulary rarely changes in isolation.

As one concept shifts, related concepts often shift with it.

Consider several examples of changing narratives:

• Palestine as the Jewish national home → Palestine as the Palestinian homeland
• “Palestinian” as a geographic designation → “Palestinian” as an Arab national identity
• Jewish refugees rebuilding a homeland → European colonizers
• Arab military intervention in 1948 → Palestinian resistance
• A regional conflict between states → A struggle between colonizers and an indigenous people

Whether one agrees with every characterization is less important than recognizing the mechanism.

Political language evolves.

The Overton window determines which vocabulary becomes respectable.

Narrative Before Facts

The relationship between facts and narratives is often misunderstood.

Many people assume that facts create narratives.

In practice, narratives frequently determine which facts people notice, trust, remember, and regard as significant.

The influence of narrative is especially visible during major historical events. The atrocities of October 7, 2023, were documented not only by victims and investigators but also by many of the perpetrators themselves. Yet the availability of extensive photographic and video evidence did not produce a universal consensus about what those events meant.

At the same time, numerous images and videos—including misleading material, content taken out of context, staged scenes, and images generated by artificial intelligence—have circulated widely on social media, particularly when they reinforced an already established narrative about Gaza.

Some depicted impossible scenes of snowstorms, catastrophic floods, or other dramatic events that never occurred, yet they spread widely because they matched expectations shaped by existing narratives.

This does not mean facts are irrelevant. It suggests that public perception is shaped not only by the availability of evidence, but also by the narratives through which that evidence is interpreted. Images do not speak for themselves; their meaning is shaped by the framework in which they are presented.

Facts alone rarely determine public opinion. Narratives influence which facts people notice, trust, remember, and assign significance to.

The Arab-Israeli conflict (and increasingly a UN-Israeli conflict) is not unique in this respect. Similar dynamics can be observed in debates over race, immigration, climate change, gender, and countless other politically charged issues.

The history of Palestine is one of the clearest illustrations of how changing language can reshape historical memory.

Why It Matters

The Overton window is not merely about politics.

It is about memory.

When language changes gradually, people often forget that it has changed at all.

The new terminology begins to feel timeless.

History is then read backward through contemporary definitions.

Words that once meant one thing are assumed always to have meant that thing.

This is why debates over names are never merely semantic.

They shape how entire histories are remembered.

The Battle Over Words

Every society inherits vocabulary from previous generations.

Sometimes those words preserve history.

Sometimes they overwrite it.

Understanding the Overton window helps us recognize that political change often begins long before laws change or borders move. It begins when familiar words quietly acquire unfamiliar meanings.

The history of Palestine and Palestinian illustrates how powerful that process can be.

Whether one ultimately accepts or rejects any particular historical interpretation, one lesson remains clear:

Before narratives reshape history, they first reshape language.

Reclaiming the Words

If language can reshape history, it can also restore it.

The Overton window did not create the redefinition of Palestine and Palestinian, but it helps explain how that redefinition became normalized. Once the new terminology entered mainstream discourse, it gradually displaced meanings that had existed for centuries. The shift of the Overton window caused lasting damage to the historical understanding of these words.

Reclaiming them will not be easy. Over decades, governments, international organizations, educators, journalists, and popular culture have reinforced the newer meanings until they became accepted as self-evident. Yet the same mechanism that normalized one vocabulary can normalize another.

The difference is fundamental.

Creating a new identity requires persuading people to adopt unfamiliar meanings. Reclaiming an older one means restoring meanings that already existed for centuries.

For most of recorded history, Palestine referred to the Land of Israel, and Palestinian was a designation closely associated with the Jews of Palestine. In some places, even diaspora Jews who had never lived in Palestine were referred to by their neighbors as Palestinians, reflecting the longstanding association between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland.

Reclaiming these terms is therefore not the invention of a new narrative but the recovery of an older one.

That is the purpose of my ongoing work, including The Palestinian Identity Manifesto, Greek Art of Translating Meaning, Narrative War of Attrition, and related essays. My aim is to reclaim the name Palestine and the term Palestinian from appropriation and restore their historical connection to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.

Overton windows can move in both directions.

Words conquered memory once.

Words can reclaim it.

—

See Also

Hijacked Ideas and Stolen Names: The Meme of “Palestine”