Are Palestinians and Philistines The Same People?

Common Sense Commentary: It is totally impossible to explain the shifting tides of history. Changes over a period of hundreds of years, causes of conflicts, wars and changing borders. That is far too complicated to know or understand all of the details. History is written by the winners of wars and changes of borders ... not by the losers of them. That said, here is my understanding of the subjects of my title, "Are Palestinians And Philistines The Same People?".

"Palestine" did not even exist until 137 AD.  It began when Roman Emperor Hadrian defeated rebellious Jews in a series of wars, and murdered close to two million of them. He then erased the name "Judaea" and "Israel"  from the early maps. He wanted to do away with the history of the Jews ever being in the Holy Land. The new name, He gave the Jew's homeland, which they had been driven from, was "Syria Palaestina" which, the latter, is a rendering of "Philistine", but who knows why he named it that.  Maybe as an insult to the Jews whom he hated or maybe he gave that land to the Jew's arch enemy the Philistines. After that change, no Jews were allowed to enter the renamed country, "Syria Palaestina".  Over the following hundreds of years, after the fall of Rome, Jews began to slowly return to their original homeland, though persecuted by the newer inhabitants called Palestinians. The Palestinians were and are a mixture of primarily Philistines, immigrants, displaced persons, Arabs and from various other Middle Eastern countries. Palaestina, in the absence of Jews, became a catch all for wandering, homeless, exiled, refugee and renagade people. That small portion of God's original, and larger gift, of a homeland to the Jews, is still in effect and always will be. So the answer is, no they are not exactly the same, though there is Philistine DNA in the mix. Hadrian really complicated matters by renaming the Jewish homeland.  However, it is understandable that the modern Palestinians who had lived their entire lives, and their forebears, for centuries, in that land, considered it their own. It was thinly settled when the restored nation of Israel was established by the U.N. in 1948. That is one reason the U.N. saw fit to send the surviving Jews, of Germany, and Europe in general, back there. they had no other nation. Another reason was that the Arab nations had been on the German's side of WWII and were not in the good graces of the super powers in control of the U.N. at that time. This was before Arabs became rich and powerful on oil. If the Palestinians had not been stirred up by the Arab, Muslim leadership surrounding Israel, they could have worked out an agreement which would have benefited both Palestinians and Jews, but it was a hopeless situation. Today Israel looks like the Garden Of Eden compared to the surrounding lands. I sympathize with the relatively few Palestinians who, because of war and conflict, left their homes, but the fact is, God gave the land to the Jews for an everlasting covenant. A covenant cannot be changed and they did not leave the land willingly but were driven out of it.

The renewed establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 confirms the fact, and it is commonly known, that Israel had once occupied that same land... as a separate nation.  It was not a beginning of the nation but a returning to it, to a much smaller portion of land, within their old borders. The U.N. dared not give back the land mass the Jewish people had previously occupied which God had given it "forever". There was too much Arab, Muslim and other anti-Semitic opposition. 

Here is what God told Moses, who had disobeyed Him by double striking the rock, and thereby lost his opportunity to enter the Jewish promised land. He would see it from a distant mountain-top and then die there, but the children of Israel would enter their "Promised Land" in the land of Canaan and remain until their final dispersion from it by the Romans. Even that was within God's permissive will and probably His perfect will, for His own purposes,  at the time, but His covenant with Israel still stands. The land is theirs.

The Covenant Promise:
"And the LORD spake unto Moses that selfsame day, saying, Get thee up into this mountain Abarim, unto mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, that is over against Jericho; and behold the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel for a possession:  And die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people; as Aaron thy brother died in mount Hor, and was gathered
unto thy people; as Aaron thy brother died in mount Hor, and was gathered unto his people: Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin; because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel. Yet thou shalt see the land before thee; but thou shalt not go thither unto the land which I give the children of Israel." 
Deuteronomy 32:48-52.