the name palestine derives from an ethnic group that occupied the gaza strip during the iron age and leading into the classical period and that is referenced in the bible as the philistines. this ethnic group is also referenced in egyptian hieroglyphs as having migrated into the region during a period called the bronze age collapse, c 1500 bce. cross-disciplinary historical investigations, including genetic studies, have identified the philistines as a greek ethnic group that moved into the gaza area as a part of a large migration southwards that the egyptians referred to as 'sea peoples' and would appear to have been a mix of indo-european groups, including halstatt period celts. these sea peoples conquered the eastern mediterranean region and dismantled most of the urban centres, replacing them with a seafaraing civilization that became what we call the classical civilization of greeks and phonecians, as told to us in the homeric epics. my own opinion after having looked into it is that they were essentially early vikings. 

during the period that the philistines lived in gaza, west semitic speaking tribes inhabited the region between syria and egypt. these people are known to history variously as phoenicians (the greek name for them) or canaanites (apparently their name for themselves), and what we call israel and jewish identity broke off from the canaanites some time during the iron age, but it actually remains unclear how due to the obscuring and enduring influence of the bible, which is a useless source of actual history. there is essentially no evidence that anything in the bible before the captivity is anything more than a late founding myth, but it is relatively clear that a semitic speaking people migrated into the area with the persians and re-occupied the phoenecian coast, after it had been devastated by the barbaric assyrians. these are the people we today call the jews. outside of a linguistic continuity, it's not clear what relationship these jews actually had to the canaanites and phoenecians, the remnants of which fled assyrian barbarism by migrating to north africa. however, these jews then remained put in the levant through most of antiquity, while living in close proximity to the greek  philistines, who, quite oddly, were actually there first.

what eventually happened was that the romans conquered the entire area, made the area then called judea into several different provinces and, many centuries later, eventually renamed the area from judea to philistinia in a conscious attempt to redefine the space ethnically, and in an act that we would today label clearly as genocide. before it was persia,  the mortal, perpetual enemy of rome was carthage, until it was destroyed. the historical sources are not there to back me up, but i strongly suspect that the destruction of judaea was the last stage in the destruction of carthage and that most of the tropes we today label as anti-semitic (like the baby-eating thing) are actually roman propaganda against the carthaginians (although the carthaginians actually do appear to have practiced a type of child sacrifice relatively late into antiquity). this decision by rome to change the name of the province was eventually adopted by conquering arabs, who inherited the name of the province as philistinia, which in arab is falasteen and in english is palestine.

in depth genetic studies on the current inhabitants of gaza and the west bank, as well as what we call israeli arabs, indicate that they are overwhelmingly hebrew in ancestry. that's right - the palestinians are actually converted jews. however, if we could find some actually philistines in gaza today, and we no doubt could if we looked hard enough, we would learn that they are of r1* indo-european greek ancestry. these philistines could perhaps migrate back to europe; i'd propose their quality of life would dramatically increase, if they did. 

while the question of eastern european jewry's origins is a valid scientific question, it has at this point been extensively studied and determined that there was a genetic bottleneck that took place and that a small number of middle eastern men moved into eastern europe with a smaller number of women and did eventually marry some of the slavic speaking women that were indigenous to the region but overall retained an almost gross level of inbreeding. as such, it has been thoroughly scientifically proven that eastern european jews do in fact have overwhelming middle eastern ancestry. the claim otherwise is intuitive and based on skin colour, but skin colour is not exactly a fixed characteristic, and people that are not of subsaharan african ancestry will vary their skin tones wildly depending on their exposure to sunlight. pigmentation is a variable trait and an adaptation. my own skin colour has varied dramatically from swedish white to sicilian brown, and my picture archive demonstrates it clearly.

while the actual truth is that both jews and palestinians are actually hebrews, they are just hebrews with different religions, it nonetheless follows that philistines are a european tribe and ethnic group, while the jews are clearly of west semitic ancestry (despite having very curious iranian cultural overtones). if anybody should go back to europe, it should be the philistines, if we insist on having a witch hunt to actually find them.