Palestine is an idea in people’s minds, not a geological or topographical or physical reality in the natural world. This paper examines what the people of Palestine thought about this idea of Palestine from 1600-1850. For many decades, the conventional wisdom was that Palestine was forgotten sometime after the Crusader conquest until its late 19th century revival. This paper challenges the conventional wisdom on the issue through an in-depth examination of court records, travelogs, legal opinions, biographical dictionaries and chronicles. My argument is that, first, since Palestine was a political unit during Byzantine and early Islamic periods, and since Christian and Islamic literature got canonized, the idea of Palestine was infused in 17th, 18th and 19th century works in history, biography, hagiography, Hadith and Bible studies, travel and merits literature, and even jurisprudence produced by the people of Palestine. In other words, Muslim and Christian scholars in Palestine continued to cite the earlier sources of their cannon throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and so Palestine continued to be remembered despite its political retreat. And, second, my argument is that the people from Ramla and its surroundings called the region, “Palestine,” to describe their current place of residence, including folks like The scholar Abu al-‘Awn Muhammad al-Ghazzi al-Shafi‘i al- Faruqi (d.1504), Khayr al-Din al-Ramli (d. 1671), Najm al-Din (fl. 1718) and Yusuf Jahshan (c. 1760s). That’s because the city of Ramla was the political capital of the District of Palestine in the early Islamic period and its economic hub for hundreds of years thereafter. It lay at the crossroads of the key trading routes within the District of Palestine as well as the route connecting Damascus to Cairo, and so the idea of Palestine persisted in Ramla. Palestine was part of the geographical lexicon for learned Christian and Muslims Arabs of Palestine throughout the period of study, and it held special importance for the people of Ramla.