The notions of nation and nationalism have played a central role in
the process of shaping, making and constructing our modern world
and its history. Since the nineteenth century, the nation has
proclaimed itself the guardian and champion of all history. With
the birth of the nation, national historical narratives were also
born. The need arose to create and write authoritative lineages and
chronologies that would present the nation not only as an entity
but often as ancient and primordial.
Accordingly, it has been the task of some historians to provide
nations with a sense of historical legitimacy. The distinction
between dead past and living present is what invents historical
chronologies that divide the past into different periods assumed to
have beginnings and endings (de Certeau 1988). The nation appears
as the messiah of history not only because it "consummates all
history" (Benjamin 1978: 312) but also because it presents itself
as the end of history. Studying the formation and development of a
specific national identity is almost more of an academic exercise
in "historical teleology" than a search for the actual historical
roots of a nation. It is a process that begins from an already
known conclusion whereby the historian selects events and employs
them retrospectively.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find different narratives on
the evolution of each nation. Each national historical narrative
depends on what a historian has chosen as a beginning point and as
significant events. Of course, the historian does not always select
consciously. It is rather a process where interests intersect with
ideology, the structure of knowledge, and historical imagination,
all of which influence the historian.
Multiple Narrations
The history of Palestinian national identity is one example of the
multiplicity of historical narratives, whose implications are
particularly weighty in the Palestinian context. It is not only
that Palestinians form a national group whose very existence is
often questioned by Zionist denial. There are also internal
contradictions inside the Palestinian discourse itself, partly
because the discourse emerged out of historical processes that were
often intended precisely to prevent its emergence.
The construction of a modern Palestinian identity points to a
number of challenges and contradictions that simultaneously
produced it and made it ambiguous. For example, Palestinian
discourse in the 1960s was essentially a pan-Arabist discourse that
stemmed from belief in the existence of a larger Arab nation.
Simultaneously, it argued that Palestinians constituted a nationed
people, in order to counter Zionist discourse that insisted
Palestinians were simply Arabs living in Palestine and as such
ought to be absorbed by a larger Arab nation. In other words,
Palestinian discourse both rejected the Arab sameness argument
because Zionism employed it and, at the same time, advocated a form
of Arab nationalism. In any case, Palestinian and Arab discourses
have already bypassed this 1960s predicament.
Today, even fervent proponents of Arab nationalism accept the
existence of different Arab identities, while Palestinians are
generally recognized by the international community, and even by
Israel, as a people. Nonetheless, since such developments are
essentially political in nature, they do not imply that there is
agreement about how a collective Palestinian identity came into
existence, or its nature and boundaries.
Studying the history of identity through a reading of the past is a
matter of utmost importance to the Palestinians themselves not only
because it is necessary for the negotiation process. It is tied to
the ways that Palestinians define themselves, envision their
future, and determine the boundaries of their national political
community. However, most Palestinian historians have not adequately
considered the question of Palestinian national identity. The few
studies dealing with the issue expose, at best, disagreements among
historians about the origins and evolution of the Palestinians as a
people with identity.
Some historians, particularly Israeli, propose that Palestinian
identity was a reaction to Zionist presence, having a recent origin
in the 1960s. Others couple the two national movements by saying
that "the Zionist movement is one of the most successful national
movements in history for it started with the aim of forming one
national group, and it ended up with forming two" (see Pappe). Some
Palestinian studies also view the formation of Palestinian identity
as a relatively recent historical process going back to the events
surrounding the start of Zionist immigration to Palestine, the
British Mandate period and the failure of the Arab nationalist
movement in the aftermath of World War II. Muhammad Muslih (1988),
for example, states that Palestinian nationalism was "ushered into
its own independent existence mainly as a result of the chaos and
disarray of the larger Arab nationalist movement" after the fall of
Prince Faisal's government between 1918 and 1920.
In short, theories about Palestinian identity range from total
negation of its existence (Arab nationalists and Zionists) to
insistence on a long historical presence that goes back to the
Canaanites (al-Hout and others).
Interdependent Narratives and "Consciousness"
My starting point is the belief that nations are not infinite
primordial entities, as some national thinkers claim. Rather, the
nation or people as a collectivity is basically, as Anderson has
shown, an imagined political community produced at specific time
and place. Construction of such an imagined community is not only
an economic and political process but also a cultural-rhetorical
one. Therefore, writing its history must not be limited to the
political events that produce the nation-people, but must also
include the discourse through which the nation is produced and
constructed, and the history employed in this production process.
Accordingly, the study of the emergence of the Palestinians as a
people must be looked at not only through the development of their
political institutions (e.g. al-Shareef) but also through the study
of the Palestinian imagination, the kind of discourse it produced,
and the historical factors influencing it. All contributed to the
construction of a Palestinian consciousness with loyalty to the
collectivity and helped draw the boundaries of this
collectivity.
I realize that limiting the discussion to consciousness and
discourse has dangerous implications, for many see in
self-consciousness a kind of false consciousness or regard national
consciousness itself as a false premise. But, after all,
consciousness influences reality and reality influences
consciousness. Self-consciousness is not only connected to the way
the self is imagined, but also to the way others see, represent,
and interact with it.
A main challenge facing historians of Palestinian identity is that
a distinctive identity on the political level intersects with, but
does not completely depend on, the exclusion of Palestinians (their
becoming the Other) for national groups that hold different
historical narrations. This makes the study of Palestinian identity
based on its own textual sources an almost impossible task. The
historian of Palestine, therefore, cannot solely depend on
"Palestinian sources" but must rely on, and borrow from, historical
texts belonging to other nations in the region. Other textual
sources often employ the same historical events on which the
Palestinian narrative is trying to base itself.
There are many examples of this narrative overlap. For instance, is
it possible to claim that the period of Arab renaissance at the end
of the nineteenth century (or the period of the political emergence
of Arab national thought during the First World War) belongs only
to Lebanese history, or to Palestinian history, or to any other
single history? Is it possible to claim that Jewish history in
Palestine is a matter relevant only to Israeli history and is not
part of the history of the Palestinians themselves?
This intersection of, and frequent conflict between, Palestinian
history and other histories poses yet another difficulty. Because
the development of Palestinian identity is often explained
according to meanings produced in other texts that may ignore the
Palestinians themselves, the Palestinian historian is faced with
the responsibility of recovering those parts of Palestinian memory
that have been colonized by competing historical discourses. The
historian of Palestine has the uneasy task of defining modern
Palestinian history and separating it from its Israeli counterpart
and from the wider Arab history or the history of neighboring
countries.
Distinct Early Roots
If the apparent non-independence of Palestinian history is one
challenge facing the historian, another is resisting the temptation
to invent a completely independent Palestinian narrative. The
difference of Palestinian national identity from that of its
neighbors does not mean that it is possible to understand it
outside the context of histories that are not, strictly speaking,
its own. The particularity of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe)
of 1948, for instance, ties the Palestinian narrative with its
Israeli counterpart, whether both parties like it or not. Thus, not
recognizing the connections between Palestinian history and
competing histories has led some to consider Palestinian identity
as a recent phenomenon, emerging in the 1960s. Such a perspective
has led historians to form a rather simplistic solution of seeing
the evolution of Palestinian identity through the political history
of the region - thus ignoring the roots of Palestinian
identity.
True, it is important to consider the impact on the production of
Palestinian identity of dominant Middle East ideologies, such as
Arab nationalism and Islamism, of the imposed western divisions on
the region, and of Zionism. However, these factors, do not explain
the evidence that suggests that urban intellectuals in Palestine
and the mashreq (the eastern Arab world) began to imagine Palestine
as a distinct political unit well before colonial divisions and
intensive Jewish immigration. Such imagining occurred though not
accompanied by a very distinct Palestinian national
consciousness.
The writer (and former Ottoman official in Jerusalem) Najib Azuri
proposed in 1908 the idea of expanding the Sanjak (district in the
Ottoman Empire) of Jerusalem to include northern Palestine,
explaining that this was necessary to develop the land of Palestine
(Khalidi 1997: 28-29). Azuri's vision of Palestine corresponds to
Palestine's borders as they were drawn a decade later by the
British, as well as with the borders indicated in the statement
issued by the First Palestinian Arab Congress that was held in
Jerusalem on 3 February 1919. Participants to the Peace Conference
stated in their protest that they represent "all Muslim and
Christian residents of Palestine, which is made of the regions of
Jerusalem, Nablus, Arab Acre." Moreover, the protest letter sent by
the Muslim-Christian committee in Jaffa to General Allenby in 1918
spoke in the name of "the Arab Palestinian" (see Wathaeq).
Defined borders similar to those created later by the British
Mandate indicate belief in the idea of a Palestine distinct from
its neighbors. A number of historians accept this view, believing
that Palestinian imagining of these boundaries is a product of
conditions that largely existed in the nineteenth century. However,
they do not agree on the main reason behind such an
imagining.
Different Centers
Rashid Khalidi argues for Jerusalem's centrality in popular
imagination among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish residents, which
made it a symbol for all other places in Palestine and made
visiting it part of their religious identity (1997, 28-29). Other
historians also cite the importance of the administrative status of
Jerusalem in people's lives starting in mid-nineteenth century.
Jerusalem was an administrative and political center, particularly
in the period after 1887, when it became the capital of an
independent Sanjak carrying its name and sending delegates to
Majlis al-Mab'outheen (the Ottoman parliament). Kimmerling and
Migdal point out that such a special administrative status for
Jerusalem led to the eventual birth of an independent Palestinian
identity after Ottoman rule, basing this on Butrus Abu-Manneh's
argument that such autonomous status "was of tremendous importance
for the emergence of Palestine" (Kimmerling and Migdal 1993: 68-69;
Abu-Manneh 1978: 25).
While agreeing that the emergence of Palestinian identity is
related to the latter Ottoman period, Beshara Doumani does not
think this was due to the centrality of Jerusalem. Instead, it is
important to examine the "economic, social, and cultural relations
between the inhabitants of the various regions of Palestine during
the Ottoman period . . . [to understand] why Palestine became a
nation in the minds of the people who call themselves Palestinians
today." Doumani points out that Palestine "produced large
agricultural surplus and was integrated into the world capitalist
economy as an exporter of wheat, barely, sesame, olive oil, soap
and cotton during 1856-1882 period" (1995: 245, 4). Nablus, rather
than Jerusalem, constituted the main commercial center in the
nineteenth century to the villages in a region that spreads from
Hebron in the south to the Galilee in the north. Its trade
relations with the Greater Syrian hinterlands, particularly with
Damascus, made Jabal Nablus the actual center of Palestine.
Yet, there are historians who argue that consciousness of the
region generally, and of Palestine as a holy land, expressed in
writings by European travelers, missionaries, archaeologists in the
nineteenth century, played a role in shaping local recognition of
the distinctiveness of Palestine and its geography, even though its
frontiers were not clearly drawn (see Scholch). From this
perspective and as export-import center, the port of Jaffa was
Palestine's window to the world in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Using Ottoman and European statistics, Scholch
argues that Jaffa played a central role in shaping an independent
meaning for Palestine.
Multiple but Distinct Identifications
Different identifications and narrations do not mean that any one
was totally prevalent among Palestine's population. Rather,
different narrations only point to the multiple material conditions
that laid foundations for the eventual emergence of a single
Palestinian self-identification. There is almost a consensus that
loyalties and identifications at the end of the Ottoman period were
a combination of local, regional and religious affiliations rather
than national ones. The Ottoman, Arab, tribal, and religious
identities coexisted among the urban elite and village residents,
who often assumed local identities (Khalidi 1997: 63-88). This
variety of identities did not necessarily reflect any kind of
conflict. Loyalty to the Ottomans did not negate pride in Arab
heritage, nor did it mean lack of desire to defend Palestine
against foreign greed. The coexistence of different loyalties will
continue to accompany Palestinian discourse and later become one
special characteristic of Palestinian identity.
Herein lies the main problem for Palestinian historians. For the
history of Palestinian self-identification cannot be characterized
as chronological in growth, since it has been expressed in
different historical belongings and loyalties. Sometimes, the
historian finds in the same event evidence of Palestinian
particularity and at the same time an insistence on a national
identification broader than Palestine. This multiplicity was
obvious during the mandate period as well as in the 1950s and
60s.
The conference held in Jerusalem in 1919, for instance, was called
"the Arab Palestinian Congress" and its statement emphasized the
importance of Palestine independence and unity, asserting at the
same time that Palestine was part of Greater Arab Syria. The same
thing is noticeable in the 1950s and early 60s. Examine the
political program of any the Palestinian political movement at the
time (for example, the Arab Nationalist Movement), and you will
notice that Palestinian concern with the liberation of Palestine
from Zionist control was always expressed in the language of Arab
nationalism.
Along with the colonial divisions based on the Sykes-Picot
agreement (1916), Jewish immigration to Palestine played a main
role in the evolution of a distinct Palestinian nation, which began
to assume new directions and develop new characteristics. Since
early Jewish settlement sought to build agricultural colonies, the
initial clash with the Zionist project began in the villages, not
in the cities. This produced an important characteristic of
Palestinian identity and one of its problems at the same
time.
Peasant and Urban Expressions
Rather than the city, the fellahin (peasant) character became an
essential part of the way Palestinians view themselves. Later,
Palestinians would adopt peasant forms of dress, the kaffiyah
headscarf, and the village dance dabkeh as symbols of Palestinian
national identity. But, during the British Mandate period, this
peasant feeling of distinctness found political expression not in
rural areas but in the city, through articles in local newspapers,
political discourse, and emerging parties. The different
Palestinian newspapers, Al Karmel, Filasteen, and Al Munadi, all
without exception, conducted one campaign after another against the
Zionist movement and its project in Palestine, demanding that
Palestine be maintained for its people as a politically independent
entity. Najeeb Nassar, a prominent Palestinian journalist and owner
of the Haifa-based Al-Karmel newspaper asked the Arabs of Bilad al
Sham (Greater Syria) to support the people of Palestine, whom he
called "the Palestinians." Nassar wrote this in his newspaper in
1914: "We, your Palestinian brothers, share with you all your
difficulties. So why don't you, at least, feel with us a little the
disasters raining on us [. . .] and on our country" (quoted in
Muhaftha 1989: 23-24).
Nassar's text reveals early awareness of Palestinian borders and
difference from neighboring people in Greater Syria. This awareness
becomes deeper after the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and during the
British Mandate period, when it starts to take a political bent. In
1923, for instance, the National Arab party announced in its
founding statement that its goal is "preserving Palestine for its
people […] and establishing a constitutional government in
it" (Muhaftha 1989: 225).
Although Arab identity continues to be part of Palestinian
discourse during the Mandate period, this discourse begins to focus
more and more on the particularity of Palestine. While Palestinian
particularity was rooted in historical conditions preceding
intensive Jewish settlement activity, it crystallized as a
consciousness after the Palestinian encounter with Zionist
colonization.
Peasant rejection of settlement and its political expression
through urban institutions constitute practical starting points
where Palestinians begin to see themselves as an independent
people. The Zionist project and British support for it through the
Balfour Declaration accelerated the development of a distinct
political Palestinian identity. This identity found expression in
societies and organizations that characterized themselves as Arab,
Syrian, Islamic, or Christian but whose aim was defending Palestine
against the Zionist threat. Imagining Palestinian collectivity
begins to take a practical bent with the convening of several
Palestinian conferences, in reaction to the Zionist threat, with
unambiguous demands for the right to self-determination. This
collective imagining becomes widespread during the Mandate period
until 1948.
Nakba and Identity
The development of a Palestinian national consciousness, however,
did not produce its own nation state, as was the case with Arab
neighbors of Palestine. Rather, it went through disruption and
discontinuity as a result of the events of 1948, which Palestinians
call the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe. A tragic event on different
levels (familial, personal, and national), the Nakba resulted,
first, in dismantling the social structure of the larger part of
the Palestinian population, who became refugees. Second, it caused
the disappearance of urban centers from the lives of most
Palestinians remaining in Palestine, who were transformed from city
dwellers into groups living on the margins of cities. These two
consequences mark a turning point in the nature of Palestinian
discourse and in its continuity. The refugee status significantly
aided in the emergence of Palestinians as a distinct group united
by the shared experience of displacement, while the disruption of
city life held back the development of a Palestinian collective
imagination, which used to be formulated in cities.
The disappearance of local identifications as a result of uprooting
accelerated the confirmation of a Palestinian particularity and
national feeling. After all, as Homi K. Bhabha notes, the "nation
fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin" (1994:
139). The exodus and the forced expulsion of the Palestinians in
1948 and the eventual erection of refugee camps all over the Middle
East presented the perfect context for the transformation of the
old Palestinian local and communal belongings into a nationalist
one. The construction of such a new form of a living locality that
is far more complex than the old community and far more symbolic
than society to a large extent transfigured "the meaning of home
and belonging" (1994: 140).
The uprooting of the Palestinians affirmed for them a kind of
particularity and created a condition ripe for the creation of a
new kind of national imagining. Therefore, seen within the
framework of Palestinian national discourse, the Nakba of 1948
resulted in a rhetorical shift, rather than the beginning or ending
of an era in itself. The identity that seemed so clear before 1948,
finessed and expressed by the intellectuals of the city elite, was
terminated with the end of cities. Further, the destruction of more
than 400 Palestinian population centers led to the loss of old
local traits and their replacement by a new kind of belonging, that
is of the refugee experience as a distinctly Palestinian one.
This experience and its rhetorical shift did not affect all
Palestinian Arabs in the same way at the time. While it retained
the Palestinian as an "Other," it did so in relation to new groups
in neighboring Arab countries. The exclusion of refugees from other
identities forming around them deepened this feeling of
"otherness." Residents of East Jerusalem and parts of Palestine
(except for internal refugees among them) did not experience this
exclusion in the same way. Many Palestinians in East Jerusalem in
the 1950s grew up with a sense of being in "Jordanian" Jerusalem
(e.g., Budeiri 1998: 39). As opposed to the Diaspora, a new
Palestinian self-awareness took longer to take roots in the West
Bank mainly as a result of an active and repressive Jordanian
policy intended to Jordanize eastern Palestine and its people.
Thus, Palestinian identification in this part of Palestine after
1967 emerged from a combination of circumstances, including
Palestinian political activity from abroad and repressive Israeli
policies that distanced the West Bank from Jordan socially and
economically.
It is no secret that residents of the "West Bank" (both urbanites
and villagers) were rather aware of the distinction between
themselves as "residents" and those who arrived during and after
the war in 1948 as the "refugees." The notion of a Palestinian
collective identity, which started among the refugees and dominated
modern Palestinian national discourse, was essentially based on the
experience of the refugee camp.
A National Group with National Rights
With the Oslo peace agreement, there emerged a quasi-legal
framework for determining who is a Palestinian and who is not,
evolving around those who currently live in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Such a separation will only make future studies of
Palestinian identity more confusing because it excludes the
Palestinians who do not reside in these areas. West Bank-Gaza
centrism can be described as a colonization of historical
Palestinian discourse. This reductive transformation of the
Palestinians into a single local group deprives those who lived the
Palestinian experience of their Palestinianism, casting them once
again as refugees, almost permanently so.
Those who lived the catastrophe are now facing a new catastrophe:
the legal disappearance of their Palestinian identity, an identity
that evolved from their personal diasporic experience in the years
between the creation of Israel in 1948 and today.
In conclusion, I believe that the Palestinians constitute a
national group with political and national rights that must not be
ignored, regardless of how they read their history. The issue of
how legitimate a nation is might be relevant for international law,
but from the perspective of real history it is a meaningless and
futile question.
My main point is that nations, to use the words of Homi Bhabha,
"lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize
their horizons in the mind's eye" (1995, 1). In other words, the
question is not whether historians, of Palestinian identity in this
case, can actually come to agree on the origins of their nation or
what kind of nation they envision they have. It is precisely here
that the narrative of a nation is what matters most. For not only
does it present a certain vision of the past but it also forms the
foundation on which a nation views its present and its future. It
is important to realize the elusive, ambivalent, pliant and
changeable character of national identities.
What makes the Palestinian case difficult is that, because of
dispersion, the change is now affecting different parts of the
community differently. In the particular circumstances, the mere
creation of an authoritative national history of the Palestinian
nation will most likely result in the marginalization of some
segments among the Palestinians.
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