I
When did a significant proportion of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine begin to think of themselves as Palestinians? What are the constituent elements of this sense of identification with Palestine, and how does it relate to other forms of identity, whether national, religious, or otherwise? These and other basic questions touching on Palestinian identity have generated an extensive polemical literature.1 They have also produced some valuable scholarship.2 These questions have informed our consideration of the identity of Palestinian Arabs in the pre-World War I period. These same questions are the primary focus of this chapter, which argues that the answers to them can be found largely in the years at the end of World War I and immediately afterwards.
As with the identity of the peoples of many other Arab countries (and indeed other countries) in the modern period, we have seen that the case of Palestinian identity is complicated by the difficulty of explaining its interrelation with broad, powerful transnational foci of identity, in particular Arabism and Islam, and with other potent regional and local loyalties. People in the Arab world throughout most of the twentieth century (including the Palestinians themselves), understood that these and other elements simultaneously constituted the identity of a Palestinian Arab. This interrelation is particularly difficult to explain to those who think of national identity in ahistorical, unidimensional terms, generally with reference to models derived from an idealized and simplified version of the Western European experience.3
Thus, while in most cases the identity of a Frenchwoman would today be determined both by herself and by others primarily in terms of her identification with the French nation (notwithstanding important differences among the French of region, religion, politics, race, gender, class, and broader European affiliations), it would be normal for a Palestinian today to identify primarily as an Arab in one context, as a Muslim or Christian in another, as a Nabulsi or Jaffan in yet another, and as a Palestinian in a fourth.4 The Frenchwoman would refer her identity in some measure to a powerful, generations-old “historical” narrative of Frenchness, propagated with authority since some time in the nineteenth century by a unified school system and other means at the disposal of the French state. In contrast, given the lack of such a state or such a unified educational system, the Palestinian would be more likely to refer identity to a number of “historical” narratives, each carrying a different valence and a somewhat different message. The same pattern of multiple foci of identity of course applies to the populations of other Arab countries in the modern era, with the major difference that in their cases there exist authoritative official “historical” national narratives (most of them fairly recent) propagated vigorously for several generations by their respective nation-states, which usually would take pride of place in the self-description of these populations.
However, unlike that of the other Arab peoples—indeed, perhaps uniquely—the Palestinian case is further complicated by the intimate intertwining over the past century (and in some senses for much longer) of the Palestinian narrative with one of the most potent narratives in existence, that of Israel and the Jewish people, a circumstance touched on in chapter 2.5 The interweaving of these two narratives reaches the point that in much public discourse about the Palestinians in the United States, their narrative can be considered only in terms of the other,6 and as a rule such discourse is constructed in terms of a rigid polarity between the two narratives. This polarity is sometimes justified, but at other times it is artifically imposed: it often means that permission cannot be granted for a Palestinian voice to be heard—even on matters having absolutely nothing to do with Israel—without the reassuring presence of its Israeli echo. The opposite, of course, is not true: a Palestinian voice is not necessarily required when exclusively Israeli or Jewish concerns are aired.
Clearly, within this paradigm, the Palestinians exist not as an independent entity with an independent narrative, but only in relation to another entity and another narrative. In view of the compelling claim we have already cited—that self-definition takes place with reference to an “other” (as Stuart Hall puts it, “only when there is an Other can you know who you are”7)—discussions of contentious questions of national identity understandably tend to gravitate in the direction of such polarizations. But over the past few decades the intertwining of, and the tension between, the Palestinian and Israeli national narratives may have reached a level of intensity in Palestine itself, and in American and European public discourse, that is unique.
This overlap of the two narratives has primarily affected that of the Palestinians. In recent decades, the resounding success of the Zionist political project, and the resultant successful grafting of modern political Zionism onto Jewish history, with the former coming to be considered the logical and inevitable outcome of the latter, has legitimized the resulting synthesis of the two, such that there is a perceived continuity, a seamless transition, between ancient, medieval, and early modern Jewish history on the one hand, and the history of modern Zionism and Israel on the other.8 Palestinian identity, by contrast, never having enjoyed such success, has since its beginnings struggled for acceptance and legitimacy in the outside world,9 and even for recognition of its very existence as a category of being. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s widely disseminated dismissive remark that “There was no such thing as Palestinians. . . . They did not exist” was significant not only for its broad impact on public discourse, but also as expressing a common view that over time has come to be widely held among westerners generally.10
All of this has complicated what might otherwise have been a relatively straightforward story. In the case of the national identities of the peoples of other Arab countries which came into being in their modern form in the wake of World War I, similar processes of the construction of new identities building on elements of old ones as part of a novel synthesis (for this is what we are talking about in the Palestinian case and most other cases of the development of new national identities in the modern era) have occasioned relatively little attention, and limited controversy, whether within these countries or elsewhere. The main exception was Lebanon. And in the instance of Lebanon, the resulting debate has been primarily an internal one among Lebanese, for whom the definition of Lebanese identity proved to be a bitterly contested subject throughout the twentieth century, contributing significantly to the civil strife that afflicted the country in 1958, and again much more severely from 1975 until the early 1990s.11 Although the question of Lebanese identity has occasioned some scholarly attention outside of Lebanon, this was restrained and unpolemical by comparison with that devoted to the Palestinian case.
While issues of Palestinian identity are hotly disputed in the United States and Israel, they occasion controversy as well in the Arab world and among Palestinians. From a radical Arab nationalist perspective, the very existence of nation-states in the Arab world is suspect: from this purist point of view, they are seen as a contrivance imposed by western imperialism, and as utterly lacking in legitimacy. Although rapidly waning in force in recent years as pan-Arabism declined, such a view lingers on to this day in corners of Arab popular consciousness. It has at various times in the past been taken by, among others, the Ba‘thist regime in Syria as a pretext for arguing that the Palestinians (and for that matter the Lebanese and Jordanians) should accept Syrian hegemony. The Syrian Ba‘thist position at times suggested that Palestine is part of Southern Syria, a small segment of the great Arab homeland whose legitimate representative is none other than the Ba‘th party, headed by Hafiz al-Asad. While often cynical and manipulative, and perceived as such by many in the Arab world, such views benefited from a certain popularity and credibility as long as pan-Arabism retained its power, particularly when put forth by a rhetorical and tactical master such as Egyptian President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir during the decade or so when he was at the height of his pan-Arab power and prestige, from the mid-1950s until the 1967 war.
Similarly, from a radical Islamist perspective, Palestinian-centered nationalism is tantamount to heresy, splitting as it does the Islamic umrna—a word which can mean community, or people, or nation in different contexts—into warring nations, a view in support of which various more or less canonical sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are adduced. Such a view, which has been growing in popularity lately, is espoused by Palestinian Islamist factions such as Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami, the Islamic Liberation Party, an almost entirely Palestinian radical organization dating from the 1950s, as well as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring of the late 1980s, Hamas, and the equally recent Islamic Jihad movement. All subsume Palestinian nationalism within one or another form of Islamic identity, although all are primarily Palestinian organizations in terms of membership, organization, and goals, and it is not clear how they resolve the tension between their universalist Islamic message and the particularist Palestinian reality in which all of them are firmly grounded.
In contradiction to these Arabist and Islamist views, there is mainstream secular Palestinian nationalism, grouped together under the umbrella of the PLO and represented for the past three decades by a variety of its constituent organizations including Fateh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and others.12 These groups, which have probably represented the views of a majority of Palestinians since some time in the mid- or late 1960s, emerge from a relatively recent tradition which argues that Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots. As with other national movements, extreme advocates of this view go further than this, and anachronistically read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern.13 While not denying the Islamist or the Arabist dimensions of Palestinian identity outright, they tend to give precedence to the purely Palestinian aspects.
With this background in mind, this chapter attempts to reconstruct the formative period in the genesis of Palestinian national identity, specifically the years immediately after World War I. It builds on the assumption that many of the constituents of this identity—patriotic feeling, local loyalties, Arabism, religious sentiment, higher levels of education and literacy, and other factors we have examined in the preceding chapters—were already widespread before World War I, and were probably even then coalescing into a sense of community among the people of the country as Palestinians, without yet constituting the primary focus of identification for most of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine.
The main thesis of the chapter is that under the impact of rapid, momentous, and unsettling changes during the period from the outset of World War I to some time early on in the British mandate for Palestine, at the outside in 1922 or 1923, the sense of political and national identification of most politically conscious, literate, and urban Palestinians underwent a sequence of major transformations. The end result was a strong and growing national identification with Palestine, as the Arab residents of the country increasingly came to “imagine” themselves as part of a single community.14 This identification was certainly not exclusive—for Arabism, religion, and local loyalties still remained extremely important, and continued to make it possible for Arabs in Palestine to also see themselves simultaneously as part of other communities, both larger and smaller ones. And this identification certainly did not include all sectors or classes of the population. But it did constitute a new and powerful category of identity that was simply nonexistent a generation or two before, and was still novel and limited in its diffusion before World War I.
In succeeding decades, this identification with Palestine was to be developed and refined significantly, as Palestinian nationalism grew and developed during the mandatory period and after 1948. Equally important, it continued its slow spread beyond the relatively narrow elite which was initially affected by these ideas to broader sectors of the population—outside the upper and middle classes in the cities, and in the countryside. The acceleration of ongoing social and economic trends, which can be traced back to the years before World War I, such as the growth in the urban population, and of wage labor, the expansion of the press and of the educational system, and the spread of literacy, played a major role in this process. So profound a transformation of the sense of self of the Arab population of Palestine, which began during the years immediately before World War I and intensified immediately after it, resulted in the emergence of a Palestinian national identity where a few decades before no such thing had existed.
II
Among the factors that caused the Arab population of Palestine to identify with the country in the years immediately before World War I, several stand out. We have already touched on many of these, but it is worthwhile reiterating and redefining them before going on to look at the years after World War I when so much changed so fast. First among these factors was a religious attachment to Palestine as a holy land on the part of Muslims and Christians (as well as by Jews, of course), which we have glimpsed repeatedly in earlier chapters. This attachment was felt by followers of both faiths elsewhere, but it was particularly strong for those Christian and Muslim Arabs who lived in Palestine.
Although Muslims and Christians had somewhat different conceptions from one another of what made Palestine a holy land, and of its boundaries and extent, they shared a similar general idea of the country as a unit, and as being special and holy. In the Christian case, as Alexander Schölch has pointed out most clearly (in the context of ascertaining “the extent to which it is at all meaningful to write a history of Palestine during a certain phase in the nineteenth century when there was no administrative unit with this name and when this area’s ‘borders’—in other words, the area’s historical-geographical identity—were contested”), this conception was firmly based on the biblical definition of the country as running from “Dan to Beersheba.”15 It was reinforced by the boundaries of the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox and Latin Patriarchates and the Protestant Episcopate of Jerusalem, all three of which included the entirety of Palestine irrespective of the Ottoman administrative divisions, which changed from time to time.
Both Schölch and Yehoshua Porath have described how the Muslim perception of Palestine as a holy land—it is indeed called “al-ard al-muqaddasa” [meaning “the holy land”] in the Qur’an (5:21)—developed over time.16 This took place notably through such genres as the “Fada’il al-Quds” literature referred to briefly in chapter 2, which praised Jerusalem, Hebron, and other parts of Palestine, and which was widespread before, and even more so after, the Crusades.17 This literature reinforced the sense for Muslims in which Palestine was an entity, albeit a sacred rather than a political one. Also important in this regard were annual seasonal pilgrimages to local holy sites, notably the Nabi Musa celebration, which traditionally attracted thousands of Muslim pilgrims from all over the country to a site identified with Moses by Muslims, at a twelfth-thirteenth century shrine located halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho.18
Various authors have also described how two more factors helped to shape the local inhabitants’ conception of the country: the first was Ottoman administrative boundaries, and the second was the ambitions and aspirations of the European powers in Palestine. As far as the first is concerned, we have seen that from 1874 onwards, the sanjaq of Jerusalem, including the districts of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheeba, Gaza, and Jaffa, was a separate unit administered independently from any other Ottoman province, and as such was under the direct authority of Istanbul. In earlier times, Jerusalem had briefly been capital of a larger province, a vilayet of “Filastin” which encompassed all of what is now Palestine, including Nablus, Haifa, and the Galilee. More frequently in the period before 1874, the Jerusalem sanjaq was included with other regions within the province of Damascus.19
The way in which these administrative arrangements affected local conceptions of the country can be seen in recommendations for action by the new Ottoman Parliament published in the Turkish and Arabic press in 1908 by a former official of the Jerusalem sanjaq, the Lebanese Najib ‘Azuri. Among the recommendations in this article (mentioned in chapter 2) was the expansion of the sanjaq of Jerusalem, and raising it to the rank of a vilayet, which ‘Azuri argued was necessary “since the progress of the land of Palestine depends on it.”20 ‘Azuri had earlier aroused the ire of Sultan Abdul Hamid for his outspoken opposition to government policies, notably regarding Zionism. He had been sentenced to death for treason in absentia after his flight to France, where in 1905 he wrote the prophetic book Reveil de la Nation Arabe, which predicted a momentous conflict between Zionism and Arab nationalism. His opposition to Zionism was undoubtedly one of the bases for his argument that Palestine should be a separate province, but it was clearly predicated on the assumption that there was such a thing as a “land of Palestine,” an idea that must have been shared with the readers of Sabah and Thamarat al-Funun.
This bears out Schölch’s statement that “the administrative experiments and facts mentioned here, especially the elevated position of the sanjaq of Jerusalem (which lasted for almost half a century), doubtless contributed to the emergence of the concept of Palestine as an administrative entity.”21 Porath goes further: “. . . at the end of the Ottoman period the concept of Filastin was already widespread among the educated Arab public, denoting either the whole of Palestine or the Jerusalem sanjaq alone.”22 This resulting local consciousness of Palestine as a discrete entity, based on religious tradition and long-standing administrative practice, was only enhanced by the second factor, the fact that foreigners also recognized it as such.
The covetousness of the European powers regarding Palestine, and in particular their constant efforts to expand their influence and standing there throughout the nineteenth century,23 naturally affected the self-view of the inhabitants of the country. We have noted that the inhabitants of Palestine had long perceived that control of the country was a prize of value to the Western powers, and it can easily be seen that such a consciousness did much to cement a sense of community and belonging, and to spur patriotic feeling regarding Palestine. Such a feeling was originally particularly strong among Muslims, and had been widespread among them at least since the Crusades, as was clear from the 1701 petition by notables and other inhabitants of Jerusalem to Sultan Mustafa II protesting the visit of a French Consul to Jerusalem, discussed at length in chapter 2. It is worth recalling that the petition mentioned that “our city is the focus of attention of the infidels” and that “this holy land” could be “occupied as a result of this, as has happened repeatedly in earlier times.” The meeting which produced this petition was attended by both notables and common people, testimony to the prevalence of such feelings among all sectors of urban society.24 In the nineteenth century, many Palestinian and other Arab Christians came to share this fear of European imperialism, while at the same time many Christians were among the first local inhabitants to be affected by Western notions of nationalism and patriotism obtained in missionary schools and through other contacts with Europeans.
In looking at the factors that caused the Arab population to identify with Palestine, an obvious one has already been mentioned and deserves reiteration: this was a powerful local attachment to place. As in other Islamic cultures, in the cities of Palestine there was a strong tradition of what might be called urban patriotism. Jerusalemites, Nabulsis, Gazans, and Khalilis (inhabitants of Hebron—al-Khalil in Arabic) all took pride in their cities, as can be seen from the profusion of local histories devoted to cities and regions of Palestine.25 This can be seen also from the frequency of the use of the name of a city—al-Maqdisi, al-Nabulsi, al-Ghazzawi, al-Khalili, and so on—as either a family name or as an identifier in addition to a family name. Outside of the cities, there was also a deep attachment to place, including pride in the village as special and better than others, and a related pride in family and lineage which was shared by city-dwellers, villagers, and nomads.26
With the spread of a broader notion of patriotism as modern education reached wider circles of the population, and with the increased ease and speed of travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as roads and railways were constructed, these local loyalties were gradually supplemented by a sense of belonging to an entity larger than a city, town, or village and its immediate environs. Local loyalties have never been completely superseded, however, and they still retain their vitality in the cities and villages of Palestine.27 It is difficult to convey how dense can be the associations with place in a society like that of Palestine, and especially difficult to do so when the referent is American society, in much of which mobility has greater value than rootedness. In Palestine and other Arab countries, these local associations are still meaningful to the degree that people can often be easily identified as to their place of origin by their family name, and to some degree remain identified with these places, even if they have never lived there. This can be seen particularly clearly among residents of Palestinian refugee camps who, to this day, identify with their villages and towns of origin even if they have lived in exile from them for two or three generations.28
We have seen in Chapters 5 and 6 that the reaction of the Palestinian Arabs to modern political Zionism drew upon all these preexisting elements: religious attachment to what both Muslim and Christians saw as a holy land, the conception of Palestine as an administrative entity, the fear of external encroachment, and local patriotism. Before going into the details of the Palestinian reaction to Zionism, it is worth stressing that these elements of attachment to Palestine all antedated the encounter with Zionism. It is necessary to stress this obvious fact because of the common assertion that Palestinian identity was no more than a reaction to Zionism, and the attachment of Palestinian Arabs to the country no more than a response to the attachment to it of those inspired by Zionism. There is a kernel of truth in these assertions: in some measure, as we have already seen, identity develops in response to the encounter with an “other.” But for the Palestinians there were always other “others” besides Zionism: among them were the covetous European powers and the country’s Turkish rulers before World War I, and the British Mandatory authorities and other Arab peoples after that. In any case, it is clear from the abundant evidence, much of which we have surveyed, that the Arab population of Palestine had a strong attachment to their country—albeit an attachment expressed in pre-nationalist terms—long before the arrival of modern political Zionism on the scene in the last years of the nineteenth century.
We have seen in earlier chapters that there was a widespread and sophisticated opposition to Zionism among educated, urban, and politically active Palestinians from a very early stage in the implantation of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Chapter 5 analyzed the crucial role in engendering this opposition played by the strong resistance to Zionism among the peasantry in areas where Zionist colonization led to the displacement of fellahin from their lands. All of this was reflected in the press, which had a broad impact on public opinion, and helped to shape both Arab views of Zionism, and the conception of Palestine as a land under threat. At the same time, it has been apparent that the issue of Zionism was a defining one for many Palestinian papers, notably Najib Nassar’s al-Karmil, and Filastin, published by ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa. As was pointed out, the very titles of these two papers, as well as others like al-Quds, named for Jerusalem, are indicative of the local patriotism that inspired their establishment.
One of the clearest pre-war examples of this conception of Palestine as a land under threat from the Zionist movement, and of the Palestinians as an entity, indeed a national entity, can be seen from the opening words of a full-page editorial in a special one-page broadsheet issue of Filastin in 1914 entitled “An Open Letter to Subscribers.” In it, the editors began by commenting sarcastically on an attempt by the Ottoman authorities to close down the newspaper in May 1914 in response to their published attacks on the Zionist movement: “Dear readers, it seems we have done something serious in the view of the central government in warning the Palestinian nation [al-umma al-filistiniyya—my italics] of the danger which threatens it from the Zionist current.”29 This brilliantly written editorial is full of pungent attacks on the government, ridiculing it for defending the Zionist movement and trying to shut down Filastin, even though the newspaper was only doing its patriotic duty by warning against a clear danger to the country. The editorial writers stress repeatedly that nothing the government can do will change the belief that “we are a nation [umma] threatened with disappearance in the face of this Zionist current in this Palestinian land [fi hathihi al-bilad al-filistiniyya].” As significant as the sentiment that the Palestinians were endangered by Zionism was the repeated use of the term “Palestinian nation” in this context. Perhaps equally significant, Yusuf and ‘Isa al-‘Isa fought the government closure order in a local court, won the case, and were described in contemporary French consular reports as having been carried from the courtroom on the shoulders of a delirious throng of well-wishers.30
Much else in this editorial is worthy of note. Its authors mention that a Zionist leader, a certain Dr. Orbach, had stated to a Jewish audience in Haifa that the Zionists should oppose the Arabs, and scatter them from their lands, because this would be a service to the Turks, who would thank the Zionists for this. Such statements were foolish, the authors of the editorial argued, since they inspire hatred in the heart of the Arab nation (al-umma al-‘arabiyya), and wake it from its stupor, and make the Zionists, who claimed disingenuously they were “cousins of the Arabs,” look like liars. The authors continued:
Let the central government learn that Zionism is not a mere “ghost” or a “bogey-man,” as its supporters claim. Today it is a palpable danger. If it succeeds in silencing us . . . it cannot prevent the eye from seeing, or the hand from touching what is before it and around it. If it silences us, how can it suppress this resurgence which has touched all the patriotic newspapers, reaching as far as the Nile Valley. . . . Even if they defeat Filastin in court, patriots will arise to found tens of newspapers like it to serve the same principles, and to mount the same defense of the body of this poor nation which is threatened in its very being by expulsion from its homeland.31
In view of these powerful sentiments, which clearly distinguish among, while accepting, loyalty to Ottomanism, belonging to an Arab nation, and Palestinian patriotism, it can be understood that, although other foci of loyalty were still operative for most of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine before World War I, the idea of Palestine as a source of identity and as a community with shared interests had already taken root. It competed with and complemented loyalty to the Ottoman state and to the Muslim and Christian religious communities, the growing sense of Arabism fostered by the spread of education and the expansion of the influence of the Arabic press, and other more local loyalties—to regions, cities, villages, and families.
In this context, the growing problem of dealing with Zionism provided Palestinians with the occasion to feel part of a larger whole, whether Ottoman or Arab, which they hoped might help them to deal with an opponent whom they had already begun to fear they could not resist alone. This tendency was encouraged by the extent to which the question of Zionism was addressed in Ottoman politics, in parliament, and in the press, and by the degree to which Arabist politicians and newspapers stressed their opposition to Zionism. However, as time went by, the problems posed by Zionism contributed to the tendency for Palestinians to feel separate and abandoned, for in the end the Ottoman authorities failed to take seriously the complaints of the Palestinians regarding Zionism (the same editorial noted bitterly: “government officials in the provinces do not understand the Hebrew of those like Orbach, . . . and if we translate their words the government does not trust our translations, and lets it all pass lightly, laughingly.”),32 while even those Arabist politicians who initially seemed sympathetic in the end proved equally ineffective.
The overlap between these various loyalties, and the way in which one developed from another, can be seen from remarks of ‘Isa al-‘Isa about the motives that led him to found Filastin in 1911. In a speech many years later at the Arab Orthodox club in Jerusalem, he stated that at the outset his main aim had been to defend the Arab Orthodox cause.33 Very soon afterwards, however, he said that he found himself in the midst of a national conflict on two fronts: one Arab-Turkish, and the other Arab-Jewish, and he joined in both, without ever abandoning the Orthodox cause.34 Clearly, for an individual such as ‘Isa al-‘Isa, all of these loyalties were fully compatible with one another, and notable among them was the sense of Palestinian identity which his words in the Filastin editorial cited above show clearly to have been prominent even before World War I.
World War I changed many things as far as Palestinian identity was concerned, however. Of the elements of identity for Palestinians and other Arabs whose attraction had waned by the end of the war, two stand out: they were Ottomanism and religious affiliation. The reason for the collapse of Ottomanism as a focus of identity is obvious. Beyond the defeat of the Ottoman army and the withdrawal of Ottoman authority from the Arab provinces by the end of 1918, Ottomanism as an attempt at a transnational ideological synthesis was rendered obsolete by the outcome of World War I. Among Turks and Arabs, Armenians and Kurds, its place was taken by the national principle. That principle had already asserted itself forcefully in the decades before 1914, as it dissolved many of the bonds that held the multinational Empire together. Its appeal was greatly strengthened during World War I, when President Wilson made national self-determination one of his Fourteen Points. Although the Ottoman heritage was to continue to have a powerful influence on the Arab world in the following decades (one that has been unjustly ignored and insufficiently examined),35 in a period of a few years, Ottomanism as an ideology went from being one of the primary sources of identification for Palestinians, and many others, to having no apparent impact at all. We have touched on some of the ways in which Ottomanism bound Arab elites to the Empire, in looking at the careers of Yusuf Diya’ and Ruhi al-Khalidi. For others, the Ottoman bond was a simple religious one: the Ottoman Sultan was the Caliph, and the Empire the greatest Muslim state of its day.
In regard to the Arab provinces, it can be argued in hindsight that even before the war the Ottoman synthesis was gravely undermined because of what many Arabs and others came to perceive was the rise of Turkish nationalism as the governing principle of the Ottoman state and the party that dominated it from 1908 until 1918, the CUP.36 Similarly, the decline of religion as the governing principle of the Ottoman state in the waning years of the Empire, and what was perceived by many as the cynical exploitation of Islam by the highly secular CUP from 1908 to 1918, accelerated a decline in the saliency of religious identification in the Empire before and during the War. This complemented and enhanced a growing shift to secularism and secular nationalism on the part of some of the younger segments of the Ottoman elite, but this shift was by no means as definitive as the eclipse of Ottomanism. For many sectors of the population, and perhaps for most people in the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, religion has remained the most important single source of identification and community feeling. This has been true not only of the lower classes and the rural populace, but also of many members of the upper classes and among city dwellers, particularly the older ones.
The end result was nevertheless that two of the central pillars of identity before 1914, Ottomanism and religion, were seriously diminished in importance by the end of World War I. This left the field open for nationalism, the ideological rival of both, which had been growing rapidly in influence in the late Ottoman period. The only question, in Palestine and elsewhere, was not whether nationalism would supplant other forms of loyalty, but rather which specific form of nationalism would do so. And, at the outset, the answer to that question seemed to be clear: Arab nationalism appeared to be the obvious successor to Ottomanism as the hegemonic ideology throughout the former Arab provinces of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire.37 However, in Palestine, as elsewhere in the Arab world, matters were to prove to be not quite that simple.
III
A nation which has long been in the depths of sleep only awakes if it is rudely shaken by events, and only arises little by little. . . . This was the situation of Palestine, which for many centuries had been in the deepest sleep, until it was shaken by the great war, shocked by the Zionist movement, and violated by the illegal policy [of the British], and it awoke, little by little.38
These were the words used in 1925 by the eminent Jerusalem writer and educator, Khalil al-Sakakini, the co-founder of the al-Madrasa al-Wataniyya school in Jerusalem whom we met in chapter 3, to describe the situation in Palestine in the immediate aftermath of World War I, a period during which rapid and crucial changes in consciousness and perception took place among much of the population.
Each of the factors listed by al-Sakakini had a major impact on Palestine. The war initially brought with it a massive Ottoman military presence to support the campaigns across the Sinai desert against the Suez Canal launched by Cemal Paşa’s Fourth Army. Three years of Ottoman military campaigns against Egypt from bases in Palestine, and of grave dislocations caused by the British naval blockade to an economy that had become in large part dependent on foreign trade, were followed by the arrival of the allied army commanded by General Allenby, fighting its way north through the country in 1917 and 1918. Parts of Palestine were devastated by combat, notably the Gaza region, many trees throughout the country were cut down to fuel steam locomotives, draft animals were requisitioned by both armies, famine prevailed in some areas, and virtually all the draft-age men were inducted into the Ottoman army, many never to return. Others were arrested, executed, or exiled by the authorities on suspicion of aiding the allies.39 The economic results of the war were debilitating, as was its demographic impact, which has been estimated in the most careful assessment of the demography of Palestine during this period as leading to a population decrease of over 6 percent in little more than four years, a particularly grave decline given that the population of Palestine had been growing by about 2 percent per year before the war.40
However serious was the material impact of the war on Palestine, its political and psychological consequences were even greater.41 The effect of the collapse of the Ottoman state, within whose framework some twenty generations of Arabs had lived for four centuries in the countries of the Fertile Crescent, has already been mentioned. This event left a huge vacuum in political consciousness, particularly for the older generation, one made all the greater by the occupation of the region by the British and the French, an eventuality much anticipated and much feared by most of the population even before the war.42 As the quotation from al-Sakakini indicates, the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and the revelation of the Sykes-Picot accords by the Bolsheviks—both in November 1917, only weeks before Jerusalem fell to Allenby’s forces—had an enormous impact in Palestine.43 Suddenly, the Palestinians found that their country was being occupied by the greatest imperial power of the age, Great Britain, which had made secret arrangements for its disposition with France, and had publicly proclaimed its support for the national aspirations of the Zionist movement in Palestine—aspirations some Zionist spokesmen had denied,44 but many Palestinians feared.
During the war, and unbeknownst to the Palestinians at the time, Britain had in fact entered into three international engagements respecting Palestine. The first was the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, an exchange of letters in 1915 and 1916 between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and the hereditary ruler of Mecca under the Ottomans, the Sharif Husayn Ibn ‘Ali, in which the British promised to support Arab independence within extremely ill-defined frontiers, if the Arabs would revolt against the Ottomans. The question of whether or not Palestine was included within those areas in which Britain had agreed to support Arab independence was one of the most vexed issues of the interwar period (it was ultimately addressed at an international conference in London in 1939) and of Middle East historical scholarship since then.45
The other two engagements were the Sykes-Picot accords of 1916, whereby Britain and France divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between them into spheres of influences and zones of direct control, and the Balfour Declaration, whereby Britain promised to support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Of the three, only the latter was made public at the time, although the Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky, revealed the Sykes-Picot accords and other secret inter-Allied agreements to the world in November 1917, immediately after the Russian Revolution.
These upheavals in the world around them, upheavals that impinged directly on the structure of the lives of the entire population, made possible, and at the same time necessitated, extremely rapid changes in attitudes and consciousness on the part of the people of Palestine. The speed and magnitude of these changes is striking. It is essential to emphasize this point, particularly since the upheavals of the war itself were followed by several more years of equally rapid, equally momentous changes as the Versailles peace conference and other postwar gatherings of the European powers disposed of Palestine, Syria, and other Arab lands, and as an independent Arab kingdom was established in Damascus and then eliminated by the French.
By way of contrast with the rapid changes in attitude made necessary by the upheavals of the war and the years immediately afterwards, mentalities and ideology appear to have evolved relatively slowly in Palestine in times of peace and stability, such as the decades stretching from the late 1860s through 1914 (and in this respect Palestine appears to have been similar to other Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire). We have seen in earlier chapters that there were important transformations in government, social structure, education, and ideology over this period. But the pace of change, at least as regards attitudes, mentalities, and self-view, appears to have been fairly sedate.
It is clear, however, from the evidence for the years after 1914 that in this time of crisis, when the population was subjected to great stress, their attitudes and identities were transformed very rapidly, and with only minimal apparent dislocation for those whose self-view was thus transformed. It would appear that this propensity of peoples to reassess fundamental attitudes and beliefs at times of major historical shifts is a general pattern, and not one exclusive to this time and place.46 Clearly, more must be involved than simply a situation of crisis, great stress, and a threat to existing values and attitudes: there also must be a vision or a goal, or at least a viable alternative for people to be drawn to, since stress and crisis by themselves could simply lead to the shattering of a community.47
For primary material providing Palestinian perceptions of events for the war years and the first year afterwards, we are unfortunately restricted to memoirs, private papers, a limited number of published documents,48 and the occasional pamphlet or interview in the press outside of Palestine. Both British and Zionist sources are of course available in abundance for the early years of the British occupation of Palestine, but they are of extremely limited utility for purposes of studying Palestinian attitudes. Indeed both the level of ignorance of Palestinian society and politics, and the prejudices, of most British and Zionist officials on the spot in Palestine, particularly in the first few years after the war, drastically diminish the value of many of their observations about the beliefs and attitudes of the Arab population during this period.49
Perhaps the most crucial source for evaluating Palestinian public attitudes and perceptions for most of twentieth century, the local press, was shut down by the Ottoman authorities at the outbreak of the war and only reappeared slowly afterwards, starting in 1919, when it began operating again under strict British military censorship. The postwar delay can be explained in part by the fact that the country was under military rule—under the rubric Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (South)—until 1920, and indeed was an active scene of combat for most of 1917 and 1918, until the armistice in November of the latter year. During much of the hard winter and spring of 1917–1918, moreover, a near-famine reigned in many parts of Palestine.50
The British military regime was superseded by a civilian one in July 1920, which itself maintained tight control over newspapers and other publications. This can be seen from two letters from the Military Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, to the journalist Mustafa al-Budayri, both dated August 16, 1921, one refusing permission for publication of a new newspaper entitled al-Amal, and the other refusing permission to open a printing press. A third letter dated six days latter requested in a peremptory manner that Muhammad Kamil al-Budayri, publisher of the nationalist newspaper al-Sabah, come into the Governorate the following morning for an interview.51
Many established pre-war publications, such as ‘Isa al-‘Isa’s Jaffa newspaper Filastin, did not resume publication until well after the war ended, following many delays in reopening.52 In al-‘Isa’s case, this did not take place until March 1921 because of his exile from the country by the Ottoman authorities during the war, his service with Faysal’s government in Damascus for two years thereafter, and what appears to have been a British ban on his reentry into Palestine for several months after that.53 Najib Nassar’s al-Karmil, another important pre-war Palestinian paper, resumed publication in Haifa only in February 1920, while Iliya Zakka’s much less influential al-Nafir reappeared in the same city in September 1919.54 Although the press was hampered by censorship, beset by the problems of restarting in a society ravaged and impoverished by war and famine, and with its ranks thinned by the death of many journalists and the disappearance of many papers during the 1914–1918 period, it remains a crucial source for us in devining attitudes toward identity in Palestinian society.
IV
In the years immediately after the war, the first new newspaper to be established in Palestine was Suriyya al-Janubiyya, published in Jerusalem beginning in September 1919 by the lawyer Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri, and edited by ‘Arif al-‘Arif.55 This paper was important in several respects: it appears to have been the most influential organ of opinion during its short lifetime; it was highly political and intensely nationalist; and its articles were extremely vividly written—for many years indeed only Filastin among Palestinian papers could approach Suriyya al-Janubiyya for the pungency and power of its prose, and as we have seen, it was nearly two more years before Filastin reopened. That this new newspaper should have attracted such talented writers is not surprising, given that it was affiliated with the Arab nationalist club al-Nadi al-‘Arabi in Jerusalem, that the Arabist movement had been a magnet for talented journalists since well before the war,56 and that during this period Arabism benefited from the prestige that attached to the new (albeit short-lived) Arab state in Damascus.57
The newspaper was certainly taken seriously by the British authorities, as was evidenced by their closing it down for a month after the first ten issues, and then shutting it down permanently following the disturbances of April 1920, after it had appeared for less than a year. The first issue after the initial closure in November 1919 reports the paper’s reopening after a month of enforced silence, while insisting staunchly that it will not change its “Arab principles,” and calling on God to bring good to the “umma” [nation], and success to the “watan” [homeland]. This issue shows a slight softening of its normally militant nationalist tone by comparison with earlier numbers, a softening that does not continue in the later issues of the paper.58
The newspaper’s title, meaning “Southern Syria,” was indicative of the political temper of the times: at this stage, many in Palestine and elsewhere were motivated by the hope that all of Syria (here meaning greater Syria, or bilad al-Sham, including the modern-day countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) would remain united under the state established by Amir Faysal, third son of Sharif Husayn, as a first stage toward a larger Arab unity, a hope that was to wane in succeeding years, although it remained alive. The initial salience of this hope, and its diminution over time, can be traced from the varying frequency of the employment of terms reflecting it in the slogans found at the top of the pages of nationalist newspapers like Suriyya al-Janubiyya and its successor as the leading organ of patriotic opinion, al-Sabah. It can be seen as well from the names chosen for conferences, meetings, and political parties and clubs in Palestine, the wording used in communiqués and statements, and the letters and papers of Palestinians during the first few years after the war.
Thus, while Suriyya al-Janubiyya printed the words “biladuna land” [our country/countries are ours] across the masthead of every issue, the slogans at the top of the inside pages on issues ranging from October 1919 to March 1920 were either overtly Arabist (“we live for the Arabs and die for the Arabs”) or expressed general nationalist sentiments (such as “there is no majesty, no glory, no honor and no life except in independence”). By contrast, al-Sabah employed the more general—and more ambiguous—“bilad al-‘Arab lil-‘Arab” [“the Arab countries are for the Arabs”] on its masthead. While an unexceptionable sentiment in Arab nationalist terms, this slogan also represented a tacit adjustment to the new realities of 1921, with its implicit recognition that there are many Arab countries.
The background and import of the commitment to southern Syria at this time in Palestine requires some explanation, and is illustrative for our exploration of the emergence of Palestinian identity. The new Arab state in Syria was seen quite differently by different constituencies. For the British, the entity headquartered in Damascus was not a legitimate state; it was no more than a temporary military administration, under overall British military command, of one area of a region where Britain had multiple commitments and interests. Great Britain in fact never recognized this state, or Amir Faysal in his capacity as King of Syria after his coronation by a Syrian congress. When in London, and at the Versailles Peace Conference, Faysal was received by both Britain and France as the representative of his father, Sharif Husayn, whom the British recognized as King of the Hijaz. Ultimately, of course, in July 1920 the British gave in to insistent French demands that they honor their commitments to France embodied in the Sykes-Picot agreements, and allowed French forces to take over Syria, expel Faysal, and dismantle the Arab state he headed.59
In contrast, for many Arabs, this state was a harbinger of a new era of Arab independence and unity, the first stage in the reconstruction of an Arab polity whose roots were seen as going back to the earliest era of Islam, and fittingly, to the great Umayyad state, whose capital was Damascus.60 The boundaries of this new Syrian state were always problematic. The linguistic lines separating the mainly Arabic-speaking areas of Syria from the mainly Turkish-speaking areas of Anatolia served as rough boundaries in the north, the separation of Syria from Egypt to the west and the Hijaz to the south was generally recognized, while the relation of Syria to Iraq was settled by Iraqi representatives at a congress in Damascus that called for a separate Iraqi state linked dynastically to Syria. The precise status of Lebanon and Palestine, however, was less clear.
These coastal areas of greater Syria, or bilad al-Sham, were the ones Britain and France coveted the most. It was there that they had the most extensive interests, and where they had agreed in the Sykes-Picot accords during the war to establish their direct control. The Arab state in Damascus nevertheless claimed sovereignty over the littoral, and although Arab troops were expelled from Beirut by the French in 1918, and the British never allowed this state to extend its authority to Palestine, both Lebanese and Palestinians sat in the Syrian Parliament, and many of them served as ministers in the Syrian government.61 While elections were held for deputies in other parts of Syria, since this was not possible in Lebanon and Palestine due to French and British obstruction, they were represented in the Syrian Parliament by the surviving deputies for these regions who had served in the Ottoman Parliament originally elected in 1914.
For the Palestinian elite, therefore, a commitment to seeing their country as southern Syria was in large measure an indication of devotion to Arabism, and to its incarnation, the first modern Arab state of Syria with its capital in Damascus. As with Palestinian identity, there is little in the pre-war period to indicate an intense commitment to Syria as a primary focus of identity on the part of the great majority of Syrians, including Palestinians, while, as in the Palestinian case, there is much evidence of a general consciousness of Syria as an entity, and of the existence of strong local loyalties that were sometimes transmuted into Syrian patriotism. The encroachments and ambitions of foreign powers, in particular France, whose government explicitly and publicly declared its desire to control Syria from 1912 onwards, had had a potent cumulative impact in Syria, but until World War I, the response to this external challenge more often took an Ottomanist or Arabist cast than a Syrian one.62
The idea of Southern Syria as a post-war focus of identity among the Arab inhabitants of Palestine was therefore almost entirely new, its emergence as rapid as that of Palestine as a focus of identity. Like Palestinian identity, it overlapped with Arabism, albeit to an even greater degree during the two brief years when Syria was the location of the Arab state that seemed the incarnation of Arab nationalist aspirations. Unlike Palestinian identity, however, for inhabitants of Palestine it did not rest on a pre-war substratum of religious, administrative, local, and other loyalties going back many generations. With the crushing of the independent Syrian state by the French in 1920, Syria was to fade rapidly as a focus of identity for Palestinians, although it remained important for many Lebanese, particularly Sunnis and Greek Orthodox.63 Thus, less than a month after the fall of Faysal’s government in Damascus, Musa Kazim Paşa al-Husayni, who was the preeminent nationalist leader in Palestine until his death in 1934, declared: “Now, after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine.”64
We can observe an example of the centrality of Syria for Palestinians soon after the war in the earliest extant issue of Suriyya al-Janubiyya, dated October 2, 1919, where the focus is clearly on Syria, and in particular on news about developments relating to the country at the Paris peace conference. Already at this early date, a note of alarm emerged as to the possibility that Syria would be partitioned at the behest of the European powers: an article by ‘Arif al-‘Arif reported rumors that the Versailles peace conference was going to confirm the separation of both Lebanon and Palestine from the rest of Syria and the right of the Zionists to immigrate to the latter.65 Another article in the same issue, reprinted from the newspaper al-Istiqlal al-‘Arabi in Damascus, gloomily concluded that after Iraq had been forgotten by the Arabs and abandoned to the British (who at this stage were intent on imposing direct rule there on the Indian model) now it was the turn of Palestine, which would be separated from the rest of the Arab lands, and abandoned to the “shadow of Zionism.”66
The same notes of defiance are struck even after the paper’s closure by the British. In the first issue after it was reopened, in November 1919, one article commented on news from Paris regarding the likely partition of Syria, arguing that “we are residents of Southern Syria, we do not want partition, we want an independent Syria, and we are against Zionist immigration.”67 A second article, reporting a public speech by Sir Herbert Samuel at the London Opera House on the second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, categorically stated that the Arab nation had awakened from its sleep, and that “our country is Arab, Palestine is Arab, and Palestine must remain Arab.”68 This passage is interesting in that it combines local patriotism, focused on Palestine as “our country,” with a strong commitment to Arabism—a combination that was to become characteristic, and that we have already seen in pre-war editorials in Filastin. Such an assertive response can be understood in light of the content of Samuel’s speech, in which he said that while the Zionist movement did not intend to turn Palestine into a “purely Jewish state” immediately, its aim was to create as soon as possible “a purely self-governing Commonwealth under the auspices of an established Jewish majority.”69 Not entirely surprisingly, this “moderation” on Samuel’s part failed to reassure Palestinians suddenly faced with the spectre of sooner or later becoming a minority in a country they naturally assumed was their own.
The focus on Syria continued through 1919 and into early 1920 in Suriyya al-Janubiyya, which by this time had established itself as the most influential newspaper in Palestine.70 A December 1919 article entitled “Warning, Warning!” cautioned against meetings between Arab leaders and the Zionists at which deals were made at the expense of Palestine: it stressed that any agreement which does harm to “the Arab grouping (al-jami‘a al-‘arabiyya) and Syrian unity” would be opposed by the people.71 Similar language was used in a March 1920 article stating that Amir Faysal knew better than to make an agreement with the Zionists at the expense of Arab rights, for the Arabs, especially “the people of Southern Syria,” knew their history and their rights.72 Such a stress on Arabism and on the unity of Syria (while at the same time underlining the special place of Palestine—“Southern Syria” in the rhetoric of the moment) was to be expected at a time when the elected First Syrian General Congress, including representatives from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, had just concluded its meetings in Damascus in early March 1920 with radical resolutions proclaiming Faysal King of a united Syria, rejecting a French mandatory, as well as both the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration, and stressing the unity of Syria as a part of the Arab homeland.
In fact, as Muhammad Muslih and other historians have shown, by this stage many Palestinians, including the most devoted Arabists among them who were in Damascus serving the new Sherifian state, had grown disillusioned with Faysal’s willingness to compromise with the Zionists, and with the lack of concern shown by many Syrian leaders regarding the issue of Zionism.73 This disillusionment can indeed be read without difficulty between the lines of the articles just cited. It became clear to these Arabist Palestinian intellectuals and political leaders in Damascus that, for some Damascene politicians, the survival of an independent Arab state in Syria in the face of French imperialist ambitions would require great sacrifices, including perhaps a sacrifice of Palestine to Britain and the Zionists, who might then support Syrian independence against the incessant pressures from the French.74
This can now be seen to have been a shortsighted calculation, for neither the British nor the Zionists had the ability to deter France from its drive to control Syria, even had they wished to. In any case, within a few months these were rendered moot questions, as the entry of French troops into Damascus ended Syrian independence and delivered a crushing blow to Arab and pan-Syrian aspirations. The effects of these momentous events were naturally felt strongly in Palestine: just as the destruction of the Ottoman Empire forced a fundamental rethinking of questions of identity on Palestinians, so did the destruction of Faysal’s much shorter-lived kingdom in Damascus. Within a period of less than three years beginning in 1917, occurrences outside Palestine and circumstances that were completely outside their control thus forced Palestinians to confront repeatedly fundamental questions of identity.
Even before this, however, and before Suriyya al-Janubiyya was shut down for good by the British in the wake of the Nabi Musa riots of April 1920, the paper had begun to reflect other ideological trends than its original defiant Arabism. Side by side with a continuing commitment to Arabism, and with it to a unified Syria, this important organ of opinion showed a growing concentration on purely Palestinian matters. A remarkable article by Hajj Amin al-Husayni (later to become Mufti of Jerusalem) argued that the Arabs should take heart from the experience of a people (“qawm”) long dispersed and despised, and who had no homeland to call their own, but did not despair and were getting together after their dispersion to regain their glory after twenty centuries of oppression (nowhere are the Jews or Zionism mentioned by name, although the meaning is unmistakable). While ostensibly addressed to the Arab people as a whole, the fact that this exhortation was directed primarily at a Palestinian audience is indicated by comments like: “you can see others with far less then yourselves trying to build their house on the ruins of yours,” an unmistakable reference to Zionism and Palestine.75
More blatant than the subtle argument of Hajj Amin was a piece published in January 1920 over the signature “Ibn al-Jazira,” meaning “Son of Arabia,” a pseudonym perhaps for ‘Arif al-‘Arif, entitled “Manajat Filastin” [meaning a confidential talk or spiritual communion with Palestine] which began with the fulsome peroration:
Palestine, oh stage of the Prophets and source of great men; Palestine, oh sister of the gardens of paradise; Palestine, oh Ka‘ba of hopes and source of fulfilment; Palestine, oh beloved of millions of people; Palestine, oh lord of lands and pride of worshippers; Palestine, oh source of happiness and spring of purity; Palestine, my country and the country of my forefathers and ancestors; Palestine, only in you do I have pride, and only for you am I ashamed; Palestine, oh maiden of nations and desired of peoples; Palestine, my honor, my glory, my life and my pride.
This remarkable paean was followed by a lengthy series of further declarations of loyalty to Palestine and love for it, stressing in particular the “patriotic bonds and national rights” which tie the people of Palestine to their country. Noting that these were the sorts of expressions of the love of Palestinians for their country by which they proved to all how attached they were to it, the piece concluded with the words “Long live dear Palestine and its honest, sincere sons.”76 This is classical, full-blown nationalist rhetoric, notable for the fact that it referred solely to Palestine, and not the whole of the Arab lands, and solely to the people of Palestine, and not all the Arabs.
While these were no more than the words of “Ibn al-Jazira”—presumably ‘Arif al-‘Arif—and represented no more than his own ideas, their appearance in the most popular Palestinian newspaper of the day, one profoundly Arabist in orientation and whose very title proclaimed its commitment to the idea of greater Syria, is indicative of a shift in the direction of expressions of Palestinian patriotism, and of a growing identification with Palestine alone. While one such article does not constitute a trend in and of itself, it signifies a phenomenon not previously present, and one wholly unaccounted for by the conventional ascription of Palestinian identity and Palestinian nationalism to a much later period.
Even more striking than this example of overripe romantic nationalism is the terminology employed in news articles in Suriyya al-Janubiyya like one in March 1920. The article discussed the newfound unity between Christians and Muslims in Gaza “after all old sensitivities and frictions had been removed from spirits and hearts.” This unity, the author of the article noted in conclusion, was demonstrated by the establishment of a Muslim-Christian Society in Gaza aimed at building a united front against Zionism and against attempts by the British and the Zionists to divide the Arabs on religious lines. The Gaza branch of this society described in this article was one of a series of such branches established in cities all over Palestine at this time which represented a new form of organization of Palestinian Arab politics in response to the British occupation and the boost it gave to the fortunes of the Zionist movement.77 The article concludes that, God willing, this Society would have a positive effect in terms of “al-wataniyya al-Filistiniyya khususan wal ‘Arabiyya ‘umuman” (Palestinian nationalism/patriotism in particular, and Arab nationalism/patriotism in general).78
This crucial distinction between Palestinian and Arab patriotism, while ostensibly putting the two forms of patriotism on the same level, in fact privileged the former, for it was necessarily this form that was operative in practice in the day-to-day political activities of Palestinians in this period and afterwards. Isolated within the frontiers imposed on them by the British, and having to deal with their own specific problems, just as other Arab peoples were isolated within their own foreign-imposed frontiers and had to deal with their own problems, the Palestinians necessarily had to adjust. Inevitably, larger Arab concerns quickly began to fade by contrast with pressing Palestinian ones. This distinction between the two forms of patriotism, in exactly the same terms, formed the practical basis of nation-state nationalism in Palestine and other countries of the Arab mashriq in the years that were to follow, as commitment to Arab nationalism continued, but over the decades eventually declined into little more than lip-service.
It was only a matter of time before this change could be seen in small but significant shifts in political terminology, visible in the daily press. In the same March 1920 issue of Suriyya al-Janubiyya,79 Damascus was described as “the capital,” a description that was routine in that period, while Faysal’s government and an independent Arab state were still in existence there. However, the newspaper al-Sabah, which became the successor to Suriyya al-Janubiyya as the leading nationalist organ in Jerusalem after the closure of the latter in April 1920, in its first issue in October 1921 mentioned that it was being published in Jerusalem “the capital of Palestine.”80 Minor though this difference in wording may seem, it bespoke a subtle but important change in focus in little over a year and a half for many Palestinians, who now saw that Jerusalem was the center, not Damascus.
Such a shift was not necessary for the main journalistic competitor of Suriyya al-Janubiyya, Mir’at al-Sharq, whose lead editorial in its first issue makes no reference to Arabism (the term umma, “nation,” used frequently in its columns, is not further specified as being the Palestinian or the Arab nation, and could be understood in most cases as referring to either), while it stresses that it is being published “bayna qawmina” (“among our people”) in Jerusalem, with the clear implication that the paper is Palestinian in focus.81 While there is no evidence that the British directly supported Mir’at al-Sharq, they certainly looked with considerably more favor on it than on its nationalist rival, as is evidenced by the fact that when Maj. Gen. Bols, the Chief Administrator of Palestine, sought to respond to nationalist agitation in February 1920, he chose to do so via an interview with Mir’at al-Sharq.82 It would not be surprising if the paper did receive British support, since providing subventions to local newspapers was an old British policy in Egypt, where Storrs had served before the War as Oriental Secretary, in which capacity he was responsible for such activities. We have seen from documents quoted earlier in this chapter from the archives of Suriyya al-Janubiyya and al-Sabah,83 that Storrs exercised a personal surveillance over both papers, peremptorily calling in their editors when he saw fit.
This “South Syrian” interlude has been examined by a number of historians, notably Muhammad Muslih and Yehoshua Porath, although both tend to focus on broad trends of political history, and neither seems to have examined the press particularly closely.84 This interlude marked a crucial hiatus between pre-1917 political attitudes of the Palestinians, and those that were to last for the rest of the Mandate period and beyond. As we have seen, the Southern Syrian idea was linked to and mainly espoused by fervent Arab nationalists. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, as the idea of independence for the Arabs, via the creation of a federation of three large states—Syria, Iraq, and the Hijaz—linked together by a Hashemite dynastic connection, seemed to be on the brink of realization, the initial optimism among Arabs that allied policy would allow such an outcome was encouraged by a combination of factors. These included what was known of the British promises to Sharif Husayn in 1915 and 1916, combined with public declarations by the allies such as the Anglo-French statement of November 7, 1918, promising the Arabs of Syria and Iraq liberation from Turkish rule and freely chosen governments;85 the reassuring confidential counsels of British advisers and officials to various leading Arab figures such as Amir Faysal;86 and a strong dose of wishful thinking.
While such hopes for independence and some form of unity animated many Arabs, in Palestine from the very outset of the post-Ottoman period the spectre of the Balfour declaration clouded these bright expectations. During General Allenby’s ceremonial entry into Jerusalem in December 1917, which was attended by a host of French and Italian military and political representatives and contingents of their armed forces, the British had purposely excluded Arab forces, Arab military flags, and representatives of the Arab army.87 This was in striking contrast to the situation elsewhere in Syria, where Arab forces were often given pride of place, as for example in the capture of Damascus and the entry of allied troops into the city.88
And in violation of the principle of strict maintenance of the status quo ante bellum as regards the holy places and the rights and privileges of the various communities, which Allenby proclaimed as the basis of the military government soon after the occupation of Jerusalem, important changes were soon made in favor of the Jewish community, such as the use of Hebrew as an official language.89 Not surprisingly, this important change, which concerned language, so important where issues of identity and nationalism are salient, deeply disturbed the Palestinians. The behavior of representatives of the Zionist movement, some of whom apparently initially assumed that the Balfour Declaration meant that they would rapidly become the rulers of the country, and who soon began to arrive in Palestine in large numbers, only increased these initial concerns.90 Within a short time, many Palestinians came to believe that the British intended to carry out their pledge to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, and that this meant Jewish dominion over them, although others continued to hope that this was not the case.
Against the background of a growing understanding between Britain and France regarding the partition of the Arab lands, their disregard for Arab claims in Palestine, the unwillingness or inability of Faysal and other Syrian leaders to act against Zionism, and the failure of both the Arab and the Syrian ideas as practical vehicles either for the organization of political life or for obtaining support against the British and the Zionists, the Palestinians found themselves all alone. They were confronted by a Zionist movement that seemed to move from strength to strength. In this precarious situation, the Palestinians were obliged to find a satisfactory basis for their resistance to a multiplicity of external threats.
In view of developments in Palestine before World War I and the experiences of all the other Arab countries in similar situations—Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan—91 it seems almost certain that a Palestinian particularist response would have emerged eventually, irrespective of the goad of Zionism, and would eventually have developed into a separate sense of Palestinian identity, and ultimately a territorially based nation-state nationalism. Certainly that is the logic of every other entity in the eastern Arab world within the frontiers drawn by the imperial powers, without exception. But in the event, Palestinian identity crystallized much more rapidly than it might otherwise have done due to the urgency of the threat the Zionist movement was perceived as posing, and the already existing high level of Palestinian entity-consciousness. Indeed, it is apparent that within a few years of the end of the First World War, a well-developed sense of Palestinian identity had already emerged, at least among those sectors and strata of society whose views we are able to ascertain.
This can be seen in a variety of places, notably in the pages of the press, which both shaped opinion and reflected it. Thus, the nationalist successor of Suriyya al-Janubiyya in Jerusalem, al-Sabah, explained in its first issue in October 1921 that while one of its purposes was to defend the Arab cause, its main aim was “to serve the cause of the Fourth Palestinian Arab Congress, and to support the objectives of the delegation of the nation which is defending the Palestinian Arab cause in Europe, as part of the general Arab cause.”92 This delegation represented a coalition between various Palestinian political forces with a view to expressing their opposition to the Balfour declaration and other aspects of British policy to British policymakers in London. Through the thicket of the various qualifications and caveats about the Arab cause in the passage quoted, it is apparent that the practical focus of al-Sabah, and of the broad political trend in Palestinian society represented by the delegation it supported, had narrowed to Palestine itself.
In al-Sabah and other nationalist papers, and in general Palestinian political discourse in the years that followed, the “general Arab cause” would continue to be mentioned, but this was increasingly lip service: what really mattered was the “Palestinian Arab cause.” If this was the line of the Arabist al-Sabah, it should not be surprising that Filastin, which even before the war had stressed Palestinian particularism, should be even more emphatic in stressing a separate Palestinian identity after its reappearance. Its lead editorial in its first issue after a hiatus of six years, in March 1921, explicitly talks of “Palestine and its sister Syria,” thereby making clear that each is a separate country.93 This terminology—“sister Syria”—represents the mature discourse of Arab nation-state nationalism. This is the discourse in which for over half a century now, independent Arab states have been referred to as brothers and sisters, implying that they are members of one family out of respect for the myth of the existence of one Arab nation, even while it is perfectly clear to all concerned that they generally act almost completely independently of one another.94
And beyond the press, beyond political discourse, this separate nature of Palestine was being emphasized and established in myriad ways. Among the most important was education, for our discussion so far of the growth of Palestinian national consciousness applies mainly to the urban, literate upper and middle class and highly politicized segments of the population, which were a minority in the early 1920s. However, contrary to the condescending views of most British colonial officials and Zionist leaders regarding the majority of the population (for G. S. Symes, Chief Secretary of the Mandatory government from 1925 to 1928, the Arab peasantry “obviously couldn’t. . . manage their own affairs satisfactorily”),95 some degree of politicization had already affected other strata, notably parts of the rural population. This could already be seen many years earlier from the clashes between peasants and Jewish settlers in the countryside before 1914 discussed in chapter 5, above.
The growth of the educational system in Palestine, and the attendant spread of nationalist concepts through this system, greatly facilitated the politicization of the countryside, and provided a sort of conveyor belt whereby the ideas we have been examining rapidly became widespread beyond the cities and the literate population in the following years. By 1947 nearly half the Arab school age population was enrolled in schools: in that year 147,000 of an estimated Arab school-age population of 330,000 (or 44.5%) were being educated in government and private schools, with 103,000 in the former and the rest in the latter.96 While these are modest figures by modern standards, they represent a significant shift in little over two decades: just over 20 percent of Arab school-aged children were in schools in 1922–23. And in the towns in 1945–46, 85 percent of boys and 65 percent of girls were in school; the problem was in the countryside, where only 65 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls were in school, a problem caused in part by the fact that only 432 of about 800 villages had schools.97 It is nevertheless striking that by the end of the mandate a majority of Arab boys in both city and countryside, and of Arab girls in the cities, were in school.
The salience of Arab nationalism in the educational system in Mandatory Palestine has already been noted by many authors: the Peel Commission Report of 1937 claimed in somewhat exaggerated fashion that Arab teachers had turned the government schools into “seminaries of Arab nationalism.”98 What has been less noticed is the degree to which the system fostered a specifically Palestinian national consciousness, even though the teaching of history, normally the most potent entry-point for nationalist ideas, was closely monitored by the British to prevent the spread of such “subversive” thinking.99 One example will suffice to illustrate how the educational system served this purpose, in spite of British attempts to orient it otherwise. As early as 1923, Sabri Sharif ‘Abd al-Hadi, who taught geography in the Nablus secondary school, had published a book entitled Jughrafiyyat Suriyya wa Filastin al-Tabi’iyya (The natural geography of Syria and Palestine).100 This is an otherwise unremarkable text, which discusses the natural features, agriculture, communications routes, demography, and administrative divisions of Syria and Palestine. Its importance lies in the fact that all over Palestine, students were already in 1923 learning that Palestine was a separate entity, a unit whose geography required separate treatment. Clearly, no one who disputes the widespread existence of Palestinian identity, and the emergence of a Palestinian national consciousness during the Mandate period, can have examined the press or the country’s educational system during this early phase in even a cursory manner.
What this chapter has attempted to show is that even before the mandate for Palestine had been formally confirmed on Britain by the League of Nations in July 1922, important elements of the country’s Arab population had already come to identify primarily with Palestine. This Palestinian identity was to remain strongly tinged, and to overlap with, elements of religious sentiment and Arabism (it will be recalled that the delegation to London in 1921 described itself as a Palestinian Arab body, and the most common self-description of political groupings during the mandate was as Palestinian Arab), both of which had been among its precursors. It was to spread significantly in succeeding years to broader segments of the population outside the cities, primarily via the growing influence of the press and the expansion of the educational system. Nevertheless, this early period saw the emergence in a relatively complete form of the basic self-identification of Palestinians as Palestinians which has characterized them until the present day.