Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

One of the most common tropes in treatments of issues related to Palestine is the idea that Palestinian identity, and with it Palestinian nationalism, are ephemeral and of recent origin. This is most commonly expressed as the assertion that both of these phenomena are in some sense artificial—the implication being that they must be distinguished from “real” identities and “real” nationalisms—and that they emerged only in the 1960s.

Such a distorted vision of the Palestinian national narrative denies the complex genesis of this identity over many decades around the turn of the twentieth century, which the previous chapters have chronicled. Beyond that, it obliterates memory of two subsequent periods that were decisive for the shaping of Palestinian identity. The first included the thirty years of the British Mandate, which were marked by the desperate, losing struggle of the newly formed Palestinian national movement against the greatest imperial power of the age, Great Britain, and its protègé, the Zionist movement. This first period ended in a crescendo of violence, as fighting inside Palestine between Arabs and Jews intensified from November 1947 until May 1948, culminating in the first war between the Arab states and Israel from May 1948 onwards. These traumatic events of 1947–49, which cost the Palestinians their majority status in Palestine and their hope of controlling the country, and cost half of them their homes, land, and property, are inscribed in Palestinian memory and historiography as al-Nakba, “the catastrophe.”¹ The second period consisted of the “lost years” between 1948 and the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964,² during which time the Palestinians seemed to many to have disappeared from the political map as an independent actor, and indeed as a people.

Of the many partial explanations for this trope of Palestinian nonexistence before the 1960s, one is straightforward: there was a hiatus in manifestations of Palestinian identity for a period after 1948. During the 1950s and early 1960s there were few indications to outside observers of the existence of an independent Palestinian identity or of Palestinian nationalism. This hiatus is partly explained by the fact that Palestinian society had been devastated between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 as a result of a series of overwhelming military defeats of the disorganized Palestinians by the armed forces of the Zionist movement. These forces—the Haganah, the Palmach, and others that had grown out of the seed of the Hashomer, which we observed germinating in chapter 5—were transformed in 1948 into the core of the Israeli army. Their decisive victories over the Palestinians brought about the wholesale flight and expulsion of much of the Arab population of Palestine, beginning a demographic transformation of the country with long-lasting consequences.

This sequence of Palestinian defeats before May 15, 1948 is little known when compared with the events that took place after that date. Then, several Arab armies entered Palestine, and proceeded to lose much of the rest of the country to the new Israeli army in what came to be known as the first Arab-Israeli war. In many ways the earlier phase was more important to the Palestinians, because it resulted in the loss of major cities like Jaffa and Haifa (which by then had become those with the largest Arab population, and were the most dynamic centers of Arab economic and cultural life), and of hundreds of Arab towns and villages and vast tracts of land. These crushing defeats ended any hopes that the Arab state called for in General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, which provided for the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, would ever come into being. Instead the Arab state was strangled at birth, victim of the total failure of the Palestinians, the military triumph of the new Jewish state, and the collusion of a number of Arab leaders.³ May 15, 1948 thus marked not only the birth of the state of Israel, but also the decisive defeat of the Palestinians by their Zionist foes, and an approximate midpoint in the expulsion and flight of roughly half of Palestine’s Arab population of 1.4 million. This process of population displacement continued until the conclusion of the armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in 1949, although the precise numbers of those who became refugees are much disputed and are difficult to ascertain exactly even today.⁴

In the wake of this disaster for the Palestinians, and the division of their country among Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, it was difficult for outsiders to pick up the strands of a single narrative, and to identify where the focus of Palestinian identity was, or whether in fact it had survived the debacles of 1947–49. Indeed, during these “lost years” there no longer appeared to be a center of gravity for the Palestinians. The largest single group of Palestinians, those in Jordan, to which the region of central Palestine which came to be called the West Bank was annexed in 1949, received Jordanian nationality. They began an uneasy relationship with a country where they have formed a majority since 1949 , but where political power is out of their control. Less than 200,000 Palestinians remained in those parts of Palestine which were incorporated into the new state of Israel. These obtained Israeli citizenship,⁵ but were to remain muzzled under military rule until 1966, and were barred for long after that from any expressions of Palestinian identity. Other Palestinians, in the Gaza Strip under Egyptian military administration, in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, obtained differing categories of refugee status, and faced different barriers to political organization, free expression, and manifestations of their identity.

Given the centrality of attachment to place characteristic not only of Palestinians, but also of others in traditional and semitraditional societies, it can be imagined how powerful an impact these events must have had: by the end of the process of dispossession in 1949, more than four hundred cities, towns, and villages in Galilee, the coastal region, the area between Jaffa and Jerusalem, and the south of the country had been depopulated, incorporated into Israel and settled with Israelis, and most of their Arab inhabitants were dispersed throughout the region as refugees.⁶ However, even amidst the appalling conditions that affected the Palestinians, and the fragmentation that had beset them following their loss of their homes, the first stirrings of a reconstitution of an independent Palestinian identity were already taking place. In the refugee camps, the workplaces, the schools, and the universities where Palestinians congregated in the years after 1948, we find the beginnings, the prehistory as it were, of a new generation of Palestinian nationalist groups and movements which started clandestinely in the 1950s and emerged into the open in the mid-1960s.⁷

A student union at Cairo University, Ittihad Talabat Filastin (The Union of Palestinian Students), was founded in 1950 by a young, cleanshaven engineering student who had fought in the Palestine war of 1947–49 and was later to become known as Yasser ‘Arafat,⁸ together with a few close student colleagues including Salah Khalaf (later best known as the head of Fateh intelligence, under the nom de guerre Abu Iyyad). A student grouping at the American University of Beirut was founded about the same time by a medical student named George Habash and a few of his comrades. Other grassroots militant organizations also emerged in the Gaza Strip, such as that established by Khalil al-Wazir (a founder of Fateh later known as Abu Jihad⁹). By the mid-1950s these small beginnings had developed into a network of Palestinian nationalist organizations. Each had its own political agenda, and all were small and vulnerable, but they tapped a powerful vein of nationalist sentiment among Palestinians. The Arab governments and Israel soon learned that they had to deal warily with them.

Even a cursory examination of these new groups and their ideology reveals that they represented a continuation of the Palestinian national movement as it developed from the roots we have examined into the Mandate period, until its defeat and collapse in the wake of the 1948 war. There is the same use of the theme of historic Palestinian rootedness in the land, the same symbols signifying Palestinian identity, and the same obsession with Zionism, further accentuated by the traumatic impact of the events of 1947–49 on the Palestinians. This is true despite the major differences between the pre-1948 and post-1948 movements, among them the fact that in no case did the new movements include members of the leadership drawn from the old Palestinian elite, which was considered in some measure as being responsible for having “lost” Palestine. That class indeed disappeared utterly from the political scene, discredited by its failures, and crippled by the loss of much of its lands, businesses, and properties.¹⁰ At a stroke, the older members of families like the al-Husaynis, Nashashibis, and al-Khalidis, who had dominated Palestinian politics from the 1920s through the 1940s, were replaced by very young men who were educated in the new schools that had sprung up in Palestine during the Mandate, were often graduates of universities in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, and generally came from poor or middle-class backgrounds.¹¹

It must be admitted that both the continuities between these new, clandestine groups and the Palestinian national movement of the Mandate period, and the significance of these small, mainly underground groups of the 1950s and 1960s are easier to see in hindsight, and might well not have been fully apparent to many observers at the time. This hiatus thus in some measure appeared to substantiate the assertion that Palestinian identity emerged for the first time in the 1960s: for many years it could plausibly be argued that there did not appear to be a Palestinian identity, just as there was no Palestinian entity that could be pointed to on the map. It may thus have seemed, or could be made to seem, that, to quote Golda Meir once again, “There was no such thing as Palestinians. . .. They did not exist.”¹²

Another important reason for the trope of Palestinian nonexistence before the 1960s was a paradoxical one: this was the power of the ideology of pan-Arabism, which in some measure obscured the identities of the separate Arab nation-states it subsumed. The potency of pan-Arabism can be understood on two levels: that of the Arab world itself, and that of the outside world, especially the West, where the representation of Arabism came to take on an almost mythical life of its own, for reasons that relate in part at least to the Palestinians. Within the Arab world, Arabism was the hegemonic ideology of the first half of the twentieth century, reaching its apogee in terms of political power in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of Egyptian President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, who seemed to many to incarnate the Arab resurgence.

The ideology which ‘Abd al-Nasir mastered and helped mightily to further had resonance throughout an Arab world profoundly frustrated for generations by its inability to shake off foreign rule or to achieve true independence and real economic development.¹³ Its basic premise was that the Arabs were a single people with a single language, history, and culture, divided not by centuries of separate development of widely separated countries, but by the recent machinations of imperialism, and that all they had in common was more powerful than whatever separated them. This ideology was strong enough at a few times and in a few places to transcend the iron realities of the nation-state in the Arab world in this era, notably during the union of 1958–1961 between Egypt and Syria. The new Arab nation-states, many of which had first emerged after World War I, and which had only recently obtained even nominal independence, were nevertheless exceedingly strong and growing stronger. Even though most of them did not enjoy the ideological legitimacy of pan-Arabism, they nevertheless benefited from the fact that real material power and significant influence attached to these “artificial creations of Western imperialism,” to use the disparaging rhetoric of pan-Arabism for the Arab nation-state.¹⁴

The Palestinians were deeply attracted by the pan-Arabism of ‘Abd al-Nasir. Beyond the obvious fact that Arabism had been an important element of the Palestinian self-view for many decades, in its potent new pan-Arab form it promised, as had the other regional or transnational ideologies the Palestinians had identified with in the past—whether Ottomanism, Arabism or pan-Syrianism—to multiply their limited forces and give them support from outside Palestine against the Israeli foe they knew from bitter experience to be far stronger than they were. It also gave the Palestinian refugees, who were poorly treated in many Arab countries, a larger sense of identity, which gave the promise of protecting them from such pressures. Thus for a time, ‘Abd al-Nasir’s picture was on the walls of many homes in the Palestinian refugee camps; and in Israel, in Jordan, in the Gaza Strip, as well as in all the countries of the Palestinian diaspora, the Egyptian radio, Sawt al-‘Arab, (“Voice of the Arabs”), with its intoxicating Arab nationalist message, was listened to avidly.

For many young Palestinians who joined pan-Arab organizations like the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN—Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-‘Arab),¹⁵ the basic motivation was to benefit from the pan-Arab mobilization ‘Abd al-Nasir promised, in order to facilitate their main objective, the liberation of Palestine. But the MAN, although it took an Arab nationalist form, and included numerous members from several Arab countries, was almost exclusively Palestinian in its leadership and its basic objectives. Not surprisingly, in the wake of the 1967 war it transmuted almost instantaneously from being an ostensibly pan-Arab organization, with branches all over the Arab world, into one of the main Palestinian political/military formations, the Popular Front for the Liberation for Palestine (PFLP). It did so in the wake of its rapid loss of support in the mid-1960s to Fateh, its main rival for loyalty among Palestinians, which from the start had taken on an overtly Palestinian configuration, barely paying even lip-service to the shibboleths of Arabism.

Thus among the Palestinians, although they certainly understood themselves to be Arabs, at least some of their devotion to pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s was instrumental as regards their larger objective, which was the “return” to Palestine (al-‘awda, a term used in the names of several of the groups that emerged in this period, such as Abtal al-‘Awda, “The Heroes of the Return”) .¹⁶ This was to take place via the “liberation” of Palestine which was the aim of all the clandestine groups that started in the wake of 1948, and that had emerged from the shadows by 1967. However, for many Palestinian activists, particularly those living under Egyptian military administration in the Gaza Strip, the encounter with Nasirism was less than edifying from the very beginning. The bitter experience of being hounded, jailed, and interrogated by the Egyptian mukhabarat (intelligence service), as happened to many of them suspected of carrying out attacks on Israel, naturally tended to make these individuals cynical about the Egyptian regime’s highflown rhetoric about its commitment to the Palestine cause.¹⁷

For many other Palestinians, however, whether members of the MAN, unaffiliated Nasirists, or supporters of the Ba‘th party, which was influential in Syria from the early 1950s onwards and has been in power there continuously since 1963, pan-Arabism retained its appeal both as an ideal that had long been popular among Palestinians—why after all should the Arab people not be united?—as well as what appeared to be a practical means to the achievement of their shared goal of the liberation of their country. However, pan-Arabism failed spectacularly in 1967, with Israel’s crushing defeats of the armies of ‘Abd al-Nasir and the Ba‘thist regime in Syria (as well as that of Jordan), and the occupation by Israel of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the only parts of Palestine that had remained under Arab control after 1948, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights.

In consequence of this failure of pan-Arabism, many of these Palestinians looked to groups like Fateh which from the beginning had espoused a Palestinian particularism with which they were both familiar and comfortable. These groups, the long-standing rivals of the MAN, the Ba‘th and other Arabist formations, had already been gaining ground at the expense of the latter in the mid-1960s. And after the Arab debacle of 1967, with its ranks rapidly swelled with recruits and their coffers with contributions, Fateh swiftly achieved the dominance over Palestinian politics it has retained to this day.

But if pan-Arabism was dead—or at least moribund—as a political force among most Palestinians living in the real world of Middle East politics after 1967, it lived on as a convenient myth in the West, where its impact lingered on far longer than in the Arab world. This requires an explanation, and several are possible. The most charitable is that it was hard for westerners, weaned on their own myth of unitary nationalism we have already touched on, whereby a Frenchwoman is a Frenchwoman before all else, an American an American, and so forth, to understand the multiple, layered identities so characteristic of the Arab world in general, and of the Palestinians in particular. Put simply, this view applied to the Palestinians as follows: these people could either be Palestinians or they could be Arabs, but they could not be both. In support of this explanation, it can be argued that confusion about such multiple, layered identities persists to this day among Westerners, even educated and knowledgeable ones, and about nationalities far beyond the Palestinian case.

There are two less charitable explanations for why the myth of Arabism lived on after its demise as a political force in the real world in 1967. The first is that Arab nationalism, especially in the form represented by ‘Abd al-Nasir, had become a powerful symbolic bogeyman, representing all that was objectionable in the Arab world to those outside it. This was true for British colonialists like Anthony Eden, who could never forgive the Egyptians for freeing themselves from British control (and indeed Eden apparently suffered paroxysms of irrational rage in his hatred of ‘Abd al-Nasir, comparing him to Hitler¹⁸); French colonialists like Guy Mollet, who could never forgive the Egyptians for their support of the Algerian revolutionaries and of Tunisian and Moroccan nationalists in the 1950s and afterwards; and American anti-Communists like John Foster Dulles, who could never forgive ‘Abd al-Nasir for the 1955 Czech arms deal with Egypt, whereby the Soviet Union first obtained a foothold in the Arab world. To this powerful coalition of enemies must be added Israel and its friends, who were deeply uneasy at the prospect of a new Egyptian-led Arab coalition capable of challenging the results of the war of 1947–49.

Some of these enemies were to combine in the tripartite Israeli-British-French Suez invasion of 1956, whose failure ultimately shattered the power of Britain and France in the Middle East, and brought about the downfall of Eden’s government. But the other enemies ‘Abd al-Nasir had acquired at this stage were to stay with him: to ideologically oriented American policymakers, he continued to symbolize a hostile force allied with the USSR; and to Israel’s leaders and supporters, he clearly appeared to be that country’s most dangerous potential opponent. With powerful enemies such as these for well over a decade and a half, it is no wonder that so much should have been invested in the myth of the power of pan-Arabism. Particularly galling for American policymakers, ‘Abd al-Nasir appeared to have much support in the region, while such American allies as King Faysal of Saudi Arabia and King Husayn of Jordan appeared to be in danger of losing power to revolutionaries inspired by pan-Arabism, as had happened to the monarchies in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya.

The last reason for some of the perceived force of pan-Arabism in the eyes of those who opposed it was that the existence of such an ideology was convenient for them. For pan-Arabism, which proclaimed the kinship of the Arabs as a single people, and purported to aim to unite them in a single state, made it easier for some to argue that in view of this ideology, there was no reason why the Palestinians, who could be shown to be such fervent Arab nationalists, and so devoted in following ‘Abd al-Nasir, shouldn’t simply dissolve in the larger Arab world. Such a solution, which at least a few of its proponents must have put forward in good faith and honest ignorance, had the unmatched merit in their eyes of removing the most legitimate Arab claimant to Palestine, leaving the Israeli claim to the country unchallenged.

The logic of this analysis can be perceived if one were to postulate the nonexistence or the extreme weakness of Arabism. In such a case, the Zionist claim to Palestine, which since even before the establishment of the state of Israel had depended in some measure on arguing that there was no legitimacy to the competing Arab claim, would have been much weaker. For if those others who claimed Palestine were not just generic Arabs, part of a larger Arab people with many wide lands to live in, who could and should go to the Arab countries where they belonged (and whence Joan Peters and others preached to the gullible that they had come), if in other words they had no other identity than as Palestinians, and were a people whose identity was rooted in Palestine, then they had a much stronger claim than would otherwise have been the case to this land in which the state of Israel had successfully established itself.

None of this is to say that pan-Arabism had no force of its own, or that it was entirely a bogeyman concocted by Anglo-French imperialists, American anti-communists, and Israelis intent on delegitimizing their foes. But it does help to explain the extraordinary strength of the hostility of many in the West to pan-Arabism for so many years, indeed well beyond the time it had ceased to be a dynamic force in Arab politics. In other words, this caricature of pan-Arabism was useful to its enemies as a mobilizational tool, even after the real movement on which it was based had lost its potency. This was directly relevant to the issue of Palestinian identity, since the strength or weakness of pan-Arabism was seen as inversely proportional to a separate Palestinian identity. This is not as far-fetched as it may sound, in view of the intensity of the passion and commitment attaching to the competing claims to Palestine this issue impinged on. A great deal was invested in the Israeli claim, and given that the legitimacy of Israel was denied in the Arab world in the name of the Palestinian claim, it was not surprising that the response should have been to add to the old argument that there were no Palestinians, the new one that these people were just part of the vast, undifferentiated Arab world, which was simply exploiting a nonexistent “Palestinian” claim in order to delegitimize Israel.¹⁹

All of this was suffused with ineffable emotion in Israel and the West, because from its inception and at least until 1967, Israel seemed to its supporters to be existentially threatened. In such a situation, the stubborn Arab denial of legitimacy to Israel, and the absolute refusal to recognize its existence, or even its name (“the Zionist entity” was the favorite term for Israel in the Arab world in those days), were seen as especially sinister. The wide gap between Arab rhetoric and actual Arab intentions, not to speak of the even wider one between Arab rhetoric and pitifully limited Arab capabilities, was rarely assessed rationally or calmly, nor were the broad differences of opinion on this matter in the Arab world (which had produced a number of initiatives for a settlement with Israel in the first years after 1948²⁰) closely examined. Instead, the most extreme Arab rhetoric was taken for the only reality, and was often taken out of context, misunderstood, or mistranslated.²¹ There resulted a fantastic but barely plausible representation of the Palestinians as no more than pawns for a huge, united Arab world deliberately waiting to pounce on tiny Israel and drive its population into the sea, a heady if fanciful representation that has evocative power to this day.

What may be called the hiatus in manifestations of Palestinian nationalism from 1948 until the mid 1960s, and the potency and utility of the myth of pan-Arabism to some of its enemies in the West and Israel, help to explain the trope of the late emergence of Palestinian identity which we have been examining, but these two explanations are not sufficient to elucidate it fully. At least one other factor must be adduced: the impact of the failure of the Palestinians on themselves and others.

The broad dimensions of this failure should be amply clear by now. Even before World War I, it was possible to detect a deep undercurrent of frustration among many Palestinians about their inability to bring their society’s concerns about Zionism to the attention of the Ottoman government in a way that produced the required response. In spite of peasant resistance and rural unrest, in spite of the futile efforts of Palestinian deputies to raise the matter in Parliament, and in spite of newspaper editorials and local protests, the Ottoman government failed to act to rein in the growth of the Zionist movement. Thus a 1914 editorial in Filastin which has already been cited complained that although Ottoman government officials who do not understand Arabic refuse to accept the newspaper’s translations of inflammatory Zionist statements, the government “is able to find a few words we wrote about the Zionists on page three of our newspaper next to the advertisements, and builds a court case on it, and punishes the paper with closure!”²²

This inability to affect the Ottoman government was made all the more galling by an inability of activists and political leaders to affect their own society. The very first newspaper articles on the activities of the Zionist movement in Palestine which we have surveyed exhibit an awareness that were it not for the willingness of absentee and local landlords to sell land to the newcomers, there would be little problem. Similarly, as we have seen, Ruhi al-Khalidi laid great stress on the issue of land sales in his book on Zionism, as did Najib Nassar in the pages of al-Karmil, and ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa in Filastin. Some of the blame could be placed on the Ottoman government, for example for failing to implement the laws restricting land sales to foreigners, or the visa restrictions on Jewish immigrants, but some had to be placed as well on the members of a society who could not perceive the harmful aims of the Zionist movement, or refused to take them into account, and went ahead and sold land to representatives of this movement. These same editorials pointed out a failure to raise popular consciousness regarding the gravity of this danger, and to organize Palestinian society to oppose it.

After World War I, the same themes recurred, and in time the frustration of those writing in the press became almost palpable. In this period, articles in many of the same newspapers we have followed before 1914 expressed frustration about the failure of the Palestinians to obtain a response from the British Mandatory administration, and the government in London to which this administration was responsible, but the problem in essence remained the same one: how to get a just hearing for what was by the early 1920s routinely described as “the Palestinian national cause.”²³ Before 1914, the Palestinians had their own elected representatives in Istanbul who could raise their concerns in Parliament, albeit with little result. After 1918, in spite of repeated British promises to the Arabs about independence and representative government,²⁴ the Mandatory authorities prevented the creation of representative elected bodies in Palestine, for these would inevitably have reflected the will of the Arab majority and nullified the Balfour Declaration.

The Palestinians deeply resented what they saw as a form of discrimination against Palestine, among all the other Arab regions which came under Anglo-French control after the war. Thus, the nationalist Jerusalem newspaper al-Sabah wrote in 1921 that Palestine would have had few problems if it were not for the Balfour declaration. In the best case, Palestine would have been within the area of Arab independence and free Arab governments promised by Sir Henry McMahon to Sharif Husayn. In the worst case, if the Sykes-Picot accords had been implemented in Palestine, the country would have been under foreign control, but administered by its own people. By comparison, Iraq had an independent Arab government, a parliament, an Arab king, and had “a strong national life”; Syria, in spite of its bad situation imposed by the French, had national governments, and a parliament; Jordan had an Arab government with an Arab amir and internal independence. The article continued bitterly, “Why should Palestine have any less?,” concluding that it was all because of Zionism, which was aiming for a privileged position and trying to take away Palestinian rights.²⁵

In spite of this discrimination, the Palestinians nevertheless held national conferences, sent telegrams of protest, met British Ministers, such as Winston Churchill, who came to Palestine in April 1921, and in the fall of the same year sent a delegation to London to lay their concerns before the British government and people. All of this was to no avail in affecting the basic lines of British policy as regards Zionism, or in achieving Palestinian independence and self-determination. “The nation,” a 1921 communiqué announcing the preparations for sending the Palestinian delegation to London stated, “desires the formation of a national government responsible to an elected parliamentary assembly which alone would have the authority to frame legislation and approve the formation of such a government.”²⁶ Until 1948, and for as long as the British remained in Palestine and the country had an Arab majority, these unexceptionable wishes were to remain unfulfilled.

These failures to win concessions from the British were matched by failures in organizing Palestinian society, overcoming internal divisions, and stopping Arab land sales to the Zionist movement: thus in the 1920s the Jewish National Fund completed the purchase of the vast remaining Sursuq holdings in the Marj Ibn ‘Amir, in transactions that dwarfed those at al-Shajara and al-Fula in the earlier part of the century (described in previous chapters), which were the source of such consternation at the time. Although the Palestinians were able to present a united front to their foes for many years after the war, the internal divisions among the elite eventually surfaced, ably exploited by the British, with their vast experience of dividing colonized societies in order to rule them more effectively, and by the Zionists, the workings of whose intelligence services in these early years have yet to be fully elucidated.²⁷ By the 1930s, the Palestinian leadership was polarized between a faction led by the British-appointed Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni,²⁸ and another often aligned with the British and led by the former Mayor of Jerusalem, Raghib al-Nashashibi, which feuded bitterly with one another.²⁹

To these divisions among the elite must be added another one: that between the elite itself and a growing current of discontent among younger Palestinians, among the landless urban poor who were flocking to the cities (especially Haifa and Jaffa), and among many in the countryside, saddled with debt to urban merchants and money-lenders.³⁰ This discontent was accentuated by economic distress in the early 1930s as the worldwide depression hit Palestine, and by the impact of rapidly mounting Jewish immigration as Nazi persecution drove thousands of Jews escaping from Europe to seek refuge in Palestine, at a time when most of the countries of the world shut their doors to them. In the year 1935 alone, at the height of this flood of refugees from Hitler’s persecution, more than 60,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, a number equal to the entire Jewish population of the country only twenty years earlier.

There was a swift reaction by the discontented and dispossessed elements in Palestinian society to the internecine divisions among the elite, and the hopeless ineffectiveness of its leadership of the national movement in the face of this mounting peril. The spark of armed revolt ignited by Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam in the north of Palestine in late 1935—the first overt attempt at such a revolt directed against the British since the beginning of the Mandate, in contrast to more spontaneous outbreaks of violence directed against Jews in 1920 and 1929—was immediately stamped out by British troops, in a clash in which al-Qassam was killed. But the Shaykh had clearly touched a deep chord in the popular imagination, and was much more closely in tune with Palestinian sentiment than was the elite leadership. His death in battle was portrayed as a glorious “martyrdom,” and was followed within a few months by the spontaneous outbreak of a nation-wide general strike in April 1936. In its wake, a three-year armed uprising erupted, in the course of which the British briefly lost control of much of the country, including cities like Jerusalem and Nablus, before a massive campaign of repression by tens of thousands of troops and numerous squadrons of aircraft in 1938–39 was able to restore “order.”

In the end, the Arab revolt of 1936–39 was another massive failure for the Palestinians. It obtained no lasting concessions from the British, who in a 1939 White Paper promised limits on Jewish immigration, which proved impossible to implement in light of the revelation of the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. The British promised as well that Palestine would obtain independence within ten years, yet another promise they failed to keep. The yishuv suffered during the years of the revolt, but nevertheless, benefiting from the Arab strikes and boycotts, implemented the principle of avoda ivrit [Hebrew labor] first put forward by the settlers of the second aliya in 1904, and fortified an exclusively Jewish “national” economy. It benefited as well from the significant assistance in armaments and military organization Britain provided in order to fight the common Arab enemy.

But from a Palestinian point of view, the worst effects of the failure of the revolt were on their own society: the Arab economy of Palestine was devastated by years of strikes, boycotts, and British reprisals, and the fighting forces suffered casualties—5,000 killed and 10,000 wounded—that were proportionately huge in an Arab population of about a million, and included the loss of hundreds of the bravest and most enterprising military cadres killed in battle or executed by the British. Finally, the traditional Palestinian leadership, which had been obliged by grassroots pressure to come together to form a joint national leadership, the Arab Higher Committee, at the outset of the general strike in 1936, was shattered by the end of the revolt, divided anew by differences over tactics, which were once again ably exploited by the British. Many individual leaders were exiled by the British in 1937, and others fled, some never to return to the country. The net result was that the Palestinians entered World War II in effect headless—without even the semblance of a unified leadership. In that condition they were to face their most fateful challenge in 1947–49.³¹ The crippling defeat they had suffered in 1936—39 was among the main reasons they failed to overcome it.³²

Thus the nakba, the “catastrophe,” of 1947–49 was both the outcome and the conclusion of a series of failures, a series of defeats. The Palestinians, with a divided leadership, exceedingly limited finances, no centrally organized military forces, and no reliable allies, were facing a Zionist movement and a Jewish society in Palestine which, although small, was politically unified, had centralized institutions, and was exceedingly well led and extremely highly motivated—the horrors of the Holocaust had just been revealed, if any further spur to determined action to consummate the aims of Zionism were needed. As we have seen, the Zionist leadership had long since achieved territorial contiguity via land purchases and settlements which gave them holdings in the shape of an “N,” running up the coastal strip, down the Marj Ibn ‘Amir/Vale of Jezreel, and up the finger of eastern Galilee. They benefited as well from international backing—both the U.S. and USSR supported the partition of Palestine and immediately recognized the new state of Israel—and finally had understandings with the key Arab military power, Jordan, whose ruler’s ambition was to control the Arab portions of Palestine that were not absorbed into Israel, and who also commanded the Iraqi forces sent to Palestine in 1948.

In view of this almost unbroken chronicle of failure on the part of the Palestinians, it was perhaps understandable that their enemies might assume that their rhetoric had been correct all along, and that there were indeed no Palestinians. In fact, it should have been understandable that in spite of the disparity in numbers in favor of the Palestinians, a larger economy (by 1948, the Jewish economy of Palestine was larger than the Arab one), greater firepower, superior organization, and considerable support from the great powers of the age would enable the new Israeli state to triumph over the poorly led and mainly rural, mainly illiterate Palestinian population of 1.4 million. Instead, the arrogance of victory convinced the winners not just that they were stronger, but that they had prevailed because their opponents had not had a truly “national” cause, or a unified identity. In other words, that they had not really existed!

The “disappearance” of the Palestinians was thus in some measure a function of their failures, at least in the perception of others, including, but not restricted to, their foes. This was not just an Israeli or Western perception. In the Arab world, voices could be heard saying that the Palestinians had sold their land,³³ or had not fought hard enough, or had left their homes too easily. And for some Arab regimes, these failures, although they confronted the entire Arab world with a militarily strong Israeli state in their midst, which had just decisively defeated their combined armies, also presented opportunities for aggrandizement. The Amirate of Transjordan was the first to benefit, winning the biggest prize on the Arab side as it absorbed the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and becoming the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the process. Others also benefited. Egypt gained control of the Gaza Strip, which, dubious prize though it might have been, was better than having either the Israelis or the Hashemites controlling the northeastern land gateway to Egypt. And Lebanon benefited, as Beirut became the uncontested transit port of the Eastern Mediterranean after its competitor, Haifa, lost this role because of the state of war between Israel and the Arab countries, and as oil pipelines which had run across Palestine were rerouted across Lebanon.

Several Arab states thus had a vested interest in Palestinian failure in some degree, although this was something which could not be admitted in public. For ever since the first decade of the century, when the press of Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo had first alerted their readers to the dangers to Palestine and the Arab world posed by the Zionist movement, public opinion in these and other centers of Arab political life was deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians, and suspicious of the Zionist movement, its Western friends, and those Arabs and Arab regimes that colluded with it. This sympathy put pressure on most newly independent Arab governments to act in support of the Palestinians at times when prudence might have dictated otherwise (this is a partial explanation for the entry of some Arab states into the 1948 war), but it also meant that the Palestine issue became a political football in the domestic politics of several Arab countries, and in inter-Arab politics.

Initially, and for many years after 1948, this meant that the Arab regimes exploited the Palestine issue at the expense of one another (Jordan was generally the target of such exploitation of the Palestine issue by other Arab regimes, notably those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt) and often at the expense of the Palestinians themselves. But once the latter had emerged from the “lost years” as an independent actor in Arab politics, this same reality meant that the Palestinians could turn the tables and use Arab popular sympathy to exploit the Palestine issue against the Arab regimes. They did this with some success for many years, starting in the mid-1960s, when the Palestinians contributed significantly to the outbreak of the 1967 war, and thereafter played Arab regimes off against one another over the Palestine issue.

On the Palestinian popular level the defeats, the dislocations, the dispossession, the flight, and the expulsions ironically helped complete the process whose genesis we have traced in this book: these failures ultimately resulted in the universalization of a uniform Palestinian identity. To understand how and why this came about, it would be useful to recapitulate the stages of the emergence of Palestininan identity which have been chronicled in earlier chapters. In the first stage, before World War I, this identity was shared by a relatively restricted circle, largely composed of the urban, the literate, and the educated. They formed a new elite considerably wider than the old traditional notables, and including the new middle classes—the teachers, clerks, government officials and businessmen who proliferated in the last decades of Ottoman rule—but they were still a relatively restricted stratum, and among them as well as among the rural and illiterate majority of the population, the new sense of Palestinian identity competed and overlapped with Ottomanism and Arabism, as well as older religious, local, and family loyalties.

In a second stage, the shocks of the first few years after World War I expanded this sense of Palestinian identity to include much wider segments of the population, incorporating and winning over the entire political class. These shocks had also deepened the sense of a shared fate, making it a primary category of identity for many, if not most, Palestinians. The Mandate years, with their losing struggles with the Zionists and the British, only deepened this shared sense of identity, as a common set of “others” and a common sense of threat made increasing numbers of Palestinians perceive that they shared a common fate. These years also broadened the ranks of those exposed to the elements of this identity transmitted by the educational system and the press, as education continued to spread, such that by 1945, 45 percent of the Arab school-age population was in school, and literacy increased significantly.³⁴ But there remained differences in consciousness, education, and outlook in Palestinian society, as well as internecine conflicts rooted in the bitter internal struggles of the 1930s, and a gap between the urban and rural populations, between the well-to-do and the poor, and between the literate and the illiterate.

In the third and final stage, the events of 1948 and their aftermath obliterated many of these differences, erased many of these gaps, and decreased the importance of many pre-1948 conflicts. Urban and rural, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians found themselves in refugee camps, where their children all received an education, thanks to UNRWA (something they had never been able to obtain from the British mandatory administration of Palestine), and where virtually universal literacy among the young obtained within a generation. Equally important, 1948 proved both a great leveller, and a source of a universally shared experience, especially for that half of Palestinian society which had fled or been expelled and had lost everything, and for those who were able to remain in their homes, but were also traumatized by the events of 1948.

The turbulent and conflicting political currents that affected the Palestinians immediately after the 1947–49 war completed this process. For in spite of their dispersion and fragmentation among several new successor states and forms of refugee status, what the Palestinians now shared was far greater than what separated them; all had been dispossessed, none were masters of their own fate, all were at the mercy of cold, distant, and hostile new authorities. If the Arab population of Palestine had not been sure of their identity before 1948, the experience of defeat, dispossession, and exile guaranteed that they knew what their identity was very soon afterwards: they were Palestinians. The refugee experience, the callous treatment by Israel and several of the Arab host states, and the shared trauma of 1948, which all still had to come to terms with, cemented and universalized a common identity as Palestinians which built on all the elements we have explored in these pages, crowning it with this series of unforgettable shared experiences.

Palestinian identity is thus in some ways now similar to other national identities in the Arab world and elsewhere. It has been determined in some respects by boundaries that are fairly recent, and yet has based itself on elements of identity that go back in time far beyond the origins of these modern boundaries. Some of these elements are local, some religious, and some draw on other national narratives, and all have been reshaped and reworked to fit a new narrative of identity. Palestinian identity is different from most of these national identities in several important respects, however. Like many other unfulfilled, “unsuccessful” national identities, that of the Palestinians has been fashioned without the benefit of the powerful machinery of the nation-state to propagate it. Like the Kurds, like the Armenians, like the Jews in Palestine before 1948, the Palestinians have asserted their identity without the trappings of an independent state and against powerful countervailing currents.

In the Palestinian case, repeated, crushing failure has been surmounted and survived, and in some sense has been incorporated into the narrative of identity as triumph.³⁵ This brings up a characteristic of the Palestinian experience that, while perhaps not unique—and that indeed may be shared with other long-“unsuccessful” national identities—has taken a specific form in the Palestinian case: the way in which Palestinian failure has been portrayed as triumph, or at least as heroic perseverence against impossible odds. Such a portrayal draws on the Palestinians’ perception that throughout their modern history, they have faced a constellation of enemies so formidable as to be nearly insuperable. While drawing on undeniable verities—it is hard to imagine the British Empire abandoning Palestine under Arab pressure in the late 1930s, or the world supporting the Palestinians against the nascent Israeli state in the wake of the Holocaust—there can be little question that such a version of history conveniently absolves the Palestinians from the responsibility for their own fate. From this perspective, if their enemies were so numerous and powerful, it is hardly surprising that they were defeated.

This narrative of failure as triumph began during the Mandate, but reached its apogee in the years after 1948, when it was picked up and elaborated by the grassroots underground Palestinian nationalist organizations that would emerge and take over the PLO in the mid-1960s. The PLO was to give this narrative of events before 1948 its final shape, and to use it successfully as a tool in the mobilization of the Palestinian people. Ultimately, the more recent failures of the Palestinian people to achieve their aims under the leadership of the PLO came to be inscribed within the context of this same narrative, fitting seamlessly with the defeats of the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s.

An example is the martyrdom of Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam in 1935, an event that caused a great impact at the time, and would also later become an inspiration to all the underground organizations preaching the path of “armed struggle.” His story came in later years to be narrated as a great event in sparking the struggle of the Palestinian people against their enemies, the British and the Zionists. As the tale was retold by Palestinian nationalists like Ghassan Kanafani in an influential article published in the PLO Research Center’s magazine Shu’un Filistiniyya [Palestinian Affairs], and later widely disseminated in booklet form by the PFLP in Arabic and English,³⁶ or by activist-historians like ‘Abdel-Wahhab Kayyali and Naji ‘Alloush in influential works of theirs which went through numerous printings, al-Qassam had played a crucial role in winning the populace away from the elite-brokered politics of compromise with the British, and in showing them the “correct” path of popular armed struggle against the British and the Zionists.³⁷

These same writers, and other less gifted ones, provided a similar version of the 1936–39 revolt, correctly perceiving it as a popular uprising that had taken the traditional elite by surprise, and in which the means chosen—the general strike, and later armed guerrilla action—were arrived at spontaneously. This same narrative stressed the heroic quality of the revolt, its successes in for a time bringing together the Palestinian people, and the fact that it had been “betrayed” by Arab governments and traditional Palestinian leaders beholden to the British. These narratives generally failed to mention the appalling losses suffered by the Palestinians during the course of the revolt, or to assess the uprising’s slim possibilities of success from the very beginning, or to ask what the Palestinians might have done differently and more successfully in the same historical circumstances.

In treating the Palestinian aspect of the fighting of 1947–49, these accounts similarly stressed the heroism of the Palestinian peasant and urban fighters against heavy odds, highlighting the martyrdom in battle of charismatic leaders like ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, and the self-interested machinations of the Arab regimes against the Palestinians, and downplaying the poor political calculations, and the disorganization, confusion, and leaderless chaos on the Palestinian side which contributed measurably to the debacle. What was at work in all these cases, of course, was a perfectly normal rewriting of history to fit the circumstances of the time it was written, providing a narrative appropriate for the 1960s, when the Palestinians were again being told by these same historian-activists, and by the PLO, to take their fate in their own hands and launch armed struggle against heavy odds.

Once the new movement had been launched, and tens of thousands of Palestinians had flocked to its ranks, the list of defeats narrated as triumphs against heavy odds increased. The narration of the “foundation myth” of the modern Palestinian commando movement, the battle of al-Karama on March 21, 1968, during which several brigades of Israeli troops crossed the Jordan River to attack Palestinian military bases in the abandoned town of al-Karama, and returned across the river after a hard day of fighting, was typical in this respect. Like all foundation myths, this one had a solid basis in fact: the Israeli army had apparently anticipated an easy time, as the commandos were expected to flee, in keeping with classical guerrilla doctrine when facing a superior regular force (and in keeping with Israeli expectations regarding the Arabs). They had not done so, and thereafter nothing had gone as the Israelis planned. The Fateh leadership had made a strategic decision to keep all of its limited forces in and around al-Karama, and to stand and fight; Jordanian artillery joined in the fray from the hills above when the unexpected resistance of the Palestinian commandos led to slow going for the Israeli forces, knocking out some tanks and armored personnel carriers; the Israelis suffered much heavier casualties than expected, and they were forced to leave behind several damaged vehicles, which were duly paraded through the streets of Amman to the cheering of jubilant multitudes.

These appearances notwithstanding, this was no Arab victory, at least not militarily: the Israelis had inflicted heavy casualties on the Palestinians, far heavier than they themselves had suffered, and had extricated their forces on the same day without losing any prisoners or leaving behind any bodies. It was politically significant, however, since inappropriate though the comparison was in fact, the Palestinians were able to contrast a situation where they had stood and fought, and at the end of the day were in control of the ground, with the inability of three regular Arab armies to do the same thing during the June war only a few months earlier.³⁸ The Palestinian commando organizations and the media sympathetic to them immediately picked up this theme, which found a ready response in an Arab world still reeling from the unexpected defeat of June 1967.

The name al-Karama, which as chance would have it means “dignity,” became a symbol intensely exploited by Palestinian nationalist groups both to expand their ranks enormously with fresh recruits, and to put pressure on the Arab regimes to allow them greater freedom of action, and this relatively small battle soon helped make the PLO a force to reckon with in Arab politics. Like the commando actions the Palestinians carried out against Israel on other occasions, both before and after this battle, the results were far greater casualties for them than for their foes, and little change in the purely military balance of forces with the Israeli enemy.³⁹ Thus, the battle of al-Karama was a case of a failure against overwhelming odds brilliantly narrated as heroic triumph.

This portrayal of failure as triumph and defeat as victory was to become almost a stock in trade for the PLO. A case in point was the debacle in Jordan in September 1970, when the Palestinians were unable to discipline their own ranks, as a constituent group of the PLO, the PFLP, provoked the Hashemite regime beyond tolerance with a series of aircraft hijackings, and the Jordanian army finally reacted by routing the PLO in a crushing campaign which became known as Black September, ultimately expelling it from Jordan.⁴⁰ In the Palestinian narration of this devastating defeat, the heavy military odds against the PLO were typically mentioned prominently, but not the appalling Palestinian political mistakes between the battle of al-Karama in March 1968 and September of 1970, which squandered the massive public support the PLO had previously enjoyed in Jordan.⁴¹

Another case in point was the seemingly endless war in Lebanon, which the PLO allowed itself to be drawn into in 1975–76, an intense period of confused fighting that ended with the military intervention of Syria, a former ally, against the PLO and its Lebanese supporters. In this devastating phase of the conflict, three Palestinian refugee camps in the Beirut area, Tal al-Za‘tar, Jisr al-Basha, and Dbayye, were overrun by Phalangist and allied militias backed indirectly by both Israel and Syria,⁴² and their inhabitants subjected to massacre and expulsion.⁴³ This phase of the war was followed by a series of intense clashes over the next few years, many of them involving the PLO, marked by an Israeli incursion into the south of the country in 1978, and capped by Israel’s massive invasion of Lebanon and its nine-week siege of the PLO in Beirut in the summer of 1982. The PLO, the Palestinian civilian population, and the Lebanese suffered extremely heavy casualties during the 1982 fighting, estimated at 19,000 killed and 30,000 wounded.⁴⁴

The end result of this sequence of disasters and defeats was the American-brokered expulsion of the PLO to a number of even more distant places of exile, as its leadership, cadres, fighters, and institutions were forced to leave Beirut, where they had been established for well over a decade, and were scattered to Tunisia, Yemen, the Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. This defeat and its aftermath were particularly painful for Palestinians, as it evoked for many of them the exodus of 1948, and the more recent expulsion of the movement from Jordan. As in Jordan, one of the hardest things for the Palestinians to accept was that in Lebanon they had lost the support of the originally sympathetic local population, due largely to their own political mistakes.

When, at a meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC) convened in Algiers in November 1982, a few months after the exodus from Beirut, this latest catastrophe was portrayed by some PLO leaders as yet another victory, yet another triumph, ‘Isam Sirtawi, an iconoclastic middle-ranking leader of the movement who was to be assassinated in Portugal soon afterwards, rose to speak in exasperation. His voice dripping with sarcasm, he intoned: “Our defeat in Lebanon and our evacuation of Beirut has been described as a ‘victory.’ One more ‘victory’ like this one, and we will have the next meeting of the PNC in the Seychelles Islands!” More substantively, one of the greatest Palestinian orators of his generation, and probably the most thoughtful, Shafiq al-Hout, the PLO representative in Lebanon, gave perhaps the most brilliant speech of his career at this meeting, denouncing those who would portray what had just happened in Lebanon as a victory, and accusing them of lying to the Palestinian people. His speech was received with thunderous applause by those present.⁴⁵

For all its flaws in the eyes of al-Hout’s audience, who had perhaps had enough of such costly “victories,” the portrayal of failure as triumph seems nevertheless to have worked well for the PLO. Although this narrative obscured the role of poor leadership and bad decisionmaking in the years when the PLO led the national movement (which for PLO leaders was undoubtedly one of its great virtues), just as it did in describing the actions of the Palestinians during the 1930s and 1940s, it had the undeniable merit of making acceptable to the Palestinian people a story that involved the confrontation of daunting odds. A willingness to do so was obviously necessary for a few Palestinians to defy the will of virtually all the Arab regimes in the mid-1960s, and begin launching attacks on Israel; for a few of them to stand and fight the Israeli army in March 1968 at al-Karama; or for larger numbers of Palestinian fighters and militiamen to take on the Jordanian Army, the vaunted Arab Legion, in 1970; and to fight the Phalangist and allied Lebanese right-wing militias in 1975; the Syrian army in 1976; and the Israeli army in Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. Whether it was wise, or necessary, to do all these things was an entirely different matter, and one which this whole approach naturally did not address. But this Quixotic narrative put such actions into a perspective where they were acceptable, if not always entirely sensible.

More to the point, this narrative was one which enabled the Palestinians to make sense of a troubled history which involved enormous efforts against great odds simply for them to maintain their identity as a people. The PLO was not a government, and thus was without the authoritative means at the disposal of a national government for the propagation of an approved, official version of history to the entirety of its people—an educational system, control or at least influence over exclusive channels of the media, and the possibility of creating a network of museums, archaeological exhibits, national parks, and cultural manifestations to reinforce this version of history. It was nevertheless able to do some of these things with those Palestinian populations it was able to reach through its newspapers and periodicals, its publishing houses and research institutes, and especially its radio station Sawt Filastin, “The Voice of Palestine,” which was much listened to by Palestinians, for many of whom it soon took the place of Egypt’s Sawt al-‘Arab.

These and other media disseminated a version of the Palestinian experience meant both to engender a strong sense of group solidarity in the face of a formidable sequence of foes whom the Palestinians had to face, and to induce them to make the sacrifices necessary to further the national cause. That it was a self-serving retelling of Palestinian history, which in addition to highlighting the heroism of Palestinian fighters stressed the brave decisions made by PLO leaders, while downplaying all their errors of judgment, did not make it any less attractive to those who propagated it.

By the early 1980s, however, a corrosive counter-narrative had begun to emerge. This did not usually go so far as to ask why it was not possible to have victories which were real victories: most Palestinians saw their enemies, whether Israel, or the Arab regimes, or the American and other foreign governments which supported them, as collosi who could not easily be defeated. But it did question persistently whether better choices were not possible in some circumstances, and as ‘Isam al-Sirtawi’s sarcastic comment and the enthusiastic audience response to Shafiq al-Hout’s speech to the PNC both indicate, many were ready to ask such questions. This willingness was a function of a disillusionment with the PLO leadership, particularly among Palestinians in the diaspora, which led to a Syrian-supported revolt in Fateh in 1983, and to a gradual decline in the loyalty the leadership in far-off Tunis was able to command. In these circumstances, the spontaneous outbreak of the intifada, the grassroots popular uprising in the occupied territories, in December 1987, which took the PLO leadership entirely by surprise, gave a much-needed boost to a Palestinian national movement that was clearly flagging. It also reestablished “the inside,” Palestine itself, as the center of gravity of Palestinian politics, rather than “the outside,” the Palestinian diaspora, where it had been located for so many decades.

The outbreak of the intifada also vindicated the strategy advocated since the late 1970s by Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), the so-called Khiyar al-Urduni, or “Jordanian Option.” Reacting to the pointlessness of the PLO’s involvement in the Lebanese quagmire, Abu Jihad had postulated that there was no future for the movement unless it reestablished itself inside the occupied territories. This could only be done, he argued, via Jordan, and to do so would require that the PLO improve its relationship with the Kingdom, which had been poor since Black September. Against much internal opposition, especially from within Fateh, the PLO leadership managed to achieve a rapprochement with Jordan even before the defeat in Lebanon and, via the presence in Amman this made possible, was able to renew links with the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This move betokened a realization by the PLO leadership that the future of the movement lay inside Palestine, rather than outside, but it was too little too late. The PLO was already sidetracked and ignored within the Arab world, its declining status indicated by the poor treatment it received at the Arab summit in Amman in November 1987. The precipitous decline of the Palestinian cause would have continued, had it not been for the spontaneous outbreak of the intifada, which galvanized the Palestinian people, impressed international public opinion, and, most importantly, convinced a sizeable number of Israelis that they could not indefinitely maintain the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. All of these were prerequisites for the following phase, which began with the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991. At that time a Palestinian delegation (albeit as part of a joint delegation with Jordan) sat down at a negotiating table with one from Israel for the first time in history. The meeting, while it changed nothing on the ground in Palestine, where Israel still held most of the cards, was of symbolic importance: the assertion of Palestinian national identity it betokened was undeniable.

In 1993, Israel and the PLO signed a Declaration of Principles in Washington under the auspices of the U.S. government. As a result of this agreement and others that have followed it, Palestinian identity would appear to be firmly established today. PLO leaders like Yasser ‘Arafat, once routinely reviled as “terrorists” by the western and Israeli media, have been honored guests in Israel and the United States, where they are recognized as legitimate representatives of an accepted entity, the Palestinian people. For an interim period of five years, the agreements signed with Israel have given a new Palestinian Authority dominated by the PLO control over the nearly 1 million Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, but not over its Israeli settlements and the land annexed to them, nor of its Israeli army bases, roads, and borders, more than 30 percent of the Strip’s territory in total. This authority gained control as well over most of the cities, towns, and villages in the West Bank, but not of the countryside, meaning that most of its territory remained under Israeli dominion.

Recognized by its most determined enemies, and at last able to establish itself on its national soil, the movement that has incarnated Palestinian identity for the past few decades appears at last to be responsible for a genuine achievement, rather than yet another disaster dressed up as a “victory.” But there is an underside to this achievement. The Palestinian Authority is not a national government, nor have self-determination, independence, and statehood yet been conceded by Israel in any of the agreements its government has signed, and it is not clear when, or whether, it will concede these things, or whether the Likud government that has emerged from the 1996 elections will honor the provisions of the interim accords already signed, let alone negotiate new ones determining the final status of all the matters at issue between the two sides. The jurisdiction and power of the Palestinian authority is moreover sharply circumscribed in many ways, not least of which is the fact that it does not yet have control over most of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after five years of negotiations which were supposed to end the Israeli occupation and give self-rule to the entire Palestinian population. Many other crucial issues have been deferred, some fear indefinitely.

The nightmare of many Palestinians is that Israel might freeze these unsatisfactory “interim arrangements,” which would become the basis for the final status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They fear this because the iron logic behind the expansion during the last few years in the area and population of Israeli settlements, and with it the building of an extensive and costly network of strategic roads criss-crossing the West Bank and Gaza Strip, can only be that Israel will use the existence of both settlements and roads as a pretext to keep key parts of these areas under its permanent control. Given these far-reaching territorial dispositions, and the restricted jurisdiction over a fraction of the country Israel has conceded, they fear that even if an “independent” and “sovereign” Palestinian entity ultimately does emerge, it will involve only minor modifications in the size and status of the existing Palestinian islands in the Israeli-dominated sea of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This misshapen and grotesque creation could then be baptized as a “Palestinian state”: one with a flag, postage stamps, a marching band, ambassadors, and Presidential motorcades, but nothing resembling exclusive jurisdiction over most of the contiguous territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, nor anything recognizable in the real world as sovereignty.

These concerns, and the daily problems that have emerged since Oslo, are the basis for much dissatisfaction among Palestinians with the PLO leadership that negotiated these accords (although most polls still show that a majority of Palestinians support the agreements⁴⁶), and for a strong undercurrent that argues the accords are deeply flawed, embodying too many vital concessions to the Israelis. Consequently, many Palestinians mutter that the same tired old PLO leaders who have portrayed their past failures as victories are trying to do the same thing again. But irrespective of the many flaws in the accords with Israel, and the bitter Palestinian critiques of them, a process with great import for issues of Palestinian identity has now begun. The most important feature of this entire process is that it is taking place inside Palestine, which has become the sole focus of Palestinian politics, thus completing a shift from outside to inside Palestine which started with the intifada.

As some exiles have returned, as PLO institutions have been integrated with local structures to constitute the new Palestinian Authority, and as Palestinian financiers and capitalists begin to invest their funds in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it is clear that a recentering of Palestinian society is taking place, and with it a redefinition of identity in new circumstances. One unique circumstance is that although not sovereign or independent, and indeed although bound by myriad restrictions imposed by the agreements with the Israelis, the new Palestinian Authority has more power over more of its people in more of Palestine than any Palestinian agency has had in the twentieth century. With this power has come responsibility and accountability, which cannot be shirked or shunted off onto another actor. In these circumstances, although the Palestinian Authority can and undoubtedly will blame others for its failures, using the PLO’s old scenario of Palestinians facing insuperable odds to explain away failures or describe them as triumphs, it is possible that for the first time this strategy will not work, and that the Palestinian leadership will be held accountable for its actions by its own people.

Regardless, Palestinian identity has come full circle. Once denied and scorned, its early history is being analyzed by mainstream Israeli social scientists,⁴⁷ and not just iconoclasts like the historian Yehoshua Porath, who began the process more than two decades ago.⁴⁸ Where American politicians once avoided having anything to do with anything Palestinian, an American President saw to it that the signing of the PLO-Israeli accord took place on the White House lawn in September 1993, and another in the White House in September 1995, although his administration had played virtually no positive role in either negotiation.⁴⁹ And after 1993, Israeli Labor Party leaders like the late Yitzhaq Rabin and Shimon Peres spoke freely about an independent Palestinian personality and a Palestinian people with a national cause—something that twenty-five years earlier Golda Meir could not bring herself to say. It remains to be seen whether their Likud successors will continue along this path, which is so antithetical to the traditions of their party.

In a sense a taboo has been broken, as part of a mutual process: just as at least some Israelis can finally bring themselves to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people, so the Palestinians can finally recognize that of the Israeli people. This ends a lengthy period of mutual denial, when both sides withheld recognition as if it were the ultimate weapon in a peculiar version of mutual deterrence. For just as the Zionists before 1948, and the Israelis and much western opinion after that, persisted in denying the Palestinians the legitimacy attached to an independent national identity, so did the Palestinians and the Arab world consistently deny that the Israelis were a people, or that Zionism could be considered as a legitimate national movement.⁵⁰

With the abatement of perceptions of an existential threat to Israel, as peace treaties and diplomatic relations with the Arab countries slowly become the norm, and as realization of Israel’s absolute strategic superiority over all its neighbors slowly overcomes Israelis’ deeply ingrained perception of their country’s vulnerability, it has become easier for some Israelis to accept the existence of the Palestinians, who are no longer seen as the spearhead of an implacable Arab campaign to destroy Israel—although other Israelis and some of their supporters still appear attached to this lurid vision. And for the Arabs, denial of Israel’s existence—a particularly futile endeavor in any case given its ubiquitous intrusions into the lives of the Palestinians and in the Arab world over the past few decades—has both achieved one of its main aims with Israeli recognition of the Palestinians, and lost whatever tattered value it once had.

It would be a mistake to take the parallels too far, however, or to assume that the mutality is more than superficial. This is not a reconciliation between equals: it is a situation where dominance of one over the other prevails, and where after a century of conflict there is an unequivocal winner and a clear loser. Israel is an established nation-state, a regional nuclear superpower with one of the best armies and perhaps the best air force in the world, and has a strongly established sense of national identity which has been reinforced by its state structures and their parastate predecessors since well before the country achieved independence. It has a well-functioning political system, a large and thriving economy, and a firm, decades-old alliance with the greatest power on earth, not to speak of the unstinting support of wealthy, influential, and generous Jewish communities the world over. Moreover, Israel still has complete command—at least in terms of security—over every part of Palestine. In spite of all the agreements with the PLO, it has yet to concede ultimate security control over any part of the country.⁵¹

For Palestinians the contrast could not be greater: they have yet to achieve self-determination, independence, or statehood; they are only now painfully integrating their feeble parastate, which grew up in exile, into an administration with the limited powers the Israelis allow them; they have an economy in a shambles after three decades of occupation and several years of intifada (which probably had as devastating an impact on the Palestinian economy as did the 1936–39 revolt⁵²); they control virtually no resources and have no real allies in the world. The Palestinians, of course, do have one asset in spite of everything: a powerful sense of national identity, which we have seen they were able to develop and maintain in spite of extraordinary vicissitudes.

Palestinian identity, however, is not now and never has been defined solely by the conflict with Zionism and Israel. It has many other aspects, which the Palestinians will have to resolve for themselves. One of them is that although it is clear to Palestinians what constitutes the identity of a Palestinian, hard though it may be to define, it is not so clear what are the dimensions of Palestine, this country the Palestinians come from and to which they relate their identity. In other words, as we asked at the outset, what are the limits of Palestine? Specifically, does it include the places on the map of the country now presumably irrevocably part of Israel, even though on the Palestinian “internal map” they will always be part of Palestine? Thus although Jaffa is today a rundown slum, a southern suburb of the Tel Aviv urban complex, with a poor, largely Arab population (and a small night life district much frequented by Israelis in old, renovated Arab homes), in the Palestinian imagination it is the place of origin of all those who still proudly call themselves Jaffans.

This issue, and others related to the prospect of a resolution of the conflict over Palestine raise a number of questions relating to essential issues of Palestinian identity, questions that may be with us for a long time. Mention of Jaffa, for example, raises a larger question: how will the Palestinians adapt to the final “amputation” of areas that have been integrated into Israel since 1948, but that they have always considered part of their country? For decades, during the “lost years” of the 1950s and 1960s, and then during the euphoric era when it seemed as if “liberation” were a possibility, these questions were never raised. Now they are coming up again, encouraged by the ability of some of the returning exiles to visit the parts of the country incorporated into Israel nearly three generations ago, and now nearly unrecognizable as Palestinian. Will this issue be harder to deal with for those Palestinians still in the refugee camps and with little to look forward to, or for those of the middle classes who have managed to integrate into society wherever they have ended up, but are still moved by nostalgia for Ramla or Lydd, or Jaffa or Haifa, which in many cases they have never seen?

More practical questions include that of how the Palestinians will find a substitute or substitutes for Haifa and Jaffa—as cultural, intellectual, and economic centers—and whether they will ever be able to function with Jerusalem as a political center. Today, in the patchwork of areas either still occupied by Israel, under control of the Palestinian Authority, or in some indeterminate intermediate status, there are in effect four main Palestinian urban centers: Gaza, largest city of the Gaza Strip and (temporary?) headquarters of the Palestinian Authority; the Ramallah/al-Bira conurbation, increasingly the most active economic center and a growing focus of intellectual life; Nablus, capital of the north of the West Bank; and Jerusalem, “the political capital” and now the largest Arab city in Palestine (albeit one with a huge Jewish majority today and under firm Israeli control) , and the center of much cultural, intellectual, and economic activity.

Jerusalem is all of these things, but it is also a city cut off from its hinterland in the West Bank by Israeli closure measures in force for several years now, ostensibly for security reasons, but with obvious political implications for Israel’s ultimate objective: the absorption of the entirety of the city into Israel. The answers to some of these questions as to the “recentering” of Palestinian national life can be determined only in light of the results of negotiations as yet uncompleted, such as those over Jerusalem, and the answers to others will persumably emerge “naturally” as urban growth, social change, and economic development take place.

There are several further questions emanating from those already posed. One is how will those parts of Palestine with clear Arab majorities and a considerable chance of achieving a large measure of self-rule (or even, perhaps, one day, full self-determination) such as most of the Gaza Strip, or the Nablus and Ramallah areas, relate to those either without such clear-cut majorities, such as Arab East Jerusalem, whose population now has a Jewish majority, or those like Hebron where even self-rule seems distant because of the presence of religious sites of importance to both sides to the conflict? The Arab population in all these areas is Palestinian, but while some are or will presumably soon be under Palestinian governance, others face the indefinite prospect of remaining under one form or another of Israeli control.

Where identity is concerned, the markers could go either way, or both ways, in such a situation: borders, security frontiers, control over antiquities, and road signs, for example, could indicate one set of things, while the educational system⁵³ or the identity cards people carry could indicate something else. These different sorts of markers of course indicate clear relations of dominance and subordination, and some of this extraordinary confusion is a function of the complex “interim” arrangements imposed because of Israel’s insistence on not removing any of its West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements for several years at least, thus necessitating the bewildering patchwork arrangement that has been negotiated.

Some of it, however, is a function of the overlapping of Israelis with Palestinians and Palestinians with Israelis since 1967, as Israel has spread slowly into parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while the Palestinian identity of the growing number of Palestinians left behind in Israel in 1948 has reemerged. And some of it is simply a function of the inextricable interweaving of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives which we stressed earlier, and visible at places like Jerusalem, and in Hebron, site of the Tomb of those like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are considered Patriarchs by both peoples.

This brings up the question of the nearly one million Palestinians who are also Israeli citizens, the descendants of the fewer than 200,000 who remained in 1948 and who today constitute more than 18 percent of Israel’s population. How will they relate to their fellow-Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip once the final arrangements have been sorted out, and one lot are on one side of a final frontier and another on the other? One segment of Palestinians study Hebrew literature and Jewish history in school, carry Israeli passports and vote in Israeli elections; members of another are learning Arabic literature and Palestinian history, carry a bewildering array of travel documents or none at all, plus a new Palestinian passport whose value has yet to be tested, and voted in a Palestinian election. Yet both identify with the same national symbols (as is evidenced by the fact that a ceaseless stream of popular delegations of Palestinians from the Galilee and other Arab regions of Israel has poured into Gaza over the past two years to meet Yasser ‘Arafat), and both groups regard themselves and each other as Palestinians.

Hard as all these questions are, harder ones still remain to be answered. Perhaps the most painful is that related to those Palestinians outside their homeland: not the privileged few PLO cadres, officials, and soldiers who have been able to return to Palestine with their families after decades of exile, nor the comfortable ones with foreign passports who can come and go freely, nor even the middle-class ones integrated into Jordan and most of whom have always been able at least to visit the West Bank. This question applies rather to those still in refugee camps (a distinct minority of Palestinians today, but an important one) .⁵⁴ It was these Palestinians of the “outside” who first picked up the fallen banner of Palestinian nationalism after 1948, rebuilt the national movement, and then sustained it with their sacrifices. This question is most cruel, and most apt, when applied to those in Lebanon, who have suffered and sacrificed the most—perhaps 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Lebanon since 1975 out of a population which never exceeded 400,000,⁵⁵ and is today down to about 300,000—and are unwanted by their host country. At the same time, as refugees who were originally from the Galilee, Jaffa and Haifa, they currently appear to stand little chance of returning to their homes, or even to other parts of Palestine, at least for the foreseeable future.

We have seen that for the approximately 700,000 Palestinians who became refugees in 1948, the idea of return became important very soon after they left their homes. The concept of a right of return was thus fostered by the early Palestinian organizations and later by the PLO as a central mobilizational slogan in response to this popular sentiment. This right rested on the language of General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which gave Palestinian refugees the option of return or compensation.⁵⁶ The PLO has since limited what was formerly postulated as an unrestricted “right of return” to this UN formula of return or compensation, but that still appears to be far beyond what the Palestinians are capable of achieving at this juncture of their history.⁵⁷ This issue has not yet been resolved between the Palestinians and Israelis—it is one of the so-called “final status issues,” like Jerusalem, which was postponed until later⁵⁸—and thus has not been entirely foreclosed. However, the adamant Israeli position on the issue of refugee return (which if unlimited has the potential to undo the effects of 100 years of successful Zionist efforts to change the demographic nature of Palestine), and the balance of forces between the two sides, do not promise a happy answer to this question for the 1948 refugees.

These are all questions without simple answers and indeed, like this one, some of them have a wide range of possible answers, none of which promises to be pleasant for the Palestinian people to absorb. The story of Palestinian identity would thus appear in sum to be one of both failure and success. It has been a failure in that in spite of all their sacrifices over so many generations, the Palestinian people have not so far achieved the self-determination and control over their own lives for which they have been striving for so long. Indeed, in light of the genesis of Palestinian identity we have just chronicled, in some respects the Palestinians have gone backwards since World War I, a time when this identity was not yet firmly established on a mass basis. From the perspective of today, the late Ottoman era, for all its many faults, in some ways looks almost like a golden age:⁵⁹ it was the last time the Palestinians had majority status throughout nearly the entirety of their own country, and the last time they had free, countrywide elections to a Parliament (albeit a multinational Ottoman parliament rather than a Palestinian national one), and had an almost completely free press able to challenge the authorities, as did the editors of Filastin in 1914.

This story has been a success in that a Palestinian identity has asserted itself and survived against all odds, and in spite of the many failures we have touched on. Dulles said in the 1950s that the Palestinians would disappear, and Golda Meir spoke in 1969 as if they had disappeared, going so far as to declare that they had never existed in the first place. But they have not disappeared, and even their most determined opponents seem to have begun to reconcile themselves to this uncomfortable fact. For these opponents, whether Israel, or some Arab states, or the great powers, the nonexistence of the Palestinians would have made things considerably easier at various stages of history. But inconvenient though their identity often has been for others, the Palestinians have remained stubbornly attached to it. This probably must be adjudged a success, although it is a small one.

The final question, an open-ended one like all the others, is whether this very limited success can be turned into the basis for building something lasting, something that will perhaps make possible a reversal of some of the failures of this past century, and finally allow the achievement of self-determination, statehood, and national independence the modern world has taught us is the “natural state” of peoples with an independent national identity like the Palestinians.