Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

When Palestinian Identity was published in 1996, the vantage point from which I and others regarded Palestine and the Palestinians was quite different from that of 2009. I researched and wrote this book from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s. At that time, it appeared to many observers that the first Palestinian intifada (or uprising), which began in December 1987, had made clear the impossibility of indefinitely prolonging Israel’s so-called benevolent occupation and had placed the Palestine problem on a trajectory toward a just resolution. In this view, the negotiations that produced the September 1993 Oslo accords and their sequels were seen as rewarding the sacrifices and suffering of the Palestinian people with the achievement of many of their national goals, including an independent Palestinian state.

However, I served as one of several advisors to the Palestinian delegation in the difficult and ultimately futile negotiations with Israeli envoys that took place in Madrid and Washington from October 1991 until June 1993.¹ These American-sponsored negotiations preceded the Oslo agreements. I did so while I was working on this book. During part of this time I was also living in Jerusalem and therefore knew very well the crippling limitations concerning what was subject to negotiation as part of a “peace process” whose rules—largely unfavorable to the Palestinians—were entirely determined by the United States and Israel. The Palestinian-Israeli track we were involved in was completely unlike Israel’s bilateral talks with Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that began simultaneously at the 1991 Madrid peace conference. These other negotiations were all aimed at achieving final bilateral peace accords (and in the case of Jordan eventually did so). By contrast, on the Palestinian-Israel track, which included humiliating, Israeli-imposed restrictions at the outset on who could represent the Palestinians (no one from Jerusalem, from outside the occupied territories, or with any connection to the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] was allowed to take part²), negotiations in these and subsequent talks at Oslo and elsewhere were rigorously confined within very narrow bounds. At the insistence of Israel (supported by the United States at Madrid and Washington in 1991–1993 and also later on), all that could be discussed on this track were the modalities of “autonomy” for the Palestinians living under continuing Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Virtually every matter of importance to the Palestinians could not be discussed at all in these negotiations. Such crucial topics included the end of the Israeli occupation (which in 1991 was only twenty-four years old; the occupation has now ended its forty-second year), the removal of illegal Israeli settlements (which then constituted only a fraction of the vast enterprise that now physically dominates the West Bank), the disposition of Jerusalem, a resolution of the refugee issue, the apportionment of scarce water supplies, the determination of borders, the establishment of Palestinian statehood, and agreement on terms of a final peace.

So-called permanent status negotiations to deal with these burning issues were supposed to take place within three years of the launching of the 1991 Madrid talks, and according to the American-Israeli-imposed ground rules were to be completed by 1997.³ They kept being postponed, however, until these issues were finally taken up during the hastily convened and abortive Camp David summit in the waning months of Bill Clinton’s presidency in the late summer and fall of 2000, only to evaporate quickly. They were not resumed until the administration of President George W. Bush finally got around to restarting negotiations in 2008, his last year in office. Thus, in spite of the misleading appearance of many years of nearly constant negotiations, between 1991 and early 2009, with the exception of these two belated, brief, and ultimately unsuccessful efforts at the very end of the Clinton and Bush presidential terms, there were no official talks between Israel and the Palestinians on most of the matters of real substance that divided them.

In consequence of my firsthand knowledge of the crushing limitations from the very outset on what the Palestinians were even allowed to discuss, and therefore might achieve, I was less sanguine than others when the Palestinian-Israeli agreement, the so-called Oslo accords, were signed in September of 1993. Indeed, when I learned the terms of these secretly negotiated accords (which were arrived at without the knowledge of most members of the “official” Palestinian delegation while it was engaged in parallel talks with Israeli negotiators in Washington), I was appalled at how unbalanced and disadvantageous they were to the Palestinians. I was therefore doubtful from the outset that they would lead to a just and lasting resolution of the conflict.⁴ As it turned out, my skepticism was not misplaced. Although many of the flaws in the accords were apparent at the time, and although we had learned in Washington to recognize the heavy pro-Israel slant of many of the American official intermediaries,⁵ I did not know then how biased in favor of Israel the Norwegian mediators at Oslo had been. This was only revealed by Norwegian researchers many years later.⁶

But even for skeptics like myself, as I was writing Palestinian Identity there seemed little question in the mid-1990s that major shifts had taken place that had changed some of the terms of the Palestinian-Israeli equation. The intifada of 1987–1991 had shaken the comfortable conviction of much of the Israeli public, and of key elements of the Israeli security establishment, that Israel could indefinitely maintain the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in its then-current form. In the wake of the Gulf War of 1990–1991, the United States, with broad international support, had launched the comprehensive effort at Madrid in 1991 to resolve all aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, involving all the relevant parties, including the Palestinians. This was the first such attempt in the entire history of the conflict, and it represented a major breakthrough, in spite of the profound flaws I have touched on in the structure of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

The Israeli government under Prime Minister Yitzhaq Rabin that came to power in 1992 had thereafter recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, following decades when Israeli governments treated the PLO as no more than a terrorist organization and the Palestinian people as if they did not exist. Rabin’s envoys had secretly negotiated the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords directly with representatives of the PLO, although Israel did not at that stage recognize a Palestinian right to self-determination or statehood, even as it demanded the Palestinian recognition of these same rights for the Israeli people. This was just one of many forms of inequality in the structure and outcome of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations that went largely unrecognized in most contemporary assessments.

Efforts to achieve comprehensive peace agreements with the Palestinians and all of Israel’s neighbors were already evaporating even before this book was published in 1996 (although an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty was signed in 1994). This occurred as first the administration of George H.W. Bush in its waning months and then that of Bill Clinton lost the focus and the sense of urgency about the drive for a comprehensive peace settlement that had initially motivated the first President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. American mediators instead adopted narrower and narrower, and increasingly less ambitious, “interim” objectives, as sterile process took over from any hope of rapidly achieving real peace. Thereafter, events on the ground intervened. The 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Rabin (both attacks undertaken by right-wing Israeli extremists), Israeli assassinations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad military leaders in 1995 and 1996, and a series of Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel that killed many civilians in the same years all poisoned the atmosphere. Together with the unabated expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the doubling of the Israeli settler population in the years from 1991 to 2000, these violent episodes constituted clear signs—ignored by most of those involved in the negotiations—that time was running out for the inaptly named “peace process.”

In spite of these ominous indicators, the United States, Israel, and the PLO appeared to be deeply engaged in efforts to resolve the conflict. This lulled many into a false sense of security, as process imperceptibly became the primary element in the “peace process.” Indeed, this term has become one of opprobrium for those who now realize that Palestinian-Israeli negotiations under the American aegis have been ongoing in some form since 1991 (albeit with an interruption during several years when President George W. Bush and most of his advisors clearly disdained these negotiations), with no peace to show for it. The conflict has become far more envenomed, and the situation on the ground today for the Palestinian population under occupation is considerably worse, than it was when I completed this book in August 1996.

In spite of the removal of the few thousand Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip in 2005, the number of settlers in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) has grown from around 200,000 to nearly half a million, with movement for the nearly 4 million Palestinians in these areas becoming progressively more restricted. Meanwhile, the second intifada, which started in 2000, failed to emulate the largely unarmed grassroots-based mass movement tactics of its predecessor. It turned increasingly to the use of arms and then degenerated into suicide bombing attacks inside Israel. Besides being morally indefensible, this proved to be a terrible strategic error. The second intifada ended up being a stinging defeat for the Palestinians, which over the next few years provided Israel with a pretext to destroy much of the governmental infrastructure the Palestinian Authority (PA) had been able to construct. During this same period, the Palestinian national movement became deeply divided between Fateh and Hamas and now looks feebler than it has in nearly sixty years.

The unspoken assumption behind this book when I wrote it was that in the preceding decades the Palestinians had not only developed a resilient national identity, but were on their way to actualizing this identity within the context of a state. (This is regarded by nearly all nationalists to be the inevitable and “natural” outcome for any national movement.) In spite of my deep skepticism about the inevitabilities so dear to the hearts of nationalists and about the course of events at the time, I largely shared that assumption. Today things do not look so simple, nor does this teleological certainty appear as if it will necessarily be borne out by events. The Palestinians, in other words, today still clearly appear to have a strong and resilient national identity, one that has survived quite powerful tribulations. However, it may be their fate not to have a separate national state of their own.

The already formidable obstacles to a Palestinian state in any meaningful sense of that word—a state that is independent, sovereign, possessed of a contiguous territory, and economically viable—have in fact been growing rapidly over the past two decades. These obstacles include notably the apparently inexorable process of the creeping expansion and consolidation all over the West Bank of a network of Israeli settlements expressly designed to make such a state impossible. This is a process that no political leaders—Israeli or American—have been able to retard significantly, let alone reverse. Increasing obstacles include the imposition of more physical separations—in the form of walls, fences, security barriers, and checkpoints—by Israel within segments of the West Bank, as well as between the West Bank, occupied Arab East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. They include the expansion and deepening of the matrix of control by the Israeli state over all essential elements of the everyday lives of the nearly 4 million Palestinians living at its mercy in these territories. They include as well the growth over more than four decades of numerous influential and powerful economic entities and bureaucratic interest groups in Israeli society (and elsewhere), constituting a sort of “settlement–occupation–industrial complex,” that have come to benefit materially from the occupation, and in some cases depend on it for their very existence and livelihood.⁷ Among further obstacles must be counted the venomous and profoundly damaging rift in Palestinian politics between the Fateh and Hamas movements, and the two PA “governments” they control. This division has gravely weakened the already enfeebled Palestinian national movement. Also in this category is the lack of any effective pressure from the Arab states, the European Union, and the United States (or any other powers) on Israel to move rapidly toward ending its occupation, removing its illegal settlements, and resolving the conflict.

Independent Palestinian statehood within the context of a two-state solution whereby there would be a Palestinian state alongside Israel thus looks much farther off than it did in the first half of the 1990s. Paradoxically, at the same time, the reality of the Palestinian people, their very existence, is now recognized and even taken for granted by many, including even some of their foes. Before the 1990s, Palestinian identity was fiercely contested. Some of this “recognition” is the purest hypocrisy. The pronouncements from Washington and European capitals (not to speak of Israeli leaders) about their support for a Palestinian state mask the brutal reality that statehood gets inexorably farther away with every Israeli settlement expansion, bypass road, and new wall, barrier, or fence hemming the Palestinians in and separating them from one another and making normal life impossible. These and a myriad of other actions by the occupation authorities that entrench their control and nullify the possibility of any form of real Palestinian statehoood are regarded quite benignly by the statesmen and women in these same capitals. They talk airily of a Palestinian state but have no means of giving the concept substance, if one is to judge by their passivity and inaction in the face of ceaseless provocative actions expressly designed to make Palestinian statehood an impossibility.

The situation is made much worse by the delusions fostered by the fiction of the PA established by the Oslo accords. This is in effect a virtual body that does not have sovereignty, jurisdiction, or ultimate control. In other words, it is an authority that has no real authority over anything—certainly not over the territories it claims in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Only within the artificial bubble of the PA “capital” of Ramallah can the PA be said to have any semblance of reality. Ramallah is largely shielded from the worst depredations of the occupation and is gorged with money pouring in from foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s). Everywhere else the brutal reality of the strengthening of the occupation and unceasing land seizure and alienation, and the near impotence of the PA, are undeniable. The PA has become a sort of subcontractor for Israel and has thus served in part to mask the reality of an Israeli military occupation whose full security control over all these territories, and total domination over land and all other resources, is now in its forty-second year.

Because of the fiction of a Palestinian Authority—supported by flags, honor guards, ministries, a presidential mausoleum, and all the empty trappings of statehood—some are deluded into believing, or pretend to believe, that the Palestinians have all but achieved their national aims and are nearly on a footing of equality with Israel as citizens of a contiguous state. As I have suggested, the truth is that they are most likely much farther away from achieving these aims than they were two decades ago. This is one reason that many serious Palestinian voices—ranging from ‘Ali Jirbawi to Sari Nuseibeh—have been raised recently pointing out the sham nature of the PA and suggesting that it is time to consider disbanding the PA.⁸

In much of American, European, and Israeli discourse, moreover—in spite of lip-service in favor of recognizing the existence of the Palestinian people—there remains today the familiar undercurrent of dismissiveness of Palestinian identity and Palestinian national claims as being less genuine, less deep-rooted, and less valid than those of other peoples in the region. I noted this phenomenon more than a dozen years ago, and it continues unabated today. The modern Jewish national identity fashioned by Zionism, and Israel’s claims as a nation-state within the contemporary world order, are usually the unspoken referent for this belittling of the Palestinians. The belittlement is tinged with condescension and sometimes even darker sentiments. Like most nationalist impulses, this attitude is driven by unawareness of the constructed and extremely recent nature of all modern national identities, including that of Israel.⁹ Paradoxically, some of the same attitudes can be seen in the perspectives of pan-Arab nationalism and political Islamism, whose advocates see these structures of identification as more “genuine” and deeply rooted than Palestinian identity. Both are, of course, quite modern invented responses, using modern political forms, to modern conditions, and neither is any more “ancient” than Palestinian nationalism or Zionism.

It is not for these reasons alone, however, that Palestinian identity is still in question. I began this book in 1996 with the travails of Palestinians in crossing boundaries, borders, and barriers within and without their homeland. These travails have not diminished. In some respects they have deepened. Certainly this is the case within Palestine, where the relative ease of movement for Palestinians that existed while I was researching and writing Palestinian Identity is a thing of the past.

When I was living in Jerusalem on and off for a time in the early 1990s, most Palestinians from there and the West Bank could travel freely to Israel itself, to the Golan Heights, and to the Gaza Strip. Gazans were more restricted in their movements, but only marginally so. These freedoms are only fond memories for the older generation today, as is the ability to travel freely to Jerusalem for the nearly 4 million Palestinians living in the rest of the occupied territories. For many years now the latter have been excluded from entry to Jerusalem by a massive complex of walls, barriers, and checkpoints that chokes off the city from its West Bank hinterland (and indeed in many cases from other Arab-inhabited neighborhoods of Jerusalem itself that are outside the wall). Other similar barriers to the movement of Palestinians exist everywhere within the West Bank, including more than 600 internal checkpoints and earthen barriers blocking roads. Meanwhile, the half million Israeli settlers there speed freely anywhere they please on their own network of state-of-the-art settler-only roads, part of a diabolically planned transportation and movement control regime that makes apartheid and its pass system look like child’s play.¹⁰ I have relatives in Nablus who were not able to leave that city for nearly five years. In this they are like most of the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories who have basically been confined for years to their home cities, towns, and villages, and to their immediate surroundings.

The relative freedom and absence of restrictions on movement that their elders once enjoyed is unimaginable for an entire generation of Palestinians that has grown up during the past decade and more in the archipelago of large open-air prisons that today constitute the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. This language may sound melodramatic, but it barely begins to sum up the physical web of constrictions, restrictions, and barriers, and the array of requirements for ID documents, passes, and permissions that obstruct free movement and sometimes prevent it completely (only for Palestinian Arabs, not for Israeli Jews) within and between these territories and occupied Arab East Jerusalem and Israel itself.¹¹ In the words of the indomitable Israeli journalist Amira Hass, Palestinians have gone in the past two decades from the situation that obtained at the outset of the occupation, where there were restrictions on the movement of a single narrow category of persons (for “security” reasons) and where all others could move relatively freely, to one where a single tiny category of persons (a miniscule group of PA “VIP’s”) has some limited freedom of movement and the rest of the population suffers from severe restrictions on their movement, if they are allowed to move at all.¹²

The formidable physical barriers to Palestinian movement in the West Bank are not restricted to the walls and barriers, and the more than 600 military roadblocks and checkpoints specifically designed to pen in the Palestinians under occupation and to control their movement. To them must be added the unceasing refashioning of the landscape of the West Bank by the growth of the looming hilltop fortress-like Israeli settlements themselves and the broad roads and their adjacent security zones designated for Jewish settlers only. Taken together with closed military zones, “green zones,” and other areas reserved for the exclusive use of Israelis, these “facts on the ground,” established systematically by every Israeli government since 1967, make possible the restriction of Palestinians to only a shrinking part of what remains of Palestine.¹³ They are the brute physical expression of this people’s progressive alienation from its own land, which is slowly being effectively incorporated into Israel.¹⁴

As the Palestinians see it, this is part of a gradual but so far inexorable century-old process whereby the Palestinians have been removed from more and more of their ancestral homeland, their property and their patrimony seized, and their very identity and existence as a people placed into question. Most Palestinians are convinced of the basic validity of this narrative, and in consequence experience deep traumatic anxieties. Tragically, most Israelis, and many others, are mesmerized by their own profound fears about threats to the continued existence of the Jews as a people (and therefore of Israel). These fears are rooted in the searing experiences of twentieth-century Jewish history culminating in the Holocaust. Such fears seem to blind those in their grip to the fact that the Palestinians are tormented by their own profound existential crisis as a people, one born largely of their traumatic historical experiences suffered at the hands of Zionism and Israel over the past century.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to conclude that it is only the historical processes driven by the conflict with Israel that cause Palestinian identity to remain in question. As I show in this book, Palestinian identity has been shaped by much more than the century-old contest with Zionism, and this is as true today as it always was. Palestinians have also felt themselves to be in conflict with the world as a whole. As I explain in a recent book,¹⁵ the Palestinian national movement has indeed often been at odds with the two greatest powers of the twentieth century, Great Britain and the United States. That tension has certainly contributed to the tenuousness of Palestinian identity and to foiling the Palestinians in their efforts to achieve their national aspirations.

More directly affecting them, however, has been the ambivalent and often hostile attitude of several key Arab governments toward Palestinian national aspirations and toward the presence of Palestinian refugees on their soil. This is another enduring element that renders Palestinian identity so questionable. That such should be the case is paradoxical in view of the undoubted and long-standing support for Palestinian aspirations by broad segments of public opinion throughout the Arab world, as was demonstrated on many occasions in the past, most recently during the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip in 2008–2009. But it is true that such problems exist in different ways in relation to many different Arab states, especially those where there is a large Palestinian refugee population, or in nearby countries where the Palestine issue has been important in domestic politics since well before 1948.

Thus in Lebanon the status of the Palestinian population has long been and still is a major issue of domestic political contention. This is a function of that country’s delicate and unstable internal political and sectarian balance, and of a painful history of Palestinian involvement in Lebanese politics. This was especially the case during the years when the PLO was at the height of its power there from 1968 until the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, after which the PLO was expelled from Lebanon. As a result, this population of around 300,000 people, most of them living in eleven refugee camps located in and around the major cities, currently has few allies or supporters within the Lebanese political system. This conflicted situation results in the Palestinians who live in Lebanon, the overwhelming majority of whom were born there and have known no other home, suffering major restrictions in employment, housing, education, and other basic human needs. Worse, the Palestinian civilian population, which suffered greatly from 1973 until 1982, has repeatedly since then become a political football for Lebanese factions, and the object of the opprobrium of certain of them, often supported by outside powers.

This process has included many tragic episodes, such as the so-called War of the Camps, when the Shiite Amal militia, backed by Syria, besieged Burj al-Barajneh and other Palestinian refugee camps in 1985–1986. It reached its nadir with the assault on Nahr al-Bared camp near Tripoli in the spring of 2007 as a result of the infiltration into the camp of radical Islamic militants, many of them not Palestinian. The Lebanese army rooted this group out in a fierce battle that led to the entire camp population of more than 20,000 people being forced to leave their homes, which were looted and largely destroyed. As I write this, these homes have not been rebuilt, and most of the camp’s inhabitants (now refugees for a second time) have been forced to suffer through a second bitterly cold, snowy winter in makeshift shelters. (Over the winter of 2008–2009 this plight was shared by even larger numbers of Gazans driven from their homes by the Israeli assault, who also became refugees yet again.)

The possibility of the permanent resettlement of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (tawtin) is a perennial issue in Lebanese politics. This is the case in spite of the fact that it is opposed both by most Palestinians, who cling to their Palestinian identity and to their right to return to their former homes or to compensation, and by all Lebanese political parties. This dark possibility is universally reviled as being both destabilizing of the sectarian Lebanese political system and a betrayal of the wishes of the Palestinians themselves, not to speak of a denial of their identity, or a prospective dilution of that of the Lebanese. However, the unending invocation of this prospect by some Lebanese politicians and commentators is in fact often a veiled form of attack on the entire Palestinian presence in Lebanon. Acting supposedly in defense of the integrity of both Lebanese and Palestinian identity, certain Lebanese factions thus apparently find it in their interest to threaten the now relatively weak Palestinian community in Lebanon, which in consequence has been exposed to harsh conditions and has been living under a shadow since the departure of the PLO in 1982.¹⁶

Lebanon is only the most extreme example of the identity—and sometimes the collective existence of the Palestinians—remaining in question. Iraq is another, in spite of the relatively small size of the Palestinian refugee population there (perhaps 20,000–30,000 before 2003, none of them living in refugee camps). After the American occupation of Iraq, thousands of Palestinians were terrorized and expelled from the country because of their alleged sympathy for the former regime. Others fled after 2003 because of their not entirely unfounded fear that they would be persecuted, whether because of their nationality or for sectarian reasons (nearly all Palestinian Muslims are Sunni). Many of these unfortunates were not allowed entry into either Syria or Jordan, and a few thousand of them ended up waiting in makeshift camps on the Iraqi borders with these two countries. Some have been trapped there for more than two years, their fate still undecided.

The situation of these new refugees from Iraq is emblematic of the fact that the Palestinians have no safe haven, as they do not yet have real control over any part of their own homeland. Israel has absolute and total power over all of what was Mandatory Palestine before 1948, including control not only of its own territory but of the territories nominally under the authority of the PA. No one enters or leaves these areas without its permission. Palestinian refugees from Iraq, even if born in Palestine, have no right to enter the country, all of which is subject to the complete control of the Israeli authorities. In consequence, none have been able to take refuge in Palestine, although through the intercession of active NGO’s some of these Palestinian refugees from Iraq have been able to obtain asylum in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and other faraway places, while many of their compatriots still languish in miserable conditions on the Iraqi border.

Another example of the questionable current status of the Palestinians, and their lack of agency, is the role of Egypt in Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. This nearly hermetic closure has been ongoing for more than twenty-one months as I write this, after starting in a slightly less severe and systematic fashion soon after Hamas won the Palestinian Electoral Council elections in January 2006. Egypt has a role in controlling access to one of the exit points from that now-sealed-off territory, the Rafah crossing for people (but not goods) between the Gaza Strip and Egyptian Sinai. By an agreement of November 2005 between the PA and Israel, endorsed by the United States, the European Union, and Egypt, the Rafah crossing point on the Gaza Strip side came under the nominal control of PA security forces and European Union monitors. However, by this agreement Israel maintained its ultimate control over this and all other entry points into the Gaza Strip, as the Rafah crossing operated under the constant electronic supervision of the Israeli security authorities, who vetted all individuals hoping to cross, and made the final decision as to who had permission to enter or leave. Moreover, at Israeli insistence, all goods from Egypt destined for Gaza had to enter Israel first and be subject to Israeli security procedures.

This situation obtained until July 2007, when Hamas forcibly took over the Gaza Strip, a step it claimed was necessary to preempt a planned Fatah coup de main.¹⁷ At that point, the PA guards and European Union monitors disappeared, and the Rafah crossing was sealed by Egypt on its side of the border at the same time as Israel closed all the other routes into the strip. Except for one “prison break” in January 2008, when Palestinians broke down the barriers and surged freely into Egypt for a number of days, the Rafah crossing point has been kept shut by Egypt. This has consistently been the case, apart from a few exceptional cases, like the return of Palestinian patients from treatment in Egypt, and the occasional passage of a limited number of individuals for humanitarian purposes during and after the December 2008–January 2009 Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. Deprived of free access to the more than 200 truckloads of goods necessary for normal life in the Gaza Strip, and sealed into their 139-square-mile prison, Gazans quickly turned to an existing network of tunnels running from the Egyptian to the Palestinian side of the divided town of Rafah, which formerly carried mainly contraband such as drugs and arms. As the Israeli siege tightened, these tunnels multiplied and were expanded to carry a wide range of goods ranging from diesel fuel to macaroni to Viagra. Israel, desirous of stopping the flow of weapons to Hamas, and also of maintaining its absolute control of entry of goods and people into the Gaza Strip, focused among other things on destroying these tunnels during its three weeks of attacks on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. It is worth noting that the tunnels have been in continuous operation for many years, including the period before 2005, when Israel had forces stationed in Rafah that were unable to find all the tunnels and halt the smuggling.

Egypt argues, with some reason, that under international law the Gaza Strip, like the West Bank, is technically still an occupied territory, in spite of the withdrawal of Israeli forces and Israeli settlers from within the Strip in 2005, since Israel still controls the territory from without by sea, land, and air. It therefore maintains that as the occupying power, Israel bears the responsibility for the welfare of the population under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention.¹⁸ Thus the Egyptian government states that if it were to take full responsibility for opening the Rafah crossing and allow goods and people to cross freely, that would enable Israel to escape its own responsibilities. It further argues, much more debatably, that its hands are tied by its international obligations. This would only be true if Egypt were to insist on unilaterally observing the 2005 agreement, which has not been in force since July 2007, or if it were to admit that it feels coerced by Israel into doing its bidding as far as the blockade is concerned. In fact, Egypt’s complicity in the Israeli blockade of Gaza is voluntary: It could and does open the Rafah crossing on occasion when it chooses to do so, and has in the past turned a blind eye to at least some of the smuggling through the Rafah tunnels.

Like other Arab states, Egypt pays voluble lip-service to the Palestinian cause, but like them its actions are not always consonant with its words. The Egyptian regime’s hostility to the effective Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip (who are ideological soul-mates of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, which leads the opposition to the regime in Egypt) and its own weakness vis-à-vis the United States and Israel (the main proponents of the blockade) provide the driving force for Egyptian policy.¹⁹ By keeping the Rafah crossing sealed during the Israeli closure of all the other entry and exit points from the Gaza Strip, Egypt has in practice become a junior participant in the Israeli blockade of the Strip that started in July 2007. This blockade amounts to inflicting suffering on its 1.5 million people because of the actions of their Hamas rulers. This is a form of collective punishment that is clearly in violation of international law. It is moreover another indication of the powerlessness of the Palestinians at the hands not only of Israel and its American and European supporters, but also of the Arab states that are nominally sympathetic to them. It further underlines the fact that being Palestinian means having a status that is unstable and subject to arbitrary behavior by any of the many states with power over Palestinians.

To complete this tour d’ horizon of the complications confronting Palestinian identity today, Syria and Jordan have large Palestinian refugee populations on their soil. Moreover, both countries have long been deeply involved in the Palestine question, while their governments have been in intermittent conflict with the Palestinian national movement in differing ways and at different times. Each has had a major impact on the lives of the Palestinians who live within their borders, all of whom are probably more integrated into their societies and live under more regular circumstances than Palestinians anywhere else in the Arab world. Thus, virtually all Palestinians in Jordan are full citizens of the country (as were the Palestinians of the West Bank before the establishment of the PA, which now provides them with passports). Palestinians in Syria are not Syrian citizens, but they have all the rights and obligations of Syrians (including being subject to conscription, receiving free university education, and having the right to own land and businesses), except the right to vote in national elections—a right that in any case is of very limited value, given the nature of the political system in Syria. Although the perhaps 300,000 Palestinians in Syria constitute a tiny minority in a population of more than 20 million, in Jordan the very size and prominence of the population of Palestinian origin has been a considerable source of tension at different times in the past. Palestinians may constitute a majority of Jordanian citizens, and Palestinians dominate the Jordanian economy and some other spheres of life. This Palestinian preponderance arouses the fears of some East Bank Jordanian nationalists. At the same time, many Palestinians in Jordan are so well assimilated that some question whether they consider themselves more Jordanian than Palestinian.

It is through their interference in Palestinian politics that the Jordanian and Syrian regimes have had the most impact on the Palestinians. This impact has ranged from outright warfare, whether between the PLO and the Jordanian regime in 1970–1971 or Syrian troops and PLO forces in Lebanon in 1976, to subversion, covert activities, and assassinations (of Jordanian officials by Palestinian militants, or of PLO leaders by members of groups linked to Damascus). As was the case with Palestinian involvement in internal conflicts within Lebanon, although the Palestinian civilian population has generally suffered the most in confrontations between the PLO and the Jordanian and Syrian regimes, the PLO was not blameless in all instances. Whether this was a matter of sometimes questionable alliances in Lebanon, provocations of the Jordanian army and government before Black September in 1970, or covert alignments with opponents of the Syrian regime, at times the PLO made grave mistakes or purposely initiated conflicts with these powerful regimes. In some measure this can be interpreted as a function of the precarious existence of the exiled PLO at the mercy of different Arab host countries before the Oslo accords allowed its leadership to return to Palestine in 1995. But that blanket excuse can only cover some, not all, of its sins of omission and commission. The PLO’s often stormy relationship with these two countries that have played such major roles in relation to the Palestine question illustrates once again the precarious status of the Palestinians and Palestinian national identity throughout the Arab world.

These dangers facing the Palestinians as a political entity, whether of what amounts to “politicide” by Israel (to use the term coined by the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling²⁰) or of subjugation, suppression, or cooptation by the Arab regimes, are in fact old ones. However, a new and deadly danger faces Palestinian identity today, one that was only dimly visible in the early to mid-1990s. This is the dual danger of the fragmentation of the remainder of the Palestinian homeland and of the unity of the Palestinian national movement. It involves first the potentially lasting physical divisions between and within what remains of the imagined homeland of the would-be Palestinian state: East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. This is a result not only of the obstinacy of the Israeli occupation authorities in blocking movement of the Palestinian population between and within these three areas (which has already been described), but also of the profound and growing chasm between the two Palestinian “Authorities”: those of Fateh and Hamas. As the former now controls the West Bank, even if only tenuously and with the support of the Israeli security services, and the latter currently dominates the Gaza Strip, the divisions between them have contributed further to the separation between these two regions and to the growing social and other differences between their populations.

Some differences in the responses of Gazans and West Bankers to political issues have long been visible in the regular polling of Palestinian opinion that has been done for more than a decade.²¹ It is to be expected that there would be variances in the responses of populations in radically different situations, as most Gazans are considerably worse off than the West Bankers, with the former suffering from nearly twice the unemployment rate of the latter²² and having a GDP per capita that was less than four fifths that of the West Bank, even before an eighteen-month blockade and the twenty-two-day Israeli offensive in 2008–2009 that further crippled the economy of the Gaza Strip.²³ To these differences must be added what appears to be a growing disaffection between the two populations. This could best be seen in the absence of a massive popular outpouring of protest by West Bank residents in response to the Israeli attack on Gaza of 2008–2009. It was noticeable that there were more spirited and more continuous demonstrations by Palestinians (but also in many cases mainly non-Palestinians) in cities and towns in Israel as well as in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, and other parts of the Arab world than there were in the towns and cities of the West Bank. Some of this was probably ascribable to the active intimidation and repression of demonstrations by the PA security forces in the West Bank, which are dominated by Hamas’s rivals in Fateh. The absence of massive popular protest at what was being done to fellow Palestinians only a few tens of kilometers away was nevertheless a noticeable phenomenon, perhaps revealing an estrangement between the two populations. It is certainly the case that they know each other less and less as time goes on, given the crippling Israeli restrictions on movement. Young West Bank Palestinians are very unlikely to have been to the Gaza Strip, and young Gazans are even less likely ever to have been allowed to leave the Strip, let alone visit Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the split between Fateh and Hamas has had a strongly corrosive effect on Palestinian politics at least since the height of the second intifada, in 2001–2002. At that time, as Israeli troops suppressed unarmed demonstrations with lethal gunfire and the death toll mounted steeply, the two groups responded by competing in launching suicide attacks against Israeli population centers. The impact of the ill-thought-out and indiscriminate assaults that resulted from this competition between Hamas and Fateh was strategically disastrous for the Palestinians. It had the result of decisively turning world opinion against the Palestinian cause, particularly since these attacks coincided with the suicide attacks on the United States of 9/11. The suicide bombings also both provoked and provided the pretext for Israel’s devastating reoccupation of Palestinian cities and its destruction of much of the PA’s infrastructure in 2002. Largely as a result of the ferocious competition between these two Palestinian movements, the second intifada constituted a major defeat for the Palestinian national movement, whose unquestioned leader, Yasser Arafat, besieged and isolated by Israeli forces in his headquarters in Ramallah, died in 2004.

Since Arafat’s death, the competition between the two groups has only grown more intense and more destructive. The leadership of Fateh stubbornly refused to accept the popular verdict embodied in the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council election of January 2006, when it garnered just over 42 percent of the vote, versus 44 percent for Hamas, which won a large parliamentary majority because of the quirks of the electoral system, and disunity within Fateh. Instead of either accepting the role of loyal opposition or joining a coalition government, the top leaders of Fateh chose to attempt to subvert and undermine these electoral results. The course they thereupon took was in effect to conspire with Israel and the United States in their adamant opposition to dealing with Hamas, among other things via complicity in the Israeli blockade and siege of Gaza. This momentous decision by Fateh envenomed Palestinian politics and divided the Palestinian national movement in a way not seen since the 1930s. This is not an exaggeration, because for narrow partisan reasons Fateh was trying to bring down a popularly elected Palestinian government in collaboration with outside forces that were overtly hostile to the Palestinian cause.

Hamas played its own sorry role in this downward spiral, beyond its heavy responsibility for initiating the suicide attacks inside Israel in the mid-1990s, and again after 2000. Faced with the paralysis of the PA because of Fateh control of the executive branch, and theirs of the legislative branch, Hamas carried out an armed coup de main in Gaza in July 2007, supposedly in response to the plotting of leading Fateh security officials to oust them from power.²⁴ The Islamic movement thereby lost much of the legitimacy that it had retained until this point as a result of its 2006 electoral victory. Hamas thus consecrated and deepened the split in Palestinian politics, and contributed significantly to the creation of two separate quasi-governmental entities, each claiming to be the legitimate PA, one centered in Ramallah and the other in Gaza. This coup, which led to exclusive Hamas control over the Gaza Strip, in turn gave Israel the pretext to further isolate that territory and to punish its population more. The brutal and sometimes lethal treatment meted out by Hamas to Fateh cadres in the Gaza Strip, and the reciprocally brutal treatment of Hamas members by Fateh in the West Bank, only further poisoned Palestinian politics. In both cases, Fateh and Hamas at times seemed to be acting more in consonance with the urgings of their foreign patrons, the United States and Israel in the case of the former, and Syria and Iran in the case of the latter (all of them engaged in a mini cold war with one another at the end of the George W. Bush era²⁵), than out of any discernable interpretation of the Palestinian national interest.

The two leaderships did not stop at this in their actions, most of which had the effect of further polarizing and debilitating the Palestinian national movement. The Fateh-dominated Ramallah-based PA, for its part, insisted on continuing fruitless negotiations with the Olmert government for the last year of the Bush administration. It did so although it should have been apparent that given the weakness of the Palestinian position in the absence of national unity, nothing of substance could be achieved thereby (and by the end of the Bush administration nothing had been achieved). More important, there was no clear Palestinian national consensus for engaging in such negotiations in the absence of a coalition government with clear guidelines for dealing with Israel, a coalition government whose formation Fateh had sabotaged, in part at the instigation of the external powers supporting it, notably the United States. The PA in Ramallah continued these negotiations during Israel’s hermetic blockade of the Gaza Strip, doing so in a situation in which 1.5 million of the Palestinian citizens whom the PA in Ramallah purported to represent were being subjected by Israel to extreme deprivation. This unseemly spectacle of the PA’s complicity in what amounted to an egregious violation of international law against its own people further exacerbated the bitterness of the inter-Palestinian split.

Hamas, meanwhile, insisted on its right to employ armed resistance to Israel, acting like Fateh, in the absence of a clear national consensus in favor of such a policy. In practice, “resistance” primarily meant firing wildly inaccurate, home-made Qassam rockets with tiny warheads produced from fertilizer and other similar ingredients and with minimal explosive power (and a few larger and more lethal Soviet-designed and Syrian-manufactured Katyusha and Grad rockets that had been smuggled into the Gaza Strip) in the general direction of nearby Israeli population centers. By sheer dint of firing thousands of these Qassam rockets, some of which hit targets in these Israeli towns and villages, killing several people and wounding more, normal life was eventually rendered impossible for many thousands of Israelis.²⁶ Hamas apparently understood both the danger it courted from a devastating Israeli response to these largely ineffective but infuriating pinpricks, and the unpopularity of these actions among its own people.²⁷ It therefore tried in 2008 to work out a six-month truce, but this was foiled by Israel, which broke the truce it had agreed to after only four months with a major attack on November 4, 2008. Moreover, Israel never carried out one of the truce’s key provisions, which was the opening of the Gaza crossings and the lifting of the blockade. The long-planned, ferocious Israeli attack on Gaza that was launched on December 27, 2008 was the inevitable result of these grievous miscalculations by Hamas, and of Israel’s desire to re-establish its power to intimidate, which went in Israeli security parlance by the name of “deterrence.”²⁸ And while Gaza burned, the PA leadership in Ramallah fiddled, joining Israel, the United States, and Egypt in initially placing blame for what was happening on Hamas and helping Israel by suppressing protests in the West Bank.

These damaging actions of both leaderships—which even with the greatest charity can only be described as short-sighted, irresponsible, and motivated by the narrowest of selfish, partisan motives (and some of which could certainly bear far less complimentary interpretations)—came at a time of grave crisis for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian national objectives that had been hammered out from the early 1970s until 1988 and that eventually formed the basis of a Palestinian consensus, centering on a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jerusalem as its capital, linked to a just resolution of the refugee issue on the basis of United Nations resolutions, have come to appear more and more unrealizable with the passage of time. Hamas originally refused adamantly to subscribe to these goals or to support the Oslo accords and the PA that purported to fulfill them. It thereafter appeared to edge toward tacitly accepting both a two-state solution and the Oslo accords by agreeing to take part in PA Legislative Council elections in 2006, although it never formally accepted either. Hamas thereby put itself in a contradictory position. On the one hand, it was scathingly critical of the meager results of Fateh’s negotiations with Israel, of its scaling down of Palestinian aspirations, and of its abandonment of any means of pressure on the powerful and overbearing Israeli side. On the other, it was willing to enter into a series of cease-fires with the Jewish state, and after 2006 agreed to be part of coalition governments with Fateh that would negotiate with Israel. It thus seemed to be increasingly committed to its own peculiar form of a two-state solution, rejecting outright any formal recognition of Israel but accepting the possibility of a “truce” with Israel of as much as 100 years and other similarly unique features (none of which was necessarily acceptable to Israel or other actors). Hamas thus seemed to want to preserve its purity, but also to enjoy the fruits of sin.

Nowadays, however, it can and should be argued that all of this is moot. The establishment of the PA as a step toward the establishment of a Palestinian state seems clearly to have created more problems than it solved. The need for a fresh approach to the definition of Palestinian national goals and for a re-examination of the means for achieving them has become increasingly apparent to Palestinians. This involves a rethinking of the appropriate forms of resistance to occupation, including the place of armed and nonviolent means; whether it is indeed possible to negotiate an end to the occupation with Israel; and, if negotiation is possible, the best approach to negotiations and to achievement of other Palestinian national objectives. Instead of addressing these critical issues, however, Fateh and Hamas have for years now been mired in their fratricidal, partisan conflict. They have in particular been engaged in unseemly squabbling over the diminishing spoils represented by the PA, even as the value and actual power of this authority came more and more into question, and as their lack of a clear strategy for national liberation became manifest to all but their most devoted partisans.

As I write these words, in early summer of 2009, two rounds of unity talks between Fateh and Hamas after nearly two years of an open split have just adjourned without results in Cairo, with another round promised. It would be foolhardy to bank on their success, given the deep bitterness that has developed between the two sides, the strong vested interests of external parties in the continuation of the existing inter-Palestinian divisions, and the obstacles that Israel and the United States are capable of placing in the way of any PA unity government that may emerge from these talks. Even if the two sides do succeed, even if some form of Palestinian unity is restored and a coalition government is formed and new elections held, and even if the blockade of Gaza is lifted and reconstruction can begin, the really hard part will be yet to come. That would be to get the Palestinian people out of the state of occupation, dispersion, and lack of a clear strategy for mobilizing enough forces to change the current extremely unfavorable status quo that they have been in for many years.

Besides the difficulties already outlined, that task is made all the harder by the fact that the possibility of an equitable two-state solution seems so distant, dimmed as it is by the many massive Israeli creations on the ground, both physical and institutional, that I described earlier. These changes make any form of equitable partition of this small country between its two peoples seem almost unattainable as a Palestinian goal. Many level-headed observers have in fact concluded that it is now completely unattainable. Meanwhile, the prospect of a just one-state solution, increasingly being discussed in some quarters, appears even more distant, given the attachment of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples to having a state of their own, and the difficulties of bringing these antagonists not just to make peace but to live together within the same polity. This is not to speak of the opposition of the entire international community to a one-state solution, and the international commitment to the continued existence of Israel explicitly in the context of a two-state solution.

Instead of a reasonably equitable two-state solution or some form of one-state binational solution, in the immediate and indefinite future the Palestinians seem fated to live with the present status quo. This status quo involves an achingly unjust and highly unstable “one-state solution” of a peculiarly perverse kind. The one state that we are likely to continue to see in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is an Israeli state that is increasingly intolerant of the nearly 20 percent of its citizens who are Palestinians. In that one state, what will soon become a Jewish minority within the entire country between the sea and the river will continue to dominate multiple different categories of what will soon become a Palestinian majority (if it is not already one), deprived in different ways of rights and agency, like the descending circles of Dante’s inferno.

This is why I believe that discussions in some circles of whether a one-state or a two-state solution to this conflict is preferable have a slightly surreal quality in the current critical environment. What we must have now is not debate about how many states can dance on the head of a pin, but rather discovery of the means of reversing—very rapidly—the powerful current dynamic, and of extricating the Palestinian people from their present state. The highly inequitable de facto one-state “solution” now in effect looks more and more entrenched. Paradoxically, I predict it will become more and more untenable and more violently unstable as time goes on.

Palestinian identity may be under much greater threat today than it was when this book was first published. At the same time, in spite of the looming challenges it faces, Palestinian identity is as alive and powerful today in knitting together the 8 or 9 million Palestinians—not just the more than 5 million living inside the country, but those in the diaspora—as it was at any time over the past century or so. I hope this new printing of Palestinian Identity will help a new generation of readers comprehend where it came from—and perhaps help it understand where it may be going.

3. According to the Letter of Invitation by the superpower co-sponsors of the Madrid peace conference and the American “Letter of Assurances” to the Palestinian side, both dated October 18, 1991, negotiations on Palestinian “interim self-government arrangements” were to be concluded within a year. These arrangements were to last for five years. After these arrangements had been in force for two years, “permanent status” negotiations were to begin. These were to be concluded by the end of the “transitional period”; that is, by the fall of 1997.

5. One egregious example that I witnessed occurred at a late stage of the Washington negotiations, in early May 1993, when the United States finally consented to mediate a deadlock between the two sides and offered a “bridging proposal” that was in crucial respects less favorable to the Palestinians than proposals the Israeli delegation itself had made. For more details see R. Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon, 2004), n. 38, p. 204.

9. See Nachman Ben Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Gabby Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Shlomo Sand, Comment le people juif a été inventé (Paris: Fayard, 2008).

10. The physical aspects of this system are brilliantly summed up by the Israeli architect and planner Eyal Weizman in his book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). South African visitors to Palestine commonly remark on the similarities between this regime and that of apartheid. See Aslam Farouk-Alli, ed., The Future of Palestine and Israel: From Colonial Roots to Post-colonial Realities (Midrand, South Africa: Institute for Global Dialogue & Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2007), pp. 272–298.

18. Israel vigorously denies that it is still the occupying power, describing the Gaza Strip as a “hostile entity,” and treating it as such, while at the same time admitting some responsibility for a minimal level of humanitarian assistance. The U.S. government apparently does not concur. The CIA website states in reference to the Gaza Strip’s maritime boundaries (which are controlled by Israel): “Israeli-occupied with current status subject to the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement—permanent status to be determined through further negotiation.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gz.html. Nor does Israeli legal expert Prof. Yoram Dinstein, the former president of Tel Aviv University, concur. He stated at a seminar to assess the results of the war held at the university’s Institute for National Security Studies on January 27, 2009, that Israel continues to occupy the Gaza Strip.

26. Between June 2004 and the end of 2007, 12 Israelis were killed by rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip, according to the Israeli human rights organization B‘tselem: http://www.btselem.org/English/Israeli_Civilians/Qassam_missiles.asp. Israeli. During the same period, more than 1100 were killed in the Gaza Strip. Israeli civilian casualties resulting from rocket and mortar fire from Gaza during the 22-day Israeli offensive that started on December 27, 2008 totaled 3 killed and 182 wounded according to the Israeli Magen David Adom Society, cited by the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs. During Israel’s incursion into Gaza, 11 soldiers were killed (most by “friendly fire”) and 339 wounded. Palestinian casualties according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights Gaza amounted to 1434 killed (including 960 civilians, 239 police officers, and 235 militants) and 5303 injured (including 2434 women and children): http://www.pchrgaza.org.

27. The growing unpopularity of Hamas during a period when it was firing rockets from the Gaza Strip can be seen in polling data from any of the reliable Palestinian institutions that do regular public opinion polls: e.g., those of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (http://www.jmcc.org/publicpoll/results/2008/index.htm), which showed a decline in support for Hamas in four polls from November 2007 through November 2008: 19.7%; 17.8%; 16.4%, and 16.6%. Support for Fateh also declined, from 40% to 31.3% at the end of the period.

28. See, e.g., Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in “Analysis: Israel’s Three Alternative for the Future of the Gaza War” in Haaretz, January 9, 2009: “A senior officer admitted Tuesday that the army’s secondary objective was to restore the serious blow dealt to its self-confidence after the 2006 loss of the Second Lebanon War. This has already been restored, he said.” According to the astute Israeli commentator Meron Benvenisti, writing in Haaretz (“Woe to the Victors,” January 22, 2009): “The masterminds of Operation Cast Lead sought to characterize it in two contradictory terms: ‘the landlord has gone insane’ and is retaliating with unbridled savagery; and ‘controlled rage,’ or a rational military operation that is aimed at deterring the other side.” As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim put it in The Guardian (January 7, 2009): “The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006.”