Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

Like most projects of this size, this book has gone through several metamorphoses. The initial idea, which I developed about eight years ago, was for a text that would reinterpret and rework the received versions of the history of Palestine over perhaps the past two centuries. But for several reasons I eventually saw that such a project was unfeasible: it would have involved a huge amount of research over many years and would have culminated in a massive volume (or volumes)—an unappealing prospect. I felt that there was a need for a book that would be accessible to a broad circle of readers beyond a specialist audience, and would be available soon, in order to meet the widespread current interest in the subject of the Palestinians. In addition, I found that the existing specialized works on Palestinian history covered some topics well, and that I had nothing original to say regarding certain other aspects of Palestinian history. The idea of writing a comprehensive history of Palestine thus made increasingly little sense to me.

In the next phase, my involvement in the restoration of the Khalidi family library in Jerusalem gradually led me to the idea of an intellectual history of Jerusalem over the past century or so. This project was the focus of a twelve-month serial Fulbright grant to do research in Jerusalem over three years, from 1991 until 1993. While in Jerusalem over these three extended summers, I did much of the research for this book, and once again modified this project. In the end, I broadened its scope from Jerusalem to the entirety of Palestine, and shifted its focus from general intellectual history to a study of the emergence of Palestinian identity. I narrowed the focus because I felt that the issue of identity was perhaps the most important problem of Palestinian history which needed to be explained to both a general and an academic audience. If one takes identity as the answer to the question, “Who are you?” it is clear that the response of the inhabitants of Palestine has changed considerably over time. I sought to explain the reasons for that change.

When I first conceived of this project in its present form, it involved studying Palestinian national identity in some detail from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the present day. But as my research progressed, the conclusions which emerged from it, as well as my circumstances from 1991 until 1993, brought me to limit its scope even further. During this three-year period, in addition to extensive summer research and work on the restoration of the family library in Jerusalem, I continued with my teaching and other full-time duties at the University of Chicago. But beyond that, in a moment of incaution during my first stay in Jerusalem during the summer of 1991, I had agreed to the request of Faisal al-Husayni that, if the Palestinians became involved in negotiations with Israel (negotiations whose format and participants were at that time being determined in intensive shuttle diplomacy with all the parties concerned by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker) I would serve as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation.

At the time, I had no reason to assume that Baker would have any more success than his many predecessors, all of whom had failed to get the Palestinians and Israelis to sit around the same negotiating table. I felt especially secure in this assumption since the Israeli government then headed by Yitzhaq Shamir was deeply opposed to such a prospect. I thus did not give much thought to my agreement to Faysal al-Husayni’s proposition, until late one night on the eve of the sudden convocation of the Madrid conference, I received a call from PLO officials in Tunis asking me to confirm that I was indeed going to Madrid, since the names of the delegation and its advisers had to be presented to Secretary Baker’s assistants that very night.

I thereafter served as one of several advisers to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid conference in October–November 1991, and participated in part of each of the ten Palestinian-Israeli bilateral negotiating sessions in Washington which continued until June 1993. These negotiations generally went on for a few intense weeks of nonstop work, followed by many weeks or months of recess. I did not participate in the entirety of every round of negotiations, and obtained welcome respite during the often lengthy breaks between them. Nevertheless, my colleagues and I on the Palestinian delegation worked extremely hard while the talks were in session, and the overlap between these negotiations and my research, teaching, and other duties was naturally stressful and often frustrating. It undoubtedly limited the amount of research and writing on this project that I was able to undertake.

However, my involvement in the negotiations did have some positive results for my research. Being in Madrid, Washington, and Jerusalem over these three years watching Palestinian national identity slowly but inexorably become embodied in concrete form—however unsatisfactory this form may have seemed to some at the time or later—convinced me of the centrality of the topic of the book I was working on. It also convinced me that I should not try to bring my narrative down to the present day, since it would be difficult to obtain the perspective necessary for writing history, given the speed with which the circumstances affecting Palestinian national identity were evolving.

At the same time, being in the midst of such momentous events made it clearer to me than ever before how rapidly views of self and other, of history, and of time and space, could shift in situations of extreme political stress, which could be seen as watersheds in terms of identity. I had already witnessed such swift changes in similar situations while living in Lebanon from the early 1970s until 1983, and had observed that constructs of identity and of political preference, and understandings of history, which appeared long-lasting and persistent in certain circumstances, could crumble or evolve almost overnight.

My earliest research, started in 1970, explored the first stirrings of Arab nationalism in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in the years before World War I.¹ This work brought to my attention examples of rapid changes in political attitudes in these areas, specifically during the Balkan wars of 1912–1913, when it seemed that the Ottoman Empire was on the brink of collapse. Suddenly, the population of the Arab provinces of the Empire was faced with the possible dissolution of the Ottoman political framework within which their region had operated for four centuries. The consequences of this realization—and of the shock when the Empire actually did collapse a few years later—for this population’s sense of identity were momentous. Insofar as they relate to Palestine, they will be touched on in chapter 7.

My next major research project, on the decisions made by the PLO during the 1982 war, dealt with very different examples of rapid changes in political attitudes, changes I had witnessed in Beirut.² Notable among them were the reversal in Lebanese attitudes toward the Palestinians from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and how the PLO and their supporters in Lebanon came to be reconciled to the idea of a negotiated evacuation from Beirut during the seventy days of Israel’s bombardment and siege of the city. In relatively short order, a Lebanese population, large parts of which had been supportive of Palestinian political and military activities, came to oppose them, alienated by the behavior of the PLO, and under intense pressure from Israel and its allies. In another such rapid shift, during the watershed of the 1982 war, the Palestinians accepted under extreme duress both the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut, and fundamental changes in their political strategy.

As my research in Jerusalem broadened my understanding of the issue of Palestinian identity, it became clear to me that there had been a similar watershed with respect to the Palestinian self-view in the first decades of this century. I realized that it was sufficient to explain the circumstances of this shift, and unnecessary to continue my narrative with a detailed examination of Palestinian identity from the time of its emergence to the present. The final chapter of this book nevertheless briefly recapitulates the story of the evolution of Palestinian national identity from the early 1920s to the mid-1990s.

This end point is necessarily an arbitrary one—for Palestinian national identity has of course not stopped evolving, and it is still too early to tell whether it has reached a watershed comparable to that of the early years of the century. In any case, tempting though the examination of such a question might have been, I had to send this book to press (a point my editor, Kate Wittenberg, kindly but forcefully kept impressing upon me). As I write these words, Palestinian national identity continues to unfold and reconfigure itself under the impact of a cascade of startling events and powerful historical forces which have changed the Middle East almost beyond recognition.

The treatment of Palestinian identity in this book should have resonance for readers interested in the Palestinians and their role in the Arab-Israeli conflict; for those concerned with post-colonial nationalisms in the Arab world and elsewhere; and for anyone studying nationalism who wishes to understand an instance of national consciousness emerging in the absence of a nation-state. It can also serve as a test-case for theories about nationalism, identity, and the role of the state in forming both. The case of Palestinian identity also seems particularly relevant for consideration by those in the growing fields studying diasporas and transnational and global phenomena.

The scholarly attention currently devoted to the topic of national identity guarantees a wealth of theoretical material on which to draw, and many possible comparisons with the evolution of other national identities.³ There also exists a considerable literature on nationalism, including both classics and more recent works, as well as case studies of specific national movements. At the same time, dealing with Palestinian history in terms of national identity also poses problems, because the literature on identity, nationalism, and the nation, while voluminous, is of varied quality; in many instances it is not applicable to the Palestinian case.

It is worth stating at the outset that this treatment of identity starts from the firmly held premise that national identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given, as the apostles of nationalism, and some students of culture, politics and history claim.⁴ While this can easily be shown to be the case as far as the Palestinians are concerned, their example also has a certain universal applicability for issues of national identity generally. Although it may be argued that the specificity of the circumstances affecting the Palestinians is so extreme that one cannot generalize from their example, the case of the Palestinians is not unique. This is true as regards a number of ways in which the Palestinians mirror other national groups, including the manner in which preexisting elements of identity are reconfigured and history is used to give shape to a certain vision, the impact of powerful shocks and extreme stress on the framing of questions of identity, and the role of contingent external factors in shaping national identity.

Whereas, to use Ernest Gellner’s terminology, the Palestinian cultural and political communities have not yet coincided in time and space⁵—that is to say, a Palestinian national state encompassing all or most of the world’s Palestinians has not yet been established—in no way does this condition diminish the relevance of the Palestinian case for understanding national identity in general, or for substantiating the argument that this identity is constructed. A close examination of the way in which the Palestinian national narrative has been created shows myriad features similar to those of other national movements, albeit exhibiting a specificity peculiar to the circumstances that have affected the Palestinians in recent decades.

Several of the most respected writers on nationalism and identity have put forward arguments on which this approach, which sees national identity as constructed, can be solidly based. In one of his more recent writings on this subject, Eric Hobsbawm agrees with Gellner in stressing “the element of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations.”⁶ Gellner is even blunter: “Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent. . . political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality.”⁷ In short, nations and the identity linked to them are a construct for Gellner; the nationalism that does this work of construction is a real political force.

Hobsbawm stresses another element in this process of construction of identity, pointing in the introduction to the influential volume he edited with Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, to “the use of ancient material to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes,” referring specifically to cases related to the building of national feeling.⁸ Benedict Anderson goes perhaps the farthest in this regard, with his argument for the nation as an “imagined political community,” which is “imagined as both limited and sovereign” and which essentially constitutes a shared consciousness of a certain set of elements of identity made possible by a conjunction of factors, including what he describes as “print-capitalism.”⁹ Although Anthony Smith appears less sympathetic to this approach in some of his writings,¹⁰ given his concern with the ethnic origins of nations, he nevertheless admits in a recent article that “the nation that emerges in the modern era must be regarded as both construct and process.”¹¹

It may be argued (and is, incessantly, in the Palestinian case), that certain identities are recent, flimsy, and artificial, whereas by contrast others are long-standing, deep-rooted and natural. (A specific identity, the Israeli-Jewish one, is usually mentioned in this context, although similar arguments can be made in favor of Arab or Islamic identities.) This is not the place to dispute these sorts of arguments, which are often not amenable to rational dispute in any case (as Hobsbawm puts it: “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist. . . . Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not true.”)¹² But it will become clear whether Palestinian identity is as insubstantial as it is made out to be by the skeptics, while some of the fundamental similarities between it and other national identities will be brought out.

One further aspect of the emergence of Palestinian identity deserves mention here: the role played by those whose voices we often do not hear in the historical record. Such concerns have been brought out both theoretically and as they apply to South Asian historiography in the work of the Subaltern Studies school,¹³ and are only beginning to be applied to the study of the Middle East. In much of what follows the elite voices, engaged in the construction of a nationalism that often served as the vehicle of elite interests, will predominate. But as is clear from the events examined in chapter 5, non-elite subaltern elements of Palestinian society played an important, and perhaps central, role in the crucial early years of the emergence of a separate Palestinian identity, and thereafter. Much more remains to be done to determine the place of such actors, whose words often do not reach us, even at so short a remove as four or five generations. This chapter makes a start at doing so, and contains a welcome corrective to the impression that may be derived from the emphasis on elite-generated discourse in much of the literature, and much of the rest of this book. Throughout this book, the question will remain not only regarding the agency of individuals and groups of the subaltern classes, but also how they responded to the writings and words of the elite which feature so prominently in the historical record. For the time being these remain questions without answers.

My work on this project has gone on for so long, and has involved so many people, that it will be impossible to thank them all adequately. Among those who helped me in Jerusalem, many individuals deserve my special thanks: without the access to sources they provided, their help and advice in interpreting them, and the warmth and hospitality they extended to me and to my family, this book could never have been written. Among them, Khadr Salama, the Director of the al-Aqsa Library and the Islamic Museum, and Sa‘id al-Husayni and Musa al-Budayri, who generously provided me with access to invaluable primary source materials, deserve my warm thanks. So do Nazmi al-Ju‘ba, ‘Adnan al-Husayni, Yusuf al-Natshe, Faysal al-Husayni, Fu’ad al-Budayri, Butros Abu-Manneh, ‘Adil Manna‘, Amnon Cohen, Danny Bahat, Su‘ad al-‘Amiry, Salim Tamari, Albert Aghazarian and George Hintlian for their assistance in various ways. Without Michael Metrinko’s intervention I might never have made it to Jerusalem in May 1991 to begin the research on this book.

Haifa al-Khalidi, her mother Raqiyya (Um Kamil), and her late father, Haydar al-Khalidi, did more than extend to us the warmth of their home. In addition, each one contributed in different concrete ways to the process of research on this book: Haydar al-Khalidi by encouraging my interest in this project and by preserving the Khalidi Library and a trove of family documents almost single-handed until outside support became available; Haifa by continuing her father’s work against difficult odds and giving me invaluable guidance in my research (and much-appreciated sustenance and support throughout); and Raqiyya by offering me her recollections of the first decades of this century. In doing this, she added further invaluable personal details to a picture of that era that I had originally obtained from my late aunts, ‘Anbara, Wahidi, and Fatima al-Khalidi. Kamil al-Khalidi, mutawalli of the Khalidi Library waqf, was helpful and supportive in many ways, not least of which was his discovery of a number of useful documents. Walid Khalidi, who encouraged me to go to Jerusalem to examine the Khalidi Library in the first place, has since then been the mainstay of the Library restoration effort, and has throughout been supportive of my work, deserves my special thanks.

Many others in various places contributed to this book by reading parts of it, by their comments on versions of chapters presented at conferences, or by sharpening my thinking on this subject in discussions with them. Those who did so are too numerous to recall or to mention, but I owe special thanks in this regard to Edward Said, Nubar Hovsepian, Anton Shammas, Nadia Abu al-Hajj, Çaglar Keyder, Sükrü Hanioglu, Patricia Yaeger, ‘Azmi Bishara, Jim Jankowski, Israel Gershoni, Joel Beinin, Philip Khoury, Gabby Piterberg, David Laitin, Ron Suny, Norma Field, Jim Chandler, and Michael Geyer, as well as Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Ariela Finkelstein, Julie Peteet, Uday Mehta, May Seikaly, and Lisa Wedeen. David Peters and Michael Raley deserve my thanks for assistance with my research in ways above and beyond the call of duty. Many of my students contributed to this book by their comments and questions about early drafts of various chapters.

One other group deserves my special gratitude: these are my friends and colleagues who held the fort at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago during my lengthy absences over the summers and at other times when I was working on this book. Notable among them are John Woods, Richard Chambers, Vera Beard, Ralph Austen, Cornell Fleischer, Karen Shrode, Susan Hubbard, and Michael Christiana. My fellow residents at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio during the summer of 1995 helped me complete this book by their companionship and their suggestions, especially John Kleiner for help with the idea of failure, Bill Beardslee for help with the idea of identity, and both of them, as well as Don Campbell and Jerry Kelly, for less serious but more strenuous kinds of inspiration. To Dorothy and Rudy Pozzati go my special thanks for their friendship and companionship throughout my stay there.

I benefited from much institutional support in the writing of this book. The Council for the International Exchange of Scholars and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Humanities Institute at the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the Center for Behavioral Research of the American University of Beirut, and the Divisions of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Chicago all provided me with support that made it possible to do the research and writing for this project, or with venues at which I was enabled to present parts of it. In this regard, I am particularly grateful to Gary Garrison of the CIES, to the late Gil Sherman of the U.S. Information Agency in Jerusalem, to Gianna Celli, Pasquale Pesce, and Susan Garfield of the Rockefeller Foundation, to Shibli Telhami at Cornell, to Samir Khalaf at the American University of Beirut, and to Bruce Craig, Fayez Masad, and the skilled staff of the Middle East section of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

My wife Mona, who put up with my seemingly unending absences, both physical and psychological, while I was working on this book, deserves thanks beyond measure. She and my three children spent three summers in Jerusalem, during most of which time I was totally wrapped up in the cocoon of my research and writing, and they showed great forbearance then and at many other times. All of them, but especially Mona, have contributed to this volume in ways they know, and others they cannot know.

In a sense, a work of history is written as much by the individuals about whom it is written as by the historian, who can be thought of as no more than their interpreter, giving voice once again to their forgotten words, and illustrating and explaining their actions and the forces that affected them so that another generation can understand them. I dedicate this book to members of another generation than my own, to Lamya, Dima, and Ismail, in the hope that it will speak to them and many others of an important time in the past, and help them to carry some understanding of these ideas, actions, and forces with them into a better future.