Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (review)

IN 1969, THEN PRIME MINISTER Golda Meir announced in an interview with The Sunday Times that "There was no such thing as Palestinians. . . They did not exist" (Khalidi, p. 147). Twenty-four years later, the State of Israel, by then led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, formally recognized the existence of a Palestinian people with national rights, and set in motion a process that was to award sovereignty to the Palestinians over parts of the Land of Israel/Palestine. What remains today in dispute is the exact size of those parts and the exact nature of that sovereignty.

Golda Meir, of course, and not Rabin, represented in this context the viewpoint of the Zionist movement through most of its history. For long decades, the movement was at pains to deny the "other" living between Dan and Eilat and the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. At the beginning—somewhat bizarrely in the eyes of later commentators—the Zionist leaders and settlers by and large denied (or at very least ignored) the presence of other inhabitants in the various areas of Palestine, which had been earmarked by the movement for the absorption of waves of Jewish immigrants and the eventual establishment of a Jewish state or commonwealth. Thus was born the myth of the "land without people" waiting to accommodate a "people without a land" (though the phrase itself had been invented some decades earlier by a British philo-Zionist, Lord Shaftesbury). Later, while recognizing that there were, indeed, non-Jewish inhabitants in the country, the Zionists denied their "national" existence or reality. During the past two-three decades, Zionism and Israel have very gradually, very grudgingly, come to accept that there are several million "others" living in the area between the Sea and the River and that they have a distinct, collective national identity; that is, that there are "Palestinian Arabs."

The book under review is among the more important recent contributions to the expanding literature about the emergence of the Palestinian people. It directly attacks the subject of how and why and when this happened.

Khalidi, a professor of Middle East history in the University of Chicago, a sometime member of Palestine Authority peace process delegations, and a scion of one of East Jerusalem's notable families, tries in his book to discover from what point in time the Arabs living in Palestine can be properly called a "people," from what point did they regard themselves as a distinct people or nation, separate from the wider "Arab Nation" or the "Syrian Arab people," and when did others "notice" that the Palestine Arabs were seeing themselves in such a way and when did these others also acknowledge that they were looking at a new "people."

The answers to these questions, almost needless to say, have a variety of implications, some of which are crucial, both in terms of the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict and in terms of current political developments in the region.

En large, this theme was previously treated in Yehoshua Porath's two volumes, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 and From Riots to Rebellion: The Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1929-1939, published in the 1970s, as well as in Anne Mosley Lesch's Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917-1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement (1979) and Muhammad Muslih's The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (1988), and Khalidi in this respect does not contribute much that is new. He seems to accept the Porath-Lesch-Muslih depiction of events and implicitly rejects that recently suggested by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal in their book Palestinians: The Making of a People (1993), who looked to the 1834 peasant revolt in Palestine against the Egyptian occupiers as the beginning of Palestinian Arab nationalism.

Porath, Lesch and Muslih had argued that the Arabs of Palestine had been an indistinguishable part of the Arabs of the Levant (or "Syria") during the...