Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine

Epilogue. The Consequences of Sectarianism

158 In 1917, just before Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem and claimed Palestine for the British, Arab Christians seemed poised to take a central role in the construction of a post-Ottoman political order. By the time the mandate ended in 1948, they had nearly disappeared from Palestinian political life. At the same time, they also vanished from much of the historiography of modern Palestine. The colonial conflict that began with the 1917 British declaration of support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine was, by 1948, already being portrayed as partly a religious contest between Muslims and Jews for their shared “Holy Land,” an interpretation that replaced its political and economic causes with an invented primordial religious origin and conveniently elided Britain’s role in the making of the struggle. British policy in Palestine, driven by imperial precepts developed in India and Africa, helped to create a new kind of sectarianism in Palestine that encouraged the emergence of Muslim political organization while discouraging the kind of multi-religious, middle-class, urban nationalism in which Christians were heavily involved. British officials developed a rhetoric of an innate Palestinian sectarianism that they used simultaneously to justify their own invented systems of communal organization and to decry the primitiveness of the Palestinian Arabs. This colonial discourse also served to rationalize the British refusal to allow Palestinian Arabs official political representation. The involvement of various European powers that had historically claimed “protectorates ” over the Christian communities in Palestine and their ongoing interest in maintaining their privileges in the “Holy Land” through their church institutions further promoted the development of a highly sectarian atmosphere. Palestinian Arab Christians reacted to this colonial interpretation of religious identity by reinventing their communal institutions as political entities in an attempt to maintain some influence and access to the state in the new system. In remaking their church communities as identifiable blocs with speePilogue : the ConseQuenCes of seCtarianism 159 ePilogue cifically communal political interests, Arab Christians were both responding and contributing to an increasingly sectarian political landscape. While the colonial construction of sectarianism did not manage to slow the progress of anti-imperial feeling or nationalist organization, it did succeed in driving a wedge between Muslims and Christians in Palestine and in redefining religious affiliation as a central aspect of political participation in the modern Middle East—a legacy that persists to the present day. The British decision to exclude the Arab Christian population from Palestinian politics was made on the basis of immediate imperial interests. As the mandate proceeded, it became clear that this approach had another benefit. Gradually excising the Christian population from Palestinian Arab politics made it possible for British to cast the relationship between European Jews and Arab Muslims in Palestine as one of medieval religious hatred rather than modern political conflict. It suppressed discussion of the British role in creating a situation of discord and presented the British colonial government as a necessary mediator among warring parties in a Palestine hidebound by primitive religious feeling. This vision of the origins of the conflict and the necessity of Western mediation among Palestine’s different religious groups has survived the demise of the mandate; it may well be among the most lasting legacies of British imperial rule in the Middle East. Palestinian Christians from the l ate ottoman era to the end of the mandate: some ConClusions The category of Palestinian Arab Christian began to take on a specifically modern political meaning during the late nineteenth century. The unprecedented growth of foreign institutions in Palestine and the internationalization of Palestine’s affairs helped to promote new kinds of communal identifications in Palestine’s Muslim and Christian communities. But simultaneously, these same forces assisted the emergence of a self-consciously modern political , social, and cultural space for Palestine’s urban elites, both Muslim and Christian. When the British entered Palestine in December 1917, elite urban Palestinian Christians were beginning to consider the political implications of their religious heritage but were more interested in building up a modern, multi-religious Arab civil society. The presence of so many Christian leaders in the Palestinian nationalist movement confused British dignitaries in London like Winston Churchill , who seemed unable to comprehend the presence of an indigenous Arab Christianity politically committed to Palestinian nationalism. In a more local context, mandate officials saw Palestinian Christian leaders contributing to 160 Colonialism and Christianity in mandate Palestine the middle-class, urban, nationalist movement that...