As an admittedly clunky term, Palestinianism, as the mantle claimed by Hamas, Fatah and other major Palestinian identified groups, is best understood as a movement, an ideology, and/or a belief system. At the outset, it is important to understand that the idea of a unified, independent Palestinian state did not evolve naturally from its history.[1] This statement could also be valid for the emergence of European nation-states and that of post-colonial independent states in the Global South. But the site of the Levant or Middle East at the confluence so many different civilisations and cultures poses particular questions for the study of the development of Palestinian identity.
In ancient times, Levantine states like Phoenicia (primarily modern-day Lebanon) and Syria consisted of independent city states like Tyre, Sidon and Byblos in Phoenicia or Damascus or Aleppo in Syria. The Phoenician cities were maritime hubs and separate entities, each governed by its own royal lineage, worshipping their specific pantheons and speaking dialectical variations. Even though they shared a common cultural backdrop marked by their unique alphabetic script and seafaring prowess, they never coalesced into a unified Phoenician nation. Syria was a melting pot of diverse thought and religious practices, from the Canaanites and Amorite to the later influence of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman and Byzantine empires. Damascus and Aleppo became epicentres of learning, trade, and power, each contributing to a multifaceted Syrian identity that was very heterogenous.[2]
While the Islamic Caliphates, from the Umayyad to the Abbasid and the Fatimid, brought a semblance of religious and administrative unity they did not erase the unique characteristics of each region.[3]
Palestine offers a particular conundrum in the quest for nationhood in the Levant. Since its population was comprised largely of Arabs who transcended the artificial boundaries imposed by the Anglo-French, Sykes-Picot arrangements for the Middle East in 1916 across Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, its path towards statehood was always going to be complicated, even more so by the Israel/Palestine conflict.[4]
Palestine has long been a meeting point of civilisations, religions, and empires – from the Byzantines and Romans to the Ottomans and the British Mandate. But its history is deeply interwoven with the Jewish people who according to biblical accounts settled in ancient Canaan. They established the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, contributing significantly to the region’s cultural and religious landscapes, such as the construction of the First Temple of Jerusalem. These kingdoms faced invasions and exile, but their legacies are integral to modern Judaism. The land underwent various phases of foreign rule, eventually becoming part of the Roman Empire "Syria Palestina" to distance from its Jewish roots.[5]
The idea of a unitary Palestinian state did not emerge evenly and naturally from its history. During the Ottoman Empire, for example, what is now called Palestine was administratively fragmented into different districts, integrated into a larger, relatively decentralised empire. Identity was often tied to locality – village, clan, or religious community – rather than a wider sense of national belonging. Therefore, any initial inertia towards statehood must be seen in the context of this historical backdrop marked by administrative fragmentation and a conglomeration of localised identities.[6]
The establishment of the British Mandate in the aftermath of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and their German allies in World War I introduced new terminologies and geographical units. [7] Territories were redefined, borders were drawn, and identities were often externally imposed. The new geographical realities forced the local populations to navigate a spectrum of loyalties and identities which hitherto had been largely shaped by more immediate social and religious fabrics. While the Sykes-Picot Agreement provided a pathway to statehood for the new entities they brought into being be it the Hashemite dynasty forming new thrones in Jordan and Iraq or the unique confessional system institutionalised in Lebanon, Palestine’s Arab population found themselves in a less straightforward and more anomalous situation.[8]
For nationalism, as a concept and aspiration, was imported into Palestine as a response to external challenges, namely the British Mandate and the immigration of Jews making Aliyah to the homeland aspired to by the Zionist movement set up in the 19th century and then promised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The resistance was not for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state per se but against the external forces that were destabilising the existing socio-political equilibrium.[9]
Contrary to the assertions of the Palestinian cause’s detractors, Palestinian national identity was not the artificial creation they claim of the USSR inspired formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1964. There is clear evidence of attempts at the formation of a Palestinian national consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century. In his book Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), Rashid Khalidi describes the Arab population as having “overlapping identities” incorporating loyalties to villages, regions, a projected nation of Palestine, an alternative of inclusion in a Greater Syria, an Arab national project as well as to Islam.[10]
He documents active opposition by the Arab press to Zionism in the 1880s. He described the identity as organically developed due to the challenges of peasants forced from their homes due to Zionist immigrant pressure, but that Palestinian nationalism was far more complex than merely an anti-Zionist reaction.[11]
Unlike the unitary purpose and organisation of the Zionist movement, Palestinian leadership in the Mandate years was characterised by divisions along clan lines. A pivotal Palestinian religious and political figure in this era was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini who forged up to and during World War II an alliance with Nazi Germany, motivated by mutual antisemitic convictions. This alliance involved active collaboration such as propogandist radio broadcasts throughout the Arab world and even meetings between the Mufti and Hitler. [12] Not for the first time in their modern history, the Palestinian people were badly served by decisions taken by their leadership. Husseini’s embrace of Nazi ideologies exacerbated the already existing animosity towards Jews which fed into the cycles of communal violence which had their denouement in the three-cornered civil war between Zionist and Arab militants and the British Mandate authorities prior to the latter’s withdrawal in 1947. It also provided a potent generational propaganda weapon for Israel.
The Arab Israeli war of 1948 and the resultant trauma of the Nakba (the flight or expulsion of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs) is the transformative moment in the development of Palestinian identity and consciousness. It has to be borne in mind that the primary objective of the Arab states that attacked Israel in 1948 was not the establishment of an independent Palestinian state but the eradication of the Jewish state. In the two decades after the formation of the State of Israel and the Nakba, Palestinian identity developed as a reaction to the situation Palestinian Arabs found themselves in; in the crossfire of competing nationalisms and regional entities and their statelessness and refugee status created by the failure of the Arab states to defeat Israel. Palestinian nationalism in this era was essentially reactive and did not contain a coherent vision for what it was for, such as a concrete programme for statehood and government.[13]
All this changed in the 1960s with the emergence of Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Now the Palestinian cause was to be transformed from a reactive to a proactive project. Under Arafat, the PLO adopted a distinct Palestinian flag and endeavoured to standardise and disseminate a unique Palestinian lexicon and separate national consciousness. In his understanding of the power of symbolism and narrative, Yasser Arafat can be regarded as the founder of modern Palestine even if its road to statehood has, sadly, been largely one of thwarted achievement. Arafat’s imprimatur as de facto leader of the Palestinian nation was the recognition by the Arab League of the PLO in 1974 as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. Palestinian identity thus became divorced from the pan-Arab negativity of the Khartoum Resolution “Three Nos” of 1967 – no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiation with Israel. [14]
It was in the 1960s also that support for Palestine became the totemic rallying issue for much of the left that is arguably even more potent today as the humanitarian catastrophe of Gaza plays out; a catastrophe which many see as genocide. There has long been agreement among historians that it was the Six Day War of 1967 that was the catalyst for the shift from support for Israel from, admittedly, the Old Labourist Left, a support grounded in the global revulsion at the Holocaust and solidarity with the socialist ideology of the early Zionists, to support to Palestine from the New Left movements (as well as the Marxist- Leninist Left) as a front line cause in a broader Third World struggle against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and US hegemony. The latter element was pivotal for many nascent pro-Palestinians, due to its position in the oil-rich Middle East.[15]
Having adopted a view of themselves as ‘cosmopolitan revolutionaries’ prior to 1967, the PLO launched a global offensive that was partly supported by the People’s Republic of China, and which aided its integration into the Cuba-led “Tricontinental movement”. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Palestinians consciously and successfully connected with the global revolutionary and worldwide national liberation movements which allowed them to tap into radical networks across the Third World Social relationships forged in this era created a legacy of pro-Palestinian activity in the NGO sectors in nations such [16] as Denmark and Norway and leftist political parties in Western Europe.[17]
Said’s Use of the Term
Arguably Palestine’s foremost public intellectual, Edward Said defined the term “Palestinianism” as a “political movement that is being reborn out a reassertion of Palestinian multiracial and multilingual history.” According to Adam Shatz, US editor of the London Review of Books, Said endeavoured to elaborate a “counter-myth” to that which underwrote Zionism and one written in counterpoint to the “dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other” characteristic of the Zionist narrative.[18]
As construed by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, “Palestinianism” strove to overcome both Zionism and Arab tyrannies by the three principles of acknowledgement , accountability and acceptance: namely global recognition of the Nakba which was more important than achieving Palestinian statehood; in obeisance to universal principles, Israel should accept accountability for ethnic cleansing as a prelude for a future return of refugees and, thirdly, an acceptance of the historic reality of Jewish suffering, a precondition for integrating Israelis into the larger Arab world within which their state was founded.[19]
Jason Franks in 2006 argued that Palestinianism stood in diametric opposition to Zionism and both it and Zionism were twin ideological codes both accounting for the terroristic, nationalist, and religious elements driving the Israel/Palestine conflict. He further argued that the roots of Palestinianism lie in the Young Turks revolt in 1908 in that it was crucial to the emergence of a Palestinian nationalist sentiment in that period because the revolution in Turkey freed up the press from Ottoman censorship and enabled the local assertion of a distinct Arab identity to emerge. Thereafter, it developed not only as a reaction against Zionism and British imperialism but also against the wider Arab world.[20]
Anti-Palestinianism: A Conspiracy Theory?
A counter discourse has emerged, especially since the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the resumption of perpetual conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, to the articulation of Palestinian national identity. Heavily conspiratorial in nature and drawing on global articulation of Islamophobia/anti Muslim sentiment as much as support for Israel, it essentially posits Palestinianism as a threat to Western civilisation.
Writing in the context of the Al-Aqsa Intifada Bat Ye’or in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis[21] which advanced a conspiracy theory surrounding the emergence of Palestinianism, which she derided as “Palestinolatry” positing that it was both a new vehicle for traditional European anti-Semitism, (and "a return of the Euro-Arab Nazism of the 1930-1940s.") In her view, it emerged with the works of the Anglican bishop Kenneth Cragg[22] and the Palestinian Anglican priest Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre.
Neither of these writers, however, had ever used the term at the time of her writing, but Bat Ye'or deployed it to characterize what she saw as ecclesiastical attempts to play on European consciences by depicting Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation.[23]. The impact of this "Palestinianism" can be discerned, she claimed further, in the positions of major politicians in Europe, ranging Jacques Chirac, Javier Sola, Romani Prodi, Dominique de Villepin and Mary Robinson who came to consider the Palestinian problem a central issue for world peace[24]. For her, Christian evocations of the plight of Palestinians betrayed an underlying tradition of Christian demonization of Jews, and had assumed the status of a "modern Eurabian cult".[25]
The term was subsequently picked up as a negative description for the Palestinian cause, by British journalist Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan in which she claimed that the Muslim Association of Britain, in her opinion the British franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood, had become the “spearhead” of “radical Palestinianism” in Great Britain.[26] Among the many more controversial things she has gone onto state about Palestinianism is that it “is opening up a posthumous Nazi front against Jews”[27] A voluntary retirement of All Nazi analogies and comparisons by All actors in the Israel/Palestine conflict would, if nothing else, lower the temperature of discussions on it.
In 2010 Palestinianism was described by Israeli journalist Moshe Dann as an "ideology", that viewed Israel as a settler-colonial state, and one which had two immediate Palestinian statehood in the Palestinian territories defined by the 1949 Armistice lines, and the implementation of the right of return of Palestinian refugees. According to Dann, who repeated his claims in 2021, the long-term goal of the "elimination of Israel" was explicitly called for in both in both the Palestinian National Covenant, (nullified in 1996 after the Oslo Accords), and the Hamas Covenant (a provision officially cancelled in 2017, but still endorsed by Hamas).[28]
This "ideology" had been, he asserted, legitimized by Israel itself by the 1993 Oslo Accords. Dann claimed that Palestinian identity is a fiction contrived to oppose Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that Israel was entitled to the Palestinian West Bank as it was full of Jewish archaeological sites, with no evidence for any Palestinian historical heritage there or anywhere else in Palestine. [29]
In conclusion, the emergence of a modern Palestinian identity not out of a long-term pursuit of statehood but a complex and contingent response to a series of external circumstances. These included shifting geographical and tribal boundaries occasioned by the transfer of power from the dominion of the Ottoman Empire to that of the British League of Nations mandate, the independence of neighbouring Arab states and the influx of Jewish immigrants with national aspirations over a stateless land. While Palestinian Arab national consciousness most certainly developed as early as the 1880s, the concepts of the nation state and distinct identity were thrust upon the Palestinians as a result of the collision of highly consequential regional events; most notably the 1948 War and Nakba. Consequently, there has been degrees of ambiguity about the ultimate goals of the Palestinian movement by its leaders and the difficulty of fitting the Palestinian journey towards nationhood (and eventually statehood) into the explanatory models used to describe other emancipatory movements. Therefore, both supporters and opponents of the Palestinian cause have tried to put flesh on the rather clunky word and concept of “Palestinianism” which in its almost andromorphic way. has had the effect of adding to the toxicity and divisiveness of the Israel/Palestine debate.
References
[1] Jordan Schachtel, The Roots of Palestinianism. The Dossier 24 October 2023.
[2]Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Wikipedia
[11] Ibid
[12] Schachtel, op cit
[13] Ibid
[14] Ibid.
[15] Sune Haugbelle and Pelle Valentin, Olsen Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause Middle East. Critique Volume 32 2023 Issue 1 pp.129-148
[16] Edward Said, (2007) The Palestinian Experience (1968-1989) in Robin Andrew and Bayoumi Moustafa (eds). The Selected Works of Edward Said 1966-2006. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, pp.14-37
[17] Ibid
[18] Adam Shatz (2021) Palestinianism. London Review of Books Volume 43, No.9
[19] Ilan Pappe (June 2010) Diaspora as Catastrophe. Diaspora as a Mission and the Post-Colonial Philosophy of Edward Said Policy Futures in Education 6 (3)
[20] Jason Franks (2006) Rethinking the Roots of Terrorism. Springer.
[21] Bat Ye’or (2005) Eurabia. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
[22] Kenneth Cragg (1991) The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East Westminster. John Knox Press.
[23] Ye’or pp. 176-188
[24] Ibid p,185
[25] Ibid, p.177
[26] Melanie Phillips (2008) Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within. Gibson Square p.120
[27] 17 July 2021. Jewish News Syndicate
[28] Moshe Dann Who are the Palestinians? Ynetnews, Ynet; The Immoral Goals of Palestinianism. Jerusalem Post 7 August 2021
[29] Ibid
[1] Jordan Schachtel, The Roots of Palestinianism. The Dossier 24 October 2023.
[2]Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Wikipedia
[11] Ibid
[12] Schachtel, op cit
[13] Ibid
[14] Ibid.
[15] Sune Haugbelle and Pelle Valentin, Olsen Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause Middle East. Critique Volume 32 2023 Issue 1 pp.129-148
[16] Edward Said, (2007) The Palestinian Experience (1968-1989) in Robin Andrew and Bayoumi Moustafa (eds). The Selected Works of Edward Said 1966-2006. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, pp.14-37
[17] Ibid
[18] Adam Shatz (2021) Palestinianism. London Review of Books Volume 43, No.9
[19] Ilan Pappe (June 2010) Diaspora as Catastrophe. Diaspora as a Mission and the Post-Colonial Philosophy of Edward Said Policy Futures in Education 6 (3)
[20] Jason Franks (2006) Rethinking the Roots of Terrorism. Springer.
[21] Bat Ye’or (2005) Eurabia. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
[22] Kenneth Cragg (1991) The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East Westminster. John Knox Press.
[23] Ye’or pp. 176-188
[24] Ibid p,185
[25] Ibid, p.177
[26] Melanie Phillips (2008) Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within. Gibson Square p.120
[27] 17 July 2021. Jewish News Syndicate
[28] Moshe Dann Who are the Palestinians? Ynetnews, Ynet; The Immoral Goals of Palestinianism. Jerusalem Post 7 August 2021
[29] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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