Middle East Policy, Volume VI, Number 3, February 1999

Book Review

Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, by Rashid Khalidi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 325 pages, xvi + 209, notes to 265, bibliography to 285, index to 309. $29.50, hardcover; $16.50, paperback.

Geoffrey D. Schad
Instructor in Middle Eastern history, University of Pennsylvania

Discussing the historical evolution of Palestinian nationalism is a project fraught with perils both political and analytical. The highly charged atmosphere of the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes the question to be considered through the prisms of mutually exclusive political and ideological narratives, not only between the two sides but also within each community. Analytically, it is impossible to fix a specific date for the inception of Palestinian nationalism as we now know it, as it developed over time simultaneously with other ideologies of identity, including Arab nationalism, the nationalisms of the individual Arab states, and various versions of political Islam.

Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago grapples with these perils in Palestinian Identity, a valuable contribution to the literature on this subject. Khalidi has previously written and edited several important works on the early development of Arab nationalism as well as a treatment of the Palestine Liberation Organization's decision making during the 1982 war in Lebanon. Moreover, he is a scion of one of Jerusalem's most prominent families and has acted as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference. He is thus well positioned to treat the issue of Palestinian identity's development over the long term, especially the role of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian intellectual elite in the nineteenth century and the major trends in the Palestinian national movement in recent decades.

Palestinian Identity is devoted in large part to the various cultural, social, intellectual and political factors that fed the crystallization of a distinct Palestinian identity over the course of the nineteenth century. Of eight chapters, the first two concern introductory issues, including the contrasting narratives of Palestinian identity, four examine the nineteenth century, and only the last two deal with the twentieth. Of these two, the first (chapter 7) considers 1917-1923 -- that is, from the onset of the British occupation of Palestine in World War I to the formal grant of the League of Nations Mandate -- as the "critical years" in the formation of Palestinian identity. Only the last chapter discusses the period that has been the focus of so much of the literature on Palestinian nationalism, the years since the establishment of Israel and especially since the "rebirth" of Palestinian nationalism in the 1960s with the founding of the PLO. This emphasis is hardly accidental. It is Khalidi's central thesis that Palestinian identity, far from being a product of the 1947-49 nakba was in fact constructed over a long period of time, most importantly during the nineteenth century.

While this claim should hardly be surprising to serious students of the evolution of Arab identities, it is one that needs to be reiterated because of the persistent denial of the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or even the existence of the Palestinians as a distinct people. On the one hand, this denial is absolute, as in Golda Meir's notorious remark that the Palestinians did not exist, or Joan Peter's more recent tendentious (and largely fraudulent) book claiming that the Palestinian Arabs were predominantly if not exclusively recent immigrants from neighboring regions. Indeed, it is a sad comment on the state of at least popular discussions of the Arab-Israeli conflict that Khalidi, writing after the official Israeli acknowledgement of Palestinian national aspirations and recognition of the PLO as their representative in the 1993 Oslo accords, is forced to refute the spurious claims of From Time Immemorial.

A more subtle denial of the validity of Palestinian national identity is the claim that it arose solely as a response to the post-1882 Zionist settlement of the coastal regions of the country. Khalidi demonstrates that there was a widespread consciousness of Palestine as a distinct region at least as far back as the mid-eighteenth century and that this consciousness heightened over time, notwithstanding the fact that the territory was subdivided among a variety of Ottoman administrative districts. Here a central role was played by the notion of Jerusalem as a city holy to not only Judaism, but also Christianity and Islam, and the function that the city served as an administrative and economic hub in the life of the peoples inhabiting what came to be Palestine during the Mandate.

With his stress on the nineteenth century and his constructivist approach (i.e., that identities are not primordial but rather the results of specific historical experiences), Khalidi contends with not only exclusivist (and largely abandoned) Zionist denials of Palestinian existence but also varying Palestinian, Arab and Islamist narratives. For some Palestinian nationalists, the "Palestinian nation" has existed since the time of the Canaanites; for extreme Arab nationalists, Palestine is only a small part of the broad Arab homeland; and for the Islamists, the move toward Arab and local identities was a denial of the allegedly pure Islamic character of the Ottoman Empire. Khalidi dismisses these polemics in detail, while at the same time recognizing that an individual Palestinian, and perhaps most Palestinians, could simultaneously hold Palestinian, Arab, Ottoman and Muslim (or Christian) identities, not to mention local (Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus) identities without any sense of contradiction. The institution of the Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration's promise to the Zionist movement, and the results of 1947-48, which broke the Palestinian leadership and dispersed a large portion of the Palestinian people, obviously reinforced a more specifically "Palestinian" element in Palestinian identities. These others persist, however, as evidenced by the resurgence of an Islamist identity among the partisans of Hamas, or the local identities to lost villages and towns held by the refugees of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

To be sure, Khalidi's own narrative privileges to a certain extent the Palestinian elite, especially that of Jerusalem, and within that, especially the Khalidi family. In part this is an artifact of the sources available to him, in particular the rich resources of the Khalidi family library in Jerusalem. But the author does not neglect popular manifestations of Palestinian identity, as shown in his chapter (chapter 5) on how the (mostly illiterate) Palestinian peasants resisted their dispossession at the hands of the new Zionist immigrants. Likewise, while most of the population remained illiterate until recently, the popular press played a major role in the debate over Zionism's implications for the future of Palestine, a subject ably treated in Khalidi's chapter 6.

The ultimate future territorial disposition of what was once known as Palestine remains to be determined; much depends on the result of the May 1999 Israeli elections, the American commitment to implementing the Oslo, Hebron and Wye accords, and the maturing of a new generation of Palestinian leaders. But the reality of the existence of a strong, territorially rooted Palestinian nationalism can no longer be denied. Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity provides a substantial understanding of the roots of this nationalism and of why its claims must be considered in any solution of this conflict.