Palestinian Identity

The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

Rashid Khalidi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231521741
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This foundational text now features a new introduction by Rashid Khalidi reflecting on the significance of his work over the past decade and its relationship to the struggle for Palestinian nationhood. Khalidi also casts an eye to the future, noting the strength of Palestinian identity and social solidarity yet wondering whether current trends will lead to Palestinian statehood and independence.

CHAPTER 1

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Introduction

I

The quintessential Palestinian experience, which illustrates some of the most basic issues raised by Palestinian identity, takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified. What happens to Palestinians at these crossing points brings home to them how much they share in common as a people. For it is at these borders and barriers that the six million Palestinians are singled out for “special treatment,” and are forcefully reminded of their identity: of who they are, and of why they are different from others.

Such borders and barriers are rarely more than a source of passing inconvenience for most of those citizens of the world who are fortunate enough to possess an American, European, or other first world passport, along with a sense of belonging so secure that it renders them blandly oblivious to the problems identity can pose for others. But for Palestinians, arrival at such barriers generates shared sources of profound anxiety. This is true whether this is a formal frontier between states, or a military checkpoint like those erected by Israel a few years ago between Arab East Jerusalem and its suburbs and immediate hinterland in the West Bank,¹ or those currently maintained by Israeli and Palestinian security forces through the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Borders are a problem for Palestinians since their identity—which is constantly reinforced in myriad positive and negative ways—not only is subject to question by the powers that be; but also is in many contexts suspect almost by definition. As a result, at each of these barriers which most others take for granted, every Palestinian is exposed to the possibility of harassment, exclusion, and sometimes worse, simply because of his or her identity.² The dread with which Palestinians regard such boundaries, and the potent—albeit negative—reinforcement of their identity this fear engenders, can be understood only in light of the many anecdotal examples of incidents at crossing points.

Countless stories bear out the reasons for this dread, such as that of the Palestinian who was shuttled back and forth on airliners between an Arab Gulf state and Lebanon for three weeks in 1991 because his identity documents were not satisfactory to the authorities at either end of his trajectory. In September 1991, Gaza Strip Palestinians carrying Egyptian travel papers who were expelled from Kuwait spent twelve days sleeping in Cairo Airport because they did not have the proper documents to enter Egypt or the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, to go back to Kuwait, or to go anywhere else. Similarly, in July 1993, numerous Palestinians expelled by Libya were stranded for weeks on the Libyan-Egyptian border. Entire refugee camps sprang up in the same no-man’s-land the following year, after the Libyan authorities expelled thousands more Palestinians, whose travel papers were not acceptable to any country. In August 1995, Palestinians with valid refugee travel documents issued by Lebanon were suddenly denied re-entry into that country because they did not have a visa—a requirement that had been imposed during their absence. Among them were members of the Palestinian delegation returning from the international women’s conference in Beijing, who were shunted from airport to airport for ten days before being readmitted into Lebanon—where most of them had been born. Such stories of exclusion and denial, which are common knowledge to Palestinians, and have long been a feature of their literature,³ are but the grotesque tip of an iceberg. Such problems touch every Palestinian in some way, although there are important gradations.

Most unfortunate of all Palestinians are the carriers of travel documents—which are not technically passports—issued by Egypt or Israel for residents of the Gaza Strip (those issued by Israel list “undefined” under the category of “Nationality”), or by Lebanon for Palestinian refugees residing there. Because their travel documents list them as stateless Palestinians (and there are more than one million people among this category in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon), they are more subject than any of their compatriots to anxiety, humiliation, and frustration at barriers or border crossings. It remains to be seen what protection from such concerns will be provided by the Palestinian passports the Palestinian Authority began to issue in Gaza and the West Bank in 1995, but whose validity is still not recognized by some states. They will not in any case help Palestinians in Lebanon, who are not entitled to carry them.

Beyond all this, inhabitants of the Gaza Strip must have at least three different identity documents to get out of the Strip and into Israel, or anywhere else, since all access to and from the Gaza Strip is via Israel. Most of them are originally from regions of Palestine incorporated into Israel during the 1948 war, at which time the indigenous population was driven into the Gaza Strip, in an early example of what is now fashionably called “ethnic cleansing.” Only a lucky few, currently under 5 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population of 800,000, possess all three of these identity documents. For the rest of this population, even today, after the signing of the Palestinian-Israeli accords of September 1993 and September 1995, the 323 sq. km. of the Strip are their prison, surrounded on all sides by closely guarded barbed wire fences with only one exit, which most of them are not allowed to use, and beyond which lie their former lands, now part of Israel.

In an intermediate category are Palestinians residing in Jordan and Syria; the former carry Jordanian passports, and the latter Syrian passports marked as Palestinian travel documents. Travelers from among these two groups are often singled out for adverse treatment, since it is well known to international security authorities that a large proportion of Jordanian passport holders are Palestinians, while the Syrian travel document clearly identifies them as such. Since 1988, West Bank residents have carried Jordanian passports which, unlike those held by other Jordanians, are valid only for two years.⁴ West Bankers, who used to be able to obtain Israeli travel documents before the 1995 Palestinian-Israeli accords, are no longer eligible for these, but can now obtain only the new passports issued by the Palestinian Authority.

Even those few Palestinians who by the chance of birth, marriage, or emigration have managed to acquire United States, European, or other first world passports, find that barriers and borders remind them inexorably of who they are. This is especially true if they return to their homeland, which they have to do via points of entry controlled exclusively by Israel; or if they travel to virtually any Arab country. The border guard’s ominous words “Step out of line and follow me” are depressingly familiar to Palestinians waiting their turn at these crossing points. They all know well that notwithstanding their first world passports, their troubles—and the special interrogations they are subjected to just because they are Palestinians—have only just begun.

This condition of suspense in which Palestinians find themselves at borders means that as far as the world, or at least a large part of it, is concerned, the Palestinian’s identity remains in question. This identity is therefore a source of anxiety to governments and their security authorities, which like things to be unambiguous and explicitly designated.⁵ This is particularly true of the governments of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, under whose jurisdiction the majority of Palestinians have lived since 1948.

The anxiety of these governments is displayed notably at the frontiers Palestinians are obliged to cross most often. Thus at the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the West Bank, the main avenue of entry and egress for the Palestinians of the West Bank, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who travel back and forth annually have for three decades been routinely subject to a border crossing ordeal imposed by Israel. This has not improved much since the Palestinian-Israeli self-rule accords. In summertime, when most families travel, these formalities can more than triple the length of the journey from Amman to Jerusalem, which took under three hours before 1967. In one of the hottest places on the face of the earth, located 1,200 feet below sea level in the Jordan River Valley, Palestinian travelers have to stand in the blazing sun, waiting to be subjected to a minute and humiliating search process during which electrical devices, cosmetics, and any tubes or containers are confiscated (foreigners are not subject to this ordeal, although the process can be lengthy for them as well).

With entry from the Gaza Strip into Israel being restricted only to the lucky few possessing the right number and type of Israeli-issued identity cards already mentioned, it remains only to note that entry into Egypt from Gaza has always been exceedingly difficult for Palestinians since the days when Egypt ruled the area, from 1948 to 1967. Finally, for Palestinians, whichever passport they carry, passage via Ben Gurion airport—the main air gateway into the country—generally involves a lengthy interrogation and search procedure by plainclothes security officers upon arrival, and a similar but often lengthier process on departure. These “arrival ceremonies” take place in a special room set aside exclusively for Palestinians.

Such experiences are so universal that a Palestinian wit has said that whenever an independent, sovereign Palestinian state with full control over its own borders is finally created, its border guards will be specially trained to show precisely the same exquisite courtesy as has so long been bestowed on Palestinians to citizens of all those countries which had singled them out for “special treatment.” These border guards will be under strict orders to repeat to every citizen of these countries the same words that Palestinians have heard so often since 1948: “Step out of line and follow me.”

At a time when internal and international barriers to the free movement of people and ideas are crumbling rapidly in many places, those barriers remain in place for Palestinians, and some have been newly erected, like those around Jerusalem. The fact that all Palestinians are subject to these special indignities, and thus are all subject to an almost unique postmodern condition of shared anxiety at the frontier, the checkpoint and the crossing point proves that they are a people, if nothing else does.

Ironically, it is Israel, the prime agitator for and beneficiary of the free movement of Soviet Jews, which has been responsible for many of these suffocating restrictions on the movement of Palestinians. There is clearly a paradox here. Its core is that Israelis, many of them descended from victims of persecution, pogroms, and concentration camps, have themselves been mistreating another people. We thus find that the sins done to the fathers have morally desensitized the sons to their sins toward others, and have even sometimes been used to justify these sins. (Many Lebanese would bitterly say the same thing about the behavior of the PLO in Lebanon between the late 1960s and 1982.)

This intertwined history, this counterpoint between two extraordinary narratives, and the interplay between two senses of identity which have certain things in common with each other, but are completely different in so many other ways, is one of the themes that stands out in any study of the emergence of Palestinian national identity. The fact that these two—and other—narratives are so intertwined, and often give completely different significance to the same places, events, and people in the same land, makes it harder to disentangle the Palestinian narrative, or to convey it to Western readers who are generally conversant only with the Jewish-Israeli one, or the Christian biblical one. The purpose of this book is to overcome these impediments, in order to explain how a strong sense of Palestinian national identity developed in spite of, and in some cases because of, the obstacles it faced.

II

This examination of the construction of the national identity of the Palestinian people is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 2 examines different narratives in their history and some of the constituents of Palestinian identity, in particular those relating to Jerusalem. It explores why it is so difficult to perceive the specificity of Palestinian nationalism. This is so partly because of the way in which identity for the Palestinians is and has always been intermingled with a sense of identity on so many other levels, whether Islamic or Christian, Ottoman or Arab, local or universal, or family and tribal. The chapter also explores how the Palestinian narrative intersects with other powerful narratives, religious and national, which focus on Palestine and Jerusalem, in some cases drawing on them and in others clashing with them. One of the main arguments of this book, first laid out in this chapter, is that the fierce conflict between the Palestinian and Zionist narratives which developed at an early stage in the history of both is among the reasons why Palestinian identity is so poorly understood. In addition, several overlapping senses of identity are involved in the process of how Palestinians have come to define themselves as a people, which can lead to others misunderstanding or misintepreting them.

Chapter 3 examines the various constituents of Palestinian identity in the intellectual and cultural realms that theorists and historians of nationalism primarily focus on. Concentrating on Jerusalem before 1914, this chapter examines the elements that shaped the emerging identity of Palestinians in the late Ottoman era, when they had multiple loyalties to their religion, the Ottoman state, the Arabic language, and the emerging identity of Arabism, as well as their country and local and familial foci. Among the institutions involved were the press, schools, religious establishments, the organs of the Ottoman state, clubs, libraries and charitable organizations, and political groups. Other elements shaping identity included extended family linkages, traditional connections to other parts of Palestine, and the impact of foreign missions, diplomats, and visitors.

Chapter 4 moves to the specific, focusing on the lives of two individuals from this era and several of their compatriots who exemplify the shifting identities of Palestinians before World War I. These two men, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi and Ruhi al-Khalidi, uncle and nephew, were scholars, writers, and diplomats who served as representatives of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament in 1876–78 and 1908–13 respectively. Through an examination of their lives and their writings, and those of colleagues and contemporaries of theirs such as Sa‘id al-Husayni, Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri, ‘Arif al-‘Arif, and Musa al-‘Alami, the choices open to their generation in terms of identity become clearer, and it is possible to understand more fully the matrix out of which Palestinian identity emerged in the early twentieth century.

Another aspect of the crucial role Zionism played in shaping Palestinian identity is examined in chapter 5. Rather than looking at ideology, where the encounter between these two emerging identities is so often examined, this chapter focuses on what happened on the land at the very outset of the interaction between the two nascent national movements. Palestinian peasant resistance starting more than a century ago was the first harbinger of a conflict which throughout has focused on control of land, and has been animated on the Palestinian side by a dynamic often propelled from below rather than from above. It was peasants driven off their farmland by Zionist land purchases, mainly from absentee landlords, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who first understood the nature of the process of colonization affecting Palestine. Their struggle for their rights in turn alerted the urban intellectuals who thereafter played a prominent role in the opposition to Zionism, even as they helped to shape Palestinian identity.

The role of the press in the early Arab reaction to Zionism between 1908 and 1914 is covered in chapter 6, which carries further the examination of the interplay between Palestinian identity and Zionism, focusing on how newspapers in Palestine and other parts of the Arab world catalyzed attitudes toward Zionism while at the same time shaping ideas of identity. This chapter also shows how the press in neighboring Arab countries, particularly in Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus, focused on the issue of Zionism, in some cases playing a leading role in the opposition to it. This illuminates concretely the interplay between the Palestinian and the Arab elements, not only in the reaction to Zionism, but also in the constitution of Palestinian identity. Examining the press in this way also helps to correct the oversimplified view that this identity was primarily a response to Zionism.⁶

Chapter 7 deals with the crucial first years of British control of Palestine, from 1917 until 1923, when the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate gave international legal sanction and great-power support to the claims of Zionism, and when the nascent Palestinian polity had to respond to this powerful concatenation of forces. The focus here is on the shift from Arab/Ottoman to Palestinian/Arab identity, which took place at the beginning of the period in response to these watershed events; and on the role of the press, education, and other elements of civil society in mobilizing the emerging Palestinian national consciousness. The chapter also examines the uneven development of this consciousness, and the strong divisive tendencies in Palestinian society—regional, familial, and social—which have lingered on since the 1920s.

In conclusion, chapter 8 eschews a straightforward historical narrative, taking as its focus first the reasons Palestinian identity did not simply disappear during the barren years of dispersion, exile, and control by others from 1948–1967, and the role of the PLO and its constituent groups in developing and shaping this identity in new ways until 1982. It also touches on an event which, like the peasant resistance to Zionism of the pre-World War I period, was animated by...