Congratulations to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gilngrich for raising the question: Are the Palestinians an invented people?
If the term Palestinian is rendered meaningless by defining it as Arab and Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Ashkenazi and Sephardi, the Palestinians are an invented people.
If everyone is a Palestinian, no one is a Palestinian.
To be meaningful, the question are the Palestinians an invented people? must define Palestinian as Arab (whether Muslim, Christian or Druze).
On this definition, then yes, the Palestinians are an invented people because, for millennia, no one knew the Arab population of the land of Israel as Palestinian.
Including the Arabs.
Including Arabs whose ancestors lived in what is now called Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.
Take the four-century Ottoman Turk era ending in 1917. It was not just the ruling Turks who did not call the Arab population living on the land of Israel Palestinian. Neither did the Arabs themselves not those actually living there and not the Arabs anywhere else.
When the British Mandate took over what it called the Jewish homeland after WW I, the British, too, did not refer to the Arabs there as Palestinians.
Nor did the Arabs actually living there. They regarded themselves as part of the Arab nation.
In the aftermath of WW I, the Arab nation acquired independence in Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. All of the residents of these newly created states and of what they took to be the future Arab state on the land of Israel regarded themselves as part of the Arab nation.
Keep in mind that these post-WW I Arab states were entirely artificial. They represented no nationalistic tradition. Before WW I, not only were there no Palestinians, there were also no Iraqis, no Saudis and no Jordanians, either.
The Arab states that came into existence did so only by the luck of the military or the diplomatic draw.
Whichever individual Arab leader had conquered the most territory during WW I, or had mounted the most effective diplomatic campaign after WW I, got a state.
Jordan, for example, was strictly a sop to a Hashemite family branch whose relatives had beaten it out of control of what became Saudi Arabia.
The Arab mentality then was not to see Arab peoples as citizens of different states but as one, pan-Arabic nation. Under this concept, there was no Palestinian people any more than there was a Jordanian people.
Then, when the British mandate ended in 1948 with the transformation of the Jewish homeland into the State of Israel, Jordan won, in battle, the West Bank, and Egypt won, in battle, Gaza. Neither Jordan nor Egypt nor Israel referred to the residents of the West Bank and Gaza as Palestinians.
Nor did these residents themselves until 1964, when Yasir Arafat founded the Palestine Liberation Organization.
One of the reasons Arafat turned to terrorism to bring attention to his cause was because the term Palestinian was utterly alien to the wider world, to the Arab world and to Israel.
Yes, the reference to a Palestinian people before 1964 is a reference to an invented people. Even 1964 is a date with only retroactive import. In truth, only with the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel won, in battle, the West Bank and Gaza, did it become convenient for the rest of the Arab nation to refer to Palestinians, and for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza themselves to refer to themselves that way.
Observe: After 1948, the Arab refugees from the land of Israel were purposely confined to refugee camps by the rest of the Arab nation, and now, after the Six Day War of 1967, it became o so handy, o so convenient, to place the onus on Israel. What better way than to claim that Israel was denying another people the same rights of national liberation that it claimed for itself?
Yes, with reference to very many and very long historical eras, the use of the term Palestinian is a reference to an invented people.
However, after 1967, things began to change. The residents of the West Bank and Gaza began to see themselves as a people. Jordan, in 1974, washed its hands of responsibility for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. That is, Jordan refused to be the negotiating address on behalf of these people, saying they were now their own people.
Ironically, these residents were also aided in the transformation of their identity by Israel itself, beginning with Gen. Moshe Dayan.
As Defense Minister of Israel, Dayan was not only a military hero of the 1967 war; he was also responsible for Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza after the war. He said: Let Israel stay out of the lives of these Arabs as much as possible. Let them enjoy municipal autonomy and run their lives as they liked.
While this policy broke down later as these Arabs turned to terrorism, making Dayans laissez faire policy impractical, Dayan played a major role in encouraging these residents to see themselves as a distinct people.
The Palestinian identity grew by virtue of its incessant resort to terrorism, by the gradual shift in international sympathy away from Israel (originally seen as the underdog after the Holocaust), by the first intifada (1987-1991), and by the official beginning of a peace process in 1991 with Israel on one side, and the Palestinians now on the other.
The real question is, of course, whether this long-invented people with current political legitimacy can lay legitimate claim to any part of the land of Israel. Whatever the rights or wrongs in an absolute sense, Israel will have to come to terms with a permanent Palestinian presence, one way or another. For all practical purposes, the residents of the West Bank and Gaza are now a people.
A backward, anachronistic logic chop, however, cannot make this peoples ancestors who fled the area in 1948 and whose own descendants now live all over the world (the so-called Palestinian refugees) a part of the Palestinian people, any more than the Jews who fled Europe after the Holocaust are Europeans any more.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
