Palestinian nationalism could have existed without Israel
Even many critics of Israel can't fully grasp that Palestinians are not just a foil in someone else's story.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton created a lot of controversy last week while campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris. “Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable. Well, I got news for them. They [Israelis] were there first, before their [Muslims’] faith existed,” he said. Unprompted, Clinton also referred to the West Bank by the Israeli nationalist term “Judea and Samaria.” Clinton follows in a tradition of those who believe that Palestinian nationalism is a cheap imitation of Zionism at best, or an attempt to spite Jews and trick them out of their ancestral homeland at worst.
Thinkers who are far more critical of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians also seem to have been stuck in a framework where Palestinian nationalism only exists as a reaction to Zionism, and Palestine would not have existed if not for Israel. I choose the following examples not because I think these writers are fanatics like Clinton, but because I think they’re not; if even thoughtful, open-minded liberals have this hangup around Palestinian identity, then it must be deeply rooted in English-speaking culture.
The American novelist Michael Chabon, for example, wrote an alternative history called The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in 2007 about a world in which the State of Israel was strangled in the cradle and the Jewish homeland was instead created in Sitka, Alaska. While the novel is a delightful and thought-provoking read about the Jewish condition, its references to the Middle East struck me as a shallow stereotype. (To be fair, Chabon’s views have evolved, and his wife Ayelet Waldman recently wrote a fascinating critique of liberal Zionism based on her own family’s history with it.) This is how Chabon imagined Palestine without Zionism when he wrote his novel:
The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel [‘the Land of Israel’] and worried it down to bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles. Observant Jews around the world have not abandoned their hope to dwell one day in the land of Zion. But Jews have been tossed out of the joint three times now—in 586 BCE, in 70 CE and with savage finality in 1948.
More recently, in 2019, the journalist Ben Judah (now an adviser to the British government) used the biography of Israeli founding father David Ben Gurion and his American friend Sam Fox to reflect on the different paths that Eastern European Jews took at the dawn of the 20th century, the ways in which both history at large and specific people’s lives are so contingent. He imagines different turning points at which Zionism could have failed, whether it’s because European Jews aren’t forced to leave Europe or because the nascent State of Israel loses foreign support. As for the fate of Jews in the Holy Land itself:
The population of this unworldly and absurd experiment, their kibbutzim abandoned, crammed behind American GIs and barbed-wire into Camp Tel Aviv, would have had to emigrate or be evacuated, as Palestine was partitioned—not between Israel and the Hashemites, but between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.
But why would Palestine, left to its own devices, have to be partitioned at all? If the creation of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel depends so much on the twists and turns of history, why are Palestinians doomed to lose their country no matter what? Are Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — countries whose borders are no less a product of European colonialism — more “real” than Palestine? Why wouldn’t the British Mandate of Palestine become the Palestinian Republic, with its own national identity and sovereign institutions?
A quick look at every other nation in the area suggests that the experience of British colonialism, and the borders drawn by the British Mandate, would have made Palestine a “real” country. The French Mandate of Syria and the Lebanon became the Syrian Republic and the Lebanese Republic. The British Mandate of Iraq became the Kingdom of Iraq. The same goes for Egypt and Jordan, two nations that Israeli hardliners often insist are more “real” than Palestine. The colonial administrative units formed the basis of a new national identity everywhere in the Arab world.
Going deeper than that, Professor Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity makes the cast that Palestinian nationalism “has been shaped by much more than the century-old contest with Zionism,” and started to form before Europeans partitioned the region. Ottoman-era elites in Jerusalem, he argues, saw their country (which they did call Palestine) as distinct within both the Ottoman Empire and the Arab world. After all, the Holy Land is The Holy Land. Not only its Jews but also its Christians and Muslims understood that their prophets were born here and not in some other land. Zionists were just one of the many foreign groups who had an intense interest in the land, and helped shape it at the dawn of modernity.
There’s an obvious and understandable discomfort, visible in Chabon and Ben Judah’s fantasies, with the idea that Jews could lose a war of independence and the other people living there would go on living happy lives in a normal country. Indeed, by mid-1948, the civil war in Palestine had gotten to a point where there probably was no happy ending in sight. But a U.S. intervention would not necessarily be like the evacuation of “Camp Tel Aviv” that Judah pictured. In 1958, the U.S. Marines landed in Beirut to impose an uneasy settlement on clashing Lebanese political factions. It took another two decades for civil war to erupt, by which time Lebanon was an established nation-state; the fight since then has been over what kind of nation-state it would be.
And that is the absolute worst-case scenario. Had the Zionist movement petered out early, had Jewish migration to Palestine been well-integrated like the Armenian influx, then there is no reason to assume that different sects would automatically come to blows over Palestine after independence. Even Lebanon’s civil war, which was finally tipped over the edge by a Palestinian refugee influx, is impossible to separate from circumstances under which Israel was created. Without the sudden and violent reshuffling of the Levant’s ethnic landscape in 1948, why wouldn’t Palestine and Lebanon look more like Egypt and Jordan, dealing with the “normal” issues of middle-income postcolonial nations?
In that world, political conflict between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Palestinians might look a lot like modern, peacetime Lebanese identity politics. Jewish Palestinians might even argue that they’re more Palestinian than their Christian and Muslim neighbors. In Lebanon, (predominantly Muslim) Arabists identify with Lebanon’s Arab heritage, opposed by (predominantly Christian) Phoenicianists who use the ancient city-states of Phoenicia to identify Lebanon as the cradle of Western civilization and Arabness as a foreign imposition.
There’s plenty of raw historical material to create different Palestinian nationalisms. Partisans of different sects would play up Palestinian’s ancient Hebrew or Greco-Roman or Arabic heritage. Genetic studies would be trotted out to prove that all the different sects in Palestine descend from the same ancient Canaanite stock. (“Phoenicia” and “Canaan” are two different names for the same ancient ethnicity.) It’s not hard to imagine a local version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb arguing that “Palestinian Arabic” is really a distinct, Hebrew-influenced language in its own right.
(By the way, you really should read Taleb’s wide-ranging essay on the Levant, which covers why the false East-West distinction is false, how “Indo-European vs. Semitic is merely linguistic, not racial,” and what “being on the radar of the United States State Department” does to a society.)
Look at some of the early Zionist messaging, from when “Palestine” was the matter-of-fact name of the place, and let your imagination run wild. Zionists in the (then Ottoman, now Greek) city of Thessaloniki used to sing “viva viva Palestina.” The Jerusalem Post was called The Palestine Post. The famous “Visit Palestine” poster used the beauty of the Aqsa Mosque to attract Jewish immigrants. (Modern-day Israeli nationalists, including Israeli government itself, tend to wish away the Aqsa Mosque instead.) The strange twist of history is not that Palestinian nationalism exists, but that Jews weren’t a part of it.
Of course, we don’t live in the world of counterfactuals. Zionism happened. Jewish Israelis, who have state power behind them, don’t identify as Palestinian. Almost everyone else living under Israeli rule does. Palestinian nationalism can only exist today in response to that reality. Any political solution will have to reckon with the existence of two, mutually opposed nations. So what’s the point of theorizing about what could have been?
The problem is that American political culture cannot see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in normal terms, a postcolonial ethnic war no more or less vicious than all the others. Palestinian nationalism only exists to American as the last modern nationalism opposed to Jews, the latest iteration of the antisemitic mind virus, the final boss villain in the story of Judeo-Christian reconciliation, the obstacle to overcoming the Holocaust. By clinging onto their lost homeland, like every other exiled nation in history, Palestinians seem to be demonstrating sinister intent.
Palestinians often complain that American culture dehumanizes them. That’s not just a moral statement. The view of Palestinians as a fake nation removes them from the world of normal human motivations and places them in a paranoid, conspiratorial realm. Their predictable, human reactions to events makes them seem even more inhuman. Nothing they want is comprehensible except in terms of some irrational, esoteric hatred. Although Clinton claimed that “you can’t kill your way out of this,” it’s hard to see what else there is to do in his worldview. To believe that Palestinian nationalism exists only out of spite is an abdication of rationality, a surrender to the world of “blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles.”