state on the global map. The educated elite in Palestine joined others in the Arab world in digesting these ideas and formulating an authentic national doctrine, which led them to demand more autonomy within, and eventually independence from, the Ottoman Empire.
In the mid to late nineteenth century the Ottoman intellectual and political elite adopted romantic nationalist ideas that equated Ottomanism with Turkishness. This trend contributed to the alienation of the non-Turkish subjects of Istanbul, most of them Arabs, from the Ottoman Empire. The nationalization process in Turkey itself was accompanied by secularization trends in the second half of the nineteenth century which diminished the importance of Istanbul as a religious authority and focus.
In the Arab world, secularization was also part of the process of nationalization. Not surprisingly, it was mainly minorities, such as the Christians, that embraced warmly the idea of a secular national identity based on a shared territory, language, history, and culture. In Palestine, Christians who engaged with nationalism found eager allies among the Muslim elite, leading to a mushrooming of Muslim-Christian societies all over Palestine towards the end of World War I. In the Arab world, Jews joined these kind of alliances between activists from different religions. The same would have happened in Palestine had not Zionism demanded total loyalty from the veteran Jewish community there.
A thorough and comprehensive study of how Palestinian nationalism arose before the arrival of Zionism can be found in the works of Palestinian historians such as Muhammad Muslih and Rashid Khalidi.5 They show clearly that both elite and non-elite sections of Palestinian society were involved in developing a national movement and sentiment before 1882. Khalidi in particular shows how patriotic feelings, local loyalties, Arabism, religious sentiments, and higher levels of education and literacy were the main constituents of the new nationalism, and how it was only later that resistance to Zionism played an additional crucial role in defining Palestinian nationalism.
Khalidi, among others, demonstrates how modernization, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the greedy European quest for territories in the Middle East contributed to the solidification of Palestinian nationalism before Zionism made its mark in Palestine with the British promise of a Jewish homeland in 1917. One of the clearest manifestations of this new self-definition was the reference in the country to Palestine as geographical and cultural entity, and later as a political one. Despite there not being a Palestinian state, the cultural location of Palestine was very clear. There was a unifying sense of belonging. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the newspaper Filastin reflected the way the people named their country.6 Palestinians spoke their own dialect, had their own customs and rituals, and appeared on the maps of the world as living in a country called Palestine.
During the nineteenth century, Palestine, like its neighboring regions, became more clearly defined as a geopolitical unit in the wake of administrative reforms initiated from Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, the local Palestinian elite began to seek independence within a united Syria, or even a united Arab state (a bit like the United States of America). This pan-Arabist national drive was called in Arabic qawmiyya, and was popular in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world.
Following the famous, or rather infamous, Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed in 1916 between Britain and France, the two colonial powers divided the area into new nation states. As the area was divided, a new sentiment developed: a more local variant of nationalism, named in Arabic wataniyya. As a result, Palestine began to see itself as an independent Arab state. Without the appearance of Zionism on its doorstep, Palestine would probably have gone the same way as Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria and embraced a process of modernization and growth.7 This had, in fact, already started by 1916, as a result of Ottoman polices in the late nineteenth century. In 1872, when the Istanbul government founded the Sanjak (administrative province) of Jerusalem, they created a cohesive geopolitical space in Palestine. For a brief moment, the powers in Istanbul even toyed with the possibility of adding to the Sanjak, encompassing much of Palestine as we know it today, as well as the sub-provinces of Nablus and Acre. Had they done this, the Ottomans would have created a geographical unit, as happened in Egypt, in which a particular nationalism might have arisen even earlier.8
However, even with its administrative division into north (ruled by Beirut) and south (ruled by Jerusalem), this shift raised Palestine as a whole above its previous peripheral status, when it had been divided into small regional sub-provinces. In 1918, with the onset of British rule, the north and the south divisions became one unit. In a similar way and in the same year the British established the basis for modern Iraq when they fused the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into one modern nation state. In Palestine, unlike in Iraq, familial connections and geographical boundaries (the River Litani in the north, the River Jordan in the east, the Mediterranean in the west) worked together to weld the three sub-provinces of South Beirut, Nablus, and Jerusalem into one social and cultural unit. This geopolitical space had its own major dialect and its own customs, folklore, and traditions.9
By 1918, Palestine was therefore more united than in the Ottoman period, but there were to be further changes. While waiting for final international approval of Palestine’s status in 1923, the British government renegotiated the borders of the land, creating a better-defined geographical space for the national movements to struggle over, and a clearer sense of belonging for the people living in it. It was now clear what Palestine was; what was not clear was who it belonged to: the native Palestinians or the new Jewish settlers? The final irony of this administrative regime was that the reshaping of the borders helped the Zionist movement to conceptualize geographically “Eretz Israel,” the Land of Israel where only Jews had the right to the land and its resources.
Thus, Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.
| Chapter 2 | The Jews Were a People Without a Land |
The claim in the previous chapter, that Palestine was a land without people, goes hand in hand with the claim that the Jews were a people without a land.
But were the Jewish settlers a people? Recent scholarship has repeated doubts expressed many years ago about this as well. The common theme of this critical point of view is best summarized in Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People.1 Sand shows that the Christian world, in its own interest and at a given moment in modern history, supported the idea of the Jews as a nation that must one day return to the holy land. In this account, this return would be part of the divine scheme for the end of time, along with the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of the Messiah.
The theological and religious upheavals of the Reformation from the sixteenth century onwards produced a clear association, especially among Protestants, between the notion of the end of the millennium and the conversion of the Jews and their return to Palestine. Thomas Brightman, a sixteenth-century English clergyman, represented these notions when he wrote, “Shall they return to Jerusalem again? There is nothing more certain: the prophets do everywhere confirm it and beat about it.”2 Brightman was not only hoping for a divine promise to be fulfilled; he also, like so many after him, wished the Jews either to convert to Christianity or to leave Europe all together. A hundred years later, Henry Oldenburg, a German theologian and natural philosopher, wrote: “If the occasion present itself amid changes to which human affairs are liable, [the Jews] may even raise their empire anew, and …
