The idea of a “Palestinian nation” wasn’t invented in 1948. It didn’t really gain solid identity in the global imagination as such until after the Six-Day War in 1967, which the Arabs (especially Egypt) lost badly to Israel.
This humiliation of Muslim states changed the strategic needs of the Islamic resistance movement and fabricated a Palestinian national identity with a bogus history more or less out of thin air.
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It will have become obvious to most by now that “Palestine” is not a geographical location but a political ideology. But whose ideology? And why?
Yesterday, James Lindsay, American author, mathematician, founder of New Discourses and leading expert on Critical Race Theory, provided some answers in a post on Gettr.
What is “Palestine”?
The term “Palestine” until the 20th century referred to an administrative region without fixed or clear borders and with no national identity. The people who lived there before then were either regarded as Ottomans or as part of the Syrian region.
The term came from the final humiliation of the Jews by the Romans in AD 135, following the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The Romans put down the revolt and humiliated the Jews by renaming Judea, etc., “Syria Palaestina,” which means “Philistine Syria.” Arabs and other Arabic speakers record this by naming the “Land of Filastin” (Ard Filastin) in their fatwas and some other writings.
While some Muslims used the term that we’d render as Palestine, and many Europeans did as a hangover from the Latin name for the region, especially given the general vacancy and irrelevance of the region to most world affairs, it was never anything more than a vague regional designation. There was no state, no province, no administrative district, even, referred to by any name that would render to “Palestine” today. There was, as noted, certainly no national or even sub-national identity, and any attempt to do so would have been shut down by seeing them as incorporated within the broader Syrian identity. The name carried roughly the same kind of specific significance as a term like the “Near East” would today.
Identifying people as “Palestinians” didn’t really begin until the very end of the 19th century, and even then, it was a reaction to Zionism and Jews starting to move into the region. The term was sort of mainstreamed as a political reality after the Ottoman Empire was broken up in defeat after World War I and the region came under British control, using the old Latin terminology as “British Mandate Palestine,” meaning “the part of the Palestinian region under British control.” That was roughly thirty years before Israel would declare independence as the sovereign nation-state of Israel as we know it today. At no point in this story is there a sovereign nation-state called Palestine or anything resembling it.
That said, the beginnings of an Arab “Palestinian” identity as oppositional to Zionism and British Mandatory control developed from their previous 1890s beginnings to something more like a dedicated resistance identity when the Brits took over. Arabs didn’t believe in British sovereignty or control over what they deemed Islamic land, either, and they were adamantly opposed to the Mandate’s explicit Zionism, which was being acted upon to bring Jews into the region (even though the British were wishy-washy on this and then betrayed it during World War II, when it was arguably needed most).
The “Palestinian” identity at the time wasn’t exactly national but quasi-national and born (and borne) only in resistance. It gained some crystallisation as such in the mid and late 1930s after the failed Arab Revolt, significantly as a response (back-up plan) to the failure of Greater Syria to defend “Arab” interests in the region against British (and Jewish Zionist) control.
Still, it didn’t acquire something approaching the identity status people might recognise today for about another decade. That had to wait until after the “Nakba” in 1948-49. This contested event occurred when five of the surrounding actual Arabian nations declared and LOST a war on the newly declared Israel. These were Egypt, Syria, (Trans)jordan, Iraq and Lebanon.
Now, this war was the continuation of the same war being fought in the region before Israel’s declaration of independence (15 May 1948) following the late 1947 UN Partition of the region, which the proto-Israelis accepted and all the Arabs rejected. The Arabs started that war, too. Notice: no state of Palestine was involved because there was no state of Palestine to be involved. Something like a “Palestinian identity” as a refusal of these developments took significant shape at the time, though.
The Arabs refer to this humiliating loss as a “catastrophe,” THE catastrophe (Nakba), and rewrote history to create a “Palestinian” people who were displaced, harmed and killed by the (defensive) military actions of the Israelis, which they see as an act of colonial aggression because they cannot admit or accept that they lost the wars, including WWI, which removed the land from Muslim control (which they believe is permanent). The “Palestinian people,” whom none of these Arab states would absorb because they were more useful as a military-political weapon against Israel, came into existence as a tool to further their Islamic designs.
By the way, the UN Partition in 1947 (General Assembly Resolution 181) does not name the two states it partitioned: “Israel” and “Palestine.” It called them the “Jewish State” and the “Arab State.” The Jews took for themselves the name “Israel” for that land, as they would. As for the “Arab State,” it is not actually clear what would have been its fate. Jordan (Transjordan) viewed the Arab land by the Jordan River to naturally be part of its territory, not an independent state called “Palestine.” The Syrians opposed this not particularly because they wanted the land but because they didn’t want Jordanian expansion. As for Gaza, Egypt wanted administrative control but not to annex it. It is not clear what its fate as “Arab State” would have been.
In all, in 1948-49, and following the “Nakba,” these behaviours and conflicts reflected the broader pattern of inter-Arab rivalry more than anything else. The neighbouring states were more focused on preventing a Jewish state and on blocking one another’s gains than on creating a viable independent Palestinian Arab state under the UN plan. The very idea of “Palestine” with a unique national identity and (fabricated) national history would have to wait.
Identity during this period (1949-1967) was still largely either “Arab” or as part of one of the Arab states, like Syrian, Jordan or Egyptian, specifically, or just “Islamic.” Movements like pan-Arabism and even pan-Syrianism were more relevant to the identity of the people today treated as “Palestinians” than was anything to do with Palestine, although the word was used. The biggest change in this period from the one before is that before this, the term “Palestinian” referred also to Jews in the region (under the Mandate), which more or less ended. Arab states also kicked out all the Jews (850,000 of them) during this time, and most of them were absorbed by Israel.
Even still, the idea of a “Palestinian nation” wasn’t really invented in 1948. It didn’t really gain solid identity in the global imagination as such until after the Six-Day War in 1967, which the Arabs (especially Egypt) lost badly to Israel. This second humiliation, referred to as the Naksa (“setback” or “relapse” or “defeat”), which displaced some 400,000 people[1] as Israel pushed threats out of its immediate vicinity by taking the lands from which they operated, changed the strategic needs of the resistance movement and fabricated a Palestinian national identity with a bogus history more or less out of thin air. That’s the one defended to this day.
[1] Note: These people were in large part there as a stand of active resistance against the existence of Israel as part of the aforementioned strategic refusal of any Arab states to absorb them, etc., so focusing on their displacement alone is complicated, to say the least.
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Doesn’t really matter what they are called, or what their territory is named, the genocide of these people is an unforgivable crime against humanity committed by those who are beyond reproach.