Loading ...What's a Palestinian?
Last week, on his return from a tour of the Holy Land, former Governor of Arkansas and Republican presidential nomination candidate Mike Huckabee said to The Washington Post that “there’s really no such thing as the Palestinians.”
“The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true,” Huckabee continued, citing one of the tour’s speakers, Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein.
Huckabee’s comments are far from the first on the issue from a United States politician. “There was no Palestine as a state,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the Jewish Channel when running for president in 2011. “It was part of the Ottoman Empire. I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs.”
It is not often that American presidential candidates make public pronouncements about the historical origins of national identities, but the Palestinian identity is a unique case. It has long been the source of much controversy and mystery, begging the question of when the Arabic speakers of Palestine first began calling themselves Palestinians.
THE FIRST PALESTINIANS
Based on hundreds of manuscripts, Islamic court records, books, magazines, and newspapers from the Ottoman period (1516–1918), it seems that the first Arab to use the term “Palestinian” was Farid Georges Kassab, a Beirut-based Orthodox Christian who espoused hostility toward the Orthodox clerical establishment but sympathy for Zionism. Kassab’s 1909 book Palestine, Hellenism, and Clericalism focused on the status of Greek Orthodox Christianity in Palestine, but noted in passing that “the Orthodox Palestinian Ottomans call themselves Arabs, and are in fact Arabs,” despite describing the Arabic speakers of Palestine as Palestinians throughout the rest of the book.
The term “Palestinian” soon caught on: In 1910, an anonymous contributor to the Haifa-based paper al-Nafir praised an Egyptian writer for acknowledging that Palestinians had made significant literary contributions to the bourgeoning intellectual atmosphere of the age, but criticized him for failing to mention the Palestinians by name. In 1911, the Orthodox Christian Najib Nassar from Haifa described himself and others from Palestine as Palestinians in his Haifa-based newspaper, al-Kamil. So too did the Muslim Jerusalemite Muhammad Musa al-Maghribi around the same time in his Jerusalem-based newspaper, al-Munadi, noting that the paper would cover only news relevant to the Palestinians. In June 1913, the concept of a Palestinian identity began forming in the media, prompting Ottoman parliamentarian and Muslim Jerusalemite Ruhi al-Khalidi to write an article titled “The Palestinian Race” for the paper Filastin, arguing that Zionists were attempting to create an exclusionary society in Palestine.
HISTORY MISUNDERSTOOD
In the wake of Gingrich’s 2011 statements, members of the media went searching for answers to the mystery of the origins of the Palestinians. The Guardian ran a piece stating that “most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment as 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.” In fact, few if any historians think that the 1834 revolt had much to do with Palestine or the Palestinians. Rather, the event was a revolt in support of Ottoman rule, against the policies of the Levant’s new Egyptian occupiers who had levied high taxes, conscripted young men into the army, and abolished erstwhile privileges that Muslims had had over their Christian neighbors.
Fox News also tried to contextualize Gingrich’s comments, stating, “Palestinians never had their own state—they were ruled by the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, like most of the Arab world. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed … the British … took control of the area, then known as British Mandate Palestine. During that time, Jews, Muslims and Christians living on the land were identified as ‘Palestinian.’ But modern-day Palestinians bristle at the implication that they were generic Arabs. … [T]hey, for the most part, identify themselves as Palestinians, just as the Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrians also identify themselves with a specific national identity.”
Source: www.foreignaffairs.com