Khalidi, Rashid. "Contrasting Narratives of Palestinian National Identity". In Palestinian Identity: the Construction of Modern National Consciousness, by Rashid Khalidi, 9-34. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Khalidi, Rashid. "Contrasting Narratives of Palestinian National Identity". In Palestinian Identity: the Construction of Modern National Consciousness, by Rashid Khalidi, 9-34. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2010.

• The construction of identity requires the comparison between the self and the other. Similarly, the construction of specific areas of history requires that other areas be delineated as other historical focuses; that is, for Palestinian history to exist it must be made separated and compared to the other Arab and Zionist histories (9-10).
• Palestinian national identity has been more conflicted and contested than other Arab identities because Palestine never existed as a sovereign nation-state. The two closest versions of Palestine were the Palestinian camps in Lebanon from the 1960s to 1982, which were deeply resented by many Lebanese, and the Palestinian Authority established in Gaza in 1993 and in the West Bank in 1995, which lacks true sovereign power or autonomy (10).
• Palestinians are not alone in the Middle East in developing a high level of national consciousness without achieving statehood, as the same has been true for the Kurds and, until recently, the Armenians. All three groups had been promised self-determination under President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and none had received it. Now, however, the Armenians have a state and the Kurds have autonomy in northern Iraq, while the Palestinians have nothing (11).
• In all official documents in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, the Israeli government refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria. This part of a larger trend of replacing Arabic place names with Hebrew ones. Many of these names, such as 'City of David' are used to grant historical legitimacy to recent Israeli settlements (14-15).
• The Israeli government prioritized 'Urshalim' as the Arabic name for Jerusalem, although the name al Quds is also frequently used in government documents (14).
• Jews and Palestinians contest the holy sites of the city of Jerusalem, with many areas around the Temple Mount being contested by Muslims and Jews due to the role of these sites in both religions and Christianity. For example, the Western Wall is sacred to Jews as the remnant of the Second Temple and to Muslims as the place where the Prophet Mohammed tied his horse before ascending to Heaven (16-17).
• Contest over the holy sites and the space surrounding them is a form of political expression and domination. Israel destroyed the 'Moroccan Quarter' and evicted its residents from the area of the Western Wall in 1967 to form a plaza better for Jewish worship; this space, which had been created as a waqf in 1193 by al Malik al Afdal, is also used for national and patriotic events (17-18).
• The control of Jerusalem allows the Israeli authorities to dominate discussions of its history to the advantage of their narratives and the detriment of Palestinian historical narratives. This can be done because Israelis control the museums and archaeological digs, as well as supply the narratives provided to tourists (18).
• Early Palestinian figures often had multiple non-conflicting identities, including as Ottoman subjects, Muslims, Palestinians, Arabs, and local or regional identities. By the 1920s and 1930s this had changed due to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of Mandate rule over Palestine with national rights promised to the Jews (19).
• The Palestinians faced a different situation from other Arabs in the 1920s because they did not have their state entity like the Egyptians, Syrians, or Iraqis, but shared the colonial state with Zionist Jews, who articulated their own powerful nationalist narrative that excluded Palestinians, and were thus excluded from even limited self-rule (19-21).
• Zionism was certainly an important element of the development of the Palestinian national identity, but it was also based on other factors surrounding native resistance to European colonialism. In this way, it shared traits with nationalism developed in the rest of the Arab world (20).
• Palestinians were thus excluded from participation in any state structures under the Mandate, unlike Arabs elsewhere, as they structures were reserved primarily for Jews by the British authorities (25-26).
• The strongest identities and attachments among the Palestinian community prior to 1948 were local and regional, the attachment to specific villages and cities. These local ties formed the basis of future Palestinian national identity, including among those in exile (21).
• Palestinians failed to unite against Zionism, despite viewing it as a threat to Palestinian nationalism, due to their own deep internal divisions along local, family, and political lines (25, 32). These divisions were present elsewhere in the Arab world, but were not as severe; although they did lead to domestic turmoil in Syria and Iraq following independence (25).
• These regional, class, and family rivalries splintered the popular nationalist movement of the 1930s, which was crushed by the British in 1938. This defeat by the British in 1938 meant that the Palestinians were poorly prepared to fight the Zionists in 1948 and had already lost many strategic locations to Haganah, Irgun, and Palmach by the time that foreign Arab armies intervened (27).
• Half of the Palestinian population, or around 700,000 people, became refugees in 1948. This destroyed traditional social and political structures among Palestinians, as demonstrated by the failure of traditional ruling families to dominate Palestinian affairs afterward, and leaving the ethnic group leaderless for over 15 years. (21-22).
• Although Palestinian refugees did integrate socially, politically, and economically into the host countries, the exodus of 1948 actually served as a major event to reinforce Palestinian national identity (22).
• A new class of Palestinian leadership only emerged in the 1960s from among the middle class, forming organization such as the Fatah and the Movement of Arab Nationalists (27).
• Palestinian attempts at statehood have been repeatedly crushed by the UK and the USA, the two dominant powers in the Middle East during the 20th Century. The British favored the Jews during their administration of Palestine and denied Palestinian Arabs any national rights, seeing their primary responsibility under the Mandate to establish a Jewish homeland (22-23). The USA originally supported Palestinian statehood, but did not intervene during British rule and has since materially and militarily supported Israel against the Palestinians. The USA has repeatedly argued for Palestinian political rights, but never for self-determination of the Palestinians (23).
• The greatest obstacle to Palestinian statehood had been Zionism, as the majority of early Zionists both saw their movement as in essential conflict with Palestinian nationalism and won most early contests against the Palestinians, establishing power on the ground and support among the world powers for Zionist nationalism (24).
• Most Palestinian leaders viewed also Zionism as an essential threat to Palestinian nationalism and incompatible, as demonstrated by the 1899 letter by Yusuf Diya al Khalidi to Theodor Herzl (24).
• The Palestinians also had a smaller urban base and lower levels of economic development than other Arab states, potentially given them a smaller and less powerful strata of leadership. This meant that Palestinian leadership was largely drawn from villages near Hebron, Nablus, and Jerusalem, where local and family rivalries were more important and thus more debilitating than in urban areas (26).
• The earliest sense of Palestinian nationalism dates from the 1900s and 1910s, although there was an older regional identity of the 'lands surrounding Jerusalem' that has existed for centuries among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and was evoked as a salient identity by local authorities throughout the Ottoman period (28-30).
• Nationalist sentiment was stirred up during the 1910s by local opposition to Zionism and land purchases by Zionists, which local politicians urged the Ottoman government to oppose. Common historical comparisons during this time were to Saladin's opposition to the Crusaders (31).
• This period also saw Palestinian concerns about Zionism result in a split between regional political consciousness and general Ottoman political consciousness, as concerns about Zionism were dismissed in the Ottoman parliament, but taken very seriously by Palestinians. These concerns remained, despite the Ottomans rigging the 1912 elections to rid parliament of anti-Zionist representatives (31-32).
• Scholarship on Palestinian identity must be careful not to project an essential Palestinian identity back in time, but instead recognize that such national identity is contested, constructed, and relatively recent. It is also important to pay attention to the internal divisions in a diverse Palestinian identity, rather than privileging an idea of national unity crushed by foreign enemies (34).