Palestinian identity
This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Prior to the rise of nationalism during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the term Palestinian referred to any person born in or living in Palestine, regardless of their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious affiliations.
By the mid-1950s, the term "Palestinian" has shifted to be a demonym that exclusively refers to the Arabs of former Mandatory Palestine who did not become citizens of the State of Israel, including their descendants, who had developed a distinctly Palestinian-Arab national identity.
The word "Palestinian" in Academia is occasionally used as a term rather than a demonym by ethnographers, linguists, theologians, and historians to denote a specific subculture in Palestine.
In such context, it covers not only those who have a Palestinian Arab national identity or Jews of Palestine, but also those inhabitants of the Southern Levant as a whole, Including ethnic and religious minorities such as the Druze, the Dom, the Circassians, and the Samaritans,[4] while excluding the Bedouin (who culturally and linguistically group with the Arabian Peninsula)
[5][6] Legal historian Assaf Likhovski states that the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the 20th century,[5] when an embryonic desire among Palestinians for self-government in the face of generalized fears that Zionism would lead to a Jewish state and the dispossession of the Arab majority crystallised among most editors, Christian and Muslim, of local newspapers.
[9] Filasteen initially focused its critique of Zionism around the failure of the Ottoman administration to control Jewish immigration and the large influx of foreigners, later exploring the impact of Zionist land-purchases on Palestinian peasants (Arabic: فلاحين, fellahin), expressing growing concern over land dispossession and its implications for the society at large.
[9] Historian Rashid Khalidi's 1997 book Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness is considered a "foundational text" on the subject.
[10] He notes that the archaeological strata that denote the history of Palestine – encompassing the Biblical, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods – form part of the identity of the modern-day Palestinian people, as they have come to understand it over the last century.
In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War he states that "Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement.
"[16] Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal consider the 1834 Peasants' revolt in Palestine as constituting the first formative event of the Palestinian people.
The local leaders and urban notables were unhappy about the loss of traditional privileges, while the peasants were well aware that conscription was little more than a death sentence.
[17] Benny Morris argues that the Arabs in Palestine nevertheless remained part of a larger national pan-Arab or, alternatively, pan-Islamist movement.
Foster argued in a 2015 Foreign Affairs article that "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."
[24][25][26] After the inception of the State of Israel, a phrase that has similarly become oft repeated is Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's remark that "There was no such thing as Palestinians.
as part of an interview with Frank Giles, then deputy editor of The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, to mark the second anniversary of the Six-Day War.
