Cultures take centuries or millennia to form organically, but Palestinian Arab culture, or "Palestinianism," sprang into being quickly and artificially. In March 2023, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed at a conference in France that, "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people." News outlets quoted him saying "There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language," and asking rhetorically "Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none."
Smotrich was correct in many respects. There is no nation called "Palestine" and no "Palestinian" language, but there is a Palestinian culture, of recent origin. It was forged mostly by Yasser Arafat, the PLO's leader for five decades, and is singularly defined by violence. Unique among all other Arab cultures and national identities, Palestinian Arab culture and the Palestinian Arab identity are predicated on a single political goal - the unceasing desire to destroy an existing country, in this case Israel. Take away the resistance, and there's nothing left of a distinctly Palestinian culture.
Origins of the Palestinian Arab Identity
Origins of the Palestinian Arab Identity
Cultures take centuries or millennia to form organically, but Palestinian Arab culture, or "Palestinianism," sprang into being quickly and artificially.Historians might not agree on the precise date of the new Palestinian Arab identity and its concomitant culture, but no serious scholar claims it to be much more than a century old. The designation "Palestinian" only became applicable to the inhabitants of the region because the British named it the Palestinian Mandate after acquiring it following World War I.
Daniel Pipes dates the origin of the Palestinian Arab identity at 1920 when the British created the Palestine Mandate which all Muslims in the Middle East universally rejected because they perceived it as "a victory for Zionism." So instead, they decided to form their own independent state, a project taken up by Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem.
Even Rashid Khalidi, once a PLO spokesman and later a Columbia University professor, concedes in his book Palestinian Identity (1997) that only after the first World War did "Palestinian" become "a new and powerful category of identity that was simply nonexistent a generation or two before, and was still novel and limited in its diffusion before World War I ... result[ing] in the emergence of a Palestinian national identity where a few decades before no such thing had existed."
In 1958, Mike Wallace interviewed Israel's Ambassador to the U.S., Abba Eban, for the CBS news show 60 Minutes. In the 22-minute segment, neither Eban nor Wallace utters the word "Palestinian" even once. Rather, both men refer to the people who today call themselves Palestinians as the "Arab refugees." (Read More)
