Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Morris, Benny

Titel

Rashid Khalidi—"Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness"

Ist Teil von

• Israel Studies, 1998, Vol.3 (1), p.266-272

Ort / Verlag

Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1998

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [Golda Meir], of course, and not [Yitzhak Rabin], represented in this context the viewpoint of the Zionist movement through most of its history. For long decades, the movement was at pains to deny the "other" living between Dan and Eilat and the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. At the beginning-somewhat bizarrely in the eyes of later commentators -- the Zionist leaders and settlers by and large denied (or at very least ignored) the presence of other inhabitants in the various areas of Palestine, which had been earmarked by the movement for the absorption of waves of Jewish immigrants and the eventual establishment of a Jewish state or commonwealth. Thus was born the myth of the "land without people" waiting to accommodate a "people without a land" (though the phrase itself had been invented some decades earlier by a British philo-Zionist, Lord Shaftesbury). Later, while recognizing that there were, indeed, non-Jewish inhabitants in the country, the Zionists denied their "national" existence or reality. During the past two-three decades, Zionism and Israel have very gradually, very grudgingly, come to accept that there arc several million "others" living in the area between the Sea and the River and that they have a distinct, collective national identity; that is, that there are "Palestinian Arabs." [Rashid Khalidi], a professor of Middle East history in the University of Chicago, a sometime member of Palestine Authority peace process delegations, and a scion of one of East Jerusalem's notable families, tries in his book to discover from what point in time the Arabs living in Palestine can be properly called a "people" from what point did they regard themselves as a distinct people or nation, separate from the wider "Arab Nation" or the "Syrian Arab people" and when did others "notice" that the Palestine Arabs were seeing themselves in such a way and when did these others also acknowledge that they were looking at a new "people" In his first chapters, Khalidi makes a hesitant effort to trace distinct "national" features in the development of the Arabs of Palestine already during the last decades of Ottoman rule. But again and again he finds himself compelled to qualify and circumscribe his assertions, and concedes that familial, tribal, local, religious, and (Ottoman) imperial affiliations and attributes characterized Palestinian identity more than anything that could be called "national." Khalidi seems occasionally to fall victim to insuperable undergrowth as he wends his way between such concepts as "local patriotism," and family, clan, tribal, and national "loyalty." Again and again, Khalidi, with a degree of artificiality, latches hold of Benedict Anderson's definitions of "imagined communities" to explain the essence of Palestinian Arab nationalism in those Ottoman times.