The Myth of Palestinian Self-Determination
The Arabs of the Mandate chose their identity, more than once. Each time, they were ignored by those who would bend them into weapons
A personal note before you read this article: Having studied the Arab-Israeli conflict for nearly 30 years, living inside it for almost 20 years, and working within it for 10 years, the topic is very close to my heart. Despite the severe tone of much of my writing (which is earned by the current state of the conflict), I have also met many Arabs and Palestinians along the journey. Many have been far from my enemy, some have been very good friends.
These are the people who inspired me to step back from the political conflict and to look with empathy to understand the formation of the modern Palestinian identity, and the paths not taken that those friends rested their own identities on.
What I found on this journey does not change the present day political situation, it does not change the foundational flaws that I have and will continue to call out in the Palestinian National movement and in Palestinianism, but it is a worthwhile reminder that the human cost of the games of empires (old and new) are real.
When the Arab leadership of Palestine gathered in Jerusalem in January 1919 to state their demands for the Paris Peace Conference, they reached a unanimous conclusion. They were not Palestinian. The First Palestine Arab Congress resolved that Palestine was “nothing but part of Arab Syria,” bound by “national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic, and geographic bounds” to the north, and that the region should not be “separated from the independent Arab Syrian government.” The recognized Arab political leadership from across the territory had convened for the explicit purpose of stating who they were and what they wanted. What they wanted was Syria.
They were not given it. French forces expelled the Hashemite ruler Faisal from Damascus in 1920 and destroyed the Syrian option militarily. When the 1948 war ended, Palestinian notables gathered at Jericho and expressed a preference a second time: the conference formally requested annexation to Transjordan, stating that “Palestine Arabs desire unity between Transjordan and Arab Palestine.” The Hashemite Kingdom gave them citizenship, parliamentary representation, and passports. The arrangement functioned until Jordan stripped that citizenship in 1988. Meanwhile, the moderate wing of Palestinian Arab politics, the Nashashibi faction that had advocated pragmatic coexistence with the British Mandate, was killed off. The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 functioned as an internal purge, with the Husseini faction systematically eliminating Arab leaders who had chosen accommodation over maximalism.
Nations follow a recognizable sequence when they form. A people develop distinct consciousness through language, land, and shared memory. That consciousness generates a political movement, which eventually produces a state. America worked this way. Zionism worked this way. Jewish peoplehood had persisted through two thousand years of exile, carrying a language, a liturgy, and a specific geography, before Theodor Herzl wrote a single word. The movement came after the people.
Palestinianism inverted this. The movement came first. The Palestine Liberation Organization was created in Cairo in May 1964 by the Arab League, not by Palestinians. Its founding chairman, Ahmed Shuqeiri, had served as Saudi Arabia’s representative to the United Nations and then as Syria’s, representing two other Arab states before being placed to lead an organization the Arab League designed, funded, and controlled. The founding charter confirms the arrangement: Article 1 defines Palestinians as “part of the Arab nation,” and Article 24 explicitly disclaimed sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, territories then held by Jordan and Egypt. Nobody at Cairo in May 1964 was proposing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Those territories were Jordanian and Egyptian. The concept did not yet exist.
Whoever holds the movement controls the definition of the people. There is no prior stable identity to anchor to, no bedrock consciousness that exists independent of the political project’s current requirements. The same territories the founding charter had excluded from Palestinian claims became the core of those claims after 1967. Oslo diplomacy in the 1990s created demand for historical priority arguments, and the leadership began asserting Canaanite ancestry. Mahmoud Abbas told the UN Security Council in 2018 that Palestinians were “descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago.” These claims were absent from every Palestinian political document before the 1970s and are flatly rejected by Hamas, which grounds Palestinian claims in the Islamic conquest of the seventh century rather than in Bronze Age genealogy. Two wings of the same national movement hold mutually exclusive accounts of where the people came from. An inherited folk identity does not produce that degree of internal disagreement about its own origins.
An entire institutional apparatus then locked the construction in place. UNRWA, created exclusively for Palestinian refugees, operates under a definition of refugee status unlike anything else in international law. The 1951 Refugee Convention, which governs every other displaced population in the world, terminates refugee status when individuals acquire citizenship elsewhere. UNRWA has no such provision. The 1982 extension made all descendants eligible regardless of whether they had been granted citizenship elsewhere.
Greece and Turkey exchanged 1.6 million people in 1923 and resolved the question within a decade. India and Pakistan displaced 14 million in 1947 and granted constitutional citizenship within three years. The same Arab states that maintained Palestinian refugees in stateless camps simultaneously expelled between 850,000 and 900,000 Jews from their own countries; Israel absorbed most of them under the Law of Return, and their descendants are full citizens today. The original Palestinian displaced population, at approximately 700,000, was smaller than any of these cases. What is without parallel is the institutional response: an apparatus designed to prevent the resolution that every comparable displacement achieved, transforming 700,000 into 5.6 million registered refugees across five generations.
These consequences were structural and predictable. An identity organized around what it opposes rather than what it builds cannot generate the foundations statehood requires, and a political project premised on a return that recedes with each generation cannot deliver the future it promises. Three generations of Palestinians were educated primarily in resistance, with no corresponding preparation for what follows resistance. Political movements that eliminated their own moderates in the 1930s produce political cultures in which moderation remains dangerous. The catastrophe in Gaza is not the inevitable expression of who these people are. It is the predictable result of what was built around them.
What the international community calls “resistance” has a specific form. It produced a culture in which the murder of children was met with street celebrations, classrooms where seven-year-olds learned martyrs’ names alongside arithmetic, and a political culture so organized around death that the prayer for the annihilation of a neighboring people became an expression of identity rather than a departure from it. Five decades of education in martyrdom, resistance, and collective grievance produces what education always produces: exactly what it was designed to teach. The movement needed a people who saw dying as victory and living as insufficient. That is the people it made.
The Arabs of the Mandate and their descendants are real people. They have real culture, real attachment to land, and real suffering. Mahmoud Darwish, who turned the experience of displacement into some of the greatest Arabic-language verse of the twentieth century, was writing about actual loss. The families who left or were expelled in 1948 were real people with real homes. None of that is in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether the political project constructed in their name has ever served their interests. Arab states kept Palestinian refugees stateless because stateless Palestinians remained politically useful. The Arab League created the PLO because a controlled Palestinian movement served regional power dynamics. International donors funded UNRWA for seven decades because the Palestinian refugee crisis provided a language of grievance that satisfied requirements on multiple continents. On the question of what the people themselves actually wanted, the historical record is clear.
They wanted to be Syrian. They wanted Jordanian citizenship. The moderates among them wanted accommodation. Every choice was taken from them. What remained was the identity they were never given the chance to refuse: children taught that martyrdom is the highest aspiration, crowds that celebrate massacre as victory, a prayer for the annihilation of a people offered as resistance in classrooms funded by international donors. That is what was engineered for them, handed to them as liberation, and described by everyone who built it and everyone who funded it as “self-determination”.
Writing this has not been a simple task, and has required my stepping outside of my usual analytical frames. I invite you to explore these ideas in a greater depth, not to change your position on the current politics of the region, but to understand that the current range of possible solutions is shaped by our ability to understand both what was, and what is.
As such, I am publishing my work on this for a short time here for anyone to download.
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