The Reactionary Origins Of Palestinian Identity

Uncomfortable Parallels Between Palestinian Identity Formation And Hate Movement Dynamics 

Peoples And Populations

I just paired these maps (with the help of AI). The one on the left I didn’t make — it already existed. It is a map of the Ottoman Empire’s political organization just prior to World War I, about five years before Britain took it over.

The map on the right is current Israel - then the British Mandate of Palestine - overlaid on it with the help of ChatGPT 5.5.

Click it. Enlarge it. Take a look at it. Compare. And then I’ll tell you why.

 

In today’s conflict between Israel and the Arab world, there is a lot of fake history and law about the Jewish refugees from Europe taking away the “Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”

There is a difference between a people and a population. By modern consensus, a people has a right to self-determination. In contrast, populations -- that is, groups of people who inhabit arbitrary borders -- do not.

Why? It is because a “people” differs from a population by having shared traits which are unique to them. We are talking about things such as language, culture, religion, a political orientation, and way of life -- a constructive civilizational blueprint -- around which those people are unified between themselves and differentiated from those surrounding them. This is so important, let’s say this twice: these shared traits differentiate them from all those around them.

In modernity, there is at least a general consensus that peoples -- populations with these characteristics of unity and differentiation from others – have a right to self-determination because we believe it is moral to preserve this cultural diversity and tradition. Outside of self-determination, we have seen again and again such minorities are destroyed and their unique cultures are lost to history.

Look again at the two maps. What you’ll notice is that the population which became the British Mandate did not have a shared political life which would have unified them into a people prior to the Mandate era. The area was part of a much larger Levantine Arab space whose populations shared language, religion, and culture with each other, across what later became Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Each of those lined districts on the lefthand map was a distinct governing entity; the Ottomans had changed it several times in the 400 years they ruled, and at no time did it correspond to the land mass which became Israel.

The last time there had even been a named Palestine was the 10th century, a thousand years earlier. That entity did not have the borders of the current one either, and it was a military district of an empire, not a self-governing political state. After that, it became a folkloric name referring to a very general region south of Syria which included most of that map.

The population across those Ottoman districts also didn’t have a unique language. Arabic was spoken throughout the region and beyond. While Arabic breaks into dialectical differences (like American English has Southern Drawls and Midwestern Twangs), there was not a singular, unique dialect spoken in the land mass which became Israel, but quite a few different ones. The hill country, the coastal plane, and the southern area towards Gaza all had their distinct (and minor) variations.

There was no special or unique religion differentiating them, or distinct diet, etc. The population belonged to the broader Levantine Arab cultural and religious world rather than constituting a distinct people with its own separate civilizational blueprint.

The population Israel overlays on that map was not a “people” in the political or cultural sense, and they had never been a national identity. They were a population and that population was part of a much larger political, religious and cultural reality with which it was continuous.

Here’s the harsh truth: Under moral and legal standards, that population didn’t have the right to override the larger world’s immigration policies nor a right to self-determination at the time of Zionist immigration and state formation, in the same way Florida didn’t have the power to veto Cuban immigration or Minnesota didn’t have the power to veto Somali immigration or Massachusetts didn’t have the power to veto Irish immigration.

At the time, in the land which became the British Mandate, the population was not a unique people to preserve, who would have had such rights to claim. In that land, there was a population whose way of life could blend in seamlessly with others around them, such as the population of Jordan, which tried to give them that opportunity. Syria could have tried too, had it not been so evil; similarly with Egypt.

However, the Jewish people were a people, not just a population, and they had an urgent need: They were being humiliated, restricted, slaughtered and burned out of their homes in both the Christian and Muslim worlds because they “were foreign and didn’t belong.” So, they needed a refuge where they could preserve their peoplehood and be safe from majoritarian violence. That’s where their rights of self-determination came from.

The Palestinian predicament today did not come from them being robbed of a “right to self-determination” by Zionist immigration. The Arabs of Palestine were a heterogenous population within an arbitrary political border who had no such right. Their predicament is because they have conspired with the Arab nations to reject their right to blend in with their co-religionists and co-linguals and co-cultural neighbors.

That’s the issue which must be resolved. The Palestinian’s fight is not with the Israelis. It is with their fellow Arabs. It is time to wake up from our antizionist slumbers. This essay will provide the history and diagnosis of the problem of Palestinian identity formation and how it blocks a way forward for them and for the world.

The Emergence of Palestinian’s Aspirational National Identity

The modern political identity known as Palestinian did not arise organically from that population or from any pre-existing national consciousness tied specifically to the land west of the Jordan. It was constructed later, in the mid-twentieth century, as a deliberate political project. The first public declaration of the existence of a “Palestinian people” was in 1964. It was written by the Soviet Union in Moscow, and given to an Arab leader named Ahmed Shakeiri, quickly replaced by one born in Egypt named Yasser Arafat, who they falsely claimed had been born a “Palestinian” in Jerusalem.

The purpose was to fight US influence in the Middle East by creating a “liberation movement” capable of making claims on Israeli land. Prior to that, the Arabs in Palestine were regarded, by themselves and others, as a population continuous with the other populations in the area, not a distinct “people”, and could have been incorporated into those other political entities. The Arabs of Palestine most frequently expressed national aspiration was to become part of Syria, as they had been during the Ottoman empire.

The Soviet move to announce and support this national identity was not built on nothing: in the 1920’s, the first stirrings of the idea existed among a small segment of the population, and in the 1930s the Nazi-aligned leadership created a political party to promote the concept. In the 1950s, after the displacements of Israel’s war for Independence, the idea began to percolate more seriously in the refugee camps as a way to oppose the Jews.

Why does it matter? The national identity of “Palestinian” was created specifically to oppose the Jewish identity in Israel. Without that meaning, it is mostly a Levantine Arab identity, with local clans and flavors, similar to the Arabs of Jordan or Syria or Lebanon. As a national identity, eternal conflict over the existence of a Jewish state is built into it.

On a practical level, because this national identity is reactionary, there is no collective expression of its will or aspirations. The true loyalties and political dynamic of the Palestine Arabs even today exists at the levels of clans, tribes and villages. The result is there are over 20 different jihadist organizations operating in the West Bank and Gaza, and none have the right to speak for or negotiate on behalf of the “Palestinian people” when it comes to peace. Their only shared objective is the fight.

In particular, the Palestinians assert a Right of Return to Israeli land which they hold is an individual right that cannot be collectively negotiated for them by the Palestinian Authority or any other group. Thus, even though they still live in “Palestine”, they hold they are “refugees” and have an individual right to fight and no “Palestinian” political group is willing to stop any other group which asserts it wants to continue to fight.

It creates a situation which is impossible to turn into peaceful co-existence. How did this situation come to be?

The Reactionary Trigger

The Palestinians were intent on setting up a counter-force to Jewish peoplehood, so they could make rival claims. In Hebrew antiquity, the differing tribes of Canaan had to accept a basis for their unity, in which they would be willing to hold their Hebrew identity on a par with or above their clan or tribe identities. They also needed a shared language, religion, culture, heritage, literature, holidays, rituals, understanding of history, method of governance, and so forth which differentiated them from their neighbors and were tied to the land. Through these accomplishments — simultaneous unity and differentiation — over a long period, they transitioned from being many people living with and near one another on the land, to being a people living on their land.

The founding myth of the Hebrew people is that they are one family, descended from Abraham, tied together under one God by a binding covenant for all time. Derived from this, Jewish people anywhere in the world share many of the same tribal stories, the same liturgical religious language, the same core values, the same sacred lunar calendar, the same rituals, the same views on family and work and education, the same mystical alphabet, the same loyalties to tradition, etc., all having originated from the same physical land and place, and differentiating them from any other people on earth. It is by establishing this unity and differentiation, and maintaining it for thousands of years, in good times and bad, that the Jewish people became a people, indigenous to the land of Israel.

We know the Jewish people’s process of becoming a nation and a people was completed at the latest by 1200 BCE, 3200 years ago. Most likely, it was completed hundreds of years before. The oldest known reference to Israel outside of Israel exists on the Merneptah stele, an Egyptian hieroglyphic tablet from 1200 BCE, recording Egyptian military victories,

The princes are prostrate, saying ‘Peace!’
Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows.
Desolation is for Tjehenu;
Hatti is pacified;

Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Asqaluni;
Seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is made non-existent;
Israel is laid waste — its seed is no more;
Kharru has become a widow because of Egypt.

All lands together are pacified.
Everyone who was restless has been bound.

Above, “Canaan” refers to the land, followed by a list of defeated people within or near the land. “Israel” refers to the people living in the land. Obviously, with hindsight, we know the Egyptian description of that victory is a bit overstated.

This long evolved and well-preserved differentiated unity is why Israel was able to achieve stable nationhood after 1948. Unlike other abandoned colonial states, it did not need an authoritarian strong man to hold it together. This differentiated unity underwriting its peoplehood is why it succeeded with tough measures like banning Yiddish and other languages native to the immigrants, in favor of Hebrew, their indigenous language which they had preserved across their exilic cultures and updated in the nineteenth century, as one means for achieving national unity. Poland may have hated Germany, but the Polish Jews could join hands with the German Jews and agree on Hebrew.

We know that a population is not a people. Many “artificial countries” created by European powers drawing lines on maps in the 20th century failed because the population in-between those lines was not a people. No one can precisely define exactly what makes peoplehood, in the sense of a nation or a true ethnic group. There’s admittedly a weak sense in which any population of people can declare themselves to be “a people” if they want to, and others should respect this. However, to live and work and govern together in the way a natural people does, these conditions of achieving a sense of unity above clan and tribe, and differentiation from neighbors through things like language, religion, literature, historical myths, traditions, form of government and so forth, are the usual route.

As the era of empires ended during the first half of the 20th century, and the era of nation states replaced it, the Jewish people’s history of being a people had been received as a profound argument for the legitimacy of re-establishing a Jewish state inside the ancient lands of Israel and Judea. It establishes an historical claim which is deep and ancient and pre-dates any modern politics.

Early in the Zionist movement, even the Arabs of Palestine recognized the validity of the Jewish connection to the land. In 1899, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yusef Diya al-Khalidi, said, “Who can challenge the rights of the Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”

The group of Jerusalem elites who organized Arab resistance to Jewish immigration into Palestine called itself the “Arab Higher Committee”, not the “Palestinian Higher Committee”.

Writing about the Soviet “Operation SIG”, established to create an anti-Israel ideology, Eli Cohen and Elizabeth Boyd note,

In the early 1900s, before Israel’s establishment, the term “Palestinian” primarily referred to the local Jews and their institutions. For example, the Palestine Post newspaper (founded in 1932), books on Palestinian folk songs and folk tales, and the Palestinian Philharmonic (founded in 1936) all related to the Jewish people living there and to their institutions. The Arabs living there identified themselves as people of Greater Syria or Transjordan. (Modern Syria leadership still aspires to control not only Lebanon but also Israel and Jordan.) While some Arab families (like the Jews) had lived the pre-British Mandate Palestine for generations, most were immigrants from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many forcibly relocated by their Islamic Ottoman rulers, some as punishment (Blumi 2013).

Go deeper: The Soviet “Operation SIG” which created the PLO and Anti-Israel Ideology

As late as 1948, at the Jericho Conference where thousands of assembled Palestinian leaders met to ask for the joining of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Jordan, the United States State Department in its internal communications referred to them as the “Palestine Arabs”, which is basically how everyone else referred to them as well:

1. Palestine Arabs desire unity between Transjordan and Arab Palestine and therefore make known their wish that Arab Palestine be annexed immediately to Transjordan. They also recognize Abdullah as their King and request him proclaim himself King of new territory.

2. Palestine Arabs express gratitude to Arab states for their efforts in behalf of liberation of Palestine (Nuweihid indicated object of this was hint to Arab states that their job was done).

3. Expression of thanks to Arab states for their generous assistance and support to Palestine Arab refugees.

4. Resolve that purport of first resolution be conveyed to King at once.

From Reactionary Idea To Reactionary Reality

Soon after Israel was formally established in 1948, the Arabs of Palestine began to realize the peoplehood of Jews was an important element of the international support for a Jewish state.

The people who would become Palestinians needed a counter beat to Jewish peoplehood. They realized they would have an easier time claiming international legitimacy for their cause, and to make specific territorial claims, if the Arabs of Palestine were not just Arabs who lived in the Mandate of Palestine, a short-lived British territory west of the Jordan.

They could not simply be many clans and tribes, identifying first with their clan and tribe, and then in a larger sense with the Arabs east of the river or in Syria or Lebanon, with whom they shared the same language, religion, dress, customs, and mythic histories. They must be, instead, the Palestinian people: a unique people living precisely on the lands between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, where Israel happens to exist today.

Thus out of this political necessity, the idea of the Palestinian people gestated in the 1920s and 1930s, and among a small group it was born sometime in the 1950’s, accelerated into declared reality and self-awareness through the 1960’s and 1970’s under the tutelage of the Soviet Union ( which saw an opportunity to support yet another “national liberation” movement which could challenge the United States’ influence ), and hardened in the 1980’s and beyond. The very first time the term “Palestinian People” in the modern sense appeared in print was in a 1964 pre-print of the Palestine Liberation Organization ( PLO ) charter, drafted in Moscow for the PLO by the Soviet propaganda machine.

The need for this political intent is documented. In 1956, Ahmad Shukeiri, a founder of the PLO, echoed this in his testimony before the UN Security Council in his capacity as Ambassador of the Arab League,

Such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but the southern portion of Greater Syria. It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.

He was not alone. Zuheir Mohsen, an executive member of the PLO , is quoted notoriously from his biography saying:

The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

Further proof of this was the original 1964 PLO charter itself, which renounced any claims to the West Bank, Gaza, or even East Jerusalem, claiming as the right of the Palestinian people only the lands where Israel exists,

Article 24. This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area. Its activities will be on the national popular level in the liberational, organizational, political and financial fields.

Article 25. The Organization is encharged with the movement of the Palestinian people in its struggle to liberate its homeland in all liberational, organizational, political, and financial matters, and in all other needs of the Palestine Question in the Arab and international spheres.

Cohen and Boyd quote Palestinian Minister Fathi Hammad saying as late as 2012,

Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Damietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims.

They go on to note,

Creating a national identity of Palestinian Arabs as a pre-existing people required inventing a post-truth history. Nazmi Al-Ju’beh, associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University, acknowledged this in 2008 when he wrote that Arab Palestinian identity was invented solely to destroy Israel. He writes, “There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict” (Al-Ju’beh, 2008). Khalidi (1997) writes similarly. The oldest academic journal to claim Arab Palestinians as a people, the Journal of Palestine Studies, was created in 1972, five years after Operation SIG began. The importance of this is that, once an academic journal publishes a paper, the contents of the paper take on a reputation as credible and its papers are repeated as real by reporters, politicians, and textbook writings. This process creates “fake history” (De Baets, 2019).

In 1968, after Jordan lost the 1967 war, the West Bank and Jerusalem, the PLO re-issued a new charter reflecting the change in hands, which is historically something of a “coming out” document for Palestinian national identity. Suddenly, they make claims to the West Bank and Jerusalem as lands of the Palestinians, which they had not claimed before. It makes the existence of Palestinian identity as a counter beat to Hebrew national identity extremely explicit and specific,

Article 19: The partition of Palestine in 1947, and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and its natural right in their homeland, and were inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, particularly the right to self-determination.

Article 20: The Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and everything that has been based on them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of their own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

Article 21: The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aimed at the liquidation of the Palestinian cause, or at its internationalization.

And in this same document, the concept of the “Arabs of Palestine”, a group of clans and tribes living in the area but without an identity as a single national people, was fully dissolved to be replaced by “Palestinians”,

Article 4: The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from fathers to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.

Article 5: The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father- whether in Palestine or outside it- is also a Palestinian.

Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion are considered Palestinians.

In the charter, the existence of the “Palestinian people” is pegged to 1947, carefully calibrated to the emergence of the state of Israel. There is no natural definition, just this political rejectionist definition. This declaration is the difference between having a group of people who think of themselves as “the white people who live in the Americas” or a group of white people who think of themselves as “real Americans”. The PLO had to consider some Jews to be Palestinians, a necessity implied by the fact they denied that Jews were part of a people at all.

Like Hamas some 20 years later, the PLO put the negation of the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel at the very core of its version of Palestinian political identity. The Palestinians are a counter-narrative to the Jewish people. They are a beat inserted into history intended to cancel out the beat of history representing the Hebrew people.

I am not saying here that Palestinians are not a people. If they want to be a people, they can be. No one has a right to say they are not. I am saying they are a new people, the emergence of their national identity is still early in its process, and the question of how they unify and differentiate themselves as a people is very, very problematic.

Do they teach their children the Palestinian language? No, there is no such language. Do they teach their children the Palestinian religion? No, there is no distinctive Palestinian religion. Do they teach their children how to make the hummus and falafel found only in the old British territory between the river and the sea? No, those recipes exist elsewhere too. Do they teach their children their national literature, going back centuries? No, this literature does not exist. Do they teach their children of the times past when they had national sovereignty in the land of Palestine as a people? No, such a time does not exist. Do they teach their children the names of the Palestinian forebears going back to ancient times and the mythic histories of those patriarch’s virtues? No, there are no such myths. Do they teach them the treasured Palestinian political values and systems of government which they created to build and protect their civilization? No, there are no such values and systems.

The Palestinians as a people do not have the sorts of touchstones normally associated with peoplehood. They need to be made.

What do they have instead, around which they can weave such things to make an identity? Grievance and the Nakba. Their heroes do not date back to before their fight against the Zionists.

This is the crux: The differentiating and unifying core of Palestinian identity is the narrative of Zionist colonialism, the Nakba and the “struggle” to destroy Zionism and Israel. Their unifying and differentiating identity is intrinsically a negative, implying the need to address a national humiliation, demonize a certain people and destroy a certain nation in an epic redemptive feat of murder, martyrdom and re-taking. The central apocryphal prophecy of their national identity is, “We will kill the Jews and take back what is ours.”

Here are some examples of how this works. Instead of telling themselves about how the Zionists and the Arabs worked together to save the land from malaria by helping them drain the swamps, Palestinians have created a negative myth about how the Zionists ruined their ancient pastoral lives by stealing the waters where they used to take their cattle to drink.

Instead of talking about how Arab land owners got rich off of overcharging Zionists for bad land, ultimately freeing many impoverished Arabs from generations of serfdom in a feudal system of subsistence farming, they instead tell themselves stories about how rich, colonist Jews stole land their families had farmed for generations. And so it goes, a litany of grievance based on partial truths and outright falsities, needed to build the national identity.

The false re-telling of Palestinian history infects the body politic of the world and international law. To such a national identity, the destruction of Israel is metaphysical. Without that Nakba-driven grievance, there is nothing in their identity which differentiates and unifies them as a people from the Arabs in Jordan, Syria or Lebanon.

In its initial construction, Palestinian identity requires Jewish erasure. It is a huge obstacle to peace. Israelis find it incredibly difficult to even conceive how there can be compromise or peace with a people who have defined their peoplehood by building a dream of erasure into the essential conditions which differentiate and unify them as a people.

Is The Core Of Palestinian National Identity Modeled On Hate Group Dynamics?

Here is a thought experiment: Within Israel, there are a little over two million Israeli Arabs (about 21% of the population). The vast majority of these when surveyed say they do not primarily think of themselves as “Palestinian” or do not think of themselves as Palestinian at all. Their national identity is Israeli and their primary identity is either “Arab” or “Muslim,” categories consistent with how Israeli society is internally organized.

These Israeli Arabs share everything substantial with the Palestinians themselves, i.e., those descendants of Palestine Arabs who live outside of Israel’s borders in the Palestinian territories or beyond: descendancy, culture, cuisine, religion, language, etc. What makes them not ‘Palestinian’ while the others descended from the same population are ‘Palestinian?’ I propose the chief factor is hatred of Israel and rejection of Jewish sovereignty on any part of the land.

A second thought experiment: Palestinian history is riven by sectarian infighting and assassination. The Israeli Arab society’s problems with violence are not of that sort, but instead are economically motivated by gangs and mafias of various flavors. Why are ‘Palestinians’ cursed by large amounts of political violence but their ethnic similars, the Israeli Arabs, are not?

I propose it is because the Palestinian national identity is predicated on war against Israel, and it finds itself with a recurring and never dying need to enforce its violent ideology violently. Dissenters - those who want to co-exist - threaten the very core of the national identity.

The two thought experiments reveal more than a surface difference in political preference. They expose a structural feature: the politically effective Palestinian identity has been built and maintained by defining itself in deliberate opposition to the existence and legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. This is not ordinary nationalism with an adversary. It is closer to the logic of movements whose cohesion depends on sustained negation of an out-group.

The pattern of enforcement against internal dissent begins early and is specific. During the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, Haj Amin al-Husseini’s faction did not confine its violence to British forces and Jewish targets. After the Peel Commission Report of July 1937 recommended partition, the campaign of political assassination against Arab opponents accelerated sharply. British intelligence documented a deliberate effort to eliminate Arab leaders and notables who favored pragmatism, limited compromise, or cooperation with the Mandate authorities. The British described an increase in “assassinations, especially of police personnel, Government officials and moderate Arabs in prominent positions.”

One prominent case was Fakhri al-Nashashibi, a leading figure in the opposition Nashashibi clan who favored negotiation with the Jewish arrivals. He survived an assassination attempt in Jaffa in July 1937 and was later killed in Baghdad on 9 November 1941 by gunmen linked to Husseini networks.

His uncle, Raghib al-Nashashibi — head of the National Defense Party and Husseini’s most prominent Arab political rival — survived multiple assassination attempts and was forced at times to operate from exile or under heavy protection. British reports recorded attacks on other Nashashibi affiliates and supporters of the “Peace Bands,” the local forces organized to resist Husseini’s insurgents and protect villages that refused to join the revolt and his rejectionist ideology.

Estimates derived from British statistics put the number of Arabs killed by other Arabs during the revolt at approximately 1,200 through what officials termed intracommunal terrorism. These killings were not random clan feuds. Historian Efraim Karsh documents how, through systematic murder and intimidation of opponents, Husseini consolidated his preeminence in Palestinian Arab politics by the late 1930s. The pattern reflected a consistent effort to remove space for any Arab position short of total rejection of Jewish sovereignty.

This pattern of eliminating those who favored any form of coexistence continued. In November 1946, Fawzi Darwish Husseini, a cousin of the Mufti and a respected figure who had worked with Jews to advocate a binational state, was murdered by the Mufti’s thugs. Jamal al-Husseini reportedly remarked that his cousin “stumbled and received his proper punishment.” In September 1947, Sami Taha, a leading Haifa trade unionist who supported granting Jews certain rights and took a more moderate stance, was assassinated outside his home. The killing was widely understood to have been carried out on orders from the Husseini faction.

Husseini himself made the underlying premise explicit. In 1936 he declared: “There is no place in Palestine for two races. The Jews left Palestine 2,000 years ago, let them go to other parts of the world, where there are wide vacant places.” The Jewish response, articulated by David Ben-Gurion in 1937, offered a different premise: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place. All our aspiration is built on the assumption — proven throughout all our activity in the Land of Israel — that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.” The Peel Commission Report observed the resulting asymmetry with clinical precision: “Though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary… with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the political situation.”

This pattern reflects the reactionary politics of hate groups.

Specifically, the Palestinian pattern exhibits features that align with what anthropologist Gregory Bateson termed schismogenesis — the process by which groups define and intensify their identity through deliberate opposition to traits they attribute to the other side. One clear expression appears in statements by Hamas leaders. Former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh declared: “We love death like our enemies love life.” The formulation inverts a perceived Jewish and Israeli emphasis on life, continuity, and future-building into its explicit opposite. The same inversion structures the 1988 Hamas Charter, which frames the conflict as a religious obligation requiring the obliteration of Israel. The identity constructed here is one whose highest collective purpose is not the building of normal national life but the negation of another people’s legitimacy on the land.

A reasonable objection is that internal political violence and the mobilization of an external enemy are common features of many nationalist movements, and that Palestinian reactionary rejectionism can be understood as a response to rapid demographic change and displacement rather than an inherent structural defect in the formation of the national identity. This objection has merit. Many national movements have used coercion against internal rivals and defined themselves partly against an “other.”

What distinguishes the Palestinian case, on the evidence, is the combination of three observable fractures in healthy identity formation: the relative thinness of positive national content available to the Arab population of the Mandate during the process of formation; the consistent use of violence and intimidation to suppress alternatives that treated coexistence as legitimate, communicating the fundamental importance of hating the out-group as a condition of acceptance within the in-group; and the persistence of this pattern across decades and changes in leadership, even when compromise offered tangible political and economic gains.

The usual observation that “opposition to a common enemy is the easiest way to unify a people” therefore requires a sharper distinction. Short-term mobilization around a shared adversary is common. What distinguishes hate-group logic is when the adversary becomes indispensable to the identity’s continuation. In such cases, resolution on terms that allow the adversary to persist as a legitimate equal threatens not a policy failure but the dissolution of meaning. The movement must then either escalate or generate new crises to reassert the necessity of the struggle.

Survey data on Israeli Arabs illustrates what occurs when that differentiating pressure and source of meaning is not enforced. Multiple polls since 2020 show that only a small minority — consistently in the single digits to low teens — primarily identify as Palestinian in the political sense that has come to require rejection of Jewish sovereignty. Recent surveys make the divide measurable. In a 2020 Tel Aviv University poll, only 7 percent of Israeli Arabs defined themselves primarily as Palestinian. A 2023 survey found just 8 percent named Palestinian identity as the most important component of their personal identity, while Israeli citizenship ranked far higher for many. A 2025 Central Bureau of Statistics poll showed the large majority defining themselves first as Arab or Muslim, a classification consistent with Israel’s “millet” system of group identity carried over from Ottoman times which the Palestine Arabs had lived within for hundreds of years.

The large majority define themselves in terms that accept the existing state framework as legitimate. The political category “Palestinian,” as constructed and maintained since the 1960s, has been reserved for the segment of the population whose identity requires that rejection. When internal voices have challenged that requirement, the historical response has been marginalization or elimination.

This structure explains the recurring pattern more precisely than conventional accounts of frustrated nationalism. A standard national movement can, in principle, achieve its core aims and then shift to the ordinary work of governance and negotiated coexistence. An identity whose central political act is the negation of another people’s legitimacy on the land has no equivalent off-ramp. Its internal coherence depends on the continued presence of the negated other as threat or obstacle. When that other demonstrates willingness to share the land — as Ben-Gurion articulated in 1937 and as later Israeli proposals have repeated — the response has been reassertion of total rejection rather than negotiation, because anything less would require dismantling the differentiating core on which the identity has come to rest.

The result is a political identity unusually effective at sustained resistance but structurally resistant to the compromises required of any stable national project that must live alongside a neighbor it has defined itself against. The internal complexity that exists beneath the dominant surface has not been permitted to alter that surface because doing so would undermine the foundational act of negation. That is the obstacle the preceding sections of this essay have traced across a century. It is not primarily a problem of incomplete historical understanding or insufficient goodwill on either side. It is a problem of an identity whose central political act remains the negation of another people’s legitimacy on the land they both claim.