A people who consider themselves descendants of the Canaanites, and other peoples who have settled in Palestine since ancient times.
The name Palestinian applies in contemporary times to Muslim and Christian Arabs who inhabited Palestine as a consolidated community until the creation of Israel in May 1948, an event that shattered the community and dispersed about 726,000 Palestinians throughout the Middle East, primarily to Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
In 2004 the total number of Palestinians was estimated at 8.9 million. Approximately 88 percent are Muslims, and the other 12 percent are Christians. Until the initiation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the summer of 1994, the largest concentration of Palestinians lived under Israeli occupation. In 2004 approximately 2.1 million lived in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem, and 1.33 million in the Gaza Strip. Approximately 1.3 million lived in pre-1967 Israel as Palestinian citizens of the Jewish state. Other Palestinians lived in other Arab countries, especially Jordan, which had approximately 3 million.
Late Ottoman Period
The politics and culture of the Palestinians from the latter part of the nineteenth century until after the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on 13 September 1993 can be divided into five stages. In the first stage, from 1876 to 1917, the Palestinians shared a common cultural heritage shaped primarily by the values of the Arab and Muslim empires that had ruled the country with few interruptions from 638 C.E. to 1917. Palestinian society in this stage consisted of three major classes: peasants (fallahin), commercial bourgeoisie, and urban notables or patricians. The patricians were the ruling class, and their influence ran deep in the countryside and in Palestinian cities and towns.
In 1897 the Basel program of the first Zionist Congress strongly affected the Palestinians. The program fixed the Zionist goal: "To create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine, secured by public law." This ushered in the first phase of a protracted struggle between indigenous Palestinians and Jewish immigrants. Opposition to Zionism was the focus of Palestinian political activities, as well as of Palestinian historiography and other forms of writing.
British Rule
The second stage, from 1917 to 1948, was inaugurated with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. By the autumn of 1918 Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq were under British control. This development made Palestine increasingly vulnerable to Zionist colonization - first, by isolating the country from its wider Arab environment and second, by giving the British a free hand in implementing the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, in which the British promised to support a Jewish National Home in Palestine. With the Balfour Declaration, the stage was set for a long struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionist immigrants. The Palestinians, who constituted approximately 90 percent of Palestine's population by the end of World War I, saw in the Zionists a potential threat to their national existence.
In strategic terms, the Palestinian-Zionist struggle was over the status quo. The Palestinians wanted to preserve the status quo, through political and diplomatic efforts between 1917 and 1936 and through armed rebellion during the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939. In contrast, the Zionists sought to change the status quo through mass immigration and land acquisition. The Jewish population in Palestine rose from 9.7 percent in 1919 to 35.1 percent in 1946, and Jewish-owned land increased from 2.04 percent of the total area of Palestine in 1919 to 7 percent in 1946. Meanwhile, British policy in the military sphere was aimed at disarming the Palestinians and arming the Jews. Thus, by 1947 the overall power equation was decisively in favor of the Zionists.
Palestinian society was also affected by three other factors: Zionist settlement activity, British colonial policies, and the expansion of Palestine's economy. While dominant members of urban notable families continued to control the politics of the country, other social forces were at play. The expansion of trade and the growth of coastal cities and towns enhanced the position of the middle class. Artisans and craftsmen, as well as people engaged in the finance, construction, and service sectors, also benefited from the expansion of trade. However, the peasants, who constituted almost two-thirds of Palestinian society, did not benefit from these economic developments. Their condition worsened in great part because of Zionist settlement and the lack of capital. Although Jewish agricultural settlers had adequate land, the indigenous Palestinian peasantry lacked the space necessary for its growing population. The October 1930 report of Sir John Hope-Simpson acknowledged this problem, noting that there was not room for a substantial number of Jewish settlers on the land.
The depressed state of the peasantry, together with other developments, had produced rebellion within Palestinian society by the mid-1930s. The most notable development was the escalating rate of Jewish immigration. The influx of Jewish immigrants had two major consequences: It produced panic and desperation among the Palestinians, reinforcing their fears of Jewish domination in the future; and it radicalized the Palestinians and convinced them that the British were unwilling or incapable of following an evenhanded policy. Against this background, a revolt erupted in May 1936 and continued unabated until the summer of 1939, with only a short lull between November 1936 and January 1937 while the Peel Commission toured Palestine to ascertain the causes of the revolt.
With the publication of the Peel Commission Report in July 1937, the rebellion exploded again in opposition to the commission's recommendation calling for a tripartite partition: a Jewish state; a Palestinian state to be incorporated by Transjordan; and a British mandate over other areas. There was a Palestinian consensus against partition because the proposed Jewish state would cover about 33 percent of the total area of the country at a time when Jewish ownership of land was roughly 5.6 percent, and because a large portion of Palestinian villages, and a high percentage of Palestinians, would fall inside the Jewish state. The British responded to the Palestinian revolt with the full force of their military power. In terms of the cost in human lives, the revolt was a national calamity for the Palestinians: More than 3,075 were killed, 110 hanged, and 6,000 jailed in 1939 alone. At the same time, the British organized, trained, and armed special Jewish forces, creating in the process a Jewish military infrastructure that gave a decisive edge to the Jewish forces ten years later during the Arab - Israel War of 1948.
When the British realized that partition was not practicable, as indicated by the Woodhead Commission report of November 1938, they convened the unsuccessful London Conference in February and March 1939 to resolve the issue of the future status of Palestine. To break the deadlock, Malcolm MacDonald, colonial secretary of state, issued a white paper on 17 May 1939. Although the white paper fell short of meeting long-standing Palestinian demands, it introduced a number of important modifications concerning immigration and the application of the Balfour Declaration.
British implementation of the white paper proved difficult, partly because of Palestinian and Zionist opposition and partly because of the burdens of World War II. In these circumstances, by the 1940s the British were unable to handle the effects of the Balfour Declaration. The military and political structures of a Jewish national home were already in place in Palestine, in great part because of Britain's generosity. In almost every respect these structures were superior to those of the Palestinians.
Against this background, the United Nations (UN) divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in November 1947. The Palestinians rejected partition primarily because the UN proposed to give the Jews 55 percent of Palestine when Jewish ownership in November 1947 did not exceed 7 percent of the country's land. By contrast, the Jews found it in their interest to accept partition. Thus, the door for armed conflict in Palestine was wide open. A civil war between Jews and Palestinians followed the partition resolution. After the British left Palestine in May 1948, war, interspersed with cease-fires, continued until July 1949.
Units of armies and volunteers from neighboring Arab countries came to the aid of the Palestinians, who were losing the civil war and fleeing in large numbers. However, the Arab intervention was to no avail. The Jewish immigrant population was militarily superior to all the Arab soldiers combined. The Jews were also superior in terms of leadership, organization, and institutional links to the Western powers. In the end, the Zionists prevailed. Israel seized 77 percent of Palestine; about 726,000 Palestinians became refugees, many of them forcefully expelled by the Jewish forces while others fled out of fear. The Palestinians call this event al-Nakba, or the catastrophe.
The politics of the national struggle left a deep imprint on the intellectual life of the Palestinians, as is clearly illustrated in Palestinian historiography, art, and literature. There were literary and artistic works written in the romantic tradition, such as those by Khalil Baydas, Khalil al-Sakakini, and Muhammad Isʿaf al-Nashashibi, that focus on the social responsibility of men of letters and the relationship between culture and civilization. Other works, written in the realist tradition, reflect the philosophies of Ibn Khaldoun, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin.
From al-Nakba to the 1967 War
The third stage, which lasted from 1948 to 1967, was characterized by formal armistice agreements between a number of Arab states - Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan - and Israel; the disarray among Arab states unsuccessfully attempting to achieve Arab unity; the impact of Cold War politics on the Middle East; the eclipsing of Palestinian nationalism by Arab nationalism; and Israel's refusal to accept any responsibility for what had befallen the Palestinians in 1948. Uprooted, dispersed, and with no state of their own, diaspora Palestinians (60% of the Palestinian population in 1948) came under the guardianship of the host Arab countries in which they lived. Another 30 percent lived in the West Bank and Gaza, and the remaining 10 percent lived in Israel. As a whole, the lives of Palestinians during this stage were marked by national dispersion, occupation, job insecurity, uncertain residency, discrimination, and political repression.
The post-1948 situation had serious consequences. First, it made the Palestinians totally dependent on the Arab states. Second, geographical dispersal made it difficult for the Palestinians to work together within one organizational framework. Thus, some Palestinians identified with the Arab National Movement, others with the Arab Baʿth Party or the Muslim Brotherhood; others acquired senior positions in the bureaucracies of Arab governments, particularly the Jordanian government, or formed independent Palestinian movements that advocated armed struggle against Israel. Life in the diaspora radicalized certain Palestinian groups that embarked on armed struggle against Israel in the mid-1960s in the hope of triggering an Arab - Israel war.
Against a background of inter-Arab rivalries and escalating Arab - Israel tensions, the Arab League created the PLO in 1964. The PLO's leadership was entrusted to Ahmad Shuqayri, a diaspora Palestinian of upper-class origin. In theory, the PLO was to work for the liberation of Palestine, but in practice it provided cover for Arab inaction toward Israel. The PLO charter of 1964 called for the total liberation of Palestine. Arab unity, rather than armed struggle or revolution, was posited as the instrument of liberation. Palestinian authors such as Abd alLatif Tibawi, Fadwa Tuqan, and Fawaz Turki gave expression to this goal. Many of them romanticized this goal by infusing it with the sentiment of the Palestinian concept of return. History books, novels, and collections of poems and pictures of Palestine poured forth during this period to express the pain of exile and the overpowering desire to return.
Literary and political themes were expressed by poets such as Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Zayyad and literary critics such as Salim Jubran, Ihsan Abbas, and Afif Salim. Palestinian and Islamic historiography was produced by Arif alArif, Muhammad Izzat Darwaza, and Akram Zuʿaytir. Stories of great Arab travelers were written by Iskandar al-Khuri al-Baytjali and Nicola Ziyada.
Reemergence of the Palestinian National Movement
The fourth stage of contemporary Palestinian history, from 1967 to the present, began with the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967, a development that resulted in the displacement of more than 300,000 Palestinian refugees who fled the West Bank and the Golan area. Approximately 120,000 of these people were second-time refugees who had lived in refugee camps under Jordanian or Syrian jurisdiction. The Arab - Israel War of 1967 also resulted in the placement of the West Bank and Gaza under the jurisdiction of the Israeli military government. During its occupation of these territories, Israel undertook settlement and other activities that had a devastating impact on the Palestinians, including the formal annexation of East Jerusalem and the doubling of its surface area; the settlement of more than 120,000 Israelis in the Palestinian sector of the city; the confiscation of more than 55 percent of the West Bank and more than 40 percent of the Gaza Strip; and the deportation of some Palestinians from both areas.
Soon after the 1967 war, the Palestinians arose as an independent political force. They asserted the primacy of Palestinian nationalism and expressed themselves in the idiom of revolution and armed struggle. The PLO charter, revised in 1968 to give expression to this new trend, called for the liberation of all of Palestine, emphasizing that armed struggle was the only way. Aware at the time that the problem of Israeli Jews must be addressed, the PLO articulated the idea of a secular democratic state anchored on nonsectarian principles of coexistence among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim citizens of a liberated Palestine. In terms of political organizing, the Palestinians used Jordan as their early base of operations against Israel. In an attempt to attract international attention, radical Palestinian groups resorted to acts of violence, including the hijacking of civilian airliners and the murder of members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in September 1972.
The unprecedented coincidence between the radicalization of the Palestinians and the emergence of pragmatism and a preference for a diplomatic settlement with Israel on the part of key Arab states led to tensions between revolutionary Palestinians and the new Arab political order. The Jordanian Civil War (1970 - 1971) epitomized the incongruence between the romanticism of revolutionary Palestinians and the pragmatism of the leaders of Arab states. The Palestinian guerrillas were defeated in Jordan, but they moved to Lebanon, where they reemerged as a strong political force in a country deeply divided by sectarian as well as socioeconomic differences. Their presence in Lebanon served as a catalyst for the civil war that was triggered in April 1975. After the Arab - Israel War of October 1973, a new Palestinian consensus emerged with respect to a diplomatic settlement with Israel. This consensus was reflected in the PLO's political programs of June 1974 and March 1977. Both programs implicitly called for peace with Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Momentous events affected the Palestinians between 1982 and 1990. In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. Thousands of Palestinians were killed, maimed, or taken prisoner by the Israeli invading force. After nearly three months of fighting, the PLO evacuated Lebanon under the protection of a multinational force and set up its new headquarters in Tunisia. While the PLO, led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to recover from the devastating impact of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continued to deteriorate under the impact of massive Jewish settlements and the policies of the Likud government, which took power in Israel in 1977. The Palestinian response to this situation was the Intifada (uprising), which erupted in December 1987. The Intifada put the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians in the limelight after several years of neglect by Arab governments whose energies were focused on the Iran-Iraq War.
The Struggle for a State
The intifada also catapulted the priorities of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians to the top of the PLO agenda. Before that, the PLO catered primarily to the preferences of diaspora Palestinians. This led to the further crystallization of the pragmatic trend that had begun to emerge in the previous phase. The intifada forced the PLO to move definitively toward the peaceful pursuit of a state in the West Bank and Gaza, where the overriding priority of the Palestinians living in those territories was to end Israeli occupation. This was the crux of the PLO's political program of November 1988, when the Palestine National Council accepted the UN land for peace Resolution 242 and recognized the State of Israel. Politically and intellectually, this phase witnessed the greater salience of religious activism with the emergence of the Islamic Jihad in 1986 and the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) in January 1988.
Despite their political difficulties, the Palestinians participated in the Arab national debate over cultural and sociopolitical issues. Hisham Sharabi wrote on Arab intellectuals and their interaction with Western culture. Using anthropological and sociological concepts, he also analyzed patterns of authority in contemporary Arab society. Edward Said, a scholar-critic, wrote on Western literature and authored books and articles on the Palestine question and other Middle Eastern topics. Walid Khalidi wrote on the Palestinians in Palestine before their diaspora. Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinians' national poet, wrote poems about the Palestine struggle and criticized PLO and Arab leaders. Palestinian women such as Fadwa Tuqan, Sahar Khalifa, and Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi used poetry and other genres to express the cause of women's rights in the Arab world. Other women, including Hanan Ashrawi, participated in politics and wrote on social and cultural topics.
Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990 set in motion a chain of political developments that led to the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO and the signing of the historic Declaration of Principles in September 1993 by PLO chairman Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The PLO's support for Saddam Hussein was to a significant degree responsible for the shattering of the Palestinian community in Kuwait, which totaled approximately 350,000 people working as teachers, civil servants, and industrialists. However, the tragic results of the Gulf Crisis provided a propitious occasion for resolving the cause of the Palestinians. The launching of the Madrid peace process in 1991 opened the way for the Israel-PLO accord of September 1993. This accord was followed by other agreements to implement Palestinian self-rule, including the Taba Accords of September 1995. The Oslo Accord (1993) resulted in the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and major West Bank towns and the establishment of the Palestinian Legislative Council. With the Palestinians exercising control over some areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the realization of Palestinian self-determination seemed possible.
Yet, Palestinian hope for self-determination was dashed by a number of setbacks. One of the architects of Oslo, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated in 1995. The foundation for peace that he and Arafat built was undermined by the policies of a new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, an opponent of the Oslo process, who refused to implement troop withdrawal and continued settlement activity, especially at Har Homa/Jamal Abu Ghunaym in East Jerusalem. By the time the more pragmatic Ehud Barak took over the premiership in Israel, most Palestinians had lost hope in the Oslo peace process. During the decade of the negotiations of the 1990s, confiscation of Palestinian land continued and the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the area in which the Palestinians hoped to establish a state. In addition, their economic conditions worsened. They were humiliated at checkpoints and their lives were disrupted by curfews and blockades. Finally, when the Camp David summit meeting in July 2000 failed, and Ariel Sharon provocatively visited al-Haram al-Sharif with 1,000 Israeli armed police on 28 September 2000, on the following day they initiated a second intifada, or uprising, that many considered to be their war of liberation.
Instead, it proved to be a costly rebellion. Palestinian militants attacked military and civilian Israeli targets. The violence helped to bring to power a hard-line Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Sharon, an enemy of Oslo, destroyed a large part of the PA's security system, administrative offices, and economic infrastructure. He placed Arafat under house arrest, assassinated Palestinian militants, and continued his confiscation of Palestinian lands for Jewish settlements. As a result of the suicide bombings by Palestinian radicals against Israeli civilians (which Arafat tolerated despite his promises in 1988 and 1993 to fight terrorism) international support for the Palestinian struggle for a state diminished, especially after 11 September 2001, when the United States and its allies declared war on "international terrorism." By early 2004 some 3,000 Palestinians, including about 500 children, and about 900 Israelis had lost their lives. More than half of those killed on both sides were civilians.
There were unexpected benefits arising from the al-Aqsa Intifada. Some reforms, such as financial accountability, were welcomed by the Palestinian public when they were instituted in the PA areas. The office of prime minister was established in 2003 in an effort to share power outside of President Arafat's narrow circle. The United States announced in a diplomatic initiative, Road Map, tosupport the creation of a democratic, sovereign state of Palestine within three years. Despite the violence and destruction, both the Palestinian and Israeli publics continued to support a two-state solution, and they seemed closer to resolving the final status issues than ever before. In early 2004 Palestinian realization of a state of Palestine was awaiting the right circumstances and leadership to make it happen.
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— MUHAMMAD MUSLIH
UPDATED BY PHILIP MATTAR
