Interesting analysis of the evolution of Palestinian identity by an anti-Zionist

Zachary Foster has become a popular anti-Zionist tweeter in recent months, to the point of becoming essentially a troll more interested in scoring points than in facts.  (Before he blocked the terrific Adin Haykin, they had a number of entertaining exchanges.)

Yet in the past, I have found his scholarly papers to be very interesting and illuminating, and they tell a story that does not at all support the current Palestinian lies about their history. Sadly, he seems now to be more addicted to "Likes" than to the truth. 

A 2011 unpublished master's thesis by Foster also upends current Palestinian lies, especially from Rashid Khalidi.

The period 1914-1923 is what, the most influential of these writers, Rashid Khalidi, has called the “critical years,” in his widely-praised  award-winning work on the subject, Palestinian Identity. He argues that as a result of the “rapid, momentous, and unsettling changes” from the outset of World War I in 1914 to roughly 1922 or 1923, “the sense of political and national identification of most politically conscious, literate and urban Palestinians underwent a sequence of major transformations. The end result was a strong and growing national identification with Palestine.”  Importantly, Khalidi writes, this full-fledged national loyalty was felt by a “significant proportion of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine”and by 1922, “important elements of the country’s Arab population had already come to identify primarily with Palestine” (my emphasis). He adds that the “most common self-description of political groupings during the mandate was as Palestinian Arab.”....Although Khalidi might like to think that “no one” could possibly dispute the widespread existence of a Palestinian identity during this thirty year period, with careful attention to evidence rather than hyperbole and polemic, I believe we can gain a much more accurate understanding of precisely when, how and why a unique Palestinian identity became widespread.

Foster then demolishes Khalidi, showing that he primary identification of Palestinian Arabs before the 1936 revolt were with their cities, or with Syrians/Egyptians or Arabs in general. 

Foster uses interesting analysis methods to come to this conclusion. For example, "not a single book was written on the history of Palestine out of sheer passion and love for Palestine until the 1930s. As we stated previously, this is in complete contrast to the city histories – all of which seem to have been written out of the authors devotion and love for the hometown." And then, "In 1936 and 1937, alone, eight books were published on the Palestine issue, more books than had been published in the preceding sixteen years combined. If the historical works are a guide to identity in Palestine, then, it seems that the major shift from city to Palestine did not obtain until the mid-late 1930s."

This is also fascinating (I put footnote text in parentheses):

The other major work on Palestine in the pre-1936 period is al-Barghouthi and Totah’s Tarikh Filastin, but, as previously mentioned, this was written at the behest of the British authorities to be used in the Mandatory education system. To be sure, this does not make the book irrelevant for the study of Palestinian identity. It does, however, suggest that it was not necessarily a natural idea for an Arab intellectual to pen a book on “the History of Palestine” in 1923.(Indeed, Totah wrote his Ph.D dissertation on the history of Arab education. Palestine is a totally irrelevant analytical category in his dissertation, as discussed above.)  And, indeed, this point is reinforced throughout the text, such as in their etymological discussion of this place we now call Palestine. Four names are offered which have historically been used to describe the region, Filastin being merely one of them. (The other three are ‘ard kana’an, ‘ard al-mi‘ad, and al-‘ard al-muqqadisa.)

Those translate to the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land and the Holy Land. Foster doesn't mention that Khalil Totah was a Christian Quaker; while he was born in Ramallah his view of Palestine was through the lens of the Bible rather than as an Arab. It is curious that Foster doesn't spend more time talking about how religion was a more important marker of identity than being a citizen of "Palestine" as well.

 

As far as identifying as Palestinian, Foster notes,

While Filastin emerged as a geographical, social and political space by the 1920s, it seems that “al-‘Arab” (the Arabs) or “al-Muslimin” and “al-Masihiyyin” (the Christians) were still preferred over “al-filastiniyyin” (the Palestinians) throughout the Mandate period to describe the region’s inhabitants. Very rarely is the word Palestinian used to describe the people of the region, who instead preferred to describe themselves, their culture, their land and their people as Arab.

One reason that Foster doesn't mention is that Jews at the time enthusiastically identified as Palestinian, and Palestinian Arabs - especially the literate ones who were espousing nationalism - didn't want to be identified with the Jews.  

Foster, quite reasonably, uses "loyalty" as a metric to see whether nationalism was more important to Palestinians than their hometowns or Arabness (he also seems to ignore clans, which were much more important in how Palestinian Arabs self-identified.) I'm still not convinced that most Palestinian Arabs identified as being loyal to Arab Palestine even into the 1940s. Here's why.

Foster is only looking at written texts of the time for evidence of loyalty. While literacy soared in Palestine between 1900-1948, a significant number of Palestinians, especially in rural areas and villages, were still illiterate in 1948, and there is no evidence that they identified with "Palestine." Moreover,  Arab actions during the 1948 war speak louder than the printed word that Foster relies on. While many defended their own towns, practically none defended anyone else's town - they fled along with their own community members. There was no loyalty to, or sacrificing for, an Arab Palestine.  The loyalty Foster sees is the written loyalty of intellectuals, a theoretical loyalty that they were trying to instill in their readers, not a reflection of actual loyalty that would make one fight for and die for one's country. 

Indeed, it was the Arab intellectuals who fled the fastest in 1947-48.  While the Jewish Palestine Post took heroic measures to ensure that it would put out a paper every day even during the worst fighting and when its own building was bombed, the Arab newspapers in Jaffa and elsewhere simply stopped publishing when the war reached them.

Last issue of "Falastin", blaming the British for Arabs fleeing Jaffa

So while Foster proves that loyalty to Arab Palestine was close to nonexistent before 1936, he doesn't go far enough because of his reliance on written materials as evidence of "loyalty" without keeping in mind that the loyalty espoused was more theoretical and prescriptive than real. It ignores the larger context that includes the people whose mindset hadn't changed for centuries. These were Arabs who easily moved from one part to another of the Arab world for economic reasons or because of wars, who did not accept the Western division of the region with arbitrary borders as relevant to their lives, and who thought that they could migrate to other Arab areas in 1948 as many of their ancestors migrated to Palestine - never dreaming that their fellow Arabs would refuse to accept them and treat them as brothers upon their arrival. 

Their identity as Palestinians was forged largely because of their mistreatment by the rest of the Arab world and its refusal to integrate them in their own societies in the 1950s, not from the Arab intellectuals of the 1910s or 1930s who created a new nationalism as a response to Zionism. The shame of their being so badly mistreated by their own people is what fuels the desire to create theories after the fact of a pre-1948 Palestinian identity, an identity that was extraordinarily weak.

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01/17 Links Pt2: Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel; The NYTs and the PLO are made for each other; The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

From Ian:

A New Study Shows That the U.S. Has More Anti-Semites Than Jews

According to a recent survey conducted by the Antidefamation League (ADL), disturbingly large numbers of Americans answered “yes” when asked if they believe Jews “go out of their way to hire other Jews” or “are more loyal to Israel than to America,” and to other similar questions. Kevin Williamson reflects on these results, and what they say about the persistence of this “strange prejudice.”
About 3 percent of Americans agreed that all of the anti-Semitic tropes in the ADL survey are “mostly or somewhat true,” suggesting that there are millions more anti-Semites in the United States than there are Jews. This is not entirely surprising, given the small size of the Jewish population.

Anti-black racism has of course been the most consequential prejudice in American history, but anti-Semitism remains strangely vital. Like its cousin, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism is more than a prejudice and more than a visceral hatred—it is, in its most extreme form, a kind of “theory of everything” in politics. Anti-black racism may exist with or without an attendant conspiracy theory, but anti-Semitism is almost without exception rooted in a conspiratorial view of the world. The fact that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise on college campuses is entirely predictable in that campus culture is as much conspiracy-driven as talk-radio culture or Fox News culture, with different villains and a slightly more refined rhetoric: not “Jews” pulling the strings from the shadows, but “Zionists.”

Williamson also notes the confusion, and the bad faith arguments, that have emerged from the term “anti-Semitism.”
The Semitic languages famously include both Hebrew and Arabic, but also Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Aramaic, and Maltese. But when T. S. Eliot wrote, “But this or such was Bleistein’s way:/ A saggy bending of the knees/ And elbows, with the palms turned out,/ Chicago Semite Viennese,” he wasn’t talking about the Catholics down in sunny Malta.

The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

The claim that Jewish influence and money can force non-Jews to serve the selfish interests of the Jews is, of course, a classic antisemitic trope. In the modern context, this trope usually claims that these Jewish conspirators are doing their dirty work to benefit Israel.

Roth also claimed that Elmendorf’s decision was “a shocking violation of academic freedom.” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), agreed, saying, “If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint.”

It appears that Roth and Romero do not understand the nature of academic freedom. An applicant for a fellowship or faculty position does not enjoy academic freedom at the institution—in this case, Harvard—where they wish to work. They have freedom of speech to express their ideology and beliefs like all other citizens, but Roth would not have enjoyed the protection of academic freedom, which would allow him to express his views, no matter how corrosive or biased, until he became part of the Harvard community. Obviously, this never took place.

Moreover, hiring committees normally vet applicants during the application process. It appears that in the initial stages of Roth’s application, the committee inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, ignored Roth’s hostility to Israel. So, it is very likely that when the choice of Roth was made public, Harvard stakeholders had the opportunity to inform the dean about the darker aspects of Roth’s career. Dean Elmendorf then did what the hiring committee at the Carr Center should have done in the first place: Examine HRW’s and Roth’s defective scholarship and singular focus on Israel, objectively.

One particularly grotesque example of Roth’s shoddy scholarship and tendency toward outright falsehoods was a 2021 HRW report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the title of which makes its content clear.

No apartheid exists in Israel, but that did not prevent HRW from presenting the 217-page report as fact, effectively redefining apartheid to make their case. The Israel-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor, however, produced a report of its own that eviscerated HRW’s libels. NGO Monitor concluded that “the HRW publication is fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions and blatant double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative demonizing Israel.”

“A careful examination of the text shows that HRW conducted almost no primary research,” NGO Monitor noted. “Rather, the text is bloated with cut-and-paste phrases, and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources—notably, other political NGOs participating in the same ‘apartheid’ campaign against Israel.”

“The omissions are even more egregious than the errors and misrepresentations, rendering HRW’s report as nothing more than propaganda,” the watchdog group asserted.

Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel - opinion

To deal with the inconvenient historical fact that Jews are the indigenous population of Israel, the drafters of the PLO charter created an arbitrary dividing line to determine who would be considered a Palestinian. First, the PLO charter deems any Arab who had lived in the entirety of what is now modern Israel prior to the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland to automatically be Palestinian, without regard to whether they were residents in the land. Further, the PLO charter deemed any Arab (but not Jews) born after 1947 to a Palestinian father to be a Palestinian.

Jews, on the other hand, were excised from their own national identity under the PLO charter. Only Jews who had resided in what is now modern Israel prior to “the Zionist invasion” would be considered Palestinian. And what did the PLO even mean when they called it “the Zionist invasion,” 1948 or the 1800s? The latter, of course.

Jews were forcibly removed from Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple and dispersed across the globe, making Palestine, as conceived by the PLO charter, a nearly Jew-free land before the Zionist movement was ever founded.

Imagine if, at the time of the founding of modern Israel, Jews had made a similar declaration with regard to Arabs. To wit, Israel would only recognize those “Arab Palestinians” who resided in the land and identified as “Palestinian” prior to the time of Abraham. This would obviously be an impossibility since the term “Palestinian” was created by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba revolt in around 130 C.E., while Abraham arrived in the Land of Israel approximately 2,000 years before the first use of the term Palestine.

Recently, antisemitic activists have escalated their attacks on Jews, claiming we are “settler-colonists” of a land they call Palestine. In my latest new law review article, I examine the question of colonialism and Israel. Part of my research involved tracing the history of the Jewish presence in Israel and comparing it to the waves of actual settler-colonists, ending with Palestinian Arabs, who displaced the indigenous Jewish population.

The only way that anti-Israel activists can strip Jews of our status as the indigenous people of the land and eliminate Jewish self-determination is to do as the PLO charter did: ignore history and designate a time when Jews had been ethnically cleansed from our own homeland as the point in time when Jewish history in Israel starts.

There are settler-colonists in Israel, and they are Palestinian Arabs. Nonetheless, Israel welcomes these settler-colonists and provides them with rights that no other country would provide to invaders and occupiers. It’s time for Palestinian Arab activists and their supporters to accept history and thank Israel for the gracious hospitality extended to newcomers.

Based on a true story. Israel has never occupied another people’s land in all her 4,000-Year recorded history; Israel is the world’s most accused country of illegally occupying another peoples’ land.
Ten Deceptions: https://t.co/4qiCALoxOJ #israel #palestine

— Joseph Shellim (@PhotoshopTruth) January 17, 2023

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