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In March 2023, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed at a conference in France that, "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people." News outlets quoted him saying "There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language," and asking rhetorically "Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none."
Smotrich was correct in many respects. There is no nation called "Palestine" and no "Palestinian" language, but there is a Palestinian culture, of recent origin. It was forged mostly by Yasser Arafat, the PLO's leader for five decades, and is singularly defined by violence. Unique among all other Arab cultures and national identities, Palestinian Arab culture and the Palestinian Arab identity are predicated on a single political goal - the unceasing desire to destroy an existing country, in this case Israel.
Take away the resistance, and there's nothing left of a distinctly Palestinian culture.
Origins of the Palestinian Arab Identity
Cultures take centuries or millennia to form organically, but Palestinian Arab culture, or "Palestinianism," sprang into being quickly and artificially.
Historians might not agree on the precise date of the new Palestinian Arab identity and its concomitant culture, but no serious scholar claims it to be much more than a century old. The designation "Palestinian" only became applicable to the inhabitants of the region because the British named it the Palestinian Mandate after acquiring it following World War I.
Daniel Pipes dates the origin of the Palestinian Arab identity at 1920 when the British created the Palestine Mandate which all Muslims in the Middle East universally rejected because they perceived it as "a victory for Zionism." So instead, they decided to form their own independent state, a project taken up by Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem.
Even Rashid Khalidi, once a PLO spokesman and later a Columbia University professor, concedes in his book Palestinian Identity (1997) that only after the first World War did "Palestinian" become "a new and powerful category of identity that was simply nonexistent a generation or two before, and was still novel and limited in its diffusion before World War I ... result[ing] in the emergence of a Palestinian national identity where a few decades before no such thing had existed."
In 1958, Mike Wallace interviewed Israel's Ambassador to the U.S., Abba Eban, for the CBS news show 60 Minutes. In the 22-minute segment, neither Eban nor Wallace utters the word "Palestinian" even once. Rather, both men refer to the people who today call themselves Palestinians as the "Arab refugees."
Nasser and Arafat 1970 via Wikimedia Commons (AI enhanced)
According to Sha'I Ben-Tekoa, on March 29, 1959, Gamal Abdel Nasser announced to the Arab League meeting in Cairo that he "wanted to replace 'Arab refugees' with kiyan falastini (a Palestinian entity) in imitation of Algeria's FLN."
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded and declared the existence of a "Palestinian" people. In 1967 Arafat took over the PLO and used it to shape Palestinian Arab identity and culture into what they are today.
In a candid moment in 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, leader of the Ba'athist As-Saiqa faction of the PLO acknowledged, "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 ... the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons."
Anti-Zionism Culture
Whatever date one prefers, the Palestinian Arab identity was formulated to counter the Zionist identity, and it did so by imitation. Daniel Pipes calls this phenomenon "Islamic Zionism," pointing out that "Palestinians have modeled ideas, institutions, and practices - nearly everything - on the Jewish model." From their newfound veneration of Jerusalem, their posturing as victims of a Holocaust and appropriation of the word "genocide," even their demand for a "right of return," nearly every facet of Palestinian Arab identity is a distorted mirror image of the Israeli Jewish identity.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of Jerusalem. Ignored by the Ottoman Caliphate and in ruins throughout the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century, Jerusalem only became politically important after Britain took control in 1917. When Jordan controlled it from 1948 until 1967, it was again neglected and mostly ignored. But once it was conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War, Jerusalem became central to the new Palestinian Arab identity.
Jordanian, Syrian, or Palestinian?
It is often observed that the people of Jordan (a nation that did not exist prior to 1921) are ethnically and genetically indistinguishable from "Palestinian" Arabs. The same could be said of the people of Syria.
In fact, Syrian dictator Hafez al Assad believed Palestine was simply southern Syria, part of "Greater Syria." A June 1980 Damascus Radio broadcast asserted that "Syria views Palestine - according to historic, cultural, and geographic factors - as its own southern province." Even the Palestinian Arab nationalist leader Ahmed Shukairy, the first leader of the PLO, believed this, as he told the U.N. Security Council on May 31, 1956, "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."
What differentiates these three Arab peoples is largely political. Any linguistic differences are as inconsequential as variations in American English as spoken in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the deep South. The same is true of most other indicators of culture among Arabs who are Syrians, Jordanians, and Palestinians.
But the cultures differ in their approach to Israel. This is not to say that many Syrians and Jordanians would not celebrate the destruction of Israel, but the Syrian and Jordanian identities are not predicated entirely upon the dream of destroying it.
What distinguishes Palestinian Arab culture and identity from all other Arab cultures and identities is that single goal.
So what are the distinguishing features of culture, and how have Palestinian Arabs expressed their individualism within a sea of Arab culture?
Part 2 of this series examines how, in every category of culture, Palestinianism depends entirely on war, violence, and the dream of destroying Israel.
Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.