"Palestinianism" is a term occasionally used to denote either the national political movement or identity of the Palestinian people. It was used by Edward Said and others to describe the distinct nationalism of Palestinians as distinct from broader Arab nationalism or Pan-Arabism in the wake of the defeat of the Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War. The term has also been used by anti-Palestinian writers such as Bat Yeor to describe Palestinian nationalism as a hostile ideology.
Early use During the British Mandate over Palestine, the word was used as a loose expression to either describe the integration of the Zionist Aliyah into Mandatory Palestine, or as an alternative to Non-Zionism.
Multiple observers in the early 1970s were under the impression that Palestinian national identity was a product of the late 1960s. However, others pointed to its prior existence in the early 20th century in Mandatory Palestine, as well as the period between 1948 and 1967.
1970s
The word was employed as a term in its modern meaning as early as 1970 by Edward Said in his work "A Palestinian voice".
It was also used in 1970 by Alfred Sherman, the London correspondent for Haaretz at the time, while expressing his surprise that the Palestinians' bid for independent statehood had garnered widespread support in the West. Sherman described it as the irredentist claim on all of Palestine and rejection of being part of the Hashemite state, and argued that Palestinianism emerged after the disillusionment with the outcome of the Six-Day War, in the aftermath of which Palestinian Arabs realized that they had to rely on their own resources, rather than on the broader Arab world, to secure their aspirations. For Sherman, it was founded in the refusal of Arab states to integrate Palestinian populations and the separate identity promoted by UNRWA. According to Sherman, Israeli Jews were uncomfortable with Palestinian nationalism, since the aspiration of Palestinians for statehood ("Palestinianism") mirrored exactly what Jews had sought by Zionism. To challenge Palestinians on this ground would mean Israelis would find themselves querying a right they themselves had asserted and therefore implicitly question the legitimacy of the Israeli state itself.
In 1973, John B. Wolf made a similar diagnosis to that advanced by Sherman: the 1967 war had compelled Palestinians to recognize the truth of their isolation from allies. Citing Said’s 1970 essay, he said their "Palestinianism" thereby developed two goals: to integrate themselves with the land they lost, and to change a politics that had excluded and "negated their presence", denying Palestinians a say in their own future.
Similarly, Harkabi Yehoshafat, in his 1974 book Palestinians and Israel, described Palestinianism as the specific national identity of Palestinian Arabs, rooted in the land, that after 1967 fully emerged as a distinct national liberation movement distinct from Pan-Arabism. He described it as aiming for the negation of Zionism and the Israeli state.
Edward Said's usage of the term For Edward Said, Israel and its supporters had striven to deny Palestinians, with their long and fragmented history of dispossession, war, exile and ethnic cleansing, "permission to narrate" what they had undergone as a result of the establishment of the state of Israel. Said defined the term as "a political movement that is being built out of a reassertion of Palestine's multiracial and multireligious history", aimed at the “full integration” of Palestinian Arabs into the land of Palestine and into the political processes controlling the land. According to Adam Shatz, US editor for the London Review of Books, Said endeavoured to elaborate a "counter-myth" to that which underwrote Zionism, one written in counterpoint to the "dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other" characteristic of the Zionist narrative. "Palestinianism" for Said referred to a kind of open-ended dissident narrative testifying to the contradictions of exile and military occupation, one that was non-doctrinal, unobsessed with racial ontology, as a premise for the creation of a future for both Palestinians and Jews.
As construed by Ilan Pappé, Said's "Palestinianism" was a compromise between the narrow call of nationalist impulses and the universal values he subscribed to, consisting in striving to overcome both Zionism and Arab tyrannies by the three principles of acknowledgement, accountability and acceptance: namely, global recognition of the Nakba which was more important than achieving Palestinian statehood; in obeisance to universal principles, Israel should accept its accountability for ethnic cleansing, as a prelude to a future return of refugees; and, thirdly, an acceptance of the historic reality of Jewish suffering, a precondition for integrating Israelis into the larger Arab world within which their state was founded.
“Palestinianism” as a threat In 2005, writing in the context of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Bat Ye'or, in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which advanced a conspiracy theory surrounding the emergence of Palestinianism, dedicated a whole chapter to the word, entitled "Palestinianism: The New Eurabian Cult", where she claimed that Palestinianism, which she glossed as "Palestinolatry", was both a new vehicle for traditional European antisemitism, and "a return of the Euro-Arab Nazism of the 1930–1940s." In her view, it emerged with the works of the Anglican bishop and theologian Kenneth Cragg and the Palestinian Anglican priest Naim Ateek, director of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Neither of these writers, however, had ever used the term at the time of her writing, but Bat Ye'or deployed it to characterize what she saw as ecclesiastical attempts to play on European consciences by depicting Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. The impact of this "Palestinianism" can be discerned, she claimed further, in the positions of major politicians in Europe, ranging from Jacques Chirac, Javier Solana, Romano Prodi to Dominique de Villepin and Mary Robinson, who came to consider the Palestinian problem a central issue for world peace. For her, Christian evocations of the plight of Palestinians betrayed an underlying tradition of Christian demonization of Jews, and had assumed the status of a "modern Eurabian cult". More specifically, in theological terms, she interpreted this "Christian Palestinianism" as heretical, because she claimed that it was a variety of Marcionism.
The term was subsequently picked up as a negative description for the Palestinian cause, by British journalist Melanie Phillips in her Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, where she claimed that the Muslim Association of Britain, in her view an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, had become the "spearhead" of "radical Palestinianism" in Great Britain.
In 2007, the idea that Palestinian national rights were a threat to Western civilization, and in particular to its religious values, was argued for in a book by evangelical theologian Paul Wilkinson, a British Christian Zionist. He devoted a chapter in his book For Zion's Sake, to what he called "Christian Palestinianism", as the antithesis of Christian Zionism. He pursued his assertions in more detail in 2017, in the second volume, entitled Israel Betrayed – Volume 2: The rise of Christian Palestinianism, of his study of replacement theology. Wilkinson says that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, their nation, language, culture and religion are hoaxes perpetrated by anti-Christian liberals. The very idea itself is merely "another tactical manoeuvre in the Islamic war waged against Israel to effect her destruction." Other Christians, in particular Palestinian Christians who criticize Israel, speaking of the "perceived" suffering of Palestinians, foment Jew-hatred in favouring pro-Palestinian propaganda. The book was excoriated by theologian Darren M. Slade. professor of humanities at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
Modern usage In 2008, Jason Franks, a Research Fellow in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, cited Said in using the term Palestinianism to denote the ensemble of values, beliefs, traditions and history underwriting Palestinian nationhood. In his analysis, it stood in diametrical opposition to Zionism, and both it and Zionism were twin ideological codes competing in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, both accounting for the terroristic, nationalist and religious elements driving the conflict. The roots of Palestinianism lay, he further argued, in the Young Turks' revolt in 1908, which was crucial to the emergence of a Palestinian nationalist sentiment in that period because the revolution in Turkey freed up the press from Ottoman censorship, and enabled local assertions of a distinct identity to emerge. It developed thereafter "not only (as) a reaction against Zionism and British imperialism but also against the wider Arab world."
In 2010 Palestinianism was described in op eds by Israeli journalist Moshe Dann as an "ideology", that viewed Israel as a settler-colonial state, and one which had two immediate goals: Palestinian statehood in the Palestinian territories defined by the 1949 armistice lines, and the implementation of the right of return of Palestinian refugees. According to Dann, who repeated his claims in 2021, the long-term goal of the "elimination of Israel" was explicitly called for in both the Palestinian National Covenant, (nullified in 1996 after the Oslo Accords), and the 1988 Hamas Covenant. This "ideology" had been, he asserted, legitimized by Israel itself by the 1993 Oslo Accords.
In her 2016 monograph on Palestinian comedy, UK-based arts researcher Chrisoula Lionis traced the development of Palestinian national awareness. She argues that there was a transition via three core episodes from "Palestinianess", stirred by both the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the 1948 nakba, which crystallised this national consciousness, to "Palestinianism" proper, which she sees as the outcome of the Battle of Karameh in 1968.
Writing in 2016, Tower Magazine journalist, and then advisor to The Israel Project Ben Cohen, described Palestinianism as the core ideology informing recent antisemitism, one that assumes the guise of a social movement which, bundling together neo-fascists, liberals, extreme leftists, and Islamicists, is militantly opposed to the age of Jewish self-empowerment after 1945. in 2024, Cohen credited Melanie Phillips for this use of the term, and later described Palestinianism as a “cult”.
Anti-Palestinianism In 2021, Peter Beinart, writing in Jewish Currents, described what he called anti-Palestinianism, a form of bigotry – "treating people as inferior because of their group identity" – which is, he argues, commonplace throughout American society. The bigotry of anti-Palestinianism, for Beinart, is "ubiquitous" notwithstanding the fact that, unlike "anti-Israeli" or "anti-Jewish", the word "anti-Palestinian" hardly exists. Beinart makes an historical analogy between anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism. Citing historian David Feldman, he notes that there was no term to denote treating Jews as inferior before pressure for treating Jews equally gained some political traction in the 19th century. Once they had achieved legal recognition, the term antisemitism came into use to denote those hostile to parity of rights for Jewish citizens. A similar logic applies, he argues, to the term (anti-)Palestinianism, a term that remained unnameable because throughout the 20th century, American and Israeli discourse hardly even tolerated the word “Palestinian”.
See also Palestine (region) Palestinian nationalism Palestinian self-determination
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