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The Palestinians Need to Have an Identity Crisis freebeacon.com/blog/palestini…
Before 1948, when the modern state of Israel was established, there were no Palestinians, at least as we understand the term today.
Jewish residents in Mandatory Palestine, the name of the land under British administration, were called "Palestinians." In 1936, for example, a Jewish violinist founded the Palestine Orchestra, which became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1948.
The Arabs living in Palestine, meanwhile, were called, well, Arabs. That is why, in 1947, the United Nations recommended the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Mandatory Palestine, not a Palestinian one.
No one called the Arabs living in Palestine at the time the Palestinian people, including the residents themselves, nor did anyone define them as a unique nation.
In fact, many of the Arabs were migrants, or descendants of migrants, who came from the surrounding Arab countries from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.
During the period of British administration, Arabs across the Middle East saw themselves as part of one nationality. The Palestinian Arabs, however, lived in the ancient Jewish homeland, where many Jews moved in the 1920s and 1930s.
But then, from 1936 to 1939, the Arabs revolted against the British for allowing Jews into the land. As a result, London issued the White Paper of 1939, which significantly cut Jewish immigration to Palestine for the first five years and then made it contingent on Arab consent
In other words, ending it altogether. So as Hitler's genocidal plan took shape in Europe, Jews there were no longer able to flee to their holy land.
Eight years later, the Palestinian Arabs boycotted the committee empowered by the United Nations General Assembly to make recommendations about the future government of Mandatory Palestine,
The Arabs rejected both a plan to partition the territory into two states (one Arab and one Jewish) and a single, binational state.
The following year, several Arab armies tried (and failed) to destroy the nascent Jewish state of Israel.
During Israel's war of independence, many Arabs fled to Gaza and the West Bank. Yet Arab leaders, and even the Palestinian Arabs themselves did not seriously seek to create a Palestinian state from 1949 to 1967, during which Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt occupied Gaza
That was the best time to establish an independent Palestine, but no one tried, because Palestinian nationalism did not really exist.
Egypt did create an "All-Palestine Government," but it was short-lived and for geopolitical reasons, a façade for Egyptian control. More important, no one thought of the government as an expression of Palestinian nationalism.
Nonetheless, Palestinian Arabs still launched numerous terrorist attacks against Israel during this time and worked with Arab governments to destroy the Jewish state.
Still, the Palestinians only called the land disputed after Israel gained control of Gaza and the West Bank following the Six-Day War in 1967.
And only in 1964, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was established, did the world begin to refer widely to a group of Arabs as "Palestinians"— a term that, after the war three years later, began to apply to people living in Gaza and the West Bank.
And yet, even in the aftermath of Israel's victory, United Nations Resolution 242 referred only to "refugees," not even "Arab refugees"—as had been the term for those who left Israel—let alone Palestinian refugees.
Again, a Palestinian people with a distinct nationality seeking an independent state was a foreign concept.
Since the mid to late 1960s, however, the Palestinians have tried to form a national identity, all the while waging war against Israel through terrorism, intifadas, and now, delegitimization in the public sphere.
A Palestinian people exists today, but that people, that nation, emerged historically as an opposition movement against Israel, offering no vision other than destroying Israel and, only after several years, replacing Israel with its own state.
Moreover, creating a sovereign state was always secondary to opposing Israel. That sentiment has dominated Palestinian identity, which did not even exist until a few decades ago.
Just look at Palestinian society today. Put aside Gaza, which endures post-apocalyptic conditions under the suffocating rule of Hamas, an Islamist terrorist organization.
Focus instead on the supposedly moderate, more responsible Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, where streets, mosques, stadiums, and even summer camps are named after terrorists who murdered Israelis.
Such butchers are glorified in every direction, revealing how Palestinians have chosen to build their identity. There is nothing distinctly Palestinian other than a unique form of resistance against Israel—resistance steeped in hate.
The Palestinians need to have an identity crisis, to look inward and question who they are and what Palestinian nationality really entails. They should feel insecure about creating a national identity whose only clear pillar is blindly opposing Israel.
After all, what good do they have to show for it? Yes, there are countless Palestinians who are kind, wonderful, talented, and deserve to live in dignity. And yes, the Palestinians should one day have their own, independent state, existing next to Israel in peace.
But that will never happen if the collective identity that unifies and defines the Palestinians under a national banner is really about the "evils" of Israel and not about the Palestinians themselves.
How can Palestinians create a stable, prosperous society when they focus their attention almost exclusively on Israel?
The Palestinian plight is a psychological problem more than anything else. Only when the Palestinians seek to build up their own society rather than tear down Israel’s will there be peace.
That means asking a tough question: What makes a Palestinian a Palestinian? Not as individuals, but as a people, the Palestinians have only one answer right now, and that answer offers no solutions, just bitterness and violence, if not corrosive apathy.
