In the first part of this article which appeared yesterday, I described how the 1948 war marked the death of Palestinians’ nation — the nakba (catastrophe) — and their physical dispossession. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in his famous poem, Passport:

Stripped of a name, an identity

On a soil I nourished with my own hands!

Job’s cry fills the sky:

Don’t make me an example twice!

For the wider region, the Palestinians became a symbol because the nakba marked the first visible defeat for the dream of Arab independence and cast into stark relief the extent of Arab weakness. In fact, Zionism was the rallying call of the pan-Arabism adopted by the secular Arab regimes of the 1950s and 1960s. “Pan-Arabism can in many senses be read as a response to the idea championed by Zionism of an ethnically pure state for the Jews in the midst of the Arab region,” Andrew Hammond writes in Popular Culture in the Arab World.

In addition, many Arabs see in the Palestinians an expression of their own oppression at the hands of corrupt elites who took over control from the colonial powers without empowering their people.

In a moving account of her childhood in pre-partition Palestine, Palestinian academic and author Ghada Karmi writes: “I was born in Jerusalem when the country was still called Palestine. I remember a happy, settled existence with my parents, my sister and my brother ... We expected to grow old in our country and some day to be buried in its soil.”

It was not to be so, although her family was the last in her street to flee in 1948 and her mother had only packed a few summer clothes for them in the expectation that they would soon return once the violence died down. But they were never able to go back.

Instead, Karmi’s family wound up in London, where she grew up in Golders Green. There, she found herself being denied the existence she and her family had left behind. “The terrible losses we had incurred were trivialized and dismissed as if we had been impostors, had owned nothing in that country, perhaps had never even been there, until I found myself doubting my own memories and experience.”

It is one of the great ironies of history that the people who suffered centuries of exile should bring the same upon their “cousins” and then construct a narrative that refuses the Palestinians the right even to grieve their loss — as if the keys many Palestinian families treasure as their most valuable possession are to nonexistent doors in an imaginary land.

This denial has toned down in recent times, but even today one hears from ardent Zionists and their supporters dismissals that claim “Palestine” never existed as a nation and that the idea of a Palestinian people is a modern innovation.

But just because the Palestinians lived under the yoke of the Ottoman and British empires does not mean that they had no sense of national identity, as the pre-partition international press amply demonstrates. My own native Egypt was under foreign rule for some 2,300 years, yet few would dare suggest that the Egyptians do not constitute a nation.

Before the Palestinian exodus, Palestinian national aspirations were fairly straightforward: Self-determination for all the people who lived on the land, free of foreign domination and interference. Some saw this in the context of a broader union of all the Arabized Canaanite peoples (ahl al-sham, in Arabic). The most idealistic wanted Palestine to be part of the utopian Arab Ummah, a voluntary political union of all Arabic-speaking peoples which would make the region strong and be able to withstand the winds of imperialism. But this glossed over the fact that the Arab world is united by language but divided by almost everything else.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi argues in “Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness” that the modern national identity of Palestinians has its roots in nationalist discourses that emerged among the peoples of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century. Khalidi acknowledges that the challenges posed by Zionism played a role in shaping this identity, but that “it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism”.

This has changed over the past six decades, as Palestinian identity lost its geographic anchor and Palestinian nationalism began defining itself in terms of how it relates to Zionism.

After six decades of dispossession, the lot of Palestinians is growing increasingly to resemble the historical lot of the Jews: A people without a homeland dependent on the whims and largesse of their host countries — distrusted, feared, respected and pitied, all at once.

This homelessness has become a great motivator for success, with the Palestinian diaspora among the most successful minority groups in the world. Perhaps it is time for Israel-Palestine to become the tolerant and inclusive home for both these long-suffering peoples. (Concluded)