Nation building

Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi explains why Palestinians have failed to create a nation and discusses the grave situation in the Middle East.

By Jonathan Shainin

Read more: Books, Palestine, Politics, Israel, Middle East, Interviews, Arab, Authors, Books Interviews

Dec. 18, 2006 | For most of the 20th century, the struggle of the Palestinian people was to prove themselves to the world as a "nation," something more than a collection of unaffiliated Arab squatters who happened to make their home on a particularly hot parcel of holy land. But the invisible process by which peoples graduate to nationhood is shrouded in mystery. A nation, as a rule, possesses an illusory timelessness. Its inhabitants are tied to one another, and to their land, by prehistoric bonds that stir the hearts of patriots yet elude definition. Nations are not created in the present, they emerge from the past, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus -- fully grown, and armed -- appearing to all the world to have existed forever. A nation makes its home in a state, with sovereignty over its people on its "ancestral" lands. Nations that have persisted without their own states should, according to the logic of self-determination, have statehood bestowed upon them. But those peoples who have failed history's test do not get states and never will.

Reading "The Iron Cage," Rashid Khalidi's elegant history of failures and disappointments in the Palestinian quest for statehood, it is impossible not to conclude that the above puzzle encapsulates the terms of the Palestinian dilemma, one that has been dramatized by the astounding success of a competing national project in the territory both Palestinians and Israelis claim as their home.

Though one still hears, from certain disreputable quarters, the claim that the Palestinians are merely Arabs, and therefore should content themselves with residence in one of "the other 22 Arab states," most of the world now acknowledges that the Palestinians are a nation, entitled to self-determination, presumably within a state of their own. The question that remains is why they have not achieved it.

"Palestinian Identity," Khalidi's landmark 1997 study of the formation of Palestinian national consciousness before World War I, deftly untangled the mesh of overlaying identities shared by the residents of Palestine -- Arab, Ottoman, Muslim or Christian, and Palestinian -- to demonstrate authoritatively that, 50 years before Golda Meir's infamous declaration that "there are no Palestinians," Arab residents of Palestine spoke of a "Palestinian nation."

Khalidi's "The Iron Cage" picks up where "Palestinian Identity" left off, considering the situation of the Palestinians beginning after the war, when the British took possession of Palestine under a League of Nations mandate and issued the Balfour Declaration, whose stated intention was to preserve for the Jewish people a national home in Palestine. As Khalidi notes, the very structure of the mandate conferred a proto-state legitimacy on the Zionist project and extended no such rights to the Palestinians; this distinction, in his telling, would prove to have baleful consequences for the Palestinians, under the mandate and long thereafter. In considering this situation, "The Iron Cage" attempts to answer a question left over from the prior book, in which Khalidi noted that explaining the "failure thus far to achieve statehood and sovereignty ... is a central problem of modern Palestinian historiography." "If the Palestinians had such a strong sense of identity before 1920," he explained to me, "why did it all go so wrong for them?"

In a refreshing contrast to the yammering bazaar of complaint and allegation that has dominated American public discussion of the Middle East since Sept. 11, 2001, "The Iron Cage" is a patient and eloquent work, ranging over the whole of modern Palestinian history from World War I to the death of Yasser Arafat. Reorienting the Palestinian narrative around the attitudes and tactics of the Palestinians themselves, Khalidi lends a remarkable illumination to a story so wearily familiar it is often hard to believe anything new can be found within.

He spoke to Salon at his office at Columbia, where he heads the university's Middle East Institute.

This book begins during the British Mandate, but your depiction of that era departs from the conventional narrative.

This book is an attempt to talk specifically about Palestinian history, not the history of the conflict or the history of Israel or Zionism. And there are, as you suggest, many versions of the Palestinian story in this era. One says, essentially, that the Palestinians entirely deserved what they got; they missed a number of opportunities, and were mired in backwardness by comparison with the Yishuv [the Zionist community in Palestine] and later with Israel. That version, both in scholarly work and in popular understanding, is quite widespread. There is another Palestinian and Arab version of the story, which has it that the Palestinians were overwhelmed by forces beyond their control, were helpless victims and had no agency -- they could have done nothing else. They were overwhelmed by a tragic fate. I am actually trying to deal more with the latter than the former. The former ... whatever. I address it in the book; I don't think it's grounded in historical reality.

My focus is on the Palestinians, and on an issue that I was surprised to discover had not really been addressed, which is the Palestinian view of statehood, the idea of state power and governance. No one, it seems to me, has asked, Why did the Palestinians not establish a state before 1948? Why have they failed since to do so? Implicit in both of the narratives that I reject are answers to these questions. The first one says, Because they were backward and stupid, and the second, Because they were overwhelmed by a superior force. But I don't think either of those answers is sufficient.

You quote a French diplomat in Syria who described the mandate's restrictions on the Palestinians as "the height of illogic."

The British saw the Jews as more or less like themselves: a people, a national group. There was anti-Semitism -- there was profound anti-Semitism in the British mandatory administration of Palestine -- but officially, institutionally, in the terms of the Balfour Declaration, the mandate and the League of Nations, the Jews were a national group. The Arabs were not seen in those terms; they were not a national group and did not exist as such. The words Arab and Palestinian are not in the mandate. There are more articles about antiquities and archaeology than about Arabs or Palestinians.

From the beginning, the British assumed that they could finesse the issue of the Arabs; they gave them institutions, religious institutions, primarily, which the British hoped would keep them busy, divert them, distract them, give them a certain degree of status. The Jews were a people, and the Jewish Agency was given prerogatives and rights according to the terms of the mandate. There wasn't an Arab Agency because the Arabs, in the British view, were not equal to the Jews. Even at a time when the Jewish population of Palestine was rather small, they had diplomatic representation, the ability to take issues before the League of Nations and so on. The Arabs, during the entire period of the mandate, never achieved this because of the way the British saw them. Over time, the British were forced to modify this view, and by the late 1930s the Palestinians were able to come to the table. But it was two decades too late.

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