Nation building

This seems to embody the paradox: You depict a kind of Catch-22, in which the failure to become a state can be explained by the failure to have already been a state.

Given the way the game was loaded in the mandate period, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for the Palestinians to achieve any form of sovereign statehood in Palestine -- even when they were an overwhelming majority of the population. But there might have been ways for them to change the rules of the game or go outside of the game, and they failed to do that.

The might-have-beens of history are a sort of foolish exercise, but I do suggest that the Palestinians could have done such a thing. The Palestinians had more agency than one version of Palestinian history would suggest -- nothing was entirely inevitable, certainly not before Hitler came to power. Up to a certain point, had the Palestinians managed to change the rules of the game, adopt a different approach, things might have been different. But in the context of the mandate rules, at least, there was no way that any other outcome was likely.

The religious institutions that were ostensibly at the head of the Palestinian community, as you observe, were essentially created by the British.

I'm not sure anyone has ever fully teased out and pulled together the degree to which these institutions were completely new and artificial, created by the British for the Muslim community. Consider the Supreme Muslim Council, and the grand mufti of Palestine, institutions and positions that had never existed in the history of the country, which the British created on the basis of patterns of indirect control they had employed elsewhere -- Egypt, especially, but also in Ireland and India.

There's an overtone here of Orientalist benevolence: Let's give these people what they know.

You see this in Iraq as well. There's a terrible denigration of the political level of these populations prior to British rule. The British come in thinking they are purveyors of civilization, while the natives are basically barbaric savages at the head of whom are a few semieducated urban effendis, who pretend to speak for the people but in fact are ignorant. But in fact the British came in and destroyed institutions of democratic governance and parliamentary representation that had developed, with great difficulty, during many decades of Ottoman rule. I quote one Palestinian deputy, who exclaims, in 1930, "We had a government of our own in which we participated. We had parliaments." But now they had nothing.

There is surely an irony here, with the Palestinians, not a particularly pious people, led by a pretend religious figurehead created by the British.

Anybody who looks at the history will say, no, not a particularly pious people. Quite the contrary, in fact, a particularly secular people, in this period and for decades thereafter. The mufti himself was not a pious character -- he was a secular figure until he was anointed by the British.

I don't often quote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But he said a wonderful thing the other day, in a vitriolic and obnoxious attack on secular intellectuals in Iran. He said something like, "For a hundred and fifty years, these people have controlled the universities, they have taken over, they have dominated the country." This is a thesis that I only wish some people in this country would pay a little attention to. There was, in the Arab world, what Albert Hourani called a "Liberal Age." In the Arab world, in Turkey, in Iran as well. The Islamic revolution in Iran, among other things, was a reaction to the dominance of secular ideas in this part of the world.

Anyone who ignores the first two decades of the mandate and just looks at what happens in the late 1930s is missing a great deal, and the mufti's role in helping the British keep control of Palestine in the first few decades of their occupation is crucial, just as the role of the British in establishing Zionism in Palestine is indispensable. You would not have had a successful Zionist project without everything the British did between 1917 and 1939. The individual figure of the mufti is less important, historically, but the British would not have been able to control Palestine as they did had they not been able to co-opt an important segment of Palestinian notables through the religious institutions they created.

You write of the mufti that his would not be the last time the Palestinians suffered "from the damaging conflation of the national cause with the personality of an overweening leader."

Well, that's my judgment of both the mufti and Arafat. The mufti was an old-style notable politician who could play both sides of the street, doing deals in backrooms, just as Arafat was able to navigate the shark-infested waters of Arab politics -- which is where he made his career. Arafat did not make his career fighting Israelis. He made his career by reestablishing the Palestinian national movement, and fending off attempts by Arab governments to control the Palestinians.

In the book we see a kind of division between two eras of Palestinian history: There is the British Mandate era, until 1948, and then a post-1964 Palestine Liberation Organization era, with a sort of Dark Ages in between. Is there a difference?

In both of these eras, there is a major element of continuity: the limited degree to which the Palestinians focus on the question of the state and state power right up to the present. I don't think that explains everything, but it is an important point, and one of the main focal points of the book.

The Dark Ages, as you describe them, in fact begin during the Arab revolt [from 1936 to 1939] and continue until the 1960s. The Palestinians lost agency, and their effort in those years was to regain that agency, to become actors in their own drama, which they were not, for decades.

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