as 2011, according to the Palestinian press agency, WAFA, a survey revealed that when asked their first identity, 57 percent of Palestinians answered “Muslim,” rather than “Palestinian,” “Arab,” or “human being.”1 Of course, by the same token, some people in the West might feel that Christianity is their first attachment, but it is likely that the proportion is much smaller. More to the point, “Christian” is a spiritual identity, not a political or ethnic one. For Islam, these two selves are not separable. When Palestinians were asked in the same poll to choose the political system best for themselves, a plurality of 40 percent favored an Islamic caliphate, whereas only 24 percent wanted “a system like one of the Arab countries” and 12 percent “a system like one of the European countries.”
Beyond religion, another strong affinity that came before nationalism was pan-Arabism—the idea that all Arabs should form a single polity. This vision had germinated in the years after World War I in reaction to the high-handedness with which the Western powers carved up the Arab lands they had taken from Turkey. Pan-Arabism was central to the philosophy of the Baath movement that took power in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s. But its foremost proponent was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most popular figure that the Arab world has known since the crusades.
Pan-Arabism was not so natural to Egypt, with its distinct and ancient national identity, as to the newly minted Arab countries. Nonetheless, it answered the burning need to restore dignity by creating a union strong enough to stand up to the West and to Israel. “Lift your head, brother, the days of humiliation are over,” was one of the slogans of Nasser’s revolution. As the Cambridge History of Egypt summarizes it:
Arab unity, under Egyptian leadership, would guarantee victory over the Zionist enemy and the liberation of Arab land; [and] battling Israel was only the local facet of a struggle that set the Arabs in general, and particularly Egypt, against imperialism . . . and through which the connection with the third world was established.2
Although today there is not much left of this ideology, for the two decades bracketed by the 1948 and 1967 Arab–Israel wars, pan-Arabism was the dominant political idea of the Arab world. Given the salience of Muslim and Arab identities, Palestinian identity lagged far behind.
Palestine, after all, had never been a country. The name designated a portion of the Arab territory taken from the defeated Ottomans in World War I and given to the British to govern as a League of Nations “mandate,” meaning they were not to treat it as a colony. The Balfour Declaration reflected an awareness of the Arab inhabitants without seeing them as a distinct nationality. Rather, it spoke of the Jewish people and “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Likewise, a full generation later, the UN partition plan of 1947 referred to creating “Arab and Jewish states . . . in Palestine.” The numerous other diplomatic documents of the preceding decades spoke in similar terms. Insofar as anyone referred to “Palestinians,” the term simply meant those who dwelled in the territory called Palestine, Jews as well as Arabs, without any suggestion that these individuals constituted a distinct political or cultural community as is connoted by the word “nation.”
It was Zionism, itself—made to seem real and threatening by the Balfour Declaration—that stimulated the Arabs of Palestine to search for their own identity. They first turned their gaze northward. Palestine had been connected with, or part of Syria, virtually since its earliest identity in the form of the second century Roman province called Syria Palaestina. “When Amir Faysal established a government in Damascus in October 1918, the Palestinian Arabs’ aspirations focused on him,” writes Ann Mosely Lesch, coauthor of a Rand Corporation study of Palestinian nationalism. “An all-Palestine Conference in February 1919 . . . supported the inclusion of Palestine in an independent Syria.”3
Faysal’s ouster by France was not fatal to his ambitions for a throne—he went on to become king of Iraq—but it eliminated this option for the Palestinians. So, in 1921, local Arab notables formed an alternative program to present to London. It sought cancelation of the Balfour Declaration, an end to Jewish immigration, restoration of Ottoman law, and agreement that “Palestine not . . . be separated from the neighboring Arab states.”4 It also called for the election of a representative government in Palestine, but this was less an expression of national identity than simply a demand for self-rule within the jurisdiction designated as “Palestine” by the reigning powers. The essential sensibility was not Palestinian, per se, but rather the feeling, as the Rand study puts it, “that Palestine is essentially Arab and that it should be governed by Arabs.”5
The same sentiment motivated the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), which was formed in 1936 and led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Spearheading the Arab revolt against the Jews and British from 1936 to 1939, the AHC spoke in the name of the Arabs of Palestine but did not call itself “Palestinian.”
During the 1948 war over the birth of Israel, al-Husseini declared the formation of a government of all Palestine. But Alain Gresh, former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and a sympathetic authority on the Palestinian cause, observes that “this appears to have been much more an Egyptian maneuver intended to counter Hashemite designs [the Hashemites were the rulers of Transjordan] than a desire to nurture an embryo Palestinian government. This government was soon forgotten.”6
Egypt came away from the 1948 war occupying Gaza, which had been part of Palestine. In the 1950s, tiring of al-Husseini and his AHC, Nasser directed the creation of some new Palestinian offices. But “Nasser was . . . concerned not with forming a provisional government . . . of a future independent state . . . only with creating a sort of Palestinian body [as] the spokesman for Cairo’s policy,” explains another French specialist, cited by Gresh, who adds: “At this time, the question of the Palestinian people and its self-determination and independent struggle was not an issue either for Nasser or the Arab Higher Committee. This view was, with some nuances, shared by the Palestinians themselves.”7
This picture began to change in 1964 at the first Arab League summit meeting, convened in Cairo by Nasser, at which the decision was made to create the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO would eventually become the very embodiment of Palestinian national aspirations, but this is not how it began. As scholar Hussam Mohamed put it:
Regardless of the claim that the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 was necessary to fill a gap in the political life of the Palestinians, the new organization was the stepchild of inter-Arab rivalries and power politics. In fact, it was President Nasser of Egypt who, during the 1964 Arab Summit Conference, recommended the creation of the PLO, and nominated [Ahmad] Shuqairy to be its first chairman. . . . The . . . goals of the new Palestinian organization were simple: . . . to cater more to the interests of certain Arab states than to those of the Palestinian people.8
Ahmad Shuqairy was born in Lebanon but his family home was in the ancient city of Acre on the Mediterranean coast just north of Haifa. His father, As’ad, was an Ottoman official, cool to the cause of Arab, much less Palestinian independence.9 But, Ahmad made a career as an Arab spokesman. In the 1940s, he worked for al-Husseini’s AHC until becoming, in 1949, a member of Syria’s delegation to the United Nations. He followed that with seven years of service as assistant secretary-general of the Arab League and then several years back at the United Nations, this time representing Saudi Arabia until 1963, shortly before Nasser tabbed him to found the PLO.10 In short, he was the very personification of pan-Arabism.
Shuqairy was a man of bombast who won few admirers. Conor Cruise O’Brien, who represented Ireland in the United Nations during Shuqairy’s tenure there as the Saudi ambassador, preserves this memory:
All delegates are constrained in the General Assembly to become connoisseurs of windbags, and [Shuqairy] was, by common assent, the windbag’s windbag. He used to begin his oratorical set piece each year with the words: “I am honored to address the members of the United Nations”—pause for effect—“all [x] of them.” X always represented whatever the real current membership was, minus one. Israel was a non-nation.11
Years later, Yasser Arafat offered his take on Shuqairy to biographer Thomas Kiernan. “The