It is true that a firm national consciousness did not exist among the Arabs of Palestine, any more than it did among Palestine’s Jews—at least not before the Zionists arrived in droves. At the time nationalism was a distinctly European and secular phenomenon. Although there were upper-class Arab intellectuals and landed elites who considered themselves “Palestinian”—that is, living in a region called Palestine, distinct from a territory called Syria, inside an empire dominated by Turks—the majority of Palestine’s Arab Muslim population had, up to that point in time, considered itself subjects
...more
