On The Usage of "Palestinian Arabs" in the 1920s

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
09 March '11

The term "Palestinian Arabs" is ubiquitous today. It means there is a "Palestine", and some people, too many, presume there always was a "Palestine", and that it is/was a state, a very real geo-political entity and that it was Arab. These Arabs that were "Palestinian" always existed as a national group. And then, the Jews came and stole it away. That's a very short version.

"Palestinian" is now applied only to Arabs, as if there is/was a political, social and demographic identity of Arabs as distinctly "Palestinian". Not Syrian. Not Jordanian (more on this later) or any other Arab community.

As here:

The Palestinian people, (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني‎, ash-sha`b al-filasTīni) also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs(Arabic: الفلسطينيون‎, al-filasTīnīyyūn; Arabic: العرب الفلسطينيون‎, al-`Arab al-filasTīnīyyūn), are an Arabic-speaking Mediterranean people with family origins in the geographic region of Palestine.

Taken all together, the object in the usage of "Palestinian Arabs" is first and foremost not connected with Arabs but to negate and deny any Jewish connection or rights to the geographical entity known as the Land of Israel (Eretz-Yisrael).

To his credit,

historian Rashid Khalidi...cautions against the efforts of some Palestinian nationalists to "anachronistically" read back into history a nationalist consciousness that is in fact "relatively modern". 

[35] Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Columbia University Press. 1997, p. 19–21.
[36] Khalidi, 1997, p. 149.

(Read full "On The Usage of "Palestinian Arabs" in the 1920s")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.