http://www.jpost.com/com/Archive/28.Jul.1999/Opinion/Article-2.html
Wednesday, July 28, 1999
Who is a Palestinian?
By DAVID NEWMAN, The Jerusalem Post
(July 28) - What's in a name? A great deal, it seems. In
a recent column on this page, I used the term
"Palestinian residents of Israel" to describe those
Israeli citizens who are Arabs. The copy editor changed
it, explaining that the paper did not refer to Arabs who
lived within the Green Line as "Palestinians" but as
"Israeli Arabs." By this definition, the latter group is
not part of the Palestinian people.
Tell that to Hadash MK Hashem Mahameed, the first Arab
to be appointed to the Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee, and who proudly defines himself as a
Palestinian, not an Israeli Arab, nor as an Arab citizen
of Israel.
There is no longer any question surrounding the use of
the term "Palestine" or "Palestinians," although only 10
years ago, this was an unacceptable term in Israeli
political discourse.
It took the intifada for most Israelis to finally accept
the fact that the Palestinians are a people, no
different from the mosaic of peoples that make up the
rest of the world. We have also come to accept that,
sooner or later, there will be a separate Palestinian
state which is likely to be called Palestine.
We so easily forget that prior to the partition of this
small country in 1948, there was a single political and
social entity under British administration which
included all of the Arab and Jewish residents of this
area from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the
Jordan Valley in the east. All of them, Arabs and Jews,
were known as Palestinians.
When the State of Israel was established, Palestinian
Jews, together with the hundreds of thousands of Jewish
refugees who came to the country, immediately took on a
new national identity - that of Israelis, a name which
had been decided upon by David Ben-Gurion almost at the
very last moment before he read the Declaration of
Independence.
The emergence of a separate Palestinian national
identity took another 40 years, spurred on particularly
by the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
in the Six Day War.
Despite all the historical arguments and polemics aimed
at showing that there was, or was not, a separate
Palestinian Arab identity prior to the establishment of
the State of Israel, and/or that the Palestinian
identity was an artificial construction of the past few
decades, the fact remains that a separate Palestinian
identity has emerged.
And as with all national groups which have emerged over
the course of history, their right to be called a nation
is not rooted in whether they existed hundreds of years
ago or not. The simple fact that they constitute a
group, numbering several million, who have shared
beliefs, with common cultural and territorial ties, at
any given point in history, is sufficient to legitimize
their claims to independence and statehood - although
whether they actually achieve statehood or not is
another matter altogether.
It should not be particularly surprising that the
younger Arab residents of Israel increasingly identify
themselves as Palestinians. They are better educated
than their parents, more sure of their right to express
themselves, and increasingly feel their second-class
status as compared to their Jewish neighbors.
As the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza move
forward in their quest for statehood, it is quite
logical that the Arab residents of Israel should seek to
identify with them, much the same way as Jews throughout
the world identify with the Jewish state.
This does not mean that they automatically seek to
secede from the State of Israel and become part of the
new Palestinian state. Indeed, most surveys show quite
the opposite; that while they increasingly identify as
Palestinians, the majority prefer to remain Israeli
citizens.
Rather than see them as a fifth column, representing the
interests of Israel's enemies, the new government would
do well to understand that it is precisely through their
"Palestinianism" that they can build the bridges linking
Israel and a future Palestine.
After 50 years of conflict, we should have learned that
we can no more deny others self-determination than
others were able to deny our own.
This is totally unrelated to these Arabs' citizenship
and country of residence. It doesn't take a fool to look
a few years down the road and see a Palestinian state in
the West Bank and Gaza, while Palestinian residents of
Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, who may identify with the
new state, will remain citizens of the countries within
which they reside.
