ABSTRACT
Introduction The term ‘identity’ has been much used in studies of Palestinians. After the Resistance movement emerged in the late 1960s, Palestinian national identity possessed such forceful self-evidentiality that scholars tended to take it for granted, and to neglect what might be contained within, or suppressed by, the powerful new ‘Palestinianism’. Given the Israeli drive to erase the Palestinians as a people with a history and a territory, re-constructing a strong form of Palestinian identity from its pre-1948 latency seemed as necessary in academic writing as it was on the political level. In retrospect it is clear that assumptions of the homogeneity and stability of a Palestinian national identity ignored its original pluralism, variation introduced by diaspora and – most importantly – change over time in reaction to crisis at the local or national level. Such neglect deflected attention from other identities contained within the dominant national one, not only forms that preceded the Nakba, such as attachment to locality,1 but also new ones arising out of exile, for example Resistance group affiliations. Assumptions of the stability of ‘Palestinianism’ left little space for considering divergences produced by prolonged dispersion, whether through shifts in the international or Arab environment of the Resistance movement, changes in leadership policies, the emergence of new Resistance factions (e.g. Hamas) or the paralysis of national representative institutions such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian National Council (PNC).
