ABSTRACT
Palestinian national identity, like all national identities, is a construct rather than a static reality. Palestinians today form a recognized national group, whose membership extends to those who have lived within what have became the borders of Palestine since the beginning of the British mandate period, following World War I. The arbitrariness of these borders excluded many whose lives were connected to Palestine, though their villages were outside designated official boundaries. Nations “lose their origins in the myths of time and fully realize their horizons only in the mind’s eye” (Bhabha 1995: 1). The question is not whether historians can actually come to agree on the origins and boundaries of their nation, so much as what kind of nation they think they have. Herein lies the problem for Palestinian historians, because their history of Palestinian self-consciousness is not a historical development in the sense that it has developed over time. On the contrary, Palestinian self-identity has oscillated between different forms of belonging and loyalty. Sometimes, in the same event, the historian finds evidence of Palestinian particularity while, at the same time, an insistence of a national identity broader than that of Palestine.
