ABSTRACT
THE premise from which this essay starts is that nations and nationalism are modern products with histories that date back to a few centuries at the most. Although the emergence of nations and nationhood appear to be a hallmark of the last two centuries, the birth of a single nation was not necessarily a matter of “historical determinism.” Rather, each nation emerged as a result of certain particular events, circumstances and incidents combined with certain activities and rhetoric produced mostly by what we can call the nation’s elite. In other words, the production of the imagined community; i.e. the nation, to use Anderson’s phrase, combines economic and political process with cultural-rhetorical one. 1 Therefore, writing its history must not be limited to the political events that produce the nation-people, but must also include the discourse through which the nation is produced and constructed, and the history employed in this production process. 2 Accordingly, the study of the emergence of the Palestinians as a nationed people, in my opinion, ought to go beyond the narrow angle of the development of their political institutions. But it should primarily include the study of the Palestinian imagination of the self, the kind of discourse it produced, and the historical factors influencing it.
