Palestinianism is term occasionally used to denote the national political movement of the Palestinian people. It is a relatively recent coinage whose origins are disputed. It gained currency by its use in the works of Edward Said and to describe a certain vein of theology opposed to Christian Zionism and that challenges Zionism and the right of Israel to exist.
History of the word
Though some date the emergence of the term to recent decades, – the word does not figure in the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary – it was employed as early as 1970 when Alfred Sherman, the London correspondent for Haaretz at the time, expressed surprise that the Palestinians' bid for independent statehood had garnered widespread support in the West Sherman laboured under the impression that a distinct Palestinian identity was a late product of the 1960s, and in particular began to emerge after disillusionment with the outcome of the Six-Day War, in the aftermath of which Palestinians realized they must rely on their own resources, rather than on the broader Arab world, to secure their aspirations. Israelis were uncomfortable with such a proposal, he concluded, since the aspiration of Palestinians for nationhood ('Palestinianism') mirrored exactly what Jews had sought by Zionism. To challenge Palestinians on this ground would mean Israelis would find themselves querying a right they themselves had asserted and therefore implicitly question the legitimacy of the Israeli project itself.
In 1973, John B. Wolf made a similar diagnosis to that advanced by Sherman: the 1967 war had compelled Palestinians to recognize the truth of their isolation from allies, and their "Palestinianism" thereby developed two goals: to reintegrate themselves with the land they lost, and strive to change a politics that had excluded and 'negated their presence', denying Palestinians a say in their own future.
Edward Said's adoption of the term
The word assumed some importance in the 1980s when the Palestinian academic Edward Said, author of the influential book Orientalism which analysed bias in foreign representations of the Arab world, adopted it. For Said, Israel and its supporters had striven to deny Palestinians, with their long and fragmented history of dispossession, war, exile and ethnic cleansing, 'permission to narrate' what they had undergone as a result of the establishment of the state of Israel. Said defined the term as 'a political movement that is being built out of a reassertion of Palestine's multiracial and multireligious history.' According to Adam Shatz, US editor for the London Review of Books, Said endeavoured to elaborate a 'counter-myth' to that which underwrote Zionism, one written in counterpoint to the 'dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other' characteristic of the Zionist narrative. "Palestinianism" for Said referred to a kind of open-ended dissident narrative testifying to the contradictions of exile and military occupation, one that was non-doctrinal, unobsessed with racial ontology, as a premise for the creation of a future for both Palestinians and Jews.
As construed by Ilan Pappé, Said's "Palestinianism" was a compromise between the narrow call of nationalist impulses and the universal values he subscribed to, consisting in striving to overcome both Zionism and Arab tyrannies by the three principles of acknowledgement, accountability and acceptance: namely, global recognition of the nakba which was more important than achieving Palestinian statehood; in obeisance to universal principles, Israel should accept its accountability for ethnic cleansing, as a prelude to a future return of refugees; and, thirdly, an acceptance of the historic reality of Jewish suffering, a precondition for integrating Israelis into the larger Arab world within which their state was founded.
Haim Gerber, professor of Islamic history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued in 2004 that, as one could see from the research of Rashid Khalidi on the press in Arabic before WW1, a national Palestinian sentiment, or "Palestinianism", was attested before the onset of fully-fledged Zionist emigration under the British Mandate.