On December 17, 2010, a Tunisian street vendor, Muhammad Bouazizi, set himself on fire in front of the local government building in Sidi Bouzid, a small town in central Tunisia. Earlier in the day, a policewoman had confiscated his wares and publicly humiliated him. He tried to complain at the local municipality, but to no avail. It was then that he went to the local market and bought the flammable liquid with which he doused himself.

This chapter explores how Jews and the indigenous inhabitants came to see themselves as members of national communities. It begins with a description of “culture of nationalism” –– a collective belief in society that the assumptions that undergird nationalism are part of the natural order. It then describes how the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and the Jews of mainly Eastern Europe, embedded within empires undergoing transformations that imbued them with structures associated with modern states, came to see themselves as a homogeneous grouping. In the case of the indigenous population of Palestine, that grouping was imperial in scope. The Jews of Eastern Europe, however, were “othered” by the majority community, and thus came to see themselves as a people apart.

It was the PLO and the work of its chairman, Yasir Arafat, that made it impossible for the world to ignore the Palestinian issue. The PLO was born in the age of national liberation struggles, when national liberation movements took as their model the struggle for Algerian independence and when violent revolution undertaken by a select group of cadres provided the means to achieve movement goals. Although by the early 1970s the PLO was recognized by most of the world as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” it was never able to fully shed the national liberation model. And although the PLO was recognized as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” two phenomena that came about in the late 1980s called that recognition into question: an uprising in the occupied territories (intifada), during which a local Palestinian leadership emerged; and the emergence of an Islamist movement, Hamas, which would eventually take control of Gaza, leading to a division within the movement.

After the close of the Cold War, a delegation of Israelis met with a delegation of Palestinians in Oslo, Norway, and hammered out a plan to bring peace between the two national communities. The result –– the Oslo Accords –– consisted of two parts: recognition of Israel by the Palestinians and recognition of a Palestinian nation by the Israelis; and a roadmap for step-by-step negotiations between the two sides for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and a final settlement of issues that had been outstanding since 1948 and 1967. Peace, however, was not to be for a variety of reasons: spoilers on both sides; publics that grew disenchanted with waiting or with only half a loaf; politicians who never rose to the occasion by becoming statesmen; the imbalance in power and negotiating positions; the passing of a singular window of opportunity that, over time, diminished to a vanishing point. The “era of Oslo” came to an end in 2020, when Donald Trump offered a “peace plan” that, in fact, gave the Israelis everything and the Palestinians nothing.

The British devised a variety of schemes to try to make their Palestine mandate work before they threw up their hands and gave in. During the lead-up to World War II the British proposed dividing the territory between Jews and Arabs. Then when the Great Revolt threatened to spiral out of control they gave up that plan and offered one that would lead to a single state. During World War II, conditions in Palestine actually improved, and the situation temporarily calmed. But with the end of hostilities and an upsurge in Zionist violence, the British dumped the Palestine issue on the United Nations, which voted to divide the territory. The vote sparked two wars: the first, a civil war between the Jewish and Arab communities of Palestine; the second, an invasion of Palestine by surrounding states. The victory of the Zionists in both had two results: the creation of the State of Israel in its internationally accepted borders, and the nakba, the flight of 720,000 Palestinians across ceasefire lines. Many of the refugees and their descendants remain in refugee camps throughout the area supported by the United Nations and various donor states and organizations.

This chapter traces the emergence of Palestinian nationalism from its beginning through the Great Revolt (1936––39), when it becomes a mass movement. Unlike the Zionists, Palestinians under the Ottomans had never been compelled to define themselves, and thus Palestinian nationalism emerged later than Zionism. Nationalism in Palestine went through a number of incarnations. First, the Ottomans attempted to promote their own brand of nationalism, osmanlilik. After the empire was dismantled, a number of nationalists in Palestine embraced a Greater Syrian nationalism. Over time, a Syrian identity for Palestinians became untenable: the mandates system had divided French-controlled Syria from British-controlled Palestine, the two territories evolved in different ways, and Palestinians faced the wholesale settlement of Europeans in their midst. The mobilization of townsmen and farmers during the Great Revolt ensured Palestinian nationalism would remain the dominant nationalist strain in Palestine.

This chapter looks at the effects of World War I on Palestine and the Zionist movement. During the war, the entente powers viewed Ottoman territories as spoils of war, although they differed on who would get what. This was because the secret treaties they signed with each other and pledges to others were mutually contradictory and/or ambiguous. One pledge, the Balfour Declaration, promised the Zionist movement a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, thereby giving political Zionism the victory it needed to ensure the survival of the movement. After the war, the entente met to decide the future of Ottoman territory and came up with the “mandates system,” which created a new political form comparable to a temporary colony. Britain received the mandate for Palestine. The Jewish community there cooperated with the British and established structures compatible with the mandate. The indigenous community rejected both the Balfour Declaration and the mandate. As a result, it lacked the structures that might have prevented the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.

Every nationalism is a “house of many mansions,” and Zionism and Palestinian nationalism are no different. This chapter examines the various strains that have emerged in each nationalism by focusing in on the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, erected at the 1939––40 New York World”s Fair, and Palestinian poetry, particularly poems and poets that address the nakba. The Jewish Palestine Pavilion addressed a number of audiences, including hardliners in the Yishuv and American Jews who had created their own “American Zionism.” Planners clashed on a number of issues, including the representation of Palestinians and women in the pavilion, which went to the heart of the Zionist project. Palestinian poets, on the other hand, have dealt with the nakba in various ways, from bereavement to anger (at both Israelis and those who left) to finding commonality with those who forced them to leave.

This chapter traces the emergence of the Zionist movement and the colonization of Palestine from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. It begins with two Zionist pioneers. The first, Theodor Herzl––the father of political Zionism––was important both for his approach to Jewish colonization (he sought the backing of a Great Power for the project) and for his organizational skills which created structures in Europe that nurtured the movement. The second, Leo Pinsker––the father of Practical Zionism––believed the Jews of Europe could not wait, and thus organized Jewish emigration to Palestine. While the first attempts at colonization failed, the chapter goes on to discuss three more waves of immigration. The second and third wave were inspired by socialism and Romanticism, and the structures they created––which lasted well into the statehood period––reflected this. The fourth wave, however, was mainly made up of economic refugees who were attracted to a rightwing, petit-bourgeois ideology. They and their descendents became influential in Israel beginning in the late 1970s.

Although some histories of the conflict between Zionists/Israelis and Palestinians call the totality of the struggle the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” the term more properly refers to a fifty-year period between the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Oslo Accords of 1993, when the goal of much of the world was to make peace between Israel and its neighbors and the question of the Palestinians seemingly dropped by the wayside. From 1948 to 1967, the conflict settled into a stalemate, with Arab states refusing to recognize Israel and Israel consolidating the state at home. That stalemate was broken with the 1967 war, which created a dynamic bargaining proposition: land-for-peace. With the exception of an Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 1979, whereby Israel withdrew from the Sinai, that proposition proved elusive for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most significant of which was Israeli settlement policies.

The chapter looks at the geography of the territory west of the Jordan River, and describes how competing nationalist narratives –– Zionism and Palestinian nationalism –– have inscribed meaning not only in that geography, but in the pre-national history of the two “peoples” with rival claims to the land.