Bulletin of Palestine Studies

Abstract

The development of Palestinian historiography in the Mandate period is closely related to the debate about how and when a distinct Palestinian identity has emerged. The findings of the scholars who have examined Palestinian historiography of the Mandate period through history books point to a later date for the development of the Palestinian identity than the one suggested by the scholars who have focused on that identity per se. The present study aims to contribute to this debate by focusing on the specimens of historiography published in Palestinian Arab newspapers in the 1920s, namely before the proliferation of books that treated the history of Palestine as a distinct geographical entity. It shows that in these specimens there were signs of an unmistakable attachment to Palestine and its history, as distinct from Bilād al-Shām, coupled with a strong emphasis on their Arab character. Rather than supporting the studies dating the formation of a “Palestinian Arab” identity to the 1930s at the earliest, it tends to corroborate the arguments that such an identity had crystallized by the years following the Great War at the latest, that the “Palestinian” geographical and “Arab” ethnic components within this identity were fused without one submerging the other, and that the Palestinian identity was separated from the broader Bilād al-Shām identity.