By Limor Simhony Philpott, CapX
When British politicians defend recognising a Palestinian state, they present it as the pragmatic, humane way out of a long-running border dispute. But this framing misreads what the Palestinian national movement has actually been about.
When five Arab nations declared war on Israel immediately after it was established in 1948, they assured the Arabs living in the land that once the Jews were defeated, the entire country would be theirs. From the beginning, the project was not about partition, compromise or two states, but about reclaiming the entire land.
Successive Palestinian leaders – from the PLO to the Palestinian Authority to Hamas – have followed that same path. To the West, they often speak the language of peace and negotiation. But at home, in Arabic, their rhetoric and actions tell another story: armed struggle, rejectionism, glorification of terrorism and the slogan of ‘throwing the Jews into the sea’. These are not the markers of a leadership preparing its people for coexistence, but of one committed to erasing Israel.
Palestinian nationhood itself is relatively recent, and remains fragmented. Before the British Mandate and the resurgence of Zionism, most Arab inhabitants of Palestine did not describe themselves as ‘Palestinian’. The name was imposed by outside powers, first by Greek and Roman invaders, later revived by the British in the First World War. Many of the Arabs living there had immigrated under Ottoman rule, especially in the nineteenth century, from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and beyond.
Their primary loyalties were not to a putative Palestinian nation-state but to broader Arab identity, clan networks and religious community. A distinct Palestinian nationalism only began to coalesce in the 1920s and 1930s. Even then, it was expressed more through pan-Arabism than as a standalone state project. This explains why the notion of a distinct Palestinian nation-state was never the movement’s primary goal. Leaders consistently framed their struggle in terms of broader Arab unity and religious resistance, rather than building a functional, independent state alongside Israel.
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