Reply To: Who as here [Israel] first Jews or the Palestinians?

The notion of a Palestinian Arab national identity became possible in 1916, when Sykes and Picot separated the southern sanjaks from the rest of the former Ottoman Syrian vilayet (=E.I). This separated the Arabs in the southern areas (“Southern Syria”) from their erstwhile capital, Damascus. That’s not to say that they became a Palestinian Arab national group. Evidence: the Mufti chaired the Arab Higher Committee, not the Palestinian one, and the 1947 UN partition plan and its related literature spoke only of Arab and Jewish states, never a Palestinian one. The Palestinian national consciousness is more recent than that and more recent than R. Gafni’s birth.