LOcATING THe ZIONIST-ARAB eNcOUNTeR • 35I focus on the ideas of Palestine’s Zionists^74 (rather than those of
all yishuv residents) in my analysis of Jews’ perceptions of their non-
Jewish neighbors in order to look particularly at those individuals and
communities who we would imagine employed primarily nationalist
modes of categorization. after all, we might not be surprised were we
to find that antinationalist Jews did not conceive of their Arab neigh-
bors in exclusively national terms— why would they think of others as
members of nations when they did not even consider themselves as
such? Ideological Zionists who believed that they were first and fore-
most members of a Jewish nation, on the other hand, would perhaps
see not only themselves but also the world around them primarily in
national terms. thus it is especially interesting to discover the religious
and racial aspects of committed Zionists’ perceptions of their neighbors
in palestine.
The issue of national identity among Palestine’s Arabs is more com-
plicated still. The loyalties and national identities of Palestine’s Arabs—
that is, native Muslim and christian Arabic- speakers— were at this
stage multifarious and in flux. As Rashid Khalidi has shown, Arabs
of Late Ottoman palestine could simultaneously imagine themselves
as loyal Ottomans, Muslims or Christians, arabs, palestinians, while
also associating strongly with their hometown or village and extended
family.^75 While recent scholarship has argued that distinctly palestin-
ian national identity existed even before the First World War, because
of the extent of the variety of palestinian arab identities at this early
stage in the development and articulation of these notions, it would
not be possible to write this book only about individuals who affiliated
exclusively or even primarily as palestinians. I therefore have chosen
the category of arabs of palestine or palestinian arabs, which I use
interchangeably, though of course I remain cognizant of the particular
national identities of the subjects of this study, to the extent that they
may be discerned.^76
(^74) I include in this study individuals such as eliezer Ben- Yehuda, who, motivated by
Jewish nationalist ideology, immigrated to palestine in 1881. technically Zionism as an
official organization was founded only in 1897, with Theodor Herzl’s establishment of
the Zionist Congress; while acknowledging the somewhat anachronistic terminology, I
include in this study Jewish palestinocentric nationalists in palestine (e.g., those associ-
ated with the hibbat Zion or Bilu movements) even before 1897.
(^75) See especially the chapter “Competing and Overlapping Loyalties in Ottoman Jeru-
salem” in Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 63– 88.
(^76) In my use of the term palestinian arab, I follow Lockman, who writes: “adding the
term ‘Arab’ when referring to the people whom we would today simply call ‘the Pales-
tinians’ may seem redundant, but in fact it avoids an anachronism, for it was really only
after 1948 that the palestinian arab people came to call themselves, and be called by
others, simply palestinians. During the mandate period most palestinian organizations