British rule created the political entity of Palestine and a Palestinian nationality.

Evidence

The constitution or the formation of a political entity called Palestine which eventually gave rise to a nationality called Palestinian and the reconstitution of Jerusalem as the capital were, it seems to me, very important, and as it turns out, lasting innovations of the British Mandate. Even in the Ottoman period Jerusalem was the capital of the district of Jerusalem, but there were separate districts ruled from other cities such as Safed and Nabulus and Gaza. All of them sub-divisions of larger provinces governed at various times from Damascus, Si­ don, or Beirut. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 818 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Palestinians as a people and Arabs more generally, more regionally, as a pan-national self-identification emerged in modern terms first in the earlier decades of the twentieth century as expressions of anti-colonial and autonomous sensibilities, interests, and commitments. The heterogeneity among Arabs living throughout the region sought a more cohering identity in the face of intensifying British and French colonization after World War I, the discovery of large holdings of oil, growing anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia, and ultimately the founding of Israel. The name “Palestine” was reinvoked by the British in the early 1920s upon receiving a League of Nations mandate to rule over the territory after Ottoman imperial control in the late nineteenth century had folded it into the southern extension of Syria. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 555 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Though ‘it is linked with ancient Jewish tradition’, the Jewish national home of Mandate Palestine was, the commissioners argued, ‘predominantly a culture of the West’. The Asian Palestinian Arabs, therefore, possessed ‘little kinship’ with the Zionist community. The Semitic family was no more. ‘There is’, the report stated, ‘no common ground between them’. The nationalism of the two communities was the greatest barrier to peace, but the separation went further: ‘Their cultural and social life, their ways of thought and conduct, are as incompatible as their national aspirations.’ Indeed, the authors argued, ‘It has long been obvious that the notion of a cultural “assimilation” between Arab and Jew is a phantasy.’ The Commission talked of Jews and Palestinians as two separate races, and contended that the only possibility for peace lay in territorial partition and racial separation, with a transfer of populations to solve the ‘cardinal problem’ of minorities living in what were to be racially defined states. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 702 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The name Palestine was never attached to a state before the British Mandate.; British administrative unification, not Ottoman precedent, created Palestine as a single political unit — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 818; The British civil-service concept transplanted a distinctively British model of authority into Palestine (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• British administrative unification, not Ottoman precedent, created Palestine as a single political unit #corroborates (0.95) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 818
• Modern Arab and Palestinian national identity crystallized largely as anti-colonial reaction #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 555
• British colonial administration deemed Jews and Palestinian Arabs racially inseparable into one nation #complicates (0.80) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 702
• A Palestinian nationalist movement emerged immediately in 1918 with statist sovereignty aims #complicates (0.75) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 693