Modern Arab and Palestinian national identity crystallized largely as anti-colonial reaction

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pan-Arab political culture predates and outlasts colonial and state boundaries — Youssef Cherif, Neo-pan-Arabism: a renewed contract of…, 32