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" Palestinianism" is a term occasionally used to denote either the national political movement or identity of the Palestinian people. It gained currency by its use in the works of Edward Said to describe a certain vein of theology opposed to Christian Zionism and that challenges Zionism and the right of Israel to exist.
The word was employed as a term in its modern meaning as early as 1970 by Edward Said in his work "A Palestinian voice". It was also used by Alfred Sherman, the London correspondent for Haaretz at the time also in 1970, while expressing his surprise that the Palestinians' bid for independent statehood had garnered widespread support in Western world.
Multiple observers in the early 1970s were under the impression that Palestinian national identity was a product of the late 1960s. Sherman was supportive of the view that it emerged after the disillusionment with the outcome of the Six-Day War, in the aftermath of which Palestinian Arabs realized that they had to rely on their own resources, rather than on the broader Arab world, to secure their aspirations. However others pointed to its prior existence in the early 20th century in Mandatory Palestine, as well as the period between 1948 and 1967.
According to Sherman, Israeli Jews were uncomfortable with Palestinian nationalism, since the aspiration of Palestinians for statehood ("Palestinianism") mirrored exactly what Jews had sought by Zionism. To challenge Palestinians on this ground would mean Israelis would find themselves querying a right they themselves had asserted and therefore implicitly question the legitimacy of the Israeli state itself.
In 1973, John B. Wolf made a similar diagnosis to that advanced by Sherman: the 1967 war had compelled Palestinians to recognize the truth of their isolation from allies, and their "Palestinianism" thereby developed two goals: to reintegrate themselves with the land they lost, and strive to change a politics that had excluded and "negated their presence", denying Palestinians a say in their own future.
As construed by Ilan Pappé, Said's "Palestinianism" was a compromise between the narrow call of nationalist impulses and the universalism he subscribed to, consisting in striving to overcome both Zionism and Arab tyrannies by the three principles of acknowledgement, accountability and acceptance: namely, global recognition of the Nakba which was more important than achieving Palestinian statehood; in obeisance to universal principles, Israel should accept its accountability for ethnic cleansing, as a prelude to a future return of refugees; and, thirdly, an acceptance of the historic reality of Jewish suffering, a precondition for integrating Israelis into the larger Arab world within which their state was founded.
Haim Gerber, professor of Islamic history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued in 2004 that, as one could see from the research of Rashid Khalidi on the press in Arabic before WW1, a national Palestinian sentiment, or "Palestinianism", was attested before the onset of fully-fledged Zionist emigration under the British Mandate.
Two years later, Jason Franks employed it to denote the ensemble of values, beliefs, traditions and history underwriting Palestinian nationhood. In his analysis, it stood in diametrical opposition to Zionism, and both it and Zionism were twin ideological codes competing in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, both accounting for the terroristic, nationalist and religious elements driving the conflict.The roots of Palestinianism lay, he further argued, in the Young Turks' revolt in 1908, which was crucial to the emergence of a Palestinian nationalist sentiment in that period because the revolution in Turkey freed up the press from Ottoman Empire, and enabled local assertions of a distinct identity to emerge. It developed thereafter "not only (as) a reaction against Zionism and British imperialism but also against the wider Arab world."
In her 2016 monograph on Palestinian film history, Chrisoula Lionis challenged the recency theory of Palestinian identity. In tracing the development of national awareness, she detects a transition via three core episodes from "Palestinianess", stirred by both the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the 1948 nakba, which crystallised this national consciousness of Palestinianess, to "Palestinianism" proper, which she sees as the outcome of the Battle of Karameh in 1968.
The term was subsequently picked up as a negative description for the Palestinian cause, by British journalist Melanie Phillips in her , where she claimed that the Muslim Association of Britain, in her view an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, had become the "spearhead" of "radical Palestinianism." in Great Britain.
In 2007, the idea that Palestinian national rights were a threat to Western civilization, and in particular to its religious values, was argued for in a book by evangelical theologian Paul Wilkinson, assistant Minister at Hazel Grove Full Gospel Church in Stockport, Cheshire and a member of Tim LaHaye's Rapture. A British Christian Zionist, in that year he devoted a chapter in his book For Zion's Sake, to what he called "Christian Palestinianism", as the antithesis of Christian Zionism. He pursued his assertions in more detail in 2017, in the second volume, entitled Israel Betrayed – Volume 2: The rise of Christian Palestinianism, of his study of Supersessionism.
Wilkinson's critique of Christian Palestinianism holds that Christians must acknowledge that God's "sovereign hand" established Israel in 1948. Only pro-Zionists are true Christians, since the ingathering of Jews to Palestine is a precondition for the parousia. Unconditional support of the Jewish state of Israel is premised on a Christian anticipation of the Messianism. Wilkinson says that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, their nation, language, culture and religion are hoaxes perpetrated by anti-Christian liberals. The very idea itself is merely "another tactical manoeuvre in the Islamic war waged against Israel to effect her destruction." Other Christians, in particular Palestinian Christians who criticize Israel, speaking of the "perceived" suffering of Palestinians, foment Jew-hatred in favouring pro-Palestinian propaganda. Non-Zionists are anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizers. The book was excoriated by theologian Darren M. Slade. professor of humanities at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
According to Tower Magazine journalist, and former advisor to The Israel Project Ben Cohen, Palestinianism is the core ideology informing recent antisemitism, one that assumes the guise of a social movement which, bundling together neo-fascists, liberals, extreme leftists, and Islamicists, is militantly opposed to the age of Jewish self-empowerment after 1945.
In 2018, a pro-Zionist English blogger David Collier, whose mission was described as one "show(ing) everybody how toxic our enemies are", claimed that Palestinianism was a threat to freedom of speech and the cause of human rights, an infective agent of anti-Semitism:
"Palestinianism" is a disease that is anathema to freedom, to debate, to openness and to human rights. ... It will infect those who catch the disease with anti-Semitism just as it provides them with a denial mechanism to protest their innocence.
The bigotry of anti-Palestinianism, for Beinart, is "ubiquitous" notwithstanding the fact that, unlike "anti-Israeli" or "anti-Jewish", the word "anti-Palestinian" hardly exists. Any Google search, he found, will unfold an endless number of links associating such politicians with antisemitism, whereas Google yields no evidence that the congressmen he cites – Mike Waltz, Jim Banks, Claudia Tenney, Ted Deutch, Josh Gottheimer, Kathy Manning, Elaine Luria, and Dean Phillips – who repeat these accusations in the House of Representatives, are hostile to Palestinians, despite his claim that there is strong evidence for their bias in this regard. Beinart considers that the group of Democrats accusing Israel of apartheid practices or Supremacism (B'Tselem) are simply reflecting an opposition to violations of international law: a view shared by NGOs like Human Rights Watch. Beinart makes an historical analogy between anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism. There was no term to denote treating Jews as inferior before pressure for treating Jews equally gained some political traction in the 19th century. Once they had achieved legal recognition, the term anti-Semitism came into vogue to denote those hostile to parity of rights for Jewish citizens. A similar logic applies to the term (anti-)Palestinianism. Throughout the 20th century, American and Israeli discourse hardly tolerated a word like Palestinian. It is still unmentionable that Palestinians also deserve equality, and relentless allegations that those who advocate for Palestinian equality are ipso facto anti-Semitic constitute, for Beinart, a form of bigotry. The effectiveness of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism strikingly illustrates the way, thus construed, anti-Palestinian oppressive practices are silenced.
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