With characteristic boldness (perhaps we should call it the "audacity of nope"), the GOP front-runner
du jour, Newt Gingrich, asserts that the Palestinians are "an invented people." This was a telling moment at the pander fest that was the Republican Jewish Coalition's candidates' forum. Having carefully not invited Rep. Ron Paul, the RJC insured that it would be no less. From the little that I saw of it, only Jon Huntsman-- while being warm toward his audience-- seems not to have gone overboard in this mode.
Although Gingrich's comment, according to
the JTA account, drew "rebukes" from some of his rivals, these were not anything like the points I'll raise here. First off, all nations are "invented" at the formative stage in their history. Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people and generally press their claim in some organized way. As the well-known Palestinian-American scholar Prof. Rashid Khalidi indicated in
Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), "National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given...."
Arab-Palestinian identity was largely a reaction to the Zionist movement reestablishing Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible and remembered reverentially in the Jewish religion for two millennia. Just as Palestinian nationalism was born of the Arab struggle against the Jews in the early to mid 20th century, the Jewish national rebirth occurred in Palestine, with Jewish identity made over from what was primarily (but not only) a religious heritage -- because of the tragic experience of Jews as a frequently trod-upon minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East.