Palestine Before Palestine
Why Islam, Not Communism or Nationalism, Defined the Conflict
Before “Palestinian nationalism” was ever uttered as a phrase, before communists in Moscow even bothered to discuss the Middle East, and long before Western academics tried to retroactively frame the conflict through Marxist or postmodern lenses, Palestine was an Islamic land. Its very status under the Ottomans was not debated in nationalist categories but in theological ones. Palestine belonged to Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, and that designation was not symbolic, it was binding. The land was not just territory; it was waqf, an inalienable trust consecrated to God. Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque gave it sacred gravity, making the defense of Palestine a religious duty long before it was ever recast as an anti-colonial slogan.
Ottoman administration entrenched this Islamic order. Sharia courts mediated daily life, waqf revenues funded mosques and schools, and the ulema gave religious legitimacy to political authority. Even as cracks appeared in the empire in the 19th century, the cultural language of loyalty was still Islamic. When the Nahda (Arab renaissance) began to stir nationalist thought among Arab intellectuals in Cairo and Beirut, in Palestine it barely registered beyond the coffeehouses of a few urban elites. For the masses, overwhelmingly rural, poor, devout, their world was structured by faith, not ideology.
This continuity mattered. Because when the empire collapsed in 1917–18 and Britain took over under the Mandate, the framework into which Zionism was received was not “national sovereignty” or “class struggle” but the religious framework of Dar al-Islam. To transfer this land to Jews, to promise it to another people, was not seen as a political experiment but a desecration of the sacred. The Balfour Declaration was received not merely as a betrayal of Arab interests but as a violation of God’s law. And that is why jihad, not nationalism, not communism, would define the reaction from the outset.
The First Communists: Imported Revolutionaries in the Wrong Soil
After World War I, communism attempted to plant itself in Palestine, carried on the backs of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Many of these young men and women had been socialists in Warsaw or Odessa, steeped in the rhetoric of class struggle and inspired by Lenin’s revolution of 1917. They arrived in Palestine determined to transplant Marxism into the Middle East.
In 1919 they formed the Socialist Workers Movement (MOPS) Mifleget Poalim Sozialistim, which soon internally fractured into competing factions. Some believed that Zionism itself could be justified as a socialist project, the creation of a Jewish workers’ society on Palestinian soil. Others, skeptical of Zionist colonization, leaned toward a universalist anti-imperialism that called for solidarity with Arab workers. The Comintern in Moscow, ever eager to expand its network in the colonial world, recognized that the only way for communism to survive in Palestine was to “Arabize.” In 1923 the factions merged into a single Palestine Communist Party (PCP), formally recognized by the Comintern in 1924. On paper it looked promising: anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, solidarity with the Arab masses. In reality, it was a joke. Membership was still overwhelmingly Jewish, and Arab recruits were few and far between. The PCP’s atheism alone was fatal in a deeply religious society. To tell a Palestinian peasant that the defense of al-Aqsa was not about God but about “class struggle” was not only insulting, it was incomprehensible.
The PCP tried to bridge the divide. They sponsored Ehdut in 1926, a binational workers’ organization meant to unite Arabs and Jews under one class banner. It collapsed almost instantly. Arabs distrusted Jewish motives, suspecting that “internationalism” was a Trojan horse for Zionism. Jews, meanwhile, were reluctant to abandon the Zionist principle of “Hebrew labor” that excluded Arabs from work. The communists had engineered a perfect ideological cul-de-sac: too Zionist for Arabs, too anti-Zionist for Jews, too atheist for everyone.
By the early 1930s, the PCP survived only because Moscow subsidized it. Britain monitored it, Zionist leaders distrusted it, Arab nationalists dismissed it. The Comintern kept demanding “Arabization,” and eventually in 1934, under Radwan al-Hilu, the PCP got its first Arab secretary-general. But even this breakthrough could not disguise the obvious: the communists were outsiders, parasites on a conflict they neither created nor could control.
Nationalists: Petitions, Politics, and Powerlessness
If the communists failed because they had no roots, the nationalists at least had names, families, and social standing. In the 1920s and 1930s, two families dominated Palestinian politics: the Husseinis and the Nashashibis. They led the Arab Executive, petitioned the British, and maneuvered for influence. They spoke in the language of nationalism, invoking Arab unity and the right of self-determination. But for all their rhetoric, their mobilizing power was weak. Nationalism among the educated elite was just that, elite. It circulated in newspapers, not in mosques; in notables’ salons, not in peasant villages. The Nashashibis, in particular, often preferred accommodation with the British and even cooperation with Zionists when it suited their interests. This pragmatism only deepened the divide between them and the broader population, who wanted something more visceral, more binding than nationalist speeches.
Nationalism also suffered from being conceptually thin. What exactly did it mean to be “Palestinian” in the 1920s? Most people’s identity was still local (a village, a clan) or religious (Muslim, Christian). The idea of “nation” was abstract, borrowed from European categories. Islam, on the other hand, was not abstract. It was the lived reality of prayer, law, community, and history. That is why nationalist slogans could not compete with the religious cry that “al-Aqsa is in danger.”
This explains why the most consequential Palestinian leader of the Mandate period was not a secular nationalist but a religious authority: Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Haj Amin al-Husseini
Appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, Husseini became the single most important figure in Palestinian politics. His power was not bureaucratic but spiritual. As head of the Supreme Muslim Council, he controlled the waqf funds, the mosques, the religious schools. In a society where Islam framed daily life, this meant he controlled the very soul of the people. Husseini’s genius, and his danger, was in fusing religious obligation with nationalist politics. He did not frame opposition to Zionism as merely “political” or “economic.” He declared it sacred. To defend Palestine was to defend Islam itself, and to fight the Jews was to fulfill the command of God. This gave nationalism a backbone it otherwise lacked. Under Husseini, nationalism put on Islamic armor.