Objectives

This joint research project brings the perspectives of anthropology, history, political science, geography, and sociology to a comparative study of Palestinian nationalism, Zionism, and Arab nationalism.

The origins of Palestinian nationalism has been traced to 1834, the year of popular uprisings against the Ottoman Empire in the major cities of Palestine (Kimmering and Midgal 1995). There have, however, been numerous critiques of this view, citing, for example, reaction against the great powers splitting off of Syria and the colonization of Palestine. The thesis advanced by Khalidi (1997) that Palestinian identity was formed in opposition to Zionism is particularly well-known. Whatever the case, there is no denying that Palestinian nationalism was fueled by the clash of Arab nationalism in Arab territories on the periphery of the Ottoman Empire with Zionist colonization originating in Russia and Eastern Europe. For this project, we have invited experts on all three nationalisms, Palestinian, Arab and Zionist to share information in an effort to deepen understanding of the relationships among them.

Research Results

Our goal of conducting a diverse comparative study in this joint research on Arab/Palestinian Nationalism and Zionism was largely achieved. Based on each joint researcher’s interest, we redefined existing assumptions and studied how nationalism had been represented in cultural activities in order to broaden each other’s knowledge. In particular, we could boast that our attempts to review the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century through the perspectives of neglected or forgotten individual narratives, which tend to be omitted from conventional studies or undervalued in the current social trend of placing importance on broad political analysis and quantitative data, provided unique viewpoints to Palestinian and Zionism research. Our specialist researchers were able to make use of both historical and anthropological methods to study the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is necessary to conduct a fact-finding survey in future because those with firsthand experience of that period are rapidly aging.

Another result of this research was that we were able to provide a place for interaction and contemplation among young and middle-level researchers. Although joint Palestinian-Israeli research is also undertaken by the NIHU Program for Islamic Area Studies at the University of Tokyo, we were able to adopt different themes and methods. It was regrettable that some researchers were replaced so often because the core members of our study were made up of researchers in a generation susceptible to personnel changes. However, we are still in contact with those who left our joint research and believe that our relationship will lead to further developments in our future study.