This isn't a new idea: I've heard people on the right and the left saying it for decades: there would be no Palestinian national identity without help from Zionism. Somewhere in the 19th century, during a period in which Europeans were coming together or apart in forming nations, early Zionists, in response to ancient patterns of persecution towards them, began to imagine a common national identity and homeland for Jews everywhere. The only problem was that Palestine emerged as the most likely candidate and this happened to be already occcupied by other people.

Other people, but not necessarily a People. Those living here did not so much have a sense of being a nation either. Borders, back then, under the Ottoman empire, were fluid. It was only with the help of Europeans that national boundaries, often with the help of pencils and rulers that drew straight lines on the map, were formed.

Whenever someone boxes us in and declares that everyone in that box belong together, we decide that as citizens of the new box, we need a flag and an anthem and begin to develop a sense of nationhood. And then, sometimes we begin to play a game of defining common characteristics of the dominant group within the box and deciding that the true Izzians have blond hair, blue eyes, speak the language of the capital and belong to a certain faith, to the exclusion of others who inconveniently live among us.

Palestinians had a common language and shared cultural characteristics, true, but with many regional variants and extensible borders. They only began to really come together as a people in response to the incursions of Zionism and especially the Nakba, which exiled many of them from their historic homeland, just as Jews had once been exiled from the same location. Or some of them (one of the paradoxes of today's conflict is that the Jews that remained from the Roman period became the Palestinians of today, whereas Jews elsewhere emerged partly as a result of religious conversion).

Palestinian national identity was forged in opposition to Zionism, just as Zionism and the realization of the Zionist dream of a homeland came as a result of persecution by Europeans.

The Europeans, for their part, due to their ancient xenophobia, were happy to rid themselves of the Jews, who had a different religion and perceived cultural characteristics, even if in other ways they were almost identical to themselves. It did not matter to Europeans that this would create a new problem in another land. After all, the lives of Arabs were worth even less than the lives of Jews, and there were important economic interests in establishing a western-style state in the midst of them.