Opinion | We Are Palestinians - The New York Times 5/4/23, 10:06 AM

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/opinion/we-are-palestinians.html

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

We Are Palestinians
Daoud Kuttab
Dec. 14, 2011

JERUSALEM — When they were young, one of my children’s favorite games was reciting the family lineage. In our
culture a person’s full name is a combination of his paternal parentage. My son, born in Jerusalem in 1988, would say
his name is Bishara Daoud George Musa Qustandi Musa Kuttab.

Our family name came from the profession two brothers had a long time ago. The first Kuttabs were scribes who sat
outside the court and wrote up petitions for people who had a claim with the authorities. Kuttab is Arabic for writers or
scribes.

Upon graduating from North Park University in Chicago and returning to Palestine, Bishara visited the St. James
Orthodox Church in the Old City of Jerusalem. He met with the head of the local Palestinian Christian parish. Using
extensive baptismal records, they were able to patch together the history of Kuttabs in Jerusalem for hundreds of
years. This turned into a family tree that has been circulated on Facebook to all Kuttabs.

My son’s visit had another reason: He wanted to collect rent on our family’s property. On the eve of World War I, many
Palestinian families turned their properties over to local churches or the Islamic Waqf (trust) for safekeeping. The
properties were controlled by the churches but the owners were able to collect a meager rent. Our history is typical of
many Palestinians.

When my father was born in 1922, the world was abuzz with the self-determination doctrine advanced by President
Woodrow Wilson. Palestinian Arabs attempted to become independent after the British mandate ended, but the British
pledged Palestine simultaneously to Jews and Arabs.

In addition to owning property, my father had a passport issued by the government of Palestine and he often showed
us Palestinian coins that he had used before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Dad, his brother Qustandi and their mother
escaped the violence to Zarqa in Jordan. Their sister, Hoda, decided to stay on with her family and lost her husband,
Elias Awad, in the fighting that broke out in the Musrara district just outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate.

My grandmother’s family, the Fatallehs, left their home in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem and, as Palestinian
refugee, have been barred by Israel from returning. Their house still stands, not far from the King David Hotel.

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Opinion | We Are Palestinians - The New York Times 5/4/23, 10:06 AM

Raquel Marín

With the unification of the Palestinians under the Palestine Liberation Organization, and with the Arab and
international recognition the P.L.O. acquired, questions began to arise over Palestinian identity and nationhood. In
1969, for example, the Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel declared, “There were no such thing as Palestinians.”

Nearly 25 years later, in 1993, Meir’s successor, Yitzhak Rabin, shook hands with Yasir Arafat after the P.L.O. and
Israel exchanged letters of recognition. The handshake on the South Lawn of the White House was witnessed by
President Bill Clinton and leading Jewish and non-Jewish American leaders and members of Congress.

Newt Gingrich attended that ceremony, and reportedly shook hands with Arafat. Now, as a Republican candidate for
president, he is claiming that the Palestinian people were “invented” because there was never a Palestinian state. The
107 states that recognized Palestine as a full member of Unesco would seriously disagree with this logic.

Gingrich never does say what should happen to this “invented” people if he is elected president.

The people themselves are the best authority on what a people is. If the learned Republican nominee really wants to
know who Palestinians are, I would suggest he listen to what they say about themselves.

The historian Rashid Khalidi, in his book “Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness,”
argues that the fierce conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is one reason why the Palestinian identity is so poorly
understood. He traces the development of the Palestinians’ identity to the late Ottoman area, “when they had multiple
loyalties to their religion, the Ottoman state, the Arabic language, and the emerging identity of Arabism, as well as
their country and local and familial foci.”

In the end, however, Gingrich’s attempt to deny Palestinians their identity has nothing to do with history. It is simply
political pandering.

The majority of Israelis and Palestinians understand that they must share the land between the Mediterranean and
the River Jordan. The last thing we need is for American politicians to use our lives and future as a political football.

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Opinion | We Are Palestinians - The New York Times 5/4/23, 10:06 AM

Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist who was born and lives in Jerusalem.
A version of this article appears in print on in The International Herald Tribune

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