Palestinian National Identity as a Zionist Creation: Q-Analyses

Abstract

A central theme in the discussions above was the proposition that Zionism created and recreated Palestinianism, with the intifada (the Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories that began in December 1987) as the climax of spatial, social, and historical processes. This proposition arose peripherally to discussions on Palestinian labour in Israel and the resultant relations between Israelis and Palestinians. It was based on an interpretation of historical sources and on the analyses of data from our survey of Palestinian workers in Israel. The present chapter focuses directly on this proposition. Its origin was a paper I presented at a conference on War Peace and Geography in which I elaborated on this proposition (Portugali, 1989a). This provided a starting point for a subsequent study, conducted in collaboration with M. Sonis, in which we employed Q-analyses as means to obtain further insight into the process by which the integration of the Palestinians into the Israeli labour market paved the way for the intifada.

Based on a collaborative paper, Portugali and Sonis, 1991.