Table of Contents
Framing a Palestinian Historical Narrative
The Palestinian historical narrative is not a single, uniform story, but a broad pattern of shared themes, memories, and interpretations that many Palestinians recognize as their own. It is shaped by geography, religion, class, and political ideology, and by whether someone lives in the occupied territories, inside Israel, in refugee camps, or in the wider diaspora. Yet across these differences, some key elements repeat: a deep connection to the land, a story of dispossession and resistance, and a persistent claim to peoplehood and rights.
This chapter presents that narrative in its own logic and language, without asking whether it is “correct” or “incorrect.” Later chapters and your own critical work can compare competing narratives and weigh evidence. Here, the aim is to understand how many Palestinians see their own history, what meanings they draw from it, and how it shapes their politics and identity today.
Deep Roots and Indigenous Presence
A central pillar of the Palestinian narrative is the belief that Palestinians are an indigenous people of the land known historically as Palestine. The story starts long before the modern conflict, in a deep past that includes Canaanites, ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, and others. Palestinians tend to see themselves as the product of all these layers, with a particular emphasis on the Arabization and Islamization of the region after the 7th century.
In this view, Palestinian identity developed over centuries through shared language, customs, and ties to specific cities, villages, and regions. Families trace their presence to particular towns and agricultural lands. Place names, shrines, mosques, churches, and cemeteries are treated as living evidence of continuous presence. Even when people did not call themselves “Palestinians” in the modern national sense, they are retrospectively understood as ancestors of the contemporary Palestinian people.
This sense of rootedness is closely linked to the land itself. In Palestinian memory, the land is not an abstract territory but a patchwork of orchards, fields, olive groves, and pastures that sustained communities for generations. The village, or balad, and the city neighborhood, or hāra, form the basic units of belonging. Stories of planting trees, harvesting olives, and building stone houses serve as proof of ownership and care. This attachment is often expressed as a moral claim: a people who worked, lived, and were buried here for centuries cannot simply be replaced.
Ottoman Period and Everyday Life Before Upheaval
When Palestinians describe the period under Ottoman rule, they usually do not focus on imperial politics, but on the texture of everyday life that they say existed before the great ruptures of the 20th century. Villages and towns are remembered as socially cohesive, religiously diverse, and relatively autonomous communities. People recall Muslim, Christian, and Jewish neighbors who shared markets and sometimes even family ties.
In nationalist memory, local notables, religious leaders, and urban elites represent an early form of Palestinian leadership. Palestinian historians often point to the growth of newspapers, charitable societies, and educational institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as evidence of an emerging local public sphere. These developments are seen as the seeds of a distinct Palestinian political identity that would later confront Zionism and European colonial power.
Crucially, Palestinians tend to reject the idea that their land was “empty” or “underdeveloped” before Zionist settlement. They highlight agriculture, trade, and cultural life in cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza, and Acre. Photographs, memoirs, and travel accounts are used to reconstruct a picture of a society that, while often poor and hierarchical, was vibrant and rooted. This remembered world becomes the baseline against which later loss and displacement are measured.
Zionism and British Rule Through a Palestinian Lens
In the Palestinian narrative, the rise of Zionism and the British Mandate are not primarily stories of Jewish national revival or British statecraft, but of a foreign project gaining power with imperial backing at the expense of the indigenous population.
Zionism is typically understood by Palestinians as a European settler movement that sought to transform Palestine into a state with a Jewish majority. While Palestinians often acknowledge longstanding Jewish religious and historical ties to the land, they usually distinguish those ties from the political project of Zionism. The arrival of Jewish immigrants in growing numbers, particularly under British rule, is experienced as demographic pressure and a direct threat to Palestinian land and political future.
The Balfour Declaration and British Mandatory policies are remembered as acts of betrayal that disregarded the majority Arab population. From this perspective, Britain promised a “national home” to another people in a land where Palestinians already lived and held the vast majority of property. Restrictions on Palestinian political representation, land laws that facilitated Jewish land purchase, and the suppression of Palestinian revolts are described as a colonial strategy that weakened the indigenous society while empowering the Zionist movement.
This period is therefore a key moment of politicization in Palestinian memory. Resistance to Zionist immigration and British rule is recast as a legitimate anti-colonial struggle. Figures who opposed British and Zionist policies, whether through petition, protest, or armed revolt, are central in schoolbooks, commemorations, and family stories. The narrative presents Palestinians not as passive victims but as a people who recognized the threat and tried to resist with the means available to them.
The Nakba as Foundational Trauma
The events of 1947 to 1949 occupy a unique place in Palestinian historical consciousness under the name “al Nakba,” the Catastrophe. In Palestinian memory, this is not just a war between armies or a failed political project. It is the defining wound that shapes almost every aspect of identity, politics, and emotion.
According to the Palestinian narrative, the Nakba involved the mass displacement of the majority of the Palestinian Arab population from their homes, the destruction or depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the denial of return. People remember a sequence of fear, violence, flight, and, in many cases, expulsion by Zionist militias which later formed the core of the Israeli army. Stories of massacres and terror are woven into family histories, with certain place names symbolizing the horror of that period.
A central claim is that this displacement was not an accidental byproduct of war, but part of a systematic process to secure a Jewish majority in the new state. Even when the historical scholarship is debated, Palestinian memory tends to interpret patterns of attack, the destruction of homes, and the prevention of return as proof of an intentional policy of removing Palestinians.
The Nakba is a lived experience more than a historical date. In many families, elders carry keys, land deeds, or photographs from pre-1948 homes as physical symbols of the life that was lost. Children grow up hearing stories that start with “Before 1948, our village had…”. This creates a strong sense that history is unresolved and that the injustice of that moment continues into the present.
Life as Refugees and the Politics of Return
Out of the Nakba emerges the core Palestinian theme of refugeeness. For Palestinians, refugee status is not simply a legal category, but a central part of identity and politics. Camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza are seen as both humanitarian spaces and political symbols.
In the narrative, the refugee camps represent the unfinished nature of the conflict. Tents that turned into shacks and then into crowded concrete buildings are reminders that displacement, which was expected by many to be temporary, became semi-permanent. Streets in the camps often bear the names of original villages. Community institutions keep alive the memory of those places, sometimes with maps that show where houses and fields once stood.
The “right of return” is therefore one of the pillars of the Palestinian story. It is understood as a personal and collective right of refugees and their descendants to go back to their homes and lands, or at least to the areas from which they or their families came. This right is seen as non-negotiable and grounded both in international principles and in simple moral intuition: those who were forced out must be allowed back.
The refusal of Israel to accept a general right of return is felt as a continuation of the original dispossession. Every generation of refugees that grows up in camps, often with restricted rights in host countries, deepens the conviction that justice has been denied. This fuels a narrative in which the Palestinian struggle is not just about borders or statehood, but about restoring a basic human order that was disrupted in 1948.
Occupation as Ongoing Nakba
For Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, the period after 1967 is often understood as an extension or second phase of the Nakba. Where 1948 created a massive refugee population outside what became Israel, 1967 brought much of the remaining Palestinian population under direct Israeli military rule.
From the Palestinian perspective, occupation means daily control over movement, borders, resources, and political life. Checkpoints, permits, arrests, land confiscations, and settlement expansion are presented as part of a continuous process of dispossession. Maps showing the shrinking areas under Palestinian control and the spread of Israeli settlements are common tools for teaching this history.
The building of settlements inside the occupied territories is interpreted as clear evidence of a long-term project to fragment Palestinian land and prevent the emergence of a viable independent state. Palestinians see changes in the landscape, such as bypass roads and separation barriers, as physical manifestations of a system that prioritizes one population over another.
Because of this, the concept of “occupation” within the Palestinian narrative is more than a legal term. It is a framework for understanding nearly every aspect of life: where people can live, whether they can visit family, how they access water, and how they imagine their future. Many Palestinians describe their experience not only as occupation, but also using the language of apartheid or colonialism, which they believe better captures the depth and structure of the inequality they perceive.
Resistance, Sumud, and the Language of Struggle
A defining feature of the Palestinian narrative is the idea of resistance, in Arabic “muqāwama.” Resistance is broadly defined. It can include armed struggle, mass uprisings, civil disobedience, diplomacy, cultural production, and simply remaining on the land. Each has its own place in Palestinian memory.
Armed resistance is often justified within this story as a response to occupation and dispossession rather than as unprovoked aggression. Militant groups present their actions as part of an anti-colonial struggle, similar to other national liberation movements in Africa or Asia. At the same time, there is also a strong tradition that emphasizes popular or civil resistance, particularly in memories of strikes, protests, and the Intifadas.
Closely related is the concept of “sumud,” or steadfastness. Sumud refers to the quiet, everyday decision to stay, rebuild, and endure, even in the face of house demolitions, economic hardship, or political repression. For many Palestinians, the refusal to leave, to sell land, or to give up on the idea of return is itself a form of resistance. Farmers who continue to cultivate fields near settlements, families who rebuild homes after they are demolished, and teachers who work in difficult conditions all become symbols of sumud.
The language of struggle is therefore central to how history is told. Martyrs, prisoners, and wounded individuals are honored as those who have paid the highest price for the national cause. Calendars and public murals mark anniversaries of uprisings, massacres, and battles. This pattern strengthens the sense that Palestinian history is not merely a sequence of events, but an ongoing collective effort to survive and reclaim rights.
Fragmented Experiences, Shared Narrative
Palestinian communities are highly fragmented geographically and politically. Some live in the West Bank under direct occupation and partial self-rule. Others live in Gaza under blockade and repeated conflict. Palestinian citizens of Israel live within the state that defines itself as Jewish, with citizenship but also with experiences of discrimination and contested identity. Refugees live in neighboring Arab states, some with citizenship, many without. There is also a global diaspora spread across Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere.
Despite these differences, a common narrative ties these communities together. The Nakba serves as the main point of convergence, but so do certain recurring themes: attachment to the land, denial of rights, and the demand for justice and recognition. Education systems, media, family storytelling, and national institutions all work to reinforce a shared sense of past and purpose.
At the same time, each group has its own inflection of the broader story. Palestinians inside Israel often focus on experiences of military rule in the early decades of the state, land confiscation, and struggles for equality and recognition. Refugees focus intensely on camp life, marginalization in host countries, and the right of return. Those in the occupied territories highlight daily confrontations with military rule, settlers, and restrictions on movement.
There is a tension in the narrative between unity and fragmentation. Many Palestinians stress that all belong to a single people with shared historical claims, even as they acknowledge that their lived experiences diverge significantly. This tension shapes contemporary debates about political strategy and representation.
Memory, Education, and the Passing of History
The Palestinian historical narrative is not only preserved in formal histories, but transmitted through a dense network of family memories, commemorations, and cultural practices. For many young Palestinians, their first exposure to this history comes from grandparents’ stories, visits to depopulated village sites, or participation in memorial events.
Commemoration of Nakba Day, Land Day, and anniversaries of uprisings plays a major role in keeping the narrative alive. These events link personal experience to collective history. Speeches, marches, and symbolic acts such as key-carrying, tent villages, or reenactments of displacement embed the sense that the past is still present.
Education in Palestinian schools, whether under the Palestinian Authority, in UN-run schools for refugees, or in other settings, generally frames history within this larger narrative, although the details and emphases vary. Literature, poetry, music, and visual arts also function as powerful vehicles of memory. Poems about exile and return, songs about martyrs and prisoners, and novels that reconstruct village life before 1948 all help to shape how Palestinians imagine their past and future.
With each generation, the balance between lived memory and learned history shifts. Older Palestinians who experienced the Nakba directly are fewer in number, and their children and grandchildren must rely more on what is documented, taught, or imagined. This raises questions within Palestinian society itself: how can the core elements of the narrative be preserved without freezing them, and how should new experiences, such as recent wars or political splits, be integrated into the story of who Palestinians are.
Justice, Recognition, and the Future
The Palestinian historical narrative is ultimately oriented toward the future. It does not only describe what happened, but also argues about what ought to happen. In this narrative, justice means addressing the root causes of the conflict, beginning with the dispossession of 1948 and the structures created since.
Key demands include recognition of Palestinian peoplehood and of the Nakba, acknowledgment of responsibility for displacement, fulfillment of rights such as return or compensation for refugees, and the end of occupation and discrimination. Different Palestinians propose different political outcomes, whether one state, two states, or other models. Yet behind these proposals lies a shared conviction that past wrongs must be named and remedied, not simply forgotten in the name of pragmatism.
Many Palestinians also seek international recognition of their narrative. They push for acknowledgment in global institutions, school curricula, and public discussions that Palestinians are not merely “obstacles to peace” or “security threats,” but a people with a history of their own. For them, having their story heard and taken seriously is itself a form of political and moral vindication.
In this way, the Palestinian historical narrative functions at once as memory, identity, and argument. It explains how Palestinians see their past, shapes how they experience the present, and frames what they believe is necessary for a just and lasting future. Understanding this narrative on its own terms is essential for any meaningful engagement with the wider conflict and with the contrasting stories that other groups tell about the same land and events.