Israeli Representations of an Arab Intellectual‪.‬

The flamboyant rhetoric of the various PLO factions, as well as the Israeli military and its political leaders, has for years shrouded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian factions, consisting of exiled militants and intellectuals, declared a private war on Israel decades ago, and eventually declared one amongst themselves as well. Today it has become obvious that these Palestinian cadres were almost oblivious to the dispersed Palestinian people. The Palestinian experience in the decades after the establishment of an Israeli state ramified into numerous national narratives, each of which reflected a different experience of exile. But it should not be perceived that there is no such thing as a collective Palestinian identity. There are collective national and historical symbols that ignite a national consciousness among those who geographically existed in historical Palestine and whose lives have been directly affected by the events of 1948. However, the history and harsh circumstances of the early twentieth century did not permit the Palestinians to narrate their own nationality. Palestine has been subject to a tragic history of colonial and repressive systems of administration in the last four hundred and fifty years. These have inflicted both traceable and untraceable marks on the development of Palestinian national consciousness.