Book by Haim Gerber, Reviewed by Kivanc Ozcan

HAIM GERBER, Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Pp. 243. $80 cloth.

REVIEWED BY KIVANC OZCAN, Middle East Studies Program, George Washington University, Washington, DC.


Haim Gerber’s Remembering and Imagining Palestine is a remarkable attempt to reconsider and question the way Zionist historians view Palestinian identity and Palestinian nationalism. His central theses are that first; there were meaningful historical antecedents to Palestinian nationalism before the beginning of the twentieth century. Second, Palestinian nationalism in the twentieth century was truly Palestinian and was not created by the elites. The author intends to show that the memory of the Crusades was remembered for centuries and kept the Palestinian community feeling alive. Moreover, he argues that Palestinian-Arab nationalism, which involved voluntary participation of the masses, took shape in the early Mandate period and it radicalized in the 1930s.

The importance of Remembering and Imagining Palestine lies not only in its contribution to Palestinian nationalism debate but also its criticisms to nationalism and elite-mass theories. Despite its shortcomings such as chapter seven, Remembering and Imagining Palestine is an invaluable source for researchers, providing them with striking analysis of Palestinian identity and Palestinian nationalism. With its use of British archives of the Mandate period and the Palestinian sources and its select bibliography, the book is useful study.


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