This work locates the multicultural identity and shared histories of Palestine in a very long history of the whole region. It locates Palestinian history in the ancient, classical, post-classical, medieval, early and modern histories of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. The intention is not to produce an intellectually detached form of history but rather to offer a socially, intellectually, culturally and politically informed and engaged history. While attempting to cover the vast span of history, this work links questions of history from below, social memory, cultural identity and politics.

This is not a ‘nationalist history’ or a narrative about the Bible to the present for a ‘Palestinian nation’, although I am fully aware of history’s power to create national/political legitimacy in the present. ‘Nation’ and nationalism are modern inventions and constructions and I am highly sceptical about the utility of a political term such as ‘nation’ across a vast sweep of history. Of course, the process of ‘national invention’ and visualisation is not confined to modern Palestine or the Palestinians. It is common to all modern national entities and groupings, and it is an important ingredient both in nationalism and in the creation and maintenance of nation-states. Nation-building and the invention of tradition was a typical European practice of using collective memory selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national and religious past, suppressing others and elevating and mobilising others in an entirely functional way and for political purposes; thus mobilised memory is not necessarily authentic but rather useful politically (Said 1999: 6‒7). Competing modes of modern nation-building and nationalist myth-making have received extensive critical reappraisal in the works of Benedict Anderson (1991: 6, 11‒12), Eric Hobsbawm (1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1996), Anthony Smith (1971, 1984, 1986) and Ernest Gellner (1983). Hobsbawm’s most comprehensive analysis of nation-building and myth-making in Europe is found in Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Published in 1990 with the subtitle Programme, Myth, Reality, his work is about the ‘invention of tradition’, the creation of national culture, and the construction of national identities from a mixture of folk history and historical myths (Hobsbawm 1990).