Newt Gingrich recycles the tedious “Palestinians aren’t a real nation” line:

Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.

It’s a good thing we have Gingrich to inform us that Palestinians are “in fact” Arabs, or we might somehow forget. Prior to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, there were no independent Arab states anywhere. Did that mean that there were no distinctive nationalities or local identities among the Ottomans’ Arab subjects? Obviously not.

We should all understand that Gingrich isn’t referring to an “invented people” here in the way that historians sometimes talk about nations as “imagined communities” or constructed identities. He is singling out the Palestinians. He is plainly saying that Palestinians have no national existence, and therefore no claim to national self-determination. This claim would have been ridiculous fifty years ago, and today it is the statement of an ideological fanatic. Lumping together Palestinians with all other Arabs and referring to “the Arab community” as if it were one thing is typical of Gingrich’s sloppy and shoddy thinking.

The particular circumstances and experiences of an individual nation that accounts for the differences between nations that may share a language or culture, and if Gingrich were half as serious as an historian as he pretends to be he would understand that. If an identifiable Palestinian nation did not exist, say, 150 years ago, it has existed for the better part of the last century. National identities are formed through historical experience, and the last seventy or eighty years have witnessed the emergence of a distinctive Palestinian national identity.

Update: Via Andrew, Hussein Ibish explains to Ben Smith just how ignorant Gingrich’s statement is:

For a man who likes to call himself a historian, Gingrich’s grasp of these realities is astoundingly weak. To call the Palestinians ‘an invented people’ in an obvious effort to undermine their national identity is outrageous, especially since there was no such thing as an ‘Israeli’ before 1948. Arab and Jewish identities are very old, but Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms are both 20th-century phenomena, and arose at the same time in competition with each other. The idea that either is more ‘invented’ and hence less ‘authentic’ than the other is ignorant, ahistorical claptrap.