Ideological cohesion and intensified nationalism develop not only out of direct
experience in conflict participation but also through perspectives created to in-
terpret such experience. To understand how the Arab-Israeli conflict has been
maintained, one should examine some of the views about rights and entitlement
to statehood, based primarily on concepts of ethnic identity and suffering ad-
vanced by Zionists and Palestinian Nationalists alike. Each of the two political
movements produced a major document of political freedom expression in its
Declaration of Independence. Although these statements were issued forty years
apart--the Zionist position was presented in May 1948, whereas the PLO dec-
laration appeared in November 1988--it is remarkable how the two nationalisms
rely on very similar arguments of emotional appeal to justify their beliefs of
entitlement to the land of Palestine for the purpose of creating an individual
nation-state.

Some early, important manifestos formalizing nationalist aspirations were
issued by the Zionists during the Basel Conference of 1897 and by the Palestinians
in Jerusalem in 1964 (and as amended by the National Covenant of the PLO in
1968). Although the tones are quite different, the messages are essentially the
same. Each pledges a commitment to mobilize material and intellectual forces
in the cause of nationalist aspirations and indicates a readiness to take action in
order to achieve these goals. The Palestinian statement is more forceful, more
confrontational, than the one prepared by the Zionists. This is undoubtedly
because the Palestinians face an organization whose nationalist spirit and emo-
tional appeals are quite developed. The early Jewish settlers, by contrast, dealt
with Arab opponents who, at the time, had not coalesced into a solid, patriotic
unit.

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