I’m no fan of Newt Gingrich (to put it very, very mildly), but when he says that Palestinians are an invented people he is absolutely right.

Of course, they are. Every nation is an imagined community, a fictional construct with very little basis in reality. Every nation establishes a baseless claim to the land it inhabits, invents a shared glorious history, appropriates some figures who command unanimous respect (and who, in their wildest dreams, could not have imagined how their names would be used to support this invented construct), lashes out with hatred and violence against an equally invented Other, and employs a series of mechanisms to provoke an unthinking emotional attachment on the part of the people in order to get them to die enthusiastically and for free for a piece of painted fabric.

Palestinians are as invented a people as are Ukrainians, Spaniards, Germans, Americans, Australians, Pakistanis, etc. The rise of nationalism and the strategies it uses to convince us that nations have always existed and hence should continue to exist have been studied and analyzed probably more than any other political phenomenon. So let’s stop dumping on Newt and start educating ourselves.

Read books, people. Read many good books. Otherwise, you run the risk of looking stupid by Newt Gingrich’s side.

If anybody is interested in understanding how nationalism works, I can provide a list of readings from here to the Moon.