At the end of his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha regrets that he has not included the voices of those who, and I quote, ‘have not yet found their nation: amongst them the Palestinians.’ Their voices, he goes on to say, ‘remind us of important questions: When did we become “a people”? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do these big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others?’ (1990: 7)

These questions are, of course, too broad to be addressed in the present article, especially for Palestinians whose varied experience, as a minority group whether in Israel, under occupation or in diaspora, means that any serious treatment of their national identity will be especially complex. Moreover, individual Palestinians, like other people, belong to different groups, enjoy diverse relationships with various ethnic, cultural and political entities, and at different times and places may express and, indeed, feel differently vis-à-vis their Palestinian-ness. We cannot hope, then, to answer Bhabha's questions for Palestinians (When did they become ‘a people’? When did they stop being one? Are they in the process of becoming one, and so on) in any definitive or complete way. Rather, to understand the ‘people-hood’ of Palestinians generally we must begin by considering how that notion is engendered locally, among discrete groups of Palestinians.