12 THFr QUESTION OF PALESTINE A ll o f them spoke Arabic, and were mainly Sunni Muslims, although a minority among them were Christians, Druzes, and Shiite Muslims— all o f whom spoke A rabic too. A pproxim ate­ ly 65 percent o f the Palestinian Arabs were agricultural people who lived in about 500 villages where ground crops as well as fruits and vegetables were grown. The principal Palestinian cities— Nablus, Jerusalem, N azareth, A cre, Jaffa, Jericho, Ram lah, H ebron, and Haifa— were built in the main by Palestinian A rabs, who continued to live there even after the encroaching Zionist colonies expanded very close to them. There were also a respectable Palestinian intellectual and professional class, the beginnings o f small industry, and a highly developed national consciousness. Modern Palestinian social, econom ic, and cultural life was organized around the same issues o f independence and anti colonialism prevalent in the region, only for the Palestinians there were the legacy of Ottom an rule, then Zionist colonialism , then British m andato­ ry authority (after W orld W ar I) to contcnd with more or less all together. A ll A rab Palestinians, almost without exception, felt themselves to be part o f the great A rab awakening stirring since the last years of the nineteenth century, and it is this feeling that gave encouragement and coherence to an other­ wise disruptive modern history. Palestinian writers and intel­ lectuals like Hakam D arw azeh, Khalil Sakakineh. Khalil Beidas, and N ajib Nassar, political organizations like the Futtuwa and N ajada, the A rab Higher Com m ittees, and the A rab League o f A rab National Liberation (w-hich argued that the Palestinian question could only be solved by Arabs and Jews together)*— all these form ed great national blocs among the population, directed the energies of the “ non-Jewish" Palestinian community, created a Palestinian identity opposed equally to British rule and to Jewish colonization, and solidi­ fied the Palestinian sense o f belonging by whichever continuity of residence to a distinct national group with a language (the Palestinian A rab dialect) and a specific communal sense (threatened particularly by Zionism ) o f its own. From the beginning o f serious Zionist planning for Palestine (that is, roughly, from the period during and after World W ar