Before European colonialism imposed its borders, a great part of the Arab world formed a single unit under the Ottoman Empire. Its frame of reference was not the nation, but the town or the administrative province. In the nineteenth century, the Nahda (renaissance) cultural movement reasserted reference to Arab identity and a united Arab consciousness.

Despite compromise in its dealings with the Ottoman federal empire, the nationalist response of the Young Turks in 1908 followed the replacement of the Arabic alphabet by the Latin alphabet (a negation par excellence of Arab culture), which developed the emergence of a distinct Arab consciousness. Although it proved impossible to establish a united Arab political entity, the struggles to construct an Arab nation and especially the struggles for the liberation of each Arab country created at least an Arab cultural nation (Umma arabiyya) where there was inter-Arab solidarity.

In this context, British colonialism and the Zionist invasion contributed to the development of a specific sense of being Palestinian, amplified by the feeling of belonging to the Holy Land. The identity of the Palestinian people was heightened by the sense of being a single nation (over and above questions of religious identity of Muslims and Christians) whose defined borders were threatened by foreign conquest. The struggle to protect their land and then to recover their rights contributed to the defining of the identity of the Palestinian people, an identity deeply attached to the land.

Today, of the over 8 million Palestinians, some 4 million live within the boundaries of historic Palestine; half of those people are refugees in their own land (45.5%, without referring to the internally displaced refugees within the borders of the State of Israel). In the Gaza Strip, the proportion of refugees reaches 76.5%. The other half of the Palestinian people are scattered all over the world, a large percentage in neighbouring Arab states. There is a high rate of natural growth among the population (3.5% in 2004), which makes Palestinian society a young one: 52.6% is under the age of 17.

At the present rate, the population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will have doubled by 2025. The position of youth and its needs in terms of education, social infrastructure and housing as well as the aspiration to end the oppression and injustices they endure explain their strong commitment to the Palestinian national struggle.