My research can be described as a comparative-historical analysis of what I define as three modes of identities found in the Middle East: Occidentalizing, Modernizing, and Orientalizing nationalist identities. My main concern is this overlapping question: How did Palestinians and Arabs come to be seen as distinct from the Jews, Greeks, and Turks of this once symbiotic civilization, all presumed to be in need of separate national “homes” (i.e., the containers called nation-states)? Here I focus on the impacts that modernity has had on the identities of this world and myself.