1919, as has often been stated, was a watershed year for the Middle East and this certainly holds true for the confessional groups of Palestine. Perhaps the year’s most politically charged moment in Palestine was the visit of the King-Crane Commission, which was a group of Americans sent to the region by Woodrow Wilson in order to gauge the political aspirations of its inhabitants. This spurred an enormous amount of political maneuvering within and between Palestine’s confessional groups, with many actors attempting to ensure that their political wishes be expressed before the Commission. Lobbying was fierce and elites in all of the confessions were forced to make decisions that would put them directly at political odds with their neighbors. Longstanding communal identities were being rapidly transformed in post-Ottoman Palestine. This paper takes as a point of departure James Gelvin’s observation that ‘a world power necessarily influences the object of its interest simply by turning its attention to it’ (1). While Gelvin has convincingly argued that the King-Crane Commission’s visit led to a more populist nationalism in Syria, it seems that there is more to be said about the unintended consequences of this visit in Palestine. Through the use of archival sources from the Middle East and the United States, and employing discourse analysis based on the work of Ernesto Laclau and David Howarth, this paper will argue that the visit of the King-Crane Commission forced the leaders of Palestine’s confessional groups to take a political stand and the choices that these leaders made strengthened confessional borders and weakened other pre-existing community bonds. More specifically, Palestine’s Jewish communities unanimously (if hesitantly in some instances) chose to side with the Zionist project, and the Muslim and Christian leaders nearly all took staunch stances against this newly united Jewish community. In general, the visit of the King-Crane Commission was a political moment that hastened a broad discursive shift in Palestine (already in motion before World War I) and significantly decreased the likelihood of peaceful co-existence between the Jews and the other populations of the region. (1) James Gelvin, ‘The Ironic Legacy of the King-Crane Commission’, in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment ed. by David W. Lesch, 3rd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), pp. 13-29, quote on p. 14.