My paper will discuss the class limits of an early twentieth-century vision of Arab liberal modernity (al-nahda) in a rural Palestinian setting—the Beisan Valley in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine (1909-1948). In its original late nineteenth-century meaning the term nahda referred to the intellectual efforts of Islamic modernist reforms such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. Yet the term offered other writers and activists—outside the religious or sectarian cannon—a maxim to describe their vision of modernity. Christian and Muslim Arabs found unprecedented power in broadening the notion of the nahda. This paper explicates the ways in which class culture (that is the culture and ideology of civil society) and influence on governmental power and politics, as opposed to confessional identity, most characterized the flexibility and desirability of an Arab modernity. The paper will offer an analysis of the history of landholding in the Beisan Valley as a changing matrix of governmental power and politics, in which we find important articulations of Palestinian nationalism and Arab modernity under two different land regimes—the Ottoman and the British Mandate. The emergence of a number of Zionists settlements in Beisan in the late 1930s and their domination of the region after the expulsion on its Arab inhabitants in 1948, led many historians to read the history of landholding backwards, as a pre-history of Israel. Instead, my paper will bring to the fore the complex ways in which Palestinian Arab nationalists understood shifting regimes of landholding—despite their potential to empower Zionist settlement—as central to a new conceptual nexus of nationalism and civil society. By discussing the class tensions of this project, this paper also attends to the ways in which common people understood and interacted with nationalist modernity and its visions for land and social relations.