political science essay"International Relations of the Middle East" 2 pages needed

Arab Nationalism and Palestine Author(s): E. G. H. Joffé Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 157-170 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/424086 Accessed: 27/09/2008 03:31

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ISSN 0022-3433 Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1983

Arab Nationalism and Palestine

E.G.H. JOFFE

Despite the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the critical issue in the Arab World, there is a striking lack of sympathy with the specific demands of the Palestinians, both amongst Arab regimes and the Muslim populations in the area. National consciousness has few indigenous roots in the Middle East because of the assumptions of universality within Islam. When it did arise, it was a specific response to European technological dominance and political aggressiveness and to the newly-awakened ethnic con- sciousness of the late Ottoman empire. Moreover, it did not express itself as nationalism in the European sense. Instead it turned to the ready-made vehicle of Arabic to define a much wider entity - the Arab Nation. The strong Muslim component involved in this ultimately made the concept acceptable to Arab population at large.

Three different and at times conflicting concepts - Muslim, Arabic and secular identity - confronted European colonialism and Zionism until 1948. These concepts altered only when the Palestinians began to create an effective national community after 1967, leading to an ideological contradiction within the Arab World that explains the ambivalence shown towards the Palestinian issue today. Arabism has been shown to be vacuous and divisive, whereas nation-states, with their claims to secular ethnic nationalism, have led to Camp David in the case of Egypt, and the Iran-Iraq War elsewhere. The only remaining source of ideological relevance for the Muslim World is a return to pure Islamic social organization, and this rejects all question of secular nationalism. In short, although the issue of Israel as an alien intrusion within the Muslim World is relevant, the issue of Palestinian nationalism is not.

Marxism was not the only European affliction forced upon the Arab-Muslim world: Another, earlier one was secular nationalism. Kishk is even more con- temptuous of secular nationalism than he is of Marxism, more certain of its disruptive consequences. Arabs were so convinced of the power of secular nationalism, so taken by its mystique, he says, that they were willing to set aside their religious beliefs in pursuit of the nationalist dream.l

The ideas of Muhammad Jalal Kishk, as out- lined above by a perspicacious observer of the Arab World in the recent past, encapsulate many of the views now current amongst Muslims in the wake of recent disasters in the Middle East. Not only has Egypt, once the leader of the Arab world in its struggle against both Israel and its own underdevel- opment under the charismatic leadership of Abdul Gamel Nasser, now chosen its own path through the Camp David Peace Process, thus betraying, in Arab eyes, both regional and popular aspirations, but Arab govern- ments themselves have demonstrated a less than enthusiastic response over the fate of the Palestinians in Lebanon.2 Yet, such

cynicism is not limited just to governments, for many Arabs themselves show a strange reluctance to accept the reality and implica- tions of a Palestinian nation or of the state it may one day inherit.

This is not to suggest that Arabs generally are not acutely aware of the nature and tragedy of the Palestinian struggle, or that the Arab- Israeli conflict is merely a cynical abuse of commitment by Arab regimes desperate to find some means of sustaining a political equilibrium. No doubt such factors do play a part, but the sincerity of the emotions expressed widely throughout the Middle East cannot be doubted. However, it has struck this observer at least - and he has reason to believe that he is not alone - that the real issue for most Arabs is not the justified demand for statehood by a nation dispersed, but the fact of an intrusion by an alien religious, cultural and ethnic community into a region that they regard peculiarly their own. The state of Israel, for most Arabs, is more than just a community of Jews. After all, Jewish communities have lived amongst Mus-

158 E.G.H.JoJfe

lim ones - not always very happily and always in a state of normative inferiority, but nonetheless relatively peaceably - ever since Islam was borne.3 It is the fact that Israel sprang into the Arab consciousness as a national entity, with a nationalist ideology - Zionism - which directly confronted the Arab world's own assumptions about itself on the very territory that it regarded as its own that has made the issue such a vital one in the Middle East today.

Yet this is not the only reason. In addition to the specific fact of the Israeli state there is a more general background, both historical and social, which has added to the issue. For almost two centuries, the Arab World, together with the wider Muslim world of which it forms a part, has grown increasingly conscious of European technological and political domination. Indeed, large parts of it have had direct experience of these factors as a result of colonial occupation and else- where contact with Europe has been almost as abrasive.4 In many respects, the develop- ment of Israel has been seen as a continuation of that experience, from the famous Balfour Declaration, which established the precedent of a 'Jewish National Home' onwards.5 With the advent of Independence in the region, the persistence of the problem of Israel seems to many to be a persistence of Western attempts at neo-imperialism and neo- colonialism.6

To the Arab World at large - if indeed one can talk of such a large and heterogeneous region in terms that suggest political and social homogeneity - the response to these twin threats, as they are perceived, has been complex and internalised. The major concern has not been with the Palestinians as such, for the misfortunes that have befallen them, acute though awareness of their sufferings has been. Instead, the tendency has been to question the assumptions of indigenous society itself, just as occurred in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the process has often gone further, involving assumptions that the Arab failure was in part a consequence of the in- ability of the Arab world to mirror the social

and political achievements of Europe, since it was clearly at that level that European super- iority was achieved. An alternative, however, has been to see that precisely because of the attempt to mirror European development, the Arab world has suffered for its implied rejection of its own religious and cultural authenticity.

Indeed, it has been the dichotomy between these two concepts that has dominated Arab thought and action during the past three decades and it has been the Arab-Israeli conflict that has concentrated minds in this way, despite the fact that normally such views would have been satisfied by the very achieve- ment of Independence alone. The presence of the state of Israel has caused the old con- tradictions to persist and, by its very success, Zionism has ensured that nationalism, in one form or another, should continue to seem to most Arabs to be the sole way in which even- tually Zionism can be combatted. However, for the Arab World, the problems remain over which form of nationalism it should choose. The choice is rather more varied than is usually the case, for it can extend from the secular concepts of nationalism, typical of nineteenth century Europe, to concepts of pan-Arabism and even pan-Islam. Yet, by the very nature of nationalism as an ideology, these three forms cannot co-exist and, for the Arab world, the problem has been to choose between them. It is the contention of this article that 'fundamentalism' so-called - as typified by the quotation at the beginning - is merely a repetition in a new guise of an old prescription. However, it also marks a generalised 'retour aux sources', a rejection of European archetypes, and thus has an attraction and authenticity that has lacked in the past. Nonetheless, it is unlikely to be more successful than its precursors.

The reasons for these extreme swings in Arab opinion lie deep within the cultural and religious corpus of Islam, as well as owing much to the influence of Arab Christian minorities within the Levant7 and to twentieth century perceptions of the relevance of European thought. It is no accident that the

Arab Nationalism and Palestine 159

original archetypes for Arabic concepts of nationalism were French thinkers in the nine- teenth century and Germans in the twentieth.8 From this pot-pourri of sources the major strands of modern Arabic political theory and nationalist ideology have emerged and it is to these that we now turn, for it is there that the explanation of Arab attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinian problem can be found.

Islam and the concept of 'nation' One of the features that makes Islam so remarkable as a world religion is that it provides not only an individual moral ideal and a metaphysical explanation of the Uni- verse and human life, but that it also provides a complete prescription for the organisation of communal life in the real world. There is an interplay of the metaphysical, individual and communal spheres of an intensity that is difficult for an outsider to imagine. Nor should this be considered merely to be the preserve of the traditionalist or the tradi- tionaliser,9 for Islamic concepts so permeate daily life that all Muslims owe an immense cultural debt, whether conscious or not, to ideas and values that claim universality and do not admit of competition. It is for this reason that nationalism, in the European sense, rarely appeared in the Middle East until quite late in the colonial period, although, as we shall see, the concept was not un- known.10

Classically, the Islamic world had seen itself as a single political unit, under the rule of a Caliph - a delegate for the Prophet Muhammed who thus represented the guaran- tee of continuity with the initial revelation of the Qu'ran. By this very fact, the caliph, if genuinely such, would rule in accordance with the prescripts of the Qu'ran, the literal revealed word of Allah, with the hadith - traditions of the sayings of the Prophet which supplemented the inevitable gaps in the political and social prescriptions of the Qu'ran - and with the shariah, the code of law laid down in and derived from the Qu'ran and the hadith. In so far as a supposed caliph did

not abide by these principles, he was clearly not a true guardian of the interests of the Islamic community - the umma - and, as such, could not be tolerated as ruler. In other words, the community had a right and a duty to remove an unjust ruler, although injustice means only actions not in accord with those elemental prescripts of Islam.

In fact, this mutual system of constraints - on the ruled who had a duty to obey the Caliph as a religious obligation and on the ruler who lost his right to rule by failure to abide by the elemental political principles laid down in the corpus of Islam tradition, shariah and Qu'ran - was embodied in the bay'a. This was a conditional oath of allegiance sworn to the Caliph by the community on his accession which embodied obligations con- sciously accepted by the Caliph in turn to preserve Muslim civil society for the proper practice of Islam. In other words, he was to maintain social and political structures in accordance with Islamic precepts, since those, in themselves, formed part of Islam itself.11 Should he fail, then he could be removed.

The vital point, for our purposes, was that, quite apart from ethnic, cultural or linguistic differences, the Muslim world was originally perceived as a single political unit and this perception lasted right up to the French Revolution and, more importantly, until Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Of course, realities did not correspond to this simplistic political vision and, from the fourth Caliph, Ali, divisions began to appear. Nonetheless, the cultural imperative was still for political unity coterminus with religious extension. The Muslim world was the Dar al-Islam, the rest the Dar al-Harb, the region of war - war for the faith and war to defend it.

To allow for the fact that local sources of power arose at the periphery of the Muslim world and that ethnic sentiment and resent- ment, despite the normative prescriptions of Islam, frequently appeared, Islamic political theory did allow for 'authority' - sultah - to be delegated. Local potentates could be granted rights of rule by the caliph on the

160 E. G. H. Joffe

same contractual terms, and thus the Muslim world became dotted by sultanates, emirates and so on. Yet all - rather as in the late medieval Papacy - paid lip-service to the idea that the true repository of power was the caliph.12 This even applied when the caliph was an impotent figurehead in Cairo under the Mameluks, when there were two or more caliphs, in Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, when the caliph was totally rejected by the Shia in Iran or the Kharajiites in North Africa, or when the caliph was subordinate to the Ottoman sultan and finally absorbed into the same person through a fictitious genealogy. In all circumstances, the theory and the ideal of a unity of culture, religion and political structures remained.

The result was that Muslims developed a system of graduated loyalties, each of which could respond to different circumstances with no apparent contradiction. In addition to a loyalty to the concept of the Muslim world, the umma, most Muslims also acquired a sense of territorial and ethnic loyalty, a sense of watan and of qaum. They were aware of specific regional characteristics of their environments which made each unique and uniquely valuable and they were also aware of the vital importance of family and kin, a concept which could extend infinitely to tribe, ethnic or even cultural or linguistic groups - Berbers versus Arabs, Arabs against Persians and so on. Above this, of course, was the universality of the umma and Islam. Yet, even in this universality, there remained a historical legacy - that of the pre-Islamic Arabic background that conditioned and influenced the later development of Islam itself and of the cultural environment and the political nature of the umma.13

For Samir Amin, this peculiar nature of the pre-colonial Muslim world, with its normative assumptions of universality and the overtones of Arab pre-eminence, is explained by its underlying economic structure. It was stamped by a universalist mercantile character with urban-based ruling elites. This depended on long-distance trade guaranteed by nomadic alliance with the urban groups and exclusion

of the rural sedentary peasant communities whose sole purpose was to provide a modest surplus.14 Its origins and superstructure lay in the urban mercantile communities of the Hadhramat - Mecca and Medina - and the alliance patterns of peripheral Arab kingdoms with the early Muslims in the initial con- quests.15 As the end of the eighteenth century approached, the prebendial nature of the Ottoman Empire led to a decline of long-range mercantilism and its replacement by a tributary mode of production and the growth of agra- rian capitalism through the iltizam system, particularly in Egypt.16 Thus, by the time that Europe began to impinge on the Muslim world, the ground was already laid for particularistic nationalism to take root.

Such arguments may well be open to dispute. However, they do have the merit of emphasi- sing where the true sense of universality of Islamic society really lay - in urban groups connected with trade. They do not, however, sufficiently emphasise the graduated and differentiated sets of loyalties that Muslims had towards three quite different concepts of political order - territorial or patriotic through the concept of watan (homeland), ethnic, linguistic and particularistic through qaum (family, tribe, community), and cultural, religious and universal through umma, the Muslim world at large. Under the impact of Europe the simultaneous incorporation of all three concepts within Islamic political phil- osophy was to break down as the inherent contradictions were to assert themselves. Later on, with the confrontation with Zionism, the contradictions inherent within Muslim con- cepts of nationalism itself were to assert themselves, forcing a return to the purity of the past and, by implication, a rejection of that new nationalist entity, the Palestinians.

Nationalism in the nineteenth century It should be clear from what has been said above that, although the whole tenor of political theory in Islam is opposed to the idea of nationalism, two very important pre- requisites already formed part of the Muslim consciousness. On the one hand, particularistic

Arab Nationalism and Palestine 161

ethnic and territorial concepts were a com- monplace in Muslim life and, on the other, the very fact that political loyalties on the part of the community to its rulers were conditional implied a degree of egalitarianism that countered the patterns of dominance implied by multi-ethnic empires dominated by an ethnic elite, such as the Ottomans. Beyond this was the fact that the reality of power in economic terms was urban and merchantile, and that these groups were those which in practice dominated the social and cultural superstructure.

The immediate consequence of European penetration into the Mediterranean Muslim world was, then, to excite precisely these features, for so long dormant. Beginning with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and continuing with the slow decline - with en- thusiastic European encouragement despite Britain's occasional reluctance - of the Ottoman Empire, the concepts of watan and qaum came more and more to the fore. Not only did Mohammed Ali try to create an autonomous empire within the confines of the old Ottoman province of Egypt in the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire itself was eventually to break up into a recognisably nationalist entity by the end of the century. In all cases, the stimulus for these developments was the horrified realisation that Europe, for so long regarded by the Muslim world with contempt for its cultural and religious primitiveness,17 was in fact vastly superior, at least technologically. The obvious response was to look towards the way in which Europe organised itself for this technological and military dominance, to see if here the Muslim world could regain its own vitality.

The one institution that came to dominate Muslim views of European success was the nation-state - that unitary political entity that encompassed the simplicities of a single language, ethnic group, cultural tradition and religious experience. It seemed in many ways to mirror the Islamic ideal writ small and, in any case, also corresponded with profound resentments with the way of the Ottoman

Muslim world in much of the periphery and the centre. Hence, for Mohammed Ali in Egypt, it was obvious that imitation of Europe would provide the means by which he could escape the trammels of Istanbul.'8 Similarly, after 1840, Tunisia under Ahmad Bey and his successors was to try the same course and even Morocco, despite its thousand years of isolation from the mainstream of the Muslim world, would halfheartedly take the same path at the start of this century.19

Yet there was another reaction as well. This was to look towards Islam itself, to see where, within that universalist corpus of belief and social practice, things had gone wrong, so that Islam, the revealed word of Allah, could not withstand the Christian onslaught. The archetypal figure in this movement, who was to act as the initiator of the Salafiya movement - a return to the purity of early Islam that was to have a powerful influence in national liberation movements in North Africa - was a Persian Jamal ad-Din al-Asadabadi, better known as al-Afghani. For him, the invasion of the Muslim world in the latter part of the nine- teenth century by Europe could only be con- fronted by Muslim unity; unity first against the corruption of Muslim rulers and unity second around the vital cultural and religious banner of Islam.20

This concept, despite its apparent tradi- tionalism, was in fact revolutionary since it saw Islam as a political ideology of con- frontation and unity, rather than as an or- dering of social life in accordance with divine precept. In addition, although it was explicitly pan-Islamic and thus a source of support to a multi-ethnic political entity such as the Ottoman Empire (as the last Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid, was to realise), by its call for a return to the original purity of Islam it implicitly emphasised the fact that Islam origi- nally had been an Arab preserve. Al-Afghani's ideas thus extended beyond the simple call for Islamic unity as a cultural response to Europe to the idea of Arabism as an inherent part of that response. The threat to the established Muslim order went even deeper, for al-Afghani

162 E. G. H. Joffe

argued that it was the solidarity provided by religion that enabled societies to withstand and survive outside attack. This solidarity - asabiyya - was a concept developed originally by Ibn Khaldun to explain the vitality of nomadic society as opposed to urban society in his theory of the tribal circulation of elites and applied specifically to the Arab world.21

Al-Afghani specifically excluded national solidarity from his analysis as a means of creating the necessary sense of will to combat Europe, since bonds of nationality (jinsiyya) were less efficacious than those of religion. Nonetheless, nationalism as an adjunct to Islamic solidarity was desirable, for it provided the cultural and historical authenticity that any community must have to resist effectively. Hence, the watan now became an essential component to the umma. Al-Afghani's ideas were to be further developed by three other major figures, Mohammed Abduh at the start of the twentieth century in Egypt and, after him, by Rashid Rida and Chekib Arslan in the 1920s and 1930s. In all cases the concept of the essential relevance of pure Islam as a source of political and cultural inspiration dominates, and all of them attempted to show how such a vision of Islam was relevant to the modern world.

Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, such ideas had taken on a specifically anti- Ottoman overtone, for the Ottoman sultan was clearly an interloper into the original Arab world of Islam. In addition, the develop- ment of the Young Ottoman and the Young Turk movements in the Ottoman Empire, after the failure of the Tanzimat period in the 1840s and 1850s, had led to a specifically Turkish nationalist movement developing there which was eventually to result in the Committee for Union and Progress in 1908 and cause the dissolution of the Empire itself.22 Here, the concept of watan, the homeland, had come to the fore and excluded all other ideas. Territorial nationalism seemed to have come of age, although, as the twentieth century wore on, the massacres of Armenians and the repressions in the Levant seemed to

suggest that it was ethnic, rather than terri- torial concepts which were vital to modern Turkey. Similar ideas began to develop in Egypt, with figures such as Taha Hussein referring to Egypt's pharaonic past.23

Arab Nationalism Under the influence of both the new-found ethnicity of the late Ottoman Empire, with its emphasis on 'Turkishness', and that of Europe, particularly as expressed through missionary activity in the Levant, a new form of nationalism began to develop. Its inspira- tion came not from Islam directly, for the early exponents were Christian Arabs in large part who had been exposed to educational activity by French and American missionaries in Beirut. Nonetheless it looked quite speci- fically to indigeneous archetypes and saw in the rich cultural fabric around it a source of inspiration. It capitalised on the growing Arab sense of ethnic and linguistic difference from the Ottoman Turks, as well as the originators' own sense of uniqueness as Christians with specific contacts with Europe - which European powers had been anxious to exploit.24

Although many of the ideas of the Christian Arabs - personalities such as Bustani, Nujaym and al-Khuri - related specifically to a Lebanese or Syrian watan, there was a strong overtone of the sense of belonging to a specially Arab qaum - for, by now, qaum had come to embody specifically cultural and linguistic, rather than ethnic, features. Although Christian, they still saw themselves as inheritors of the benefits of Arab greatness under the pre-Ottoman caliphs - a specifically Muslim inheritance which they could accept because it was Arab. Its Arabness was authenticated by the fact of a common language - classical Arabic - and thus the group to which they belonged was a wider unity than that of the homeland, it was a group that was linguistically defined. To this extent, they joined those specifically Muslim thinkers, such as Rashid Rida and Chekib Arslan, who saw that the Islamic umma too was really an Arab preserve, since it was the

Arab Nationalism and Palestine 163

Arabs who had created it and it was Arabic through which its culture was best expressed.

The response to the European threat, then, had, by the early twentieth century, resulted in two specific kinds of nationalist responses. On the one hand, there was the territorial and ethnic nationalism of Turkey and Egypt, based on the concept of watan - a limited territorial homeland for a single ethnic group. On the other, there was the wider concept of a unitary Arab world, linked by common culture and language, whether or not its members were Muslim, Christian or Druze, Sunni, Alawi or Shia. The old supra-ethnic vision of the Islamic umma had either been rejected - Turkey and Egypt - as a source of social cohesion, or it had been assimilated and minimalised in the Middle East. In so far as the old vision of the Arab qaum - now a ethnocultural and linguistic concept - had come to dominate, so concepts to justify it by reference to ideas outside specifically Arab sources also came into play. The original inspiration was mainly French, but, in the aftermath of the First World War, this was to vanish.

The First World War was to be a watershed for Arab nationalism. First there was the Arab Revolt, specifically against the Ottoman Empire and led by the family of the Sharif of Mecca in the hope that, with British support, an Arab nation in the Levant would be created. This dream was to be smashed with the Sykes-Picot Treaty and the French occu- pation of Syria in 1921. Then the Balfour Declaration added fuel to the flames, both for the Arab nationalists, with their dream of the Arab homeland, and for the Islamic traditionalists, with their belief in the integrity of the Dar al-Islam. It was not that secular nationalism in itself had arisen in Palestine - there was little evidence of that until the revolt in Mandate Palestine in 1936, and even then it was not nationalism that played so important a role - it was the sense of be- trayal, betrayal by erstwhile supporters and mentors,25 with the attendant violation of Arab land and the Muslim environment that hurt both groups so deeply.

The result was that the moral and philo-

sophical dominance enjoyed by France and Britain throughout the Middle East during the latter part of the nineteenth century disappeared. For Arab nationalists - and by now Arab nationalism with all its secular implications was well-rooted in fertile colonial soil - a new model had to be found. It had already been foreseen by al-Kawakibi at the turn of the century, when he pointed towards the moral and spiritual decadence of Turkey, arguing - admittedly in an Islamic vein - that Arabs alone had the moral dynamism to recover.26 Now, however, in the wake of the disappointments of the 1920s, German writers on nationalism began to play an increasing role in forming Middle Eastern attitudes. Under the twin pressures of disappointment and the evidence of the success of Zionism,27 Arab nationalists sought for new archetypes and found them in Fichte. The most influential of such thinkers was Sati al-Husri, who, from the end of the First World War exerted a major influence on Arab thought - although the major commentator on his ideas, Bassam Tibi, claims that he distorted Fichte's original concepts.28 He was certainly influential in the growth of pro-German sympathies in Iraq during the Second World War and in finally bringing Egypt into the Arab fold.

For Egypt, still under the influence of its own historical past reaching back over five thousand years and ruled by the corrupt Khedivate of King Farouk, still rejected its membership of the Arab nation. Zaghzul, the leader of the Wafd who eventually forced Britain to grant limited independence in 1921, rejected the idea of Egypt as part of the Arab nation, as did most of his fellows. The Khedive, whether Farouk or his father Faud, was only interested in so far as he could subvert the concept of an Arab nation into a caliphate that he would head.29

Al-Husri found such ideas incredible. Not only did he attach an almost mystical meaning to the concept of the Arab Nation, arguing that the individual has no real existence outside it, he insisted that Egypt, with its demographic and cultural dominance within the Middle East, was not only part of the Arab Nation

164 E. G. H. Joffe

but its leader. He also argued that such a nation was in no way inimicable to Islam, indeed it was coterminous with it, and thus nationalism, in the form of Arab nationalism, was not in contradiction to Islam at all.30 His aim was, of course, to co-opt the all-important support that the Arab nationalists would need from Islamic purists who still rejected all concepts of nationalism as fundamentally and irredeemably anti-Muslim.31 Of course, as time was to show, he was unsuccessful, for in Egypt at just about the same time the Muslim Brotherhood was formed by Hassan al-Banna, with a conscious rejection of na- tionalism in all its forms.32

In fact, by the end of the 1930s, it was evident that Egyptians, particularly the petty bourgeoisie who increasingly were to play a role in administration and the army, together with those from the peasantry who had escaped the confines of rural life, were convinced of Egypt's Arab destiny.33 Many of them had flirted with the Muslim Brother- hood, but nonetheless turned towards Arab Nationalism, particularly after the end of the Second World War. In part, the War itself was responsible for this, for it demonstrated that Europe was not all-powerful and that determination and unity could break the colonial hold. American influence also en- couraged this, as young Egyptian Army of- ficers began to consider that both the ideals of the Caliphate, as sought by the Khedive, and the vision of the specifically Egyptian watan, as embodied by the old Wafd, were inadequate and inappropriate when compared with the cultural and political potential of the Arab Nation with Egypt at its head.

At the same time, new ideas, stemming in part from the theories of Sati al-Husri and in part from the earlier Lebanese Christian protonationalist experience, began to develop in Syria. These looked to a resurgence of Arabic culture through the medium of the Arabic Islamic past. Like al-Husri, its creators argued that the collectivity was the only base against which individual life took meaning and, in a new departure, egalitarianism took on a specifically socialist context. Thus, by

the end of the Second World War, the Arab world was ready for a renewed attempt to find a viable ideology for Arab Nationalism.

Nasserism and the Baath Of the two specific ideologies that were to dominate the Arab Nationalist world from the end of the Second World War until the catastrophe of the Six Days War in 1967, one, Nasserism, sprang directly from the Arab confrontation with Zionism. The 1948 war against the new state of Israel was a shocking and horrifying defeat for most in the Arab world, particularly for Egypt. Once again, it was the apparent cohesion and unity of purpose that Zionism seemed to have given Israelis - whether or not this was the real reason - that impressed their defeated opponents. In addition, the alien presence in the Arab world was now apparently immo- vable and immutable.

The 1952 officers coup which eventually brought Nasser to power, was, of course, as much inspired by the lamentable state of Egypt as by any sense of Arab solidarity. It clearly mirrored the general attitudes of Egyptians, for even the ulema of Al-Ahzar, formerly the guardians of Islamic inter- nationalism, threw themselves behind its success.34 Yet Nasser never was a nationalist ideologue and Nasserism was an eclectic mixture of ideas and concepts thrown together to justify specific policy objectives. In ad- dition, it was still really the Egyptian watan, or homeland, that was important, for it was there that the forerunners of what the Arab World was to become were to be forged. Egypt was first to be a 'progressive state' - leading the way for the removal of corrupt regimes elsewhere. Then, as part of that progressiveness, it was to be a 'socialist' state, with a specifically 'Arab' form of socialism. In fact, most of the real inspiration and ideology for Arab Socialism came, not from the Qu'ran, but from Titoist Yugoslavia.35 Then, finally, Egypt was to be a pan-Arab state, with proposed unions with Syria, Sudan and Libya.36

Arab Nationalism and Palestine 165

soon began to resent Egyptian arrogance and the accompanying sense of Egyptian patriotism - hardly acceptable to Arab nationalists. Sudan had little option to resist the Egyptian embrace - any more than under the old Condominium system. Only Libya, ruled after 1969 by one of Nasser's most fervent admirers, took his ideas seriously. In fact, Nasserism, despite its early hopes, eventually became no more than a name to dignify a borrowed ideology to justify Egyptian dominance within the Arab world. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict - which Nasser made into a peculiarly Egyptian-Israeli one - after 1969 came second to the vital preoccupation of restoring the Egyptian economy and Egypt's social structure. No wonder, then, that Sadat was able, with relatively little difficulty, to com- pletely contradict the trends of two decades of Egyptian policy towards Israel, for ulti- mately the only issue was between two states, two nation-states, once Egyptian honour had been satisfied by the 1973 War, and Arab Nationalism was ultimately irrelevant. Ir- relevant too were the Palestinians, for they fell right outside the Egyptian watan.

The example of Baathism equally clearly demonstrates that Arab Nationalism was not just a Palestinian response to the Pale- stinians, but far more a continuation of that ethnic and cultural consciousness that had first developed in response to the Ottoman Empire. The Baath Party was founded in 1940 by Michael Aflaq, a Christian Arab, and took its present form after he had allied with Akram Hawrani's Socialist Party.37 Yet, despite the leavening of socialism, the original Baath doctrine was exclusively Arab na- tionalist, in addition demonstrating the schizophrenia typical of Arab nationalists of Christian origin towards the issue of Islam.

For Aflaq, Islam was a national culture - for Arabs. It was also revolutionary and thus, in both senses, could apply to all Arabs whether or not they were Muslim. In this respect, Aflaq followed in the footsteps of al-Husri (who believed in the historical existance of an Arab nation), Qubrusi and

Malik.38 However, in his insistence on the inseparability of Islam and Arab nationalism, Aflaq went far further than his predecessors, particularly in allying socialism with na- tionalism in a single cohesive ideology. Despite the fact that the Baath movement has split into two main factions - in Syria and Iraq - the overall ideology is generally accepted and was first enunciated in a com- plete form only in 1963 at the movement's sixth congress.

According to the Ideological Starting Points adopted then, Baathism is a revolutionary movement based on the 'resurgence' of the Arab nation which will then be able to achieve genuine social and economic reform.39 It is based on the 'popular masses' - a com- bination of peasants and workers - with a vanguard of the petty bourgeoisie and pro- fessional classes. Its enemies are agrarian capitalists, merchants and feudal oligarchies. Its primary economic aims are nationalisation of the means of production and agrarian reform and politically it believes in the primacy of the single party system. The party's primary duty, however, is to carry the revolution and 'resurgence' of Arabism into all Arab coun- tries.

In many respects, the ideals of Nasserism and Baathism were similar and it was on this basis that unity between Syria and Egypt was originally proposed. However, in so far as Nasserism was in large measure eclectic and fundamentally concerned with Egyptian domination within the Middle East, while Baathism is clearly dominated by a vision of the cultural heritage and inherent dynamism of the Arab world with its unique heritage in Islam, it is not surprising that the United Arab Republic soon became a dead letter. In addition, both ideologies look towards some sort of 'consensus' socialism which both ex- plicitly justify by reference to the Islamic heritage. Yet, given those specific groups which were to provide the vanguards in each case - in practice in Nasserism and explicitly in the Baath - there was to be an inevitable conflict between their socialist and nationalist aspirations. Th result has been that, in the

166 E. G. H. Joffe

past decade, both have been largely rejected inside the Arab world.

Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians From what has been said so far, it is clear that the issue of Zionism and Palestine was not of critical importance to Arab nationalists until, at the earliest, the Arab Revolt in Palestine after 1936. Indeed, in most respects, Arab nationalists only became aware of the importance of the Palestine issue after the 1948 War. Instead, their concern through- out was with the concept of the Arab Nation, Islam and national solidarity as expressed through asabiyya. Even the spectacle of the dispossession of the Palestinian fellahs from 1920 onwards, as Jewish migration into Palestine continued, did not stir the nationalist conscience too deeply.40 As late as 1939, most Arab states, in so far as they took the issue seriously, were prepared to accept that the future of Palestine should be as proposed in the British White Paper of that year - whereby, although a Jewish nation-state in Palestine was not to be allowed, Jewish immi- gration would continue.41

The Palestinian issue became suddenly relevant to Arab nationalists only when it became clear that, as a result of Zionist pressure in the United States, a Jewish state would appear in Palestine. Even then, as the pre-war attitudes had shown, it was the fact of an alien state, a nation-state, that excited hostility amongst nationalists, for it would be located on territory that they con- sidered part of the Arab world. For Islamic fundamentalists, who, although rejecting Arab Nationalism, accepted wholeheartedly the idea that the umma also implied a terri- torial component in which Islam should be supreme, the same sense of outrage at an alien intrusion was manifest. Even for the Pale- stinians themselves, the compromises and divisions within their community were such that no recognisable nationalist ideology had emerged. On the one hand, the peasantry, infuriated by the loss of land, formed the backbone to the insurrections of the late 1930s, while, on the other, the Arab-Palestinian

landowners were quite prepared to part with the very land that the peasants worked. At the same time, Palestinian urban groups looked towards a level of collaboration with Britain in resolving the difficult problem of Jewish immigration with little apparent awareness of the implications for their national com- munity.42 Even Palestinian trade unions were of little effect until the mid-1940s. Palestinian nationalist leaders were redused to isolated figures such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem seeking international recognition for Palesti- nian nationalism through a misguided sympathy for Nazi Germany.

Interestingly enough, the most significant Palestinian leader was a Muslim preacher, Shaikh Izzadin al-Qassim, who addressed his message to the poor and used the emotive terms of Islam to call for violent resistance to the impending breakup of Palestine. Until his death in 1935, he provided the fuel that fired the outbreak of rural violence in 1937-38, which, when crushed, deprived the nascent nationalist movement of its potential.43 It is also striking that the most consistent sup- porters of the Palestinians in this period were not the Arab nationalists but the Muslim Brotherhood. Once again, the call to protec- tion of Dar al-Islam, the Muslim world, was more potent than any claim to nationalism with a secular base, whether Arab or Palesti- nian.44

In fact, it was only after the Arab failure in 1948 that an effective Palestinian movement began with the creation of al-Fatah in 1959. In 1963 al-Fatah created a military group al- Assifa, and in 1966 the Palestinian left, under the leadership of the onetime Arab nationalist, Dr. George Habbash, coalesced in the forma- tion of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.45 To a large extent, the creation of the Palestinian resistance depended on the prevalence of Nasserist ideas throughout the Middle East and the predominant belief that the only way to conquer Zionism and what Arabs saw as its neo-colonialist consequence, the State of Israel, was to confront it with a more potent form of nationalism - Arab Nationalism and Arab unity. Thus, the Pale-

Arab Nationalism and Palestine 167

stinian struggle was subsumed into the wider issue of the Arab world,

Although the Palestinians may have believed that the path back to a Palestinian nationalist community lay through the wider goal of Arab unity, the 1967 War was to make it clear that this was not the case. In effect, the Arab failure then demonstrated the bankruptcy of Arab Nationalism as a prescription - qaum, based on the Arab nation, was clearly not potent enough to counter the strength of Israel. To this there were two responses. On the one hand, the Arab failure was laid at the door of Arab states - the sense of watan had been dominant, to the detriment of the Arab Nationalist ideal. Thus the corrupt states and regimes responsible had to be removed and the radical Palestinian resistance movement was seen as a means by which this could be done. The other answer, which had much less support, was that of the fundamentalists. For someone such as the Egyptian preacher Kishk, the failure occured precisely because of Arab nationalism. The answer to neo- colonialism in the Middle East was not to oppose an indigenous Arab nationalism to a Jewish nationalist creed. Instead it was to see that it was Islam, with its implied unity and strength, that offered the sole hope.46

This view was not to gain currency for some years. Instead, hopes were placed in the inspiration of the Palestinian resistance movement, with its nationalist wing repre- sented by Arafat and al-Fatah and its revolu- tionary wing under Habbash and the PFLP and later on the PDFLP. However, in the five years after the 1967 War - until Egypt finally escaped from the trammels of Nas- serism in 1973 - time and again Arab states demonstrated that support for the Palestinians as part of the Arab World was at best an empty sham and at worst a lie. Indeed, despite all the fine words, conferences and promises, the Palestinian Cause was systemati- cally undermined by Arab governments, from the purportedly radical to the clearly conser- vative, with the final shabby act being played out earlier this year in Beirut. As Ajami observes, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been a

conservatising force, not the catalyst of revolutionary upheaval.47 In short, the territorially-based nation-state, the watan, finally displaced the cultural ideals of Arab Nationalism.

However, this left two groups in the Middle East totally unsatisfied. One clearly was the Palestinian community, dispersed throughout the Arab world, considered by most host regimes to be a threat and with its political aspirations abandoned by major leaders. The response has, of course, been to create a nationalist movement and a nationalist identity far stronger and more radical than any that had existed before.

As has been discovered elsewhere, the exi- gencies of continued struggle can weld a potent sense of national solidarity and this has clearly been the case with the Palestinian refugee community.48 Given the heterogeneous cultural nature of the Palestinians, with religious loyalties shared significantly between Christian and Muslim, the sentiments now underlying Palestinian nationalism are largely related to Palestine, rather than to a wider Arab context. In addition, the evident failure of pan-Arab ideals after 1967 and their abandonment by most Arab states has forced the Palestinians back on their own sense of ethnic and cultural identity.

Yet, at the same time, for many Arabs, the fundamental insult to Islam that the persis- tence of the Palestinian problem represents remains. Indeed, for some, such as Colonel Qaddafi, Arab nationalism is now an un- acceptable creed unless it is linked to Islam.49 He, no doubt, is an exception, yet the sen- timents expressed by the Fundamentalists have large-scale and increasing support throughout the Middle East. It is not just the successful example of the Iranian Revolu- tion that has brought fundamentalist issues to the fore. Far more, it is the Arab failure over Palestine that has forced Arab popula- tions back to indigenous sources of inspiration. Once again, it is thef confrontation with Europe that forces the Arab and Muslim world to reconsider its values, only this time it is in

168 E. G. H. Joffe

the imitation of Europe that Muslims in- creasingly feel their problems to be based.

The Arab Nationalist Failure Given the fact that the ideal of Arab Na- tionalism has so clearly betrayed the hopes of its practitioners and, except for Libyan atavism, has increasingly been rejected in recent years, one can pose the question as to what precisely has caused the failure. One simple answer, and one that is frequently preferred in the Arab world itself, is that the ideal has been betrayed by corrupt and reac- tionary regimes. Yet this is hardly adequate, for it leaves unanswered the subsidiary issue, namely that, although Arab Nationalism has been rejected, its counterpart, the watan instead of quam, clearly has not. In addition, the issue of wider loyalties to the umma has also re-emerged as a dynamic alternative. Finally, the Palestinians at least have created a sense of national identity which did not exist before.

An alternative answer to the failure of Arab Nationalism can perhaps be found in the views on nationalism expressed by a commentator who has devoted much time to a consideration of these issues in North Africa.50 Ernest Gellner has suggested that nationalism is the consequence of modernisation and industri- alisation, whereby individuals become aware of a nationalist identity through the realisation that ethnic and political boundaries should be congruent and that such a nationalist society should be culturally homogeneous. It is an awareness of a common culture and an ability to communicate that awareness which creates the basis for nationalism, for it replaces other pre-nationalist social structures and provides a sense of identity within a newly mobile society. Nationalism is thus closely associated with culture and culture implies educational access. Thus, in the Middle Eastern context, it is evident that such 'nationalism' could only really develop under the conditions of con- frontation with European aggressiveness, for this was the vital catalyst.

However, the fact is that the ideal of the Arab Nation failed. One clear reason must

be that the sense of national identity through cultural identification did not achieve the widespread acceptance necessary for success. In short, the processes of change were too uneven and too limited. In so far as it is evident that the inspiration and definition of Arab Nationalism was the prerogative of specific social groups within the Middle East - and here one can recall the Baathist prescrip- tion of the petty bourgeois vanguard - and that such groups did not make the necessary contact with the far wider traditionalist communities, the failure of the Arab Nation- alist ideal is not surprising.

Yet, other forms of nationalism have been successful, although they have usually served to sustain conservative forms of government - or, better still, to conserve existing forms of government. Here, however, it has been ethnic and territorial, rather than cultural, nationalism that has been most notable. A possible explanation might be that ethnic nationalism in the Middle Eastern context is far more a demonstration of the persistence of pre-nationalist patterns of social identity and social structure than it is a demonstration of social change. One is reminded here of the distinction drawn by Ranger between primary and secondary resistance in Africa.5' In so far as Middle Eastern states tend to be 'defective' - in the sense that they rarely achieve the institutional objectivity and territorial homogeneity that the term 'state' implies - they are forced to rely on informal structures for survival that themselves involve a per- sistence of the past. In short, it is the personal- ised nature of power in such circumstances that defines national cohesion. The Middle East depends on patron-client relationships for stability.

The persistence of 'pre-existent cultural orientations of the society involved which become relevant because of the nature of modernization'52 - in this case the prolonged confrontation with Europe - is the means by which most Middle Eastern and North African states create the links between elite and mass that are vital for their stability. Necessarily, therefore, such societies and states

Arab Nationalism and Palestine 169

are far more concerned with national survival than with regional issues involving other national groups. Thus the Palestinian issue as such cannot and does not dominate national political visions in the Middle East.

However, there is still the wider context of Islam and Dar al-Islam, with the unac- ceptable fact of Israel and Zionism. This, after all, also forms part of a common cultural vision and thus, presumably, would fall within the purview of a common sense of nationalism. Yet, it is precisely this ideology which is used to justify the pre-existent cultural orientations mentioned above. Middle Eastern states increasingly turn to Islamic archetypes of law and political organisation to ensure national cohesion, not merely to satisfy fundamentalist demands but because such concepts are far closer to popular ex- pectation and fit into the pattern of clientalism on which they depend. Only the Palestinians, through the experience of their own diaspora, have avoided this and in large measure for that reason alone they are disliked and distrusted by state and society alike.53

Yet the universalist nature of Islam and the claims it makes to cultural domination create an inevitable contradiction within the pattern of normativised ethnic nationalisms. It is this aspect that the Arab-Israeli conflict has exacerbated and it is this contradiction that now so threatens the stability of regimes in the Middle East. The Palestinian issue is then relevant only in so far as it illuminates this feature, but has little relevance of itself - or at least, the ills of the Muslim world must be cured first by a recasting of tradition before the Palestinians themselves can be offered aid.54

NOTES

1. Ajami F., The Arab Predicament, CUP, 1982, p. 54.

2. viz. Hist D. & Beeson I., Sadat, Thames & Hudson London 1981.

3. viz. The situation of Jewish groups in Medina - see: Gibb H.A.R., Mohammedanism, OUP, 1962, p. 69. Guillaume A., Islam, Penguin, 1956, p. 44.

4. viz. The Ottoman and Persian Empires; see: Lewis B. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, RIIA, 1961, pp. 40-72.

5. Graham-Brown S., Palestinians and their society 1880-1964, Quarto, 1981.

6. Rodinson M., Marxism and the Muslim World, Zed, 1979. ben Jelloun T., Les amandiers sont morts de leurs blessures, Maspero, 1976, p. 15.

7. Hourani A., Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 OUP, 1962, pp. 260-324.

8. viz. Tibi B., Arab Nationalism, a Critical Enquiry, Macmillan, 1981.

9 Laroui A., La crise des intellectuels arabes, Maspero, 1974, pp. 45-58.

10. Zaim S.G., Arab Nationalism, an Anthology, California UP, 1962, p. 46ff.

11. viz. Enayat H., Modern Islamic Political Thought, Methuen, 1982.

12. Lewis B., The Arabs in History, Hutchinson, 1970, pp. 14-20.

13. Sharabi H.B., Nationalism & Revolution in the Arab World, Van Nostrand, 1966, pp. 4-5.

14. Amin S., The Arab Nation, Zed, 1978, p. 21. 15. Guillaume, op.cit., p. 19. 16. Amin, op.cit., pp. 29-30. 17. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, op. cit.,

p. 40. 18. Hourani, op.cit., p. 261. 19. Abun Nasr J., A History of the Maghreb, CUP,

1975, pp. 276-303. 20. Haim, op.cit., p. 9. 21. Lacoste Y., Ibn Khaldun, naissance de l'histoire

passe du tiers monde, Maspero, 1969, p. 137. 22. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, op. cit.,

p. 346. For the Young Ottomans, see Mardin S., The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, a Study in the Modernisation of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton, 1962.

23. Haim, op. cit., p. 53. 24. Hourani, op.cit., p. 274. 25. Gasper L., Histoire de la Palestine, Maspero,

1978, p. 95. 26. Haim, op. cit., p. 32. 27. Enayat, op. cit., p. 119. 28. viz. Tibi, op. cit. Ajami, op. cit., p. 28. 29. Haim, op. cit., pp. 45-46. 30. Tibi, op. cit., p. 138. 31. Rodinson M., The Arabs, Croom Helm, 1981,

pp. 106-107. 32. Mortimer E., Faith and Power, Faber & Faber,

1982, pp. 252-271. 33. eg. see Sadat's early career in Hirst & Beeson,

op. cit. 34. Enayat, op. cit., p. 118. 35. Cigar, N., personal communication. 36. Said A.M., Arab Socialism, Blandford, 1972,

p. 91-104. 37. Hourani, op. cit., p. 357. 38. Haim, op. cit., pp. 60-61.

170 E. G. H.Joffe

39. Sharabi, op. cit., p. 84. 40. Gaspar, op. cit., pp. 96, 125. 41. ibid., p. 110. 42. Graham-Brown, op. cit., p. 171. 43. ibid. 44. Mortimer, op. cit., p. 253. 45. Gaspar, op. cit., pp. 205-207. See also: Kazziha

W.W., Palestine in the Arab Dilemma, Croom Helm, 1979.

46. Ajami, op. cit., p. 54. 47. ibid., p. 149. 48. Sayigh R., Palestinians from Peasants to Revolu-

tionaries, Zed, 1979, pp. 148, 175-180. 49. For instance, Colonel Quaddifi's suggestion in

September 1982 that all Palestinians should be Muslim if they are Arabs.

50. Gellner, E., Thought & Change, Duckworth, 1964.

51. Ranger T.O., Emerging Themes of African History, Heinemann, 1968. Rodinson M., Marxism and the Muslim World, op. cit., p. 81.

52. Heiberg, M., Basque nationalism: its economic, political and cultural determinants and effects, Ph.D. (Lond), 1981. Heiberg, M., 'Insider/ Outsiders: Basque Nationalism', Arch. europ. sociol., XVI (1975), pp. 186-193.

53. Ajami, op. cit., p. 145. 54. ibid., p. 60.