It is even more recent than that, the idea of a Watan Arabi on the European nation model. It is an idea and movement of the early 20th century and it is as much the reaction to the European colonial government structures that only penetrate around the time of the WWI.
Before 1900 the essence of the movements not pan islamic criticisms of the Ottomane sultanate were more like the local Qaoumi - not the pan arabism of the 20th century that came from particularly the christian arabic speakers (and who directed it against the jewish arabic speakers who until this time were considered more close as both the jewish and the muslim found the christian practice less like theirs than between them).
the idea this is a thousands years old conflict or hundreds years old conflict has no basis, until the european colonial empires of the 19th century began their internal liberalization away from the Christianist model and began to use the jewish population for divide and conquer, the Islamic regions were the regions welcoming the Jewish refugees from the oppression and the Ottoman welcomed the Jewish refugees as the positive economic factors and contributors.
I agree with everything, though I’d add a little caveat to the last sentence - the Jewish population was an insignificant factor in European colonial divide-and-conquer plans.
Rather, the roots of local anti-Semitism go back to local Christian attempts to manipulate the local Muslim majority.
See for example the 1840 “Damascus Affair”, which originated in a completely traditional accusation of the “Blood Libel” (namely, that Jews were killing non-Jews and taking their blood for religious rituals):
Note that this affair originated due to Christian-Jewish tensions, which in turn were created by Western powers supporting the rights of local Christians.
During this period, local Jewish groups tended, on the whole, to have a better relationship with local Muslims than local Christians did - which isn’t to say they were perfect. From the article:
Point is that Jews, like every other religious minority, existed on sufferance - relations were generally good, because they generally did not challenge the dhimmi status quo (unlike local Christian groups, who could count on European great-power protectors). They did, however, suffer “occasional outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence” - such as the Damascus Affair.
In terms of severity, the Damascus Affair is of course piddling compared with contemporary pogroms in (say) Russia.
It is also noteworthy that the Turkish authorities put an end to this Affair after some prodding … but its influence didn’t die in 1840; like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (originally a Russian fraud), it spread and it is still referenced to this day …
Of course, a bit of intercommunal tension, or even the occasional outbreak of violence, was nothing much in significance until European notions of ethno-nationalism took root. What it did, was create a pattern by which increased tensions caused by ethno-nationalism on both sides (and in particular of course the success of Zionism) could be expressed.
yes in the east that is true, my perceptions are more colored in perhaps by the algerian maghrebine experience.
It is worht also pointing again that the promotion of the Pan Arabism with the idea of the Arab Nation was promoted and had deep roots in the same Arab christians who explicetly excluded the Arab Jews - so that now even writing Arab Jew seems strange and incoherent.
But for many centuries it was not at all strange or incoherent.
the Pan Arabism was infected at its birth by the Arab Christians importing the ideas from the Russian sources for example like the blood libel, ideas and discourses historically completely alien to the arabic discourse.
al Qaoum not al Watan.
the idea of the nation (al Watan is the arabic word that ends up with this meaning in the european sense - Vatan for the Turkish) is a thing that becomes important only in the 20th century, and a movement also reacting to the penetration of the European 19th century ethnic nation state ideas into the Turkish (young Turks).
the ethnic violences in the declining years of the Ottomans is tied in my opinion to the upheavel and the economic decline going along with the state decline and governances crisis of weakness and backlash, a classic tale of the scapegoat of the minority in the time of the stress. It is not the ideological concepts of the Wataniya that come later.
But even if we argue over 1910 versus 1890, it is clear it is nonsense to describe the current problem as an ancient thing.
I agree with malthus, it is the child of the european nationalism ideas and illegiimate child of their imperial games around WWI and after.
Every ethno-nationalist movement looks to history for its justification - first, as to why this particular set of characteristics make it a “nation” in the first place (is it Language? Genetics? Religion? some mixture of those? Something else?); second, as to why its claims to some particular territory make more sense than anyone else’s claims to the same territory.
To give a particular example - many (but certainly not all!) of the early Zionists looked to the Bible as justification for (a) why Jews (who often spoke completely different languages, came from totally different ethnic backgrounds - as far removed as Poles and Black Africans in appearance) - nevertheless formed a “nation”; and (b) why that “nation” ought to be located where it is now.
This gives the impression that the ethno-nationalist movement in fact spans millennia, back to the time the Old Testament was written!
However, this simply isn’t true. If it were not for the rise of exclusionary ethno-nationalism in Europe, Zionism would never have existed; the stories in the OT would simply be an interesting historical origin story, something for historians and archaeologists to puzzle over.
It is only in hindsight that any of this looks natural. Any number of other choices are just as “natural” in the formation of a “nation” - for example, looking to language as more important than religion (so a French-speaking Jew living in France is “French” - a point put in dispute by the Dreyfus Affair. Which gave the boost to Zionism.)
No, the arabs and the palestinians are innocent despite some stupid propagandas of any role in the holocauts - and indeed the Moroccan case the Sultan forbade collaboration with the Vichy French seeking to deport the Moroccan jews in the Vichy collaboration with the Nazis.
But the holocaust is the key to the reason why the Israeli state was birthed - pushing the European jewish to seek a safe have they controlled and helped by the European colonial powers that felt the blood debt. (and in this modern time with the recycling of the blood discourse of anti-jewish to be anti-arabo-muslim, I feel some sympathy for the european Jewish view they could never again trust the europeans - I think I recall this comment from Alessan years ago here and then I did not get it. Now I do,…).
And so those eggs were broken, and the Palestinian arab payed the price of the European total blood nationalism vision taken to its most extreme and the clumsy stupid hypocrisy of the european imperial powers that did also such a terrible idiotic work in the playing around with the carcasses of the Ottoman cosmpolitanism to deliberately open the door to the Wahhabites and the Ibn Saud for the stupid short term politics…
For me it is clearly injust for the Palestinian but then the middle eastern arab states committed their idiocy of the Jewish explusions and participated in the injustice.
So here we are.
The only useful path forward is the honorable compromise.
everything else is sterile propagandas to try to justify an ethnic cleansing by one side or the other (or Bantustan policy that is the near cousin of the ethnic cleansing).
When people talk about Black Lives Matter, do they even realize that the VAST majority of black murders are committed by other blacks? Does BLM have a skewed perspective when they talk about violence against blacks?
You’re going to have to pick a parameter. Is the criteria, “native Palestinian” “or middle easterner”?
Because I agree with you that Palestine is the operative region. If Arafat had tried to carve a nation out of Palestine along with a bunch of Egyptian migres and in the process had driven native Palestinians into refugee camps and oppressed them for 70 years, he would be exactly as bad as the Zionists.
They did this in someone else’s country. They moved created a country and wouldn’t let the original inhabitants back in.
And some of them have more of a right to be there than others.
Like the American colonists?
Like the Australian colonists?
Nah, colonialists are not agents for their mother nation. They are usually criticized for oppressing native population in the place that they colonized.
So the Afrikaaners weren’t colonists? What word would you use for white south Africans? Because that is the word that should probably be applied to Zionists.
Just like the conquistadors were not colonists.
There was a native people. They now live in refugee camps under the boot of guys like Netanyahu.
Come back and make that comparison after Arafat has dispossessed native Palestinians and created a country out of their land.
None. But they are refugees that are dispossessing natives who are in refugee camps. Things would be entirely different if all of this was done with the agreement of the current residents and natives. But it wasn’t. The partition plan was negotiated by Zionists with no participation or agreement from the majority of the people that lived in the region.
He doesn’t have to go back to Iraq.
Sure, and fuck the Iraqis for doing it. But how does Iraq’s injustice towards that jew justify Israel’s injustice towards the Palestinian?
Not just for who exactly? I bet the Palestinian refugee sees at least a little justice in it. Of course its not practical but the negotiating stance of the Zionists has been incredibly brazen and unapologetic about the injustice they have served upon the Palestinians. Chutzpah in the perjorative sense seems to be applicable here.
There have been arab states, particularly muslim arab states in the region for a long long time. They fought the crusaders mentioned a little bit further up. Sultanates, caliphates, kingdoms, etc. Then the Ottomans came and took over for a while but thearab nationalist movements were a thorn in their side pretty much the entire time, haven’t they.
That’s not the issue (no, the Arabs and Palestinians had nothing to do with it). You said the Holocaust (is your lack of capitalization on purpose? if so, why?) had nothing to do with the formation of Israel. That’s immensely false. Because of the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews felt a desperate need for a state of their own in which they could guarantee their own security with a state behind them. Many had already moved to the land that later became Israel, and many more would follow them, due to that desperate need. That’s a fact, and it’s surprising that anyone with any knowledge of history would state anything to the contrary.
That doesn’t justify any particular displacement of peoples or other injustices. But it’s a historical fact that the Holocaust was the direct motivator for the formation of Israel as a Jewish state.
If you mean “arab nationalist” movements were a thorn in the side of the Othman over centuries, no this is not in any way the case. It is only the WWI decade.
The states of the Medieval period were not the Arab in any case. After the fall of the Abbasids, the states in the middle east region are dominated by the miltiary elites of the turkish and the kurdish and the persian background, not Arab - not by the blood or the ethnicity
The famous Saladin, Salah Ad-dine al Ayoubi was a Kurd for example.
Writing Arabism back to that period is complete nonsense for the history.
Why would I call it the Holocaust and then mean something by not capitalizing it?
And why should the Palestinians suffer because of the Holocaust?
Once again, why should the Palestinians pay the price?
Of course it was the driving factor behind the huge migration of Jews into Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. But as you say, how does that justify ANYTHING? How does the Holocaust even enter into the argument between Zionists and Palestinians about Israel?
I won’t reply point by point, as it is getting repetitive - but this single sentence is really the crux of the disagreement: that “blood” or “race” should give one ethnicity more rights than another.
I disagree that it should.
No. They were one African ethnicity oppressing others.
Conquistadors were operating expressly on behalf of Spain.
Non-responsive to the point.
It doesn’t. However, undoing one past injustice now inevitably requires committing future injustices.
Every nation state is brazen and unapologetic about the wrongs that went into its existence - until the past is safely buried. See for example the US, Canada, Great Britain, etc.
It is foolish to continually butt heads over that. If you wait for those enjoying the power of the status quo to admit their past errors before making any progress, you will wait a long time, and not make any progress.
To add to what Ramira is saying(and apologies to her if I get it wrong), Arab national consciousness is a very modern and recent development.
The term “Arab” when used was largely a pejorative and Arabic speaking people, in general didn’t see themselves as “Arabs” any more than modern Americans see themselves as “English”.
People identified themselves by their religious background or the area they came from.
In fact, the movement for Arab National consciousness was largely pushed by Arabic speaking Christians who were trying to gain acceptance from Arabic speaking Muslims.
The “Abbasid Caliphate” existed in a shadowy form as exercising some sort of religious authority in Cairo until the Turks arrived, but their actual political power had evaporated centuries earlier. That is not what is meant by the “Abbasid Caliphate” any more than people usually say “the Roman Empire era lasted until the Ottomans showed up”, because the last emperors of Byzantium were terminated by the same Ottoman Turks.
Your position is the equivalent of claiming that the Romans still ruled (say) France during the 14th century AD, because there was still an emperor in Byzantium. It’s an absurdity.
What on Earth are you disputing in my posts? No idea what you’re talking about. Where did I suggest the Palestinians should suffer, pay the price, etc.?
You said something false – that the Holocaust had nothing to do with the formation of Israel. I pointed out your false statement. That’s all. You appear to agree now that the Holocaust very obviously was enormously important for the formation of Israel, and that was the only point of disagreement.
No that is entirely wrong. The Abbasides ended their effective Khalifa with the mongol invasion at the latest although after the 950s they are not really the rulers any more but there is the puppet Caliphs of the Seljuks etc.
The later puppet dynasty in the Cairo was not a ruling dynasty, they were the puppets of the various Turkish etc. Mamlouks or the Ayyoubids etc.
There is no idea in this period of the arab nationalism. It is an idea and a concept totally alien to the time period, an anachronism.
Eh?
What???
I mean what is native to me. An arabic speaker who identifies as an Arab and not as a berber or as a Kurd or as a Turkmen or etc.
Yes until the modern arab nationalism, the word arab itself had a sense of the despicable and the uncivilized bedouine. In my dialect there remains the trace of this as one of the intensive forms of arab has the very insulting sense of “idiot backwoods cretin.” It is very insulting and if you say it to someone… It is funny as people do not make the conscious connection usually.
The idea of an arab nation as a national concept like say the French is a pure creation of the 20th century.
yes.
exactly.
The majority of the governing regimes (except the Fatamides) in the region were in no way of an arab background in the modern ethnic sense and the idea of an arab national identity reacting to the Ottomans has no basis until after 1900 and only has real reaction to the Turkish ethnic nationalism coming into fore with the 20th century reforms of the Ottomans copying the Germans…