With all the discussion about "Arab unity," "Arab masses," "Arab people," "Arab nation," "Arab cause," "Arab identity," one hardly needs more evidence for the fact that it is not the "Palestinians" but the "Palestinian Arabs," who are the current shock troops in this phase of the Arab Muslim war on the Infidel state of Israel. When the Arab League meets, 22 Arab heads of state or high officials discuss the "Arab people," the "Arab nation," the threats to the "Arabs," the belittling of the "Arabs," the "Arab" cause, the insistence that Jerusalem is eternally "Arab." Typical of such gatherings was the Arab League meeting in April 2002, where Saddam Hussein gave a speech that noted "Dear brothers, we are the sons of one [Arab] nation.The people of every country in it [that Arab nation] have expressed their will clearly and strongly concerning the events around them." And then there are perorations about the greatness of the "Arab nation."

With no other group of ethnic Arabs living under the control or rule of non-Arabs, has it been necessary to create a fictional people, on the model of the "Palestinian people."

The Arabs themselves do not differentiate between the accidents of citizenship, for Arab nation-states are merely administrative units. Arab historians for the past 80 years have been writing about the impending "Arab Renaissance." Arab poets write "O, ye Arabs! Arise!" There is an Arab television channel, Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, with a staff of "Arab" journalists reporting on news of interest to "Arabs" everywhere, with talk shows and debates that discuss "Arab questions" and offer "Arab solutions" to "Arab problems" for an audience of "Arabs" from Morocco to the Gulf, and even loyal viewers in Detroit, Jersey City, and the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

And, of course, in the United States, the organization that fights against what it claims is the widespread injustice of "racial profiling" at airports and similar "outrages" calls itself the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

But there is one place where the word "Arab" is deliberately placed in the background, and that is in the propaganda against Israel, intended for non-Arab and non-Muslim audiences, by Arabs, especially "Palestinian" Arabs, from warlords such as Arafat on down. They are always careful -- these warlords, their aides, their attendant academics, journalists, and spokesmen -- to repeat the mesmeric mantra, "the Palestinian people," as if endless repetition would convince the world of its existence. Saeb Erekat and Hanan Ashrawi are particularly skillful at this.

Those who thought the Arab-Israeli battle consisted of an endless siege (to use Conor Cruise O'Brien's term) on the small Jewish state by the vast surrounding Arab people with their 22 states, and their staggering unearned wealth, so much of it applied to armaments and weapons of mass destruction, have apparently had it wrong. For all along it was something quite different, a perfectly manageable conflict between "two tiny peoples, each struggling for its homeland." It is a formulation with the false symmetry so appealing to the simple-minded.

In Europe, the slow and organic growth of national identity preceded the existence of the nation-state. Modern Italy and modern Germany are creatures of the nineteenth century; it took many centuries for the idea of "Italian" and "German" to develop, but it did develop, because the people involved slowly formed such an identity and a national yearning. The Arab yearning, since the Allies removed the rule of the Ottomans, and they began to ponder their destiny, has never focused on the nation-state. It has always been either pan-Arab, or pan-Islamic, in its direction (and sometimes there is an overlap, where secular rulers, such as Saddam Hussein or Nasser, have found that Islamic imagery, Islamic passions, are useful to their own claims to be leaders of the Arabs).

With no other group of ethnic Arabs living under the control or rule of non-Arabs, has it been necessary to create a fictional people, on the model of the "Palestinian people." There are millions of ethnic Arabs living in Khuzistan, in western Iran, on the border with Iraq. But to date no one has bothered to rename these people, and to demand "self-determination for the Khuzistanian people." There is far less need, for even if the Persians now rule these ethnic Arabs they are still within the Dar al-Islam. And though Saddam Hussein made rhetorical use of those Arabs when he first invaded Iran, he refrained from any "Khuzistanian people" concoction; he was saving his Arab brothers, not the "Khuzistanian people." Besides, creation of such a "people," at this point, would simply raise parallels with the "Palestinian people," and might expose too clearly the hollowness of the notion.

Just as in 1938, the "Sudeteners" were most accurately described as "ethnic Germans" who lived in Czechoslovakia (an "ethnic German" originally a citizen of Austria could, without much ado, be made the German Fuhrer, so strong was the sense of Deutschtum, Germanness), so the most accurate description of Arafat

Outpost               - 6 -               June 2002