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The roots of modern Pan-Arab nationalism have been identified as having emerged with the spread of Islam in the 7th to 10th centuries. Within one hundred years following the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the preaching of the Moslem faith spread out from its birthplace in the Arabian peninsula and pressed forward in every direction open to a land advance. Two simultaneous processes occurred with the spread of the new religion: what George Antonius called "islamisation" and "arabisation." The former was the religious conversion of the inhabitants of the conquered territories, while the latter refers to a linguistic, social, and cultural transformation.
Arabisation had actually begun, albeit on a smaller scale, prior to the founding of Islam. Beginning in the second century B.C., pastoral nomads from the Arabian peninsula had taken control of the caravan trade which passed from southern Arabia to Syria [modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine] and Iraq on the one hand, and between Iraq and Syria across the Syrian desert on the other. The wealth derived from this trade resulted in the building of caravan cities such as Mecca, Palmyra, and Petra and placed the Arab people at the center of the regional economy.
The arabisation and islamisation which resulted from the spread of Islam were not entirely congruent. The regions that became arabicized became largely islamicized, but the reverse is not entirely true. Persians, Africans (south of the Sahara), Turks, Afghanis, Indonesians and Malays (and others) who have adopted the Moslem religion for the most part do not consider themselves, nor do others consider them, to be Arabs. Likewise, Syrian and Egyptian Christians and Jews are examples of those who underwent socio-cultural and linguistic transformation without adopting the Islamic faith. Therefore, while the Arab world and the Moslem world overlap geographically, they are not identical.
The arabisation of Palestine, which began prior to, but was completed by, the conquest of Islam, occurred among a population that had already absorbed a large mixture of different peoples. The first inhabitants, known as the Canaanites, developed their civilization in an area that was at the center of the thriving trade between Pharaonic Egypt and Sumeria, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon (four nations of Mesopotamia). Because of its location at the crossroads of these civilizations, and also due to its fertile climate, these people, in addition to the Hittites, the Midianites, the Philistines, and others, all tried to dominate the region. Differing levels of control were achieved by each of these peoples during different periods, and accordingly, certain numbers of their population were absorbed by the Canaanites. The resultant people came to be known as the Palestinians.
Zionism was the product of an era that recognized the right of self-determination to European nations, but denied those same rights to the nations of Africa and Asia. The Balfour Declaration recognized (in words) the "civil and religious" rights of the Palestinian people but not the political rights. Even under a limited definition such as the European one, the Palestinians are a nation:
"nationality as it was originally envisaged in western Europe, carried with it certain characteristics that defined a group of people. These characteristics included the belief in a common descent, the same language, the same territory, a political entity, religion, customs, and traditions. Such a conglomerate of people possessing the same nationality was called a *nation*. This group of people did not have to possess all the characteristics that defined a "nationality." Thus, one may speak of the United States of America as a nation, though it is not [ethnically] homogenous; and of a Palestinian nation, though the latter does not now possess a finite territory." (Haddad, 1977)
While Palestine was, at moments in history, part of Syria, the case of Palestinian nationalism is not extraordinary. Often in history, arbitrarily drawn borders have resulted in new territories. The argument that Palestine is southern Syria is one the Zionists can offer only with great irony. It certainly lends no credence to their cause. In fact, there was a Palestinian self-concept before the British mandate. This description of the region from the 10th century is translated from the Arabic:
"Filastin is watered by the rains and the dew. Its trees and its ploughed fields do not need artificial irrigation; and it is only in Nablus that you find the running waters applied to this purpose. Filastin is the most fertile of the Syrian provinces. Its capital and largest town is Ar Ramlah, but the Holy City of (Jerusalem) comes very near this last in size. In the province of Filastin, despite its small extent, there are about twenty mosques, with pulpits for Friday prayer." (Said, 1979)
Two other manifestations of Palestinian self-concept prior to the British Mandate are of note. The first is that on January 1, 1872, the German Consul General received a letter from the Governor of the sanjak of Jerusalem with an altered letterhead; it read "Gouvernment de Palestine." The second is the fact that the newspaper "Filastin" which continued publication until 1967, first appeared in 1911, six years before the Balfour Declarion. The real point, though is summed up by Edward Said:
"On the land called Palestine there existed as a huge majority for hundreds of years a largely pastoral, a nevertheless socially, culturally, politically, economically, identifiable people whose language and religion were (for a huge majority) Arabic and Islam, respectively. This people-or, of one wishes to deny them any modern conception of themselves as a people-this group of people-identified itself with the land it tilled and lived on (poorly or not is irrelevant), the more so after an almost wholly European decision was made to resettle, reconstitute, recapture the land for Jews who were brought from elsewhere."
In the two hundred years following Muhammad's death the Arab world emerged as a relatively centralized political entity, connected by common language, religion, and long-distance trade. Success of the trade was due to the geographical location separating three areas of thriving agricultural civilization: Europe, Africa, and 'Monsoon' Asia. An Arab merchant class, residing in the great cities, as middlemen, did not need to rely on surplus extracted from the agricultural population. So the existing agricultural rural population remained relatively unaffected in terms of their traditional subsistence economy. The nomadic pastoral population were the caravaneers of the trade and the link between the agricultural population and the merchant-warriors.
A Pan-Arab consciousness arose among the merchant-warrior class, while the agricultural communities had a relatively more locally defined identity. There was unity and diversity, but the diversity never reached the extreme of European countries, whose ruling classes had to accentuate differences to maintain control of their agricultural populations whose surplus they relied upon.
The coveted geo-economic position of the Arab world with Palestine at its center resulted in successive invasions, military expeditions, and conquests, fragmenting the region and leading to decline. This culminated in the victory of the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century. The Ottoman monopoly on trade was relatively short-lived. At the time of the establishment of Ottoman rule, Europe had emerged out of the middle ages, and although Portuguese discovery of the Cape route did not initially damage the level of Ottoman trade, once the British and Dutch found their way into the Indian Ocean, Ottoman trade was reduced to a marginal role.
Face with a tremendous loss of revenue, the Ottomans, who had the great expense of continuous wars and expanded administration, turned to taxation and neo-feudal surplus extraction of the agricultural production. The Ottomans were forced into agreements with the European powers, such as the Capitulations, which had the effect of incorporating the Ottoman empire into the world capitalist economy as a supplier of raw materials and importer of manufactures.
This led to revived Pan-Arabism among the elites, but the socio-economic changes are key to the impact on the agricultural population (fellahin) and the bedouin. Ottoman presence had initially brought some security to the fellahin, who traditionally built their villages on the hillsides to defend against foreign invasion and bedouin raids. Ottoman presence allowed them to dispatch groups out to the fertile plains. With European powers competing for influence, the Ottoman's instituted a series of reforms centered around two policy areas: land tenure and immigration. The 1858 land code outlawed communal ownership and divided land into individual plots. Only cultivated land was recognized as belonging to the fellahin, while the common pasture and forest was expropriated. Tanzimat reforms attempted to cash in on increased demand for agricultural products in Europe by offering European settlers free land to be tax exempt for the first six years. The key here was that privatization was taking place in which large tracts of fertile land were being taken out of the hands of the fellahin and transferred to foreign interests. Taxes could no longer be paid in kind which forced fellahin from subsistence to cash crops. This often led to transfer of land titles and more and more Palestinians entering the soap industry as wage laborers.
The 1876 Land Law expropriated mulk, land granted to nobles in exchange for civil service and organized on a sharecropping basis. This land was immediately made available to Europeans, and was concentrated in the most fertile citrus growing areas. Among the buyers was Baron de Rothschild, who invested over 15 million British pounds for the Palestinian Jewish Colonization Association. The small Jewish population doubled in the next six years, despite Ottoman prohibition of mass Jewish immigration.