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| …In fact, Oxford University historian Albert Hourani, in the early 1990s published a major work he called A History of the Arab Peoples (note the plural) and in his introductory pages was at length to explain his title for even he has trouble seeing an Arab nation, a unified community.
The history of nationalism in the West covers centuries of a process of ever expanding group identities which congeal into one identity. Spain, France, Germany, Italy et cetera came together as separate and singular nation-states after centuries of provincial princes and dukedoms. But the Arabs, by contrast never became a nation. They remain largely tribal and regional and incapable of shedding their particular local identities for a larger national one. And what is happening today in the Middle East is the bonfire of the Arab nationalist movement going down in flames to the rise of imperialist and totalitarian Islam, terrorist Islam. And in this turmoil, Israel’s Arab Christian citizens should understandably be moving in the direction of the Druse who may speak Arabic but don’t call them Arabs. According to this report, some of them are starting to call themselves Arameans, not Arabs… |
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