Roie Yellinek and Assaf Malach
Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2022
While the “Palestine question” has long dominated inter-Arab politics, not only have the Arab states been driven by their own ulterior motives, but they also have shown little concern for the wellbeing of the Palestinians, let alone their demand for a state of their own. This pattern dates back to the mandate years (1920-48) when the self-styled champions of the nascent pan-Arab movement—King Faisal of Iraq, Transjordan’s Emir Abdullah, and Egyptian King Faruq—viewed Palestine as part of their would-be empires. This situation culminated in the 1948 war when the all-Arab assault on Israel was launched in pursuit of the invading states’ imperialist goals—not in support of Palestinian self-determination. In the words of the Arab League’s secretary-general Abdel Rahman Azzam:
Abdullah was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. [The] Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon.[1]
In the decades following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab states continued to use the Palestinians to their own ends, exploiting the newly created “refugee problem” to tarnish Israel’s international standing and channel their oppressed subjects’ anger outwards. They did practically nothing to relieve this problem, let alone to facilitate the crystallization of Palestinian nationalism and the attainment of statehood.
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