Pan-Arabism

no who knows who advised him it's a it's a murky tale so this man now becomes the mufti which gives him access to all the holy places he wears the turban and it gives him incredible power now he in 1922 he becomes president of the supreme muslim council and from now on His main aim is to clear the Jews out of that land.

So you see, having been a believer in pan-Arabism, he's now in Palestine.

And what he's going to try and do is to wipe the Jews out of Palestine.

And the question you always have to ask yourself, when does pan-Arabism begin? Is there such a thing as distinct Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian nationalism?

To what extent also is it fueled ideologically by, you know, kind of like restoring the caliphate and things like that?

That's beginning, but not quite there yet.

The Muslim Brotherhood did not come into being until 1928 in Egypt.

Is there any way in which the religious side influences that pan-Arabism?

This happens eight years into a war in Lebanon.

known mostly as the Lebanese Civil War, but it really pits the far-right Christian militias, fascists as well, who see their cause as a sovereignist cause against those Palestinian militants and their allies in Lebanon that are mostly Muslim, but not all, and that are secular leftist Marxists and have espoused this pan-Arab cause that is the Palestinian cause.

And it is in this quagmire that Israel invades with the defense minister Ariel Sharon and the illusion that he could change the Middle East, that he could send the Palestinians into exile, bury the Palestinian cause forever, install a friendly regime in Lebanon, sign a peace agreement with Beirut.

kneecap the Syrian regime next door, which was a satellite of the Soviet Union.

You have Balad, you had Hadash.

You have some of these parties that are either communists, that are either pan-Arabists, that are against the very notion of the creation of Israel as a Jewish state.

There were members of the Joint List who came out after the election and said that their victory was for the people of Gaza, that their victory was for the prisoners who are sitting in Israeli jails.

Now, Palestinian prisoners sitting in Israeli jails are sitting there because they either committed or attempted to commit acts of first-degree murder against Jews.

It's neither capitalist, neither imperialist.

It's not pan-Arabist.

It's not Islamist.

It's not Zionist.

My grandparents, some of my grandparents were Syrian Jews who escaped Syria and then came to Lebanon because of the rise in Jew hatred in Syria.

And I'll just do one more, although I could give many others.

In 1970, when I wasn't yet six years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser, which you reference and so on, the whole pan-Arabist stuff, died in, I think it was in September 1970.

And the first vivid example of Jew hatred that I can remember was as the people were sort of proceeding down our street, lamenting the death of this great pan-Arabist hero, They were screaming, death to Jews, death to Jews, to which I turned to my mother and say, you know, I'm not even six years old.

They refuse to condemn Hamas.

They have this very ideological, whether it's pan-Arabism, whether it's Islamic agendas.

Ram, as Liron mentioned, was leading a different way, and this is why there was some progress with them.

But I think, first of all, I think Ram got even eight seats.