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How Arab Rulers Undermined a Palestinian State

(Middle East Quarterly) Roie Yellinek and Assaf Malach - The all-Arab assault on Israel in 1948 was launched in pursuit of the invading states' imperialist goals - not in support of Palestinian self-determination. Arab League secretary-general Abdel Rahman Azzam said that Transjordan's Emir "Abdullah was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon." In the decades following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab states did nothing to facilitate the crystallization of Palestinian nationalism and the attainment of statehood. This consistent lack of recognition of a separate Palestinian nationality was perpetrated by Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. In the years between 1948 and 1967, the Jordanian government systematically erased all traces of a distinct Palestinian identity in an attempt to create a wider Jordanian national identity. In 1960, Abdullah's grandson and successor King Hussein declared his firm opposition to the idea of a separate "Palestinian entity" and denounced the "despicable innovation" of the establishment of a Palestinian entity. Roie Yellinek is a research associate at the BESA Center and a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute. Assaf Malach is a lecturer at Shalem College and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
2022-05-04 00:00:00
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