11 - The 1967 War and the Demise of Arab Nationalism

Summary

It is an established pillar of the seemingly inexhaustible stock of conventional wisdom about the history of the modern Middle East that Arab nationalism was a formidable force before the June 1967 War, and that it visibly waned in its aftermath, largely as a consequence of this crushing defeat of the Arabs and the consequent occupation of vast tracts of their territory. The claim, in essence, is that it was the 1967 debacle that lowered the standing of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and of the Arab nationalist ideological current he was seen as representing. Whether this conventional wisdom is correct, there can be little question that for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Arab nationalism held a seemingly unassailable position as the hegemonic ideology of the Arab world or that, by the post-1967 era, it had entered into a decline that appears to continue until this day.

The Myth of Demise

However, this chapter argues that while the demoralizing rout of 1967 seriously tarnished the prestige of Egypt and its charismatic president, the war did not sound the death knell of Arab nationalism as a political force. Arabism remained a force among the Arab masses long afterwards and retains its potency with many Arabs until this day. Nor is it only the case because regimes that proclaimed their Arab nationalist credentials remained in power for many years afterwards in countries like Baʾthist Iraq, Algeria, and Libya. Such a Baʾthist regime still exists in Syria, many decades after 1967. For the most part these regimes were (and the few of them remaining are) “Arab nationalist” only in name, and this was true both before 1967 and afterwards. It is important to specify that this is the case if by Arab nationalist we mean regimes that did not simply pay lip service to the shibboleths of Arabist doctrine but rather had Arab unity as a primary goal and solidly based their external relations on the principle of Arab solidarity. This should be the definition and litmus test of whether a regime was actually “Arab nationalist,” not its declaratory policy, or the perhaps sincerely held beliefs of its leaders. More importantly, this chapter contends that the 1967 war and its aftermath simply reinforced and consecrated a preexisting, underlying trend among nominally Arab nationalist regimes. This was one whereby narrow nation-state nationalism – to be sure, covered with a thick cloak of Arabist rhetoric – increasingly became these regimes’ primary guiding principle, seconded by powerful considerations of regime security.