Arab Defeat Research Articles

The Defeat of the Arabs in Nizar Qabbani's "Hawamish 'ala Daftar an-Naksah" Poem (Roland Barthes Semiotics Study)

This study aims to describe the Arab defeat implied in the poem "Hawāmish 'ala Daftar an-Naksah" by Nizar Qabbani through the process of translation and in-depth analysis. This research uses a qualitative-descriptive method by observing existing data, looking for patterns of relationships with various concepts, analyzing, then providing understanding and explanation. The data were collected through literature study and internet search, then analyzed using Roland Barthes' semiotic theory. The results of this study show that from the analysis of 12 stanzas of poetry, denotation and connotation meanings were found that reflect the defeat of the Arabs. Through this analysis, it is hoped that readers can understand the poem "Hawamish 'ala Daftar an-Naksah" both from its literal meaning and implicit meaning.

Anti-Colonial Defeat: The 1967 Naksa and Its Consequences

This entry asks what it means to mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for revolutionary liberation. State power was indeed authoritarian, and global solidarity in the era of the Third World Movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was superfluous, but it still meant something to people then and now. Losing it was felt. In this piece, I revisit the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel known as al-Naksa (the resounding setback) within the context of the Third World movement and its influence on global solidarity in the ensuing decades following 1967. I focus on the loss of Egypt’s position as an anti-colonial leader after the 1967 war and subsequent death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. Egypt, once a bastion of revolutionary anti-colonial fervor at the nexus of Pan-Arab and Pan-African imaginaries, and a hub of the historic Third World, became radically realigned with the Global North under Anwar Sadat. I argue that the fate of the Egyptians, Palestinians, Arabs, and of anti-colonial global struggle each became unlinked and siloed as individual struggles. It is not just Arabs or Egyptians or Palestinians who were defeated, it was a whole anti-colonial ethos. How do we mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for liberation, for Palestinians, for Arabs, for Africans, and for the post-colony?

Learning from Defeat: Sadik al-Azm and the Arab Defeat in 1967

Learning from Defeat: Sadik al-Azm and the Arab Defeat in 1967

Towards a New Arab Moment

Towards a New Arab Moment

Something as Essential as Life Itself

Abstract Classic trauma theory has been criticized for ignoring the possibility of healing and growth for the traumatized, especially in a non-Western context. This reading of Ghassān Kanafānī’s Returning to Haifa tries to overcome such limitations by employing a framework that articulates Ibn Khaldūn’s thought on group feeling with Pierre Janet’s theory of trauma. Accordingly, the novel construes the Nakbah as a traumatic event that, despite its subjective meaning having long remained elusive, has never stopped affecting refugees’ consciousness. It then proposes that the Arab defeat of 1967 offered an opportunity for collective engagement and historical change to the Nakbah generation because it enabled them to reconcile their traumatic memories with their lives, inspiring their support for the Palestinian resistance. Such a parable of trauma integration counters the essentialist positions that Kanafānī attributed to some Zionist literature and points to the reversal of the schemes aimed at humiliating the Palestinians.

NEW MINTNAME “GEORGIA” (“JURZĀN”): RESEARCHING THE HISTORY OF GEORGIA AND THE ‘ABBĀSID NORTH IN THE 8TH-9TH CENTURIES

NEW MINTNAME “GEORGIA” (“JURZĀN”): RESEARCHING THE HISTORY OF GEORGIA AND THE ‘ABBĀSID NORTH IN THE 8TH-9TH CENTURIES

Beyond Arab Nationalism? The Plo and its Intellectuals, 1967–1974

The Arab defeat of 1967 ushered in a new period of resistance. With Arab nationalism’s weaknesses fully exposed and the PLO given renewed support, leftist intellectuals within the organization had space to think beyond the realities they had experienced in the past few decades. For them, Palestinian liberation meant more than simply what its name suggested; it was part of a larger revolutionary struggle to transform the region. Their context, goals, and ideas define them as anticolonial intellectuals, much in the fashion of Fanon’s concepts of the colonized intellectual and building national consciousness. By 1974, with these goals left unfulfilled, a different course was chartered for the PLO, and national consciousness was left as fractured as the groups that worked to build it. Framing them as anticolonial intellectuals as described by Fanon’s colonized intellectual helps to clarify their goals, obstacles, and shortcomings. In this essay I demonstrate that Fanon’s notions of the colonized intellectuals and anticolonial efforts at building a national consciousness are parallel to and predict the efforts and failures of the leftist intellectuals within the PLO from 1967 to 1974. Using primary source material such as PLO factions’ publications, the intellectuals’ memoirs, and personal interviews with individuals active during the time, as well as secondary materials, I work to show the important link between Fanon and the PLO’s leftist intellectuals working from 1967 to 1974. In doing so, we gain a better understanding of what led to their failures, the overall significance of their work in spite of it, and the type of changes this created in the PLO’s politics.

The Palestinian Resistance Movement In Lebanon 1967–82: Survival, Challenges, and Opportunities

This article addresses the issue of the Palestinian resistance movement and its evolution and survival in the deeply divided state of Lebanon between 1967 and 1982. The Arab defeat in the 1967 war allowed the Palestinian resistance to present itself as the main resistance movement in the Arab World, and this automatically gave the Palestinians wider support in the Arab World. However, clashes between the Palestinian resistance and the right-wing Lebanese factions (who opposed the Palestinians and their military presence in Lebanon) eroded support for the Palestinian resistance, especially as the divisions and frictions spread during the Lebanese Civil War. This created seemingly endless clashes between the Palestinians and the Lebanese. These developments led to the fragmentation of the Palestinian resistance, which had always been an Israeli objective. Finally, the Israeli invasion of 1982 led to the ouster of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon.

The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen: Unique Socialist Experiment in The Arab World at a Time of World Revolutionary Fervour

This essay examines the twenty-three years’ existence of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the context of the regional and world Left revolutionary and anticolonial movements of the second half of the twentieth century. The essay first examines the divisions of the liberation movement between followers of Nasserism and those who were influenced by the left wing of the Movement of Arab Nationalists. The 1967 Arab defeat by Israel and the National Liberation Front’s occupation of Aden shortly thereafter were important in finalizing the NLF’s victory over its Nasserist rival. The essay then addresses the internal causes of the series of factional struggles which tore apart the movement (and later its successor, the Yemeni Socialist Party) throughout the PDRY’s existence and assesses the extent to which ideological differences in the world socialist movement influenced these internecine confrontations. The regime’s steadfast solidarity with world revolutionary movements took place at the expense of improved relations with its neighbours, who opposed socialism in any form. Despite its poverty, the regime implemented remarkable social and economic policies which gave its population a welfare state beyond its means; the essay assesses the extent to which this emerged from autochthonous analysis or from external influences from the socialist world or elsewhere. Finally, it hints at some of the reasons why today’s southern separatist movement looks back on this period as a model despite not subscribing to socialism. Throughout, the analysis relates developments and events in the PDRY with relevant events and organizations elsewhere in the Arab world and beyond.

The Arab Military Force in Palestine Prior to the Invasion of the Arab Armies, 1945–1948

The article examines the size, structure, composition and modi operandi of the Arab military forces which fought the Jews in the 1948 war, before the invasion of the Arab regular armies, based first and foremost on the Arab sources themselves. An attempt is made to assess the substantial reasons behind the Arab defeat in the first ‘civil war’ phase of the campaign, including a comparison of the number of combatants, which also explains the outcome.

“Someone Will Come Along and Write the Next Chapter”; The Importance of Alixa Naff for Arab American Studies

Alixa Naff collected a massive body of information on the Arabic-speaking immigrants driven by a conviction that their stories deserved and needed to be roped into a coherent narrative. The hundreds of interviews she conducted over three decades beginning in the 1960s did not investigate every conceivable facet of the lives. Yet, her first-hand accounts and writings have become part of a stock background on early immigration for two generations of scholars. This short article illustrates how the breadth of information Alixa collected, combined with additional untapped archives-some of which can be hacked thanks to dozens of leads imbedded in Alixa's interviews-will correct the record on major aspects of Arab American life during the first five decades of living in the USA, and may help reshape our understanding of the present.Armed with a Volkswagen Beetle and awareness of her own place in this country to be rooted in a deeper Arab narrative, she made her way to Michigan in the mid-1970s. Already positioned at the forefront of the scholarship on the Arab immigrants at the time, many of her contacts were members of the Organization of Arab Students and Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). At the time, George Khouri, one of the original founders of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), helped her settle into his brother's house in Detroit.1 She knew, indeed, participated in the early scholarship on Arab Americans, and understood its genesis to include the need to explain an Arab point of view and a narrative of belonging, in the aftermath of the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967. This goal fell within the perimeters of the AAUG, which came to being as a result of that war. Alixa's peers were the scholars connected in varying degrees with the AAUG, including Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Michael Suleiman, Elaine Hagopian, Janice Terry, Edward Said, Barbara Aswad, Abdo Elkholy, and Hisham Sharabi. Among the many concerns of these scholars were finding a medium for their scholarship, as they contended with an open cultural hostility in the USA toward Arabs and Arab Americans in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict. In the process of attempting to explain Arab Americans, they created a basic body of scholarship on the early Arab immigrants' experiences, but they largely left out analysis of their political work and aspirations. Part of Alixa's importance is that she elected to pursue creating a reservoir of primary information that would serve an embryonic scholarship for years to come, that is, to complete the picture on the formative years of the Arab American saga. The scholarship produced by the above pioneers, as did Alixa's, paved the way for studies on the Arabic-speaking communities through the different perspectives of gender, ethnicity, family life, and, less so, literature. Alixa's legacy is unique because she went to pains to create a massive archive, so that she explained, someone will come along and use it to write the next chapter2 on the Syrian immigrants' long and varied experiences.Alixa's firm and uncompromising mentorship became evident in the first substantive conversation I had with her. During the annual meeting of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in 1998, she chaired a panel in which I participated. My paper disclosed new information on the political activities of the early Syrian immigrants. The focus of my inquiry was political activities on behalf of Geographic Syria from 1925 to 1927 by immigrant pioneers in Southeast Michigan, in particular, Highland Park, where Alixa and her family lived in the early 1940s. Most of the audience, I recall, took with a grain of salt my conclusions that the early immigrants were in fact politically aware to the point of establishing the New Syria Party (NSP), a formal political organization with chapters across the Americas, and that they actively sought an independent Syria in the face of French and British colonialism. …

“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67)

Abstract In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and funded a worldwide network of literary journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits and other cultural events). From 1962 until its scandalous collapse over the course of 1966 and the early months of 1967, Tawfīq Ṣāyigh edited the CCF’s Arabic outpost Ḥiwār from Beirut, joining a growing web of CCF journals, including London’s Encounter, Kampala’s Transition, Bombay’s Quest, and the Latin American, Paris-based Mundo Nuevo. Ḥiwār, a journal funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and thus covertly by the CIA, sought to co-opt the Arab avant-garde, offering authors both material compensation for their writing, as well as the much lauded cultural freedom. By 1966, Ḥiwār’s promise to writers of both bread and freedom collapsed in the pages of the Arabic press under the weight of paradox and a worldwide scandal on the eve of the 1967 Arab defeat.

TREN PEMIKIRAN INTELEKTUAL MUSLIM KONTEMPORER DI TIMUR TENGAH PASCA-DIFITISME 1967

This article is an effort to make a clear map on contemporary Muslim intellectuals in the Middle East after the Arab defeat in 1967. The Six-Day War took place in June 1967 was a disaster for the Arab world. It ended the ideology of Pan-Arab nationalism and encouraged the rise of four compating self-criticism ideologies: Marxism, Liberalism, Fundamentalism and Nationalism. The four ideologies have their own particular responses and solutions to the Arab crisis. The result of this research shows that Islamic fundamentalism is still the strongest ideology compared to the secular ideologies. The Arab Spring in 2011 proved the fact and paved a way for the Islmists to become dominant in the political arena, as recently shown in Egypt. The other Islamist militant groups, such as Jama’ah Islamiyyah are now more free to promote the implementation of Islamic syari’ah.

Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (review)

Reviewed by: Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost Khalid Amine (bio) Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 271. $35.00. In Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, Margaret Litvin examines the overall discursive structures that conditioned the production, circulation, and reception of Hamlet in the Arab world over the past decades. Hamlet’s journey through the Arab world is marked by the political rhetoric of “to be or not to be,” which has become a defining slogan in Arab politics used by different types of communities. The lack of the infinitive form “to be” in Arabic further complicates the condition of “foreignness” that the statement implies. Litvin’s fresh reading unfolds the underlying histories that helped to bring Hamlet into sharper focus for Arab readers. Her timely and keen examination shows that there are compelling reasons to believe that the Arab Hamlet has been refashioned with a great sense of urgency to reflect ironically on Arab conditions. Hamlet’s Arab Journey delves deeper into the question of Arab identity and its inexorable concern with historical agency at given transitional periods. For Litvin, Hamlet “encapsulates a debate coeval with the largely constitutive of modern Arab identity: the problem of self-determination and authenticity” (2). Her reflection goes beyond Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial denials where binary relationships between colonized and colonizer, local and global, East and West dissolve and become more and more interwoven, and focuses more on the middle ground of performativity. She explores the Hamlet currency in today’s Arab political lexicon. The urgency of the crisis leads Arabs to read “to be or not to be” as a representation of collective loss and bewilderment. Litvin’s model of literary appropriation, or the “global kaleidoscope” as she calls it, allows a persistent circulation and construction of different Hamlets all the time, rather than reproducing the original. She is more interested in how Hamlet is deployed, rather than to what extent Arab versions are faithful to the original. After all, the constant refashioning of Shakespearean texts is, indeed, informed by the mythos that surrounds them. A comparative reading of Hamlet’s soliloquy as it appears in two different quartos illustrates the multiplicity (rather than the uniqueness) of the Shakespearean text—a text that is constantly edited, revised, and presented as a pattern of self-erasing traces rather than an authentic script that claims presence. Arab Hamlet negotiations, then, are part of the struggle to make space and refashioning of the self through the “detour” of the other. In this vein, Shakespeare’s representation on the Arab stage amounts to a portrait of the self. In Litvin’s much needed revision, Hamlet negotiations are no longer part of a resistance to Western “masks of difference,” or the Prospero-Caliban model of [End Page 563] postcolonial writing-back. Beyond postcolonial appropriations, Litvin’s articulate argument underlines the politics of “Hamletization of the Arab Muslim political hero” in favor of the prevailing tendency of an “Arabization of Hamlet” (90). Litvin’s journey begins from Egypt in 1952 with Gamal Ab del Nasser’s geopolitical and cultural attributes allowing an array of Hamlets to reflect on collective identity and historical agency. She succeeds to a great extent in demonstrating that Nasser’s Hamlets are rituals of empowerment fueled by a unified ideology and a full-fledged counterculture highly sensitive to pan-Arabism, which emerged as a painful process of renewal that grew out of attribution and contention, a postcolonial struggle affected by violent taxonomic labeling and conflicting aspirations for a better future. Theater was at the heart of this counterculture, strictly defining itself as the theater that thinks for the emerging Arab nation. Political satire became a favorable frame in Arab theater, a breakthrough in both subject matter and style. Litvin demonstrates that the Hamlet productions before the 1967 Arab defeat produced a romantic national hero. Since the 1970s Hamlet has been read as a play about tyranny as dreams of pan-Arab unity faded. Hamlet became inarticulate, unable to fix the “out of joint” world around him. He becomes a...

Indonesia. The end of innocence? Indonesian Islam and the temptations of radicalism. By Andrée Feillard and Remy Madinier. Trans. by Wong Wee. Singapore: NUS Press and Institute de Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud Est Contemporaine (IRASEC), 2011. Pp. 336. Bibliography, Glossary, Index.

Indonesia. The end of innocence? Indonesian Islam and the temptations of radicalism. By Andrée Feillard and Remy Madinier. Trans. by Wong Wee. Singapore: NUS Press and Institute de Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud Est Contemporaine (IRASEC), 2011. Pp. 336. Bibliography, Glossary, Index. - Volume 43 Issue 2

BOULLATA, ISSA J. Review of Arabs Face the Modern World: Religious, Cultural, and Political Responses to the West by Nissim Rejwan. IJMES 31 (1999): 465–67.

On page 465, the line “Following a brief reference of the well-known emotional response to the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the religious response to the Lebanese writers Salah al-Din al-Munajjid and Kamal Yusuf al-Hajj to the Arab defeat, Rejwan proceeds to a study …” should read “Following a brief reference to the well-known emotional response of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the religious response of the Lebanese writers Salah al-Din al-Munajjid and Kamal Yusuf al-Hajj to the Arab defeat, Rejwan proceeds to a study …”

Reform and the Human Rights Quandary: Islamists vs. Secularists

Decades of populist and revolutionary politics, statist develop ment, maldistribution of wealth, public corruption, inefficiency, and re pression have inhibited political and economic reforms in much of the Middle East. These problems have undermined the legitimacy of the region's secular regimes, while stimulating Islamic opposition. Although the roots of the Islamist movements in the Middle East can be traced back to the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Muslimin) in 1928, their political impact became increasingly pro nounced after the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

The PLO's search for a peace strategy

Among the details of the Palestinian peoples’ search for statehood over the past five decades, several factors seem to have contributed to transforming the goals and means of the Palestinian national movement. The 1948 Arab—Israeli War caused the Palestinian movement to disintegrate and disperse, although later it was revived with a different form and style of politics. Until 1967, this movement was highly susceptible to external Arab intervention and sometimes outright control. After the 1967 Arab defeat, however, the Palestinian movement re‐emerged as a significant, independent political and military force in the region. Many scholars concluded that the 1967 war marked the beginning of a new era in Arab—Israeli relations, one that reflected Palestinian influence and Palestinian insistence on playing a major political role in the politics of the region. Furthermore, the 1973 war also created radical changes, of a different sort, in Palestinian political strategy. In order to meet diverse political pressures, the PLO had to undergo a number of political changes. From the Twelfth Palestine National Congress (PNC) of 1974 to the Nineteenth PNC of 1988, the PLO was formulating a moderate position that would overshadow its earlier more militant strategy.

THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF OIL

Middle East PolicyVolume 1, Issue 1 p. 97-106 THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF OIL Mohamed Rabie, Mohamed Rabie Dr. Rabie is the president of the Center for Educational Development, a nonprofit organization, in Washington, D.C. He is also an author and a former professor of economics. He taught at several Arab and American universities, including Kuwait University and Georgetown University. He has published numerous articles and several books including The Other Side of the Arab Defeat, 7957; The Politics of Foreign Aid, 1988; The Making of American Foreign Policy and A Vision for the Transformation of the Middle East, 1991, forthcoming.Search for more papers by this author Mohamed Rabie, Mohamed Rabie Dr. Rabie is the president of the Center for Educational Development, a nonprofit organization, in Washington, D.C. He is also an author and a former professor of economics. He taught at several Arab and American universities, including Kuwait University and Georgetown University. He has published numerous articles and several books including The Other Side of the Arab Defeat, 7957; The Politics of Foreign Aid, 1988; The Making of American Foreign Policy and A Vision for the Transformation of the Middle East, 1991, forthcoming.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1992 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4967.1992.tb00023.xCitations: 2 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume1, Issue1March 1992Pages 97-106 RelatedInformation

The Great Powers, the Arabs and the Israelis

June 1967, the view gradually gained ground in the West that the Arab defeat represented a considerable Russian victory. Some more imaginative observers argued that the Rus sians had deliberately engineered both the war and the defeat in order to achieve this result; others, without going as far as to ascribe conscious purpose, nevertheless agreed that, by increas ing the hostility of the Arabs to the West and their dependence on the Soviet Union, the crisis, the war and their aftermath had greatly strengthened the Soviet political and strategic position in the Middle East and correspondingly weakened that of the United States. Observers and commentators spoke with mount ing anxiety about the growth of Soviet influence in the area and the threat which it offered to the interests of the free world.