Palestinian liberation and Arab identity

I’ve been trying to articulate why I identify—personally and not just politically—with the Palestinian liberation movement for a really long time, because it’s something that I feel is missing in discourse on Palestine. Non-Arabs are often not aware of how deeply rooted in Arab identity the Palestinian cause is, how we’re taught about Palestine from a really young age (some of my earliest memories are about Palestine), how much Palestine is not just about Palestine but about Arab anti-imperialism and self-determination and what it means to be Arab in the twentieth and now twenty-first century.

My identity as an Arab is inextricably linked to my politics as a leftist. My Arabness is conceptualized as anti-imperialist. This Arab identity was born in the twentieth century. It’s an Arab identity that was born in response to Ottoman rule, and later British and French rule. It’s the Arab identity of Gamal Abdelnasser, of Arab socialism, and ultimately, of pan-Arabism. It’s the identity of the Arab Revolt, the identity of a movement that sought to unite all Arabs under a single flag in its fight against imperialism.

There are some who believe that this identity, this conceptualization of Arabness, is dead. But I strongly believe that it’s not possible for it to truly die. It can only be transformed or be dormant. In 2010, when the people of Tunisia rose up against their oppressive government, their revolution sparked an uprising in Egypt, and then in Yemen, and Algeria, and Bahrain, and Libya, and Syria, and even smaller movements for reform in Oman and Morocco and Saudi Arabia, among other Arab countries. It was not for nothing that Arabs from the Ocean to the Gulf rose up in a single chain of events. We Arabs feel an affinity with each other and a collective experience and struggle that crosses the national borders that our colonizers and bourgeois collaborators created for us. National borders might divide us from each other, divided material realities might alienate us from each other, but our Arabness pierces borders, even when it doesn’t tear them down.

The Arab Opinion Index is an annual survey conducted across the Arab world, the largest of its kind, and year after year, the results show that Arabs overwhelmingly believe that we are one nation. In the 2024–25 results, 76% of respondents said that they believe this.

Relatedly, the survey consistently shows that the vast majority of Arabs believe that the Palestinian cause is a cause of all Arabs. In the 2024–25 results, 80% of respondents said that they believe this. That’s despite the push by many of our governments for normalization with the Zionist regime.

We Arabs have always been steadfast in our support for Palestinian liberation, even when it comes at the risk of being gunned down. Some of our governments have outright banned any show of opposition to normalization with the Zionist regime, some going so far as to point their military weapons at their own citizens for doing so. But despite that, Arabs continue to show up for Palestine. Because in a very real way, we believe—and feel in our souls—that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is the struggle for Arab liberation. Palestine is the hope of Arabs in our fight against imperialism, a fight that many of us lost through betrayal, through imperialist manipulation, through bourgeois collaboration. But as long as Palestine lives on, a sliver of hope, of the struggle for Arab self-determination—of our spirit—lives on.

In my pursuit to articulate my feelings on what Palestine means to me, I got to researching leftist Arab literature, and I found Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP is a communist organization, the second-largest faction in the Palestinian Liberation Organization after Fatah. Although its influence has waned over the years, it was a significant player in the Palestinian liberation movement during its peak years in the 1960s to 80s. The PFLP was born out of the leftist anti-colonialist movement of the twentieth century, the movement that gave rise to Arab socialism and communism and pan-Arabism, that gave rise to what it means to be Arab in the twentieth century.

Anyway, in Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, which was published in 1969, and outlined the strategy and vision of the PFLP, I found the perfect articulation of my feelings on what Palestine means to me as a leftist Arab:

The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations and which will constitute an integral part of the progressive democratic Arab national presence living peacefully with all forces of progress in the world….

The fact that imperialist interests are linked with the existence of Israel will make of our struggle against Israel a struggle against imperialism, and the linking of the Palestinian liberation movement with the Arab liberation movement will make our struggle against Israel the struggle of one hundred million Arabs in their united national effort for liberation. The struggle for Palestine today, and all the objective circumstances attendant upon it, will make of this struggle an introduction for the realisation of all the aims of the Arab revolution which are linked together. It is a wide and vast historical-movement launched by one hundred million Arabs in a large area of the world against the forces of evil, aggression and exploitation represented by neo-colonialism and imperialism in this epoch of human history.

The face of this struggle might have changed, but I wholeheartedly believe that this sentiment remains alive, even if dormant. While we no longer hear the Palestinian cause articulated in leftist language, the way it used to be articulated, it continues to be tied to Arab identity, and the struggle for self-determination continues to tie Arab identity. Because the Palestinian cause continues to unite us, and our struggle against each of our oppressors continues to ignite all of us. Contemporary Arab identity is fundamentally an anti-colonialist identity, an identity that tells the story of a people that dreams of self-determination.

This trait of what it means to be Arab is written in our history. Perhaps the only trait that defines us more is the very fact that we speak Arabic.

It’s also written in our flags. While the Arab Revolt didn’t achieve its goals, the colours of the flag of the revolt—the colours of pan-Arabism— were adopted by many Arab countries for their own flags, from the UAE to Iraq to Kuwait to Egypt and Syria and Palestine and Jordan and Sudan.

And it’s written in our poetry and national anthems. ‘Mawtini’ (translation: ‘My Homeland’) is a poem that’s widely regarded as a poem—if not the poem—of the Arab people. It has been adopted as the national anthem of Iraq, and yet it’s also largely considered to be the second, unofficial national anthem of Palestine. More than that, it’s a poem that’s heard and resonates throughout the Arab world. Because our true mawtin, our true homeland, is not the one that was defined for us by our colonizers and oppressors, but the one defined organically by our language and our culture and our common struggle and history. Indeed, Ibrahim Tuqan, the Palestinian poet who wrote ‘Mawtini’, wrote it during the Arab Revolt. It’s a love poem to his homeland, a poem of hope and resilience, and the homeland that he addresses is the homeland of the pan-Arab dream.