In the Arab world, the creation of the state of Israel was viewed as an obstacle to Arab unity, “a geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress” (Ghanem, 2013, p.20). The four wars since 1948-1973 were fought to checkmate imperialist designs in the Levant. This aspect of the crisis has been largely mediated by the series of accords to which the Arab states have appended their signature, from Camp David, Oslo to the Abraham accords. I discuss this further towards the conclusion of this lecture.
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The mediation of Arab nationalism by wars and compromises gave a unique relief to the Palestinians who have had to carry the burden of their self-determination. As Ghanem (2013, p. 18) has aptly noted:
The outcome of the June 1967 war catalysed the crystallisation of the Palestinian national movement and its independence as a deliberate step towards the establishment of a Palestinian national entity. In particular, the war significantly undermined the status of the Arab regimes that had asserted their patronage over the liberation of Palestine in the eyes of their own citizens and especially of the Palestinians.
The partition of the Palestine in the muddled canvas of the Middle East crisis defined the boundaries of the Palestinian homeland, its first element of stateness. I now turn to the question of nationalism that has been accentuated in accounting for the Middle East crisis.
Nation and Nationalism
In charting the definitional geography of nation and nationalism, Tamir provides for me a compass in his article titled“ The Enigma of Nationalism”, a review of the works of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity and Anthony D. Smith’s National Identity.
Renan (1947 as paraphrased by Tamir, 1995, p. 438) “claims that a nation is a group of individuals who cherish and retain their shared history but remember it selectively,ready to forget some ofits less pleasant episodes. Anderson (cited in Tamir, p. 420) defines a nation as
… “an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an image of their community.”
Tamir (1985, p. 423) offers a critique of Anderson’s definition of a nation by first posing the question: “Are imagined communities less real than groups?” and simultaneously provides an answer by noting that“If real is taken to mean “existing as a fact” then, as every realist in international relations will attest, the existence of imagined communities is a social fact. The term imagined communities is therefore not to be used synonymously with imaginary ones”.
The making of nation whether imagined in Andersonian sense, invented in Gellner’s conception (cited in Tamir, 1995) or the activation of a people’s shared valued and history constitutes the phenomenon of nationalism. When a nation is subjected and seeks to free itself from the condition of subjection, it then assumes a political status thereby constituting the phenomenon of nationalism. Its realisation culminates in nation-building that coalesces into a modernist vision of the state that is:
… premised on an image of the globe as a series of clearly delineated, homogenous, and highly stable territorial hyper units. Each such unit ostensibly displays a perfect, primordial, and seldom problematised overlap between territory (the “homeland”), society (the “people”), culture, a sense of common destiny, and, ultimately, the fabrication of them all into state machinery” (Rabinowitz, 2000, p. 759).
As scholarship has shown, nationalism, a speckled phenomenon, has been invoked by peoples seeking autonomy and self-determination. This is the reason why it is central to the Israeli-Palestine conflict manifest in ethno-territorial nationalism. Rabinowitz (2000, p. 759) has referenced this in the case of the Isreali-Palestine conflict. He notes:
The dispute over Israel/Palestine is, of course, an extreme case of competing ethno-territorial nationalisms, informed by modernist visions of the nation, its history, and its destiny. The nation and its state-present or future-become chief agents in an endless struggle for sanctified soil. The conflict that ensues becomes the backdrop against which mutually exclusive national identities are etched, couched in ideologies of indigenousness and rootedness.
Garry (2018-2019, p. 12) sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “conflict between two nationalisms battling for the same territory”.
His understanding acknowledges the two strands of the Jewish nationalism, namely, secular and religious Zionism. The former being “a community of Jews wishing to establish a Jewish state in Palestine on which they can be Sovereign to assure themselves their own security” (Garry, 2018-1019, p. 32) in the vision of Theodor Herzl, the author of The Jewish State.
The latter can be equated with neo-Zionism in its aspiration for total control of the Jewish historical territory, in other words the de-territorialisation of the other that gained momentum after the 1967 Six-Day War. This fits into what scholars have identified as essentialist nationalism that is problematic for outcomes such as democracy, the prevention of genocide and the provision of public goods (Chomsky, 1970; Straus 2015).
Of great importance to the nationalism discourse is the view offered by Ghanem (2013) on Palestinian nationalism. He identifies two streams of nationalism in the literature, namely, civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism. The civic, which is territorial, privileges common territory and citizenship. They constitute the basic criteria for belonging to the national group as exemplified by Britain, France and the United States.
In its essentiality, it transcends the inclination towards the hegemony of a dominant culture with a de-emphasis on primordialism and ethnic affiliation. On its part, ethno-nationalism is the inverse of the civic due to its emphasis on a group’s historical heritage and primordial ethnic values. This type of nation is typified by countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa.
He further traces the trajectory of the Palestinian nationalism to imperialist occupation of Palestine to Zionism and its de-territorialisation of the Palestinians and the consequent formation of national movements, such as Fatah, the Palestinian Liberation Movement in 1957 that gave the Palestinians a distinct identity, the ideological and hegemonic schisms within the movements and the subsequent fragmentations and decline of the movements, especially Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the post-Arafat era, which ultimately pave way for the emergence of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, in the Gaza Strip. Mayer (1994, p. 72) has also offered insight into Palestinian nationalism:
Palestinian nationalism, like nationalism in other parts of the world, has been defined to a large extent in opposition to the ‘other’. Historical events in Palestine and later in Israel made it clear to the indigenous Arab population that they, unlike other Arabs, were stateless, and dispossessed of their lands even if they shared language, religion and culture with the rest of the Arab world. Because much of their culture, heritage and folklore is anchored so heavily in their experiences of expulsion and dispossession, Palestinians’ national identity has been defined in significant part by what the British, the Zionist settlers and, later, the state of Israel have done to them. Although Palestinians have resisted these historical events their resistance has at least not, yet, yielded much change for them—but it has clearly helped to build among them a sense of national identity and national mission
Odion-Akhaine is a professor in the department of Political Science, Lagos State University (LASU). He delivered this Lecture (excerpts) at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs on December 2, 2025, as part of the Institute’s Foreign Policy Lecture Series.
