Since the formation of the contemporary Middle East in the wake of World War I, its political life has been bedevilled by the doctrine of Arab Nationalism, which postulates the existence of a single [Arab] nation bound by the common ties of language, religion and history… behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign states. The territorial expanse of this supposed nation varies according to different exponents of the ideology, ranging from merely the Fertile Crescent to the entire territory from the Zagros Mountains in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, and from the Mediterranean shores and the Anatolian hills in the north to the Indian Ocean, the sources of the Nile, and the Great Desert in the south.1 But the unity of the Arabic-speaking populations inhabiting these vast territories is never questioned. In the words of the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi: In pan-Arab ideology, this Nation is actual, not potential. The manifest failure even to approximate unity does not negate the empirical reality of the Arab Nation. It merely adds normative and prescriptive dimensions to the ideology of pan-Arabism.
The Arab Nation both is, and should be, one.2
In reality, the term Arab nationalism is a misn
