Arab Nationalism as Palestinian Solidarity? Syrian and Lebanese Christians in the 1930s and 1940s

On September 8, 1937, over 300 delegates gathered in the small town of Bludan, Syria in response to the British Peel Commission Report, which suggested partitioning Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Participants at the Bludan Conference overwhelmingly rejected partition and offered an early expression of pan-Arab solidarity with Palestinians. Although it has been relegated to a historical footnote, Greek Orthodox Christians from Syria and Lebanon played leading roles at this Conference. Archbishop Ali Hurayk of Hama served as the Conference’s Vice President, while a young political activist named Fu’ad Mufarrij was its secretary. Other prominent Orthodox figures, including Jibrail Tuwayni, editor of Beirut’s largest newspaper, were also in attendance.

Using meeting notes from the Bludan Conference as a starting point, as well as a range of public writings and personal papers of prominent Christian thinkers like George Antonius and Constantine Zurayq, this paper reexamines the historiography of pan-Arab nationalism in the Middle East. I argue that Arab nationalist discourses that began to emerge in the 1930s and 40s, particularly from Syrian and Lebanese Christians, are best understood as an outgrowth of solidarity with Palestinians in the midst of the Palestinian Revolt (1936-1939) and the end of the British Mandate of Palestine (1947-48). At the same time, I discuss the limitations of Arab nationalism as a solidarity movement. First, I show that Christian intellectuals were often disconnected from the views and priorities of Palestinians, especially the fellahin (peasantry), which formed the backbone of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance movements. Second, I argue that a nationalism that sought to transcend nation-state borders ultimately failed to account for the new political exigencies wrought by the imposition of nation-states in the Middle East. To illustrate these limitations, I conclude with a critical reappraisal of Zurayq’s seminal book, The Meaning of the Nakba (1948).