A Pox on Both Your Houses

The study employs a qualitative methodological historical deductive approach to analyzing the postwar rise and decline of pan-Arabism and its supplantation by pan-Islamism. It highlights the Palestinian–Israeli conflict as a focal point of these two grassroots social movements. This deductive study applies a political psychological theoretical framework for conceptualizing nationalism and sovereign national self-determination. It finds that the roots of this genocidal violence are in the Cold War interacting with the national self-determination aspirations of Arab and Jewish nationalism. The United States allied with Israel and Arab traditional authoritarian regimes to contain the perceived agents of Soviet Russian imperialism in the Middle East. These radical pro-change regimes included Baathist Iraq and Syria, Gadhafi’s Libya, and Nasserite Egypt. The post-colonial states are labeled here as rejectionist because they rejected the Zionist project. Cold War bipolar US and Soviet competitive interference in the post-colonial Middle East interacted with local nationalist and pan-nationalist aspirational social movements that tended to copy the formal state ideologies of their respective superpower patrons. Those patrons reinforced their respective local clients while concomitantly incentivized to restrain them to avoid escalation toward direct superpower confrontation. The disintegration of the Cold War and the Soviet Union diminished the international political systemic limitations on greater Israel aspirations. It reduced greatly the power capacities of the Arab rejectionist forces in the Levant. The prospective defeat of pan-Arab and pan-Islamic nationalism in the Middle East by the US, Israel, and their allies will lead ultimately to the elimination of Palestinian national identity.