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The autobiographies of George Haddad and Abraham Rihbany show their preoccupation with the representation of Arabs in the U.S. Rihbany’s works evidence both his indebtedness to Orientalism and his attempt to use it to further his political vision.

This chapter examines the historiography of US–Arab relations. It traces the attempted transformation of a discourse of American exceptionalism into a more critical postnationalist scholarship. At the same time, it reflects on the academic limits and political challenges of this attempted historiographical makeover. It argues that we are currently in a moment of major transformation toward a more critical, postnationalist approach that is more attentive to complexities within the United States and the region. This is a particularly strong trend in Middle East area studies as well as in the field of American studies. Not all work has moved in this direction, however. Many stereotypes persist in the framing of both places, positioning innocent America against the “inherent depravity” of Islam and the people and places of the Middle East. Such stereotypes are particularly persistent in popular culture and in books written for a general audience, as well as in some academic circles where the notion of a clash of civilizations or essentialist depictions of Arabs, Muslims, Islam, or the region endure.

Ameen Rihani’s prolific output in Arabic and English seeks to promote cultural understanding by unsettling Orientalist knowledge, but remains indebted to it. This novel attempts to fuse Arabic and European literary traditions in search of a civilizational synthesis.

This chapter investigates the broader nationalist and political contexts within which names other than Persian Gulf have emerged in the past fifty years and explores the stances archaeologists working in the region have taken in response to these developments. It analyzes the relations between Iran and Arabs in the context of the Persian Gulf and the development of Arab nationalism in the region. This chapter considers the role the archaeological community, especially Western archaeologists, has assumed amid volatile Arab-Iranian relations.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on regime security and shifting inter-Arab alliances. It proposes a specific model for understanding the dynamics of inter-Arab relations and shifting Arab alliances, positioned against the broader context of what is too often a Western-centric literature on alliances and international relations. It suggests that alliances and alignments are best seen as transnational support coalitions between ruling regimes, rather than as combinations of states allying together as unitary rational actors.

This chapter argues that while Zionist settlement has helped to raise the standard of living of Palestinian Arabs, it has engendered a loss of Arab dignity. This loss, the chapter concludes, lies at the root of the conflict between Zionists and Arabs. The chapter compares their relationship to the Biblical siblings, Esau and Jacob, contending that that the Arabs, like Esau, have indeed obtained their dish of lentils, but what they desire more than mere sustenance is their birthright, their dignity. Such a conflict also mirrors several others in world history—that longing for the sense of “superiority” over others. The chapter ends, however, with the remark that “social physicians” are necessary to heal the tensions between the Jews and Arabs.

This chapter examines the military crisis confronting the Dhufari revolutionaries in late 1966 and 1967. It further outlines regional developments that shaped their response to that crisis. Whereas these took shape far away from Dhufar, they had a direct bearing over the revolutionary struggle in that territory. It is argued that the June 1967 defeat and the transformations within the Movement of Arab Nationalists occasioned a left-turn in the ideological conception and practice of the struggle, especially amongst the ranks of republican Dhufari cadres. The victory of the South Yemeni revolution consolidated that left-turn, and provided, for the first time, a crucial base of diplomatic and military support. The announcement of British withdrawal from the Gulf heightened the broader regional orientation of the struggle and occasioned further transnational coordination between Gulf revolutionary groups. Finally, the turn to China provided the Dhufari revolutionaries with limited means to conduct their fight and exposed them to Maoist political and organisational conceptions.

In the field of American studies, attention is shifting to the long history of U.S. engagement with the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of war in Iraq and in the context of recent Arab uprisings in protest against economic inequality, social discrimination, and political repression. Here, Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy curate a new collection of essays that focuses on the cultural politics of America’s entanglement with the Middle East and North Africa, making a crucial intervention in the growing subfield of transnational American Studies. Featuring a diverse list of contributors from the United States, the Arab world, and beyond, this book analyzes Arab-American relations by looking at the War on Terror, pop culture, and the influence of the American hegemony in a time of revolution.

This chapter provides an account of Norman Anderson’s views of Anglo-Arab relations amidst the decline of British imperial involvement in the region and analyses the debt his account of the development of legal reform owed to a diffusionist vision of the globalization of the ‘modern’ European state. It does so by providing an account of Anderson’s influence on the domestic laws of Libya and Tunisia and the international laws of commercial arbitration in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The chapter illustrates the parallels between Anderson and secular nationalist legal thinkers and politicians who advocated for legal change in Muslim majority countries during the period.

This chapter shows how the Supreme Court had intervened in elections after Meir Shamgar took to his post as the chief justice in 1983. In doing so, it affected the nature of Israel’s parliament, its membership, and Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. Among other things, it had presided over the June 1984 Neiman v. Chairman of the Elections Committee case, allowing a racist party and a party alleged to support the Palestinian cause to participate in the elections. The decision would later prompt the Knesset to amend Section 7a of the Basic Law: The Knesset to respond to the Neiman ruling. The Supreme Court subsequently affirmed the elections committee decision in a second Neiman case, to disqualify Kach from participating in the elections on the grounds that the party’s publications and agenda constituted racist incitement and a rejection of Israel’s democratic character. However, every attempt by the Knesset since 1984 to prevent the election of representatives of the Palestinian nationalist movement has been frustrated by the Supreme Court through its interpretation of the law.

This chapter argues that Americans have greatly exaggerated the influence of the Jewish lobby in shaping US policy. This is largely a result of their unrealistically high and characteristically “can-do” expectations that, through diplomacy and action, the United States should be able to bring about an enduring solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflicts. Indeed, as part of the broader and conflicted Arab–Israeli relations in the Middle East, Israel–Palestinian problems are more complicated than Americans realize and are perhaps intractable to a “top-down” approach. So when American-led negotiations break down or fail to find a resolution, Americans conclude that “something nefarious must be blocking its way” and place blame on the Jewish lobby.

This chapter examines Jewish diplomacy in the year 1929, with particular emphasis on the deaths of three individuals: Louis Marshall, Leon Reich, and Lucien Wolf. It first considers the significance for Jewish–Arab relations of the convening of the Constituent Assembly of the Jewish Agency for Palestine on August 14, 1929, in Zürich. It then discusses the arguments of Marshall, Reich, and Wolf as staunch advocates and prime movers of the conception that predicated security for Jews on the restriction of state sovereignty by agencies of the international community. It also explains how a crisis in Zionist–British relations forced the non-Zionists who had joined the Jewish Agency to close ranks behind the Zionist leadership. It argues that the deaths of Marshall, Reich, and Wolf symbolized the end of one era and the beginning of another.