Pan-Arabism, Zionism, and Imperialism:
The Pan-Arabists seek to unite all the lands that have a majority Arab population, into one unit. They recognize that, in their present un-united state, with 20 or so fractious nation-states, they have no chance of dealing as equals with the US or Europe. Even united, they still would have an economic size, and military strength, far less than the two Western entities. But a united Arab world would have a better chance of keeping foreign armies from overrunning them, and foreign peoples from colonizing their lands.
The essential difference between Pan-Arabism, and Zionism, is that the Pan-Arabists seek to unite land they already live on, while Zionism's project is to conquer and colonize land where non-Jews are the majority population. So, Zionism is an essentially imperialist, aggressive ideology, while Pan-Arabism is essentially a defensive ideology.
Pan-Arabism could be called imperialist, if they sought to re-conquer Spain and Portugal (which was ruled by Muslims for 700 years), or to reconquer Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and other places the Muslim Ottomans owned for centuries. To be as imperialist as Zionism, the Pan-Arabists would have to be trying, not just for military conquest of those now-Christian/secular areas, but a demographic transformation there, that could only happen through a process to immense violence (the modern term being "ethnic cleansing").
You can call the Pan-Arabists imperialists, when they herd all the Christians in Bulgaria onto 10% of Bulgaria's land, wall them into squalid ghettoes, and import millions of Egyptians onto the other 90% of the land. And then offer the Christians a demilitarized "Bulgarian State" on their 10%, if they accept the Muslim ownership of the rest.
That is, you can call them imperialists, if they do what Israel is doing. |
