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The Mandate Years and the Diaspora: The Arab National League and a Historical Context for Arab American Narrative Chapter 5 On August 6, 1936, three months after the largest Palestinian revolt until that time culminated in a prolonged general strike, the founding of the Arab National League was reported in a communiqué in the Arabic-language publication Al-Saeh.1 The ANL was replacing the Arab Renaissance Society (Jamīyat al-Nahd .ah al-Arabīyah). A letter from Fuad Isa Shatara to Ameen Farah clears up confusion about several variations of the names of the organization that was the precursor to the league. Occasional interchangeable references to the ANL and the Palestine Renaissance Society, as well as the appearance of other social groups with some Arab orientation, suggest that a single national political organization was not present during the nine years following the Syrian revolt in 1925 save for the New Syria Party. This, however, does not mean a cessation of individual and coordinated support for Arab causes. This was a period of adjustment to the political realities of the mandate and the practical pressures of the Great Depression. In this chapter I chart immigrants’ lives during that confusing period through their writings, and I trace the genesis of the Arab National League to events and personalities on the U.S. East Coast before the NSP was founded. In the years that followed the Syrian revolt against the French, Syria’s cause was kept alive by persistent albeit sporadic gatherings of activists from New York, Michigan, and elsewhere. Arabic-language magazines and newspapers , especially As-Sameer in New York, continued to provide a forum for conversations among immigrants in which they maintained their connection to their Arab past and Syrian identity. The rebels’ defeat by the French and severe economic hardship in the United States account for the lack of a single national political organization from 1927 until the founding of the ANL in 1936. Here I attempt to fill this uncharted period within the scantily researched history of the Syrian immigrants and conditions leading to the founding of the ANL. Proposing a context for the transition from a Syrian national cause to an Arab one is congruent with Rashid Khalidi’s discourse on Palestinian identity . Khalidi has found that the years 1908 to 1921 influenced the trajectory 160 The Making of Arab Americans of Palestinian national identity. H . abīb Kātibah would work alongside Ismail Khalidi, Rashid Khalidi’s father, in the office of the Institute of Arab American Affairs after World War II before Rashid’s birth. Kātibah predicted Rashid Khalidi’s assessment of the importance of that period in his unpublished manuscript draft titled “The Arab Challenge.” Although the Ottoman Constitution, not responses to Zionism, took precedence in Kātibah’s analysis , the forces of colonialism in all parts of Syria were connected and corresponded more or less to the same period. Kātibah opened chapter 5, titled “Fateful Years: 1908–1915,” in his manuscript with these words: The period between 1908 and the outbreak of the first world war was one of the greatest, most bizarre, emotion-charged periods in the history of the Arab lands. It was as if suppressed feelings and impounded forces of all sorts had been suddenly released and, driven by the pressure of outside conditions and events, the Arabs were forced to improvise a modus operand without delay. Like a vast mural, the significance of this period dawns upon the observer only after he discovers the central theme in the mind of the artist.2 He viewed the ill-fated “Ottoman Revolution,” a term meant to signify reviving the Ottoman Constitution in 1908, as equally important to any in world history and “an indication that strength and ubiquity” of yearnings for democracy and equality are more powerful than Sultan Abdulhamid’s “elaborate system of espionage.”3 The euphoria and fraternizing that ensued among Turks, Arabs, and Armenians, Kātibah wrote, was looked upon “askance by the political vultures who had been hourly awaiting the demise of the sick man of the Bosphorus.” The political vultures, he explains, are the “European imperialists.”4 During the same period Syrian immigrants in the United States began to pay special attention to Palestine, even as they coalesced around the Syrian cause, because of the Zionists’ aggressive land acquisition, especially in light of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Zionist pressure in Palestine would be viewed as part of colonialist expansion once activists...

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