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Following the war of 1948 Palestine's Druzes became part of the state of Israel. Overwhelmingly rural, they sought to safeguard their community's age-old ethnic independence by holding on to their traditional ethno-religious particularism. Ethnicity and ethnic issues, however, were ready tools for the Zionists in the pursuit of their policy aims vis-a-vis the state's Arab population. Central among these was the cooptation of part of the Druze elite in an obvious effort to alienate the Druzes from the other Arabs - creating "good" Arabs and "bad" Arabs served the Jewish state as a foil for its...

Inventing Lebanon examines the history behind an idea: a new polity of 'Greater Lebanon'. It shows how, under the powerful influence of the French Mandate, various groups of the local elite attempted to create what amounted to a new Lebanese nationalism, carving the state into Maronite Christian, Sunni and Shiite power bases. The results only accentuated the divisions already inherent in this multi-ethnic and multi-faith society, and were to pave the way for the instability and wars that have plagued the country ever since.

Studies on nationalism in the Arab World have dealt with the socio-economic conditions through which the nationalist phenomena emerged. Notwithstanding the importance of these conditions, the focus here is on the cultural aspects as manifested in the language of the discourse and ideology. Proto-nationalist and nationalist phenomena could not exist outside their discourse and ideology through which they were modeled, shaped and identified as a conceptual framework through association, behavioral patterns, and loyalty to collective identities. Theorists of nationalism tend to deal with the...