Trauma by Proxy: A Self-Analytic Exploration of the Trials of Developing an Arab Identity*

As my name would suggest, I am an Arab. However, I do not share the Palestinian origin of my famous namesake, the late Yasser Arafat. Therefore, what I will be discussing in this paper is not the result of immediate experiences of the Middle East conflict. Rather, it is the result of reflection, or a bit of self-analysis if you will, on the remote experience of the conflict; that I hope would shed some light on the process of Arab identity formation in my generation. It is very important to note that the experiences discussed in this paper do not in any way approach the severity and/or significance of the experiences of Palestinians, and must be understood to be relatively trivial in comparison.

First, I would like to clarify the meanings of some commonly used words. As you will notice, linguistic issues are central to the thesis of this paper and fundamental elements of the perspectives I have come to have of this conflict.

The word “Arab” is the anglicized version of

or ‘arabii, which etymologically is not a word that originally described an ethnicity. Rather, it indicates that Arabic is the mother tongue of the subject. This is in contrast to the common use of the word, particularly in the West, where it does refer to an ethnicity. However, after Arab nationalism regained popularity in the geopolitical landscape in the 1950s and 1960s, many Arabs began using the term “Arab” as an ethnic reference. This kind of ethnic identification was historically uncommon, and existed only for relatively short periods of time over the centuries. The word “Arabian” is actually a term that refers to inhabitants of Arabia, otherwise known as the Arabian Peninsula. It is therefore a purely geographic reference, yet has often been used interchangeably with the word “Arab” to refer to an ethnicity. The peoples of Arabia speak Arabic, which would mean that they are both Arabs and Arabian. Therefore, the Arabs of North Africa and other parts