And Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, did not arise in competition with Arab nationalism.
The diversity of its factions better represents Iraq's subtle ethnic and religious mix than Mr Hussein's monolithic Arab nationalism.
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Its ruling Baath party preached a doctrine that combined socialism with Arab nationalism.
Today's anti-Semitism is predicated on preferring Palestinian and pan-Arab nationalism to Jewish nationalism.
Qutb lost faith in the pan-Arab nationalism that was the prevailing ideology of the Arab world in his own time.
Baathism was associated with radical Arab nationalism - a key barometer for this was a hardline approach to the Palestinian issue.
And the militant anti-American Shia cleric, Moqtada Sadr, is not seen as an ally of Iran and is partly motivated by Arab nationalism.
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In Israel's early life Zionism was a mainly secular movement and the dominant force on the other side was a secular Arab nationalism.
Considering Egypt's position as the most populous Arab country and the historical leader of Arab nationalism, mounting momentum for change there could have wide-ranging implications for the region.
The Palestinian issue is the decades-old touchstone of Arab nationalism.
The slogans and illusions of Arab nationalism, which had seemed to collapse with the regime of Saddam, were being given a second life by the American failure in Iraq.
Nasser led the 1952 overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy, touted and implemented socialist reforms, supported pan-Arab nationalism, and led a losing fight against Israel in the Six Day War.
But like for all Jewish communities in the Arab world, the advent of Arab nationalism in the mid-20th century forced the overwhelming majority of Tunisia's Jews to leave the country.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a wave of Arab nationalism emanating from Egypt swept over the Middle East - threatening the pro-Western monarchies such as the House of Saud with destruction.
Yet it has brought some sympathy from his own people: many remain persuaded by official posturing that presents their country as a bastion of Arab nationalism besieged by western and Zionist designs.
The Palestine that emerges as Jewish and Arab nationalism collided is a mixture of glamour, violence and intrigue together with a great deal of muddle on the part of the colonial officials about what Britain was trying to achieve.
But it may also herald the re-emergence, after a decades-long trend among Israel's neighbours to accommodate the Jewish state, of a broad rejectionist front, this time inspired by pan-Islamist feeling rather than the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Then, as now, the so-called international community insisted on ignoring or apologizing for the genocidal bellicosity of Palestinian Arab nationalism, while attempting to appease the Palestinians with money and the conferral of international support and legitimacy for the cause of Israel's disembowelment.
While the star of Arab nationalism has fallen everywhere, among the Palestinians in the West Bank it is still alive, kept on life support by international aid, the Israeli military, and an unquantifiable sense of dread at the prospect of a Hamas takeover.
Only by moving resolutely and with dispatch against Iraq, moreover, can the United States minimize the prospect that its policy interests in the Middle East will be held hostage indefinitely to the ambitions of Arab nationalism ambitions sure to be increasingly appealed to and exploited by Saddam Hussein.
To flatter him, flag-waving schoolchildren lined the streets, Egyptian bedouins with links to Mr Qaddafi's own tribe cheered him on, and the state-controlled media offered blanket coverage of his forays to the Egyptian Museum and the tomb of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president whom Mr Qaddafi still idolises as a hero of Arab nationalism.
That narrative explains the roots of the conflict as frustrated Arab-Palestinian nationalism.
Israel's peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) are instructive that neither nationalism nor religion are insurmountable obstacles to reaching an Arab-Israeli settlement on Palestine as proposed in the UN plan of 1947.
First is the fact that "Arab culture" is really many cultures, that "Arab people" are really many peoples, and that "Arab countries" are filled with a combustible mix of ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and race that produces the entire range of human passions.
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