Research Guides: Arab-American Heritage: Articles on Current Topics

Palestine

Current Topics: Israel and Palestine
Read more about Palestine: cities, languages, environment and geography, customs and courtesies, lifestyle, cultural history, culture, social development, government, and economy.

Also included is a wonderful bibliographic reference and works cited page, so you can easily find more references to continue your research.

Palestine was, and to some extent remains, a region in the Middle East along the Mediterranean Sea. It is in an area of the world known to Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the Holy Land.

The cultural legacy of the people who live there is rich, but complex, and marred by social, cultural, and political unrest. It unites Palestinian Arab people in a way that geography cannot, and poetry is one of its most important art forms.

Historically, the land is well acquainted with occupation. It was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and later the British Empire. In 1948, world politics forever changed the face of Palestine and ushered in an era of significant turmoil, which Palestinians refer to as Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” In the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations decreed the creation of Israel, a sovereign state and homeland for the Jewish people. Its borders were set in Palestine. The Arab population living in Palestine at the time violently opposed the creation of a new state and the new borders in the region.

The Palestinian territories, known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, border Israel, Egypt, and Jordan and are governed by Arab leaders. The majority of Palestinian Arabs live in these territories, but many Palestinians also live in Israel, particularly East Jerusalem, as well as in exile in other countries, such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, where multigenerational Palestinian camps have developed to accommodate them.

Although Palestine does not yet exist as a universally recognized state, Palestinian Arab leaders have been working in the last decades towards a goal of establishing self-rule in an independent Palestinian state that is separate from Israel. Conflicts between Palestinian leaders and the Israeli government over land, travel, security, and settlement rights have previously prevented a resolution to the cause of a self-governing Palestinian state. The movement toward a unified identity has been further complicated by serious infighting between Hamas, an Islamic resistance movement that controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, which controls the West Bank. However, in November 2012, the United Nations General Assembly resolution 67/19 elevated the Palestinian territories to the status of “non-member observer state,” which reflects significant progress toward the territories' international goal of independent nationhood. With this UN nod, what had previously been referred to as the “Palestinian National Authority” and “Palestinian Territories, Occupied” has been known since 2013 as the State of Palestine.

Note: The Current Topics: Israel & Palestine main resource features important information on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine through world history.

MENA Race Designation

From the Arab American Institute: New Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category for US Race and Ethnicity Standards

After more than four decades of organizing and advocacy by the Arab American community and nearly three decades of support for a MENA category, the Office of Management and Budget has finally acknowledged and issued the historic addition of a new “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) minimum reporting category, the use of a combined question format for collecting race and ethnicity, and the requirement of more detailed data collection by federal agencies beyond the minimum Standards in most situations to allow for greater data disaggregation.

Accurate data about the Arab American population has been a central part of AAI’s mission, beginning in the late 1980s when AAI first worked with the Census Bureau to ensure Arab Americans were accurately counted in the 1990 census. In the 1990s, AAI led the campaign for a category for persons from the MENA region in the lead up to OMB’s 1997 revision of the standards. Later, AAI helped launch the Ancestry Working Group to support the Census Bureau’s efforts to decrease systemic undercounting of Arab Americans and created the MENA Advocacy Network in 2011 after the elimination of the long-form questionnaire from the decennial census. In the last decade and a half, AAI organized Arab Americans and other MENA communities around the need for improved data, working with key stakeholders, the OMB, and the U.S. Census Bureau to make the MENA checkbox a reality.

AAI welcomes the new Standards’ improvements to data collection and the historic addition of the MENA category but is deeply troubled by OMB’s narrow definition of MENA communities and their unprecedented mandating of the detailed subpopulations groups (check boxes and write-in samples), the formulation of which is traditionally reserved for the Census Bureau based on research and testing. In a troubling move, the new Standards deny the racial diversity of the Arab American community by excluding Black Arabs and defining MENA without one of its largest populations, Armenian Americans.

The US has a long history of attributing race to ethnicities - at one point the term "free white person" was a pre-requisite to naturalization and voting. People of Arab and other Middle Eastern descent (as well as other non-European people) had to challenge their "whiteness" in court in order to obtain these rights. Among these court cases included Dow vs. US (Dow, a Syrian, had to appeal his citizenship, which was originally denied citing his status as 'not white') and US vs. Cartozian (where the US contested Cartozian's status as 'white' since he was Armenian).

Read more:

The US' history of "defining whiteness": https://daily.jstor.org/how-prerequisite-cases-tried-to-define-whiteness/
OMB’s Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity: OMB Race/Ethnicity

April is Arab American Heritage Month

Palestine

MENA Race Designation

From the Arab American Institute: New Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category for US Race and Ethnicity Standards