This entry asks what it means to mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for revolutionary liberation. State power was indeed authoritarian, and global solidarity in the era of the Third World Movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was superfluous, but it still meant something to people then and now. Losing it was felt. In this piece, I revisit the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel known as al-Naksa (the resounding setback) within the context of the Third World movement and its influence on global solidarity in the ensuing decades following 1967. I focus on the loss of Egypt’s position as an anti-colonial leader after the 1967 war and subsequent death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. Egypt, once a bastion of revolutionary anti-colonial fervor at the nexus of Pan-Arab and Pan-African imaginaries, and a hub of the historic Third World, became radically realigned with the Global North under Anwar Sadat. I argue that the fate of the Egyptians, Palestinians, Arabs, and of anti-colonial global struggle each became unlinked and siloed as individual struggles. It is not just Arabs or Egyptians or Palestinians who were defeated, it was a whole anti-colonial ethos. How do we mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for liberation, for Palestinians, for Arabs, for Africans, and for the post-colony?
Articles by Dahlia El Zein
Dahlia El Zein is a PhD Candidate in Middle Eastern and African History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, migration, and empire between the colonial and postcolonial Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Beirut to Dakar: Race-Making, Migration, and Intermarriage in West Africa and the Levant under French Colonialism, 1920–1960” which traces the genealogies of racial hierarchies as they moved from Lebanon to West Africa under shared French empire.