Status Updates From The Arabs: A History

“Our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financiers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.”
- al-Asifa

We have found the Algerian Muslim nation...This community has its history, full of great feats. It has its religious and linguistic unity. It has its own culture, its habits and customs, good or bad, like all nations. Moreover, this Algerian and Muslim nation is not France. It would not know how to be France. It does not want to become France. It could not become France, even if it wanted to.
- Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis

“Do we wish to become a nation in the real and whole sense of the word? Or to conserve ourselves as a laughable mix of communities, always separate from each other like hostile tribes? We must furnish ourselves a unique unifying symbol: a nationality. That flower can never thrive in the shadow of steeples and minarets, but only under a flag.”
- Alphonse Zenié, Le Réveil

You who cherish the homeland
Revolt against the outright oppression
Liberate the homeland from the kings
Liberate it from the puppets
I thought we had kings who could lead the men behind them
- Abu Salman

There was no way to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…Palestine would prove Britain’s gravest imperial failure in the Middle East, a failure that would condemn the whole of the Middle East to conflict and violence that persists to the present day.