Zahra Albarazi 2.3. Pan-Arabism In the post-colonial period and after the state of Israel was created, a power vacuum was left in the region alongside a feeling of a need for solidarity and establishing a shared identity.25 This led to promoting an Arab national identity in the region, which was particularly popular during the 1950s and 1960s and constituted a belief that Arabs were of one nation and that countries across North Africa and the Levant should unite. During this period the identity of many of the states as an ‘Arab nation’ was confirmed 26 with increased institutional and societal discrimination against those not considered as Arabs. In some domestic contexts, nationality policy became a component of this ideology, with subsequent discrimination against non-Arabs. In most cases, the embodiment of this ideology in nationality law was relatively innocuous, such as offering facilitated naturalisation to citizens of other Arab countries, which still is common practice in many of the regions’ nationality laws. However, in other situations, identifying who was and who was not considered a citizen was decided on an ethnic basis, with far more severe consequence. Non-Arab groups were sometimes excluded and denationalised, which happened on a massive scale in Libya27 and Iraq,28 as well as Syria and Mauritania, as described below. Take the example of Syria, which was one of the main advocates of pan-Arab ideology in the 50s and 60s. In 1962 an exceptional census took place in the Kurdish Northern region of Syria Alhassakah was ordered to take place by the authorities. The census aimed to verify who was a citizen of Syria in that region which was predominantly a Kurdish region. However, for many reasons this census was strongly flawed and carried out in an arbitrary manner. Therefore, this census stripped some 120,000 Syrian Kurds – 20 percent of the Syrian Kurdish population – of their Syrian citizenship overnight. As descendants of those who lost citizenship inherited this stateless status, the number was estimated to be approximately 300,000 before the start of the Syrian war.29 In Mauritania in the 1980s, the mainly Arab government also began to undertake a policy of Arabisation which would deeply effect its large proportion of non-Arab population. In 1989, the authorities denationaliszed and deported an estimated 70,000-80,000 black Mauritanians who ended up in Senegal and Mali.30 Both of these examples are only two of some of the major examples of the de-nationalisation of groups en masse who were not of Arab ethnicity that took place across the region. 656, 720 (2003) and Michael M. Laskier, Egyptian Jewry under the Nasser Regime, 1956-70. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 573-619. 25 See for example Hinnebusch, R, The Politics of Identity in Middle East International Relations, International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 2013 26 For more information on Pan-Arab ideology, see Choueiri, Youssef, Arab Nationalism – A History: Nation and State in the Arab World, 2011 Wiley-Blackwell publishers. 27 VanWaas, L, The Stateless Tebu of Libya?, 2013, access at http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/52aace474.pdf 28 ReliefWeb, ‘The Faili Kurds of Iraq: Thirty Years Without Nationality, , 2010, access at https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/faili-kurds-iraq-thirty-years-without-nationality. 29 For more information on this see Z. Albarazi, The Stateless Syrians, May 2013 access at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2269700 30 For more information see, Open Society Foundations, Fear and Statelessness in Mauritania, 2011, access at https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/fear-and-statelessness-mauritania and Manby, B, Citizenship Law in Africa: A Comparative Study, 2016, access at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/56a77ffe4.html 6 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp. 2017/3- © 2017 Author(s)