In They Told Us We Were Arab, Safwan M. Masri offers a critical and personal examination of what it has meant—and what it has cost—to be labeled “Arab.” Drawing on history, political analysis, cultural critique, and his own experience as a Palestinian Jordanian American, he traces how this expansive identity came to exist: who defined it and to what ends.

Masri systematically dismantles the pillars taken as evidence of a unified Arab identity—language, culture, history, and politics—across a region spanning five million square miles that is home to more than 450 million people. He shows that “Arab” has never functioned as a coherent racial, religious, linguistic, or political category. Instead, it has operated as a flexible and often imposed label, rendered legible through colonial legacies, nationalist projects, authoritarian regimes, and Western frameworks of representation. Though frequently invoked as a source of unity, the category has flattened internal diversity and displaced more nuanced ways of understanding belonging, citizenship, and political responsibility.

The consequences of this abstraction are most significant in Palestine. The century-long project to erase Palestinian identity and render Palestinians interchangeable with “Arabs” has obscured political realities, recast dispossession, and misrepresented a settler-colonial project as a regional dispute.

Moving between analysis and reflection, this book unravels how Arabness came to feel natural, inevitable, and necessary—leaving identity freer, finer-grained, and closer to lived experience.

Safwan M. Masri is the former dean of Georgetown University in Qatar and distinguished professor for the practice at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He was previously executive vice president for global centers and global development at Columbia University and senior research scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (Columbia, 2017).