Abu Manneh argues that the response of many Palestinians to the nakba, the catastrophe of dispossession by the Israelis in 1948, was to articulate a revolutionary optimism in the potential of collective action to win back freedom and self-determination. Liberty was to be regained through armed struggle but also through cultural renaissance. There was recognition that, to an extent, the catastrophe laid bare divisions and social problems within Arab society itself, particularly the inequality and subordination of the working-class poor and of women. Freedom, crucially, had to encompass wider emancipatory aims than territorial reclamation; it had to embrace the rights and needs of all peoples. For this reason, the Palestinian struggle in its early years was understood by those involved not as nationalistic, but as a universal liberation movement.