People did not identify as "Arab", this is largely a constructed political thing that took off in the 20 th century. The fact that lots of Lebanese have consistently rejected this label for a century now is a proof of this. You can be sure that if the Ottomans managed to somehow survive to this day or some other Caliphate, we would not be having this discussion in the first place and there would not have been a persistent Sunni Arabism vs Christian Particularism conflict in pre-Civil war Lebanon. There was no "calls" for "Arabism" since the Middle East acted as a Islamic based society when the region used to be "united" until the Evil Christian West "divided" it. Arabism is just a natural continuation of Ottomanism, it's a way for some people to continue feeling what they felt like was "Robed" from them. For the people who obviously have no interest in this bullshit and have an interest in maintaining their independence, they will naturally reject it. This is essentialy what hides behind the calls for "Arabism".
Unless you're going to make me believe you always felt kinship with Moroccans and the recently Arabized Nubian tribes in Sudan just because they speak Arabic, a language that's so common all over the place that it starts losing any importance at this point for being a classifier of anything.
Jan Retso, The Arabs in Antiquity : Their history from the Assyrians to the Umayyads says the following :
One day in May 1992, when I was travelling north of Salamiyyeh in Syria heading for the impressive sixth-century ruins at Qa~r ibn Wardan, I saw a group of bedouin tents far away on the plain, still deep green from the winter rains. I asked my driver, an Ismaili from Salamiyyeh, which tribe (qabile) he thought they belonged to. He pondered for a while and then asked: 'You mean: which farab?, This correction of my vocabulary was not completely unexpected, but it was a neat confirmation of an insight which had become clearer during my work for some years with the question of the meaning of the word 'Arab'. It is often alleged that those whom we call the bedouin usually see themselves as the Arabs in contrast to the nonbedouin. My driver, who, as a citizen of the Syrian Arab Republic and a user of the Arabiyya language in reading and writing, would probably on other occasions have labelled himself an Arab in accordance with the ruling ideology of modem Arabism, now relapsed into a more traditional linguistic usage when confronted with the tentdwellers. It might be a good start to try to find out the actual meaning of the word 'Arab' according to the traditional usage demonstrated by the Syrian taxi-driver. A natural way is to listen to what the inhabitants of those tents in Syria have to say about the matter. We do, in fact, today have a large corpus of texts recorded among the different bedouin tribes in the Syrian desert and the Arabian peninsula, dealing mostly with warfare and with frequent occurrences of the word farab. These texts constitute a primary source for how this term is understood among those who often identify themselves as Arabs, in opposition to the modem nationalist meaning of the word.