THE West is baffled by this people. Most Arabs from Aden to Algeria are poor, sick, uneducated, and desperately in need of survival training for the 20th century. The vision of a once great civilization moving into the modern world should be a cause to fire the Arab mind and spirit, a unifying challenge to build national pride and progress. Yet for two decades, Arab leaders have been more interested in mounting suicidal wars against Israel. If the Arabs truly weighed their own self-interest after their latest, disastrous defeat, they would face facts—or so a Westerner would reason—accept Israel's extended hand, and join in desert-blooming projects that could lift the whole Middle East to unprecedented heights of peace and prosperity. To begin this process, they would not need suddenly to embrace the Israelis, or grovel to them; they would need only to acknowledge the country's right to exist. But most Arab leaders utterly reject this idea. Even seemingly rational and well-informed Arabs cry that perpetual war against the enemy has only just begun and sincerely argue that "justice" requires the end of Israel as a state.
The world's 110 million Arabs have shown time and again a total inability to swallow their pride—and a total ability to swallow their own hyperbole. The worse their humiliation, the more unbending they seem to become. A refusal to accept unpalatable reality can be a very human trait on which the Arabs have no monopoly; yet the Arabs carry it to dazzling extremes. What ails them? Can they overcome their condition and function successfully in today's world? Or are they really a case of arrested development, doomed for generations to the kind of emotional and political instability that makes the Middle East one of the world's danger zones?
No Credibility Gap