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The tragedy is that the Arabs' humiliation over their failure to catch up has been projected into hatred of dynamic Israel and all the "Western" attitudes it represents. In the Arab case, self-contempt has not been a goad to positive achievement, as it sometimes can be, but rather to self-destruction. Today it is often forgotten that Nasser's 1952 revolution began as the most promising event in modern Arab history. Here was a completely secular government devoid of Islamic hobbles, one that stopped barefoot wretches from sleeping in the Cairo streets and moved them into high-rise apartments. Here was a leader who asserted that the Koran could be made compatible with "Arab socialism," who emancipated women, started birth control, planned the Aswan Dam, produced nuclear energy, renounced Egypt's claim to the Sudan, and even sought a Palestine settlement. Yet even Nasser could not resist the temptation of turning from the slow, difficult tasks of true growth toward the easier course—feeding his people's hunger with visions of revenge on Israel. Russia chose to arm the fantasy. In the end, Nasser bluffed and blustered himself into war and defeat, and mortgaged his country as a pawn of the Soviet power struggle against the West.
At heart, most of the Arab masses may really be indifferent toward Israel, but they have been so hypnotized by propaganda that they no longer realize this. There is an aching need for one courageous Arab leader to call reality by its name and break the spell of illusion. But it can scarcely happen now. It probably cannot happen until the Arabs begin to feel "equal and different" toward the West, including Israel; until they find sources of pride and confirmation of manhood in causes other than holy war; until they begin to distinguish the difference between word and deed. That day seems remote.