World: THE PAINFUL PRESIDENCY OF EGYPT'S NASSER

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not want a settlement agreed on by the Big Two powers. They do not want another war. Their policy, as recently defined by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, aims at the creation of "new facts" through occupation and the passage of time. This means forcing the Arabs, by pressure of occupation, to change their attitudes—a highly unlikely prospect. To many Israelis, "new facts" would include the fall of Nasser, whom they consider to be the main stumbling block to peace.

Israelis validly point out that any successor to Nasser, no matter how extreme, would at least not be in the Russians' debt, nor necessarily able to invoke Soviet aid. But, with no successor in sight, the search for a settlement comes down to what Israel will give up and what Nasser could sell to his army and to the other Arab lands. So long as their deadlock persists, Israel gets to keep the occupied territories, which it is putting to profitable use, and Nasser enjoys an external aid to survival, presented by the fact of the Israeli enemy at Egypt's gates. It is a treacherously thin high wire that Nasser walks, and he could easily fall—or jump—from it.

The ultimate conflict between Arabs and Israelis, however, is not so much a matter of land or race or religion as it is one of culture. The Arabs are light-years behind the European Israelis in education and modern managerial and technical skills. The struggle is between a highly developed nation and a woefully underdeveloped nation. Nasser led his revolt in 1952 not only to free Egypt from 4,000 years of misrule and foreign domination, but to bring it into the modern world by the simplistic techniques of socialism. Distrusted by the Israelis, the loser in two wars, he has not, after 17 years, been able to make his land any more of a modern nation state. Arabs are all too keenly aware of the gap between themselves and the Israelis, and Nasser's promise and unfulfilled hopes are the tragedy of his years of power.

Nasser's Role

If he has not been able to bring change to the Arabs, Nasser himself has been changed by being the leader of their world. From the personification of Arab militancy, able to send crowds into the streets screaming for war, he has become a relative moderate, seeking a way out of another round of war that he cannot win and an unfinished peace that he cannot long endure. In a sense, he has come a long way toward compromise, and is willing at last to concede Israel's right to exist in the Arabs' midst.

In a way, it is the Israelis who are now the more intransigent party. They would have settled before the Six-Day War for what is now available to them from the Arabs. But no country in history has ever won a war without keeping some of the spoils. With victory, the appetite of the Israelis has increased, fostering widespread Arab fears that they are indeed bent on expansion and a little neighborhood imperialism. Some diplomats believe that it would help if the Israelis at least stated their willingness in principle to withdraw from the occupied territories, provided that their other legitimate security needs were met. It would also help the situation if they made a substantive recognition of the plight of Palestinian refugees.

Unrealism still exists in abundance on both sides of the conflict. The Israelis cherish the notion that, left alone by the big powers, they