stand by idly while this happened, because this would have shattered forever his claim as the leader and defender of the Arab world. His fortunes at low ebb, the Egyptian President must have believed that doing something dramatic yet costless would be an easy way to retrieve them.
Nasser's assumptions were partly right and partly wrong. Israel was very close to attacking Syria, as our Prime Minister openly declared on the eve of Independence Day; but this had absolutely nothing to do with any American plan, nor with the social ideology of the Syrian dictatorship. The sole motivation was to put an end to acts of sabotage perpetrated in Israel by terrorists which, everyone in Israel believed, were organized by the Syrians.
Now the conscious and unconscious beliefs and convictions of both sides, formed by the events of the last three generations, started to exert their profound influence and lead to yet another war. Nasser, like all Arabs, implicitly believes that Israel is the creation of Western imperialism, and therefore acts automatically according to Western interests; as it was clearly in the American interest to get rid of the Syrian regime, it was quite obvious in the Arab mind that an Israeli threat to Syria must be a part of an American plan.
Nasser just couldn't understand that Israel's sole concern, at the moment, was to put a stop to terrorist actsand he made his first big mistake. If he had concentrated his troops in Sinai, and at the same time had demanded that the Syrian and the Arab Palestinian terrorist organizations put a stop to the guerrilla warfare, this would have been welcomed in Israel. It would have confirmed the general picture of Nasser, for the time being at least, as a moderate leader who did not want war. Yet Nasser did not do this. He declared that his troops would attack Israel if the Israeli Army attacked Syria-without making any suggestion for ending the problem which made such an attack on Syria necessary in Israeli eyes. He seemed to be telling us: "The terrorists will invade Israel in ever-