progress and industrialization of the Arab peoples, especially Egypt.
• A united Region, liberated from fear and foreign exploitation, could start at long last a rapid march toward the modernization of the whole Region, restoring it to the place it held both in ancient and Islamic times.
• It would mean breaking the vicious circle, which has embittered the lives of too many for too long, and starting a new cycle of mutual fertilization-a peaceful competition for the common good instead of a military competition, which can only end in mutual disaster.
* * *
All this sounds very optimistic. Indeed, it is.
I am an optimist. I believe that nothing in history is pre determined. History in the making is composed of acts of human beings, their emotions and aspirations.
The depth of bitterness and hatred throughout our Semitic Region seems bottomless. Yet it is a comparatively new phenomenon, the outcome of the recent clash of our peoples. Nothing like European anti-Semitism ever existed in the Arab world prior to the events which created the vicious circle.
We have seen, in our times, Germans and Frenchmen cooperating, if not loving each other, after a war which lasted for many hundreds of years and whose bitter fruits are deeply embedded in both German and French culture. We are witnessing today the beginnings of an AmericanSoviet alliance which would have been unthinkable only a dozen years ago.
We are not dealing, therefore, with mystical phenomena, but with matters which can be changed by policy decisions, by new ideas, new leaders and new political forces-in short, by a new generation all over the Middle East disgusted with the mess their fathers have made and by the conventional lies of propaganda.
The first step has to be made by Israel. Throughout the