months after the war, "If anyone thought the Arabs had learned a lesson, he was mistaken." If the Arabs could conquer and annihilate Israel, that certainly would be a clear-cut solution. But my Arab partner at the dinner table readily agreed that no such possibility exists. The military superiority of Israel will remain for a long time, and new weapons systems eventually will be introduced in the Middle East which will make it virtually certain that the destruction of Israel wTill be accompanied by the destruction of the Arab centers of population, thus setting the Region back at least two thousand years (and probably causing a thermonuclear holocaust all over the world). Both of us agreed that we must discount a military solution. (I assume that my partner realized how right he was a few months later, when the Six-Day War proved the point.)
The second proposal is dear to the Arab heart. Drawing an interesting-but, as we have seen, incomplete-analogy with the history of the Crusaders, Arabs tend to delude themselves that Israel can be wished away by not recognizing its existence. An economic and political boycott, they believe, can go on for so long that Israel will eventually wither away.
"We waited two hundred years for the Crusader State to disappear," Arabs will often say, "and we shall wait another two hundred years for the disappearance of Israel."
I asked my partner quite frankly, "Do you really want to hold up the march of Arab nationalism for two hundred years, just waiting for us to disappear? As long as we are here, and there is no solution to our conflict, you will not get anywhere in the fulfillment of your real aspirations. The conflict opens the Region for foreign intervention, both Western and Soviet, turning us all into pawns of a foreign game. No Arab unity can be achieved as long as a hostile Israel cuts the southern part of the Arab world off from the northern part. And the money you need for industrialization and reform, in order to create a modern