Saudi Arabia and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Ups and Downs of Pragmatic Moderation

The Arab-Israeli war in June 1967 was a seminal event in the postwar history of the Middle East. It changed all the power relationships in the area. The Arabs, who previously had not fully appreciated Israeli might, had now to recognize the formidable enemy they faced. From then on, it was the country most Arabs had dismissed as an 'illegitimate entity' which dominated the area's political activity. No longer could the Arabs conduct their own inter-relationships without taking into consideration the Jewish state which, in six days, had singlehandedly wrested the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria respectively. For the Arabs, the loss of land was a bitter pill to swallow, but that loss was not nearly so traumatic for the Arab world as the defeat of revolutionary Arab nationalism. It was the Arab nationalist movement and the keeper of its conscience, President Nasir of Egypt, who had dominated the Arab political scene throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The revolutionary nationalists had promised the masses not only salvation from their social and economic ills, but also the eradication of their main foreign policy concern: Arab nationalism's most deadly enemy, the 'Zionist entity/ And so long as the revolutionary march continued to pervade the psyche of the Arab masses, the leaders of conservative,