The Arab summit conference and after

six-day war and its aftermath were peculiarly calculated to awaken all the inferiority complexes of all the various Arab intelligentsias and military vis-a-vis the West together. Nearly all the Arab States of today had been occupied by Western States, and those active in politics had grown up in contact with a Western system of life and education which the occupation made seem superior to their own. And the physical removal of the Western presence, even when that removal could be made to appear the result of their own efforts, had done nothing very effectively to remove their sense of inferiority in relation to the West. Only the Lebanon, where Westernized systems of education have longest roots, and Saudi Arabia, where Wahabism provides a moral core of certainty and which never knew an occupying Power, can be regarded as partial exceptions to this rule. It was in these two countries only, by all accounts, and in the lower ranges of the Gulf, that the psychological effects of the Israeli victory were weak or non-existent. Throughout the rest of the Arab world its impact can only really be described in the language of psychiatry. An index to this can be seen first of all in the willingness with which the suggestion of Western collusion in the Israeli victory won universal acceptance. There was, after all, the precedent of 1956. But much more than this, there was complete disbelief in the margin of strength over her