320 • 17 ISRAEL'S REBIRTH AND THE RISE OF ARAB NATIONALISMCritics called the policy one of working both sides of the street, a means by
which Nasir could extract military and economic aid from the communist
bloc and the West at the same time.
Arab socialism was hard to define. It was not a coherent set of beliefs
that emerged, fully articulated, in Egypt or the other Arab countries at any
given time. Rather, it evolved in reaction to the economic system prevalent
up to the 1950s in most parts of the Arab world, a system in which "capi¬
talism" really meant foreign ownership of major business enterprises or a
more primitive system (often misnamed "feudalism") in which land,
buildings, and other sources of wealth belonged to a small native elite
while masses of Arab workers and peasants lived in dire poverty. To bring
about reform, Arab socialists called on their governments to run the major
industries and public utilities so as to divide the economic pie more evenly
among the people. They also believed that this pie could be enlarged by
comprehensive state planning to expand manufacturing and modernize
agriculture. Although they borrowed some of their ideas and rhetoric from
the Marxists, most Arab socialists opposed communism for its atheism
and tried to prove that their ideology was compatible with Islam. They ar¬
gued that shopkeepers and small-scale merchants ("national capitalists")
could play a constructive role in Arab socialism. They rejected the Marxian
concept of class struggle; if it were stimulated, they feared, class war would
divide the Arab world even more and would dissipate energies needed to
develop a modern economy. Critics said that Arab socialism lacked theo¬
retical rigor, inflated Egypt's already swollen bureaucracy, and discouraged
foreign investment.
The Ebb of the Pan-Arab Tide
In retrospect, the summer of 1958 was the zenith of pan-Arabism. Just as
Qasim's Iraq soon went its own way, so too did Saudi Arabia under Crown
Prince Faysal. The US Marines in Lebanon confronted more Coke vendors
than communists. Lebanon's parliament chose the neutralist Fuad Shihab,
the general who had kept the army out of the civil war, to replace the pro-
Western Sham'un. US troops pulled out, all factions agreed to respect the in¬
dependence and neutrality of Lebanon, and their leaders resumed their
favorite activity: making money. Britain likewise withdrew its troops from
Jordan, but Husayn's regime did not fall, to everyone's surprise. A military
coup in the Sudan in November 1958, at first thought to be pro-Nasir, did
not unify the Nile Valley. Some Syrians started to wonder why no other
country followed theirs into the UAR. During 1959-1961, Egypt's heavy-
handed bureaucracy made further inroads into Syria's hitherto capitalistic