324 DESTINY DISRUPTED
armies of its three Arab adversaries, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and so it was
Palestine, not Israel, that became the stillborn child. When the war ended,
a war that Israel remembers as their War of Independence but that Arabs
called the Catastrophe, some seven hundred thousand Arabs found them-
selves homeless and stateless, living as refugees in the neighboring Arab
countries. The lands that were supposed to become Palestine were annexed
{mostly by Jordan). The bulk of the Arab refugees collected on the West
Bank of the Jordan River, where they seethed and stewed and sometimes
staged small raids into the land that had once been theirs.
In the aftermath of the war of 1948, the Arabs lost the public relations
battle even more drastically than they had lost their land. For one thing,
some prominent Arabs publicly and constantly disputed Israel's "right to
exist." They were speaking within the framework of the nationalist argu-
ment: Zionists wanted Israel to exist, the Arabs of Palestine wanted Pales-
tine to exist, and since they claimed the same territory, both could not
exist: the assertion of each nation's "right to exist" was inherently a denial
of the other nation's "right to exist." But in the shadow of the Nazis' at-
tempted genocide, asserting that Israel had no right to exist sounded like
saying, "Jews have no right to exist."
To make matters worse, at least one Arab notable made no bones about
actually endorsing Nazi anti-Semitism. This was the Mufti of Jerusalem,
who had lived in Nazi Germany during the war and now spouted racism
from many pulpits including his radio broadcasts. The weight of world
opinion, the tone of media reporting, and the rantings of Arabs such as this
mufti subtly conflated the Arab cause with Nazism in the public mind, es-
pecially in the West. Arabs not only lost the argument about the land but in
the process became the Bad Guys who deserved to lose their land. This com-
bination of feeling wronged and feeling vilified fed a spiraling resentment
that rotted into the very anti-Semitism of which Muslims stood accused.
One man who took part in the debacle of 1948 was Egyptian army officer
Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser was born in southern Egypt, the son of a
humble postman. Even as a boy, he felt keenly wounded by his country's
subservience to Europeans. At an age when most boys were starting to ob-
sess about girls, Nasser was obsessing about his nation's "honor." His
prospects for doing anything about it looked dim, however, until a sudden