330 DESTINY DISRUPTED
when Israel won the most decisive victory in the history of modern war-
fare, it wasn't clashing with a monolith. The Arab side was a querulous
scramble of contradictions locked in struggle with one another.
The Six Day War humiliated Nasser, finished his career. Within four
years the man was literally dead. If Nasser had really been the leader of a
monolithic Arab bloc, his defeat might have forced "the Arabs" to come to
terms with Israel and work out some basis for eventual peace.
But there was no "the Arabs." Nasser was in fact just one contender
among several for leadership of just one current among all who called
themselves Arabs: secular modernism. When Israel attacked the Arabs, it
really attacked only this current; and when it crushed Nasser, it damaged
only this Westernizing, modernizing, secular, nationalist tendency, and not
even every expression of that. With Nasser's fall, down went "Nasserism,"
that odd melange of secular modernism and Islamic socialism. Into the
power vacuum left by its demise flowed other, more dangerous forces,
some of them more primal, more irrational.
In the wake of the war, the Arab refugees clumped along the borders of
Israel gave up hope that any Arab state would save them and decided to
rely only on themselves henceforth. These refugees, their numbers swelled
to more than a million by the latest mayhem, could properly be called
Palestinians at this point, because their intense shared historical experience
had certainly given them a common identity and made them a "nation" in
the classic sense. They were now the "people without a land" and among
these Palestinians sprouted many groups dedicated to the restoration of
Palestine by any means. The biggest of them drifted into a coalition called
the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been founded in 1964 as
a mechanism by which Arab governments could "manage" the Palestini-
ans. After the Six Day War, Palestinians took control of this organization
and made it their own. A part-time engineer and full-time revolutionary
named Yasser Arafat emerged as its chairman^1 , and with the PLO as their
quasi-government, the Palestinians dug in for a protracted war with Israel.
This was the first consequence of the Six Day War.
Second, the fall of Nasser created an opening for the other secular
Arab nationalist movement, the one founded by Michel Aflaq. His party
had joined with the Syrian Socialist Party to form the Ba'ath Socialist Party,
the ideology of which combined state-glorifying socialism with Arab-