Word: nasserism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...means clear that Hussein can bring the Arab leaders together even to talk about peace. Most moderate Arab nations favor the idea, but Nasser has hemmed and hawed. Algeria's Boumediene, whose militant cries during the war have made him a rival of Nasser for leadership of the Arab left, turned down a suggestion that the meeting take place in Algiers because "there are some Arabs I wouldn't want to set foot in my country." Syrian Information Minister Mohamed Zubi sneered that "the only way to forge Arab unity is through struggle and not summitry...
...blew up a Jordanian border post only a week before the war began. To the west is Israel, with which Jordan has a longer border than any Arab country. The divisions between the conservative, pro-Western Hussein and the Arab left led by Egypt's President Nasser are so fundamental that the war has just papered them over, not erased them. Hussein has to move with extreme care lest the left seize on his willingness to negotiate with Israel and invite the volatile Palestinians to move against...
...starting it. He carefully abstained from joining the chorus of Arab leftist leaders who demanded that the Jews be driven into the sea, did everything in his power to prevent Arab terrorists from using Jordan as a base. His refusal to cooperate won him scorn and vilification from Nasser and the left. But when the Arab armies began mobilizing on Israel's borders and the cry of jihad filled the air, Hussein figured that if war came he would have to join it or be toppled from his throne by Arab mobs...
...patient to the point of crippling fatalism, a trait reflected in the constant phrases, inshallah (if God wills it), malesh (it does not matter), and bukra (tomorrow). Above all, what they have in common is a language. "An Arab is anyone whose mother tongue is Arabic," says Gamal Abdel Nasser. It is not only the chief bond, but a chief source of trouble. Its whole stress is on rhetoric and resonance, not meaning and content. How poetically an Arab speaks is far more important than what he says. "In Arabic," asserts one specialist, "the medium squared is the message...
...taken literally and that the West must not take it literally either. Still, elfyza (verbalization) decisively shapes Arab thought and action. Arabic tends to act as a compensatory mechanism, producing a world far more attractive than the real one. Such an escape from reality was the recent blatant Nasser-Hussein lie that Anglo-American planes helped Israel. Arabs believed it because it could have happened: Arab truth is meant to be only approximate or potential. There is no credibility gap among Arabs, so long as a statement, however fantastic, fits in with what they want to hear. "Everyone knows that...