Sample Solution

armies of the Axis powers and the Allies fought their way across North Africa, thus involving a large segment of the Arab world directly in the conflict and other parts through overt military occupation.
The Second World War and its consequence led to a transformation in the patterns of Western influence and hegemony in the Middle East. While the Arab nations may have shared in the international sense of relief that global conflict was at an end, their feelings were also somewhat more sanguine; the memory of the way expectations would so easily be dashed in such circumstances was too fresh. Along with renewed hopes for independence there as continuing resentment towards not only the colonial powers but also many of the ancient regimes with their entrenched and often corrupt power structures. This was a volatile political and social mixture as a number of uprising and political assassinations during the immediate post war period can demonstrate. Jacques Barque quite rightly terms the moment “a decisive juncture in contemporary Arab history…… the assassination of an Egyptian prime minister bore witness to the rise of extremism, the founding of the Baath Party and the ‘free officers’ conspiracy signalled the summons to new political horizons.”61
The conduct of the Great Power during the war had convinced even the most dogged pursuers of local national interest of the need to unite efforts and forces. The urgings of a number of advocates of Arab nationalism (such as Questantin Zurayq, Edmond Rabath, Sati al-Husri) were now to bear fruit in the establishment in Cairo of the Arab League in March 1945. 62 The choice of the Egyptian capital as the site for the league’s headquarters not only acknowledge Cairo’s central geographical position in the Arab world but also symbolized a role for Egypt which Abd al-Nasir was to pursue with vigor in the next decade.
Hisham Sharabi is of the opinion, in retrospect, that from the outset “the League fell far short of the hopes and aspiration of the most Arab nationalists.” 63In any case the newly created body was presented within a year or so with a major crisis, one which again involved the Western powers, namely the establishment of the state of Israel. In November 1947 a “partition plan” for Palestine was published. In April 1948 many inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Dayr Yasin were massacred by Zionists, an event which prompted many families to leave the region. In May, the state of Israel was proclaimed, marking the first of many subsequent conflicts between Arabs and Israelis. The period which we are considering is punctuated with unfortunate regularity by conflict between the Arab nations and Zionist state. The years 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 are important events in the history of modern Arab world. The plight of the Palestinian people continues to be one of the major focuses of Arab nationalist; in Abd Allah L