"From the very beginning, the Arabs' primary instrument for opposing Jewish national aspirations was violence, and what determined Arab politics and diplomacy was the relative success or failure of that instrument in any given period. As early as April 1920, Arab nationalists sought to thwart Zionist activity (and to rally support for incorporating Palestine into the short-lived Syrian kingdom headed by King Faisal ibn Hussein) by carrying out a pogrom in Jerusalem in which five Jews were killed and 211 wounded. The following year, Arab riots claimed a far higher toll-some 90 dead and hundreds wounded. In the summer of 1929, another wave of violence resulted in the death of 133 Jews and the wounding of hundreds more.

For quite some time, this confrontational approach seemed to be working. It was especially effective in influencing the British, who had been appointed the mandatory power in Palestine by the League of Nations. Though the explicit purpose of the British was to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, the mandatory authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab violence aimed at averting that purpose and to the demands that followed upon it. In two White Papers, issued in 1922 and 1930 respectively, Great Britain severely compromised the prospective Jewish national home by imposing harsh restrictions on immigration and land sales to Jews.

In July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward when a British commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, recommended repudiating the terms of the mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with Transjordan, that would occupy some 90 percent of the mandate territory, and a Jewish state in what was left. This was followed in May 1939 by another White Paper that imposed even more draconian restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, closing the door of Palestine to Jews desperate to flee Nazi Europe and threatening the survival of the Jewish national project. Agitating for more, the Arabs dismissed both plans as insufficient.

They did the same in November 1947 when, in the face of the imminent expiration of the British mandate, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine; rejecting this solution, the Arab nations resolved instead to destroy the state of Israel at birth and gain the whole for themselves. This time, however, Arab violence backfired spectacularly. In the 1948-49 war, not only did Israel confirm its sovereign independence and assert control over somewhat wider territories than those assigned to it by the UN partition resolution, but the Palestinian Arab community was profoundly shattered, with about half of its population fleeing to other parts of Palestine and to neighboring Arab states.

FOR DECADES to come, inter-Arab politics would be driven by the determination to undo the consequences of the 1948 defeat, duly dubbed "al-Naqba," the catastrophe, and to bring about Israel's demise. This phase culminated in June 1967 in yet another major war that was irretrievably to change the course of Middle Eastern history.

It was, indeed, the magnitude of the Israeli victory in the Six-Day war of 1967 that punctured the bubble of denial and forced at least some Arabs to confront the reality of Jewish statehood. Even Gamal Abdel Nasser, the high priest of pan-Arabism and champion of the 1967 Arab campaign, seemed to recoil from the ideals he had preached for so long. A few days before the outbreak of hostilities in June 1967, Nasser had proudly prophesied that "the battle will be total and our basic aim will be the destruction of Israel." A couple of years later, shaken by defeat, he was scolding the Arab leaders who were still urging Egypt to resume hostilities: "You issue statements, but we have to fight. If you want to liberate, then get in line in front of us."

The trauma of the 1967 war thus suggested to the Arabs that military force had its limits, and that the death of Israel might have to be pursued in other ways. If that war was fought with a view to destroying the state physically, the next war, in October 1973, launched by Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat, had the far narrower objective of triggering a political process that would allow Egypt to regain the territories lost in 1967. Israel's remarkable military recovery in October 1973 after having been caught off-guard further reinforced Sadat's determination to abandon the path of outright violence, and culminated in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of March 1979.

But it would be wrong to construe that treaty as a fundamental acceptance of Israel's legitimacy. While one can only speculate about Sadat's own ultimate intentions-he was assassinated in October 1981 for having gone as far toward peace with Israel as he did-there is little doubt that his successor, Hosni Mubarak, has never had any desire to transform the formal Egyptian peace with Israel into a genuine reconciliation. For Mubarak, peace is of no value in and of itself; rather, it is the price Egypt has had to pay for such substantial benefits as U.S. economic and military aid.

Over the decades, Mubarak has reduced interaction with Israel to the lowest possible level, while simultaneously transforming the Egyptian army into a formidable modern force. He has also fostered a culture of virulent anti-Semitism in Egypt, a culture whose premises he himself evidently shares. Here is his candid assessment of the lessons and consequences of the 1973 war:

Against us stood the most intelligent people on earth-a people that controls the international press, the world economy, and world finances. We succeeded in compelling the Jews to do what we wanted; we received all our land back, up to the last grain of sand! We have outwitted them, and what have we given them in return? A piece of paper! . . . We were shrewder than the shrewdest people on earth! We managed to hamper their steps in every direction. We have established sophisticated machinery to control and limit to the minimum contacts with the Jews. We have proven that making peace with Israel does not entail Jewish domination and that there is no obligation to develop relations with Israel beyond those we desire.†

If this is the view of the leader of the largest and most powerful Arab state, other Arab players, with the partial exception of Jordan, have similarly never felt the need to acknowledge the Jewish state's legitimacy, and have declined even the most tempting offers in exchange for normalized relations. Four successive Israeli prime ministers, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak, were willing to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace. The late Hafez al-Assad rejected every proposal, not because of petty squabbles over a few hundred yards of territory around the Sea of Galilee but out of a fundamental unwillingness to acquiesce formally in the very existence of the "neo-Crusader state," whose fate, Assad never tired of reiterating, would eventually be that of the medieval Crusader kingdom before it.

As for the Palestinians, they too have persistently denied legitimacy to Israel, denigrated Jewish history, and even gone so far as to repudiate any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or, by implication, to the land of Israel itself. All in all, and up until now, contractual peace with Israel has represented, for the Arab party, not a recognition of legitimacy but a tacit admission that, at least for the time being, the Arabs have been unable to defeat Israel by force of arms."