Welcome to the New Cold War!
Arabs and the first Cold War
Revolutionaries and leftists in the world in general and in the Arab world in particular never had the freedom of movement and expression like during the Cold War, which intensified in the seventies and eighties of the last century. The balance between Marxist communism and capitalist Zionism imposed rules that allowed the Arab left in general and the Arab nationalist movement in particular to move freely and express itself and to get organized; revolt; organize; rule and spread its ideology outside the geographic borders drawn by the colonialists in the aftermath of the First World War…. And with that, the Arab nationalist movement was able to create its sphere of influence and its organization throughout the whole Arab World, even though it was received with varied responses due to different historical circumstances experienced by each of those countries. Thus, the Nasserite movement found sympathetic resonance in the whole Arab world on such a scale that governments in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf felt threatened by this movement and fended that off by agreeing to political decisions in which they were not really interested nor in support of, as happened when they were forced to accept the famous “Three Nos” resolution of the Khartoum summit following the 1967 war! The Arab Nationalist Movement succeeded in creating the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as a real conduit for its national plan in opposing the Zionist assault on the homeland, by really fighting it and through not appeasing or begging as the Palestinian Liberation Organization does today.. But the biggest success was achieved by the Ba’ath movement, which succeeded in building two national states in Iraq and Syria, which will remain, in spite of all lapses, faults and errors, the truest examples of the success of the Arab nationalist movement in the twentieth century!