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Sorcerers' Apprentices 215

of the emigre Palestinians in their midst or from the propaganda ceaselessly
broadcast from Cairo and Baghdad and elsewhere. The dispute itself, however,
had not touched them directly, and their attitude to it consequently was

apathetic. Ritual condemnations of Israeli perfidy and professions of solidarity
with Israel’s Arab neighbours were uttered from time to time by some of the
Gulfs rulers or their more excitable retainers, but there was no substance
behind these pronouncements, except perhaps in Kuwait where the local
jeunesse doree took up the cause of Palestinian irredentism as politically chic,

and the presence of thousands of Palestinians made it advisable for the
government to show a comparable degree of enthusiasm. Even here, however,
there was little fire beneath the smoke, and the further one travelled down the
Gulf, through Qatar to the Tracial Coast, the harder it became to detect a spark
of interest in the subject - except, of course, in Bahrain where the youthful
firebrands from the schools and clubs might occasionally squeak and gibber in

the streets in imitation of their fellows in Cairo or Damascus - until in the
fastnesses of the Oman mountains one would be hard put to it to find a
tribesman who had ever heard of Israel, let alone know in which direction it
lay.
In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, which in its north-western corner faced

Israel across the Gulf of Eilat, there was a greater sense of involvement, though
only in governmental circles. The populace, for the most part, was either
unaware of or uninterested in Israel’s existence. Saudi Arabia had been drawn
into the Palestine question in the late 1930s, when the British government of
the day decided to widen the scope of the quarrel between the Arab and Jewish
communities in Palestine to include the independent Arab states. Ever since

that time the Saudi government could not afford to appear less than wholly
engage in the Palestine issue, especially as any sign of wavering would have
exposed it to vilification, and even sedition, from the revolutionary regimes in
Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad.
The humiliation inflicted upon Arab arms in June 1967 brought the conflict

with Israel into the politics of the Gulf for the first time, souring the political
atmosphere and tinging it with hysteria. In part, the change was wrought by
the Palestinian emigres, whose activities, after the foundation of the Palestine
Liberation Organization in 1964, had become more conspicuous and better
orchestrated. After June 1967 they not only became more vociferous but, what
is more to the point, they were paid more heed to by the Gulf rulers and their

subjects. The consequences for the Gulf states of their involvement in the
Arab-Israeli dispute have been, without exception, unfortunate. The language
0 politics in the Gulf, never at the best of times particularly elevated, has been
immeasurably coarsened by the injection into it of the invective which cus­
tomarily surrounds discussion of the Palestine question in the larger Arab

states. Local standards of political conduct, again never very high, have been
urther degraded by the example set the Gulf tribesmen by the intrigues and