Page 226 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 223

temptation must be doubly potent in the case of the Palestinians, a people
dispossessed of their homeland, dispersed into exile and destitute of any real
hope of return. Idle though it is to speculate - and even more pointless to
dogmatize - about the likely course of Arab politics anywhere, least of all in
Arabia and the Gulf, it is yet worth recalling that it was the loyalties of the
Uitlanders in the Transvaal to alien lands and causes which set in train the
sequence of events which terminated in the extinction of the Transvaal’s
independence at the turn of this century.