INTRODUCTION slighted crux o f ihc N ear East impasse be given its due. But, alas, the possibility o f an adequate debate now, much less a cogent solution, is dim. The terms o f debate are im poverished, for (as I said above) Palestinians have been known only as refugees, or as extremists, or as terrorists. A sizeable corps of Middle East “ experts" has tended to m onopolize discussion, principally by using social science jargon and ideological chiches masked as knowledge. M ost o f all, I think, there is the entrenched cultural attitude toward Palestinians deriving from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the A rab s, and the O rient. This attitude, from which in its turn Zionism drew for its view o f the Palestinians, dehumanized us, reduced us to the barely tolerated status o f a nuisance. It would perhaps be too sweeping a statement to say that most academic political science studies o f the Middle East and o f the Palestinians continue this tradition. But it is true, I think, that they tend to. Insofar as most o f them derive from and in most important ways unquestionably accept the frame­ work that has legitimized Zionism as against Palestinian rights, they have very little to contribute to an understanding o f the real situation in the Middle East. For it is a fact that almost every serious study o f the modern Middle East produced in this country since W orld W ar II cannot prepare anyone for what has been taking place in the region: This is as patently true of the recent events in Iran as it is o f the Lebanese civil war, of the Palestinian resistance, o f the A rab performance during the 1973 war. I certainly do not intend this book as a polemic against what has rightly been called the ideological bent of social science work that pretends to scientific objectivity, particularly since the advent o f the Cold War. But I do intend consciously to avoid its “ value-free” pitfalls. Those include accounts o f political reality that focus on superpower rivalry, that claim as desirable anything associated with the West and its modernizing mission in the Third W orld, that ignore popular movements while praising and valorizing a battery of undistinguished and oppressive client regimes, that dismiss as ahistorical anything that cannot be easily made to fit a particular telos or a particular m ethodology whose goals are