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The well-informed, frequently puzzled by foreign affairs, are sometimes even mystified by problems of the Middle East, an area of unusual volatility, controversy, and seeming unpredictability. Yet that area need not be less knowable than other regions. Actually, the Middle East may well prove to be more intelligible and predictable than most regions.There are, I admit, some genuinely puzzling s pects to the Middle East—one is the military ascendancy of a small and reputedly unmarital people over vast masses of war like people. But after several decades of unremitting hostility to Jewish political assertiveness in the Middle East, it is surely a suspension of rationality to suppose—as most of us seem to—that the atmosphere can be cleared by some semantic formulation.

The involvement of peasants in the rebellions and revolutions of the distant past has been impressive in certain respects, but never acquired quite the importance attributed to it in our own time. In terms of the sheer weight of their numbers, the vastness of the peasants involvement in some internal wars of the past may perhaps never be duplicated. Over twenty million Chinese peasants' were killed in the terrible T'ai-p'ing (1850–1864). Nor was the significance of these colossal figures limited to sheer mass, as the Mexican Revolution illustrates. But never before has so much reliance been put on the peasants for so ambitiously revolutionary plans as in our time. Particularly since the Chinese Communist Revolution, the peasantry has displaced the industrial proletariat as the crucial revolutionary class in the dogma of the most militant Marxists. We have been told repeatedly that Mao, Guevara, Giap, and their disciples have put their hopes in the peasantry and the countryside not merely for radical upheavals through revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries, but also for global revolution. The role the peasants actually play in such revolutionary wars is among the crucial problems of our time.