Why did this transformation take place? Muravchik highlights as critical factors "on the one hand, the raw power in Muslim numbers and Arab oil wealth, and, on the other hand, the moral claims of the Palestinians and the latter-day ideology of the Left". Though contradictory, in practice these two forms of suasion, he writes, reinforced each other.

The semantic shift is particularly fascinating. Gradually, the "Arab-Israeli conflict", which pitted the vast Arab world against the small, beleaguered Jewish state, became the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict", which was more suggestive of some oppression visited upon this defenceless Arab minority by Israel and its mighty military. This development, however, was decidedly cynical and opportunistic, as Muravchik expertly documents. In Israel's early years, the Arabs, whose leadership had previously been allied with Nazi Germany, routinely employed genocidal rhetoric against the Jews ("no Jew will remain alive," it was forecasted of the coming Arab onslaught in 1967). But they eventually realised such talk was winning them few friends in the post-war West. Consequently, they innovated the more sympathetic and "progressive" cause of the "Palestinians".

Although their language underwent a change, their aim of building a pan-Arab alliance against the Jewish State did not. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was founded in 1964 — three years before the Six Day War, when the West Bank and Gaza fell into Israeli hands — indicating that the objective of this movement has never been solely about the disputed territories but about Israel entire. Moreover, the organisation's first chairman was not some leading figure in the "Palestinian cause" but Ahmad Shukeiri, a diplomat who had served multiple Arab governments and was "the very personification of pan-Arabism". Even Yasser Arafat, who eventually took over the PLO, was not interested in a "Palestinian state" per se, but rather "to build an independent Palestinian fighting organisation to spearhead the Arab struggle." According to Arafat, writes Muravchik, "The pan-Arabists . . . who claimed that Arab unity was the route to liberating Palestine had it backward: the liberation of Palestine would pave the way to Arab unity. The exact configuration of Arab rule over the area could be determined once the Zionist interlopers had been expelled.

Arafat's exploitation of this new terminology to cultivate Western leftist sympathies was masterful. Following the Six Day War, he looked to Algeria, which had wrested independence from France, to learn how to portray the enemy as "world imperialism" and the goal of his terroristic campaign as "liberation". As leader of the PLO and its dominant constituent, Fatah, Arafat went to visit China, North Vietnam, Cuba and eventually the USSR, embedding his struggle in the international movement of "progressive" forces. By January 1969, Fatah's central committee was declaring: "The struggle of the Palestinian people, like that of the Vietnamese people and other peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, is part of the historic process of the liberation of the oppressed peoples from colonialism and imperialism."