WASHINGTON

DESPITE VIRTUAL round-the-clock coverage of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, one important aspect remains poorly understood: the reaction of the "Arab street."

Turn on any Arab television channel, though, and you can't miss the rage and widespread support for Hezbollah and Hamas: streets roiling with protesters, callers to talk programs denouncing Israel and the United States, and clerics defending Hezbollah and calling for holy war.

Five years after 9/11, the West still struggles to understand the rage that pushes Arab masses to view radical groups as heroic forces of resistance. On one extreme, there are those who indict Islam or Arab culture. On the other, there are those who blame it on Israeli aggression and U.S. bias for Israel. Both are equally simplistic explanations of the contemporary Arab mindset, which stems largely from how Arab governments have deliberately nurtured this anger toward Israel -- and increasingly the United States -- for more than five decades.

After being dominated by foreign powers during the first half of the 20th Century, the Arab street was buoyed by hopes of "liberation" following World War II. Instead, colonial rule was replaced with oppressive and inefficient national governments. These regimes have failed to secure economic or social progress, and have denied political liberties. Most damaging, they redirected the desire of their citizens for a restored sense of pride to an external cause: the liberation of Palestine and the defeat of the "Zionist enemy," on which they blamed all the region's woes.

Arab nationalism, the misused ideology in these conflicts, was created by Arab Christians in the Levant in the late 19th Century, as a way to unite the Arabic-speaking population of the Mideast and North Africa on a cultural-ethnic ground, rather than a religious one -- namely, Islam. The Arab-nationalist ideology eventually became the legitimizing ideology of every Arab dictator. But it failed to "liberate Palestine" or to create a unified Arab world. The ensuing conflicts with Israel led only to defeat upon defeat, deepening humiliation and frustration. Its main legacy: uniting the Arab public in humiliation, pain and sorrow, increasing the desire to vanquish Israel and thus restore lost Arab pride, at any cost.

The Arab street's frustrated hopes have thus been a potent tool with which generation after generation of Arab leaders have maintained control. Saddam Hussein did not have the support of the majority of Iraqis, yet he had the support of most of the Arab street; the same applies to Syrian President Bashar Assad, and to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Even the non-Arab Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, understands this.

All of them exploit the Arab public's sense of humiliation to mobilize support for their personal ambitions.

Today, these century-old feelings are being harnessed by the forces of radical Islam to recruit Muslims willing to die for their religion. These tactics succeed because so many Arab citizens feel trapped between a lack of hope at and a dream of restoring lost pride. That's why, by the tens of thousands, Arabs are ready to die in war in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere around the world.

Already, there is pressure on the Bush administration from both the right and the left to give up on the administration's dream of a democratic Mideast. But this would be a terrible mistake.

In the long run, the only way to make the world safer is to give the Arab citizens hope for a better future. And this can happen only when they can participate in their government and shape their destiny. It is thus crucial that the radicalism we see today among Arab populations not be used to justify a retreat from reform.

A return to the so-called realism in which tyrants are tolerated as long as they keep their restive populations contained and their fiefdoms stable will ensure only that the Mideast remains the number-one recruiting ground for terrorists. Good governance won't solve every problem of the Mideast, but it must be part of the solution.

The West needs to keep protecting itself militarily against the terrorist threat, but if it continues to ignore the socio-political causes of Arab frustration, there will always be thousands of disillusioned, angry, radicalized youth, ready to die to restore their pride and receive an express ticket to heaven.

Khairi Abaza, a former official of the Egyptian Wafd Party, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.