Memory is the most dangerous political substance on earth. More dangerous than weapons. More destabilizing than sanctions. Because weapons can be embargoed and sanctions can be absorbed and armies can be defeated. But a population that remembers what it believed, what it actually, in its bones, considered right and worth defending, is a population that will eventually measure its rulers against that memory. And the rulers of several Arab states have spent considerable political energy on exactly one project: Making their populations forget. Forget Palestine. Forget sovereignty. Forget the basic suspicion that foreign military bases on Muslim land are not a partnership but an occupation with better public relations. The forgetting was working. It is working less well now.