It is not easy to be an Arab these days. If you are old, the place where you live is likely to have changed so much that little seems friendly and familiar. If you are young, years of rote learning in dreary state schools did not prepare you well for this new world. In your own country you have few rights. Travel abroad and they take you for a terrorist. Even your leaders don't count for much in the wider world. Some are big on money, others on bombast, but few are inspiring or visionary.

These are gross generalisations, of course. Huge differences persist among 300m-odd Arabic speakers and 22 countries of the Arab League. With oil prices touching record highs, some Arab economies are booming. The gulf between a Darfuri refugee and a Porsche-driving financier in Dubai is as great as between any two people on earth. Yet, to travel through the Arab world right now is to experience a peculiar sameness of spirit. Particularly among people under 30, who make up the vast majority of Arabs, the mood is one of disgruntlement and doubt.

Factors that contribute to the gloom include the discombobulating impact of one of the world's fastest population growth rates, failing public-education systems and the resilience of social traditions often ill-suited to the urban lifestyle that is now the Arab norm. But it is politics above all that shapes this generation's discontent.

In the world at large, things have not looked good for the Arabs for a long time. The generation that emerged after the second world war came to believe in the inevitability of an Arab renaissance after centuries of domination by Ottoman Turks and European imperialists. Within this scheme of Arab progress, the problem of Palestine stuck out like a troublesome nail. Defeat in the 1967 war with Israel shattered many dreams. Yet, even after Israel's victory Palestine remained a touchstone for Arabs everywhere. Sooner or later, it was felt, justice would be done.

That confidence has taken a beating of late. Few Arabs expect the peace initiative George Bush launched in Annapolis last November to achieve anything. And the schism between Hamas and Fatah has shaken underlying assumptions. If the Palestinians cannot unite in their own cause, why should other Arabs help them? And which side to support? For fellow Arabs, as for Palestinians themselves, the clash between a heart that cries "resist" and a head that counsels compromise has seldom been more perplexing.

As in Palestine, so in Iraq. In 2003 America's invasion produced all but universal Arab outrage. From afar, Iraqi "resistance" looked both natural and noble. But as Iraq has grown messier, the rights and wrongs have grown harder for Arabs to disentangle. There are few heroes in a cast that includes mass killers from al-Qaeda, brutal Shia militias, criminal gangs, Kurdish separatists and corrupt politicians as well as American occupiers. 

Elsewhere in the region, it has become harder for thoughtful Arabs to blame the government-inspired slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan or the stalemate between Lebanon's religious sects on a nefarious American foreign policy. Many Arabs still see Mr Bush's "war on terrorism" as a crusade against Islam. But many also note that al-Qaeda-style jihadism has killed more Muslims, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to the squalid Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, than "infidels".