Arabs (78 page)

The Israeli counterattack raised new tensions between the superpowers. As the Israelis threatened the encircled Egyptian Third Army on the west bank of the Suez Canal, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev sent a letter to U.S. president Richard Nixon calling for joint diplomatic action. Brezhnev warned that the Soviet Union might otherwise be forced to intervene unilaterally to protect its Egyptian allies. With the Red Army and the Soviet Navy on alert, U.S. intelligence feared the Soviets might introduce a nuclear deterrent in the conflict zone. U.S. security officials responded by placing their military on high nuclear alert for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis. After a few hours of heightened tension, the superpowers agreed to combine forces to seek a diplomatic end to the October War.

The Egyptians and the Israelis were also impatient to bring the devastating armed conflict to an end. After sixteen days of intensive warfare, both sides were ready to lay down their arms, and a cease-fire was negotiated through the UN Security Council on October 22. That same day, the Security Council passed Resolution 338, which reaffirmed the earlier Resolution 242 calling for the convening of a peace conference and a resolution of Arab-Israeli differences through an exchange of land for peace. That December the United Nations convened an international conference in Geneva to address the issue of Arab land occupied by Israel in 1967 as a first step toward a just and enduring resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Kurt Waldheim, the secretary-general of the United Nations, opened the conference on December 21, 1973. Cosponsored by the United States and the USSR, the conference was attended by delegations from Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. President
Hafiz al-Asad of Syria refused to attend when he could not obtain a guarantee that the conference would restore all occupied territory to the Arab states. There was no Palestinian representation. The Israelis vetoed PLO participation, and the Jordanians were not keen to have a rival representing the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The conference in Geneva proved inconclusive. The Arab delegations failed to coordinate before the conference, and their presentations revealed deep divisions in Arab ranks. The Egyptians referred to the West Bank as Palestinian territory, undermining Jordan’s negotiating position. The Jordanians felt the Egyptians were punishing them for not having taken part in the 1973 War. The Jordanian foreign minister, Samir al-Rifa’i, called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories, including East Jerusalem. Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, insisted Israel would never return to the 1967 lines and declared Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel. The only significant result of the conference was the creation of a joint Egyptian-Israeli military working group to negotiate a disengagement of Egyptian and Israeli forces in the Sinai.

In the aftermath of the failed conference, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger embarked on several rounds of intensive shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Agreements were concluded between Egypt and Israel on January 18, 1974, and between Syria and Israel in May 1974. By these agreements, Egypt regained the whole of the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, with a UN-controlled buffer zone between Egyptian and Israeli lines in the Sinai. The Syrians too regained a slice of Golan territory lost in the June 1967 War, again with a UN buffer force between Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan. With the war over and diplomacy in full swing, the Arab oil producers declared their objectives met and brought the oil embargo to a close on March 18, 1974.

Yet the events of 1973 were not seen as an unqualified success by all Arab analysts. Mohamed Heikal believed Egypt and the Arab oil states conceded too much, too soon. Having imposed an embargo with specific political objectives—the evacuation of all Arab territories occupied in June 1967—the Arabs had lifted the embargo before any of their objectives had actually been met. “All that can be said on the credit side,” Heikal concluded, “is that the world saw the Arabs acting for once in unison and oil being used, even if clumsily, as a political weapon.”
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Nevertheless, the Arab world did make significant gains in 1973. The display of discipline and unity of purpose impressed the international community and forced the superpowers to take the Arab world more seriously. On an economic level, the events of 1973 led to full Arab independence from the Western oil companies. In Shaykh Yamani’s words, the Arab oil states had asserted mastery over their own commodity and came out of the oil crisis immensely wealthier. Oil, which had traded at less than $3 a barrel before the 1973 crisis, stabilized at prices ranging from $11–13
for most of the 1970s. If Western cartoonists vilified the oil shaykh as a greedy hook-nosed character holding the world to ransom, Western businessmen were quick to flock to an emerging market of seemingly limitless resources. Even the Western oil companies had reaped enormous profits from the crisis, as their vast oil reserves appreciated with the spike in prices. Yet the events of October 1973 dealt the final blow to the oil concessions that had governed relations between Western companies and the Arab oil-producing states. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia followed Iraq and Libya in buying out the assets of Western oil companies for their national oil industries, bringing the age of the Western influence over Arab oil to a close by 1976.

The October War was also a diplomatic success. Sadat had succeeded in using the war to break the deadlock with Israel. Concerted Arab military action had proved a credible threat to Israel, and the war had raised dangerous tensions between the Soviets and Americans. The international community now gave a high priority to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through diplomacy based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Through his bold initiatives in 1973, Anwar Sadat had secured Egypt’s interests—and placed Palestinian national aspirations in dire jeopardy. Although the UN resolutions upheld the territorial integrity of all the states in the region, they made no mention of the stateless Palestinians, other than to promise “a just settlement of the refugee problem.” The Palestine Liberation Organization, the effective government-in-exile of the Palestinian people, faced a stark choice: engage in the new diplomacy, or see Jordan and Egypt regain the West Bank and Gaza Strip through a comprehensive peace deal that would spell the end of Palestinian hopes for an independent state.

A
helicopter cut swiftly through the predawn gloom along the East River to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. At 4:00 A.M. on November 13, 1974, the helicopter touched down, and anxious security men rushed PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to a secure suite inside the UN building. Arriving without warning in the dark of night, Arafat was spared the indignity of driving through the thousands of demonstrators who gathered later that morning at the UN Plaza to protest his appearance, carrying banners proclaiming the “PLO is Murder International” and the “UN Becomes a Forum of Terrorism.” He was also protected from assassins.

Arafat’s visit to the United Nations was the culmination of a remarkable year for Palestinian politics. The Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc states, the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Arab world had combined forces to secure an invitation for the PLO chief to open the UN debate on “The Question of Palestine.” It was his opportunity to present Palestinian aspirations to the community of nations.
The UN appearance also marked Arafat’s transition from guerrilla leader to statesman—a role for which he had little preparation. “Why don’t you go?” he had asked Khalid al-Hasan, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile. Hasan dismissed the suggestion out of hand, insisting that only Arafat could speak on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. “You’re our Chairman. You’re our symbol. You’re Mr. Palestine. It’s you or there’s no show.”
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The show had changed dramatically in the course of 1974.

In the aftermath of the October War, the guerrilla chief had made a strategic decision to turn away from the armed struggle, and the terror tactics this involved, to negotiate a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For two and a half decades the Palestinian national movement had been more or less unanimous in seeking the liberation of the whole of historic Palestine and the destruction of the state of Israel. After the October War, Arafat recognized that the Jewish state, then twenty-five years old, was the military superpower of the region, enjoying the full support of the United States and the recognition of nearly all the international community. Israel was here to stay.

In the postwar diplomacy, Arafat rightly predicted, the neighboring Arab states would eventually accept this reality and negotiate peace treaties with Israel under U.S. and Soviet sponsorship, based on Resolution 242. The Palestinians would be pushed to the side. “What does 242 offer the Palestinians?” Arafat asked a British journalist in the 1980s. “Some compensation for the refugees and perhaps, I say only perhaps, the return of some few refugees to their homes in Palestine. But what else? Nothing. We would have been finished. The chance for us Palestinians to be a nation again, even on some small part of our homeland, would have passed. Finished. No more a Palestinian people. End of story.”
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Arafat’s solution was to settle for a ministate based in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. There were, however, a number of barriers that Arafat would have to overcome before he could hope to achieve even ministatehood for the Palestinians.

The first obstacle was Palestinian public opinion. Arafat recognized that he needed to persuade the Palestinian people to relinquish their claims to the 78 percent of Palestine lost in 1948. “When a people is claiming the return of 100 percent of its land,” Arafat explained, “it’s not so easy for leadership to say, ‘No, you can take only thirty per cent.’”
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Nor was Arafat’s claim to even 30 percent of Palestine universally recognized. The Gaza Strip had been under Egyptian administration from 1948 until occupied by Israel in the June 1967 War, and the West Bank had been formally annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. Though the Egyptians had no interest in absorbing the Gaza Strip, King Hussein of Jordan was determined to recover the
West Bank and the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem, Islam’s third-holiest city, for Jordanian rule. Arafat needed to wrest the West Bank from King Hussein’s grasp.

The hard-line factions within the PLO were unwilling to concede recognition to Israel, which meant Arafat would have to overcome their opposition to a two-state solution. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front, whose notorious hijackings had precipitated the Black September war in Jordan in 1970, remained committed to the armed struggle for the liberation of all of Palestine. Had Arafat openly acknowledged the compromise he was willing to make to achieve limited statehood for the Palestinians, the more militant Palestinian factions would have demanded his head.

Finally, Arafat had to overcome international abhorrence to the PLO as an organization, and to his leadership of the PLO. Gone were the days of “humane” terrorism, in which airplanes were destroyed and hostages released unharmed. By 1974 the PLO was associated with a string of heinous crimes against civilians in Europe and Israel: an attack on El-Al offices in Athens in November 1969 that left one child dead and thirty-one people wounded; a mid-air bomb that destroyed a Swissair jet in February 1970, killing all forty-seven aboard; and the notorious attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that led to the death of eleven Israeli athletes. Israel and its Western supporters saw the PLO as a terror organization and refused to meet with its leaders; Arafat needed to persuade Western policymakers that the PLO would forego violence for diplomacy to achieve Palestinian self-determination.

Arafat had set himself high goals for 1974: securing Palestinian public support for a two-state solution, containing the hard-liners within the PLO, trumping King Hussein’s claim to the West Bank, and gaining international recognition within a single year would not be easy.

Given the constraints, Arafat had to proceed slowly and secure a constituency for the change in policy. He could not come out openly with the idea of a two-state solution, as this would entail ending the armed struggle, which enjoyed widespread Palestinian support. Negotiating for a two-state solution would have meant conferring some degree of recognition to Israel, which most Palestinians would have rejected. Instead, Arafat couched the new policy, first issued in a working paper in February 1974, in terms of establishing a “national authority” to be established “on any lands that can be wrested from Zionist occupation.”

Next, he had to gain the support of the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, for his new policy. When the PNC met in Cairo in June 1974, Arafat tabled a ten-point platform that committed the PLO to the “national authority” framework. However, to get past the hard-liners in the PLO, the platform reaffirmed the role of the armed struggle and the right of national self-determination, and it ruled out any recognition of Israel. The PNC adopted Arafat’s platform, but Palestinians
knew that change was afoot. However, to the rest of the world the PLO still looked like a guerrilla organization committed to the armed struggle.