A History of the Middle East (50 page)

As Sadat’s natural vanity was fed by the adulation of the West’s media, he became increasingly intolerant of criticism at home. His earlier reputation for liberalism was destroyed by new repressive laws to restrict political life and muzzle freedom of expression. Islamic activists, whom he had originally encouraged as a bulwark against the left, now turned outspokenly against him because of his peace with the Zionist enemy and his contemptuous hostility towards the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In September 1981, imagining a concerted move to overthrow him, Sadat ordered the arrest of 1,500 personalities covering the whole political spectrum and including Muslim divines and Coptic bishops. One month later, during a Cairo military parade, he was assassinated by a small group
of Islamic extremists within the army. The great majority of Egyptians did not approve of the murder, and there was no general uprising of the Muslim population as the assassins had hoped, but neither did the Egyptian public grieve. The crowds in the Cairo streets were unusually silent.

The succession of Vice-President Husni Mubarak, who was slightly wounded in the attack, proceeded smoothly. A former head of the air force, Mubarak was regarded as honest and straightforward, if uninspiring. He lacked the very different kinds of political charisma of his two predecessors, but he showed both wisdom and common sense. He released Sadat’s political prisoners and established a dialogue with the opposition. There was no question of the presidency abandoning its authoritarian power, but he successfully calmed the domestic political scene. At the same time he halted the media attacks on Egypt’s fellow-Arabs and began his country’s rehabilitation in the Arab world. The process was gradual, and restrained by the necessity of maintaining the peace treaty with Israel and the dependent relationship with the United States, but it was helped by the inescapable fact that Egypt’s isolation had drastically reduced the Arabs’ political strength in the world. With the notable exception of Syria, the Arab regimes had good reason to want Egypt back in the Arab fold.

Israel/Palestine and the Lebanese Victim

Israel’s devastating victory in the June 1967 war and the catastrophe suffered by the Arab armies provoked the rise of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations as an independent force in the Arab world. However, their significance was political rather than military. Israel was not seriously concerned by guerrilla activity on its new borders – casualties had been considerably heavier on the Suez Canal front during the 1969–70 war of attrition. The Israeli defence minister, Moshe Dayan, exercised virtually complete control over the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and he adopted a policy
of consolidating Israel’s economic and political hold over them while awaiting a time when the Arabs would be ready to make peace on Israel’s terms. Israel wanted direct negotiations leading to peace treaties with the neighbouring Arab states, and it did not consider it had any prior obligation under UN Security Council Resolution 242 to withdraw from all the occupied territories. In fact it envisaged only a partial withdrawal and continued military control of the occupied territories even in the event of peace. The permanence of the occupation was underlined by the launching of a colonization drive in 1968 with a series of military settlements which were established along the Jordan Valley. Most of these were later handed over to civilian settlers. There was no question of negotiating with leading Palestinians for the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian state on the West Bank, although this idea was entertained by some prominent Israelis outside the government.

General Dayan’s method in the occupied territories was to deal firmly with opposition and unrest while making the occupation as inconspicuous as possible. An ‘open-bridges’ policy which allowed Arabs of the occupied territories to travel to Jordan and other Arab states was maintained.

For their part the Palestinian guerrilla organizations, grouped together in the reconstructed Palestine Liberation Organization, did not at this stage foresee the establishment of a small Palestinian state alongside Israel any more than the Israelis. The Palestinian National Covenant, which was adopted in 1968 by the Palestine National Council (the Palestinian quasi-parliament in exile) looked forward to the total Arab liberation of Palestine and the disappearance of the state of Israel. Palestine would be for the Palestinians, who were defined (Article 5) as ‘the Arab citizens who were living permanently in Palestine until 1947’ and ‘whoever is born to a Palestinian Arab father after this date’. Jews who were living permanently in Palestine ‘until the beginning of the Zionist invasion’ would also be considered Palestinians (Article 6), but by implication this excluded the majority of Israeli citizens.

Despite their failure to cause Israel any serious military problem,
the Palestinian guerrilla organizations enjoyed high prestige. Their morale reached a climax with the battle of Kerameh in the Jordan Valley in March 1968, when the Jordanian army and Palestinian commandos co-operated in a major engagement against an Israeli reprisal raiding force which inflicted heavier losses on Israel than on previous occasions. But the increasingly independent activities of the Palestinian organizations, which brought heavy Israeli reprisals against Jordanian territory, threatened Jordan’s stability. The Jordanian civilian and military authorities were divided between those who wished to accommodate the commandos and those who wanted to restrict and control their activities. Both King Hussein and the PLO chairman Yasir Arafat favoured compromise, but the king had to contend with increasing anti-Palestinian resentment in his army, especially among ultra-loyalist elements of beduin origin, while Arafat was unable to control and discipline the smaller extremist groups in the PLO. Under pressure, the king agreed to the formation of a provisional military government.

The spark of civil war was lit in September 1970 when the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked three Western airliners to a deserted airstrip in east Jordan. From 17 September fighting was general between army units and guerrillas until on 25 September a cease-fire was arranged by an inter-Arab mission representing Arab heads of state who had hastily met in Cairo at President Nasser’s invitation (shortly before his death). King Hussein and Arafat reached a fourteen-point truce agreement providing for a return to civilian rule. Although the guerrillas still held some strongholds in north Jordan and certain quarters of Amman, they had been fatally weakened by the fighting. The king made prime minister one of his closest advisers, Wasfi Tel, who adopted an uncompromising attitude towards the guerrillas.

Gradually the full weight of the Jordanian army was used to expel the guerrillas from the country, and by July 1971 their last military bases in Jordan had been eliminated. Other Arab states expressed outrage but could do little to help the guerrillas, and Jordan, although isolated, stood firm. The frustration and despair of the
Palestinians gave rise to the self-styled ‘Black September’ movement, a shadowy and undisciplined group bent on revenge. In September 1971 Wasfi Tel was assassinated in Cairo. Black September was responsible for a series of incidents – mainly outside Israel – involving hijacking, bombing and attempts to take hostages. The most sensational, during the Olympic Games in Munich in September 1972, led to the death of nine Israeli athletes who had been taken hostage by Black September terrorists. The world reacted with horror, but the Palestinians, with nothing left to lose, felt that their cause was at least attracting public attention.

The expulsion of the Palestinian guerrillas from Jordan caused the PLO to concentrate its activities in the one remaining Arab country where they could enjoy some freedom of action – Lebanon. While many Lebanese – especially the Muslims – had some sympathy for the Palestinians’ struggle, the majority of Lebanese Christians were hostile and the Maronite political leaders demanded that the guerrillas be excluded from Lebanese territory. But the Lebanese state, built on a delicate political compromise, was weak and unable to defend its interests. All Lebanese were sharply aware of their country’s defencelessness in the face of Israeli reprisals against Palestinian guerrilla activities.

For a time the clashes between the guerrillas, the Lebanese army and armed civilian groups of various loyalties were prevented from deteriorating into a general conflict through a series of patched-up compromise agreements achieved through Arab mediation. But such mediation became increasingly difficult after 1971, when the PLO transferred its headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, where it had the last opportunity for building up a ‘state within a state’.

The 1973 Arab–Israeli war and its aftermath brought some benefits to the case of the Palestinians on the international level. The feeling that Israel was no longer invincible, the improved performance of the Arab armies and the great increase in wealth and influence of the Arab oil states were reflected in a new awareness of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. West European states inclined more strongly towards the Arabs, while Cuba and twenty-seven
African states, several of which had been friends of Israel, broke off diplomatic relations with Israel by the end of 1973. In September 1974 the UN General Assembly for the first time agreed to include ‘the Palestine question’ as a separate item on its agenda and then invited the PLO to take part in the debate, and on 13 November Yasir Arafat, accorded the honours of a head of state, addressed the UN General Assembly. ‘I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hands,’ he said. The PLO now had quasi-official status in various international organizations.

After the UN’s action the Arab states felt they could do no less in recognizing the PLO. At their summit meeting in Rabat in October 1974, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia took the lead in persuading a reluctant King Hussein to accept a resolution endorsing the right of the Palestinian people to establish an international authority under the direction of the PLO ‘in its capacity as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. Subsequent attempts to dispute this title by proposing an alternative Palestinian leadership consistently failed.

Yet there was a weakness at the heart of the PLO’s position, as Arafat could not fail to be aware. The 1973 war had helped its cause, but the Palestinians had played no part in the decision to go to war and had fought only minor actions on the Lebanese border. World recognition of the justice of Palestinian claims depended heavily on Arab diplomacy, and the key Arab states (notably Egypt) wanted peace. The prospect of recovering Palestine for the Arabs was as remote as ever.

This paradox was reflected within the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some of the Palestinian leaders, including Yasir Arafat, had reached the conclusion that Palestinian aims should be scaled down to the creation of a Palestinian ‘mini-state’ in the West Bank and Gaza and that the PLO should seek a settlement in co-operation with Egypt through a UN-sponsored conference at which they would be represented. This was bitterly opposed by others – the rejectionists – who refused to abandon, even temporarily and tactically, the goal
of making the whole of Palestine a ‘democratic, non-sectarian state’. Arafat and his colleagues did not admit that they had abandoned that aim, which was the theme of his speech to the UN General Assembly, but, as he said later, it was a dream and ‘Is it a crime to dream?’ The reality was that the Palestinian mini-state was now the objective, and the formula that was successfully adopted was to have the Palestine National Council pass a resolution calling for the establishment of a ‘national authority’ on any Palestinian territory that might be liberated.

However, as Israel, with the support of the United States, stood by its refusal to grant any recognition to the PLO, the chances of recovering even a small portion of territory to set up a PLO state seemed remote. The PLO concentrated on building up its shadow state in Lebanon. Here the situation was rapidly deteriorating and the Palestinian presence was far from being the only reason. The Shiite Muslims who were the majority of the population in southern Lebanon and had traditionally been the country’s social and political underclass had found a charismatic new leader in Imam Moussa al-Sadr, a cleric of Iranian origin, who organized a Movement of the Disinherited with its own armed militia – Amal (‘hope’). The deprived southerners suffered most from Israel’s reprisal raids against the Palestinian guerrillas, and some fled their homes to the relative safety of the suburbs of south Beirut. The social and economic disparities in Lebanon, always dangerously strong, were being increased by the effects of the great Middle East oil boom, which brought added prosperity to the country’s affluent business classes. Meanwhile the plethora of armed militias representing Lebanon’s many sects and political trends acted with increasing independence in open defiance of the inadequate Lebanese armed forces.

In 1975 the unrest developed into full-scale civil war. At first it was mainly a conflict between the right-wing Christian militia and an alliance of leftists under the leadership of the Druze politician Kemal Jumblatt. The conflict was fuelled from outside by the supply of arms and money from various quarters, including Israel, some
Arab states and very probably the CIA. The Palestinian leaders initially tried to keep out of the civil war but were dragged in remorselessly, until by January 1976 they were fully engaged on the side of the leftists. After initial successes, the leftist-Palestinian alliance gained control of some 80 per cent of the country, but at this point Syria began to intervene in force, fearing that Lebanon would be partitioned into a tiny Christian state, which would be in alliance with Israel, and a remainder in the hands of Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians, outside Syria’s control. President Assad, like any Syrian leader, regarded Lebanon as a vital Syrian interest. He also saw the Palestinian cause as the responsibility of all the Arabs – and especially of Syria, as the leading front-line state with Israel. He did not believe the PLO should act independently, and his personal relations with Arafat were characterized by deep mutual distrust.