A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  However, this was only one of many false dawns in United States relations with the Arabs. It was not only that the US government in reality still supported Israel in its rejection of Palestinian self-determination; the more immediate problem was that US strategy in the Middle East ignored the role of Syria and, by extension, that of Syria’s ally, the Soviet Union, which had more than replaced the Syrian weapons lost in the fighting with Israel. The Kissinger Doctrine of excluding the Soviet Union as far as possible from Middle East diplomacy still held.

  In September 1982, US marines returned to Lebanon to form part of an international peace-keeping force with similar Italian and French and much smaller British contingents. United States declared policy was to secure the evacuation of all foreign troops – Israelis, Syrians and the remaining Palestinians – to enable the new Lebanese president, Amin Gemayel, to establish the authority of the Lebanese state throughout its territory. Vigorous US mediation between Lebanese and Israeli negotiators finally produced, on 17 May 1983, an agreement between Israel and Lebanon which fell short of a peace treaty but which was clearly intended to establish normal relations between the two countries in every respect. But President Assad, who was outraged at this attempt to remove Lebanon from Syria’s influence and link it with Israel, had the means of aborting the agreement. Neither the United States nor Israel was able to force him to withdraw his troops, and the Lebanese state was far too weak. In November, suicide-bombers blew up the US marine headquarters and that of the French contingent, leaving more than three hundred dead. Although the United States attributed the direct responsibility to extremist Shiite militia, it considered that Syria must have approved and backed the action. The United States identified Syria, with its Soviet backers, as the obstacle not only to a settlement of the Lebanese problem but also to peace in the whole area. Its response was to move closer to Israel – with Israel’s actions in invading Lebanon forgotten and forgiven – by adopting a common strategy towards an Arab–Israeli settlement and greatly increasing military and economic aid.

  The United States was forced to accept that its strategy for Lebanon had failed. The American public would not have accepted any deeper involvement of US troops in the hopeless cause of pacifying Lebanon. In February 1984 the US marines were withdrawn from Beirut, and the other, European contingents soon followed.

  Israel also found that the objectives of its invasion of Lebanon were far from achieved. The PLO structure in Lebanon had been destroyed and its fighters scattered, but Arafat and the PLO survived and eventually made their headquarters in Tunis. Israel’s dream of having a friendly neighbour to the north, dominated by Christian Maronites, had rapidly faded. The Israeli forces were quite unable to control the multi-factional civil war that was raging and turning Lebanon into a partitioned country with shifting internal borders. In southern Lebanon the mainly Shiite population, who had not initially resisted the Israeli invasion because of their sufferings caused by the Palestinian presence, turned bitterly against the Israelis, who too often behaved as conquerors. The Israeli forces faced increasing attacks from Lebanese fighters, who now included members of Hizbollah (‘the party of God’) – Shiite extremists supported by revolutionary Iran. As Israeli casualties mounted, Israel’s intervention in Lebanon became increasingly unpopular at home.

  In September 1984 the Israeli Labour leader Shimon Peres became prime minister of a Labour/Likud coalition after a tied election.

  The Labour Party had not been responsible for the invasion of Lebanon, although it had not effectively opposed it. By June 1985 Peres was able to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. However, Israel kept military advisers with the South Lebanon army, composed mainly of Christians in a ten-mile buffer zone along the border, and to this extent could still interfere in Lebanon’s internal affairs. But it had abandoned its opportunity to influence directly the character of Lebanon’s regime.

  It seemed to many that, although Arafat and his PLO colleagues had survived the siege of Beirut, their organization’s effectiveness was ended. Moreover a worse blow was to come in April 1983 when a rebel movement within the PLO, supported by Syria, declared Arafat’s leadership to be corrupt and denounced what was seen as his intention to abandon the armed struggle in favour of diplomacy in collaboration with Jordan. Expelled from Syria by President Assad, Arafat made his headquarters in Tripoli in north Lebanon, where he faced attacks by the rebels backed by Syrian and Libyan troops. After lengthy negotiations, Arafat and 4,000 loyalists were evacuated by Greek ships flying the UN flag.

  This was surely the end. The PLO’s fighters were scattered to the farthest corners of the Arab world, and its headquarters was 2,000 miles away from Palestine in Tunis, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean. But in fact these disasters caused most of the four million Palestinians, whether in the diaspora or in Palestine, to cling more tightly to Arafat and the PLO as the only effective symbols of national identity. To the outside world the pudgy and half-shaven figure of Arafat seemed to lack appeal, but to his own people he had powerful charisma and magnetism, especially when speaking in his Arabic tongue rather than coping with Western interviewers. There was still no real alternative to him as ‘Mr Palestine’, as Israel acknowledged by attempting to destroy him and his headquarters in an air raid on Tunis in October 1985. He was also a subtle politician. He infuriated Western well-wishers by refusing to state clearly what they knew to be true – that he was ready to recognize Israel and abandon the armed struggle in return for an independent Palestinian state – and he opened himself to the charge of changing his words to suit his audience, but he knew that he had first to convince the great majority of Palestinians or their movement would shatter and dissolve. It was to prevent internal differences from emerging that he consistently refused, despite the urging of outside sympathizers, to form a provisional government-in-exile whose policy decisions would have had to be binding on all its members.

  The PLO survived as an organization, and Arafat pursued a diplomatic offensive as he shuttled between the many capitals of the world that were ready to receive him, but Western governments remained wary and the United States continued to back Israel’s refusal to have any dealings with the PLO. Both countries still hoped that the Palestine problem could be solved through an agreement with Jordan which would leave the Palestinians in the occupied territories under some form of Jordanian–Israeli condominium. In February 1985 the stalemate appeared to be broken when King Hussein and Arafat agreed on a joint Palestinian–Jordanian peace initiative, based on the exchange of territory for peace. But a year later the initiative collapsed, for reasons which had become familiar: the Jordanian monarch felt that Arafat had reneged on his undertaking to declare his willingness to recognize Israel, while Arafat refused to give up this last Palestinian card of negotiation or even to negotiate without at least securing United States recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination and hence the right to establish an independent state.

  The impasse was broken by a development which none of the parties to the Arab–Israeli conflict – including the PLO – had foreseen. In December 1987 the Palestinians in the occupied territories began an uprising against the Israeli occupiers. The uprising or intifada – an Arabic word which was to become as much part of the international vocabulary as the Russian glasnost – was unexpected because, although there had been days or even weeks of sporadic unrest, the Israeli occupiers had faced a relatively easy task for two decades. Guerrilla attacks had never been a serious military problem; internal resistance had not been prolonged or organized. When a hostile political leadership had looked like emerging, its members were imprisoned or deported. In December 1987, however, a minor incident in Gaza sparked off a resistance movement which, although unplanned and at first unorganized, refused to die down. The half of the population who had not yet reached twenty years of age had known only foreign occupation. As the occupiers seized more land and water and planted new Jewish settlements on their territory they saw a
future that could only become darker. Some 200,000 crossed each day into Israel to work, but it was generally to perform menial and unskilled tasks – the Palestinian economy was entirely colonial in kind. The despair of the people of the occupied territories was increased by the fact that the Arab states appeared to have lost interest in them. For the first time ever at a meeting of Arab heads of state, in Amman in August 1987, the Palestine problem had been displaced from the head of the agenda by a different question – the Iraq–Iran war.

  The intifada took the form of demonstrations, tyre-burning, the illegal raising of the Palestinian flag and strikes. Its characteristic feature was the hurling of stones at Israeli soldiers by Arab adolescents and even children. A significant innovation was that an anonymous National Unified Command of the Uprising emerged which, through pamphlets and a secret radio station on Syrian territory, gave some effective organization to the demonstrations and strikes.

  The Israeli authorities, surprised by the intensity and persistence of the uprising, responded with mass arrests and deportations, curfews, beatings and the various forms of plastic bullet, which were often lethal or caused grievous wounds. In the first two years there was an average of about one Palestinian death each day.

  After two years some 50,000 Palestinians had been arrested, 7,000 wounded and more than 500 killed. About half of those arrested were under the age of eighteen. The rebels rarely resorted to arms – their uprising was called the ‘Stone Revolution’ – but as its second year progressed it became increasingly bitter as the Palestinians began killing anyone suspected of collaborating with the Israeli secret police, and Islamic fundamentalists opposed to any political compromise came to the fore.

  For Israel, the effort to suppress the intifada was costly and damaging – both to the morale of its troops, mostly untrained in putting down civil resistance, and to Israel’s international reputation. There was no question that it was capable of opposing the insurrection militarily and economically – it was the political dimension that was important. Despite defiant assurances by Israeli political leaders that the rebellion would be ended, it became an accepted international truism – shared by the United States government and much of the Israeli public – that any purely military solution would be ineffective. Israel was faced with the prospect of a de facto Palestinian state being created west of the River Jordan.

  The success of the uprising merely in staying alive gave a wholly fresh impetus to the PLO. Although it had neither timed nor organized the internal rebellion, and the amount of support and direction it could provide from outside was very limited, the Arabs under occupation left no doubt that they regarded the PLO as their representative and Arafat as their leader. Everywhere they displayed his picture as the symbol of their defiance. Paradoxically, this demonstration of the spirit of Palestinian nationalism enabled the PLO leadership to adopt a more overtly moderate position which emphasized the common interest of Palestinians and Israelis in peace and security. At the same time it persuaded King Hussein of Jordan to destroy once and for all the credibility of the ‘Jordanian option’ – that is, the belief then entertained by many Israelis and some Western governments that Palestinian nationalism could remain under joint Jordanian and Israeli hegemony. In July 1988 the Jordanian monarch announced that he was finally abandoning all Jordan’s responsibilities for the West Bank. From there it was only one step for the PLO to declare, through its quasi-parliament meeting in Algiers in November, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Arafat as its president. But simultaneously the Palestine National Council for the first time unambiguously declared its acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 – the step which the United States had long been demanding as a demonstration that the PLO was willing to recognize Israel. It also declared that it was renouncing all forms of terrorism.

  Arafat spelled this out more clearly in other world capitals. He was advocating a ‘two-state solution’ – that is, a small independent Palestinian state living alongside Israel. This had been his objective for years, but he had never felt confident enough to declare it unambiguously for fear that abandoning the dream of liberating all Palestine from Zionism would divide his people against each other.

  Israel’s leaders denounced the PLO’s new stand as false and treacherous. The threat to their position was underlined when for the first time the United States declared that it was prepared to begin a dialogue with the PLO through its ambassador in Tunis.

  However, Palestinian hopes of rapid rewards for their new concessions were not realized. In March 1990 Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli premier from 1988 to 1990, dismissed his Labour partners in his coalition and eventually succeeded in forming a right-wing Likud government. Although the United States showed increasing impatience with Shamir’s stubborn rejection of any plausible formula for Palestinian autonomy it was still unprepared to exert concentrated pressure on its Israeli ally to change its attitude. An increasingly disillusioned Arafat, faced with a growing Islamic fundamentalist element in the intifada that rejected any two-state solution in favour of the old slogans of total liberation, began to look towards President Saddam of Iraq, who was posing as the champion of the Palestinians and threatening Israel with its missiles. After a botched terror raid on an Israeli beach by a PLO splinter group, almost certainly promoted by Iraq, the United States broke off its listless dialogue with the PLO.

  Consequently, Arafat showed some evident sympathy with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, though formally advising an Iraqi withdrawal, while ordinary Palestinians in Jordan and the occupied territories cheered Saddam as a hero. Powerful anti-Palestinian feelings were aroused among the Gulf Arabs, and Western governments declared that the PLO had marginalized itself in the Gulf conflict. But this was premature and unrealistic. The intifada had superficially subsided in the first half of 1990, partly through exhaustion and partly through a more restrained Israeli policy of repression, but in October a renewal of violence enhanced extremism on both sides and further envenomed relations between Arabs and Jews. In these circumstances there was no way that either the United States or Israel could promote an alternative Palestinian leadership to the PLO.

  Forty years after the triumph of Zionism in the creation of a Jewish state, a new stage had been reached in the Palestine problem that this had created. This emphatically did not mean that the problem had been solved, or even that it was nearer a solution – a ‘solution’ that would be satisfactory to all the parties concerned is in any case inconceivable. The original concept of the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state – approved by the United Nations in 1947 with so little concern for its consequences, and so bitterly rejected by the Arabs of Palestine at the time – had come to be accepted by a new generation of Palestinians and much of the rest of the world. But, after twenty years’ occupation it was no longer accepted by Zionist Jews, except for a small, albeit growing, minority. Some, represented by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, saw the West Bank (or Judaea and Samaria) and Gaza as part of the Land of Israel and could not contemplate abandoning it to an Arab sovereignty. Others, represented by the Labour leader Shimon Peres, although ready to give up some land for peace, still could not face the prospect of an independent neighbouring state governed by the PLO under President Arafat. In this rejection of an independent Arab Palestine, Israel had the support of the world’s most powerful state, and experience had shown on multiple occasions that the United States government, however much it disapproved of certain Israeli acts or attitudes, would exert pressure to change them only on the rarest occasions and never for long. It remained a cardinal principle of the US–Israeli alliance that the United States would sustain Israel’s military machine and economy to ensure that Israel remained the most powerful state in the Middle East.

  Syria’s crucial role in trying to restore peace and unity to the Lebanese state was grudgingly acknowledged by most of the world after the withdrawal of Western and Israeli troops in 1984 and 1985. B
ut if Syria was dominant in Lebanon, it was far from all-powerful. Even President Assad’s supreme abilities as a political tactician could not resolve the multifarious conflicts of Lebanon. It proved impossible to secure the essential minimum of an agreement among the factions to reunite the country. While Syria had some friends among the Maronites, these were outnumbered by its bitter enemies who controlled the strongest militia, the Lebanese Forces. Even Syria’s allies in Lebanon – the Druze, the Shiite Amal militia and the extremist Hizbollahis – were far from obedient and sometimes fought each other. An additional factor was that some of the Palestinian fighters, now fiercely anti-Syrian, had returned to Beirut and the south and had become engaged in fighting with the Amal militia who besieged the Palestinian refugee camps. By sending their forces into Muslim west Beirut, the Syrians were able to reduce the fighting between the militias, but Christian east Beirut and the Shiite southern suburbs remained outside their control.

  When President Amin Gemayel’s six-year term of office ended in September 1988, the anti-Syrian Maronites prevented the parliamentary deputies from electing a successor who would have been acceptable to Syria. After the failure of every alternative, Gemayel’s last act as president was to appoint General Michel Aoun, the Maronite commander of the armed forces, as prime minister. Since Muslims refused to serve in his cabinet and the previous Sunni prime minister declared himself still in office, Lebanon had two half-governments and no head of state. It seemed as if the little republic of Lebanon was doomed to final destruction after less than seventy years of existence. The Lebanese economy, which had survived the first decade of civil war with amazing resilience, was on the point of collapse.