State of Failure

by Jonathan Schanzer

  Meanwhile, the United States was almost singularly concerned with the advances the Soviet Union was making in the Middle East. The Soviets sought to gain increased access to oil in the region, and Arab states were proving to be willing allies in exchange for financial and military support. The US policy that emerged from this quandary was an attempt to win back the friendship of the Arabs.25 Notably, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria had become client states of the USSR. So, too, would the nascent Fatah organization, founded by Palestinian guerrilla fighter Yasser Arafat in the 1950s, sparking a new wave of Palestinian transnational terror.

  After Eisenhower came President John F. Kennedy, who pledged to the Arab states that he would do more to resolve the Arab–

  Israeli conflict. In fact, Kennedy had called for the resettlement of Palestinian refugees while serving in the US Senate.26

  Of course, he was also the first to call the US relationship with Israel a “special relationship,” indicating that it was unshakable. Additionally, Kennedy was the first US commander in chief to sell high-tech weaponry to Israel, such as the Hawk anti-aircraft missile.27

  Kennedy’s assassination heralded the unexpected rise of Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, like his predecessors, was generally unaware of the Palestinian plight. As Christison notes, “By the mid-1960s, the Palestinians had drifted so far into the political background that virtually no one regarded them as a political factor of any consequence.”28 The Arab League created the PLO in 1964, but the group was largely a tool for Nasser to maintain control over the Palestinian narrative. It was not an international player.

  In 1964, Fatah, the guerrilla organization under Arafat’s control, began to carry out cross-border raids against Israel from Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. However, these attacks were not of great concern to the United States. It was only when these raids increased tension between the Arab states and pushed them toward war with Israel that the United States began to take Fatah and its irredentist ideology seriously.29

  The 1967 Arab–Israeli War was, of course, a watershed event for the Palestinian issue. The war forced Washington to deal with some new realities, as no fewer than six Arab states broke off ties with Washington in the war’s aftermath. The Arab states also increasingly gravitated into the Soviet orbit. More important, American officials acknowledged that the raids carried out by Fatah had played a role in precipitating the confrontation. However, the importance of Palestinian nationalism was still not clear to the United States—primarily because no one was articulating this concept to decision makers in Washington in a consistent manner.

  This changed when Arafat ascended as head of the PLO in 1968. What was once an administrative tool for Nasser’s now-discredited pan-Arabist ideology became an umbrella organization for terrorist groups carrying out violence in the name of Palestinian nationalism. The drastic uptick in Palestinian violence soon became a cause for major concern for Washington.

  However, this violence, coupled with Arab intransigence, continued to make it difficult for Washington to support the Palestinian cause. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, eight Arab leaders met in Khartoum, Sudan, and declared that there would be “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” This became known as the “Three No’s.” Only as an afterthought to this rejectionist stance did the Arab leaders also call for “the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.”30

  The nascent Palestinian cause was also marred by Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of US senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in California on June 5, 1968. Footage of the shooting was broadcast by the major television networks, and it was not lost on the American public that the perpetrator was of Palestinian descent.

  President Richard Nixon assumed the office of the presidency in 1969 and held the office for five years, until scandal forced him to resign. Nixon’s view of the Palestinians was informed early on by PLO terrorism.31 Nixon was also forced to handle the 1970 Black September crisis, during which the PLO threatened to topple the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.32 That conflict lasted until July 1971, resulting in Arafat’s expulsion to Lebanon, along with thousands of PLO fighters.

  On September 5, 1972, Black September, a nascent Palestinian terrorist group (and a Fatah splinter group named after the conflict in Jordan), took 11 members of the Israeli delegation hostage at the Olympic Games in Munich. Nine athletes were subsequently killed, including David Berger, who also held US citizenship. The crisis played out on television sets across America, prompting Americans to equate Palestinian nationalism with terrorism.33

  Six months later, another terrorist attack colored the American view of the Palestinian cause. On March 1, 1973, eight operatives from Black September stormed a party at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum. The group took three hostages: George Curtis Moore, the American charge d’affaires at the US Embassy in Khartoum; Cleo Noel Jr., the US ambassador to Sudan; and Guy Eid, the Belgian Embassy’s charge d’affaires. The terror group demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan and a Baader-Meinhof terrorist held in Germany. The following day, Nixon announced that he would not negotiate with terrorists. That evening, Black September murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid.34

  According to a declassified State Department cable, “[t]he Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat,” while “Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy.”35

  A little-known footnote to this story is that Black September also plotted to assassinate Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on her visit to New York in 1973, but the bomb failed to explode. The attack was coordinated to coincide with the Black September attack in Khartoum.36

  After these attacks, Nixon established the policy that the United States would “not pay blackmail” or give in to terrorist demands. The wave of Palestinian terrorism prompted a policy that has existed to this day: Washington does not negotiate with terrorists.37

  But terrorism was not the only challenge for Nixon coming out of the Middle East. On October 6, 1973, the region again descended into war. On that date, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel. The war ratcheted up tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Washington, after initially leaving Israel to fight its own battle, began to deliver critical supplies to the Israelis to fight off the Arab forces armed and supplied by the Soviets.38

  President Gerald Ford assumed America’s highest office in the wake of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. While his top foreign policy priorities, like his predecessors’, were mostly centered on the Cold War, Ford made the Middle East a key focus.

  The Ford presidency was perhaps the first to recognize the need to find leaders among the Palestinians to engage in diplomacy. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a holdover from the Nixon administration, engaged in discussions with King Hussein of Jordan in March 1974 on the question of whether Washington would recognize a Palestinian government in exile. Later that year, Arab leaders meeting in Rabat, Morocco, officially recognized the PLO as the “sole representative” of the Palestinians.39

  The PLO was further granted observer status at the United Nations in November of that year, and the international body passed a resolution recognizing the “inalienable rights” of the Palestinian people.40 Speaking before the United Nations on November 14, 1974, Arafat delivered what became known as his “gun and olive branch” speech. “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand,” Arafat declared.41

  Washington, for its part, was unimpressed. Kissinger responded by saying that Arafat “called for a state which really did not include the existence of Israel . . . and we do not consider this a particularly moderate position.”42

  In 1975, Senators George Mc
Govern (D-SD) and Howard Baker (R-TN) reportedly asked Arafat whether he was willing to recognize Israel, disavow the PLO’s intention of destroying Israel, and accept its 1967 borders.43 However, Arafat would not do so publicly. Kissinger, meanwhile, promised Israel that the United States would not recognize or negotiate with the PLO unless it officially and publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist.44

  With these efforts under way, Palestinian violence continued to undermine the Palestinian cause. In 1975, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) kidnapped Ernest Morgan, the US military attaché to Lebanon. Two other attacks inside Israel made news when they wounded one American and killed another.45 Nevertheless, 1975 and 1976 witnessed an increase in official interest in the Palestinian cause. State Department officials began to openly opine that “Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account in the negotiating of an Arab–Israeli peace.”46 Amid ongoing terrorist attacks, back-channel talks with the PLO began.47

  Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor, became president in 1977. His 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, viewed by many as anti-Israeli screed, has earned him the reputation of being the most pro-Palestinian president in US history. But his affinity for the Palestinian cause began during his presidency.

  On March 16, 1977, speaking at a Massachusetts town hall meeting, Carter openly endorsed a Palestinian “homeland.”48 In April, Carter met with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to discuss the question of whether regional peace could be achieved. Sadat openly stated that he was interested in working with Carter but also stated that he would accept a peace treaty with Israel only if it included a solution to the Palestinian “problem.”49 Carter subsequently came to the conclusion that if the PLO were to accept Israel’s existence by embracing UN Resolution 242, then he would work with the group directly. At the same time, Carter began criticizing Israeli building in the West Bank—a territory Palestinians were eager to claim as their own.50

  By September Carter’s State Department announced, “The Palestinians must be involved in the peace-making process.” A joint statement from the United States and the Soviet Union, released in October 1977, issued “guiding principles” for Middle East diplomacy, including an Israeli withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967 and also the “legitimate rights” of the Palestinians.51

  When Secretary of State Cyrus Vance toured the Middle East in 1977, a group of West Bank mayors sent him a letter stating that they had chosen the PLO as their “sole legal representative.”52 Vance returned with the idea to grant “trusteeship” to the Palestinians to determine whether they were prepared to live side by side with Israel in peace.53

  In November 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem as an overture to make peace and inadvertently changed the subject to Egyptian–

  Israeli ties. But in early 1978, when Sadat and Carter met in Aswan, Egypt, they released the “Aswan Proclamation,” which called for recognition of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” and a Palestinian role in the peace process.54

  However, the Palestinian cause was undermined yet again by continued violence. A PLO attack north of Tel Aviv in March 1978 killed 38 and once again drew the world’s attention to the savage tactics of the organization purporting to represent the Palestinian people. As Time magazine noted, “The timing of the attack left no doubt about the terrorists’ purpose: to sabotage any attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to move toward a peace that would ignore or bypass Palestinian interests.”55

  Later that year, Carter hosted Begin and Sadat at Camp David, Maryland, from September 5 to 17, to iron out a final peace accord. The last days of the negotiations dealt with a “framework for peace in the Middle East,” which specifically addressed the Palestinian question.56 On September 17, 1978, Egypt, Israel, and the United States signed the Camp David Accords. This included provisions for the Palestinians to “participate in” the negotiations surrounding their future, although the PLO remained a terrorist organization in the eyes of Washington.

  Ronald Reagan, who assumed office in January 1981, was vocal about his distrust of the PLO. During his presidential campaign, he repeatedly identified the group as a terrorist organization that was not ready to recognize Israel. Reagan even insisted that Jordan was responsible for the Palestinians in light of Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank from 1948 through 1967.

  This is not to say that the Reagan administration was indifferent to the notion of regional peace. Reagan, in fact, authorized an “outside mediation effort” with the PLO to end their Lebanon conflict in 1981.57 By the summer of 1982, the PLO, besieged in Beirut, agreed in principle to an evacuation. The PLO sought a deal that would require it only to relocate to refugee camps, not leave Lebanon altogether. US (and Israeli) opposition nixed that plan.58 One could argue that this opposition was anti-Palestinian, but Reagan notes in his memoir that he sought to expel all outside actors—the PLO, Israel, and Syria—from Lebanon to ensure permanent calm.59 US diplomat Philip Habib negotiated the PLO withdrawal from Beirut, allowing Arafat to escape from Lebanon.60 Reagan dispatched the marines to supervise the evacuation.61

  In his 1983 book Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky alleges that the Israeli “invasion of Lebanon . . . was predicated on American support.”62 But it is undeniable that Reagan’s perspective changed after the Sabra and Shatila bloodshed, during which a Christian militia engaged in a brutal massacre of Palestinians in two Palestinian refugee camps. That event prompted him to focus on saving PLO lives and subsequently on resolving the Palestinian problem.

  On September 1, 1982, Reagan introduced a peace plan that affirmed US support for Israel but also sought to address “the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.” The Reagan plan departed from previous American efforts in that it made specific recommendations on how a compromise might be reached. The recommendations included a five-year “peaceful and orderly” transition in which the Palestinians would gain autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. However, because the PLO was not named in this plan (in keeping with the US policy of not negotiating with terrorist organizations), Arafat and his lieutenants rejected it outright.63

  Reagan’s plans suffered another blow on October 23, 1983, when an Iran-backed suicide bomber attacked the US Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 marines. The attack prompted Reagan to lower America’s profile in the Middle East. By February 1984, the United States had left Lebanon.64 Despite this setback, Reagan continued to stand behind his plan for Palestinian autonomy. His plan called for a settlement freeze, with the clarification that “America will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlement.”65

  Amid a tumultuous year of continued Palestinian terror attacks,66 along with Israel’s October 1985 bombing of the PLO headquarters in Tunis,67 the Reagan administration launched yet another initiative designed to create a Jordanian–Palestinian federation in the West Bank.68 The United States insisted that the PLO not be directly represented as part of its continuing policy not to negotiate with Arafat’s terrorist group until it accepted Israel’s existence. The Jordan initiative broke down in February 1986. The PLO charged the United States with attempting to “delude” the Palestinian people and blamed it for the failure of the peace process.69 A rash of Palestinian terrorism soon followed. From Fatah’s bombing of a TWA flight over Italy in March 198670 to the September 1986 Abu Nidal (a Fatah splinter faction) hijacking of a Pan Am flight from Pakistan that led to the killing of 22 hostages,71 the damage to US–Palestinian relations was significant. By 1987, the United States had closed the PLO office in Washington, and a Senate bill called for the PLO to reveal its investments in the United States.72

  Ties between the PLO and United States were at their nadir at the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987. After the uprising began, however, the Palestinian issue became one of

  national—even international—concern. Until this point, the United States had n
ot been satisfied that the PLO was prepared to renounce violence and negotiate with Israel. However, amid the chaos—the rise of the violent Islamist Hamas faction, Jordan’s decision to renounce all claims to the West Bank in 1988, and Arafat’s assurances that he could end the violence—Washington’s policy on the Palestinians was about to change.

  In January 1988, Secretary of State George P. Shultz called for US-sponsored negotiations with a three-year transition period of autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, with the end result being full control.73 Despite strenuous Israeli objections, Shultz also met with two Palestinian-American professors (both members of the Palestinian legislature): Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.74

  On December 14, 1988, Arafat openly and publicly affirmed his recognition of UN Resolution 242, the US precondition for dialogue, and, in the process, declared an independent Palestinian state.75 After this, the United States opened relations with the PLO, with encouragement from world leaders.76 This chain reaction of events marked the official beginning of the US-led peace process that has endured to this day.

  When former CIA director George H. W. Bush entered office in early 1989, polls indicated that 64 percent of Americans approved of contact with the Palestinians.77 Secretary of State James Baker called on both Israel and the PLO to negotiate; however, neither side appeared particularly ready to do so.

  A new window for diplomacy opened in August 1990, when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces occupied oil-rich Kuwait. The United Nations quickly condemned the invasion, as did the Arab League.78 Getting these Arab states to join an international military coalition was a more difficult task. As historian Charles D. Smith notes, as an enticement, the Bush administration promised to “sponsor an international conference to consider the Palestinian question.”79