The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Map 5. Territories captured by Israel in 1967

  Figure 9. Israeli soldiers celebrating Jerusalem’s capture in the 1967 War. Corbis.

  After six days of relentless attacks, Israel’s war against its Arab neighbors was over. In a brilliant series of military maneuvers and tactics, Israel had started, directed, and concluded a war all on its own terms. Within six days it had managed to wipe out the Arab air forces, rout the Arab armies, and capture the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. All in all, it was estimated that fewer than a thousand Israelis, both civilians and soldiers, lost their lives in the conflict. The casualties and losses on the Arab side were staggering: twenty thousand dead soldiers; twenty-six thousand square miles of lost territory; and thousands of prisoners of war, including, if the IDF is to be believed, nine generals, ten colonels, and three hundred other officers.35 There were now also over 500,000 new Arab refugees (in addition to the Palestinian refugees from 1948), including 120,000 Syrians and 250,000 Egyptians.36

  The war had other profound consequences for the actors involved in it, both Arab and Israeli. For the Arabs, defeat, complete as it was, came to symbolize the fallacies of an entire era, of a style of politics and more generally a perspective incapable of coping with the realities of the surrounding world. A wave of recrimination and self-criticism was set in motion, and the defeat brought on a deep psychological reevaluation of what Arab intellectuals saw as the chief culprits: incompetent leaders and their hollow regimes and, more importantly, the cultural milieu that had given rise to them. Even such sacred aspects of life as Islam and the Arabic language, with the latter’s penchant for hyperbole, were not spared from criticism.37 A wave of Arab literary works appeared, including al-Sadiq al-Azm’s Self-Criticism after the Defeat, which has been called “one of the most impressive and controversial pieces of Arabic political writing in recent times.”38 The revolutionary regimes of the day now came to be seen as “regimes of defeat” (anzimat al-hazima).39 In the words of the noted Arab scholar Fouad Ajami, “What the defeat did was to show that the Arab revolution was neither socialist nor revolutionary: The Arab world had merely mimicked the noise of revolutionary change and adopted the outside trappings of socialism; deep down, under the skin, it had not changed.”40

  For Egypt, the 1967 War meant the end of Nasserism. This was not an event that the Egyptian president could somehow turn into a victory. It was a defeat through and through. The Egyptian air force had been wiped out, the army soundly beaten, and Egyptian territory occupied. To add insult to injury, in the first couple days of the war, radio broadcasts from Cairo had boasted about spectacular victories by the Egyptian forces.41 For the people of Egypt, the defeat was a monumental psychological shock, a naksa, “step backward,” or yet another nakba (catastrophe) (the first one having occurred in 1948). As one observer noted, “In just one week, a system that had begun to evoke feelings of trust, confidence, and a certain degree of commitment from broad sectors of the public became either suspect or despised.”42 In disgrace, Nasser announced his resignation from the presidency on June 9, while the war was still raging at the Syrian front.43 Following mass demonstrations and pleas not to resign, some of which appear to have been orchestrated, he withdrew his resignation the next day. Instead, Nasser expanded his own powers and initiated a major purge of the armed forces, including some of his closest friends, most notably army commander Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer and Defense Minister Shamseddin Badran. With rumors of a coup in the air, Amer was arrested sometime near the end of the summer, and on September 14 it was announced that he had committed suicide.

  Nasser must have known that he was not fully exonerated by the Egyptian public. Soon after the war ended, the Soviet Union rushed massive amounts of arms to Egypt to prevent the total collapse of Nasser’s armed forces or, more plausibly, the possibility of a pro-American coup. By 1971, a year after Nasser died, Egypt’s Soviet-made arsenal is reported to have included 450 MiG planes, 100 warships, 1,350 tanks, and an undetermined number of SAM missiles, overseen by some fifteen to twenty thousand Soviet military instructors.44 But Nasser and Nasserism were never quite the same again. Different ideological currents made their presence felt in “street politics,” and on February 20, 1968, the regime was jolted by massive protests by an estimated forty thousand to fifty thousand workers and students.45 The old lion seemed to know that he had now been reduced to a shadow of his former self. The propaganda machine of the Voice of the Arabs was shut down; Egyptian troops were withdrawn from Yemen; and the Arab League ceased to be an instrument of Nasser’s diplomacy. Even his “War of Attrition” against Israel, designed to increase the cost of occupying the Sinai, backfired, as Israel, now equipped with the latest American jet fighters, retaliated with ever-greater ferocity. His health, meanwhile, rapidly deteriorated. On September 28, 1970, just as he had finished negotiating a cease-fire agreement between warring Palestinian commandos and Jordan’s King Hussein, the fifty-two-year-old Nasser suffered a fatal heart attack. Despite several attempts by others to resurrect the Nasserism that he personified, it died with him.

  The 1967 War also marked a watershed for the Palestinians. The Pal-estinian movement became more militant, as represented by the ascendancy of the Fedayeen and growing intensity of their attacks on Israel. There was also a realization that the old set of Arab actors—Nasser, PLO leader Ahmad Shuqairi, King Hussein—were unwilling or unable to do much for the Palestinian cause. The Fedayeen, now concentrated mostly in Jordan since Israel had captured the West Bank, became more daring and effective in their attacks on Israeli targets, their resolve hardened by Israel’s imposition of draconian measures in Gaza and the West Bank, demolition of more Palestinian homes to make room for Israeli settlers, and annexation of East Jerusalem. An additional four hundred thousand Palestinians became refugees and fled from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank.46 Many of the younger refugees joined the ranks of the PLO’s guerrilla fighters in the Fatah. The Fatah, in the meantime, had scored an impressive military victory of sorts over Israel, when early in 1968 it managed to down six Israeli jets and destroy twelve tanks in one of the frequent border skirmishes.

  From its establishment in 1964 up until the 1967 War, the PLO had been largely used as an instrument of inter-Arab and especially Egyptian diplomacy. But by the late 1960s, especially after Nasser’s defeat in 1967, a new generation of younger, professional Palestinians, who had long been viewed with suspicion by other Arab leaders, were beginning to assume a more active role within the organization. The steady growth within the PLO of the National Liberation Movement (Fatah), and its young leader, Yasser Arafat, represented this trend. Fatah was originally established in 1957, began armed action in 1965, and started being led by Yasser Arafat in 1968. Similar Palestinian organizations that appeared in the late 1960s and became influential within the PLO included the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), established in 1967, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), established in 1969. Some of the smaller organizations within the PLO were the PFLP-General Command (est. 1968), the pro-Syrian Vanguard for the Popular Liberation War (est. 1968), the pro-Iraqi Arab Liberation Front (est. 1968), the Palestinian Liberation Front (est. 1967), and the Democratic Union, known as FIDA (est. 1990). In addition to its legislative organ, the Palestine National Council (PNC), and its military wing, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), the PLO included a host of smaller organizations, many of them formed by various splinter groups. In the 1968 meeting of the Palestine National Council, the Fatah emerged as the dominant group within the PLO, and its leader, Yasser Arafat, became the PLO’s chairman.

  The Palestinian Fedayeen’s military and thus political ascendancy in Jordan was not to last long. By 1970, the Fedayeen had become so powerful as to openly defy the authority of the Jordanian state. They set up unauthorized roadblocks and conducted their own military operations, and some even called for the establishment of a “progressive regime” in Jordan. To call international a
ttention to the plight of the Palestinians, the PFLP, one of the PLO’s more radical groups, hijacked three international jetliners on September 6, 1970, and forced them to land in the Jordanian city of Zarqa. Once the PFLP blew up the (empty) planes and the crisis was over, Jordanian forces decided to move against the Fedayeen, who a few months earlier had been implicated in an attempt on the king’s life. An intense battle erupted between the Jordanian army and the Fedayeen between September 17 and 27, featuring house-to-house battles in Amman and Irbid. The situation became even more volatile after a brief invasion by Syria into Jordan in support of the Fedayeen. In a speech broadcast to the Arab leaders gathered in Cairo to deal with the Jordanian crisis, Arafat, speaking from his hideout in Amman, said, “There is a sea of blood. Some twenty thousand of our people are killed or wounded. . . . From amidst the dead, the debris and our patient people . . . I appeal to you to move your conference to Amman immediately so that you can see for yourselves the magnitude of the crime and the ugliness of the massacre.”47

  The Palestinian leader’s appeals were ignored, however. Syrian forces soon withdrew, and on September 27 a cease-fire agreement was signed in Cairo between King Hussein and Arafat (the day before Nasser’s death). The agreement failed to ease tensions, however, and the following July open warfare between the two sides erupted once again, this time resulting in a crushing defeat of the Fedayeen. Scores were killed, many escaped to Syria (and from there to Lebanon), and many, ironically, sought refuge in Israel in preference to being captured by the Jordanians. Arafat set up his headquarters in Beirut. A new chapter in the Palestinian movement had started.

  As a transnational conflict with multiple dimensions and actors, the 1967 War was also bound to have a profound impact on the larger international community and, more specifically, on its perceptions of means of resolving it. Significantly, in the aftermath of the 1967 War the notion of “land for peace” first became popular internationally, and it was subsequently enunciated in the United Nations’ landmark Resolution 242, passed unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967. A product of intense diplomacy, especially on the part of its chief author, the British ambassador to the United Nations, Lord Caradon, the resolution declared “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in peace.” Moreover, the resolution called for:

  (i)Withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; [and]

  (ii)Termination of all claims or state of belligerency and respect for the acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.48

  The historic importance of Resolution 242 cannot be overstated. Given the language of the resolution, its acceptance by the Arab states meant their implicit recognition of the right of the state of Israel to exist. Egypt and Jordan accepted the resolution almost immediately. Syria, however, did not accept it until after the 1973 War, and the PLO also initially rejected it. At the Arab summit conference in Fez in 1982, all Arab states except Libya voted to accept the resolution. The PLO did not formally endorse Resolution 242 until 1988, as the basis of a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East. Israel accepted the resolution early on, although it has since refused to unilaterally withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967. Instead, Israel’s position has been one of preferring bilateral agreements, beginning with the Camp David Accords with Egypt, based on which it withdrew from the Sinai in 1982, and eventually leading up to treaties with Jordan and with the PLO itself (the 1993 Oslo Accords). As if to compensate for the return of the Sinai to Egypt, however, in 1981 the Israeli Knesset voted to formally annex the Golan Heights. The map of the region was forever changed.

  THE 1973 WAR

  The Arab world entered the 1970s in a deep malaise. The nakba of 1948—the loss of Palestine—had been compounded by another catastrophe, made all the more humiliating by its boastful prelude and the endless, loud promises of liberation and victory that preceded it. The psychological wounds were deep both in the frontline states and elsewhere. A whole generation of public intellectuals emerged whose essays and stories gave popular expression to the collective anguish of their societies.49 Among them was the prolific and highly successful Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, whose bitter condemnation of Nasser’s repressive police state and its military and economic failures now reached a new crescendo.50 Nasser’s death had done little to assuage defeatism and shattered spirits. In the Egypt he left behind, the economy barely functioned, and the War of Attrition (more on which below) was far from a resounding success. Not only had the Israelis captured the Sinai; they had now built a settlement on it and were claiming the peninsula as part of biblical Eretz Israel. Syria’s predicament was not much better, its ruling revolutionary generals having lost the Golan and nearly Damascus itself. Jordan’s loss of the West Bank was equally humiliating, but its war with the Fedayeen had served to strengthen the king’s hand among the East Bankers and the conservative Arab states.

  The Arabs needed to vindicate themselves and to escape from under the heavy burden of so thorough a defeat. There was no other option. The psychology of the masses would not tolerate the defeat indefinitely, and neither, the leaders reasoned, would the judgment of history. By now, there was an even more urgent need to back up the obligatory rhetoric of Arab prowess and solidarity with actions. For the Egyptians and the Syrians especially, what was at stake was no longer the liberation of the Palestinians and the abstract righting of a historical wrong but the reclaiming of their own territories, the instinctive desire to avenge loss and to strike back. They therefore saw another war as inevitable and in fact necessary as the only way their pre-1967 borders would be restored.

  Once again, the mantle of Arab leadership fell on Egypt. Egypt’s leaders and army had lost the most, and its new president, Anwar Sadat, had the most politically urgent need for a military victory. Sadat had long been a friend and confidant of Nasser, having come up through the ranks of the Nasserist political machinery as one of the original Free Officers, then as the secretary-general of the Arab Socialist Union, as the Speaker of the parliament, and, eventually, following the purges of 1968, as Nasser’s vice president. But he had always remained in the shadow of Nasser’s magnetic personality and was generally considered to be a political lightweight. In fact, Nasser is said to have picked Sadat as his designated successor precisely because of the latter’s limited involvement in the regime’s internal political rivalries.51

  Without a solid base of his own, Sadat had to contend with powerful adversaries almost from the beginning of his presidency. This climaxed in an attempted coup by Nasser’s former associates in May 1971. But the purges and the arrests that ensued did not go far in making the president feel secure in his position. A much-publicized “corrective revolution” followed, ostensibly designed to dismantle the Nasserist police state but in reality intended to consolidate Sadat’s position within the regime. But Sadat’s powers remained tenuous well into 1973. The president might have neutralized his political enemies, but he still lacked the popularity and stature that Nasser had once enjoyed among the masses. More importantly, Egyptian territory still remained occupied, and Sadat had to find a way to put an end to the country’s festering national humiliation. The continued occupation of the Sinai and the closure of the Suez Canal eroded more than political capital. “The cost of maintaining a huge mobilized army in the desert was becoming an impossible burden on the economy,” and without a solution to the Sinai’s occupation there were few prospects for economic and political revitalization.52 Getting the Sinai back was now more than a matter of political or even national vindication. Increasingly, it was a matter of economic survival.

  These domestic political considerations had prompted Sadat to embark on an ambitious diplomatic campaign almost immediately after taking offi
ce. His principal aim was to secure some territorial concessions in the Sinai from Israel. Most of these efforts occurred first through the United Nations and then through the United States, whose active diplomacy had finally brought an end to the 1969–70 War of Attrition. The War of Attrition had started in March 1969, when the Egyptian army launched a large-scale assault on Israeli forces occupying the Suez Canal. Nasser’s intent was to prevent Israel from turning the canal into a de facto border with Egypt, to increase for Israel the costs of Sinai’s occupation by making it suffer steady losses in soldiers and equipment, and, eventually, to force it to withdraw to the pre-1967 border. To achieve these goals, with his armed forces gradually rebuilt by the Soviets, he resorted to the heavy bombardment of Israeli defenses, accompanied by occasional air strikes and mobile commando raids. The war dragged on through the spring and summer months inconclusively, interrupted only by an unsuccessful attempt by the United States to broker a cease-fire. The American initiative was rejected by the Israeli government, which in early 1970 decided to take the war to the Egyptian hinterland by starting aerial bombardments of Cairo’s suburbs. Finally, in August 1970, following extensive military and economic assurances by the Nixon administration, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, agreed to end the war that Nasser had started.