Palestine in the Arab Dilemma (RLE Israel and Palestine)

Walid W. Kazziha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138904279
• eBook ISBN: 9781317446033
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For a long time the understanding of the Palestinian question has been dominated by the views offered by the Arab governments on the Israeli establishment. But any close examination of the policies of the Arab regimes would reveal that they have done very little to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians. Since the defeat of the Arab regime in June 1967, an increasing number of Arab scholars and intellectuals have been seriously and independently involved in reassessing the political and social conditions of their societies. This book, first published in 1979, is part of that more general attempt to discover the deep-rooted causes of defeat and the general state of socio-economic underdevelopment of the Arab region. The central theme of the four essays in this study pertains to the fluctuating relationship between the Arab regimes and the Palestinian Resistance Movement. It is within this context that the first essay examines the various factors which shaped the relationship at different intervals. The second then goes on to present a case study of how the contradictions between the Arab regimes and the Resistance Movement operate in a crisis situation and reach the level of an armed confrontation. The third essay examines the prospects for peace and war in the region in the light of the political conditions given before Sadat's visit to Israel. And finally the fourth essay is concerned with Sadat's peace initiative and its consequences on the relations between Egypt and the Palestinian Resistance Movement.

1 The Political and Ideological Impact of the Palestinian Resistance Movement on the Arab World Since 1967

Introduction

Ideologies in the Arab world have been partly dominated by the process of borrowing intellectual traditions from the West and partly shaped by the major events which have shaken the roots of Arab society in the recent past. More often Arab intellectuals and idealists react either positively or negatively to the flow of Western ideas and concepts and persistently seek to understand the rapid changes which take place in the world around them. The nature of Arab thought has thus become a reactive one, a continuous effort to rationalise what has happened rather than to determine the course of development of events or at least introduce guidelines for the future. Consequently, a gap has been created between the Arabs' attempts to understand and project an image of the future and their efforts to grasp the meaning of present events. Unfortunately, historical events have always rendered any vision of the future obsolete and out-of-date by imposing new situations unaccounted for in their intellectual articulations. Over and over again, the Arabs have been caught unawares because of the shortcomings of their ruling elites and the lack of intellectual initiative among their own intelligentsia. During the last decade two major wars have taken place between the Arabs and Israel and on both occasions most of the Arabs were caught by surprise. It is only after the event that the Arab mind moved to cope with the new situation. New explanations were introduced and new interpretations were elaborated. The whole issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict was reconsidered. One such attempt was made by the Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM).

It is the contention in this essay that the PRM has since 1967 developed a new pattern of thought in the Arab world which, if allowed to survive, may cause substantial deviation from the old patterns. While Arab political and social thought has in the past been consistently over-whelmed by political events, the PRM with its emphasis on revolutionary thought and action appears to free Arab understanding from some of its static notions and restrictive conceptions of politics and society. The PRM may have not yet produced a blue-print of the future, but the political and intellectual obsessions of the past seem to face a serious challenge to their long-held position. It is further worth noting that in the context of the intellectual climate which emerged after the June war, the PRM has attracted a growing number of Arab intellectuals who are more interested in examining the potentials and prospects of Arab social and political development than accepting the established norms which have the strong and unyielding support of Arab regimes. However, the question remains as to what kind of intellectual climate the last two wars with Israel produced and what the relative weight of the Palestinian ideological stand is compared with other intellectual positions held in the Arab world.

To begin with it is necessary to define the major trends in the Arab understanding of the June war and the October war and the consequent effects of the two wars on the political situation in the Arab world. The scope of the survey is limited by the nature of the literature available on the subject which mainly reflects the views of specific segments of Arab society, namely: the intellectuals, government officials and political leaders. Unfortunately no serious effort has yet been made to gauge the attitude of the Arab masses in different Arab countries. In this respect, the researcher may only rely on speculation and on personal observations and experience. However, this does not exclude the fact that in some cases the formulations and conceptions established before and after the two wars have filtered down to other segments of Arab society.

A case in point is the ongoing process of political indoctrination among the Palestinians in the refugee camps, and the growing impact of the propaganda campaigns conducted by Arab governments which no doubt have reached some segments of the people in the countryside and the urban centres and have come to form part of their political consciousness.

Before addressing ourselves to the main question: the Arab understanding of the recent two Arab-Israeli wars, it is appropriate to note that despite the appearance of an Arab consensus in the summit meeting in Rabat in October 1974, it is safe to say that there is no uniform Arab official attitude toward Israel or the PRM. As a matter of fact Rabat turned out to be the parting point among the Arabs. Since then the gap has widened between some Arab regimes and others (Syria and Egypt), old enemies have become allies (Syria and Jordan), while old allies have been alienated from each other (PLO and Syria).

The June War

The shocking defeat of the Arabs in the six-day war revealed to them the magnitude of the problems their society had been suffering from for decades, if not centuries. The psychological mobilisation of the Arabs in the days immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities greatly contributed to the feeling of humiliation and despair which followed. Instead of the long-entertained idea of sweeping victory on the front by the Arab armies described by one of the Arab war ministers at that time as 'the strongest striking force in the Middle East', the outcome of the first few hours of the war left these armies shattered and with them were shattered the hopes of the Arab peoples.

However, the mood of despair did not last long. Partly to reassert their self-respect and partly to find solutions to the catastrophic situation which confronted them, the Arabs gradually adopted four major approaches to account for the underlying cause of the defeat and prescribed remedies to cope with it. The first approach was based on the idea of popular armed resistance. Its main advocates were the Palestinian Organisations. Arab governments, mainly the front-line countries (Syria and Egypt), while admitting some of the merits of the new tendency, were more inclined to opt for an eclectic and conventional solution. According to them there was nothing intrinsically wrong with Arab society. What the situation required was major military adjustments coupled with a new political and diplomatic initiative to strengthen the military front. A third approach was theological and viewed the confrontation between the Arabs and the Israelis as one between the believers and non-believers. Accordingly what was required from the Arabs was strict adherence to the teachings of Islam and a strategy based on the concept of the holy war. The fourth trend which, for lack of a more accurate term, may conveniently be described as a modernist approach, recognised in the defeat a further indication of a continuous process of social and political disintegration in Arab society.

Less than a year after the June war, the Palestinian Resistance Movement led by Fateh was able to make a relatively successful military stand in Karameh, a small refugee camp east of the Jordan river. This was the first sign in the Arab world that alternatives to conventional wars with Israel might be available in a new strategy known as 'the people's liberation war'. Consequently the ranks of Fateh and more than half a dozen other Palestinian organisations were flooded with new recruits from the refugee camps and Arab youth from a number of Arab countries.

The new tendency was reinforced by the adoption in varying degrees of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the guiding ideology for political and military action. It provided a theoretically coherent set of ideas which explained the cause of defeat and simultaneously, perhaps more importantly, in the midst of despair it offered hope in the future. Briefly, the analysis went as follows.

The so-called progressive Arab regimes (Egypt, Syria and Iraq) served the interest of the petty bourgeoisie. By its nature this class was hesitant in its political and social behaviour. It failed to confront imperialism and Zionism head-on and refrained from relying on the workers and peasants to introduce a genuine socialist revolution. Its successive wars with Israel proved beyond any doubt that it feared the effective involvement of the toiling and oppressed masses in politics. Thus it did not mobilise them before or even after the war. Moreover, it lacked the determination to fight seriously a war to liberate Palestine. The petty bourgeois regimes more often than not had used the Palestinian issue for purposes of internal consumption and as a means of political blackmail in the context of inter-Arab conflict. The Arab army officers were part and parcel of this class, in fact the iron arm of the petty bourgeoisie. Naturally, they were more interested in enjoying the privileges they had acquired once they were in power rather than fighting the Israelis at the front. Therefore, the only solution to that problem was to organise a mass revolutionary movement which by advocating armed struggle would eventually revolutionalise the whole situation in the Arab world and bring about the downfall of these regimes. To put it more clearly, the way to Tel Aviv had first to pass through the Arab capitals. Fateh while partly accepting this line of thinking was less antagonistic to the Arab regimes. Its members believed that a successful liberation war can only be carried out by the Palestinian masses. In the meantime, the PRM ought to maintain friendly relations with the Arab regimes and avoid entanglement in inter-Arab conflicts.

A less radical reaction to the June war emerged among a number of liberal-minded intellectuals and the apologists of the Arab governments. In the first instance, heads of Arab states, meeting in Khartoum shortly after the war in an attempt to regain some of their self-confidence and salvage their lost credibility and prestige, overreacted to the disastrous event by taking a position of no negotiations with the enemy and no recognition of Israel. A few months later, this was followed by the war of attrition on the Egyptian front. Its purpose was to show that serious steps were being taken to keep the issue alive and present a more respectable image of Arab military capabilities. Under pressure from the angry masses half-hearted measures were taken to punish those who were held to be directly responsible for the defeat. Gradually, an eclectic approach to the understanding of the causes of the set-back emerged.

Accordingly, the whole event was viewed as a result of a series of mistakes, shortcomings, irresponsibility on the part of some individuals and, most important, of the military and technically ill-preparedness of the Arabs. It was, therefore, thought to be most essential in the future that the Arab-Israeli conflict should be taken more seriously by the political leadership of the Arab world and more effort ought to be devoted to the absorption of the advanced techniques of modern warfare. At the same time a calculated move should be made on the political front with the purpose of gaining more friends internationally for the Arab cause and weakening the links between Israel and the USA, its main supporter. This point of view rejected the notion of a people's liberation war on two scores: a) The terrain, especially on the Egyptian front, was not conducive to guerilla warfare. b) The Arabs, instead of severing their links with the West (imperialism) and fighting it head-on, were still in a position to cultivate their relationships with the West including the USA. In this respect, some positive results were to be expected by intensifying the Arabs' diplomatic efforts in the West, co-ordinating and strengthening their propaganda campaign; and, most important, using oil as a political leverage.

The declared 'realistic objective' of the advocates of this moderate approach was 'to wipe out the traces of aggression'. This strategy was based on the following lines:

1. Preservation of Arab solidarity by maintaining close economic, political, and whenever possible, military co-operation between the Arab regimes.
2. Projecting a moderate image of the Arabs in the West and the USA by advocating reasonable demands which did not go beyond the return of the Arab territories lost in 1967, together with a vague formula regarding the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.
3. Building up the military capabilities of the Arab countries which were to confront Israel in a future war.
4. Accepting the UN resolution 242 which recognises the state of Israel.

The main factor which seemed to undermine these arguments was previous experience and the crisis of confidence between the Arab governments and their peoples. To the Arab layman and intellectual, the issue was more than obvious: 'Our governments have been doping us with such ideas since 1948, but on every occasion, they have failed to deliver the goods. There was no reason to believe that this time, they would do any better.' The result was a feeling of resignation and indifference and the credibility of Arab governments remained as low as ever.

Encouraged by some Arab governments, a third trend evolved advocating an Islamic federation: a form of co-operation between Muslim states to revive the concept of a Muslim community. The ideological and political bases for a move on the part of the Arabs to join hands with non-Arab Muslim countries was twofold. On the one hand, in the face of an increasing tendency adopted by some Arab regimes to introduce a vague form of socialism, other Arab governments felt that this might threaten the vested interests of the ruling groups in their own countries. Their fear was further aggravated by the popularity of Nasser who championed the cause of Arab unity throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s. Against Arab socialism, which was equated to communism, and Nasser's drive for Arab unity the notion of Islamic alliance was posed. Its purpose was to counteract the threat which seemed to undermine the socio-economic and political position of some traditional regimes in the Arab world. Consequently, when Syria and Egypt were defeated in the June war, one of the interpretations which emerged in line with this policy might be summarised in the following words:

Since the Arabs have deserted religion by adopting communism, God in turn has deserted them. It was inevitable that they should be humiliated at the hands of their enemies, the Jews.

An extreme expression of this view was revealed by one of the sheikhs of the sufi orders, who claimed that the defeat was a natural outcome of using arms imported from a communist country.

One would not have been surprised to find a politically illiterate sheikh holding such views, but when a journalist of respectable standing subscribes to a similar theological explanation, one realises to what extent superstitions are still an important factor in shaping the understanding of historical events by some Arabs:

We have closed our eyes as to the real causes of the defeat. No one mentioned the fact that we had forgotten God and therefore God had forgotten us. That atheism spread among those who claim themselves to be intellectuals ... Not one single newspaper could reveal that one of the causes of defeat was that there were thousands of political prisoners and internees. That God could not allow us victory with such a large number of innocent people in our prisons.

A fourth approach among a number of intellectuals was one which viewed the whole event in a wider context. The collapse of the Arab armies, political disunity, social fragmentation and corruption were only the symptoms of a more basic malady in Arab society, namely, the inability to confront the modern world with a viable Arab culture. It was not the fault of the army or any particular leader or government, but the whole society and the individual who had lost his self-identity, who as a result of political suppression, deprivation and submission for centuries to superior cultures had been dehumanised, or at least rendered powerless in this world. In fact the problem was not strictly Arab, but engulfed the Third World countries as a whole. The remedy could not be instantaneous, but would require decades, perhaps centuries before the individual and his society underwent a process of total transformation. Obviously this point of view was most pessimistic and held some hope for a solution only in the very remote future.

These four major trends which appeared after 1967, held in common the idea that there was no quick solution to the Arab dilemma. Time proved even less encouraging than it was first thought to be. The Palestinian Resistance Movement experienced a major crisis, almost a crippling set-back in September 1970 at the hands of the Jordanian army. Its operations against the Israelis were eventually limited to suicidal attacks across the Lebanese borders. Simultaneously, the war of attrition on the Egyptian front came to an end in expectation of an American initiative for a political settlement which never materialised at the time.

Towards the end of 1973, the probability of a military confrontation with Israel seemed more remote than ever, due to the strain in relations with the Soviet Union, Egypt's main arms supplier, and the expulsion of the Russian military mission which was rumoured to have been providing an air cover over Egyptian territory. The prevalent impression was that though Egypt and Syria had been able to build up their armed forces, the Arab regimes were more inclined to search for a political solution than to take a military risk in which the odds were strongly against them. Furthermore, measures to promote Arab solidarity did not seem by 1973 to have reached a level which would allow them to tilt the military balance of power in their favour. Israel backed by the USA continued to pose as the invincible enemy whose military might and political viability internally and internationally was unchallengeable. The Israeli raid on Beirut in 1973 and the incursion of commando units and air strikes deep into Egyptian and Syrian territory confirmed the belief among the Arabs that their armies could in no way match that of Israel.

The October War

In 1973, the state of mind of the Arabs was most pessimistic. Not only did they have no confidence in their armies, but had over and beyond this witnessed for a number of years the deterioration of the 'internal front' resulting from an increasing rate of inflation, widespread corruption, internal political conflicts and the breakdown in some Arab countries of the public services. The obviems conclusion was that if this was the state of affairs along the internal front, then how could the military front be any better? In a public lecture, a prominent Egyptian intellectual told his audience: 'Today we are living in the bottom of a deep well; we cannot go any lower.' One of the audience, a student, asked: 'What do you suggest we do?' The reply was: 'Rebel'.

It would appear that while almost all aspects of Arab life had severely suffered following the June war, one sector, to the surprise of the Arabs and the international community at large seemed to have developed at a rate incomparable with and at the expense of practically all other sectors. The Egyptian and Syrian armed forces had by the beginning of October 1973 completed the preparations that started a year earlier at the orders of the political leadership in both countries to launch a co-ordinated offensive against Israel on two fronts, but with limited political and military objectives.

It is not the purpose of this essay to dwell in any detail on the war operations, but to examine the reactions and attitudes that the October war released among the Arabs. By and large the literature on the subject, with a few exceptions, is superficial. Numerous books and articles are available but seem to scratch only the surface of the subject. However, it is possible to make a few generalisations which depict the main views that have been expressed since October 1973.

The October war caught the Arabs psychologically unprepared for the event. In the first few days of the war the immediate reaction was one of self-restraint mixed with an underlying fear that this was another round with Israel which might ultimately prove to be more damaging than 1967. Those who were a little more optimistic interpreted the event as a game purely designed by the two super-powers and in which their clients in the Middle East played the specific roles assigned to them. They claimed that the essence of the game in the new age of entente was to solve once and for all those problems which carried the seeds of a military confrontation between the super-powers. A wellknown Arab economist a day or two before the war, when news of concentration of troops were reported in the Arab press, said 'I would not be surprised if we hear on the radio tomorrow that the Egyptian army has crossed the Canal.' He claimed that a settlement would then ensue in which the Arab governments would be in a position to re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Political and Ideological Impact of the Palestinian Resistance Movement on the Arab World Since 1967
• 2. The Lebanese Civil War and the Palestinian Resistance Movement
• 3. Prospects of War and Peace in the Middle East
• 4. Sadat's Peace Initiative and the Palestinian Question
• Index