Arab League and the Arab-Israeli conflict
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- This article discusses the role of the Arab League in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Before 1948
The Arab League was established on March 22, 1945. When the League founding pact was signed in Cairo, Egypt, "[t]he Arab League states collectively put their weight behind the basic demands of Palestine's Arabs but arrogated to themselves the right to select who would represent the Palestinians in their councils, so long as their country was not independent." Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 1999. p.173By the end of World War II, the Palestinian Arabs were left leaderless. The mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni had been in exile since 1937 and spent the war years in Nazi-occupied Europe, actively collaborating with German National Socialist leadership. As the war ended, he managed to escape to Egypt and stayed there until his death in 1974. His brother Jamal al-Husayni was interned in Southern Rhodesia during the war.
In November 1945, the Arab League reestablished the Arab Higher Committee as a supreme executive body of Palestinian Arabs in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine, but it fell apart due to infighting. In June 1946, the Arab League imposed upon the Palestinians the Arab Higher Executive, renamed into "Arab Higher Committee" in 1947, with Amin al-Husayni as its chairman and Jamal al-Husayni as vice-chairman.
Since 1945 King Abdullah of Jordan had been negotiating in secret with the Jewish Agency on plans for partition of Palestine between the Jews and Transjordan. At a clandestine meeting on 17 November, 1947 between Golda Meir and Abdullah she confirmed that Transjordan's takeover of the Arab part of Palestine would be viewed favourably. At a second meeting on 10 May, 1948 Abdullah declined to confirm his commitment to the existing agreement, but left Meir with the impression that he would make peace with a Jewish state after the impending war Morris, 1999. p.221
Arab League boycott
On December 2, 1945, the Arab League Council declared a formal boycott to any Jewish owned business operating in the British Mandate of Palestine: "Jewish products and manufactured goods shall be considered undesirable to the Arab countries." All Arab "institutions, organizations, merchants, commission agents and individuals" were called upon "to refuse to deal in, distribute, or consume Zionist products or manufactured goods." [The Arab Boycott] by Mitchell Bard (JVL)
Officially, the boycott covers three areas:
- Products and services which originate in Israel (referred to as the primary boycott and still enforced in many Arab states)
- Businesses that operate in Israel (the secondary boycott)
- Businesses which have relationships with other businesses which operate in Israel (the tertiary boycott)
1948-1949
The day after the state of Israel was proclaimed, six League members, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, supported by other members (notably Yemen), coordinated the attack on the State of Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and explicitly stated the destruction of the newly-formed Jewish state as their goal. On May 15, 1948, the Arab League Secretary General Abdul Razek Azzam Pasha announced the intention to wage "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Morris, 1999. p.219 However, despite the rhetoric Arab leaders were disunited. The Egyptians knew of Abdullah's agreement with Meir and were determined to thwart Transjordan's territorial ambitions, "thus the Arab war plan changed in conception and essence from a united effort to conquer parts of the nascent Jewish state and perhaps destroy it, into a multilateral land grab focussing on the Arab areas of the country." Morris, 1999. p.221"A key feature of the Arabs' plans was the complete marginalization of the Palestinians... This aptly reflected the political reality: The military defeats of April-May had rendered them insignificant. The Arab League through the first half of 1948 had consistently rejected Husseini's appeals to establish a government-in-exile... Under strong pressure from Egypt, which feared complete Hashemite control over the Palestinians, the League Political Committee in mid-September authorized the establishment of a Palestinian 'government.'" Morris, 1999. p.222
On September 22, 1948, the All-Palestine Government was established in Gaza, and on September 30, the rival First Palestinian Congress, which promptly denounced the Gaza "government", was convened in Amman.
1949-1967
As a result of 1949 Armistice Agreements, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were ruled by Jordan, while the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt until the 1967 Six Day War.The Palestinian National Charter of 1964 stated: "This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area." [Article 24 of the Palestinian National Charter] of 1964
According to Yaacov Lozowick, "It was not the Palestinians themselves who decided to create the PLO after their defeat in 1948; The Arab League set it up in 1964 to attack Israel. For years, Palestinian independence was off the Arab agenda; now it was back. Inventing the PLO was a prelude to war, not a result of it; the goal was to destroy Israel, not to rectify the misfortune of the Palestinians, which still could have been done by the Arab states irrespective of Israel." Yaacov Lozowick, "Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars", 2003. p.126
1967-2000
On September 1, 1967, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the Khartoum Resolution was issued at the meeting between the leaders of eight Arab countries. The paragraph 3 of the resolution became known as the Three No's:- No peace with Israel
- No recognition of Israel
- No negotiations with Israel
The Arab League immediately recognized the State of Palestine unilaterally proclaimed on November 15, 1988, by the Palestinian National Council. At the time, the PLO was based in Tunis and did not have control over any part of Palestine.
After 2000
In 2002, Saudi Arabia offered a peace plan in the New York Times and at a summit meeting of the Arab League in Beirut. The plan, based on UN Security Council Resolution 242 and Resolution 338, but making more demands, essentially calls for full withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice line in return for fully normalized relations with the whole Arab world. This proposal received the unanimous backing of the Arab League for the first time.In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres stated: "... the Saudi step is an important one, but it is liable to founder if terrorism is not stopped... It is ... clear that the details of every peace plan must be discussed directly between Israel and the Palestinians, and to make this possible, the Palestinian Authority must put an end to terror, the horrifying expression of which we witnessed just last night in Netanya", referring to the Netanya suicide attack. [Response of FM Peres to the decisions of the Arab Summit in Beirut] March 28, 2002 (Israeli MFA)
References
See also
- Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees
- 1956 Suez War
- 1970 Black September in Jordan and Civil War in Lebanon
- 1973 Yom Kippur War
- 1982 Lebanon War
- 1990/1 Gulf War
- International law and the Arab-Israeli conflict
Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy and treaties
- Paris Peace Conference, 1919
- Faisal-Weizmann Agreement
- 1949 Armistice Agreements
- Camp David Accords (1978)
- Madrid Conference of 1991
- Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace (1994)
- Oslo Accords (1993)
- Camp David 2000 Summit
- Peace Process in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
- Projects working for peace among Israelis and Arabs
- List of Middle East peace proposals
- International law and the Arab-Israeli conflict
Further reading
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