CHAPTER 12
The Arab world was shaped by the power of oil in the eventful years of the 1970s. Nature spread oil unevenly among the Arab states. With the exception of Iraq, where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers have supported large agrarian populations for millennia, the greatest oil reserves are to be found in the least densely populated Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Persian Gulf states, Libya, and Algeria in North Africa. Token discoveries have been made in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, though not enough to meet local demand.
Oil was first discovered in the Arab world in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For four decades, Western oil companies enjoyed unfettered control over the production and marketing of Arab hydrocarbons. Rulers in oil-producing states grew wealthy and in the 1950s and 1960s initiated development schemes to bring the benefits of oil wealth to their impoverished populations.
It was only in the 1970s, however, that a convergence of factors turned oil into a source of power for the Arab world. Growing global dependence on petroleum, the decline of American oil production, and the political crises that jeopardized the export of oil from the Middle East to the industrial world combined to generate unprecedented oil prices in the 1970s. Increasingly over the course of that decade, the Arab states took control of their oil, and the power that came with it, from the Western oil companies.
Oil more than any other commodity has come to define Arab wealth and power in the modern age. Yet oil represents an illusive sort of power. The great wealth that oil confers also makes a state more vulnerable to outside threats. The wealth of oil can be used for development, or, through arms races and regional conflicts, for destruction. Ultimately, oil conferred little security on the Arab states to enjoy its mixed blessing, and even less on the region as a whole, during the tumultuous 1970s.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when oil exploration in the Middle East began in earnest, relations between oil companies and oil-producing states had been governed by concessions—licenses issued by governments to companies to explore for and exploit petroleum resources in return for a fee. Commercial quantities of oil were discovered in Iran (1908) and Iraq (1927); beginning in 1931, Western oil men turned to the Arab shores of the Persian Gulf. Initially, cash-strapped local rulers sold rights to British and American firms that assumed the full risk and expense of prospecting for oil.
The risks were very real for the oil pioneers in the Persian Gulf. Some companies drilled for years without so much as an oily rag to show for their efforts. Yet, increasingly in the 1930s the oil men struck it big in Arabia. Standard Oil of California discovered oil in Bahrain in 1932. CalTex found major reserves in Kuwait in 1938, and Standard Oil of California had its first strike after six years of disappointment in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, also in 1938.
When they did strike oil, the companies paid royalties to the host nation and kept the rest of the profit for themselves. Arab rulers had no complaints, for oil money came without any toil on their part. Revenues from petroleum soon exceeded all other sources of national income in the Gulf states, while the oil companies themselves bore the enormous costs of transporting and refining Arabian oil for global markets. Extracting oil from the Arabian Peninsula was a massively expensive undertaking, particularly in the early years: pipelines had to be laid and fleets of tankers had to be commissioned to carry the oil, while new refineries had to be built to convert Arabian crude to marketable products. It seemed perfectly fair to the oil companies that they should enjoy full control over the production (how much oil to extract) and marketing (setting the price in an increasingly competitive market) of a resource that they and they alone had extracted at great risk, expense, and effort.
By 1950, however, the oil-producing states had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the terms of the original concessions. Now that the infrastructure for extraction, transport, and refining was in place, the oil companies reaped tremendous profits from their investment. Aramco, the consortium of four American firms (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco) that enjoyed exclusive rights to Saudi oil, reaped three times the profits enjoyed by the Saudi government in 1949. Worse yet, the taxes Aramco paid to the federal government exceeded the Saudi take by some $4 million—meaning the U.S. government made more off Saudi oil than did the Saudis themselves.1
The Arab Gulf states demanded a greater share of those profits. After all, it was their oil and the main source of wealth for their growing economies. The oil men had recouped their original outlay and had been handsomely rewarded. Arab leaders now felt it was time the producing states got their fair share of the profits—both for their increasingly ambitious development plans and to provide for the future in anticipation of the day when oil would run out. There was precedent for their demands: in South America, Venezuela had managed to secure a 50:50 division of oil returns with its concession holders in 1943. The Arab states were determined to achieve the same division of oil revenues. The Saudis negotiated a 50:50 deal with the Aramco consortium in December 1950, and the other Arab oil states were quick to follow suit. There was a tidiness about this division of royalties, suggesting an equal partnership that both sides were willing to accept. But the oil companies resisted any effort to break the 50-50 split for fear that the producing nations would gain the upper hand over them.
The oil producing states of the Arab world would gain increasing power by dint of their massive oil reserves. Over the 1950s and 1960s, the Persian Gulf eclipsed the United States as the greatest oil-producing region in the world. Middle Eastern output expanded from 1.1 million to 18.2 million barrels per day between 1948 and 1972.2 Though the oil-producing states now enjoyed an equal share of revenues with the oil companies, the oil companies remained sovereign in all matters relating to production and pricing. In the early days of oil exploration, the Western oil men could rightly claim to have a better understanding of the geology, chemistry, and economics of oil than their Arab interlocutors. But by the 1960s this was no longer the case. The oil states were now sending their best and brightest to study geology, petroleum engineering, and management in leading Western universities. A new generation of Arab technocrats returned with advanced university degrees to government jobs and chafed at the power exercised by the foreign oil companies over their natural resources and national economy.
Abdullah al-Turayqi was one of the first Arab oil experts. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1920, al-Turayqi spent twelve years in school in Nasser’s Egypt, where he also received an education in Arab nationalism. He went on to study chemistry and geology at the University of Texas, returning to Saudi Arabia in 1948. He was placed in charge of the Directorate of Oil and Mining Affairs in 1955, which made him the highest-ranked Saudi in the oil industry. From this position, al-Turayqi had privileged access to the decision makers from other oil-producing states. He pressed his fellow Arab oil men to protect their interests through collective action.3
Most of the other Arab oil ministers were reluctant to rock the boat. They faced an oil glut, as Soviet oil began to flood the market in the 1950s. If the Arab producers put too many demands on the oil companies, the companies might simply extract their oil elsewhere. After all, the major oil companies were global giants with extensive reserves in the Americas and Africa, as well as in the Middle East. Having recently extracted a 50:50 division of oil rents from the oil companies, most Arab oil states remained cautious about pressing for more.
The Arab oil producers were rocked out of their complacency in 1959, when British Petroleum (BP) took the fateful decision to cut the posted price of oil by 10 percent. The glut of Soviet oil had put real pressure on the international price for oil, and BP’s decision simply reflected market realities. The problem with this seemingly rational decision was that BP had failed to give advance notice of its decision to the oil-producing states. Because oil revenues for both companies and producing states were based on the posted price of oil, this unilateral decision meant that the oil company had imposed a cut on the revenues—and thus the national budgets—of the oil-producing states without consultation or obtaining their consent. BP had inadvertently demonstrated how unequal the partnership really was between the companies and the states.
The oil-producing states were furious. In the wake of the cut Abdullah al-Turayqi found his fellow oil ministers more open to the idea of collective action. In April 1959, on the sidelines of the first Arab oil congress, al-Turayqi met in secret with government representatives from Kuwait, Iran, and Iraq at a sailing club in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. The Arab oil men concluded a “gentlemen’s agreement” to form a commission to defend oil prices and establish national oil companies. Their goal was to break through the 50:50 barrier to achieve a 60:40 division of revenues with the Western oil companies, securing the principle of national sovereignty over oil resources.
The resolve of Arab oil producers was stiffened in August 1960, when Standard Oil of New Jersey repeated BP’s mistake and unilaterally cut the posted price of oil by 7 percent. The move provoked outrage among oil states and convinced even the most cautious that the Arabs would be controlled by the oil companies until they asserted control over their own oil resources. Al-Turayqi went to Iraq to suggest making common cause with Venezuela against the oil companies. The Saudi oil minister suggested the creation of a global cartel to protect the rights of oil-producing states from arbitrary action by the oil companies. Muhammad Hadid, then the Iraqi finance minister, recalled al-Turayqi’s visit: “The Iraqi government welcomed the suggestion and convened a meeting of the oil producing states in Baghdad in which they agreed to establish this organization.” On September 14, 1960, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela announced the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC.4
By 1960, two new Arab oil states had emerged in North Africa. Oil had only been discovered in commercial quantities in Algeria in 1956 and in Libya in 1959. The advantages of late entry meant that the North African states could learn from the experiences of their Arab colleagues in the Persian Gulf and secure the best terms for exploration and export of their petroleum products.
Libya was a poor and underdeveloped kingdom when oil was first discovered. Under Italian colonial administration until 1943, the Libyan territories passed under joint British and French rule following the Allied occupation of Italy. The three territories of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan were consolidated into the United Kingdom of Libya, which gained its independence in 1951. The British rewarded Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Sanussi (1889–1983), leader of the powerful Sanussi religious brotherhood, with the Libyan throne for his wartime services against Axis forces. He ruled as King Idris I from 1951until 1969 and saw his country pass from poverty to wealth through the discovery of oil.
Even at the prospecting stage before any oil had been discovered, the Libyans were keen to make the most of their petroleum resources. Unlike the other Arab states, which had given concessions over vast expanses of territory to major oil companies, King Idris’s government decided to break up the target exploration areas into numerous small concessions and to favor independent oil companies. The Libyans reasoned that independent companies, with fewer alternative sources of petroleum, would have more incentive to discover and bring Libyan crude to market than the majors with their worldwide operations. Their strategy worked. By 1965, only six years after the discovery of oil, Libya had already emerged as the sixth largest oil exporter in the non-Soviet world, responsible for 10 percent of all petroleum exports. By 1969 the country’s petroleum exports had reached parity with Saudi Arabia.5
While King Idris ruled over a newly prosperous country, he faced strong domestic criticism as a conservative, pro-Western monarch. A group of Arab nationalist officers in the Libyan army, headed by a young captain named Muammar al-Qadhafi (b. 1942), saw the king as a British agent. They believed they needed to overthrow King Idris for Libya to achieve its complete independence from foreign domination. In the early morning hours of September 1, 1969, they toppled the monarchy in a bloodless coup while the elderly king was abroad for medical treatment.
In his first communiqué to the Libyan nation, broadcast by radio at 6:30 that morning, Qadhafi announced the fall of the monarchy and declared the establishment of the Libyan Arab Republic. “People of Libya! Your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened and horrified us all.” His message was replete with historical allusions. “By a single stroke [the army] has lightened the long dark night in which the Turkish domination was followed first by Italian rule, then by this reactionary and decadent regime, which was no more than a hotbed of extortion, faction, treachery and treason.” He promised the Libyan people a new age “where all will be free, brothers within a society in which, with God’s help, prosperity and equality will be seen to rule us all.”6
Libya’s new ruler was a devoted admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Upon seizing leadership of Libya, Qadhafi assumed the rank of colonel (Nasser’s rank at the time of the 1952 revolution in Egypt) and, following the Egyptian model, established a Revolutionary Command Council to oversee the government in the new Libyan Republic. “Tell President Nasser we made this revolution for him,” Qadhafi told Mohamed Heikal in the immediate aftermath of the coup.7
Upon Nasser’s death in September 1970, Qadhafi declared himself Nasser’s ideological successor. Henceforth, anti-imperialism and Arab unity would be the hallmark of Libyan foreign policy. The new Libyan government promoted the Arabic language (foreign street names were Arabized), imposed Islamic strictures (alcohol was prohibited and churches closed), and advanced the “Libyanization” of the economy by expropriating foreign-owned property in the name of the Libyan people. British and U.S. military bases were closed and all foreign troops expelled. It was in this spirit that the new Libyan regime took on the Western oil companies, believing the control they exercised over petroleum production and marketing to represent the greatest threat to Libyan sovereignty and independence.
For advice on oil policy, Colonel Qadhafi turned to the Arab nationalist oil expert Abdullah al-Turayqi (who had lost his job as Saudi oil minister to a bright new technocrat named Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani upon King Faysal’s succession to the throne in 1962). Al-Turayqi, who argued in 1967 that “it is only just that those oil producing countries who rely on oil as their primary source of revenues have the right to set the fair price for its prime natural resource,” shared Qadhafi’s determination to break the power of oil companies over the Arab oil-producing states.8 In 1970 Qadhafi embarked on a series of policies to assert Libya’s full sovereignty over its oil resources—at the oil companies’ expense.
In January 1970, Qadhafi summoned the heads of the twenty-one oil companies working in Libya to a meeting to renegotiate the terms of their contracts. The Western oil men sat uneasily in their chairs. They were still coming to terms with the new military rulers of Libya. The executives declared their resistance to any change in the way they did business in Libya. Qadhafi rounded on the oil men and made it clear that he would sooner cut oil production altogether than let his country be exploited by Western interests. “People who have lived without oil for 5,000 years,” he warned, “can live without it again for a few years in order to attain their legitimate rights.” The Western oil men shifted uncomfortably under Qadhafi’s baleful gaze.9
Qadhafi decided to force the issue and to impose his price on the oil companies. That April the Libyan government requested an unprecedented 20 percent increase ($0.43) in the price per barrel of oil, which was then trading at $2.20 per barrel. The oil major Esso (the European affiliate of Exxon) responded with an offer of only five cents a barrel and held firm. With all their alternate sources of petroleum, Esso and Exxon were immune to Qadhafi’s threats.
In response, Libyans put the squeeze on the smaller independent companies. As Libyan oil expert Ali Attiga recalled, “The government of Libya learned to use—and to use very well—the independents to raise the price of oil.” The Libyans chose their target carefully. Occidental Petroleum had emerged from total obscurity to become one of the largest oil firms in the West on the strength of its discoveries in the Libyan desert. The only problem for Occidental was that it had no other source of oil outside Libya and so was entirely reliant on Libyan oil to meet its contracts. The Libyans imposed massive production cuts on Occidental. As the government-imposed reductions began to take effect, Occidental scrambled to find alternate sources to cover its commitments to its European customers. Yet none of the oil majors would extend a helping hand to the vulnerable independent as its daily production was trimmed by the Libyan authorities from 845,000 to 465,000 barrels. Cuts were imposed on the other oil companies as well, but none was so adversely affected as Occidental. “Now the cut in production contributed to two things,” Attiga claimed. “It made the independents accept the increase in price because they had no alternative supply sources from which to meet their commitments, and it contributed to the beginning of a shortage in oil supply,” which exerted an upward pressure on oil prices.10
Libya’s strategy met with full success, and Qadhafi’s young regime could claim victory over the oil companies. In the end, the chairman of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, was forced to accept Libyan terms in a landmark deal concluded in September 1970. Occidental agreed to raise the posted price of Libyan oil by an unprecedented thirty cents to $2.53 per barrel. More significant yet was Occidental’s agreement to concede a majority of profits to Libya, breaking the 50:50 agreements that had prevailed for the past twenty years and introducing a new ratio of 55 percent profit to the producing state and only 45 percent to the oil companies. For the first time in the history of petroleum, a producing state gained the majority share of its oil revenues.
The Occidental precedent was applied on all of the oil companies working in Libya, and the Libyan precedent was followed by Iran and the Arab oil-producing states. In February 1971 Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia concluded the Tehran Agreement, which secured a minimum 55 percent of profit for the oil states and raised the posted price of oil a further $0.35. On the back of the Tehran Agreement, the Libyans and Algerians negotiated a further hike in oil prices of $0.90 per barrel in Mediterranean markets in April 1971. These agreements set two trends in motion: regular increases by the oil-producing states in the posted price of oil, and regular decreases in the oil companies’ share in profits. It was the end of the era of the Western oil barons and the beginning of the age of the Arab oil shaykhs.
The year 1971 marked the last of the Gulf states’ emergence from British protection to full independence. The Trucial States had preserved their special treaty relationship to Great Britain through all the turmoil of decolonization and Arab nationalism. Independence for Bahrain and Qatar and the establishment of the United Arab Emirates represented the end of the British Empire in the Middle East, which had begun in the Persian Gulf in 1820, finally coming to an end in the same region a century and a half later.
The Gulf shaykhdoms were not technically British colonies, but independent ministates whose relations to Britain were governed by nineteenth-century treaties. The external relations of the shaykhdoms had remained under British control in return for British protection from external threats—primarily from the Ottoman Empire, which sought to extend its influence over the Arab Gulf states at the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1968 there remained nine Gulf states under the British protectorate: Bahrain, which since 1946 had served as the seat of the British Political Residency for the Gulf, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaima, Um al-Qaiwain, Fujayra, and ’Ajman. Britain had exploited its privileged position in the Gulf to secure valuable oil concessions for British companies, particularly in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and continued to exercise influence in that region transcending its reduced global status. The rulers of the Gulf states were perfectly happy with the arrangement, which enabled them to survive as ministates against the menace of powerful neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Iran with ambitions on their oil-rich lands.
It was the British rather than the ruling shaykhs of the Trucial States who initiated the process of decolonization in the Gulf. In January 1968, Harold Wilson’s Labour government caught the Gulf rulers completely by surprise when they announced their intention to withdraw from Britain’s commitments East of Suez by the end of 1971. Britain’s decision to withdraw from the Gulf was prompted by domestic economic troubles. In November 1967 Wilson had been forced to devalue the pound to address trade and balance-of-payment deficits. Against such austerity measures, the government could not justify the cost of maintaining British military bases in the Persian Gulf. These economic concerns were compounded by the culture of the ruling Labour Party, which was openly hostile to the practice of Empire twenty years after the withdrawal from India.
The shaykhs’ first reaction was to refuse to allow the British to go—or more precisely, they refused to discharge Britain from its treaty commitments to protect the region from outside aggression. They had good grounds for concern. Saudi Arabia laid claim to most of oil-rich Abu Dhabi, and Iran declared sovereignty over the island state Bahrain and a number of smaller islands straddling major offshore oil fields. Over the next three years Britain applied all its diplomatic acumen to resolve the different claims on Gulf territories and to encourage a union of the Trucial States that would give them the critical mass to survive the treacherous waters of the Persian Gulf.
In 1970 the Shah of Iran relinquished his claim over Bahrain. Shaykh ’Isa bin Salman, the ruler of Bahrain, withdrew from union discussions with the other Trucial States and declared his country’s independence on August 14, 1971. Bahrain’s neighbor and long-time rival, the peninsular state of Qatar, quickly followed suit on September 3, 1971. The differences between the remaining seven states were significant but not insurmountable, and as the deadline for the British withdrawal approached, six of the states came to an agreement to form a Union of Arab Emirates (later the United Arab Emirates) on November 25, 1971.
The odd country out was Ras al-Khaima, which refused to join the union in protest against Iranian claims to two of its islands, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs. Ras al-Khaima did not want to release Britain from its duty to preserve what it held to be its sovereign territory in the disputed islands. Britain, in contrast, was convinced that it needed Iranian goodwill to preserve the territorial integrity of the Gulf states and was willing to sacrifice two of Ras al-Khaima’s smaller islands in the interest of preserving the independence of the union as a whole. The British had brokered an agreement between Sharjah and Iran to divide another disputed island, Abu Musa, between them and saw such concessions as a necessary evil to keep the shah from doing worse. In the end, Ras al-Khaima joined the United Arab Emirates, which was admitted to the Arab League on December 6 and to the United Nations on December 9, 1971.
Ironically, Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf strained relations with two of the states most committed to the ideals of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism. Iraq severed relations with Britain in protest against British complicity in the Iranian occupation of Arab territory—Abu Musa and the Tunbs. Libya went a step further and nationalized Britain’s oil interests on December 7, to punish the British for delivering Arab lands to Iranian rule. The West’s growing dependence on Arab oil made it vulnerable to such punitive action, and the Arabs began to view their oil as a weapon to attain their political objectives. It was not long before the Arab world began to consider ways to deploy the oil weapon in its conflict with Israel and its Western allies.
Colonel Qadhafi’s oil advisor, Abdullah al-Turayqi, saw early on how useful oil could be in reshaping geopolitics. Months after the June 1967 War, he published an essay with the PLO research center in Beirut in which he described Arab petroleum as “a weapon in the battle.” Setting out the just grounds for deploying oil strategically against Israel’s allies, al-Turayqi argued, “It is generally agreed that every state has the right to use all available means to apply pressure on its enemies. And the Arab states possess one of the most powerful economic weapons that might be used against its enemies.” The Arabs, he claimed, held no less than 58.5 percent of the world’s known petroleum resources, and the industrial world was increasingly dependent on the Arab world for its energy supplies. Why should the Arabs continue to supply the West while the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands supported their enemy, Israel? “The Arab peoples call for the use of the oil weapon and it is the responsibility of each government to satisfy the will of its people,” al-Turayqi concluded.11
Using oil as a weapon was easier said than done. Al-Turayqi knew better than most how ineffectual the oil weapon had proven in the June 1967 War. Arab oil ministers had met on June 6, the day war broke out, and agreed to ban shipments to the United States, Britain, and West Germany for their support of Israel. Within forty-eight hours both Saudi Arabia and Libya had closed down their production entirely. Arab output was reduced by 60 percent, putting tremendous pressure on Western markets.
Yet the industrial world withstood this first use of the oil weapon. It is nearly impossible to track oil once it has entered the international market, allowing embargoed states to circumvent the ban on direct sales by purchasing oil through intermediaries not affected by the embargo. The United States and other non-Arab oil producers expanded production to make up the difference, and the Japanese deployed fleets of massive new “supertankers” to transport oil to global markets. Within a month, the industrial states were back to full supply, demonstrating the futility of a gesture that had in the meantime deprived the Arab oil producers of vital revenues. By the end of August 1967, the defeated Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—called on their oil-producing brethren to resume production to help them meet the terrible burden of postwar reconstruction.
Not only had the oil weapon proven ineffectual in the 1967 War, but it harmed Arab economies long after the guns fell silent. The return of Arab oil to international markets produced a glut that drove prices down. The oil weapon had backfired and hurt the Arab states far more than Israel and its Western supporters. Yet such was the lack of confidence in Arab armies, in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat, that many policymakers still believed the Arab world more likely to achieve its objectives against Israel by economic than by military means.
The post-1967 malaise affected Egypt worse than any other Arab state. The crushing defeat of its army and the loss of the entire Sinai Peninsula were compounded by the economic effects of the war. Egypt faced a massive postwar reconstruction bill, exacerbated by the closure of the Suez Canal and the collapse in the tourist trade, Egypt’s two most important sources of external revenue.
The prospects for a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict were more remote after the 1967 War than at any point since the creation of the state of Israel. International efforts to broker a resolution between Egypt and Israel were undermined by the positions taken by the two antagonists: Israel wanted to retain all of the Sinai as a bargaining chip to force Egypt to conclude a full peace treaty, whereas the Egyptian government demanded the return of the Sinai as a precondition for any peace talks.
For Egypt, the longer Israel remained in the Sinai, the greater the risk of the international community accepting the Israeli occupation of Egyptian territory. President Gamal Abdel Nasser was determined to prevent the Israelis from turning the Suez Canal into a de facto border between the two states, and engaged Israel in an undeclared War of Attrition that lasted from March 1969 to August 1970. The Egyptians used commando raids, heavy artillery, and air attacks in a bid to wear down Israeli positions along the Suez Canal. The Israelis responded by building a series of fortifications along the canal, dubbed the Bar-Lev Line after the serving chief of staff, General Chaim Bar-Lev, and by unleashing air raids deep into Egyptian territory.
The Israelis proved their continued military superiority over the Egyptians through the months of the War of Attrition. The Egyptians had no effective air defense, leaving Israeli planes free to strike the suburbs of Cairo and the cities of the Nile Delta. “The aim was to put the Egyptian people under heavy psychological pressure and make the political leadership appear weak, forcing it to halt the War of Attrition,” Egypt’s General Abd al-Ghani El-Gamasy reasoned. “The raids carried the implicit message that since the Egyptian armed forces could not see the futility of fighting, the raids might demonstrate this directly to the Egyptian people.”12
Although the Israeli raids did not turn the Egyptian public against its government, the War of Attrition was hurting Egypt far more than Israel. Nasser was increasingly open to American mediation, and in August 1970 he agreed to a cease-fire with Israel as part of a still-born peace plan brokered by the U.S. secretary of state, William Rogers. Nasser died the following month, leaving Egypt and Israel no closer to resolving their differences.
Nasser’s successor was his vice president, Anwar Sadat. Though he was one of the founders of the Free Officers movement, had taken part in the 1952 revolution, and was one of the original members of the Revolutionary Command Council, Sadat remained something of an unknown quantity at home and abroad. He had none of Nasser’s charm or public appeal and had to prove himself if he hoped to remain in power.
Sadat faced an inauspicious international setting when he took office. The Nixon administration was pursuing a policy of détente with Egypt’s ally, the Soviet Union. As tensions between the superpowers diminished, regional disputes such as the Arab-Israeli conflict took on less urgency in Moscow and Washington. The Soviets and the Americans were willing to live with the status quo, a policy of “no war, no peace” between the Arabs and Israel, until the disputing parties showed a more pragmatic attitude toward resolving their differences. Sadat knew the status quo favored Israel. With each passing year, the international community would come to accept Israel’s hold over Arab territories occupied in 1967.
To break the impasse, Sadat had to take the initiative. He needed to force America to reengage with the Arab-Israeli conflict, to push the Soviets to provide high-tech weapons to the Egyptian military, and to present the Israelis with a credible threat to recover the Sinai. In order to achieve his goals, he would need to go to war—a limited war to achieve specific political objectives.
Sadat took his first step to war by expelling all of the 21,000 Soviet military advisors in Egypt in July 1972. It was a counterintuitive move, but one designed to force both the Americans and the Soviets to reengage with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Americans began to question Egypt’s ties to the Soviet Union and the possibility of diverting the most powerful Arab state to the pro-Western camp. It was precisely this threat that stirred the Soviets from their complacency toward their Egyptian client. Sadat had pressed the Soviet leadership to reequip Egypt’s devastated armed forces in the years after the Six Day War and the war of attrition. Moscow had prevaricated, delaying delivery of arms and withholding the more sophisticated Soviet arms needed to counter the high-tech arms the United States was providing Israel. Although Sadat expelled the Soviet military advisors, he was careful not to cut relations with the Soviet Union. Instead, he preserved Egypt’s Treaty of Friendship with the USSR and continued to extend base privileges to Soviet forces, thereby demonstrating his alliance. Sadat’s strategy proved brilliantly successful: between December 1972 and June 1973 the Soviets exported more advanced weapons to Egypt than in the previous two years combined.
Sadat’s next objective was to prepare his military for war. He called the heads of the Egyptian armed forces to a meeting at his home on October 24, 1972, to confront them with his decision to initiate a war against Israel. “This is not a matter about which I’m taking your advice,” he warned the Egyptian top brass.
The generals were aghast. They believed Israel was much better prepared for a war than the Arab states. Egypt was entirely dependent on the Soviet Union for advanced weaponry, and the Soviets still lagged well behind the Americans in supplying their allies in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As far as the generals were concerned, this was no time to be talking of war. General El-Gamasy, who attended the meeting, described the atmosphere as “exceptionally stormy and agitated,” with Sadat growing increasingly angry with his generals’ rebuttals. “By the end of the meeting, it was clear that President Sadat was not pleased with what had taken place—not with the reports presented, the opinions expressed, or the forecasts.”13 Nor had he changed his mind. Following the meeting, Sadat reshuffled his military to relieve the doubters of their commands. El-Gamasy was named chief of operations and tasked with planning the war.
General el-Gamasy was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Six Day War. He knew from firsthand experience how unprepared Egypt was in 1967 and how poorly the Arab armies had coordinated their war efforts. The first priority for the Egyptian war planners was to conclude a deal with Syria to launch a two-front attack on the Israelis. The Syrians were as determined to redeem their losses in the Golan Heights as the Egyptians were in the Sinai, and they struck a top secret agreement to unify the command of their armed forces with the Egyptians in January 1973.
Next, the planners had to decide on the ideal date to launch their attack to achieve the greatest degree of surprise. El-Gamasy and his colleagues pored over their almanacs to find the ideal moonlight and tidal conditions for crossing the Suez Canal. They considered the Jewish religious holidays, as well as the political calendar, to find a time when the military and the general public might be distracted. “We discovered that Yom Kippur fell on a Saturday and, what was more important, that it was the only day throughout the year in which radio and television stopped broadcasting as part of the religious observance and traditions of that feast. In other words, a speedy recall of the reserve forces using public means could not be made.”14 Taking all these factors into consideration, el-Gamasy and his officers recommended beginning operations on Saturday, October 6, 1973.
While the general prepared Egypt’s military for war, Sadat traveled to Riyadh to persuade the Saudis to deploy an entirely different weapon: oil. Sadat made an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia in late August 1973 to brief King Faysal on his secret war plans and to ask for Saudi support and cooperation. Sadat needed to be persuasive, for the Saudis had consistently refused Arab requests to deploy the oil weapon since the disastrous experience of 1967.
Fortunately for Sadat, the world was far more dependent on Arab oil in 1973 than it had been in 1967. American oil production had reached its peak in 1970 and was now falling each year. Saudi Arabia had replaced Texas as the swing producer that could fill shortfalls in global supplies simply by pumping more oil. As a result, the United States and the industrial powers were more vulnerable to the oil weapon than ever before. Arab analysts estimated in 1973 that the United States imported some 28 percent, Japan some 44 percent, and the European states as much as 70–75 percent of their oil from the Arab world.15 The Saudi king, a committed Arab nationalist, believed his country could use its oil resources effectively and promised Sadat his support if Egypt went to war against Israel. “But give us time,” Faysal reportedly told Sadat. “We don’t want to use our oil as a weapon in a battle which only goes on for two or three days, and then stops. We want to see a battle which goes on for long enough time for world opinion to be mobilized.”16There was no point in deploying a weapon after war was over, as the Saudis learned in 1967. The Saudi king wanted to be sure the next war would last long enough for the oil weapon to be effective.
War broke out minutes past two on the afternoon of Saturday, October 6, 1973, as the Syrian and Egyptian armies simultaneously attacked Israel to the north and south. In spite of Egyptian precautions to maintain secrecy, Israeli intelligence was convinced that an attack was imminent, though they assumed that a more limited assault would come toward sunset. An all-out, two-front war was but the first surprise for the Israeli military.
Under a blistering artillery attack—el-Gamasy claimed the Egyptians fired over 10,000 rounds in the first minutes of conflict—waves of Egyptian commandoes crossed the Suez Canal in dinghies and stormed the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”). The Egyptian troops suffered very light casualties in overcoming what were widely believed impregnable Israeli positions. “At five minutes past two the first news of the battle started coming in to Centre Number Ten [central command],” journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled. “President Sadat and [Commander-in-Chief] Ahmad Ismail listened with astonishment. It seemed as though what they were watching was a training exercise: ‘Mission accomplished . . . mission accomplished.’ It all sounded too good to be true.”17
Israeli commanders listened with no less disbelief as their soldiers in the Bar-Lev fortifications, their guard down during Yom Kippur observances, sounded the alert and declared their positions untenable in the face of superior enemy forces. Syrian tanks overran Israeli positions and pressed deeply into the Golan Heights. Both the Egyptian and Syrian air forces swept deep inside Israel to attack key military positions.
When the Israelis scrambled their own air force, their fighter jets were intercepted by Soviet SAM 6 missiles as soon as they reached the fronts. Gone was the air supremacy of the 1967 War, as the Israelis lost twenty-seven planes over the Egyptian front alone in the opening hours of the war and were forced to hold their aircraft fifteen miles behind the Canal Zone. Israeli tanks sent to relieve their troops along the Bar-Lev Line faced a similar shock, encountering Egyptian infantrymen armed with Soviet wire-guided antitank missiles that knocked out scores of Israeli armor.
With both the Israeli ground and air forces held in check, Egyptian military engineers set up high-pressure water pumps and literally washed away the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line, opening the way for Egyptian forces to pass through Israeli front lines into the Sinai Peninsula beyond. Pontoon bridges were laid across the canal for Egyptian troops and armor to cross over to the east bank and into the Sinai.
At the end of the first day of fighting, some 80,000 Egyptian soldiers had crossed through the Bar-Lev Line and were dug into positions up to 4 kilometers (about 2.5 miles) inside the Sinai Peninsula. On the northern front, Syrian troops broke through Israeli defenses in the Golan Heights, inflicting heavy losses on Israeli tanks and aircraft in a concerted press toward Lake Tiberias. With the benefit of near total surprise, the initiative was squarely in the hands of Egypt and Syria in the opening hours of the war, as the Israelis scrambled to respond to the gravest threat the Jewish state had ever faced.
The Israeli military regrouped and went on the offensive. Within forty-eight hours reserves were called and deployed, holding positions in the Sinai and concentrating their offensive on the Golan, in the hopes of defeating Syria first before concentrating on the larger Egyptian army. In response, Iraqi, Saudi, and Jordanian infantry and armor units were dispatched to Syria to resist the Israeli counterattack in the Golan. Israel and the Arabs were suffering heavy casualties and running down their reserves of arms and ammunition in the fiercest fighting yet witnessed in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
By the end of the first week of the war, both sides were in need of resupply.18 On October 10 the Soviets began airlifting weapons to Syria and Egypt, and on October 14 the Americans initiated their own secret airlift of arms and ammunition to the Israelis. Armed with new American tanks and artillery, the Israelis mounted a successful counterattack that by October 16 had overwhelmed the Syrian front and led to the encirclement of Egyptian forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal. The military situation was grinding to a stalemate with Israeli troops consolidating their advantage over their Arab adversaries.
It was at this point that the Arab states decided to deploy the oil weapon. On October 16, Arab oil ministers gathered in Kuwait. They had a new sense of confidence and self-respect in light of Egyptian and Syrian gains in the first days of the war. The leaders of the Arab oil states were also buoyed by the knowledge that the industrial world was dependent on them. This meant that when the Arabs raised the price of their oil, they were able to inflict immediate punishment on those industrial countries that supported Israel.
On the first day of their meeting in Kuwait, the Arab oil ministers imposed a 17 percent price hike without so much as a phone call to the now powerless Western oil companies. “This is a moment for which I have been waiting a long time,” Saudi oil minister Shaykh Ahmad Zaki Yamani told one of the delegates. “The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.”19 The impact on oil markets was immediate and provoked widespread panic. By the end of the day, oil traders had raised the posted price of a barrel of oil to $5.11, up 70 percent over the trading price of $2.90 in June 1973.
The price hike was but the first crack of the whip to get the world’s attention. The following day the Arab oil ministers released a communiqué outlining a series of production cuts and embargoes to force the industrial powers to modify their policies toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. “All Arab oil exporting countries shall forthwith cut their production respectively by no less than five percent of the September production,” it read, “and maintain the same rate of reduction each month thereafter until the Israeli forces are fully withdrawn from all Arab territories occupied during the June 1967 War, and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are restored.”20
The oil ministers reassured friendly states that they would not be affected by these measures. Only “countries which demonstrate moral and material support to the Israeli enemy,” the oil ministers explained, “will be subjected to severe and progressive reduction in Arab oil supplies, leading to a complete halt.” The United States and the Netherlands, given their traditional friendship for Israel, were threatened with a complete embargo “until such time as the Governments of the USA and Holland or any other country that takes a stand of active support to the Israeli aggressors reverse their positions and add their weight behind the world community’s consensus to end the Israeli occupation of Arab lands and bring about the full restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”
After demonstrating their strength on the battlefield and over the oil markets, the Arab states opened a diplomatic front. The very day that the Arab oil states sent out their communiqué, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria met with President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in the White House. The Arab ministers found the American administration amenable to the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory occupied in June 1967 in return for full peace between Israel and the Arab states. The Algerian foreign minister asked why the resolution had never been implemented in the first place. “Kissinger said that, quite frankly, the reason was the complete military superiority of Israel. The weak, he said, don’t negotiate. The Arabs had been weak; now they were strong. The Arabs had achieved more than anyone, including themselves, had believed possible.”21 To the Arabs, it seemed that the Americans only understood force.
The Nixon administration found itself in an unusually difficult position. It wanted to placate the Arab world but not at the expense of Israel’s security. This went beyond American loyalty to the Jewish state. In Cold War terms, the Americans were determined that Israel, with its American-supplied arms, should prevail over the Arabs with their Soviet weapons. When Israel turned to the United States with an emergency request to restore its depleted arsenal, President Nixon approved legislation on October 18 for a $2.2 billion arms package for the Jewish state.
The blatant U.S. support for Israel’s war effort outraged the Arab world. One by one, the Arab oil states imposed a complete embargo on the United States. Arab oil output dropped by 25 percent, and oil prices spiked, eventually reaching a peak of $11.65 a barrel by December 1973. In six months, the price of oil had quadrupled, radically unsettling Western economies and hurting consumers. As reserves diminished, drivers faced long lines at the gas pumps and rationing of scarce petroleum resources.
Western governments faced growing pressure from their citizens to bring the oil embargo to a close. The only way to resolve the oil crisis was to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. Sadat had fulfilled his strategic objectives and forced the United States to reengage with regional diplomacy. With Egyptian forces still dug in on the east bank of the Suez Canal, there was no longer any question of the international community coming to accept the canal as the de facto border between Egypt and Israel. The Egyptian leader now looked for the opportune moment to end the war and consolidate his gains.
Sadat’s military position was growing weaker the longer the war went on. By the third week of October, Israel had gone on the offensive, its troops surging deep into Arab territory to within 60 miles of Cairo and only 20 miles of Damascus. These gains had come at a tremendous cost, with over 2,800 Israelis killed and 8,800 wounded—much higher casualties in proportion to Israel’s population than the 8,500 Arab soldiers killed and nearly 20,000 wounded in the war.22
The Israeli counterattack raised new tensions between the superpowers. As the Israelis threatened the encircled Egyptian Third Army on the west bank of the Suez Canal, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev sent a letter to U.S. president Richard Nixon calling for joint diplomatic action. Brezhnev warned that the Soviet Union might otherwise be forced to intervene unilaterally to protect its Egyptian allies. With the Red Army and the Soviet Navy on alert, U.S. intelligence feared the Soviets might introduce a nuclear deterrent in the conflict zone. U.S. security officials responded by placing their military on high nuclear alert for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis. After a few hours of heightened tension, the superpowers agreed to combine forces to seek a diplomatic end to the October War.
The Egyptians and the Israelis were also impatient to bring the devastating armed conflict to an end. After sixteen days of intensive warfare, both sides were ready to lay down their arms, and a cease-fire was negotiated through the UN Security Council on October 22. That same day, the Security Council passed Resolution 338, which reaffirmed the earlier Resolution 242 calling for the convening of a peace conference and a resolution of Arab-Israeli differences through an exchange of land for peace. That December the United Nations convened an international conference in Geneva to address the issue of Arab land occupied by Israel in 1967 as a first step toward a just and enduring resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Kurt Waldheim, the secretary-general of the United Nations, opened the conference on December 21, 1973. Cosponsored by the United States and the USSR, the conference was attended by delegations from Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria refused to attend when he could not obtain a guarantee that the conference would restore all occupied territory to the Arab states. There was no Palestinian representation. The Israelis vetoed PLO participation, and the Jordanians were not keen to have a rival representing the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The conference in Geneva proved inconclusive. The Arab delegations failed to coordinate before the conference, and their presentations revealed deep divisions in Arab ranks. The Egyptians referred to the West Bank as Palestinian territory, undermining Jordan’s negotiating position. The Jordanians felt the Egyptians were punishing them for not having taken part in the 1973 War. The Jordanian foreign minister, Samir al-Rifa’i, called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories, including East Jerusalem. Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, insisted Israel would never return to the 1967 lines and declared Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel. The only significant result of the conference was the creation of a joint Egyptian-Israeli military working group to negotiate a disengagement of Egyptian and Israeli forces in the Sinai.
In the aftermath of the failed conference, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger embarked on several rounds of intensive shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Agreements were concluded between Egypt and Israel on January 18, 1974, and between Syria and Israel in May 1974. By these agreements, Egypt regained the whole of the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, with a UN-controlled buffer zone between Egyptian and Israeli lines in the Sinai. The Syrians too regained a slice of Golan territory lost in the June 1967 War, again with a UN buffer force between Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan. With the war over and diplomacy in full swing, the Arab oil producers declared their objectives met and brought the oil embargo to a close on March 18, 1974.
Yet the events of 1973 were not seen as an unqualified success by all Arab analysts. Mohamed Heikal believed Egypt and the Arab oil states conceded too much, too soon. Having imposed an embargo with specific political objectives—the evacuation of all Arab territories occupied in June 1967—the Arabs had lifted the embargo before any of their objectives had actually been met. “All that can be said on the credit side,” Heikal concluded, “is that the world saw the Arabs acting for once in unison and oil being used, even if clumsily, as a political weapon.”23
Nevertheless, the Arab world did make significant gains in 1973. The display of discipline and unity of purpose impressed the international community and forced the superpowers to take the Arab world more seriously. On an economic level, the events of 1973 led to full Arab independence from the Western oil companies. In Shaykh Yamani’s words, the Arab oil states had asserted mastery over their own commodity and came out of the oil crisis immensely wealthier. Oil, which had traded at less than $3 a barrel before the 1973 crisis, stabilized at prices ranging from $11–13 for most of the 1970s. If Western cartoonists vilified the oil shaykh as a greedy hook-nosed character holding the world to ransom, Western businessmen were quick to flock to an emerging market of seemingly limitless resources. Even the Western oil companies had reaped enormous profits from the crisis, as their vast oil reserves appreciated with the spike in prices. Yet the events of October 1973 dealt the final blow to the oil concessions that had governed relations between Western companies and the Arab oil-producing states. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia followed Iraq and Libya in buying out the assets of Western oil companies for their national oil industries, bringing the age of the Western influence over Arab oil to a close by 1976.
The October War was also a diplomatic success. Sadat had succeeded in using the war to break the deadlock with Israel. Concerted Arab military action had proved a credible threat to Israel, and the war had raised dangerous tensions between the Soviets and Americans. The international community now gave a high priority to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through diplomacy based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
Through his bold initiatives in 1973, Anwar Sadat had secured Egypt’s interests—and placed Palestinian national aspirations in dire jeopardy. Although the UN resolutions upheld the territorial integrity of all the states in the region, they made no mention of the stateless Palestinians, other than to promise “a just settlement of the refugee problem.” The Palestine Liberation Organization, the effective government-in-exile of the Palestinian people, faced a stark choice: engage in the new diplomacy, or see Jordan and Egypt regain the West Bank and Gaza Strip through a comprehensive peace deal that would spell the end of Palestinian hopes for an independent state.
A helicopter cut swiftly through the predawn gloom along the East River to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. At 4:00 A.M. on November 13, 1974, the helicopter touched down, and anxious security men rushed PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to a secure suite inside the UN building. Arriving without warning in the dark of night, Arafat was spared the indignity of driving through the thousands of demonstrators who gathered later that morning at the UN Plaza to protest his appearance, carrying banners proclaiming the “PLO is Murder International” and the “UN Becomes a Forum of Terrorism.” He was also protected from assassins.
Arafat’s visit to the United Nations was the culmination of a remarkable year for Palestinian politics. The Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc states, the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Arab world had combined forces to secure an invitation for the PLO chief to open the UN debate on “The Question of Palestine.” It was his opportunity to present Palestinian aspirations to the community of nations. The UN appearance also marked Arafat’s transition from guerrilla leader to statesman—a role for which he had little preparation. “Why don’t you go?” he had asked Khalid al-Hasan, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile. Hasan dismissed the suggestion out of hand, insisting that only Arafat could speak on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. “You’re our Chairman. You’re our symbol. You’re Mr. Palestine. It’s you or there’s no show.”24
The show had changed dramatically in the course of 1974.
In the aftermath of the October War, the guerrilla chief had made a strategic decision to turn away from the armed struggle, and the terror tactics this involved, to negotiate a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For two and a half decades the Palestinian national movement had been more or less unanimous in seeking the liberation of the whole of historic Palestine and the destruction of the state of Israel. After the October War, Arafat recognized that the Jewish state, then twenty-five years old, was the military superpower of the region, enjoying the full support of the United States and the recognition of nearly all the international community. Israel was here to stay.
In the postwar diplomacy, Arafat rightly predicted, the neighboring Arab states would eventually accept this reality and negotiate peace treaties with Israel under U.S. and Soviet sponsorship, based on Resolution 242. The Palestinians would be pushed to the side. “What does 242 offer the Palestinians?” Arafat asked a British journalist in the 1980s. “Some compensation for the refugees and perhaps, I say only perhaps, the return of some few refugees to their homes in Palestine. But what else? Nothing. We would have been finished. The chance for us Palestinians to be a nation again, even on some small part of our homeland, would have passed. Finished. No more a Palestinian people. End of story.”25
Arafat’s solution was to settle for a ministate based in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. There were, however, a number of barriers that Arafat would have to overcome before he could hope to achieve even ministatehood for the Palestinians.
The first obstacle was Palestinian public opinion. Arafat recognized that he needed to persuade the Palestinian people to relinquish their claims to the 78 percent of Palestine lost in 1948. “When a people is claiming the return of 100 percent of its land,” Arafat explained, “it’s not so easy for leadership to say, ‘No, you can take only thirty per cent.’”26
Nor was Arafat’s claim to even 30 percent of Palestine universally recognized. The Gaza Strip had been under Egyptian administration from 1948 until occupied by Israel in the June 1967 War, and the West Bank had been formally annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. Though the Egyptians had no interest in absorbing the Gaza Strip, King Hussein of Jordan was determined to recover the West Bank and the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem, Islam’s third-holiest city, for Jordanian rule. Arafat needed to wrest the West Bank from King Hussein’s grasp.
The hard-line factions within the PLO were unwilling to concede recognition to Israel, which meant Arafat would have to overcome their opposition to a two-state solution. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front, whose notorious hijackings had precipitated the Black September war in Jordan in 1970, remained committed to the armed struggle for the liberation of all of Palestine. Had Arafat openly acknowledged the compromise he was willing to make to achieve limited statehood for the Palestinians, the more militant Palestinian factions would have demanded his head.
Finally, Arafat had to overcome international abhorrence to the PLO as an organization, and to his leadership of the PLO. Gone were the days of “humane” terrorism, in which airplanes were destroyed and hostages released unharmed. By 1974 the PLO was associated with a string of heinous crimes against civilians in Europe and Israel: an attack on El-Al offices in Athens in November 1969 that left one child dead and thirty-one people wounded; a mid-air bomb that destroyed a Swissair jet in February 1970, killing all forty-seven aboard; and the notorious attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that led to the death of eleven Israeli athletes. Israel and its Western supporters saw the PLO as a terror organization and refused to meet with its leaders; Arafat needed to persuade Western policymakers that the PLO would forego violence for diplomacy to achieve Palestinian self-determination.
Arafat had set himself high goals for 1974: securing Palestinian public support for a two-state solution, containing the hard-liners within the PLO, trumping King Hussein’s claim to the West Bank, and gaining international recognition within a single year would not be easy.
Given the constraints, Arafat had to proceed slowly and secure a constituency for the change in policy. He could not come out openly with the idea of a two-state solution, as this would entail ending the armed struggle, which enjoyed widespread Palestinian support. Negotiating for a two-state solution would have meant conferring some degree of recognition to Israel, which most Palestinians would have rejected. Instead, Arafat couched the new policy, first issued in a working paper in February 1974, in terms of establishing a “national authority” to be established “on any lands that can be wrested from Zionist occupation.”
Next, he had to gain the support of the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, for his new policy. When the PNC met in Cairo in June 1974, Arafat tabled a ten-point platform that committed the PLO to the “national authority” framework. However, to get past the hard-liners in the PLO, the platform reaffirmed the role of the armed struggle and the right of national self-determination, and it ruled out any recognition of Israel. The PNC adopted Arafat’s platform, but Palestinians knew that change was afoot. However, to the rest of the world the PLO still looked like a guerrilla organization committed to the armed struggle.
The PLO clearly needed to present a new face to the international community if the organization were to gain recognition as a government in exile. In 1973 Arafat named Said Hammami as the PLO’s representative to London. A native of the coastal city of Jaffa, Hammami had been driven out of Palestine with his family in 1948 and grew up in Syria, earning a degree in English literature at Damascus University. Hammami was both a committed Palestinian nationalist and a political moderate who quickly established good relations with journalists and policymakers in London.
In November 1973, Hammami published an article in the Times of London calling for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Many Palestinians,” he wrote, “believe that a Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank . . . is a necessary part of any peace package.” He was the first PLO representative ever to make such a proposal. “It is no small thing for a people who have been wronged as we have to take the first step towards reconciliation for the sake of a just peace that should satisfy all parties”—which, by implication, included Israel. The editor of the paper added a note to the article stressing that Hammami was “known to be very close to the PLO chairman, Mr. Yasser Arafat,” and that Hammami’s decision to state such views publicly was thus “of considerable significance.”27 Through his London representative, Arafat had succeeded in opening a channel not only to the West but also to Israel itself.
An Israeli journalist and peace activist named Uri Avnery was electrified by what he had read in Hammami’s article. Avnery had immigrated to Palestine during the mandate and joined the Irgun in the late 1930s, when still just a teenager. He would later silence those who criticized him for speaking with Palestinian “terrorists,” saying, “You can’t talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist.” Avnery was wounded in the 1948 war and went on to serve three terms in the Knesset as an independent. Though a committed Zionist, Avnery had always advocated a two-state solution, long before anyone in the Arab world would support the idea. Menachem Begin used to deride him in Knesset debates, asking, “Where are the Arab Avnerys?”28 In reading Hammami’s articles, Uri Avnery immediately recognized he had found his Palestinian counterpart.
In December 1973, Hammami penned a second column for the Times, this time calling for mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians. “The Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs should recognize one another as peoples, with all the rights to which a people is entitled. This recognition should be followed by the realization of . . . a Palestinian state, an independent, fully-fledged member state of the United Nations.”29 With this second article, Avnery recognized that Hammami’s views must have reflected a conscious change of policy within the PLO. A diplomat might make one indiscretion and keep his job, but a repeat offender would certainly get the sack. Hammami could only suggest such things as mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians with the support of Yasser Arafat.
Avnery was determined to make contact with Said Hammami. While attending the Geneva peace conference in December 1973, Avnery met a journalist with the Times and asked him to arrange a meeting with the PLO representative. The meeting carried great risks for both men. In the climate of terrorist violence of the early 1970s, both the hard-line Palestinian factions and the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, were actively assassinating their enemies. Hammami and Avnery were willing to take the risk of meeting, for both men were convinced that a two-state solution held the only prospect for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
They had their first meeting in Avnery’s London hotel room on January 27, 1974, during which Hammami set out his views. Avnery summarized them as follows:
The two peoples, the Palestinian and the Israeli, exist.
He did not like the way the new Israeli nation in Palestine came into being. He rejected Zionism. But he accepted the fact that the Israeli nation does exist.
Since the Israeli nation exists it has the right to national self-determination, much as the Palestinians have this right. At present, the only realistic solution is to allow each of the two peoples to have a state of its own.
He did not like Itzhak Rabin and understood that the Israelis did not have to like Yassir Arafat. Each people must accept the leaders chosen by the other side.
We must make peace without the intervention of either of the superpowers. Peace must come from the peoples in the region itself.30
Avnery stressed to Hammami that Israel was a democracy of its Jewish citizens, and that in order to change Israeli government policy, they would have to change Israeli public opinion. “One does not change public opinion by words, statements, diplomatic formulas,” he later recalled telling Hammami. “One changes public opinion with the impact of dramatic events, which speak directly to the heart of everyone, events which a person can see with his own eyes on television, hear on the radio, read in the headlines of his paper.”31
For the moment, neither Arafat nor Hammami could go further to win over Israeli public opinion than to argue for the two-state solution in the Western press. In the climate of the times, this represented a more radical shift in policy than the PLO leadership dared to express more openly. While the meetings between Avnery and the PLO’s London representative continued to be kept in strictest secrecy, Hammami’s moderate message no doubt played a part in Arafat’s invitation to address the United Nations. Through his articles in the Times, Hammami showed the Western world that the PLO was ready to engage in a negotiated settlement with the Israelis. Arafat’s speech would provide the opportunity for the sort of “dramatic event” Avnery believed necessary to force a shift in Israeli policy.
The next major breakthrough for Arafat in 1974 came in the inter-Arab arena. At the Rabat Summit of Arab leaders, Arafat defeated his old rival King Hussein of Jordan in securing Arab recognition for the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. On October 29, 1974, the meeting of Arab heads of state gave its unanimous support to the PLO and affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to establish a “national authority” on “any liberated Palestinian land” under PLO leadership. The resolution dealt a terrible blow to King Hussein’s claims to represent the Palestinians and to Jordan’s sovereignty over the West Bank. Arafat left Rabat with the PLO’s claims as a government-in-exile greatly strengthened.
Fifteen days after his triumph in Rabat, Arafat landed at the United Nations to secure international support for Palestinian self-determination. Lina Tabbara, a Lebanese diplomat who was half Palestinian, was in his entourage to assist with the translation of his speech into English and French. Tabbara was overwhelmed by the drama of the moment. “I entered through the main door of the glass building right behind Yasser Arafat, who received the reception accorded to a head of state except for a few details of protocol,” Tabbara recalled. “It was the climax of the [Palestinian] resistance movement, a moment of triumph for the disinherited, and one of the most beautiful days of my life.” Seeing Arafat take to the rostrum and receive a standing ovation from the General Assembly awakened her “feelings of pride at having Palestinian blood.”32
Arafat gave a long speech—101 minutes in all. “It was a real committee job,” Khalid al-Hasan later recalled. “Drafts, drafts and more drafts. When we thought we’d got it about right, we asked one of our most celebrated poets to put the finishing touch to it.”33 It was a rousing speech, a call for justice, but ultimately a speech targeting a Palestinian audience, and those who supported the Palestinian revolutionary struggle. It was not a speech intended to sway the Israeli public and force a change in Israeli government policy. Arafat did not enjoy enough support within his own movement to suggest any accommodation with Israel. And the Israelis weren’t listening: the Israeli delegation boycotted Arafat’s speech in protest against the PLO chairman’s appearance.
Instead of reinforcing Hammami’s appeal for a two-state solution, Arafat reverted to his long-standing “revolutionary dream” of “one democratic State where Christian, Jew and Moslem live in justice, equality, fraternity and progress” in the whole of Palestine. To the Israelis, and their American supporters, this still sounded like the familiar old call for the destruction of the Jewish state. Even worse, instead of using the UN podium to extend his hand to the Israelis, Arafat famously ended with a rhetorical threat. “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”34
Arafat departed the hall to another standing ovation. The PLO chairman’s call for justice and statehood for the Palestinian people enjoyed widespread support in the international community. Arafat had more need for supporters than for bold gestures. When Lina Tabbara next saw Arafat, the PLO chairman would be fighting for his political survival in Civil War Lebanon, just two years later.
So much had been achieved by the Palestinian movement in 1974. Khalid al-Hasan, chairman of the PNC Foreign Relations Committee, declared 1974 “such an important year,” when the PLO leadership was “committed to an accommodation with Israel.” But no further progress was made on Palestinian-Israeli negotiations after Arafat’s UN speech. Hammami and Avnery continued to meet in secret in London, with Hammami briefing Arafat and Avnery periodically meeting with Itzhak Rabin to update their respective leaders on their conversations. “It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Said Hammami’s work,” Khalid al-Hasan insisted. “If the Israeli Government of Yitzhak Rabin had responded to the signals we were sending through Hammami, we could have had a just peace in a very few years.”35 But Arafat did not dare make any concessions to Israel, and Rabin did not want to do anything that might encourage the creation of a Palestinian state, to which he was adamantly opposed.
With both the Palestinians and the Israelis hardening their positions after 1974, both Hammami and Avnery faced growing danger from extremists within their own societies. In December 1975, a mad Israeli attacked Avnery with a knife and severely wounded him near his Tel Aviv home. And in January 1978 Hammami was gunned down in his London office, executed by the Palestinian rejectionist Abu Nidal Group for his meetings with Israelis. The gunman fired a single shot to Hammami’s head, spat on him, and called him a traitor before slipping away through the streets of London with impunity.36
The window of opportunity for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians was now closed. On April 13, 1975, Christian militiamen ambushed a busload of Palestinians in the Beirut suburb of Ain Rummaneh, killing all twenty-eight on board. It was the start of a civil war that over the next fifteen years would lay waste to Lebanon and drive the Palestinian movement to the brink of extermination.
Political stability in Lebanon was placed under growing pressure as the demographic balance of the country changed. The French had carved the biggest possible country out of the Syrian mandate so as to create a state in which their Christian protégés would represent a majority. However, the Muslim communities of Lebanon (which included the Druzes along with the Sunnis and Shiites) experienced a higher rate of population growth and by the 1950s began to overtake the Christians (which included the dominant Maronites, along with Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Protestants, and a number of smaller sects) in sheer numbers. The 1932 census, which showed the Christians with a small majority over the Muslims, was to prove the last formal head count: to this day, there still are no accurate figures for the population breakdown of Lebanon.
By the time Lebanon achieved independence in 1943 the Muslims population was willing to concede political predominance to the Christians in exchange for a Christian commitment to integrate Lebanon in the Arab world and to distance themselves from their former colonial power and protector, France. The power-sharing formula they struck in the 1943 National Pact was a “confessional” or sectarian system, in which the top government posts were apportioned to Lebanon’s communities—e.g., a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, a Shiite speaker of parliament. Seats in the parliament were distributed among Christians and Muslims by a ratio that marginally favored the Christians 6:5.
This power-sharing agreement was first challenged in the 1958 civil war. U.S. military intervention and the election of a reformist president, Fuad Chehab, in September 1958 restored the status quo in Lebanon and preserved the confessional system for another decade. The advent of the Palestinian revolution on Lebanese soil in the late 1960s catalyzed the next assault on the confessional system.
The Palestinians disrupted the political and demographic balance in Lebanon in specific ways. The number of registered Palestinian refugees had grown from 127,600 in 1950 to 197,000 by 1975, though the true Palestinian presence was closer to 350,000 by 1975.37 The Palestinian refugees were overwhelmingly Muslim. Though they were never integrated into the Lebanese population or given citizenship, their presence on Lebanese soil meant a major increase in the country’s Muslim population. They had been politically quiescent until 1969, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had negotiated terms with the Lebanese government for Palestinian guerrillas to operate from Lebanese soil against northern Israel. Lebanon became the operational headquarters of the PLO after the expulsion of Palestinian militias from Jordan following Black September. The Palestinian refugee camps became increasingly militarized and politically militant. They challenged the sovereignty of the Lebanese government in ways that led some to accuse the Palestinian revolution of constituting a state within a state in Lebanon.
There were many in Lebanon who placed the blame for the 1975 civil war squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians. To former president Camille Chamoun, still one of the most influential Maronite leaders in the mid-1970s, the conflict was never a civil war: “It began and continued to be a war between Lebanese and Palestinians” that, he argued, was harnessed by Lebanese Muslims to help them “seize the supreme authority over the whole of the country.”38 Chamoun was being economical with the truth. Differences between the Lebanese had grown so profound that the Palestinians were no more than a catalyst in a conflict to redefine politics in Lebanon.
In the early 1970s, Muslims, Druzes, Pan-Arabs, and Leftist organizations, including some Christians, forged a political coalition called the National Movement. Their goal was to overturn Lebanon’s outdated sectarian system and replace it with a secular democracy of one citizen, one vote. The head of this coalition was Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. Born in 1917 in his family’s stronghold in the village of Moukhtara, Jumblatt studied law and philosophy in Paris and at the Jesuit University in Beirut before entering the Lebanese parliament in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine. “Only a secular, progressive Lebanon freed of confessionalism,” he maintained, “could ever hope to survive.”39 To his critics, Jumblatt’s call for a secular Lebanon was nothing less than a bid for Muslim majority rule—by the mid-1970s, Lebanese Muslims were estimated to outnumber Christians by a ratio of 55:45—and the end of Lebanon’s identity as a Christian state in the Middle East.
The Palestinians, in Jumblatt’s view, were but a contributing factor in a war that was fundamentally between the Lebanese. “If the Lebanese had not been ready for an explosion,” he reasoned, “there would have been no explosion.” The differences between Chamoun’s and Jumblatt’s views of Lebanon could not be more profound. The Maronite leader Chamoun was wedded to preserving the National Pact distribution of power—and through it the privileged position of Christians in Lebanon. Jumblatt and the National Movement called for a new order based on equal rights of citizenship that would advantage Lebanon’s Muslim majority. At root it was a power struggle over who would rule Lebanon, with both sides claiming the moral high ground. One contemporary described Chamoun and Jumblatt as “paragons to their supporters and monsters to their opponents” who “detest and cold shoulder one another, both entrenched in their palaces and in their certainties.”40
Conflict between defenders of the status quo and proponents of social revolution came to a head in the spring of 1975. That March, Muslim fishermen in the southern city of Sidon went on strike to protest a new fishing monopoly they feared would destroy their livelihood. The consortium was run by Camille Chamoun and a number of other Maronites, making a sectarian issue of what was at heart industrial action. The fishermen mounted demonstrations, which the Maronite-commanded Lebanese army was dispatched to quell. The National Movement condemned the military intervention as a Maronite army defending Maronite big business. The army fired on protesters and killed Ma‘ruf Sa’d, a Sunni Muslim leader of a left-wing Nasserist party, on March 6. Sa’d’s death sparked a popular uprising in Sidon in which Palestinian commandos joined forces with Leftist Lebanese militiamen in pitched battles against the Lebanese army.
The conflict spread from Sidon to Beirut when a carload of gunmen made an unprovoked attack on Maronite leader Pierre Gemayel as he was leaving church on Sunday, April 13. Gemayel was the founder of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party, the single largest militia in Lebanon, with an estimated 15,000 armed members. The gunmen killed three people, including one of Gemayel’s bodyguards. Bent on revenge, the outraged Phalangists ambushed a busload of Palestinians that same day as they drove through the Christian suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh, killing all twenty-eight people on board. As news of the massacre spread, the Lebanese populace knew immediately that the sudden escalation of violence spelled war. The following day, no one went to work, schools closed, and the streets were empty as the people of Beirut followed events anxiously from their homes, reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, and relaying local news by telephone against the staccato background of gunfire.
Lina Tabbara was working in Beirut when the civil war began. After completing her tour of duty at the United Nations, where she had assisted Yasser Arafat with his 1974 speech, Tabbara had returned to Lebanon to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In many ways she typified the affluent, cosmopolitan Lebanese: well-educated; fluent in English, French, and Arabic; married to an architect; and living in one of the most elegant neighborhoods of downtown Beirut. She was thirty-four years old with two young daughters, ages two and four, at the outbreak of the war.
With her auburn hair and blue eyes, Tabarra could pass for a Christian, though she was in fact a Muslim of mixed Palestinian and Lebanese parentage. She wore her mixed identities with pride, and in the opening months of the war she refused to take sides, even as she watched society around her divide into two deeply entrenched camps. It was not an easy position to maintain. From its opening moments, the Lebanese civil war was marked by sectarian murder and the brutal reciprocity of revenge killings.
On May 31, after seven weeks of fighting between militias, Beirut witnessed the first sectarian massacres in which unarmed civilians were killed simply on the grounds of their religion. A friend called Lina Tabbara to warn her that Muslims were rounding up Christians in the Bashoura quarter of West Beirut. “There’s a barricade and an identity checkpoint,” Tabbara’s friend exclaimed. “The Christians have to get down. They are dragged off to the cemetery.” Ten Christians were executed in Beirut that day. The newspapers called it Black Friday. Much worse was to follow.41
Throughout the summer of 1975, life in Beirut took on an unnatural normalcy as the city’s residents adapted to the constraints imposed by the war. One of the most popular radio programs provided listeners with periodic updates on safe routes and no-go zones. “Dear listeners,” the reassuring presenter would announce, “we advise you to avoid this area and to take that route instead.” As the conflict deepened over the summer and into the autumn of 1975, his tone grew increasingly urgent. “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Today, Sunday, 20th October, you’ve all had a good time, haven’t you? Now you must go back home very quickly, very quickly!”42 The radio alert marked the start of a new battle in central Beirut in which rival militias fought over the tallest buildings as platforms from which to observe and bombard their enemies. The incomplete shell of a skyscraper called the Murr Tower, overlooking the commercial center of Beirut, became a stronghold of the Sunni Leftist Murabitun militia. The high-rise Holiday Inn, in the heart of the Beirut hotel district, was seized by the Maronite Phalangist militia.
Missiles and artillery shells were exchanged between the two towers in all-night battles, causing massive destruction to surrounding areas. National Movement forces—Tabbara called them the “Islamo-Progressives”—laid siege to the hotel district and trapped the Maronite forces in October 1975. The Christian militiamen were rescued by Camille Chamoun, who, as minister of the interior, had the authority to deploy 2,000 soldiers from the Lebanese army around the hotel district as a buffer between the combatants. Another cease-fire followed in November, but no one had any illusions that the fighting was over.
In December, the barricades were back in place and the mindless killing of innocents resumed. Four Phalangists were kidnapped and later found dead. Maronite militiamen retaliated by killing 300–400 civilians whose identity cards betrayed them as Muslims. Muslim militiamen responded in kind, killing hundreds of Christians. The day came to be known as Black Saturday. For Lina Tabbara, it was the day she finally took sides. “It’s no longer possible to ignore the yawning gulf separating Christians and Moslems; things have gone too far with this Black Saturday.” Henceforth, Lina identified with the Muslim cause. “I feel the seeds of hatred and the desire for revenge taking root in my very depths. At this moment I want the Mourabitouns or anybody else to give the Phalangists back twice as good as we got.”43
By the beginning of 1976 outside powers began to play an active role in the war between the Lebanese. The months of intense fighting consumed a great deal of guns and ammunition, jeeps and uniforms, and rockets and artillery, all of which were enormously costly. Lebanese militias sought arms from neighboring countries that were awash in weapons. One of the consequences of the oil boom was the rapid expansion of arms sales to the Middle East, and Lebanon’s neighbors seized on the deepening civil war to exercise influence over the country through arming its militias.
The Soviets and the Americans had long provided weapons systems to their allies in the region. Other states were quick to enter the lucrative market, with European producers competing with the Americans for sales of heavy weapons to West-leaning “moderate” Arab states. Saudi defense spending, for instance, increased from $171 million in 1968 to over $13 billion by 1978.44 Surplus weapons began to make their way to supply the warring Lebanese militias, as regional powers sought to influence developments in Lebanon. Lina Tabbara reported rumors of Saudi support for Christian militias “as the regime in Riyadh prefers to support the opponents of Islam for fear of a hypothetical takeover by the Communists.”45 The Maronites also received arms and ammunition from the Israelis, to assist in their fight against Palestinian militias. The Left-leaning National Movement secured arms from the Soviet Union and through Soviet client states like Iraq and Libya. The internal conflict between Lebanese was getting dragged into the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the struggle between revolutionary and conservative regimes in the Arab world.
The Lebanese war dissolved into an exterminationist conflict in the course of 1976, in which massacre begat retaliatory massacre. Christian forces overran the Muslim shantytown of the Karantina in January 1976, killing hundreds and using bulldozers to obliterate the slum quarter from the map. The National Movement and Palestinian forces retaliated by laying siege to Camille Chamoun’s stronghold at Damour, a major Christian town on the coast to the south of Beirut. Five hundred Maronites were killed when Damour fell to the Palestinians and Muslim militias on January 20. Five months later, Maronite forces laid siege to the isolated Palestinian refugee camp at Tal al-Za‘tar, set in the midst of Christian neighborhoods. The camp’s 30,000 inhabitants suffered a fifty-three-day campaign of relentless violence before surrendering, after weeks without medical relief, fresh water, and dwindling food supplies. No reliable casualty figures were available for the siege, though an estimated 3,000 died in Tal al-Za’tar.46 In all, some 30,000 people were killed and nearly 70,000 wounded between the outbreak of the war in April 1975 and the cessation of general hostilities in October 1976—an enormous toll in a population of 3.25 million.47
The end of the first stage of the Lebanese civil war, in October 1976, came as a result of a political crisis. In March 1976 the Lebanese parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the president of the republic, Suleiman Franjieh, and asked for his resignation. When Franjieh refused, Kamal Jumblatt threatened all-out war, and dissident army units began to shell the Presidential Palace in the Beirut suburbs. The Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, sent his troops into Lebanon to protect Franjieh and to secure a cease-fire.
The Lebanese parliament met again under Syrian protection and agreed to hold early elections to resolve the political deadlock. The Lebanese president was, and still is, elected by the members of parliament, who assembled in May 1976 to cast their votes for a new leader. There were two candidates—Elias Sarkis, who was supported by conservative Christians and the Maronite militias; and Raymond Eddé, the preferred choice of the reformists and the National Movement. Much to the surprise of the Muslim forces in Lebanon, Asad of Syria put his full support behind Elias Sarkis and ensured his victory over Eddé. It was a critical turning point, as Syria began to intervene directly in Lebanese politics and to secure its influence over the country by deploying its troops in strategic points in Beirut and across Lebanon.
In giving their support to Elias Sarkis, the Syrians were in effect taking sides against Jumblatt’s National Movement and the Palestinians. It was an astonishing reversal of positions, for the Syrians had always stood for Pan-Arabism and the Palestinian cause. Yet here they were coming to the defense of the West-leaning, anti-Arabist Maronites. For Lina Tabbara, the reality of the situation was brought home when she watched Syrian forces in the Beirut Airport “using Soviet-made Grad ground-to-ground missiles bought with Soviet aid to shell Palestinian refugee camps and the Beiruti areas held by the [Muslim] Progressives.”48 Lina quickly recognized that the Syrians were not supporting the Maronites in their own right so much as using the Maronites as a means to extend their own domination over Lebanon.
Syria’s intervention in Lebanon provoked concern among the other Arab states, which did not wish to see Damascus take advantage of the Lebanon conflict to absorb its once prosperous neighbor. King Khalid of Saudi Arabia (r. 1975–1982) convened a minisummit of Arab leaders in Riyadh attended by Lebanese president Sarkis, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, and representatives of Kuwait, Egypt, and Syria.
The Arab leaders announced their plans for Lebanon on October 18, 1976, with a call for total disengagement by all armed elements and a permanent cease-fire to take effect in ten days’ time. The Arab states were to create a 30,000-man peacekeeping force to be placed under the command of the president of Lebanon. The Arab peacekeepers would have the authority to disarm combatants and to confiscate weapons from all who violated the cease-fire. The Riyadh summit called on the PLO to respect Lebanese sovereignty and to withdraw to the areas allotted the Palestinian fighters in the 1969 Cairo Agreement. The summit resolution concluded with a call for political dialogue between all the parties in Lebanon to achieve national reconciliation.
Despite their concerns for Syria’s intentions, the Riyadh resolutions had done little to lessen Damascus’s grasp over Lebanon. With other Arab states unwilling to commit significant numbers of troops to Lebanon, the Syrian army dominated the Arab multinational force: of the 30,000 Arab troops sent to keep the peace in Lebanon, some 26,500 were Syrian. The token contingents from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Libya did not stay in Lebanon for long before delegating the task wholly to the Syrians. In mid-November, some 6,000 Syrian troops occupied Beirut, reinforced by 200 tanks. The Riyadh summit resolutions thus proved little more than a formula to legitimize the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
Though President Sarkis called on the Lebanese to greet the Syrians “in love and brotherhood,” Muslim and Progressive parties had grave doubts. Kamal Jumblatt recorded one of his conversations with Hafez al-Asad in his memoirs: “I beg you to withdraw the troops you have sent into Lebanon. Carry on with your political intervention, your mediation, your arbitration.... But I must advise you against military means. We do not want to be a satellite state.”49 Lina Tabbara was appalled to see the Syrian army spread all over Beirut, but what annoyed her most was that “nearly everybody is apparently satisfied with this state of affairs.”
In the wake of the Riyadh summit, the fifty-sixth cease-fire since the start of the war took effect. If the Lebanese people had hoped that the Syrian occupation would bring them peace after nearly two years of war, they were soon disappointed. Shortly after the Syrians entered Beirut, Tabbara witnessed one of the first car bombs that were to become a hallmark of the violence in Lebanon. “Loud cries and screams can be heard off-stage,” she wrote, describing the carnage before her eyes. “Look out, it’s a booby-trapped car, there may be another, someone exclaims. This kind of attack has increased during the past few days, but no one knows who is behind them. Many badly wounded people are lying on the road.” Tabbara reflected grim satisfaction on seeing “the triumphant placidity of the Lebanese under the Syrian peace shattered.” 50 She and her family had witnessed enough blood and destruction. They left Beirut to the Syrians and joined the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese in foreign exile.
Yet as far as the international community was concerned, the conflict in Lebanon had been resolved—at least for the moment. The focus of the global media had shifted from war-torn Lebanon to Jerusalem, where, on Sunday, November 20, 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was about to address the Knesset, the parliament of the state of Israel, to propose an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In January 1977, Sadat was giving an interview to a Lebanese journalist in his vacation home in the town of Aswan on the upper Nile. The journalist broke off her questioning as a column of thick smoke rose from the center of the town. “Mr. President,” she said, “something strange is happening behind you.” Sadat turned and saw fires in Aswan and a mob crossing the bridge over the Nile toward his house. Sadat had just ordered the cash-strapped Egyptian government to lift a number of ² crucial subsidies on bread and other staples. Egypt’s poor saw their subsistence placed in jeopardy and rose in nationwide bread riots that left 171 dead and hundreds injured before the subsidies, and calm, were restored.51
Something strange indeed was happening behind Sadat. The Egyptian public, who once hailed him as the “Hero of the Crossing” for Egypt’s successes on the Suez Canal in the October War, were losing confidence in their president. Sadat did not have Nasser’s charisma or mass appeal. He needed to deliver on his promises of prosperity or face deposal. Sadat grew increasingly convinced that prosperity could only be achieved through American support—and peace with Israel.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1973 War, Sadat had leveraged Egypt’s credible military performance and the successful deployment of the Arab oil weapon to secure U.S. support for a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initiated his signature shuttle diplomacy, making frequent negotiating trips between Cairo and Jerusalem to secure the two Sinai Disengagement Accords (January 1974 and September 1975) that restored both the Suez Canal and some of the Sinai oil fields to Egypt.
The recovery of the Suez Canal was a major accomplishment for Sadat, first because he had succeeded where Nasser had failed—in ensuring the canal did not become the de facto boundary between Egypt and Israel—and second, because the canal was a major revenue source for cash-strapped Egypt. With American assistance, the Egyptians cleared the wrecks of ships destroyed in the course of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 from the canal, and on June 5, 1975, Sadat reopened the strategic waterway to international shipping. The first ships to exit the canal were some of the fourteen vessels of the “Yellow Fleet,” a group of international steamers trapped in the Great Bitter Lakes by the 1967 War that had spent eight years gathering the yellow dust for which the fleet was named. Though Egypt celebrated these gains, the Sinai Accords left Israel in control of most of the Sinai Peninsula (Egyptian territory occupied by Israel in the Six Day War) and the Egyptian treasury still struggling to make ends meet.
Sadat was growing increasingly desperate for new funds for his treasury, and he revealed a willingness to turn against his Arab neighbors to reinforce his own position. In his desperation to increase Egypt’s revenues, in the summer of 1977 Sadat attempted to seize oil fields belonging to Libya. According to contemporary estimates, Libya generated some $5 billion in oil revenues each year, a vast sum for a population that was a fraction the size of Egypt’s—protected by an army that was also a fraction the size of Egypt’s. In a moment of mad opportunism, Sadat considered the Soviet arms deliveries to his wealthy neighbor a pretext to invade—as though the Libyan arsenal represented a threat to Egypt’s security.
Sadat withdrew his forces on the Israeli front in the Sinai to attack the Libyans in the Western Desert on July 16. The Egyptian air force bombed Libyan bases and provided air cover for the invasion of Libya. “Almost immediately it became clear that Sadat had miscalculated,” veteran analyst Mohamed Heikal recalled. “Neither the [Egyptian] public nor the army saw any logic in disengaging forces with an enemy, Israel, only to attack an Arab neighbour.”
The Egyptian attack on Libya went on for nine days. Egyptian public was unenthusiastic, and Washington was openly hostile to Egypt’s unprovoked aggression. The U.S. ambassador in Cairo made clear Washington’s opposition to any invasion of Libya, and Sadat was forced to back down. On July 25, Egyptian troops withdrew from Libya, bringing the conflict to an end. “Thus it was,” Heikal concluded, “that the food riots in January and a botched foreign adventure . . . led Sadat to the conclusion by mid-1977 that Egypt would have to negotiate a new relationship with Israel.” 52If Sadat failed to increase his revenues, he would face further food riots. He could not secure the funding from his Arab brethren—by persuasion or coercion. Yet by being the first Arab state to conclude peace with Israel, Egypt could attract substantial U.S. development aid and foreign investment. It was a high-risk strategy, given Arab intransigence toward Israel. Yet Sadat had taken high risks before and succeeded.
The obstacles to peace with Israel had never appeared higher. In May 1977, Menachem Begin led the right-wing Likud Party to victory, shattering the Labour Party’s monopoly of government since the founding of the state of Israel. Under Begin’s leadership, the Likud Party was committed to establishing Jewish settlements to retain the Arab territories Israel occupied in the June 1967 War. It would be hard to imagine a more intransigent negotiating partner than the ex-terrorist proponent of Greater Israel. And yet it was Begin who made the first contact, sending conciliatory messages to the Egyptian president through King Hassan II of Morocco and Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu. The latter persuaded Sadat that “a peace treaty would have been impossible with Labour in power and Begin in opposition, but with the roles reversed the prospects were better,” for the Labour Party was less likely to stand in the way of a peace deal with Egypt.53
Sadat returned to Egypt and began to contemplate the unthinkable: direct negotiations with the Israelis to secure an Arab-Israeli peace treaty. He had demonstrated Egypt’s military leadership in the October War and would secure Egypt’s leadership over the Arab world by leading the peace. Just as his generals had been resistant to making war with Israel when he first broached the subject in 1972, so he knew his politicians would resist his peace plans. He would need to reshuffle his political team and bring in some new talent less resistant to change. He chose a complete outsider to help plan his peace campaign.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali (b. 1922) was a professor of political science at Cairo University. His grandfather had served as prime minister and his uncle as foreign minister under Egypt’s monarchy. Members of the landed aristocracy, the Boutros-Ghali family saw their agricultural estates confiscated by the new government’s land reform measures following the 1952 revolution.
In a country that was overwhelmingly Muslim, Boutros-Ghali was a Coptic Christian and his wife a member of a prominent Egyptian Jewish family. Yet these very qualities, which had marginalized Boutros-Ghali from Egyptian politics since the 1952 revolution, now recommended him for government service when Sadat decided to attempt a peace settlement with Israel. On October 25, 1977, the professor who would later become secretary-general of the United Nations was astonished to learn that he had been appointed minister of state in a cabinet reshuffle.
Shortly after entering government, Boutros-Ghali attended Sadat’s November 9 speech to the People’s Assembly, in which the president first intimated his willingness to work with Israel. “I am ready to travel to the ends of the earth if this will in any way protect an Egyptian boy, soldier, or officer from being killed or wounded,” Sadat told the legislators. Speaking of the Israelis, he continued: “I am ready to go to their country, even to the Knesset itself and talk with them.”
Boutros-Ghali recalled that PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, who attended the session to hear Sadat’s speech, “was the first to burst into applause at these words. Neither Arafat nor my colleagues nor I understood the implications of what the president had said.” None of them had a clue that Sadat actually contemplated imminent travel to Israel.54 But one week later, Boutros-Ghali understood the full significance of Sadat’s words, when the then vice president Hosni Mubarak asked him to draft the outline of a speech “that the president will give next Sunday—in Israel!” Boutros-Ghali was excited to find himself “at the heart of this historic event.”
As Sadat expected, many of his politicians rejected his plans. Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi and Muhammad Riyad, the minister of state for foreign affairs, both resigned rather than accompany Sadat to Jerusalem. Two days before Sadat was scheduled to depart, Boutros-Ghali was appointed acting foreign minister and invited to join the presidential delegation to Jerusalem. His friends warned him not to go. “The fear in the air was palpable,” Boutros-Ghali recalled. “The Arab press was vicious. No Muslim, they wrote, would agree to accompany Sadat, so he chose the Christian Boutros-Ghali, who has a Jewish wife.”55 Yet the new acting foreign minister found himself “attracted by the extraordinary challenge” of shattering the taboos set out in the 1967 Khartoum Summit, which had bound all Arab states to a common position of no recognition of the Jewish state, no negotiation with Israeli officials, and no peace between Arab states and Israel.
The Egyptian president annoyed his fellow Arab heads of state by announcing his plans and only then seeking their support for his initiative. Eager to avoid a break with Syria, Sadat flew to Damascus to brief President Hafiz al-Asad on his plans to visit Israel. Al-Asad was quick to remind Sadat of the common Arab position. “Brother Anwar, you are always in a hurry,” Asad told him. “I understand your impatience, but please understand that you cannot go to Jerusalem. This is treason,” he warned. “The Egyptian people will not take it. The Arab nation will never forgive you.”56
Yet Sadat was not to be deterred, and on November 19, with Boutros-Ghali in tow, he boarded a government plane for the forty-five-minute flight to Tel Aviv. “I had not realized the distance was so short!” Boutros-Ghali exclaimed. “Israel seemed as strange to me as a land in outer space.”57After so many years of war and enmity, it was as though the Egyptian people were looking at Israel as a real country for the first time. They had very mixed feelings. Veteran Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal captured the moment as Sadat emerged from his airplane at Lod Airport: “As television cameras followed him down the steps the guilt felt by millions of Egyptians was replaced by a sense of participation. Right or wrong, Sadat’s political and physical courage was beyond dispute. His arrival on forbidden territory enthralled many Egyptians and appalled the rest of the Arab world.”58
The following day, Sunday, November 20, 1977, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset in Arabic (much to Boutros-Ghali’s chagrin, the English text on which he had worked so long was not used). This was exactly the bold gesture that Uri Avnery had always pressed the PLO to make—a gesture calculated to convince the Israeli public that there was an Arab partner for peace. “Allow me to address my call from this rostrum to the people of Israel,” Sadat said to the television cameras. “I convey to you the message of peace of the Egyptian people,” he declared, “a message of security, safety, and peace to every man, woman, and child in Israel.” Sadat went right over the heads of the Israeli lawmakers to exhort the Israeli electorate to “encourage your leadership to struggle for peace.”
“Let us be frank with each other,” Sadat continued to his audience both within and beyond the Knesset. “How can we achieve permanent peace based on justice?” Sadat made clear his view that for peace to endure, it had to bring a just solution to the Palestinian problem. “Nobody in the world could accept today slogans propagated here in Israel, ignoring the existence of a Palestinian people and questioning even their whereabouts,” he chided his hosts. Peace, he continued, was also incompatible with the occupation of other countries’ land. He called for the return of all Arab territory occupied in 1967—including East Jerusalem. In return, Israel would enjoy the full acceptance and recognition of all its Arab neighbors. “As we really and truly seek peace we really and truly welcome you to live among us in peace and security,” Sadat insisted.
Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem proved a remarkable diplomatic coup—it began the first serious peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors. However, the road to peace proved long, arduous, and full of hazards. The Egyptians and Israelis came to the negotiating table with very different expectations. Sadat hoped to lead the rest of the Arab world to conclude peace with Israel, on the basis of a complete Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Begin had no intention of making such concessions, and he undermined Sadat’s credibility within the Arab world when, in his response to Sadat at the Knesset, he asserted, “President Sadat knows, as he knew from us before he came to Jerusalem, that our position concerning permanent borders between us and our neighbors differs from his.”59 In the course of their subsequent negotiations, Begin declared his willingness to restore most of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and most of the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a full normalization of relations, but he categorically refused to make concessions to the Palestinians.
Israel’s position on a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace deal was far too restrictive to attract broader Arab involvement. Begin was intent on preserving Jewish settlements and retaining parts of occupied Syrian and Egyptian land for strategic reasons. The most the Israelis were willing to concede the Palestinians was a degree of self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank, which Begin consistently referred to by the Biblical names of Judea and Samaria. The Israelis refused to meet with the PLO, and there was no question of Palestinian independence, or statehood, or of Israel returning any part of Jerusalem, which the Knesset had declared the eternal, indivisible capital of the Jewish state (which claim has yet to gain international recognition).
Having embarked on his bold peace initiative, Sadat found himself caught between intransigence on both the Arab and the Israeli sides. None of the Arab rulers was inclined to follow Egypt’s lead, and Prime Minister Begin gave them little incentive to do so. He was convinced that peace with Egypt was in Israel’s strategic interests, for no other Arab country would be able to mount a credible threat to the Jewish state without Egypt. Peace with other Arab states was a secondary priority, and he was unwilling to make any concessions that might draw them into serious negotiations. Sadat was left to go it alone in negotiating with Israel against widespread Arab hostility.
U.S. president Jimmy Carter exerted every effort to shepherd the beleaguered Egyptian-Israeli initiative toward peace. He convened a meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978. Once again, Boutros Boutros-Ghali was in the Egyptian delegation. Flying with Sadat to the Camp David meeting, Boutros-Ghali listened to the Egyptian president’s game plan with mounting concern. Sadat naively believed he could win over American public opinion to Egypt’s negotiating position, that President Carter would take his side and force the necessary concessions from Israel to deliver what Sadat wanted. Boutros-Ghali did not think it would prove so simple. “I feared that the Americans would not pressure Israel and that Sadat would then make concessions.”60
Sadat was not entirely wrong. Egypt’s position enjoyed wide support in the United States, and President Carter did exert tremendous efforts to force concessions from Prime Minister Begin. It took thirteen days of bitter negotiations and twenty-two drafts before Carter brought the two sides to agreement. Begin agreed to retreat from the whole of the Sinai (where he had planned to spend his retirement); however, Sadat was forced to make concessions as well. Crucially, the agreement did not secure Palestinian rights to self-determination. The framework document provided for a five-year transitional period in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an Israeli military withdrawal, and a freely elected self-governing authority in the Palestinian territories. However, it left open the final status of the occupied Palestinian territories to future negotiations between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the elected representatives of the Palestinian territories. And it contained no penalty for Israel’s failure to fulfill these commitments.
The new Egyptian foreign minister, Muhammad Ibrahim Kamil, resigned in protest of Sadat’s betrayal of Palestinian rights. Yet Sadat would not be deterred and went to Washington to sign the “Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty” in a formal ceremony at the White House on September 17, 1978.
The Arab world was appalled by Sadat’s decision to break ranks and pursue a separate peace with Israel. In November 1978, the Arab heads of state convened a summit conference in Baghdad to address the crisis. The oil states pledged to provide Egypt with an annual allocation of $5 billion for a ten-year period, to undermine any material incentive Sadat might have had in seeking peace with Israel. They also threatened Egypt with expulsion from the Arab League, and to move the league’s headquarters from Cairo to Tunis, should Sadat make peace with Israel.
Yet Sadat had come too far to be deterred by Arab threats. After six months of further negotiations, Carter, Begin, and Sadat returned to the White House lawn to sign the final peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, on March 26, 1979. After Egypt had fought five wars against Israel, the most powerful Arab state put down its sword. Without Egypt, Arabs could never prevail over Israel militarily. The Palestinians and the other Arab states would have to secure their national and territorial ambitions by negotiation. Yet the Arab states would never enjoy sufficient leverage to pressure an intransigent Israel to return their lands, nor would they forgive Egypt for breaking Arab ranks to secure its own territory at their expense. Through collective action, the other Arab states argued, the Arabs could have secured a better peace deal for all.
Immediately after the signing of the peace treaty in March 1979, the Arab states acted on their threats and severed ties with Egypt. It would take over twenty years for Egypt to return fully to the Arab fold. Sadat feigned indifference, but the Egyptian people, proud of their country’s leadership of Arab affairs, were shaken by their isolation. They watched in dismay as the colors of Arab states were struck from the flag poles of the Arab League headquarters and embassy buildings across downtown Cairo in 1979, and viewed with no less concern the Star of David raised over the new Israeli Embassy in Cairo, with the conclusion of full diplomatic relations in February 1980.
The Egyptian people were not averse to peace with Israel; they just did not want peace at the price of Egypt’s ties to the Arab world. Egypt and Israel were now at peace, but it brought little joy to the people of either country.
At the end of the 1970s, Arab-Israel peacemaking was overtaken by one of the most momentous events in modern Middle Eastern history. Though Iran lies outside the Arab world, the impact of the Islamic Revolution was felt across the Arab Middle East.
In January 1979, the American-supported shah of Iran was toppled by a popular revolution headed by Islamic clerics. The Islamic Revolution was one of the most significant events of the Cold War era, for it profoundly altered the balance of power in the Middle East as the United States lost one of its pillars of influence in the region. The Iranian revolution also had a profound impact on oil prices. In the turmoil of the revolution, Iranian oil production—the second largest in the world—had ground to a virtual halt. In the panic following the fall of the shah, global markets experienced the second oil shock of the decade. Prices nearly tripled, from $13 to $34 per barrel.
While consumers around the world suffered, the oil-producing states enjoyed a new age of prosperity. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest hydrocarbons exporter, was the oil-rich state par excellence. Its revenues from oil rose from $1.2 billion in 1970 to $22.5 billion at the height of the 1973–1974 oil embargo. Following the second oil shock provoked by Iran’s revolution, Saudi revenues leaped to $70 billion in 1979—nearly a sixty-fold increase over the course of the 1970s. The other Arab oil producers, including Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, enjoyed similar rates of growth. The Saudis responded with the most ambitious public expenditure program in the Arab world, with annual spending on development leaping from $2.5 billion in 1970 to $57 billion in 1980.61
Yet Saudi Arabia, like the other oil states, lacked the manpower to realize its development objectives on its own and was forced to recruit labor from the rest of the Arab world. Egypt was the premier labor-exporting state, though Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, as well as the stateless Palestinians, were all active in Arab labor migration. In the course of the 1970s, the number of Arab migrant workers in the oil states rose from some 680,000 in 1970 to 1.3 million in the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo, to an estimated 3 million by 1980. These Arab labor migrants contributed enormously to their national economies. Egyptian workers in the oil states sent home $10 million in 1970, $189 million in 1974, and an estimated $2 billion in 1980—a 200-fold increase in the course of one decade.
Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim identified a “new Arab social order” that resulted from this exchange of labor and capital between oil-rich and oil-poor states. At a time of deep political divides, the Arabs were enjoying growing interdependence at the economic level. The new order was resilient enough to withstand inter-Arab hostilities: when Egypt went to war with Libya in the summer of 1977, none of the 400,000 Egyptian workers was expelled in retaliation. Such pragmatism prevailed even when Sadat broke Arab ranks to make peace with Israel; demand for Egyptian manpower in the oil states only increased in the years following the Camp David Accords. As Ibrahim concluded, oil had made the Arab world more closely linked socioeconomically by the end of the 1970s than at any time in its modern history.62
The impact of the Iranian revolution went much further than just the oil markets. The fall of one of the longest-ruling autocrats in the Middle East, backed by one of the most powerful armed forces in the region and enjoying the full support of the United States, made Arab politicians sit up and take notice. Nervous Arab rulers began to consider Islamic parties within their own boundaries with growing concern. “Is there a risk that the Iranian revolution can spread to Egypt?” Boutros Boutros-Ghali later recalled asking an Egyptian journalist. “The Iranian revolution is a sickness that cannot spread to Egypt,” the journalist assured him.63 Iran is a Shiite state, he argued, whereas Egypt and the Arab states were overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. And Egypt was protected from the contagion of Iran by another Islamic state—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Events would soon prove the journalist wrong. Islamic politics would rise to challenge every political leadership in the Arab world in the coming decade—starting in Saudi Arabia.
The Islamic challenge to the Saudi Kingdom came on November 20, 1979, when a little-known organization calling itself the Movement of the Muslim Revolutionaries of the Arabian Peninsula occupied the Great Mosque of Mecca, the very nerve center of Islam. The leader of the movement called for the purification of Islam, the rejection of Western values, and the liberation of the country from the Saudi monarchy, which he accused of hypocrisy and corruption. The standoff lasted more than two weeks, with some 1,000 rebels holding Islam’s holiest shrine hostage. The Saudis were forced to send in their national guard to put down the rebellion. Official figures put the death toll in the dozens; unofficial observers claimed that hundreds were killed. The leader of the movement was captured and later executed, along with sixty-three of his followers, many of whom were from Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, and other Arab countries.
While the Great Mosque was still under siege, Saudi Arabia’s Shiite community in the Eastern Province rose in violent demonstrations on November 27, carrying portraits of the spiritual leader of Iran’s revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, and distributing leaflets calling for the overthrow of the “despotic” Saudi regime. The overstretched Saudi national guard took three days to put down the pro-Iranian demonstrations, leaving dozens dead and wounded.64
Suddenly even the wealthiest, most powerful oil state looked vulnerable to the rising force of political Islam. A new generation was emerging in the Arab world that no longer believed in the rhetoric of Arab nationalism. They were disenchanted with their political leaders, seeing the Arab kings and presidents build palaces on corruption and putting their personal power over the common Arab good. They did not like the communism or the atheism of the Soviet Union. They believed the United States represented a new imperial power playing divide-and-rule politics among the Arab states and promoting Israel’s interests over Palestinian rights. The lesson they took from Iran’s revolution was that Islam was stronger than all their enemies combined. United behind the eternal truth of their religion, Muslims could overthrow autocrats and stand up to superpowers. The Arab world was entering a new age of political and social change inspired by the power of Islam.