The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict
Page 45
Fence-Sitting
The Saudis have long pursued a delicate balancing act. They were fiercely anti-Communist because the atheism of the Soviet Union conflicted with their Islamic values. The kingdom maintained close relations with the United States, but was constantly irritated by the U.S.–Israel relationship. The king was opposed to pan-Arabism, but backed Egypt after it became clear Nasser would not achieve his goals. The Saudis also became financial backers for Palestinian terrorist groups, but they were also uncomfortable with the factions under the PLO umbrella that espoused Marxist principles. Tensions also briefly grew when a Palestinian faction kidnapped the Saudi oil minister and other Arab officials at an OPEC meeting in Vienna in December 1975. (They were later released.)
In March 1975, King Faisal was assassinated by a nephew and was succeeded by Prince Khalid. Khalid, however, was in poor health and his half-brother, Crown Prince Fahd, actually ruled the country. One of Fahd’s principal changes was to assert greater control over Aramco, culminating in the 1980 announcement that the government had taken full control of the company’s assets. With complete control of the nation’s oil industry, and a succession of price hikes through OPEC, the kingdom amassed a huge reserve of money that it began to spend on additional modernization steps within the country, aid to other Arab states and the terrorists fighting Israel, and, especially, on sophisticated weapons such as American fighter planes and its AWACS radar system.
Arab Threats
The Saudi concern with security was heightened by the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the explicit threat of Khomeini to export his brand of Islam to the Gulf. It was ironic that Khomeini would be hostile toward the Saudis given their puritanical form of Islam. But the Wahhabi sect is viewed as heretical by the Shiites, and the two nations have been longstanding rivals in the region. Iran never directly threatened Saudi Arabia and recently has improved relations.
The more serious threat to the kingdom came just over a decade later when the secular Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and had his forces in place to move into Saudi Arabia. The United States came to the rescue in 1991 and made clear its commitment to ensure the kingdom’s survival (see Chapter 20). The cost of the Gulf War (the Saudis agreed to pay $51 billion to cover American costs), combined with the country’s history of profligate deficit spending and declining oil prices, created an economic crisis that provoked the Saudis to cut spending and secure loans.
The decline in spending on social services, which the Saudi people had come to expect, combined with anger over the large American military presence in the country, caused increasing tension in the society and between the American and Saudi governments. This was further exacerbated by the 1995 and June 1996 terrorist attack against a U.S. barracks at the Dhahran base that killed 19 Americans and wounded more than 300 people. The perpetrators were never found, and U.S. officials complained that the Saudi government would not cooperate in the investigation.
King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, and his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, subsequently became the country’s de facto ruler. Under Abdullah, the nation has continued its past policies and sought to strengthen ties with the United States. These were strained, however, by the attack on September 11. Americans were disturbed by the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11 attack were Saudis and that Osama bin Laden is also a Saudi. Polls in the kingdom indicate strong support for al-Qaida, and a number of press stories began to highlight the radical brand of Islam being taught in many Saudi schools, the oppression of women that resembles the treatment of blacks under apartheid in South Africa, and the lack of cooperation the Saudi government was providing to investigators of the terrorist attacks. It was largely in response to the barrage of negative publicity that Abdullah floated his peace initiative in early 2002.
After a series of terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia, and increasing pressure from outside, especially from the United States, the Saudis began to crack down on some of the extremists in the country and to initiate modest governmental reforms. Saudi Arabia, however, remains a theocracy whose culture and policies clash with those of the West.
The Least You Need to Know
The Arabs were deeply divided by Nasser’s ideology of pan-Arabism.
The peace agreements between Israel and first Egypt and then Jordan further fragmented the Arab world into moderates prepared to recognize Israel and rejectionists seeking its destruction.
Lebanon’s fragile Christian-Muslim balance finally collapsed under the weight of political ambition and Syrian intervention.
The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia made the desert kingdom an important international player.
Chapter 27
Middle East Terrorism and Its Victims
In This Chapter
Defining terrorism
Terror on land, air, and sea
Islamic radicals
The war on terror
Terrorism has been a consistent feature of the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades and remains perhaps the greatest single obstacle to progress toward peace.
Who Is a Terrorist?
Before going any further, we need to be clear about how we define the word terrorist. There is a popular notion that “one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter,” and apologists for terror sometimes try to equate their actions to those of George Washington or others who truly were fighting for freedom. The distinction, however, is rarely difficult, and although the media sometimes prefer euphemisms such as gunmen or militants, most of us have no difficulty recognizing the murder of innocent women, children, and (the often-forgotten) men to advance a political agenda as terrorism.
If you want a more-formal definition, here is how the state department defines terrorism: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”
Terrorism is hardly a new phenomenon, but the perpetrators have changed over the years as have their methods and, to some extent, their motives.
Terror Out of Palestine
Arab opposition to Zionism was often expressed in diplomatic ways, but it frequently turned violent. In Chapter 6, you learned about the riots that were fomented by the mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s. When we think of riots today, the image is typically a mob that gets out of control and usually loots and vandalizes property and turns violent against the authorities who seek to keep the peace. The Arab riots of the 1920s, and later 1930s, often were terrorist attacks against Jews. The worst single attack was against the Jews of Hebron in 1929, who were living peacefully until set upon by Arabs who killed nearly 10 percent of the city’s Jewish population.
As you learned in the early chapters of this book, the British were unable or unwilling to stop the attacks against the Jews, and the principal Jewish defense force, the Haganah, was committed to a policy of self-defense. Some Jews were dissatisfied with this restraint and formed splinter groups to take more offensive action, which sometimes was directed at innocent civilians. The main difference between the Jews who were perpetrating terrorist acts and the Arabs who were doing so was the fact that the leaders of the Jewish community vehemently opposed attacks on civilians by the Irgun and later the Lehi, whereas the Arab terrorist groups were acting at the behest of the Palestinian Arab leadership—in particular, the mufti.
Violence escalated in the 1940s with Arab and Jewish terrorist activities (see Chapter 8). The Jewish leadership periodically took action against their troublemakers; for example, turning them into the British, but no brakes were put on the mufti’s henchmen. The key moment for Israel came after declaring independence when the Irgun resisted accepting the authority of the state and David Ben-Gurion gave the order to attack and sink the Irgun’s arm-laden ship, the Altalena.
Something Arabs Agree Upon
Egyptian president Nasser also made use of terrorists to advance his stated aim of destroying Israel. He trained and equipped fedayeen
to attack Israel from bases in Jordan and the Gaza Strip. Although the fedayeen did cause death and destruction, they didn’t accomplish Nasser’s objective. On the contrary, they helped provoke the Suez War of 1956, which led to Egypt’s (temporary) loss of the Gaza Strip and Sinai.
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Ask the Sphinx
Yasser Arafat was born Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra’ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini on August 24, 1929. Though he became the symbol of the Palestinian cause, he was not a Palestinian. His birthplace was actually Cairo, Egypt.
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As you saw in Chapter 26, Nasser was having little success uniting the Arab states under his leadership. In 1964, he decided to convene a conference in Cairo of Arab leaders to discuss the one issue on which they all agreed, the destruction of Israel. Nasser proposed the creation of a Palestine Liberation Organization to pursue this goal. The Arab delegates approved the idea and agreed to fund it. Ahmad Shuqairy, a lawyer who had represented Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, and whose family came from Acre, was chosen by Nasser to be the president. Shuqairy recruited other Palestinians to serve on a National Council, which held its founding meeting in 1964 in Jerusalem. During the meeting, a National Covenant (or Charter) was adopted calling for the liberation of all of Palestine. Interestingly, the Charter does not call for the establishment of a Palestinian state. In fact, it specifically denies that the PLO has any right to the West Bank (which would have created a conflict with Jordan), the Gaza Strip (which Egypt controlled), or an area under Syrian control. The Charter does deny any historic or spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine.
Arafat Is Born
The Syrians, who were increasingly at odds with Nasser, decided to support a rival Palestinian faction and began recruiting agents from refugee camps in Lebanon. A group calling themselves the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine, led by a man named Yasser Arafat, contacted the Syrians. Arafat’s group took the name Fatah, an acronym taken from the letters from the Arabic words for his organization, and were assigned to conduct a raid on Israel from Lebanon. The raid never took place; nevertheless, Fatah had already sent out a communiqué claiming it was a great success, which was duly reported by the Arab press.
Arafat, who took the nom de guerre Abu Ammar, established Fatah’s base in Damascus. The Syrians would not allow them to launch attacks from Syrian territory, sending them to infiltrate instead through Jordan and Lebanon, hoping that they could provoke Israel into reprisals that would force Nasser to go to war. In 1965, 35 raids were carried out, and then 44 in 1966, and 37 in the first half of 1967 before the June war. The attacks were all against civilian targets in Israel, killing 11 people and wounding 62.
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Hieroglyphics
Arafat and his comrades adopted noms de guerre (French for “names of war”). Arafat became Abu Ammar, and his top aides, who would later gain notoriety for their terrorist acts, became known as Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir) and Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf). In Arabic, Abu means “father of.”
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Ironically, Arafat and his Fatah colleagues were first arrested not by Israel, but by Lebanon for their abortive plot to infiltrate Israel. The first Fatah “martyr” also fell not at the hands of an Israeli, but those of an Arab, when one of the marauders returning from setting an explosion that damaged Israel’s National Water Carrier was shot by a Jordanian border guard.
Turning Defeat into Victory
The humiliating defeat suffered by the Arab states in the Six-Day War convinced the Palestinians that they could not rely on anyone to liberate Palestine for them and that they would have to do it themselves. They almost immediately began to escalate their attacks against Israel.
Fatah established a base in the Jordanian city of Karameh. This was the target of an Israeli attack planned in reprisal for a terrorist attack against a school bus full of children that killed 2 and wounded 28 on March 18, 1968. Three days later, the Israelis dropped leaflets on Karameh warning of an impending attack and advising civilians to leave. When the Israeli forces arrived, they met unexpected resistance from forces of the regular Jordanian army. In the ensuing battle, from which Arafat fled after distributing weapons, the Israelis said they suffered 28 dead and 90 wounded, whereas the Jordanians had 100 dead and 90 wounded, and 170 terrorists had been killed and 200 captured. The Jordanian account virtually reversed these figures, claiming 200 Israeli dead compared to only 20 of their soldiers. The Palestinian version presented an entirely different picture, claiming their heroic resistance had caused 500 Israeli casualties.
Although its account was dubious, the Arab media glorified the Palestinian stand against the Israelis at Karameh (much to the chagrin of the Jordanians who did most of the fighting), and the effect was to stimulate a wave of volunteers seeking to join the PLO. The Palestinian terrorists escalated their attacks throughout the year—with the casualty toll in 1968 alone reaching 177 Israeli dead and 700 wounded, and 681 Palestinians were killed and wounded in attacks and reprisals.
Arafat Takes Command
The “victory” at Karameh allowed Arafat to gain the prestige he needed to exert greater influence over the PLO. The Palestinian National Council met in 1968 and revised the charter, adopting Fatah’s commitment to liberate Palestine by armed struggle alone. A year later, when the council met again, Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO, a position he held until his death in 2004. Arafat consolidated his power by bringing most of the militant Palestinian factions under the umbrella of the PLO. The major ones were as follows:
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a Marxist group founded by George Habash in 1967. He was influenced by Nasser and subscribed to pan-Arabism. For Habash, the destruction of Israel was a step toward world revolution.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) split away from the PFLP under the leadership of a Syrian army officer named Ahmad Jibril. Habash had angered the Syrians by his criticism of their refusal to allow attacks from Syrian territory, which led ultimately to his arrest. Habash escaped from prison and expelled Jibril from the PFLP, and the Syrian, with his government’s backing, subsequently set up his own Damascus-based terror organization.
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was formed by another of Habash’s rivals, Jordanian-born Nayef Hawatmeh. He believed that Habash was not far enough to the left and joined forces with the Communists and others seeking world revolution.
The Syrians also created their own government-controlled terror group called al-Saiqa. It, too, sought the liberation of Palestine, but for the purpose of uniting it with Syria rather than creating an independent Palestinian state.
After the Syrians had their own faction, the Iraqis felt compelled to create one, too. They established the Arab (later Palestine) Liberation Front to also fight against Israel. As in the case of al-Saiqa, the goal was to make Palestine a part of a united Arab world rather than further divide it into another state.
Terror Takes Flight
After 1967, the scale of terrorism intensified, with the PLO increasingly choosing to attack Israeli targets, or simply Jews, outside the Middle East. For the next several years, the conflict was globalized and not even the skies were safe.
One of the key events occurred December 26, 1968, when Palestinian terrorists attacked an El Al plane in Athens. In retaliation, Israel launched a raid on the Beirut airport and virtually wiped out Lebanon’s entire civilian air fleet. Afterward, the Lebanese government tried to exercise greater control over terrorist groups in the country with limited success.
Here are a few “lowlights” of the terrorist campaign against Israel in this period:
July 23, 1968. An El Al plane from Rome to Israel was hijacked by PFLP terrorists. The plane was forced to land in Algiers, where 42 people, including 11 Israelis, were held for 5 weeks. The hijackers were briefly detained, and then set free.
February 18, 1969. An El Al plane was attacked at Zurich airport; the copilot was kill
ed and pilot wounded. One Palestinian was killed; four others were convicted of the crime but later freed.
August 29, 1969. A TWA plane from Los Angeles was hijacked and forced to land in Damascus, where it was sabotaged. Six Israeli passengers were detained; two were held until December 5. The PFLP terrorists were never brought to trial.
February 10, 1970. An El Al plane was attacked at Munich airport; one Israeli passenger was killed, and eight other passengers wounded. The murderers were caught but released.
September 6, 1970. Pan Am, Swissair, and TWA planes carrying a total of 400 passengers were hijacked from Amsterdam, Zurich, and Frankfurt. The TWA and Swissair planes were forced to land in Zerqa, Jordan, and the Pan Am flight in Cairo. A fourth plane, an El Al flight, was also targeted, but Israeli security agents foiled the hijacking in mid-air and killed one of the two terrorists when they tried to storm the cockpit. Three days later, a British jet was also hijacked and landed in Cairo. All four planes were blown up on the ground. Seven terrorists held in connection with previous attacks were set free by Britain, Germany, and Switzerland in exchange for all the hostages. None of the PFLP perpetrators were tried.
May 30, 1972. Three Japanese terrorists working for the PFLP machine-gunned passengers at the Lod airport in Israel, killing 27 and wounding 80. Most victims were Puerto Rican Christians traveling to the Holy Land on a religious pilgrimage.