In the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations, the United States wasn’t brought in until the treaty was made public. I was visiting the White House at the time, and when the news broke that Sadat had made a speech declaring his willingness to go to Israel in order to make peace, it came as a total shock. The political establishment was even alarmed. I remember Zbigniew Brzezinski, then National Security Advisor, whom I was visiting in his office, saying, “It will be a disaster. Sadat will fall flat on his face, Begin will give him nothing.” My connections with Washington at that time were limited but I had a slight acquaintance with Brzezinski as an academic colleague with some coinciding interests. I asked why he was so sure that Begin would give him nothing. He went to his desk and picked up a letter he had from Nahum Goldmann, founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress, who had said just that. I said, “Do you really think that Begin would confide his plans to Nahum Goldmann?” “Well,” he said, “I know they are not on good terms, but even so.”
What neither Brzezinski nor I knew was that when Sadat made his famous speech he had been in secret negotiations with Begin for quite a long time and they had worked out the main points in advance. When Sadat made his speech he wasn’t taking a shot in the dark. The process began with a very secret approach from Begin to Sadat. It was conducted through two channels, the King of Morocco and Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania. Extremely hush-hush meetings were held between Israeli and Egyptian negotiators in Morocco and in Romania. The advantage of these two places was their locations. They were under authoritarian governments and there was no danger of journalists snooping around and picking up the story. Journalists who tried snooping in Romania got short shrift.
On the White House Lawn
In 1993, hosted by President Clinton, Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yassir Arafat shook hands before cheering crowds on the White House lawn in Washington. The handshake, the first ever in public between the two former archenemies, marked the signing of a Declaration of Principles for peace between the Arabs and Israelis. This event made worldwide headlines.
On TV it looks so smooth and coordinated. In fact, the arrangements were chaotic. The sun was blazing; there was no shade, no shelter and I didn’t have a hat. I had brought The Washington Post because I thought that there would probably be long periods of waiting and wanted to have something to read. I was sitting next to the Turkish ambassador and his wife. He asked if I could let him have part of my Washington Post. I assumed he wanted to read it and I gave him a section. He proceeded to fold the paper into two paper hats which he and his wife donned. I wished he had made me one as my efforts to hold the paper over my bald head didn’t work very well.
We waited and waited and waited. Eventually the proceedings began and they were very moving. The sight of these people who had been at war with each other for a century, and these individuals for decades, shaking hands and talking peace and mutual recognition and coexistence was something I thought would come, but I never thought it would come in my lifetime. They rose to the occasion and this culmination of the occasion, the handshake, was truly wonderful.
Norway is not an authoritarian country but it managed to keep the Oslo negotiations secret all the same. There’s a remarkable similarity between the negotiations preceding the Egyptian/Israeli treaty and the negotiations preceding the agreement with the PLO. Once the Israelis had signed the Oslo agreement, the PLO had in effect recognized Israel. That let a lot of others off the hook. It made it possible for the Jordanians to sign a full-fledged peace treaty with Israel and for many other Arab states—Morocco, Tunisia and several of the Gulf states, Oman and Qatar, for example—to enter into direct contact with Israel. When the peace process breaks down, those other links are endangered or broken. In regard to Syria, various Israeli governments, first that of Rabin and then of Peres, were willing to make territorial concessions to Hafiz al-Assad; but he wasn’t willing to give them anything in return. He was virtually offered the Golan Heights on a plate; the Israelis didn’t ask for any major concession other than making peace. He refused. Peace and normalization he refused also. That contributed quite considerably to Netanyahu’s victory in 1996.
Sadat didn’t need to convince his people that it was the right move; they were ready for it. He was following rather than leading them in this. Later, the Egyptians were able to persuade themselves that they’d won a great victory in the 1973 war, but that was not their initial reaction. The war was in October and I was in Egypt two months later, in December and early January. At that time there wasn’t the slightest doubt among Egyptians that they had been badly beaten and there was a feeling of great resentment. I remember an Egyptian friend, a prominent journalist, saying, “For long enough Egypt has been the blood bank of the Arab world.” There was a feeling that the Egyptians were suffering for a cause which was not theirs. Another man I knew who had always been actively pro-Arab said, “Enough of this ‘Arab’ stuff. We have to think about Egypt.” There were many such incidents, even before the 1973 war, and many more after. So Sadat did not have to persuade his people of the need for peace; they were well aware of it. They were thoroughly war-weary, particularly after the humiliation of 1973.
That Sadat was able to persuade Egyptians that they had won a victory in 1973 made it much easier for him to approach Israel. In a sense they did win a victory as in the opening phase they succeeded in crossing the Canal under fire and seizing the other side. But having done that, they weren’t able to follow up their advantage. In the weeks that followed, the Israelis crossed back onto the west bank of the Canal and entered the Nile valley. Nevertheless, there was this very considerable achievement at the beginning which restored a sense of Egyptian national pride, badly damaged by the Six Day War in 1967.
There was no real problem when it came to negotiating the terms of the peace because nobody seriously questioned that Sinai was Egyptian. There was some niggling over a very small piece of territory called Tabat, but that was of minor importance. For a while some Israelis, notably Moshe Dayan, thought they could hold at least part of Sinai. Dayan once said he’d rather have Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh, but the Israelis in general did not hold that view. The Egyptians made it clear—and I had said this myself when I spoke to Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and others—that Israel could not have peace with Egypt while holding Egyptian territory. The starting point had to be to assure the Egyptian government that Israel had no claims on its territory. With that, there was no real difficulty on either side. The Egyptians didn’t want Israel, and the Israelis didn’t want Egypt, which makes it much easier for them to live side by side.
Territory is a bargaining chip. If you have something that the other side wants, then you have something to talk about. The Israelis were in possession of the greater part of Egyptian Sinai. The Egyptians wanted it back. And the Israelis said in effect, yes, we’ll give it back to you, but we want a proper peace treaty in return. The Egyptians were quite ready for that. The same thing happened with Jordan. There were some very minor territorial adjustments between Israel and Jordan and a peace treaty was finally agreed, right after Oslo in 1994.
Palestine
The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is of quite a different nature. Israel and Egypt are two neighboring countries and, as is not unusual in human history, there can be long and serious disagreements between neighboring countries about where the frontier lies. The same may be said about the conflict between Israel on the one hand and Syria and Lebanon on the other. Israel and Palestine are not two countries, but two different names for the same country, representing different perceptions, held by different people and transformed in various ways in the course of the centuries.
The name Palestine was first applied to the country by the Romans, after the suppression of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt in the second century. The Romans decided that they had had enough of these troublesome people, and that the only way to deal with them was to eliminate them. Most
of the Jewish people were removed elsewhere; their capital city, Jerusalem, was renamed Aelia, and the country was renamed Palestina or Syria-Palestina—that part of Syria which had centuries earlier been inhabited by the long extinct Philistines. It was hoped by these means to obliterate any connection between the Jewish people and their ancient homeland.
The name Palestina was retained for the remaining centuries of Roman and then Byzantine rule, and, for a while, by the Arab conquerors. Before long however it was forgotten, and the country had no separate name, being seen simply as part of some larger entity. In Christian Europe, where the country was usually known by the name of “The Holy Land,” the Roman name Palestina reappeared with the classical Renaissance, and became a common term to designate the country. From Europe it was brought again to the Middle East, but was used almost exclusively by Europeans and other Westerners, and not by Jews or Arabs. The former preferred to use the biblical names; the latter had no need for a special name for what was simply part of a larger whole of the Arab world, or at least of Syria. With one brief interlude, that of the Crusader states in the Middle Ages, this remained the situation of the country for almost two millennia, from the triumph of Rome to the fall of the Ottomans.
It was with the British conquest of the country in World War I that Palestine for the first time since remote antiquity became a separate entity, this time in a mandate held by the British Empire and approved by the League of Nations. The name adopted to designate this entity was “Palestine,” resuscitated from an almost forgotten antiquity. Interestingly, during the period of the British Mandate, that is, until 1948, the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were primarily used by Jews, not by Arabs. They were not happy with these terms, but at least they designated the country as a historically separate entity. Overwhelmingly the Arabs rejected this name which they saw, not unreasonably, as a British imperialist device, with Zionist collusion, to slice off a part of the greater Arab homeland.
After the war which followed the termination of the British Mandate in 1948, much of mandatory Palestine was held by the Jews, who decided to adopt the ancient name Israel. The remainder, a not insignificant part, was held by the neighboring Arab powers—Egypt, Syria and most importantly Jordan. In none of these did the new rulers take any steps to create a Palestinian entity. The Syrians simply annexed the occupied area, regarding it as part of historic Syria. The Egyptians, more cautiously, retained it as occupied territory, and even experimented briefly with a local authority, but abandoned the attempt. Most importantly, the Jordanians simply annexed the whole area under their rule, declaring it part of the Kingdom of Jordan and extending Jordanian citizenship to all its inhabitants “other than Jews.” In later wars, when the Israelis conquered and occupied these territories, the Jordanians withdrew their claims and it was then that, for the first time in history, the notion began to develop of a distinctive Arab national entity in this region. To designate this entity, the name Palestine was adopted.
This gave a peculiar complexity and difficulty to the ensuing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This was not, as in the case of Egypt and Syria or Lebanon, a quarrel over a disputed frontier. It was a conflict over the very nature and identity of a country to which both contenders had strong historic claims, deriving from different periods of history. Extremists on both sides, both Jewish and Arab, claim the whole country as their historic national heritage, both with evidence and plausibility although from different periods of history. More recently, the idea has emerged of two separate states, one Israel, the other Palestine, in the territory previously historically claimed by both. But this kind of solution is difficult to formulate let alone to accept.
Ralph Bunche, an American mediator, presided over the first negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians on the island of Rhodes in 1949–50. Despite long and difficult arguments, they eventually achieved an armistice agreement, and Ralph Bunche’s contribution to this was recognized by a Nobel Peace Prize. A story current at the time was that at one moment when both sides were being difficult, one of the mediators, forgetting that he was speaking to Jews and Muslims, exclaimed, “Why can’t you settle this like good Christians?” Many years later, I was surprised to hear this remark quoted again, in what turned out to be a rather amusing context. It was at a meeting at the University of Toronto and one of the professors, discussing the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, quoted this remark, “Why can’t you settle this like good Christians?” There was the usual laughter, and then a member of the audience said, “He shouldn’t have told them that! That’s what they’ve been doing ever since.”
Arafat
In the 1970s I was in Tunis as a guest of the university to give a public lecture and attended a dinner at which my host told me a remarkable story. Yassir Arafat had passed through Tunis on his way to his memorable, gun-toting, 1974 appearance at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Habib Bourguiba, the ruler of Tunisia, gave a dinner in his honor. In the course of the evening Bourguiba told his guest that he had to decide whether he wished to be a revolutionary leader or a statesman. Arafat replied that of course he wanted to be a statesman but in order to obtain a state he had to be a revolutionary leader. Right, said Bourguiba, but there is a way in which you can get your state immediately. How so? asked Arafat in astonishment. Bourguiba advised that when he appeared before the General Assembly he should tell them that he is now prepared to accept Resolution 181 (which recommends the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine; it was on the basis of this resolution that the state of Israel was proclaimed and accepted by the UN). By accepting that resolution, the legality of the Palestinian state would be on the same basis as that of Israel. The UN would have to accept it, the Americans would have to accept it, and even the Israelis would have to accept it. There would be a Palestinian state in Palestine.
Arafat was appalled, as that would mean he would have to renounce the rest of Palestine. Bourguiba explained that it would only be for the time being. The rest of Palestine won’t go away, he said. It’ll still be there. And when the time is ripe, raise the matter again and prepare for the next step. In the meantime, Palestine will have a seat and a voice in the United Nations and you will have a state at least in part of Palestine. Arafat shook his head and declared he could not stand up before the world assembly and renounce the rest of Palestine, not even as a tactic.
Jordan
For many years I traveled almost every year to Jordan, where I had a personal relationship with the royal family. This helped me keep in touch with what was going on in the Arab world. I also paid frequent visits to Turkey, Egypt, and when possible, Lebanon. I have not been to Iran since the Revolution, though I did once, to my surprise, receive an invitation to participate in a conference on religious dialogue there. The subject is a very interesting and important one, but I did not feel inclined to discuss it under the auspices of the current regime.
In the early 1970s I was invited to participate in a congress of historians of the region held in Amman. The meeting was convened and presided over by Prince Hassan, the younger brother of Jordan’s ruling monarch King Hussein and heir to the throne, or Crown Prince. To Westerners it may seem odd that a younger brother should be the heir to the throne. In Middle Eastern monarchies it was the norm. Dynastic succession was well established in the Islamic lands, as everywhere else in the world, but succession was by some form of nomination or selection. The usual practice was for the ruling monarch to nominate a member of his family as being most ready and most competent to succeed him when the necessity arose. Normally, this was a younger brother, and succession by brothers and sometimes by nephews was normal. If one looks at the two most important dynasties in Islamic history, the caliphs in Baghdad and the Ottoman sultans, one sees long series of brothers succeeding one after another. It was therefore perfectly natural that King Hussein should appoint his younger brother as heir to the throne. But Prince Hassan was more than just heir; he was an active participant
in the government of the country, playing an important part in almost every aspect of domestic and foreign policy. During the King’s frequent travels abroad he was not only heir but viceroy. During his last years, when he was frequently incapacitated by illness or out of the country for medical treatment, Prince Hassan ran the show.
In the mid-1970s I was a guest of King Hussein and his brothers Prince Hassan and Prince Mohammad at a gathering of the loyal Bedouin tribes, great numbers of them, at a very elaborate tribal get-together in the Eastern Desert of Jordan. We sat in a large and rather well-upholstered tent and consumed endless cups of tea and coffee and sweet things until lunch was ready. Lunch was served with the guests standing around huge cauldrons and a large metal tray covered with a mound of rice, on top of which was mutton.
It was challenging to eat because there were no utensils. You can only use your right hand to eat in Muslim culture as the left hand is by tradition reserved for unclean purposes. So I had to eat standing, with one hand, and at the same time carry on polite conversation with my neighbors. In this instance my neighbors happened to be the King and the Crown Prince. Since I was their guest I had to maintain royal etiquette and elegant conversation while trying to eat bits of meat with very greasy fingers. Difficult!
For entertainment the host tribe had invited a tribal poet who declaimed a long ode in honor of the King, a traditional Arab eulogy. The King was sitting cross-legged on a piece of canvas on the sand as he listened to the poet recite at some length about the greatness of the King—the usual sort of fulsome eloquence. And then he stopped. The King thought he had finished and stood up. He started to say thank you but the poet cried out, “Wait a minute! I haven’t finished yet!” And the King immediately sat down and let him go on, and on, and on, as it turned out.
Chairs are not part of Middle Eastern tradition or culture. There are very few trees in the region and therefore wood is rare and precious; it is used by artists for carvings but furnishings are made of wool and leather. (Plenty of animals produce wool and leather.) You sit on carpets on cushions or hassocks and eat off metal trays. When brought to Europe the hassock was transformed into an “ottoman.” One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows a mound of hassocks, eight or ten of them, and the caption reads, “The Ottoman Empire.” With a large number of people such as you would have at a Bedouin feast there is nowhere to sit. You can’t sit on the desert floor and as there are no tables and chairs you gather around strategically placed stands.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 22
