Chapter 3 Historical/Perceptual Setting The Origins of the Palestinian Arab Cause 1948 to 1967

Chapter 3

Historical/Perceptual Setting
The Origins of the Palestinian Arab Cause
1948 to 1967

In other words, we must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter. What was this presence? No matter how backward, uncivilized, and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land.

Edward W. Said1

The psychological propaganda benefit derived by the Arabs from annexing the word “Palestinian,” to designate only Arabs, is considerable.

Joan Peters2


This chapter summarizes the perceptual and historical setting governing the Arab-Israel conflict from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 until the June 1967 Six Day War in which Israel captured the West Bank (including Old Jerusalem), Gaza and the Golan Heights. Reference to evolving perceptions provides a necessary framework for understanding American Jewish attitudes. The transformation of attitudes, I argue, influenced the community’s role in the 1988 decision by the U.S. to open a diplomatic dialogue with the PLO. The ingredients comprising perceptions include: categorization of the conflict; self-image; influential milestone events; image of other; cognitive consistency; cognitive dissonance; key environmental factors and psychological needs.

Categorization of Conflict

Between 1948 and 1967, the perception of the Arab-Israel conflict was considerably unlike what it is today. Specifically, the Palestinian Arab dimension of the clash was not accentuated in the American media and most observers understood the struggle to be a zero-sum competition.

As for the Palestinian Arabs, it is worthwhile noting that the national aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs (Palestinians) made its way sluggishly into the world’s collective political consciousness. The 1948-1967 era was a period of state-building and pan-Arabism. The image of Arab “Palestinianism” arose first among the Palestinian Arabs themselves, then gradually made its way onto the intellectual and political agenda of the Arab world. Moreover, “Palestinianism” did not make much of a mark on the international political system or upon the United States’ political agenda until well after 1967.

Perceptual factors aside, at the beginning and middle of the 1948-1967 era, the American Jewish leadership was not notably well-organized or particularly sophisticated politically. The self-image of the leadership was not anchored in its role of “shtadlanim,” or intermediary in bilateral U.S.-Israel relations.3 True, the narrow-based Zionist lobby contributed to a United States policy supporting the establishment and independence of a Jewish State. Nor was it mere happenstance that America was the first country to recognize Israel. But in those early years the pro-Israel community exercised little recurring clout over developing U.S. policy on the Arab-Israel conflict Mass pro-Israelism was also not a defining characteristic of U.S. Jewish life in general. Jewish leadership on the national level was confined to a very few prominent philanthropists and the organizations they used as their vehicles. Jewish political influence within the overall American political system was still nascent. At any rate, U.S. foreign policy was mostly focused elsewhere.

With little public fanfare, two opposing ideological camps – one pro-Arab, the other pro-Zionist – zealously contested U.S. foreign policy over Palestine during the 1940s and 1950s. The disparate players of the pro-Arab camp included: oil company lobbyists, State Department Foreign Service career professionals, Christian missionaries, the New Left and the Old Right. The pro-Israel camp was comprised mostly of American Jewish supporters of Israel and their many non-Jewish allies. During the early 1950s, when the pro-Israel movement was budding, I.L. Kenen, the founder of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had difficulty raising sufficient funds to maintain his small Washington, D.C. office which served as the headquarters of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.4 For their part, the Israelis were forced to cultivate a relationship with politically well-connected non-Zionists such as the AJCommittee’s Jacob Blaustein. The organization vehemently opposed Ben-Gurion’s call for Jews to move to Israel and Blaustein fought against Israeli interference in Jewish domestic affairs. He opposed instances where Israel claimed to act on behalf of the Jewish people such as the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina. The AJCommittee also privately took exception to various Israeli foreign policy moves. Nevertheless, leaders such as Blaustein used their political access to Israel’s overall advantage.5

U.S. Administrations
Prior to Prominence of Palestinian Cause

In order to better grapple with the role of the American Jewish community in the 1988 U.S. decision to negotiate with the PLO, it is helpful to synopsize U.S.-Israel relations between 1948 and the 1967 Six Day War. The predominant motif in U.S. foreign policy after WWII was America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union. It is virtually impossible to make any sense out of U.S. policy in the Middle East without taking this competition into account.

Overruling advice from the State Department, the Truman Administration voted in the United Nations for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state with Jerusalem to be a “corpus separatum.” On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared. Eleven minutes later the Truman Administration granted the Jewish State de jure recognition. On May 12, 1949 the U.S. supported Israel’s admission into the UN. It also granted Israel access into the U.S. Export-Import Bank, extending $1 million in agricultural aid. In 1951 the U.S. Congress provided Israel with a $65 million economic grant.6 “This was the first of many economic grants and loans (which continued until 1963 and eventually totaled $1.2 billion), most of it in loans or the sale of surplus commodities. All loans were repaid on time.”7 Aid in 1952 had been $73 million; in 1953 it was reduced to $54 million.8 From the perspective of the 1990s it is striking that, after an early flurry of activity, the Arab-Israel conflict did not become a U.S. foreign policy priority during the Truman years.

The Eisenhower Administration was preoccupied with ending the war in Korea and managing the Cold War in the wake of Stalin’s death. In 1953 the Administration quarreled with Israel over the use of water resources in the Jordan Valley. Subsequently, the U.S. tried and failed to mediate the water issue. Nevertheless, Israel completed its national water carrier system with American support in 1964. Another dispute, in 1954, involved Israeli opposition to the U.S. decision to sell weapons to Iraq as part of the Baghdad Pact. In the face of an arms flow from the Soviet Union to Egypt, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles turned down petitions from Kenen’s AIPAC to sell American weapons to the Jewish State. Israel purchased its weapons, during this period, from France, By the end of President Eisenhower’s first term, Israel faced intensifying attacks from Arab fedayeen based mainly in Gaza. These attacks contributed to the outbreak of the 1956 Sinai Campaign in which Israel captured the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Despite appeals from Jewish groups, the U.S. exerted heavy pressure to force Israel to withdraw from the captured territories.

U.S.-Soviet relations dominated the Kennedy Administration’s agenda as exemplified by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Still, during the first several years of the Administration, the U.S. “tried to work out an elaborate proposal for the solution of the Arab refugee problem which would have obliged Israel to absorb a substantial number of refugees. This attempt came to naught due to the Arabs’ refusal to enter any substantial negotiations.”9 Indeed, in early 1961, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and president-elect Kennedy met at the Waldorf-Astoria. Kennedy “kept asking what Israel could do for the Arab refugees, while Ben-Gurion kept insisting their return en masse would undermine Israel’s security.”10 Zablocki reports that: “American Jewish leaders worked together with Israeli officials to prevent American adoption of a plan for the refugees contrary to Israel’s interest.”11 Another fundamental policy difference with the Kennedy Administration involved Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations with the Arabs. Nevertheless, it was under President Kennedy that, in 1962, the U.S. first sold Israel military hardware. This first deal involved Hawk anti-aircraft missiles which the Israelis convinced Kennedy they needed to deal with the introduction of Tupelov-16 bombers into Egypt by the Soviet Union.12 Several weeks prior to Congressional elections, Kennedy invited American Jewish leaders to the White House to preview his arms sale decision before publicly announcing it.13

The Johnson Administration’s main foreign policy concern was, of course, conducting the war in Vietnam. Significantly, after the June 1967 Six Day War, the Administration opposed Arab, Soviet and UN demands for a complete and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the Golan, as well as Judea and Samaria. In fact, the U.S. helped craft the carefully nuanced UN Security Council Resolution 242 which would serve as the basis for future peace-making efforts.

Palestinian-Arab Cause Emerges

This cursory overview illustrates that throughout the first four U.S. Administrations after Israel’s establishment, the national aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs were scarcely viewed as the crux of the Arab-Israel conflict. For American foreign policy-makers, the refugee problem was part of the larger dilemma of the Arab refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish State in Palestine.

From 1948 until the early 1970s – outside the context of their plight as refugees – the United States did not substantively address the Palestinian-Arab component of the conflict. Simply put, the “Palestinian issue” did not really emerge onto the U.S. diplomatic agenda until after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Globally, American Middle East policy was a side-show to the American-Soviet main event. Even the word “Palestinian” as it pertains to Arabs appears in The New York Times Index only twice in 1948 and 1949. Thereafter, it seldom materializes again until 1973.14 This absence from the prestige media spotlight could not but have had an impact on American Jewish perceptions.

Arguably, Palestinian national consciousness developed slowly starting in the 1920s. Arabs then living in Palestine considered themselves “part of a broadly defined Syria.”15 Palestinian nationalism emerged during the period largely in response to the immigration of Jews to Palestine. It was not until the outbreak of the First World War that Arab nationalists began using the description “Palestinian.”16

Before, during and immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel – between December 1947 and September 1949 – some 600,000 Palestinian-Arabs became refugees. Benny Morris, former diplomatic correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, comments:
The Palestinian refugee problem and its consequences have shaken the Middle East and acutely troubled the world for the past four decades. The question of what caused the refugees to become refugees has been a fundamental propaganda issue between Israel and the Arab states for just as long. The general Arab claim, that the Jews expelled Palestine’s Arabs, with predetermination and preplanning, as part of a grand political-military design, has served to underline the Arab portrayal of Israel as a vicious, immoral robber state. The Israeli official version, that the Arabs fled voluntarily (not under Jewish compulsion) and/or that they were asked/ordered to do so by their Palestinian and Arab states’ leaders, helped leave intact the new state’s untarnished image as the haven of a much-persecuted people, a body politic more just, moral and deserving of the West’s sympathy and help than the surrounding sea of reactionary, semi-feudal, dictatorial Arab societies.17

The numbers of refugees, the reasons for their dispersal and the fact that their plight was exploited by the Arab states (who segregated them in refugee shanty towns) all contributed to certain American Jewish perceptions.18 For the U.S. Jewish community, it was effortless to categorize the conflict as zero-sum, state centered and Israel versus Arab.

In 1967, King Hussein challenged a Georgetown University audience by asking when Israel would “recognize the right of the Arabs to exist.”19 But such a challenge found little resonance. Eight years later, Hussein could pose the matter differently. Israel could find peace if it recognized “the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.”20 Kahn and Murray note:
The very currency of the term “Palestinian” to mean Arabs exclusively is a propaganda triumph of the first order. Palestine is the geographic term with which the West is familiar; one assumes France belongs to the French, and England to the English; it does indeed then seem as if Palestine belongs to the Palestinians. If the “Palestinians” claim Palestine, there must be a struggle between the native population and foreign invaders.21

The Arabs who remained in Israel after 1948 came to be known as “Israeli Arabs” and citizens of the Jewish State. The Israeli Arabs vacillated between apolitical economic self-interest and association with communist or Arab nationalist Knesset parties.22 The Arabs in the Gaza Strip preserved their Palestinian identity living under the hardships of Egyptian rule. In Judea and Samaria, many Palestinian Arabs were violently opposed to the incorporation of the “West Bank” into Jordan. Ultimately, “It was Jordan that was being ‘Palestinianized,’ rather than the opposite.”23

The Zionist right has long argued that Israel is Jewish Palestine and Jordan is Arab Palestine. The argument, as Sidney Zion makes it, goes as follows:
In 1920, the World War I Allies conferred on Britain a Mandate to govern Palestine, an area on both sides of the Jordan River that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. This Mandate, confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, remained unchanged during the League’s lifetime. Though the Mandate incorporated Britain’s 1917 commitment to provide a homeland in Palestine for the Jews – the Balfour Declaration – the Mandate did not provide a homeland for Arabs living there, though it did protect their “civil and religious” but not political rights. Two months after the League approved the Mandate, the British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, changed the rules and the picture. He created the Emirate of Transjordan, installing the Hashemite Abdullah, Hussein’s grandfather, as Emir of all the land east of the Jordan River . . .
Is Jordan Palestine? Yes, but not all of Mandated Palestine. Israel holds a little more than 20 percent of the Mandate’s Palestine, including the 5 percent known as the West Bank and Gaza. Jordan is not only de facto Palestine because all who have lived there except for Bedouins and the King’s family are Palestinian; it is de jure Palestine.24

While tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs prospered in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, thousands more lived in refugee shanty towns in Lebanon, the West Bank and Jordan. With the singular exception of Jordan, the Arab states had political reasons to exploit the Palestinian refugee problem and opposed their permanent re-settlement and absorption.25

PLO Established

That the PLO was established by the Arab states in January 1964 at an Arab summit called for that purpose by Egyptian president Nasser contributed little to a change in American Jewish perceptions. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created to enable the Palestinians “to play their role in the liberation of their country and their self-determination.”26 Ahmed Shukeiry, the son of a Moslem religious leader in Acre, who had gained diplomatic experience working for Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League, was chosen to head the new organization. The PLO was seen as yet another tool in the Arab arsenal against Israel. Little was known about dissident groups in the Palestinian-Arab community who opposed Shukeiry’s leadership on the grounds that he lacked independence from the Arab states. Shukeiry’s virulent oratory made clear to American Jewish observers that the Arab world was engaged in a zero-sum struggle. It was Shukeiry who proposed “driving the Jews into the sea.”27 In 1964, he told the New York Times that the Palestinian-Arabs would have to create their own military force to achieve their goal.28

Then, in the Old City of Jerusalem, on May 28, 1964, 350 delegates, under Shukeiry’s leadership, met in a Palestine National Congress. The gathering issued the Palestine National Charter, which called for the destruction of Israel:29 “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it.”30 Even though King Hussein personally opened the Congress, Shukeiry made it clear that he viewed Jordan as part of Palestine.31

On August 31, 1964, Shukeiry presented the Arab Foreign Ministers meeting in Cairo with a 15-point program for “the final liquidation of Israel.” The following month the Arab league approved the creation of a Palestine Liberation Army.32 The PLA was to be under the supervision of a unified Arab command. “This was interpreted as an attempt to control the emerging military force and ‘keep it from getting into the hands of firebrands so as to increase the likelihood of open war with Israel’.”33

Early on, American friends of the Arab cause understood the need to place the Palestinian issue, qua “Palestinian,” in the forefront of public opinion. Shukeiry’s fulminations did not win any American Jewish converts but they did help bring the Palestinian-Arab cause to prominence. The Palestinian issue had to be separated and transformed away from the greater Arab struggle into a parochial movement against Zionism. Hani al-Hassan, a close Arafat adviser, reported years later that “Shukeiry told me that George Ball had said there should be a voice of the Palestinians to speak for them. He told me that Nasser and the Arabs, in cooperation with George Ball, have helped to create this organization.”34

FATAH

Before there was a PLO there was Fatah. In the early 1950s, Khalid al-Hassan, Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Yasir Arafat – young Palestinian Arab professionals based together in Kuwait – created their own group, El Fatah. The establishment of a Palestinian movement, independent of the Arab states, and dedicated to uniting the Arabs of Palestinian origin with the long-term strategic goal of returning them to Palestine, was accomplished through the tireless dedication of Arafat and several of his closest colleagues. Constructing the movement required no small amount of intrigue and subterfuge, combined with financial, organizational and political acumen of the first order. It would take Arafat many years to transform El Fatah (and later the PLO) into a major international player. An early milestone event took place in April 1963 when, with the help of Algeria, Arafat and Wazir traveled to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) to promote the Palestinian-Arab cause. The value of the trip was only partly diminished because they were unsuccessful in making contact with high-level Chinese officials.

Arafat reacted negatively when Nasser created the PLO and placed Shukeiry in charge. “It was obvious from the very beginning that the PLO was to be nothing but a paper tiger, a tool of the Egyptians to keep us quiet,” Arafat later said.35 Competition for control of the Palestinian cause between Arafat and Shukeiry persisted for several years. An alliance with Syrian intelligence bolstered Arafat’s position against the PLO. Clearly, to build his movement Arafat would make tactical deals with anyone who could get him to the next step. But he was determined that the future of the Palestinians would not be left to the Arab states.

Previously, Arab terror organizations had served as tools for sovereign states.36 Though it received financial and military aid from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Syria (and over the years would align with this or that Arab or non-Arab benefactor), Fatah’s strategic direction was completely independent. Its fighters were first and foremost Palestinians. By launching scores of cross-border raids into Israel, between 1965 and 1967, Arafat was able to build up his stature in the Arab world.

Summary

The 1948-1967 period was one in which American Jews could easily perceive the conflict in state-centered, zero-sum and Pan-Arab versus Israel terms.37 The U.S. role in the Arab-Israel conflict was not especially prominent nor was pro-Israelism a defining feature of American Jewish life. Starting in 1964 there was an organization dedicated to the liberation of Palestine from Jewish control, but American Jews could hardly be expected to muster affinity for the PLO. The image of the conflict established within the Jewish community was that of Israel’s legitimacy being challenged on a pan-Arab level and her existence being threatened on a state-centered basis. Calls for “armed struggle” to “liberate Palestine” reinforced these Jewish perceptions. The driving cognitive consistency for the U.S. Jewish leadership was to ensure Israel’s survival in the face of the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. For the mobilized leadership elites the consistent goal was to obtain American military, diplomatic and economic backing to secure that same end. They opposed U.S. diplomatic pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai (to no avail) and with regard to Jordan River water arrangements. In vain, the Jewish leaders championed the idea of direct talks between the Arabs and Israel. Perceptions were also influenced by such factors in the political environment as the U.S.-USSR rivalry; the unfriendly Eisenhower Administrations (1952-1960); the Baghdad Pact; 1956 War; creation of the PLO and FATAH as well as bloody Fedayeen raids against Israel. The fate, prestige and prominence of the American Jewish leadership were not dependent on their pro-Israel work. And, while Jews have traditionally sought the approval of their neighbors and fellow citizens, one would be hard pressed to argue that Jewish actions (one way or the other) during the 1948-1967 era were based on a psychological need for the approval of the larger society. Given all this, there was no likelihood that Jewish perceptions about the Palestinian-Arab cause would change appreciably. The Jewish belief system called for a closing of the ranks to assure Israel’s survival.