Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

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 dйtente 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.?¹⁶ There 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 communiquй 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 communiquй, 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.