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The Arab
League and peace, after 68 years
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The disconnect between the past and the present in
the Middle East is growing fast. Consider the anachronism called the Arab
League.
In December, after an "emergency meeting"
called by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, Arab League Secretary-General
Nabil Elaraby declared that "not one" Israeli soldier could
remain in the territory of Palestine. An Arab League report condemning
American support for "Israeli security expansionist demands" was
also cited in Middle Eastern news sources but made little impression in the
West.
The statement made little impression on US
Secretary of State John Kerry who was "grateful that the Arab League
as a whole and Saudi Arabia individually will be significantly involved in
helping build support for this effort." He also promised to update
"our Arab League partners."
The very idea that the Arab League is a 'partner,'
and the League's recent pronouncements, are reminders of the Arab-Israeli
conflict as it once was; an era when furious expressions of
"unity" over Palestine were taken seriously, and which mostly
excluded the Palestinians.
The Arab League was formed in March 1945, its
charter filled with boilerplate about the strengthening, safeguarding and
coordinating of between member states. But the founding treaty's annex
stated while that Palestine's "international existence and
independence in the legal sense cannot, therefore, be questioned,"
"outward manifestations of this independence have remained obscured
for reasons beyond her control" and that "until that country can
effectively exercise its independence, the Council of the League should
take charge of the selection of an Arab representative from Palestine to
take part in its work." The League's raison d'être was control of the
Palestine question.
The pan-Arab takeover had actually begun earlier,
with the Bludan conference of 1937 "to study the duties of the Arabs
in their respective countries and to agree on effective measures to resist
the dangers posed by the Zionists." There the Peel Commission's
recommendations on partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states were
rejected and a boycott of "all Jewish goods and activities" was
proposed.
But Palestinians and certain Syrians were
unsatisfied since, as a British report put it, "They had hoped, it
appears, so far to stir up public opinion as to obtain from an excited mob
a declaration of the Jihad." Existential fear and loathing of Jews –
not Zionists – in Islamic terms was pronounced even then.
After World War II the Arab League's contradictions
became more pronounced. At the Inshas conference of 1946 Arab rulers
declared "Palestine is Arab and cannot be separated from the rest of
the Arab states, for it is the center of the great Arab nation and its
destiny rests with that of the Arab states." But the next year in
London Arab League delegates accepted the idea of a unitary Palestinian
state in which Jews would be a recognized minority with representation. The
Palestinians under Haj Amin al-Husseini, the "Grand Mufti" and
leader of the Palestinian nationalist Arab Higher Committee, refused to
even participate.
The Mufti's aspirations to rule Arab Palestine also
clashed with those of Abdullah of Transjordan, who sought to annex it to
Transjordan. In 1947 the League formed the "Arab Liberation Army"
that invaded Israel upon independence, while keeping Husseini and his
military force in marginal roles. Abdullah's Arab Legion operated independently,
while he met secretly with Zionist representations. Upon defeat the League
authorized a provisional government for Gaza, which was barely symbolic
before being dissolved by Egypt.
The League's most notable achievement was the
boycott against Israel. This prohibited direct economic relations, as well
as with countries and firms that did business with Israel. Though the
boycott limited investment and economic relations, it hardly achieved its
goals of bringing about "the eventual collapse of the State of Israel."
The boycott may have hurt Arab countries more than Israel, scaring off
investors from the Middle East and damaging regional economies. The 1966
decision to kick Ford Motors out of Arab countries following a trade
agreement with Israel cost 6000 jobs in Lebanon alone.
On the issue of Palestine the League has always
taken extreme stances. It suspended Egypt in 1979 after the Camp David
Accords and rejected the Gulf Cooperation Council's decision to lessen
trade restrictions on Israel in 1994. Even the League's endorsement of the
much-vaunted Arab Peace Initiative in 2002 was predicated on reading UN
Resolution 194 to mean the "right of return" for Palestinian
refugees.
Only in fostering creation of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, in 1964 did the Arab League inadvertently advanced
the Palestinian cause, albeit through an irredentist entity dedicated to
violent "resistance" that preyed on Arab states almost as much as
Israel. The PLO and its culture have reliably enforced extremism ever since.
The Arab League's other activities have been
incoherent and hopelessly divided. It did not defuse the 1958 Lebanon
crisis, although it played a larger role in the Yemen civil war from 1962
to 1970, in effect a proxy war between member states Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
It supported Iraq against Iran but was split over the first Gulf War, and
its solution to the Lebanese Civil War was to license the Syrian takeover
and almost three decades of occupation. The list of failure goes on until
today's Syrian crisis.
The Arab League's usurpation of Palestine served
higher purposes, Arab national integration around the twinned themes of
protecting Palestine and hating the Jews. Palestine was a fetish but this
was never the same as advancing the Palestinian national project. As with
all fetishes it became a trap. Shared outrage helped generate a common
sense of 'Arabness' as well as distinctive Syrian, Iraqi and other national
identities but contributed little positive except to continually focus
attention outward from corrupt, repressive regimes. But once ignited, the
flame could not be ignored lest outrage be redirected inward towards
regimes whose obsession wavered.
The Arab League's routine continues but the
Palestinian fetish has been taken over by UN and EU apparatchiks and US
diplomats. With more than a little antisemitism (on the UN and European
sides), they have institutionalized Palestinianism and the "peace
process" in ways the Arab League, forever banging the tables at
"emergency meetings" or even at the UN, could only have dreamed.
Perhaps the Arab League succeeded after all.
But ceding control of their national fate is now
also part of Palestinian culture. Sometimes Palestinians genuinely think
they are the paramount pan-Arab or pan-Islamic cause. Other times it just
gives Palestinians cover for being indecisive, divided, or merely to go
about business as usual.
This is immensely profitable for Palestinian elites
who make money from legal and illegal business deals, who skim or divert
Western aid, less so for the enormous Palestinian public and NGO sectors.
The status quo and "occupation" rhetoric keep money flowing and
postpones hard-decisions about self-governance and self-responsibility. The
Arab League gives the Palestinians rejectionism plausible deniability, and
helps put peace impossibly, but profitably, out of reach.
But state failure, the 'Arab Spring,' and now the
Shia-Sunni civil war, have disrupted the cycle, at least for now. And in a
supreme irony, the Jews are temporarily more useful as Sunni allies than
cosmic enemies, while the Palestinians are neither especially relevant nor
interesting.
The sooner everyone, including the US and
especially the Palestinians themselves, admit that the Arab League is an
impediment the sooner a negotiated peace with Israel may actually arrive.
Alex Joffe is a historian and archaeologist. He is a
Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum.
Related
Topics: Arab-Israel conflict &
diplomacy | Alexander H. Joffe
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