After Rabat: Middle East Risks and American Roles

Richard H. Ullman

From Foreign Affairs, January 1975

Summary:  The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), long an amorphous but powerful force present in the wings, has emerged from October's Arab summit conference at Rabat as a leading formal actor in the tangled relationships of the Middle East, a role reinforced by the PLO's reception at the United Nations in November. In one sense, this is a desirable development. Ever since the basic configuration of Middle Eastern international politics was set in the aftermath of World War II the Palestinians have been deprived not only of statehood, but also (and concomitantly) of the physical and moral resources which come with formal authority. In an era when in some parts of the world statehood is increasingly becoming an empty shell, the nation-state is alive and vigorous in the Middle East and elsewhere in the developing world. In this sense, therefore, the Palestinians deserve their place in the sun.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), long an amorphous but powerful force present in the wings, has emerged from October's Arab summit conference at Rabat as a leading formal actor in the tangled relationships of the Middle East, a role reinforced by the PLO's reception at the United Nations in November. In one sense, this is a desirable development. Ever since the basic configuration of Middle Eastern international politics was set in the aftermath of World War II the Palestinians have been deprived not only of statehood, but also (and concomitantly) of the physical and moral resources which come with formal authority. In an era when in some parts of the world statehood is increasingly becoming an empty shell, the nation-state is alive and vigorous in the Middle East and elsewhere in the developing world. In this sense, therefore, the Palestinians deserve their place in the sun.

In another sense, these developments may forebode disaster. They make the chances of the outbreak of yet another round of Arab-Israeli warfare-this time potentially a catastrophic round-very much greater. The purpose of this article is to conjecture why the risks of war may now be so much greater, and to suggest what the United States might do to prevent new major warfare from occurring. Its purpose, also, is to ask what interests the United States has in the relationship between the Israelis and their Arab enemies, and to ask what U.S. policies might further those interests.

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Less gloomy forecasts might also be made. For instance, one could argue that the accession of the PLO to formal authority not only is desirable as a means of giving due acknowledgment to a Palestinian identity, but is desirable as well because-provided it is met with an enlightened and creative response on the part of the Israelis-it suddenly makes possible a radical departure from the past structure of Arab-Israeli relationships. At the end of this line of argument lies a vision of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, the two entering into harmonious and mutually beneficial economic relations, old enmities gradually atrophying under the impetus of concrete cooperation toward progress.

This vision was impossible, it might be argued, before the formal emergence of the Palestinians. So long as they had no territorial base of their own, all territory was potentially open to their claims. Yasir Arafat and his colleagues in the PLO are, it is often asserted, not only "moderate" by comparison with other groups aspiring to speak and act for the Palestinians, but also-perhaps-genuinely moderate in their willingness now to abjure terrorism and ultimately even to recognize Israel's existence as a state. Now that they have a potential territorial base, they may soon discover that half-a-loaf is, in fact, better than none, and that a genuine peace within circumscribed frontiers is better than the constant uncertainties of unending hostility in the search for the whole loaf. Since Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 War, there have, in fact, grown up highly interdependent and cooperative relationships between the Israeli state and the Arab (mostly Palestinian) inhabitants of the region. The task of statecraft, so this argument runs, is to perpetuate these cooperative relations while at the same time granting the Palestinians a more equal status and the security of operating from the base of their own nation-state.

A harmonious relationship between Israel and a Palestinian state may be one vision of the future made possible by Rabat. Much more likely, however, is a set of grimmer alternatives. One would, indeed, include the creation, through negotiation with Israel, of some sort of Palestinian state. But, rather than harmony, new conflict and war would eventually follow as the Palestinians-perhaps under a more radical successor leadership-reasserted their claims to Israeli territory. A second and even more likely scenario would depict no Palestinian state at all, as Israel refused to cede occupied lands to a movement pledged to its destruction; and there would be, instead, renewed war between Israel and its present Arab neighbors, augmented by a reinforced and emboldened Palestinian movement.

These alternatives derive from the profound hostility which the Palestinian leadership feels for Israel and the deeply ingrained hatred of Israel which has been imbued in the Palestinian people for over a generation, combined with the deep mistrust which the Israelis feel for those who have been the agents of terror against them. The Palestinians are the one Arab group with a genuine grievance against Israel, the one group dispossessed by the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. They remain a highly nationalistic people the basis of whose nationalism is their claim to the territory of another people whose nationalism is equally strong.

These grim alternatives also derive from the dynamics of the struggle for leadership within the Palestinian movement and within the Arab world at large. Playing upon the pervasive hatred for Israel often becomes the route to political success. No matter how successful as leaders they might otherwise be, those who favor coexistence with Israel are always vulnerable to the attacks of those who preach an apocalyptic vengeance and who equate compromise with betrayal. Revolutionary politics favors the extremist and the fundamentalist over the moderate and the compromiser. Otherwise moderate leaders are thus driven to embrace militant positions on some issues in order to protect their power to deal with others. In the Arab world, relations with Israel-indeed, often the very existence of Israel-invariably is such an issue. Given this well-rehearsed political dynamic, one does not need to distrust the present Palestinian leadership, nor does one need to posit an especially marked rigidity on the part of the Israeli leadership, to feel that the risks of new war have been substantially increased by the results of the Rabat conference.

Rabat in effect symbolized the ascendance of the assumption that history belongs to the Arabs and not to their enemies. Indeed, such has long been the Arab view. New and vastly greater oil revenues, however, make it possible to shorten "history" from decades to years, and perhaps even to months. Arab resources are now many times those of the Israelis. The much-vaunted (and, by the Arabs, deeply resented) flow of funds to Israel from Jews abroad, particularly from the United States, is now a derisory trickle compared with the enormous stream of oil dollars. Arab political leaders can tell their military commanders that price is truly no barrier to acquiring the most modern and sophisticated weapons systems. Final success on the battlefield must at last seem near at hand.

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