Arab-Israeli Conflict - Arab League
Before 1948
The League was established on March 22, 1945. When the League founding
pact was signed in Cairo, Egypt, "[t]he Arab League states collectively
put their weight behind the basic demands of Palestine's Arabs but
arrogated to themselves the right to select who would represent the
Palestinians in their councils, so long as their country was not
independent." 1 (p.173)
By the end of World War II, the Palestinian Arabs were left leaderless.
The mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni had been in exile since 1937
and spent the war years in Nazi-occupied Europe, actively collaborating
with German National Socialist leadership. As the war ended, he managed
to escape to Egypt and stayed there until his death in 1974. His brother
Jamal al-Husayni was interned in Southern Rhodesia during the war.
In November 1945, the Arab League reestablished the Arab Higher
Committee as a supreme executive body of Palestinian Arabs in the
territory of the British Mandate of Palestine, but it fell apart due to
infighting. In June 1946, the Arab League imposed upon the Palestinians
the Arab Higher Executive, renamed into "Arab Higher Committee" in 1947,
with Amin al-Husayni as its chairman and Jamal al-Husayni as
vice-chairman.
Since 1945 King Abdullah of Jordan had been negotiating in secret with
the Jewish Agency on plans for partition of Palestine between the Jews
and Transjordan. At a clandestine meeting on 17 November 1947 between
Golda Meir and Abdullah she confirmed that Transjordan's takeover of the
Arab part of Palestine would be viewed favourably. At a second meeting
on 10 May 1948 Abdullah declined to confirm his commitment to the
existing agreement, but left Meir with the impression that he would make
peace with a Jewish state after the impending war 1 (p.221)
1948-1949
The day after the state of Israel was proclaimed, six League members,
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, supported by
other members (notably Yemen), coordinated the attack on the State of
Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and explicitly stated the
destruction of the newly-formed Jewish state as their goal. On May 15,
1948, the Arab League Secretary General Abdul Razek Azzam Pasha
announced the intention to wage "a war of extermination and a momentous
massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the
Crusades." 1 (p.219) However, despite the rhetoric Arab leaders were
disunited. The Egyptians knew of Abdullah's agreement with Meir and were
determined to thwart Transjordan's territorial ambitions, "thus the Arab
war plan changed in conception and essence from a united effort to
conquer parts of the nascent Jewish state and perhaps destroy it, into a
multilateral land grab focussing on the Arab areas of the country" 1
(p.221).
"A key feature of the Arabs' plans was the complete marginalization of
the Palestinians... This aptly reflected the political reality: The
military defeats of April-May had rendered them insignificant. The Arab
League through the first half of 1948 had consistently rejected
Husseini's appeals to establish a government-in-exile... Under strong
pressure from Egypt, which feared complete Hashemite control over the
Palestinians, the League Political Committee in mid-September authorized
the establishment of a Palestinian 'government.'" 1 (p.222)
On September 22, 1948, the All-Palestine Government was established in
Gaza, and on September 30, the rival First Palestinian Congress, which
promptly denounced the Gaza "government", was convened in Amman.
1949-1967
As a result of 1949 Armistice Agreements, the West Bank and East
Jerusalem were ruled by Jordan, while the Gaza Strip was occupied by
Egypt until the 1967 Six Day War.
In 1951, the Arab League established the Office of the Arab Boycott of
Israel (OABI) based in Damascus in order to boycott companies that do
business with Israel from operating in the Arab world. In its heyday,
the Arab boycott office blacklisted more than 8,500 companies, including
The Coca-Cola Company and Ford Motor Company.
"It was not the Palestinians themselves who decided to create the PLO
after their defeat in 1948; The Arab League set it up in 1964 to attack
Israel. For years, Palestinian independence was off the Arab agenda; now
it was back. Inventing the PLO was a prelude to war, not a result of it;
the goal was to destroy Israel, not to rectify the misfortune of the
Palestinians, which still could have been done by the Arab states
irrespective of Israel." 2 (p.126)
1967-2000
On September 1, 1967, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the Khartoum
Resolution was issued at the meeting between the leaders of eight Arab
countries. The paragraph 3 of the resolution became known as the Three
No's:
1. No peace with Israel
2. No recognition of Israel
3. No negotiations with Israel
During the years 1979-1989, Egypt was suspended from the Arab League in
the wake of President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and 1978 Camp
David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel.
The Arab League immediately recognized the State of Palestine
unilaterally proclaimed on November 15, 1988 by the Palestinian National
Council. At the time, the PLO was based in Tunis and did not have
control over any part of Palestine (region).
After 2000
In 2002, Saudi Arabia offered a peace plan in the New York Times and at
a summit meeting of the Arab League in Beirut. The plan, based on UN
Security Council Resolution 242 and Resolution 338, but going further,
essentially calls for full withdrawal in return for fully normalized
relations with the whole Arab world. This proposal received the
unanimous backing of the Arab League for the first time.
In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said: "... the Saudi
step is an important one, but it is liable to founder if terrorism is
not stopped... It is ... clear that the details of every peace plan must
be discussed directly between Israel and the Palestinians, and to make
this possible, the Palestinian Authority must put an end to terror, the
horrifying expression of which we witnessed just last night in Netanya."
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League_and_the_Arab-Israeli_conflict
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