Current incidents on the tense borders between Israel and Syria and Israel and Trans-jordan have focused attention again on the huge and menacing question which, in the third year of the Jewish state, still remains unanswered: will the Arab states unleash a new war against Israel? Ian Mikardo, reporting the recent meetings of the Arab League, sees, as a balance to the rise in border tensions, signs of a growth in political maturity of the Arabs, which, in his opinion, may deter them from further wasteful adventures against Israel.
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The princes and politicians of the Arab states are slowly learning to recognize, and to face, the facts of life. They are beginning to understand that the State of Israel can’t be treated as a momentary aberration of history; that the problem of their refugees can’t be settled merely by using them as an instrument of propaganda; that the Near East can’t just withdraw from the larger conflict between the Western powers and Russia; and that the slogans of jingoist editors and rioting students are no substitute for a coherent political policy.
The important recent meeting of the Political Committee of the Arab League, in January and early February, at Cairo, was characterized by a sober sense of responsibility which contrasts sharply with most of the past pronouncements and behavior of many Arab leaders. This meeting wasted little time on those half-pleading, half-threatening complaints against the UN, against the Western powers, and against Israel which have been the standard activity of the Arab League in the past: instead, its participants got down to the serious business of trying to solve their internal differences and to frame a common, constructive policy for their relations with the outside world.
The importance attached to this particular Cairo conference was evidenced by the high rank of the leaders of the delegations. Saudi Arabia was represented by the viceroy Prince Feisal, and all the other states except Yemen by their prime ministers. Leaving aside the propagandist and face-saving formulas, one may say that these leaders committed themselves, with some reluctance but nevertheless firmly, to three propositions: (1) that there can be no “second round” against Israel; (2) that the Arab refugees will have to be settled in the Arab lands; and (3) that in the East-West conflict the Arab states will have to throw in their lot with the West.
The contrast between the confident arrogance of public pronouncements and the realistic humility of private decisions is most clearly illustrated by the Arab leaders’ acceptance of the fact that the vendetta against Israel must now be abandoned. Some of them were uttering bloodcurdling threats against Israel right up to the eve of the conference, and they will doubtless do so again, because they cannot easily escape from the need to appease the belligerent nationalist public opinion they themselves have created.
Some of this threatening talk has centered on a proposed march into Israel, in violation of the armistice agreements, of a column of Arab refugees, headed by women and children. Several times a date had been fixed for this venture, and each time it was postponed. The most recent occasion—and probably the last—on which this happened was at a meeting last December of Arab refugees in Syria and the Lebanon: it was then announced over the Baghdad radio that the march would take place on January 2, and, the announcement added, “the responsibility for such a march will lie on the General Assembly of the UN, which has hitherto failed to find a solution for the refugee problem.” I was in the kibbutz of Afikim in Galilee on January 2, and the defenses of the whole area were alerted. But the Israelis were not really worried. “These Arab threats are all talk,” said one tough settler. “Just the sounding brass and the tinkling cymbal,” he added, sublimely unaware that he was quoting from the New Testament
There were, at the January-February conference of the League, other sounding brasses and tinkling cymbals. There was the then Syrian premier, Nazem el Koudsi, stressing the importance of unifying all Arab military plans “in view of the likelihood of the renewal of a war with Israel.” There was the Baghdad spokesman who described the Jordanian-Israeli border clash early this year as “the first spark of the second round.” And there was Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the League, declaring that if Egyptian national demands were not fulfilled there was “danger of war throughout the Middle East.”
Why is it that, notwithstanding all this saber rattling, the second round has ceased to be practical politics? There are three answers to this question.
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The first of these is the serious divisions which exist among the Arab states, and which the January Cairo meeting did little to bridge. For a long time Iraq has worked towards a union with Syria, and she now feels this union to be more urgent because of the dangers inherent in the apparently chronic instability of Syrian governments. It was this case which the Iraqi premier, General Nuri es Said, was arguing when he recently said that “there are too many barriers between the Arab states.” The projected Iraqi-Syrian union is supported, for dynastic reasons, by King Abdullah, and is firmly opposed by King Farouk. For a long time Syria has been under Egyptian influence: that influence declined to some extent after the assassination of Husni el Zaim in 1949 but has recently recovered, and Egypt is anxious to preserve the independence of Syria in order to maintain a sphere of influence to the north of Israel—and of Jordan.
Nor is this the only respect in which the government of Transjordan does not see eye to eye with Cairo and with some of the other Arab capitals. The incorporation of Arab Palestine into Jordan is King Abdullah’s dream come true, but it is not yet recognized by the other Arab states. His desire for a peace treaty with Israel is no secret, and it makes nonsense of “second-war” talk by an Arab League of which he is a member, especially as his Legion was the only Arab army which remained undefeated in the “first” war. And King Abdullah is not unaware of the fact that Arab League agents, operating within his borders and from Nazareth just across his border, are trying to stir up revolt against him as a tool of Great Britain, as a lackey of the UN (which in turn is a lackey of the Jews!), and therefore as a betrayer of the sacred Arab cause.
These political frictions make virtually impossible that coordination of the military forces of the Arab states without which a second round cannot hope for success. True, a collective security pact was signed at Cairo, but its real worth is much less than its face value. Before the Cairo meeting the heads of the Arab armies were discussing a Syrian Iraqi plan for full-scale military alignment against Israel. They hoped to get from each League state a firm promise of the number of troops it was prepared to mobilize on Israel’s borders and of a further number that it would be ready to contribute to a unified army under a combined high command located in Egypt. But the Cairo collective security pact was much too restricted and too indefinite to fulfill any of these hopes.
Yemen signed the pact with so many reservations that her adhesion is virtually valueless. Saudi Arabia expressed no open reservations, but nobody is in any doubt that Ibn Saud is far too happy with his Americans and their oil royalties (and perhaps now their air bases) to feel any desire for military adventure outside his own territories. Iraq wouldn’t forego freedom of action in financial matters. Jordan, too, refused to sign, and justified her refusal with a devastating array of criticisms of the pact. It failed, she said, to define the terms “a threat of war” and “aggression,” and it failed to limit the term “aggression” only to acts of countries outside the Arab League. Its mechanism was cumbersome, and it left unclarified its effects on existing treaties—an obvious reference to the Anglo-Jordan treaty. Worst of all, since a two-thirds majority for action was binding on all the members, a war could be precipitated by six states, who would then leave the fighting of it to the minority (say Egypt and Jordan) which had voted against it. This Jordanian case against the pact is a formidable one; yet it is no more than a pilpul disguising Abdullah’s real reason for his refusal to sign—which is that he doesn’t want to close the door to the possibility of an Israel-Jordan treaty.
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The second reason for the abandonment of the plan for another “round” is that the Arab states have at last come to understand that their warlike threats no longer impress the Western powers. Since the end of the Israeli-Arab war, most of the League states have felt that their defeat lowered them in the eyes of the world and that the only way to rehabilitate their military reputation was to fight another war and win it. Indeed, they thought they might not actually have to fight the war so long as they always appeared to be on the point of launching it. They considered that if they sounded sufficiently bellicose, the Western powers would hasten to give them concessions in order to appease them.
This is the argument, as it was put by the Cairo daily Al Misri: “The Arab states find it hard to understand the lack of sympathy with which their needs are met by the West, in view of the attitude adopted [by the Western powers] towards Israel. If the Arabs had used the present time of international tension to renew the war against Israel by attacking her on all sides and giving her a good lesson, there would have come about a great change in the way the Arabs are treated by the rest of the world.” This expresses the Arabs’ opportunist outlook bluntly enough; but another Arab organ, Falastin, was still more frank about the connection between Arab hostility to Israel and Arab demands upon the Western world. ‘The Arabs,” it said, “must not give permission to the West for the construction of military bases in their territories unless our lost tribes in Palestine are regained.”
But this poker game is over, and the Arabs sadly recognize the fact The preoccupations of the West in other parts of the world have made the Great Powers anxious to preserve the peace of the Near East and therefore hostile to any potential violator of it. Britain’s improved relations with Israel, and the cessation of her efforts to discourage an Israel-Jordan treaty, are pointers in the same direction. The Anglo-French-American declaration against any revision of Near Eastern boundaries by force still stands on the record. For a time some of the Arabs thought they had only to wait for a moment when the attention of the Great Powers was diverted from the Near East by an outbreak of trouble in Europe or elsewhere, and that this diversion would allow them to win a quick victory over Israel which could be presented to the UN as a fait accompli. But even that hope has vanished. For one thing, the maintenance by Israel of substantial defense forces and substantial defense expenditure rules out the possibility of a quick coup; and for another there are many officers in the British Army in the Canal Zone who would dearly like an excuse to march their troops back into Cairo.
The third reason why the Arab rulers cannot commit their armies to another war against Israel is that they need their armies to maintain their rule at home. Every one of them lives in continual fear of social uprising. The coming of the refugees from Palestine, with their educated civil-servant class and their traditions of comparatively high living standards and a non-feudal social system, has brought a new ferment of dissatisfaction; and the rapid emancipation of the Arabs of Israel provides an object lesson for the underprivileged classes of the Arab lands which creates yet another long-term threat.
In Jordan, King Abdullah is engaged in a serious struggle with the political leaders who have appeared as a result of his first essay in constitutional rule. The greater part of them are anti-British, anti-Israel, and anti-Abdullah; and the King’s chief ally against them is his Arab Legion. He would therefore be unwilling to commit that Legion to another battle outside the country, as indeed he was unwilling to commit it to full-scale action in the Israeli-Arab war, for fear that its depletion would weaken his internal position. In Syria, the successive military coups d’état have made the army a medicine for internal consumption only. In Iraq, the army is always looking back over its shoulder at the rebellious Kurds, who are too warlike and too near the precious oil wells to be left for long.
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For all these reasons, a “come-back campaign” against Israel is no longer practical politics for the Arab states. But that does not mean, of course, that the rulers of those states are ready, or even able, to pass from war against Israel to peace with Israel at any time in the immediate future. They need to continue to have the Jews as their enemies for the same reason that other rulers have, i. e., to distract attention from the causes of internal discontents. They can’t, so soon, swallow the flamboyant anti-Zionist utterances which stand within recent memory. They dare not make a present to their political opponents of that xenophobia which is the only reliable vote-catcher in any Arab country. And they are unwilling to see Israel gathering in the economic benefits which would flow from a real peace.
Alone among them all, King Abdullah is wise enough to see that for his country, as for Israel, the benefits of peace would outweigh the advantages which he can hope to gain from the absence of peace. But even he, as we have already said, is by no means successful in carrying his country with him.
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The second question to which the Arab politicians are directing some realistic thinking is the problem of the refugees. On this problem the Political Committee of the Arab League came to two conclusions: (1) that the refugees should be resettled where they are now; and (2,) that the League would cooperate with the United Nations refugee organizations, whilst pressing for more funds for resettlement schemes.
This volte-face has been largely stimulated by a belated realization that the refugees, when they are resettled, will represent a valuable accretion of manpower. If the UN and its organizations can be induced to carry the cost of resettlement, the Arab states will reap the profit of an increased population. They continue to declare, of course, that their acceptance of the refugees is “without prejudice to the refugees’ rights to repatriation or compensation,” but this declaration represents in fact a demand for money and nothing else.
There is also a new realization among the Arab states that Israel, which some time ago was showing up badly in the UN discussions on the refugees, has now gone a long way toward putting herself right with world opinion. She has done this, first, by admitting in principle the refugees’ right to compensation for certain forms of property; second, by agreeing to discuss the refugee problem in advance of all other matters outstanding between the Arab states and herself; and, third, by contributing generously to the General Assembly’s “reintegration fund.”
By contrast, the Arabs have shown themselves less accommodating and less generous. The rich Palestinian Arabs who are now in the capitals of Egypt, Syria, and the Lebanon, where they had carefully salted away their “funk money,” have shown no disposition to help their poorer brethren. Seven of the eight Arab states contributed to the UN relief for the Arab Palestine refugees in 1949, and among them they donated 16 per cent of the total subscriptions; but only five contributed to the UN Relief and Works Agency for these refugees in 1950-51, and they accounted for only 4 per cent of the total funds, while for 1951-52 they have reduced even this modest contribution by two-thirds.
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Since the Arab states are neither able to play the refugees as an international propaganda card nor willing to bear a fair share of the cost of them, they are settling down to dealing with the problem on a realistic basis, and to devoting their energies to obtaining the maximum help from UN funds. The refugees may thus come to be treated, as they ought always to have been, not as a political question but as a social and economic task.
The Arab states’ changing reactions to both Israel and the Palestine refugees has in turn created a changing attitude toward the general East-West conflict. There never was, and in the light of the social and economic structures of the Arab countries there never could have been, any question of these countries throwing in their lot with Russia. The only question that arose was whether they should openly throw in their lot with the West or whether they should play “hard to get” in order to obtain a good price for their alliance. It was the Egyptians who led the second of these two schools of thought. Russia, they argued, was far away, and the present international tension offered a golden opportunity for Arab nationalism to cash in on Western difficulties and make the West pay for Arab support. Egypt’s failure to support the United Nations’ defense of South Korea was a counter in this game. On the other side of the argument, it is Premier Nuri es Said of Iraq who continually points out that the West isn’t deceived by these posturings, and that since the Arabs can in the end make only one choice they might just as well make a virtue of necessity and offer their alliance unreservedly.
Nuri’s influence was reflected in the debates on the communiqué issued by the Cairo conference. All the contributors to those debates expressed their opposition to Communism, and added that since their countries were democracies their support for the democratic nations in a hot war would have to be automatic.
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One factor which tended to confirm them in this attitude was the realization that the Western powers, in considering their defenses in the Near East, have been looking for allies outside the Arab states, notably in Turkey and Israel. The support which those countries gave to the UN action in Korea seems, to Arab eyes, to have paid higher dividends than Egypt’s calculated equivocation.
So far as Turkey is concerned, her frontier with Russia and her control of the Straits create for her a ready-made role in any future war. But as for Israel, the conversations between her military leaders and those of the Western powers do not by any means indicate any integration of the forces of Israel into the Western combination. Far from it. Any such integration is inhibited by the internal pressure on the government by the left-wing Mapam and by the physical factor that the West cannot, as yet, spare those arms without which the Haganah cannot undertake the commitment of recognizing any potential enemy other than the Arabs.
But even though Western military cooperation with Israel is still in the embryo stage, the example of Turkey and Israel contributed much at Cairo to persuading the Arab states, in their debates on world affairs, that they ought to become good, unquestioning Westerners.
But the debates, notwithstanding this virtuously glowing conclusion, were halfhearted and perfunctory compared with the discussions on purely Near Eastern matters. So long as the cold war remains cold, the Arab states want to keep out of it, partly because of the natural desire of small states to stay out of Great-Power quarrels, and partly because of the Arabs’ permanent unwillingness to put their money on any horse before the result of the race is declared.
But in international statesmanship the princes and politicians of the Arab states are, in general, passing from adolescence to adult stature. They are learning to face reality.
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