Arab leaders have just finished a
two-day Arab Summit in Algeria that coincided with the 60th
anniversary of the Arab League. Unsurprisingly, as in the past,
the outcome of the meeting was insignificant.
Three years ago, the Arab Summit in
Beirut seemed promising, because of the peace initiative of
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. The Arabs made their historic and
comprehensive land-for-peace offer to Israel, and Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon responded by invading and raiding Ramallah 24 hours
later, killing hundreds of civilians and coming very close to
sniping down the democratically elected Palestinian president
Yasser Arafat, at his besieged compound in Ramallah.
The Arabs did nothing to stop him
and the "great" Arab Summit was sent off into history with
little ceremony or respect. The leaders that met this week in
Algeria argued and embarrassed the Arab masses on satellite
television (nine leaders did not even show up), and came up with
a statement, written in flowery Arabic, on the need to show
solidarity with the Palestinians and the Iraqis.
One year ago on this exact date,
Israel assassinated Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the popular leader and
founder of Hamas, accusing him of being a "terrorist",
infuriating the Arab masses and the Islamic resistance, which
promised to avenge the slain leader.
Less than one month later, on April
17, 2004, Yassin's successor, Dr Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, was
also killed by the Israeli army. Again, the Arabs promised
revenge, and did nothing. A few months back, on November 11,
2004, the historic leader of the Palestinian people, Yasser
Arafat, died in a hospital in Paris, and many Palestinians and
Arabs speculated that he had been poisoned by Israel. They
promised revenge, yet also did nothing. In fact, all they did
was rally in rank and file behind the newly elected leader
Mahmud Abbas, who promised to take them in the exact opposite
direction from where Arafat had been leading them since 1965.
This is the sad case today with the Arab street.
The history of Arab weakness,
especially during Arab summits, is a phenomenon worth examining.
As early as 1948, during a summit to discuss the upcoming war in
Palestine, embarrassing arguments broke out between Amin
al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the pre-Arafat
leader of the Palestinians, and Syria's Shukri al-Quwatli.
Husayni demanded that the Army of Deliverance, a volunteer army
created by the Arab League, be placed under his command, while
Quwatli objected, wanting it under the command of Syria.
Husayni reasoned that his history,
during the uprising against the British in 1936, attested that
he could lead an army in combat, while Quwatli wanted leadership
for Syria, to live up to Syria's history of Arab nationalism.
When Quwatli objected, Husayni bitterly reminded him that he had
donated generously to the Syrian cause in 1925-27, and expected
Quwatli to pay him back for his favors. He said that he would
not recognize a resistance movement in Palestine not under his
command, and sent Quwatli a list of expenses, salaries and
military needs for his 12,000 recruits, which Syria was expected
to provide. Quwatli snapped back saying, "If the Palestinian
people want to make the Mufti commander of everything in
Palestine, then I would be more than happy to give him
everything. That way I could rid myself of all the
responsibility which rests on my shoulders, and all the problems
I face in trying to save Palestine. I could relax. By pushing
forward with my efforts to defend Palestine, I am risking
Syria's very independence. An independence which is absolute and
in which every Syrian takes pride. An independence won with
tremendous sacrifice."
Quwatli added that if Husayni took
control, then the Palestinians would lose the war. "The Mufti's
actions in Palestine over the last 20 years have never been
successful, but have only led to one defeat after another," he
said. Inter-Arab differences were many, and the Arab camp was
further divided between Quwatli and Jordanian King Abdullah.
Jordan was reluctant to approve a pan-Arab fighting force in
Palestine and showed reservations about involving its own troops
in combat. Abdullah expressed resentment at Quwatli's decision
to draft a volunteer army from Syria, and added that if an Arab
force would be created, he and only he should lead it.
Iraq supported Amman (both were
ruled by the Hashemite dynasty) while Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Lebanon and Palestine supported Syria. During their meeting,
Quwatli received a cable from Hasan al-Banna, founder of the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who claimed that 10,000 fighters
from the Brotherhood were ready for combat, and were at the
disposal of the Arab League. The proposal infuriated King
Farouk, who was facing a violent clash with the Brotherhood at
home.
When the Arabs welcomed Banna's
proposal, Farouk walked out in protest. The Mufti of Jerusalem
Amin al-Husayni spoke to reporters after the meeting saying,
"The Arabs have never been united on any topic before, as they
are united today on Palestine." Then British foreign secretary
Douglas Hume mocked the Arabs, saying, "As the Arabs have always
been without a strategy, there was no clarity or feeling about
what they should do on the land that they call Palestine." These
colossal arguments were before the creation of Israel.
There are many milestones of
embarrassment in the history of Arab summits. In Alexandria,
Egypt, in September 1964, the summit formally approved the
establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO),
under the command of an Arab aristocrat named Ahmad Shuqayri. It
was a political organization, dwarfed by Egyptian president
Gamal Abd al-Nasser, very different from the revolutionary one
that emerged under Arafat, and its leader Shuqayri was a
soft-spoken notable who had never carried a gun in his life.
To have him lead the PLO was an
embarrassment in its own right, showing how serious the Arabs
were in wanting to liberate Palestine. In Casablanca, an Arab
summit was held in September 1965 that was so insignificant that
no notable decisions were reached.
The summit that came next,
officially being the fourth, called for by the Arab League, was
memorable, being held in Khartoum, Sudan, two months after the
Arab defeat in the war of 1967 where Israel occupied the Golan
Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Jerusalem. This
summit agreed that the heads of state would take all needed
measures to liberate the Arab territories occupied in war. They
would "unify their political efforts to eliminate the effects of
the Israeli aggression" in addition to increasing their military
strength through the funding of Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The summit came out with the famous
"Three No's": no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and
no negotiations with Israel. Today, nearly 40 years later, all
these occupied lands, with the exception of the Syrian Golan,
have been liberated, not by war, as the leaders that assembled
in Sudan wanted, but actually by the peace initiatives of Anwar
al-Sadat in 1977-78 and Yasser Arafat in 1993. In fact, they
were only liberated by doing exactly what the Khartoum summit
asked the Arab leaders not to do in 1967.
Then came the Arab summit of
September 1970, held while war was raging in Jordan between King
Hussein's army and the PLO of Yasser Arafat. To show their
disgust with Hussein's bloodbath, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and
Morocco failed to show up at the summit. By absenting
themselves, all four states effectively did little to stop the
bloodbath, only increasing tension between Hussein and the
Arabs.
It was not until November 1973 that
the Arab summit then decided to "refuse any solution that might
be harmful to complete Arab sovereignty over the Holy City of
Jerusalem". And it was not until October 1974 that the summit
affirmed "the right of the Palestinians to self-determination
and to return to their homeland".
Jordan objected, but this Arab
summit in Rabat, Morocco, acknowledged the PLO as the sole
representative of the Palestinian people - a title and honor
King Hussein wanted for himself. In October 1976, an Arab Summit
was held in Riyadh to discuss the civil war in Lebanon and to
form the Arab Deterrent Force to help stop the fighting. In
fact, the fighting broke out in April 1975, and the Arabs were
one year and six months late in convening to help save Lebanon
from the civil war. Even then, they failed drastically in their
task, and war did not end until 14 years later, in 1990.
More Arab shortsightedness and
weakness was shown at the Arab Summit held in Iraq in November
1978, which called on Egypt not to sign a peace treaty with
Israel, and froze relations with president Anwar Sadat. Years
later, every Arab leader assembled in Baghdad in 1978,
responsible for the strongly-worded declaration against Sadat,
tried desperately to repeat what Sadat had done at Camp David.
A summit held in Tunis in November
1979, after the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, affirmed
that liberating it would be an Arab responsibility "in as much
as it was a Lebanese responsibility". Again, as the case of
1976, the Arab decision was too little and too late, coming
months after the actual occupation of the south.
And it was not the Arab League, but
in fact the Lebanese resistance of Hezbollah, with the help of
Iran (a non-Arab country), that liberated the south in 2000,
with no help whatsoever from the Arab community.
At a 1987 Arab conference in Amman,
so tense was the situation between the Arabs and Arafat that the
Palestinian cause was absent from the leaders' agenda and no
mention of Palestine was made in the final communique. In June
1988, six months after the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada,
an Arab summit was held in Algeria, which asked for the
organization of an international conference on the Middle East,
to be attended by Arafat's exiled PLO, residing at the time in
Tunis. It affirmed the right of the Palestinians to
self-determination, and did nothing but offer verbal support to
the Palestinians, who were leading a non-militant uprising
against occupation, armed with nothing but stones.
An extraordinary summit was held in
Cairo in August 1990, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
The Arab League called on him to withdraw his forces from
Kuwait, condemning it as aggression, but took no steps toward
pressuring Saddam to comply. The league could have, had it
wished, created an Arab force to supervise Saddam's exodus from
Kuwait, but preferred to leave the job to the US, thereby
facilitating the Gulf War of 1991. In fact, at the Cairo Summit
of 1990, it was decided that an Arab force would be deployed
between Kuwait and Iraq to enforce a withdrawal and end to
hostilities, something that never took place.
In June 1996, a summit was held in Cairo to discuss the election
of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel. So divided were the Arabs, and
so eager to please the US, that Saddam's Iraq was not invited.
In October 2000, a summit was held
in Cairo where a fund of US$1 billion was set aside to preserve
the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and support the intifada that
had broken out in September 2000. Today, five years later, that
money has not gone through into either project, and the intifada
is proclaimed dead, by the Arab community at large, and by
Mahmud Abbas, the new president of the Palestinians.
The 2000 conference in Sharm
el-Sheikh and the 2001 conference in Amman were the greatest
proof of Arab inefficiency, where the Arab states were unable
even properly to channel the donation funds promised to the
Palestinians. In 2000, so terrible was the Arab scene that
Libya's Muammar Gaddafi appeared on satellite television and
accused the Arabs of organizing summits solely to meet, dine and
catch up on one another's stories, claiming that no serious work
was ever made at the "so-called summits".
The past three summits were also
very memorable. In March 2002 in Beirut, the Arabs met to
discuss a comprehensive Arab peace initiative, and the continued
house arrest of Arafat. Not only did Israel prevent Arafat from
attending the conference, but the organizers in Beirut caused an
Arab-Arab crisis by refusing to broadcast Arafat's speech,
broadcast from Ramallah, fearing that this would upset the
Syrians, who were traditional enemies of the PLO chairman.
At Sharm al-Sheikh in March 2003,
the summit was a fiasco because a war of words broke out, on
satellite television, between Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia and Gaddafi. In May 2004, a summit was held in Tunis,
after being delayed from an earlier date, where Gaddafi, so
upset at the summit's resolutions, took out a cigarette and
began to smoke, puffing away in the face of Lebanon's late prime
minister Rafik Hariri.
This year's summit opened amid
monumental changes taking place in the Arab world. It is the
first summit since 1965 held without the towering influence of
Arafat. The intifada, which Arafat championed since 2000, is
nearly over, and Syria's presence in Lebanon is also coming to
an end. In Iraq, the people are moving on after many years of
hardship, having conducted democratic elections in January and
are working to create a proper post-Saddam Iraq.
Other longtime faces of the Arab
world, including the United Arab Emirates' president, Zayed bin
Sultan al-Nahyan, who died in 2004, were absent, and so was
Hariri, killed in a bomb attack in Beirut this year.
Even the well-established leaders of
the Arab world failed to show up. King Abdullah of Jordan,
annoyed by the summit refusing to adopt a Jordanian resolution
calling for normalization with Israel, did not attend, claiming
that he had prior commitments. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia did not show, to protest the presence of Gaddafi, who was
implicated in an assassination attempt against the Saudi royals
after their feud at the Arab Summit of 2003. Lebanon's Emile
Lahhoud is facing rising tension at home in light of Prime
Minister Omar Karameh's failure to form a proper cabinet, and
the latest car bomb in Beirut, which left eight injured. He did
not show up, nor did the leaders of Bahrain, Oman and Yemen. The
leaders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also failed to show up, for
health reasons.
The reasons for so many absences
vary, but a main point is that even the Arab leaders themselves
have lost faith in their ability to change the terrible
conditions of the Middle East, for which they are collectively
responsible.