Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Arab Studies Quarterly. Volume 12, Number 1/2, Winter/Spring 1990.
Although the question of Palestine has always been at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the extent to which various works that address the foreign policy of the United States toward Palestine and the Palestinians have consistently entangled that question with the Arab-Israeli conflict is quite astonishing. The entanglement has been, analytically speaking, so basic as to produce a fusion of the Question’ of Palestine, which remains salient, with the general Arab-Israeli conflict. Equally important to observe is the extent to which the Question of Palestine in fact has become subordinate to that of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The policy that has been systematically developed by the United States, consciously or otherwise, has sought either to subordinate Palestine to the Arab-Israeli conflict or to deconstruct the Question of Palestine and thus handle its constituent parts separately. Nowhere is the latter more evident than in the Camp David agreements of 1979. Although stating that Palestinians have legitimate—but undefined—rights, the agreements clearly called for resolving the issues associated with the “autonomy” of the so-called West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the “refugees,” and so forth, without noting their connection with either Palestine or a Palestinian nation. Later schemes advanced by the Reagan-Shultz and the Bush-Baker administrations were premised on similar formulations and proposed solutions similarly in violation of the Palestinian right to self-determination.
While recognizing that the complex issues associated with the Arab-Israeli conflict were and remain pressing for policy makers, it is important to recall that it has been Israel’s historic strategy not only to ascribe primary importance to the Arab factor, but additionally to impress upon the world community that its conflict in the Middle East has much more to do with the Arab states than with the Palestinians, the principal victims of the colonization of Palestine. Even as the intifada assumes worldwide importance and emphasizes anew the centrality of the Palestinian dimension of the conflict, Israel attempts, evidently without much success, to project the primacy of its conflict with the Arabs. Hence its persistent allegations of dire threats posed by the belligerent policies of either Syria, or Libya, or Iraq, and so on. Consciously or otherwise, America’s policy has tended in fact, if not in theory, to accept the validity of Israel’s strategy and perception. Also, America’s varied economic, military, strategic, and political interests in the Arab world have tended to validate, for American policy planners and apologists, the centrality of the Arab states factor not only in resolving the issues of contention in the Middle East but also in promoting a particular foreign policy toward the states in the region. That perhaps may explain the overriding emphasis on an American Palestine policy that is essentially subordinate to that of America’s Middle East policy in general.
In the narration that follows an attempt will be made to show that the United States pursued a very complex foreign policy toward Palestine in the period of the British Mandate and that, when Palestine was dismembered in 1948, the United States pursued a distinct policy on Palestine that inevitably led to the subordination of the Palestinian dimension in the struggle to that of the Arab-Israeli conflict, while simultaneously favoring a particularly hos tile political outcome for the Palestinian people. It will also be pointed out that the United States chose in subsequent years to pursue policies in the region as if the Question of Palestine had been obliterated, thus making it possible for the United States to address itself to derivative questions such as those of autonomy, refugees, and Jerusalem. Only when the Palestinians resumed their independent political expression and reassumed their central role in conducting their own struggle for independence did the United States make tentative steps toward a comprehensive policy toward the Question of Palestine.
Our purpose is clearly not to survey the history of American policy. But it is useful to summarize the principal issues addressed by that policy in order to provide the explanation for America’s opposition to Palestinian self-determination.
American Policy on Palestine
There is strong consensus among Palestinians, reinforced by considerable international endorsement, to the effect that the United States is opposed to Palestinian self-determination. By this is meant that the United States has pursued policies toward the Palestinians that entailed denial of the Palestinian national identity, opposed the right to be represented by legitimate national leadership, namely the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and opposed the right to establish an independent and sovereign state in any part of Palestine. In theory, the United States government accepts the right of the Palestinians to return to their country (UN Resolution 194, 11 December 1948) but it is totally indifferent to its implementation, and in fact actively assists Israel in denying this right to the Palestinians.
Although Palestinian national consensus is evident on this issue, Palestinians and others differ as to the reasons and the historic bases of that hostile policy. What Palestinians, and others also, do not readily recognize is how consistent American policy has been over time on this issue. American opposition to Palestinian self-determination is all too evident today, but the reality is that the United States has consistently opposed Palestinian independence—the intimate connection of the idea of self-determination with President Woodrow Wilson notwithstanding. This was as true when the British Mandate was imposed as it is true today. For a variety of complex reasons, the United States has never accepted in principle or as a matter of policy the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
Studies of America’s Palestine policy, few as they may be, clearly reflect the distinct phases that have characterized the evolution of the Question of Palestine since its emergence essentially in the second decade of this century. Palestinians, along with other Arabs, had hoped—largely as a result of their active involvement in the dismemberment of the Ottoman state—to benefit from Ottoman defeat and achieve independence. However, European powers, namely Britain and France, already had schemes for colonizing the areas where that independence was to be exercised. It is clear that the United States early on endorsed the Balfour Declaration, ac quiesced with British-French designs, and accepted the imposition of the British Mandate on Palestine—the first significant violation of Palestinian self-determination. The provisions of the mandate recognized the legitimacy of the claim for the establishment in Palestine of “a National Home for the Jewish people,” the corporate existence of the Jewish community in Pales tine, while denying the Palestinians their political rights, especially their rights to self-government. While the United States explicitly endorsed these efforts, its concern was more specifically related to the achievement of a privileged status for itself and its citizens in a colonized Palestine. In other words, the United States sought to benefit from British imperialism’s control of Palestine—which indeed it did. In the process, however, it also provided both moral and informational support for Zionism and its claims. It was totally indifferent to the fate of Palestine’s Arab community.
A more active policy was suggested and pursued as World War II was coming to a successful end for the Allies. Both presidents Roosevelt and Truman were active in promoting policies for Palestine that presaged later policies that were extremely detrimental to the future of Palestine and the Palestinians. President Roosevelt showed malicious indifference to the Palestinian people by suggesting or entertaining proposals that sought the “transfer” of the Palestinians from Palestine to make room for the projected Jewish state. Although he is reported to have broached the subject of transfer with some of his advisers and is reported to have proposed a “bribe” to the Arabs (specifically to King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia) to facilitate such a transfer, mercifully he did not have the opportunity to act more seriously on that proposal. But the proposal in itself, and Roosevelt’s willingness to think of it as a probable solution to the conflict in Palestine, is a reflection of racial or ethnic prejudice toward Palestinian Arabs. For the proposal entails a view of the Palestinians as lesser people than the intended European Jewish immigrants, not fit for the kind of political future Zionism and its American supporters envisaged for Palestine. It certainly viewed the Palestinians as a commodity to be bartered for a few dollars. Although Roosevelt’s idea of transfer was not put into effect then, it was to surface later as an attenuated solution to the problem of the Palestine refugees.
President Truman’s policies are the most important of this second phase of America’s Palestine policy. Under Truman incessant pressure was put on Britain to permit the influx of 100,000 European Jewish immigrants to Pales tine which, in effect, caused a significant demographic revolution, to the detriment of the indigenous Palestinians. It was Truman who involved the United States in promoting the establishment of the Anglo-American Committee, which endorsed the right of European Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine—rather than in the United States! Also, it was the Truman ad ministration that pressured America’s client states to support the United Nations General Assembly’s recommendation of 1947 to partition Palestine, and thus helped immeasurably in legitimizing the effort to establish the Jewish state, with disastrous consequences for the Palestinians. And it was Truman who extended recognition to the State of Israel barely fifteen minutes after its declaration. In charting and pursuing such policies, President Truman was clearly concerned with the fate of European Jews, was excessively concerned with accommodating American Jews, and was not in the least concerned with the implications of such support for the Palestinians.
As Palestine was being successfully dismembered in 1948, America’s Middle East policy, by then obsessed with the Cold War, took concrete shape. Its basic premise became quite explicit by 1949-50. First, the United States favored the annexation by Jordan of the Arab part of Palestine that remained outside Israel’s actual military control. (The “Jordanian option” has resurfaced from time to time in subsequent years.) That same territorial policy in fact applied to Jerusalem, an area designated by the partition recommendation of the United Nations to come under international control. Although the United States did not explicitly abandon “internationalization” of Jerusalem, it acquiesced with its de facto annexation by both Israel and Jordan and later on (in 1967) by Israel alone.
Second, the United States, although seeming to endorse the Palestinian right to return, as evidenced by its sponsorship of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, first adopted in December 1948, in fact promoted various schemes premised upon the permanent settlement in the adjacent states of the then more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees. In fact, the United States in 1949 and 1950 actively promoted a scheme for the settlement of 100,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq, a scheme that was supposed to represent a population “exchange” with Iraqi Jews who were enticed (with the connivance of the government of Iraq at the time) to emigrate to Israel. Every “solution” to the refugee question that has been promoted by the United States since has been based on the settlement of the Palestinians in the Arab states. This was first given explicit expression by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954 and has remained an unexamined postulate of American policy ever since.
These two principles affecting territorial jurisdiction and the disposition of people have constituted the basis of future American policy towards Palestine and the Palestinian people. Clearly, both principles are violative of the Palestinian right to self-determination.
As the United States pursued these Palestinian policies and sought to implement them, working with some Arab states, Israel, and internationally, both the environment and the reality on the ground were altered significantly with the emergence of the PLO in 1964. As it grew more effective and began to establish an institutional basis for the struggle, the PLO became an important object of hostile U.S. policy. It is reasonably clear that the United States has never accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people (despite President Carter’s statement that the PLO “represents a substantial portion of the Palestinians”), nor has it acknowledged the political programs espoused by various Palestine National Councils.
As the PLO continued to demonstrate its effectiveness, its increasing legitimacy, and its singular role in promoting the national interests of the Palestinians, it elicited American policies that identified it not only as a “terrorist” organization but as an actual obstacle to the “peace” envisaged by the United States. In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger committed the United States not to “negotiate” with the PLO, and thus effectively cut off bilateral discussions between the two authorities, and his successor in office, Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, bade “bye bye PLO” in 1978, suggesting the end of any practical role for the Palestinians in any peacemaking process devised by the United States. Secretary of State George Shultz went even further when he suggested that it was up to the Arab states to “take care” of the PLO. The culmination of these hostile policy statements and actions came with the enactment of the notorious Anti-Terrorism Act of December 1987 (significantly two weeks after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising), which called for the closure of all PLO offices in the United States and threatened to penalize individuals who carried out activities or spent money intended to advance the interests of the PLO in the United States.
This brief outline indicates America’s broad policy toward Palestine and the Palestinians. The United States has been—and is—unalterably op posed to the Palestinian right to self-determination in all its aspects. That was true of the mandate period and it is true today. It is also obvious that the United States, on a policy level, does not accept the indivisibility of the Palestinians as a people and thus is prepared to deal with them only as distinct units: as refugees, West Bankers, PLO people, and so on. Hence, its complex policies have called for, supported, promoted, and sustained the subordination of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to Israel and Jordan, the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the settlement of the Palestinians of the diaspora in the countries of their residence.
America’s Palestine policy of today essentially calls for the Bantustanization of the West Bank and Gaza (the homeland concept) and the Armenianization of the Palestinians of the diaspora. Under such conditions, there is clearly no need for a national political representative of the Palestinian people—thus the pursual of initiatives calculated to bring about the demise of the PLO. Former president Ronald Reagan’s peace plan gave clear expression to these policies which, in their broad outline, constitute the basis of the Bush administration’s policy of peace for Palestine. A careful analysis of the minutes of the short-lived “dialogue” carried out by Ambassador Robert Pelletreau, Jr. and the PLO delegation in Tunis reveals quite clearly that the United States has not entertained any thought of reversing that policy and replacing it with a policy premised upon the acceptance of Palestinian self-determination.
Factors Affecting American Policy
It is useful to note an important paradox at this juncture. The popular and historic perception of the United States in Palestine (as in other Middle East countries) is that it has generally supported people who have been subject to European colonialism and has endorsed their right to self-determination, meaning independence. This perception underlies the persistent and historic appeal of Palestinian (and other Third World) leadership to America’s apparent historic support for self-determination, as called for by President Woodrow Wilson. The fact that the United States has never en dorsed such a principle in its engagement with the Question of Palestine (except in its applicability to Jewish self-determination), and that it has pur sued policies in Central and Latin America and elsewhere that have violated that same principle has not discouraged Palestinian leaders from their belief in the validity of the principle of self-determination as a basis of American foreign policy. When it became clear that various administrations have bypassed the Palestinians altogether and have unfailingly supported Zionist Israeli policies that have brought about Palestinian dispossession, exile from their historic national soil, and Israeli occupation, the explanation of such policies tended to emphasize the unique and powerful role that Jewish communities play in the domestic politics of the United States. A cursory ex amination of Palestinian and Arab political discourse on the issues associated with the policies of the United States toward either the Question of Palestine or the Arab-Israeli conflict would clearly suggest that the policies that have been so supportive of Zionism and Israel reflect the powerful in fluence of Jewish groups. I think it is fair to suggest that most Arab and Palestinian analysts and their supporters tend to accept this hypothesis. This has led many an Arab leader and group, including some Palestinian leaders and supporters, to work for an alternative “lobby” to counteract such pressure. An alternative explanation, generally espoused by “leftist” writers, tends to emphasize America’s global hegemonic role and Israel’s alleged utility as an instrument of American policy in dominating the Arab Middle East. This viewpoint envisions countermeasures that would unite Palestinian Arab constituencies with other anti-imperialist forces in civil society.
Both explanations of course have some validity, but neither explains America’s specific policy toward Palestine or the Palestinians within the broader context of America’s historic policy toward the Third World, including Central and Latin America, its policies toward national liberation movements globally, and its specific racial and ethnic policies and their relationship to foreign policy.
Public opinion polls taken on the eve of the 1948 war between Palestine’s two antagonistic communities revealed quite clearly that the American public was generally so uninformed on the issues of contention between the two communities as to withhold support from both of them. Only a very active minority of less than 20 percent felt sufficiently informed as to declare its support for Palestine’s Jewish community and withhold that support from the “Arabs.” The polls clearly reflected either a conscious or unintended bias of polltakers who portrayed the conflict as an Arab-Jewish one. Rarely if at all were Palestinians as such identified as the antagonists of the Jewish Zionist aspirants for a Jewish state in Palestine. The responses clearly reflected the same bias.
But what became gradually clear is that whatever support was given to Palestine’s Jewish community reflected an understanding that the Jewish settlers of Palestine were Europeans—pioneering, democratic, ambitious, and so on—in conflict with an undifferentiated mass of Arabs who were, if anything was known about them, Muslim, fanatical, backward, nonwhite, and so on. In other words, the Jews of Palestine who were calling on America’s support were more or less imbued with the same values and attitudes as Americans. That was in part what Zionists had conveyed in their incessant educational and political work in the United States and Western Europe. American policy as such tended of course to reflect the value concerns of the policy makers. Scholars of the so-called Arab image in the United States would maintain that there are significant, deep-seated racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices against the Arabs that have been perpetuated in textbooks, churches, movies, and the like to such an extent that such prejudices inevitably had a significant impact on the process of policy formation relevant to Palestine. There should be no question that Woodrow Wilson’s support for the principle of self-determination of people did not go beyond the shores of Christian Europe and certainly did not extend to the masses of Asia and Africa, including the Palestinian Arabs. Perhaps America’s complex policy toward the Arab people today has been shaped with the same ambivalence. The suggestion that is being made is clear: on religious, ethnic, and perhaps racial grounds, the United States has historically denied the applicability of the right to self-determination to the Palestinian people.
One can even go further. American policy has consistently been hostile to Arabs and Muslims in general, particularly those Arab-Muslim leaders who adopted radical policies seeking the restructuring of the social and economic sectors of the societies they led. Of course Arab and Muslim states that espoused domestic and foreign policy programs consistent with U.S. goals have fared somewhat better, but even these have not been viewed with any particular esteem. The hostility with which various American ad ministrations have viewed Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Muhammad Mussadegh of Iran, and Yasir Arafat, and the epithets used to characterize Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Ayatollah Khomeini, have been more offensive than the particular circumstances have warranted. The affiliation of the Palestinians with the Arab people and to some extent with Islam has brought long-standing American cultural and religious prejudices into play.
The second consideration relates to the affiliation of the Palestinians with the people of the Third World. Although we can identify limited in stances of some official American support for some people in the Third World, it seems clear that in general the United States has pursued policies and engaged in activities that have been quite detrimental to Third World interests. Those policies and activities have included repeated military interventions in Central America, economic exploitation in Latin America, political subjugation of Cuba and the Philippines, and actual rendering of military support to colonial powers such as France and Portugal that sought the perpetuation of their colonial relationships in Africa and elsewhere. Third World people have eventually become much more conscious of the historic role of the United States as an imperial power affiliated with the general system of imperialism, a role that has become especially evident in the era of decolonization. In the context of the Cold War, and anxious to “stabilize” recently independent countries, the United States has pursued policies that tended to support authoritarian and generally corrupt Third World regimes—a course of action that has engendered intense hostility among the people in those areas. As a Third World people, the Palestinians, especially in the period following the dismemberment of Palestine and the founding of the PLO, identified with and supported the struggle of other Third World people and movements of national liberation and of the oppressed generally. In that context, the United States identified the Palestinians as part of the general Third World public that is clearly opposed to its clients, including Israel. Thus, the American hostile policy toward the Palestinians, originally formulated to render support to Zionism (and Israel) and nourished by negative cultural, ethnic, religious, and national factors, was simply rein forced and solidified as a consequence of Palestinian identification with radical movements.
The third, related, consideration is the specific attitude of the United States toward national liberation movements that have sought the achievement of their goals by revolutionary means. An examination of American attitudes and policies towards such movements reveals quite clearly general support for the European adversaries of Asian and African national liberation movements. America’s support for France in its war against Algeria, for Portugal in its war against national liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau, as well as U.S. support for the South African regimes against the African National Congress (ANC) and South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) made it inevitable that the United States would adopt a similar policy towards the Palestinian movement of national liberation. The fact that such movements developed integrated strategies of national liberation that included “armed struggle” made them all anathema to U.S. policies. It will be recalled that the ANC was classified by the apartheid regime as a terrorist organization and that the United States accepted that designation, as it accepted Israel’s view of the PLO as a terrorist organization.
In conclusion, it is fair to suggest that America’s Palestine policy is not likely to improve in the near future. Palestinians tend to think that America’s policy can change for the better with better communication, with stronger lobbying, with “image” improvement and clarification of views and with the presentation of “reasonable” Palestinian goals. If anything is clear from our presentation, it is the following: whereas American policy has been consistently hostile to the Palestinians and opposed to the fulfillment of their national aspirations, it is not hostile simply because it is subject to Jewish influence or just because the Palestinians are Palestinians. Its hostility is rooted in deep cultural, ethnic, and racial values, in attitudes of the United States toward people of the Third World, and, perhaps equally important, in its attitude toward radical movements of national liberation. It is these considerations that in large part explain the incredible support that the United States has rendered to Israel in its effort to suppress the Palestinians.
Bibliographic Note
Whereas many works on the Middle East conflict refer to America’s policy, surprisingly there is no systematic analysis of that policy that covers the entire period. The mandate period that culminated in the dismemberment of Palestine is adequately covered in such works as Evan M. Wilson, Decision in Palestine: How the United States Came To Recognize Israel (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979); Dan Tschirgi, The Politics of Indecision: Origins and Implications of American Involvement with the Palestine Problem (New York: Praeger, 1983); and Muhammad K. Shadid, The United States and the Palestinians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981). American policy on the eve of the mandate and its concerns can be gleaned from a reading of The Palestine Mandate: Collected United States Documents relating to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, to the Possible Future Independence of Palestine and to the Need for the Creation of a Separate Jewish State (Salisbury, NC: U.S. Department of State, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, 1977, originally published as Mandate for Palestine [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1927]). In my “North American Public Opinion and the Question of Palestine” in International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies (1989), 3(2):1-11, I discuss the findings of public opinion polls relevant to Palestine per se and cite the works of such scholars as Seymour Lipset, Fouad Moughrabi, Elia Zureik, and Michael Suleiman, who have dealt with the evolution of American public opinion on the Palestine as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict. My own assessment of continuities in American policy negating the Palestinian right to self-determination, especially following the dismemberment of Palestine, is based upon the reports, minutes of meetings, and memoranda issued by the Department of State in the period of 1949-50. These are to be found in Foreign Relations of the United States 1949, vol. 6 (Washington, 19n) and Foreign Relations of the United States 1950, vol. 5 (Washington, 1978). For illustration of America’s support for the annexation of Arab Palestine to Jordan (the eventual Jordanian option) see, among others, pp. 608 and 170-71 (1949) and particularly the memorandum titled “Policy of the United States with respect to Jordan: Policy Statement Prepared in the Department of State” (1950, p. 1094ff) which contains the following statement: “The major problems which confront Jordan today and which are of primary concern to the United States are the establishment of peaceful and friendly relations between Israel and Jordan and the successful absorption into the polity and economy of Jordan and Arab Palestine, its inhabitants and the bulk of the refugees now located there.” The memo and other statements are clear on the need for annexation and for the settlement of the refugees in the Arab States. The following works are useful on some of these issues: Ambassador George McGhce (later assistant secretary of state for the Near East), Envoy to the Middle World (Cambridge, MA: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 27-45 and 85, and Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (London: al-Sagi Press, 1986). Shiblak deals with the Iraqi government’s role in facilitating the emigration of Iraq’s Jewish population to Israel in 1949-50 and the U.S. embassy’s support for the possible settlement of Palestinian refugees (about 100,000) in Iraq as a form of “exchange” for Iraq’s Jewish emigrants.