The role of Israel and the Palestinians in
intra-Arab relations
Apart from the influence of Arabism on intra-Arab relations, another specific
and unusual influence has been that of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As far as
the particular role of Israel was concerned, this stemmed largely from the fact
that, for the first thirty years of its existence, its relations with its Arab neighbours
were conducted almost exclusively by force and by threat of force, a policy
developed by its long-time prime minister David Ben-Gurion and his defence
establishment in the early 1950s. At different times this was aimed at preempting
an Arab attack, at preventing Arab support for Palestinian and other
guerrillas, and at trying to get rid of a hostile Arab leader like President Nasser.32
Israel’s Arab neighbours, for their part, were unwilling either to sign a peace
treaty or to normalize relations and were thus left with the choice of preparing
for war or seeking some kind of unofficial modus vivendi. As a rule, Egypt and
Syria took the former path, and Jordan and Lebanon the latter.
This unresolved conflict was largely responsible for a Middle Eastern arms race,
a series of wars, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt’s
Sinai peninsula in 1967, as well as numerous lesser clashes. The Palestinian factor
added an extra dimension, particularly after the increase in the size and bellicosity
of the guerrilla organizations in the late 1960s. The consequence was to bring
Lebanon and Jordan more directly into the conflict as a result of Israeli raids
against the bases established on their territory. However, Israel’s policy towards the
two states soon diverged. No sooner had King Hussein decided to expel the guerrillas
from Jordan than Israel reverted to its traditional policy of support for the
Hashemite monarchy as a conservative force on its eastern flank. At the same time,
intervention against the Palestinians in Lebanon became ever more intense,
leading up to the Israeli invasion of the country in 1982, the military defeat of the
Palestinians and the brief attempt to engineer the establishment of a friendly
regime dominated by the Lebanese forces and controlled by the newly elected
president, Bashir Gemayel. Even though politically unsuccessful, Israel’s invasion
triggered off a series of changes in the internal balance of power between
Christian, Shi’i and Druze militias that were to make their own major contribution
to the further disintegration of Lebanon’s fragile social system.
One reason why the Israelis were able to exercise their power in Lebanon was
the fact that the Egyptians had already signed a peace treaty with them in 1979.
From President Sadat’s point of view this involved a considered decision to
normalize relations with his powerful neighbour. It also involved the implicit decoupling
of the political equation that implied that support for the Palestinians
and hostility to Israel were two sides of the same coin. For most of the other Arab regimes, however, this was seen as a gross betrayal of the Arab cause, even if the
majority of them soon began, cautiously, to follow the Egyptians along the same
path.