Crossing the Rubicon: Ronald Reagan and Us Policy in the Middle East by Nicholas Laham

Author:Nicholas Laham [Laham, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351160506
Google: xrlHDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38136599
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The Reagan Administration's Hostility Toward the PLO and Yasser Arafat

The Reagan Administration tried hard [in] at least implicitly supporting Israel's attempts to destroy the PLO, attempting to shut the PLO out of peace negotiations, and in general denying the relevance and existence of Palestinian national ism.1

—Kathleen Christison, author

The single, central, overriding obstacle to the Reagan Administration's efforts to revive the stalled Middle East peace process was the White House's inability to deal with the PLO. At their summit meeting in Rabat in 1974, and subsequent conference in Fez in 1982, the Arab heads of state had affirmed that the PLO constituted the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. However, Israel refused to have anything to do with the PLO, branding it as a terrorist organization. The Reagan Administration essentially adopted the Israeli position on the PLO. Despite official American policy, which opened the door to a formal dialogue between the United States and the PLO subject to certain conditions, the administration preferred to avoid dealing with the organization.

Indeed, despite repeated declarations by the PLO that it was ready to meet the American conditions required for entering into a formal dialogue with the United States, the Reagan Administration refused to take advantage of the opportunity. Rather, the administration was determined to avoid such contacts, even if the PLO met all three conditions the United States laid down as the requirement for Washington to open a formal dialogue with the organization, which included its recognition of the right of Israel to exist, acceptance of Resolutions 242 and 338, and renunciation of the use of terrorism. Only in the closing weeks of the Reagan presidency did the administration finally relent and agree to open such a dialogue with the PLO, which came after Chairman Yasser Arafat issued a statement meeting those conditions, as we saw in the previous chapter.

However, the formal dialogue opened by the Reagan Administration in 1988 could have been initiated six years earlier, had the White House been prepared to deal with the PLO following the introduction of the Reagan Plan. The administration squandered six years in a fruitless effort to enlist Jordan as the representative of the Palestinians in peace talks with Israel, thereby excluding the PLO from the peace process. This strategy ended in complete failure on 31 July 1988 when King Hussein announced that Jordan was severing all administrative and legal ties to the West Bank, thereby leaving the administration no alternative but to open a formal dialogue with the PLO — but by then it was too late in the Reagan presidency for the White House to use its newly developed relationship with the organization to advance the peace process. Reagan's contempt for the PLO represents the main reason why he proved so ineffective as a facilitator of peace in the Middle East. The PLO has a central role to play in the peace process; without the organization's direct involvement in the peace process no peace in the Middle East is possible — a painful lesson the Reagan Administration took eight years to learn.

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