Israel Undercover by Posner Steve;

Author:Posner, Steve;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2021-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Previously, when Yigal Allon met with King Hussein in London in 1968, he was eager to talk peace and withdrawal. Under his proposal, though it appeared faithful to Israel’s security needs as later articulated by Weizmann, Dayan, and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was cognizant of the rights of Jewish settlement as expressed by Katz, Begin, and others, the establishment of military outposts in the unpopulated areas of Judea and Samaria would be accompanied by a call for “immediate negotiations with Arab leaders of the West Bank with the idea of forming an Arab autonomous district in all the area not included in the Jewish territory that would be linked economically with Israel and buttressed by a mutual security pact”.10

Hussein heeded the plan’s call for negotiations, though still insisting they be held in secret, yet in his meeting with its author Allon in London the king rejected any arrangement that might leave Israeli forces on the West Bank. Assurances that the Israeli presence would be a limited one, confined to unpopulated areas away from Arab towns and villages, were not enough. The king wanted the entire region returned to him, including east Jerusalem.

What seemed like a maximalist position to the Israelis perhaps seemed like the minimum route acceptable to Hussein, given the radicalized nature of the Arab world. According to Mideast researcher Rosemary Sayigh, the PLO, led by Arafat’s Fateh faction, still refused to accept Jewish sovereignty over any parcel of Palestine, however small, be it the West Bank of the Jordan River or the coastal plain along the Mediterranean coast. “For Fateh’s leaders,” wrote Sayigh, “the urgent need created by the 1967 defeat was to prevent the Arab governments from negotiating, from a position of weakness, an end to the Palestinian liberation struggle in return for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the June War.”11 The PLO appeared to succeed when Arab leaders adopted the three “no’s,” vowing “no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel” at the Khartoum conference of August 1967.12 Hussein may have been willing to secretly violate the second “no” prohibiting negotiations with the Jewish state, but he was bent on recovering east Jerusalem and the West Bank territories before making the slightest move toward an abandonment of the injunctions against peace and recognition.

Allon pressed on, trying to sell the king on a political settlement. Hussein repeated the line: he had to regain the territories lost in the Six Day War. At one point, Allon asked, Why did you go to war with us in 1967 when we warned you to stay out? It was your fault, Hussein answered, Israel’s behavior in the weeks leading up to the 1967 fighting gave the impression that it was so weak that the king had no choice but to run to Cairo, meet Nasser, and join in the war. The remark in part contradicted reports that Hussein was pushed into the fight, that his decision was simply an attempt to avert

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