Arab League & the Arab-Israeli conflict

This article discusses the role of the Arab League in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By the end of World War II, the Palestinian Arabs were left leaderless. The mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni had been in exile since 1937 and spent the war years in Nazi-occupied Europe, actively collaborating with German National Socialist leadership. As the war ended, he managed to escape to Egypt and stayed there until his death in 1974. His brother Jamal al-Husayni was interned in Southern Rhodesia during the war.

In November 1945, the Arab League reestablished the Arab Higher Committee as a supreme executive body of Palestinian Arabs in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine, but it fell apart due to infighting. In June 1946, the Arab League imposed upon the Palestinians the Arab Higher Executive, renamed into "Arab Higher Committee" in 1947, with Amin al-Husayni as its chairman and Jamal al-Husayni as vice-chairman.

The day after the state of Israel was proclaimed, six League members, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, supported by other members (notably Yemen), coordinated the attack on the State of Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and explicitly stated the destruction of the newly-formed Jewish state as their goal. On May 15, 1948, the Arab League Secretary General Abdul Razek Azzam Pasha announced the intention to wage "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

"A key feature of the Arabs' plans was the complete marginalization of the Palestinians... This aptly reflected the political reality: The military defeats of April-May had rendered them insignificant. The Arab League through the first half of 1948 had consistently rejected Husseini's appeals to establish a government-in-exile... Under strong pressure from Egypt, which feared complete Hashemite control over the Palestinians, the League Political Committee in mid-September authorized the establishment of a Palestinian 'government.'"

On September 22, 1948, the All-Palestine Government was established in Gaza, and on September 30, the rival First Palestinian Congress, which promptly denounced the Gaza "government", was convened in Amman.

For the period between 1948 and 1967, see Occupation of the Gaza Strip by Egypt, Occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem by Jordan.

"It was not the Palestinians themselves who decided to create the PLO after their defeat in 1948; The Arab League set it up in 1964 to attack Israel. For years, Palestinian independence was off the Arab agenda; now it was back. Inventing the PLO was a prelude to war, not a result of it; the goal was to destroy Israel, not to rectify the misfortune of the Palestinians, which still could have been done by the Arab states irrespective of Israel."

On September 1, 1967, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the Khartoum Resolution was issued at the meeting between the leaders of eight Arab countries. The paragraph 3 of the resolution became known as the Three No's: