After a fleeting moment of Muslim Co-operation in the 1973 War with Israel, Ibrahim Moiz examines how inter-state rivalries and seeking US patronage led to the dissipation of the Palestinian cause. 

Unity Squandered by State Selfishness: The International Aftermath of the 1973 War with Israel

October 2023 marked fifty years since the most signal feat of interstate Arab cooperation against Israel, the famous Ramadan war of 1973, which saw an unprecedented and sadly unrepeated level of cooperation by Muslim and Arab states against Israel. Major optimism among Muslim populations was bolstered by the recognition of the Palestine issue at several international forums such as the United Nations, and at least a lip service toward Palestinian rights that has continued since. Fifty years later, however, with the Palestinian condition no better off, the long-besieged city of Ghazza facing an abyss, and Muslim regimes either impotent or outright disinterested, it is worth examining what went wrong. The actual effect of the 1973 war was to strengthen the hand of the states both vis-à-vis one another as well as their populations, as well as confirming the United States’ role as the state intercessor in the region, ushering in decades of nearly unchallenged American suzerainty.

Palestinian Militants and the Comeback of the Arab State

The shocking rout of 1967, where Israel swept up Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Ghazza Strip, and Sinai from no less than three Arab armies within a week, is seen as the nadir of twentieth-century Arab states, exposing a decade of blustering rhetoric by competing regimes exposed. Yet the failure of the Arab regimes opened avenues for alternative routes, the most notable of which was the rise of the Palestinian fidayin. While they had spent much of the past fifteen years expecting a government-led campaign against Israel, Palestinian militants now embarked on several years of independent action unprecedented in its level since at least the start of the 1947-48 war. Groups such as Fatah espoused a brand of Palestinian independence built around armed resistance. The expansion of Palestinian assertiveness was epitomized in the attitude of influential leftist ideologue George Habash, who until 1967 had argued that the Palestinian cause must defer to Cairo but in the aftermath of the six-day war opted for a freewheeling set of militant actions, most famously the plane hijacks of the late 1960s that brought the Palestinian issue to international notice.

To be sure, the Palestinians did not cut off their links with the Arab states; thus separate Palestinian paramilitary groups remained in each of the nearby Arab countries while Cairo, Amman, and Damascus coordinated with Palestinian militants to act as auxiliaries in their border “war of attrition” with Israel in 1967-70. Yet even as they cooperated, the disruptive potential of the Palestinians was not lost on the Arab states: the military dictatorships in Cairo and Damascus sought to tightly monitor militant activity, while by 1973 both monarchic Jordan and delicately sectarian Lebanon had already come to blows with the Palestinians. It was just as friction was mounting in Lebanon that Anwar Sadat in Cairo and Hafiz Assad in Damascus secretly planned a war against Israel.

Though Palestinian paramilitaries, led by Mansour Sharif in the Sinai and Tariq Khadra in the Golan, participated in the 1973 war, the major groups were left out: it was a war conducted by Arab states against the Israeli state. The Palestinian groups certainly benefited: in 1974 the Palestinian Liberation Organization would be recognized as a shadow “government in waiting” for Palestinian aspirations, and many Muslim, Arab, and Global South countries lent at least moral support. But for Arab rulers like Sadat and Assad senior, the Palestinians were only a means to their own state and regime ends.

America’s Arabs

For Sadat, who had taken the initiative behind the 1973 war, it had been less about Israel and more about establishing Cairo within the circle of American-backed states in the region.  He had already given hints toward this before the war, briefly expelling from Cairo the widely disliked Soviet advisors who had helped rebuild its military capability, and only resorted to war when the Americans failed to respond to his overtures. Once the 1973 war had given notice of Cairo’s significant military potential, Sadat with a show of gracious pacifism thrust himself increasingly into Washington’s regional alliance – in the process sidelining many of his lieutenants from the 1973 war. Among them were the brains behind the operation, army commander Saadeddin Shazly and director Abdel-Ghany Gamasy; the former was sidelined and went into exile. Infused as Arab armies and populations were with Islamic and patriotic sentiments – from citizenry and soldiery to high-ranked leaders, Egyptians felt that Allah had restored their dignity – the war’s main leader had simply been seeking to broadcast his country’s potential usefulness to Israel’s biggest backer. The repercussions would stay with Sadat, literally, till his dying day; his assassination in 1981 was planned by Abboud Zummur, a veteran of the war with Israel.

Nor was Cairo alone in trying to extract from the Americans what concessions it could get. For many Arab states, Israel was a problem – but not so its biggest enabler. Saudi monarch Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz had famously led the celebrated oil embargo, but his priority was to wedge between the Americans and the Israelis: he was incontrovertibly opposed to Zionism, which he saw as a Soviet-backed conspiracy. Faisal believed that the solution lay in separating Israel from the United States: the Americans, in turn, exploited this stance to insert themselves more firmly into the region at the expense of the Soviets. Having administered the oil shock to make his point, Faisal was quite willing to relent to the slightest hint of American deference: in summer 1974 he agreed to an oil-for-security pact with Washington that would funnel petrodollars into the American treasury in return for military aid. The repercussions of this deal, helping entrench American hegemony, are still with us, but its initial aim of outflanking Zionism barely survived Faisal’s assassination the following year. Having firmly thrust aside the Soviets in the Middle East, Washington was in no mood to yield to the blandishments of its Arab allies, and history over the next thirty or so years would be replete with examples of the Saudis, and other pro-American Arabs, vainly pleading to the United States’ better nature even as it gave Israel every practical support.

The other preoccupation for 1970s Saudi Arabia was that of its rival for American affections, Tehran. Imperial Iran, as the other major oil exporter in the American camp, had historically been friendly to Israel, but had joined the Arab states in the 1973 embargo to increase its own profits. The Saudis’ links with Washington have been motivated more by nervousness toward Iran than Israel, a fear that in recent years has led to recurrent flirtation with the latter. After Faisal’s assassination his successors, motivated in part by fears of Iranian expansionism, eschewed his initiative in wielding the oil weapon to extract concessions. Saudi docility toward the Americans has been in equal part a failure of both imagination and nerve.

Rejectionists and Rivalries

Rivalry with Iran was also the principal motivation for the Iraqi regime, whose army had played a salutary role in the 1973 war but which was immediately engulfed with its regional feuds. In 1974 Tehran and Washington, in total cynicism, incited the historical Israeli asset and Barzani Kurdish chieftain Mala Mustafa into revolt before abandoning him when he had outlived his use. Baghdad, for its part, flirted with Kurdish dissidents in Iran, though the clerical-led revolt that brought down the seemingly impregnable Iranian monarchy would soon be in a war with Iraq as well.

Just as the Iraqi Baath regime was locked in a rivalry with its neighbours Syria and Iran, so too was Muammar Qaddhafi locked in rivalry with his neighbours. By the late 1970s stoutly opposed to the United States and the pro-American regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and Khartoum, the Libyan dictator briefly invaded  in 1977 and spent much of the subsequent decade thrashing vainly in the Chadien war, where his opponents were backed by Washington and his Arab rivals. Tripoli and Baghdad both formally rejected rapprochement with either the Israelis or their American backers; yet their own focus over the next decade, picking fights with their neighbours and cracking down ruthlessly at home, showed the same self-interested factionalism that characterized the pro-American Arab states. The 1980s war with Iran, for instance, saw Baghdad formally embrace Washington in return for armament, which the United States also secretly supplied to the Iranians. Once more, internecine rivalries helped the Americans entrench themselves.

Iraq’s Baath rival, Syria under Assad, was and remains the Arab state with the strongest links with Moscow. This relative independence from Washington did not mean solidarity with the Palestinians; aside from its handpicked paramilitaries, Damascus increasingly opposed Palestinian independence of action, and indeed waded into the Lebanese civil war foremost to crush the Palestinian militants there. The United States had an unusually indulgent relationship with Assad, who cunningly leveraged his occupation of much of Lebanon, his on-off crackdowns on the Palestinians, and his rivalry with the Iraqi regime much dreaded by the Israelis. Though there was little love lost, these factors gave Assad a guarded respect and even a level of permissiveness from Washington and Tel Aviv. The cost was largely borne by the Palestinians; not only did Assad attack them at Lebanon, but in 1983 he incited a major mutiny in Fatah that hastened the organization’s dispersal. For Assad, like his Arab rivals, the Palestinian cause was simply a tool to further his interests, to be kept on a tight leash and given a whipcrack if it forgot itself.

Fatah and the Arab States: The Trappings of Power

The fragmentation of Fatah, and other groups in the Palestinian “exile government”, emphasized the increased bargaining power of the Arab states. In 1973, the Arab regimes had pushed for Palestinian recognition; however, they saw the Palestinians as a tool to be manoeuvred and, as most clearly epitomized by Assad, kept on a leash. Fatah and other groups tried to manoeuvre by keeping their options open, maintaining links with a wide number of governments; yet as inter-government factionalism increased, so too did Arab states – Iraq, Syria, Libya, Jordan, and others – promote rival groups that effectively cut the Palestinian Liberation Organization down the middle.

Wary of other more obviously hostile states, Yasser Arafat had at first put his eggs in the Egyptian basket, but Sadat’s unexpected accord with the United States and Israel totally shut out that option. Cairo, like Riyadh, banked on Washington as a mediator, but Washington was totally committed to Israel’s side, and the twin occupations of Lebanon by Israel and Syria left the Palestinians with minimal breathing space there. Left with fewer and fewer options, Fatah threw in the towel and in 1993 accepted the Oslo Accord, which gave it at least the trappings, if no real substance, of a state. Understandably viewed as treachery by other Palestinians, this was challenged by several other groups, foremost among them Fatah’s rival Hamas, which continues to be the leading insurgent group today.

In accepting a blatantly lopsided American mediation, Arafat was following the same path that Sadat had years earlier: accepting pleasantries and diplomatic accolades in the name of a questionable peace that did not resolve any of the outstanding issues. This was the tragedy of the 1973 war: a rare display of international cooperation between Arab and Muslim states, it provoked only increased factionalism through which the United States shouldered its way to become a blatantly one-sided mediator – in effect, playing good cop to Israel’s bad cop. To this day, against overwhelming evidence of American favouritism for Israel, Arab states continue to plead for its intervention in favour of Palestinian rights, as if asking a crocodile to guard the watering hole against predators. In the end, it is hard to single out the failed Palestinian “state” under Arafat and his successors when the Arab states had set such an ignominious example, throwing away the sacrifices and promise of a brief moment of optimism.

The views and opinions in this article are those of the author.