PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's First Appearance at the United Nations

By Donald Neff

It was 20 years ago that the United States and Israel suffered one of their greatest diplomatic defeats, and the Palestinians and the United Nations one of their greatest victories. The occasion came on Nov. 13, 1974, when Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization made a dramatic appearance before the U.N. General Assembly and called on the world community to decide between an "olive branch or a freedom fighter's gun."¹Arafat declared:

"The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. Whoever stands by a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist. Those who wage war to occupy, colonize and oppress other people are the terrorists....The Palestinian people had to resort to armed struggle when they lost faith in the international community, which ignored their rights, and when it became clear that not one inch of Palestine could be regained through exclusively political means....

"The PLO dreams and hopes for one democratic state where Christian, Jew and Muslim live in justice, equality, fraternity and progress. The chairman of the PLO and leader of the Palestinian revolution appeals to the General Assembly to accompany the Palestinian people in its struggle to attain its right of self-determination....I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

More than his words, the simple presence of a Palestinian leader in the halls of the U.N. marked a watershed for the Palestinian community. The United States and Israel had opposed Arafat's appearance, as they had for years fought against recognition of Palestinians as a separate people. Washington and Tel Aviv insisted that the Palestinians be identified by their function or position such as refugees or terrorists rather than as a people. Even U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 had failed to mention Palestinians and referred only to refugees. And, as late as 1968, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir claimed that Palestinians "did not exist."²

However, starting in 1968, the same year as Golda Meir's statement, the General Assembly began passing a series of resolutions identifying Palestinians as a people and recognizing their "inalienable rights," including self-determination and the "right to struggle" to achieve it.³ The United States and Israel voted against all of these resolutions. But year after year in the late 1960s and early 1970s the General Assembly prevailed in slowly establishing the legal and moral framework of a separate Palestinian people. Arafat's 1974 U.N. appearance was the culmination of this process and emphasized how out-of-step the United States was with the world community. But still it took another year before Washington finally admitted the reality of Palestinian identity.

The moment came on Nov. 12, 1975, when Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs Harold H. Saunders testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East:

"In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict....The Palestinians collectively are a political factor....The legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account in the negotiating of an Arab-Israeli peace."⁴

It was the first extensive U.S. statement on the Palestinians since they lost their land in 1948. The Saunders Document, as the statement became known, caused an uproar in Israel, where the Cabinet expressed "grave criticism" and charged that it contained "numerous inaccuracies and distortions."⁵ The opposition in Israel to Saunders' statement became so loud that Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger soon discounted the statement as an "academic and theoretical exercise"—even though Kissinger himself had carefully worked on it before Saunders' appearance. ⁶

Although it soon became obvious that the Saunders Document presaged no serious immediate shift in U.S. diplomacy during the rest of Kissinger's tenure as secretary of state,⁷ it nonetheless signified an important turning point in the struggle. After this, for the first time, U.S. analysts began identifying Palestinians as a people and the refugee problem, festering since 1948, became only one part of the broader spectrum of concerns Palestinians faced as a people. Observed former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Kathleen Christison: "In many ways the statement changed the bureaucracy's way of looking at the Palestinian issue and set the stage for the Carter Administration's greater concern for Palestinians." ⁸

But if Washington was finally willing to recognize the Palestinians, it was not ready to recognize their representative, the PLO, any more than was Israel, even though the leaders of the Arab states had agreed in 1974 that the PLO was the "sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." But the next year, barely a month before the Saunders Document, Kissinger had bowed to Israeli demands and promised that the United States would not recognize the PLO unless it accepted U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and Israel's right to exist. Thus the gains the Palestinians had made in being recognized at last as a separate people were essentially denied them by Washington's refusal to recognize their sole representative.

Marginalizing the PLO

Congress moved in 1985 to further marginalize the PLO by passing into law Kissinger's non-recognition pledge to Israel and adding that the PLO also had to "renounce terror."⁹ Similarly, Israel passed a law in 1980 making it illegal to express any sympathy to the PLO or other "illegal organizations."¹⁰

There matters stood until 1988, when Arafat declared the establishment of the state of Palestine, renounced terrorism, accepted Security Council Resolution 242 and called for an international peace conference under U.N. auspices involving Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis.¹¹ But Arafat's declaration was not considered detailed enough by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, an embarrassingly inept diplomat when it came to the Middle East. In his pro-Israel passion, Shultz's response was essentially to ignore the declaration and defy the U.N. by denying a visa to Arafat and thereby prevent him from accepting an invitation by the General Assembly to address it in November 1988.

Shultz's petty action was a violation of America's 1947 Headquarters Agreement with the United Nations, which committed the United States to allow entry to persons invited by the world body.¹² In retaliation, the Assembly took the unprecedented action of holding an extraordinary session in December 1988 in Geneva, where Arafat appeared once again before the world body.

Shultz finally relented, saying the U.S. would recognize the PLO.

Given America's embarrassing estrangement from the world community over the Palestinian issue, Shultz finally relented on Dec. 14, 1988, saying the United States would recognize the PLO. Talks began the next day in Tunisia between the PLO and U.S. representatives, but they were so constrained by U.S. restrictions that they made no progress. Under Israeli prodding, they were broken off in 1992.

Meanwhile, in late December 1988, Pope John Paul II received Arafat in the Vatican, saying that Arabs and Jews had "an identical, fundamental right to their own homelands."¹³ And, by the first week of 1989, about 70 countries had recognized the new state of Palestine.¹⁴

Still, it took until Sept. 13, 1993, with the signing of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Arafat before Israel finally recognized "the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people."¹⁵After a century of struggle and denial, Israel had at last recognized that there were Palestinians and that they represented a people. And, of course, now that Israel recognized the PLO the United States was finally willing also to fall in line and actually begin to act like it believed the words Harold Saunders had uttered back in 1975.

Recommended Reading:

*Findley, Paul, Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts About the U.S.-Israeli Relationship, Brooklyn, NY, Lawrence Hill Books, 1993.

Hart, Alan, Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker?, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985.

Hirst, David, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Lukacs, Yehuda (ed.), The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Quandt, William B., Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967-1976, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Quigley, John, Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice, Durham, Duke University Press, 1990.

Sheehan, Edward R. E., The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomacy in the Middle East, New York, Reader's Digest Press, 1976.

Notes:

¹ Arafat spoke for 100 minutes. See Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 335. Also see Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger, pp. 152-53; Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? pp. 408-13. The text of Arafat's speech is in Journal of Palestine Studies, "Palestine at the United Nations," Winter 1975, pp. 181-92.

²Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch , p. 264, quoting the Sunday Times of London, 6/15/69.

³See, for instance, GA Resolutions 2535, 2672, 2787.

⁴ The text is in Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. 61-64.

⁵New York Times, 11/17/75. Also see Findley, Deliberate Deceptions, pp. 167-68.

⁶ Interview with Harold Saunders, Washington, DC, 5/25/94.

⁷Quandt, Decade of Decisions, p. 279. Also see Marwan R. Bubeiry, "The Saunders Document," Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1978.

⁸Kathleen Christison, "Blind Spots: Official U.S. Myths About the Middle East," Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1988, p. 57.

⁹"Codification of Policy Prohibiting Negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization," in U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Foreign Affairs, Legislation on Foreign Relations Through 1987, vol. 1, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 1988, pp. 529-30.

¹⁰New York Times, 7/31/80; Institute For Palestine Studies, International Documents on Palestine, p. 435. Also see Quigley, Palestine and Israel, p. 146.

¹¹ The text is in Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1989, pp. 216-28.

¹²New York Times, 11/27/88, includes the text of the State Department statement.

¹³ Clyde Haberman, New York Times, 12/24/88.

¹⁴ Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, 1/9/89.

¹⁵ For an analysis, see Burhan Dajani, "The September 1993 Israeli-PLO Documents: A Textual Analysis," Journal of Palestine Studies , Spring 1994.

Donald Neff is author of the Warriors trilogy on U.S.-Middle East relations and of the unpublished Middle East Handbook, a chronological data bank of significant events affecting U.S. policy and the Middle East on which this article is based. His books are available through the AET Book Club.