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Chapter 4 Peace Would Be the End of All Our Hopes The year 1974 began with the Nixon administration in the throes of the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s abuse of power, coming when American society was already torn by the Vietnam conflict, shook American confidence in the integrity of government. Nixon resigned office on 9 August 1974, leaving Gerald Ford the daunting challenge of restoring the presidency and healing a nation. To ensure continuity, Ford asked Henry Kissinger to stay on as secretary of state and encouraged him to continue his efforts to forge a peace in the Middle East compatible with United States geopolitical interests. Kissinger brokered disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January and between Israel and Syria in May, but a comprehensive peace settlement involving the Palestinians lay beyond the horizon of Kissinger’s strategic thinking. The Palestinian national movement entered 1974 in disarray. Arafat signaled his interest in dialogue and scored a series of diplomatic successes that could have opened a pathway to a two-state solution, but the emergence of the Rejection Front, led by the PFLP, proved Arafat could not keep the more radical PLO factions in line. Predictably, new terrorist threats emerged. In 1975, civil war erupted in Lebanon, and for the better part of a year, until the Syrian military intervened to safeguard Syria’s interests in Lebanon, the Palestinians were thrown into a struggle for survival. The Rejection Front While Nixon struggled to save his political life, Kissinger assiduously pursued peace in the Middle East. Although the Yom Kippur War the previous October had altered the strategic equation in the volatile region, the Geneva conference in December accomplished nothing. The White House had serious misgivings about Soviet participation in peace talks. In an unguarded remark, Kissinger admitted to reporters that the administration sought ‘‘to expel the Soviet Union from the Middle East.’’ The administration had even more serious misgivings about the participation of the PLO. ‘‘The best way to deal with the Palestinian issue,’’ Kissinger told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, Peace Would Be the End of All Our Hopes 69 was to ‘‘draw the Jordanians into the West Bank and thereby turn the debate . . . into one between the Jordanians and the Palestinians.’’ The strategy served Israel’s interests well. In June, Yitzak Rabin, a former general who had served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, replaced Golda Meir as prime minister. In September, Kissinger told Rabin during a visit to Washington ‘‘a Palestinian state is likely to have as its objective the destruction of both Jordan and Israel.’’1 The diplomatic strategy precluded anything approaching a comprehensive settlement. But it did yield incremental successes. Kissinger’s famed shuttle diplomacy produced disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January and between Israel and Syria in May. The Palestinians did everything in their power to compel Kissinger to take their interests seriously. Between April and June, as Kissinger was trading time between Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem trying to stabilize the lines redrawn in the October war, Palestinian guerrillas mounted a series of operations in Israel. All the major PLO factions attacked. The bloodshed was awful. On 5 March, eight Fatah guerrillas seized a hotel in Tel Aviv. Kissinger was in Amman for talks with King Hussein and preparing to travel to Israel the following day. He returned to Washington instead. The Israelis launched a rescue operation, but it proved deadly. Seven guerrillas were killed in the fighting; twenty Israelis were killed, including the general commanding the operation. On 11 April, three guerrillas from Jabril’s PFLP-General Command seized a group of Israelis in Qirayt Shemona. The IDF attempted a rescue, but it ended in bloodshed. The IDF killed three guerrillas, but nineteen hostages and soldiers were killed. Hawatmeh’s DFLP mounted its own operation a month later. Three DFLP guerrillas took 100 Israeli high school students hostage in Ma’alot in northern Israel. The incident ended violently on 15 May, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel. All three guerrillas and 23 children were killed. On 13 June, the PFLP struck a kibbutz. This time four guerrillas and a number of Israelis died in the ensuing firefight. On 26 June, Fatah guerrillas came ashore by boat near Nahariya, Israel, on a mission to take hostages. Three Israelis and all the terrorists were killed in a firefight.2 The renewal of attacks in Israel proved the Palestinians...

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