The AAUG: reflections on a lost opportunity.

• Author: Bassiouni, M. Cherif
• Position: Association of Arab-American University Graduates

THE CONTEXT

THE JUNE 1967 WAR WAS, in so many respects, a devastating military/political rout for the Arab world. Its implications are still being felt. In a short period of six days, Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. It occupied Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian-administered Palestinian Gaza Strip, Jordanian-annexed Palestinian East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights. The 1967 war completed Israel's control over all of Mandatory Palestine. It established Israel's military superiority over countries that had, until then, been thought a threat to its existence.

After the defeat, Arab governments, particularly the most nationalistic military ones of Egypt and Syria, could no longer conceal the failure of their political, social and economic policies, while Arab intellectuals also revealed how ineffectual they were as agents of change. As a result, many among the Arab peoples started to turn to new ideologies to take up the struggle against American neo-imperial hegemony and Israeli expansionism and military dominance of the region. Some organizations such as Marxists and the Muslim Brotherhood, though not new on the political scene, shared the scene with smaller Islamic groups who, having given up hope for peaceful change, advocated violence as the only remaining option. All of these groups sought the elimination of corrupt and/or American-compliant Arab regimes and, for the Islamic ones, the establishment of an Islamic state ultimately leading to an ummah of all Muslim states.

Most Arab intellectuals had the same goals, save for that of establishing an Islamic state. Most pursued the goals of secular democratization of the Arab world and the establishment of social and economic justice in the best of Western tradition. Not surprisingly, these secular-nationalist-democrats were opposed by the US and Israel for whom it was better to have extremists as opponents than to oppose those who share the same values and ideals but who refuse to be subjugated in their names. Irrespective of political ideology, the dominant view in the Arab world was that the core source of all problems were the policies and practices of the US and Israel--a view that has since then been consistently reinforced.

The 1967 war was the catalyst for a number of Arab-American intellectuals to get together and address a number of questions pertaining to the modern Arab world and to their identity as Arab-Americans. Two questions in particular raised their level of anguish: 1) how could Israel's military accomplishments be so formidable; and 2) how could Egypt and Syria's military failures be so dramatic? A third question also perplexed them, namely how could the US have committed itself so totally to supporting Israel? The US until the mid-sixties supported Israel economically and politically but not necessarily militarily. Then, abruptly, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave Israel what was called the "amber light" for an attack on Egypt to be executed without warning in order to destroy, by a surprise attack, its air force on the ground as well as other military capabilities. From then on, the US became Israel's principal source of military arms and high tech equipment, ensuring its military dominance in the region.

The 1967 stealth attack on Egypt was so reminiscent of the 1956 Suez war in that the Israeli ground forces employed the same strategy and tactics. In fact, ground forces used the same land routes they had crossed in 1956, deviating in their multi-prong thrusts in some areas by only a mile or two. In 1956, Israel had conspired with France and the UK, while in 1967, it can be said to have conspired with the US. The difference was that the US did not militarily participate in the 1967 war, and thus it preserved plausible deniability. Arabs and Arab-Americans concluded at that time that the US was engaging itself militarily alongside Israel. But the US continued to play a positive role in the peace process, thus sending contradictory signals to the Arabs.

In time, however, these positive signals changed as the US's full military, economic, and political backing of Israel became open and unambiguous. By 2006, the US became a de facto military ally of Israel. The George W. Bush Administration not only backed Israel's attacks on the Palestinian Territories (mostly Gaza) and the invasion of Lebanon, but it supplied Israel's military with ammunition and rockets, including cluster bombs, during the campaign. The wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure and indiscriminate killing of civilians by Israel, which constitute war crimes, makes the US an accomplice. To ignore this common perception among Arabs and others in the Muslim world is to be delusional.

While Egypt had given Israel ample grounds in 1967 to feel provoked, there was no legal basis for Israel's use of armed force against Egypt before referring to the Security Council the issue of Egypt's closure of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping and denial of maritime passage through the Suez Canal. Israel had obtained such maritime rights after the 1956 war. But it should also be remembered that in April of 1967, two months before Israel's attack on Egypt, there were a number of air battles between Israel and Syria, leading the latter to expect an Israeli invasion. The USSR confirmed that assessment to Syria and Egypt. The former, having a mutual defense treaty with the latter, asked Egypt to call for the withdrawal of UN forces from the Sinai, there since the end of the 1956 War, to deter Israel from attacking Syria. Israel may have seen this as a prelude to an Egyptian-Syrian offensive against it. From a military perspective, Israel felt that it could not easily fight on two fronts, and that it could not militarily afford to leave the initiative to its two most challenging enemies. From that premise, it was militarily logical for Israel to take the initiative irrespective of any question of legality under international law. That Israel's first attack on Egypt constituted an act of aggression was at the time self-evident. In fact, Israel carried out then the "pre-emptive" war theory the George W. Bush Administration later put into action in Iraq in 2003.

Arab-Americans and a segment of US public opinion were, however, shocked by the fact that in order to conceal its first attack on Egypt, which Israel attempted to justify by claiming Egypt had first attacked Israel, Israel attacked a US naval vessel in international waters between Egypt and Israel. The attack on the USS Liberty was to destroy intercepted communications within Israel and within Egypt that proved Egypt did not use armed force against Israel and that Israel was the first to attack Egypt. Israeli planes manufactured in the US and given to Israel by the people of the US through its Government, deliberately attacked a US ship injuring and killing 34 naval personnel and wounding 173. Even then, Israel's political power and reach made the investigation of the USS Liberty a secret one. It was able to keep the findings of the naval board of inquiry classified for 30 years, at which time there was no negative political fallout from the disclosure that Israel had intentionally and deliberately attacked the US ship in order to destroy the evidence of its aggression.

THE FOUNDING

All of this, as well as other considerations, brought about a meeting of a number of Arab-American intellectuals during the 1967 Middle East Studies Association convention held at the University of Chicago. They gathered ostensibly to discuss what could and should be done by them and their like-minded colleagues in the Arab world to counteract the pro-Israel Lobby and the negative image it was...