The Palestine question from 1967 onwards

Faced with the risk of destabilization throughout the Middle East, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 on November 22, 1967. The text was a skilful compromise: the principle of withdrawal from the occupied territories was placed on an equal footing with the right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders; freedom of navigation was placed alongside a just settlement of the refugee problem; the appointment of a UN mediator was halfway between the two extreme positions officially announced, refusal to negotiate and the demand for strictly bilateral relations. But the mission of Jarring, the UN mediator in the Middle East, ended in failure in 1968. On the political front, the confidence to which Israeli society had surrendered under Golda Meir's government was countered by the strengthening and hardening of the PLO, which now structured Palestinian society politically and socially, and made a strategic shift by opting for armed revolutionary struggle, at the risk of seriously destabilizing the weakest Arab states, such as Jordan and Lebanon, where the fedayeen had a solid foothold. On the military front, after Nasser had committed Egypt to a major tactical alliance with the USSR at the end of June 1967, the Arab-Israeli conflict resumed in covert form with the outbreak of the war of attrition against Israeli positions along the Suez Canal, and with the increasing infiltration of Palestinian commandos into the Jordan Valley from rear bases in Jordan, where they operated with virtual impunity. It was also during this period, between 1967 and 1970, that the USSR's involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict reached its peak, with direct military involvement alongside Egypt and Syria. Concerned by this situation, Nixon, at the start of his presidential term in January 1969, and despite the opposition of his advisor and head of the National Security Council, Kissinger, reoriented American policy in the Middle East and instructed his Secretary of State, William Rogers, to conduct negotiations with the Soviets, mandated by Nasser, in order to define the conditions for a peace settlement.

At the end of 1970, when the Egyptian army along the Suez Canal had, thanks to Soviet aid, been considerably strengthened, to the point of being able to consider going back on the offensive, two major events contributed to profoundly altering the situation in the riparian countries: in September, the young King Hussein of Jordan launched a formidable offensive against the armed forces of the PLO and succeeded in expelling them from his country, which he now ruled with a firm hand; then, at the end of that month of September which the Palestinians now described as black, Nasser, heavily involved in the negotiations of the Cairo ceasefire agreement in this fratricidal struggle, was struck down by an illness and died, leaving power in Egypt in the hands of his vice-president, Anwar Al-Sadat.