Introduction

This seminal speech by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders, decisively expressed or molded US thinking on the Israeli-Arab conflict for several decades and it still does. This speech must be understood in the context of a mounting Arab and Soviet offensive on the Palestinian question. In November of 1974, the UN General Assembly had invited Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to address it, and had subsequently passed resolution 3236 recognizing the rights of Palestinians and resolution 3237, granting the PLO Permanent observer status at the UN General Assembly. On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly passed resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as racism. In December of that year, the Security Council, with US acquiescence, allowed the PLO an observer's seat. Meanwhile, Saunders expressed, or was picked to express, the outlines of a change in US policy regarding the Middle East . The US would no longer ignore the Palestinians, or treat their problem as solely a refugee problem.

Saunders stated:

In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict. Final resolution of the problems arising from the partition of Palestine, the establishment of the State of Israel, and Arab opposition to those events will not be possible until agreement is reached defining a just and permanent status for the Arab peoples who consider themselves Palestinians. . . . The U.S. has provided some $620 million in assistance -- about sixty-two percent of the total international support ($1 billion) for the Palestinian refugees over the past quarter of a century.

Today, however, we recognize that, in addition to meeting the human needs and responding to legitimate personal claims of the refugees, there is another interest that must be taken into account. It is a fact that many of the three million or so people who call themselves Palestinians today increasingly regard themselves as having their own identity as a people and desire a voice in determining their political status. As with any people in this situation, there are differences among themselves, but the Palestinians collectively are a political factor which must be dealt with if there is to be a peace between Israel and its neighbors.

By November, 1975, the UN General Assembly had recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The stand of the PLO regarding a solution was unequivocal. In his address to the UN General Assembly the previous year, Chairman Yasser Arafat had made it clear that the PLO believes Zionism is racism, there is no Jewish people, and justice can only be served by turning the entire territory of Israel into a Palestinian state. The Rabat Summit had declared the PLO to be the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. However, Saunders noted:

However, the PLO does not accept the United Nations Security Council resolutions, does not recognize the existence of Israel, and has not stated its readiness to negotiate peace with Israel; Israel does not recognize the PLO or the idea of a separate Palestinian entity. Thus we do not at this point have the framework for a negotiation involving the PLO. We cannot envision or urge a negotiation between two parties as long as one professes to hold the objective of eliminating the other -- rather than the objective of negotiating peace with it.

There is one other aspect to this problem. Elements of PLO have used terrorism to gain attention for their cause. Some Americans as well as many Israelis and others have been killed by Palestinian terrorists. The international community cannot condone such practices, and it seems to us that there must be some assurance if Palestinians are drawn into that negotiating process that these practices will be curbed.

This is the problem which we now face. If the progress toward peace which has now begun is to continue, a solution to this question must be found.

Clearly, this was an invitation to the Palestinians and the Israelis. The PLO would recognize the UN resolutions and announce its readiness to negotiate a compromise solution with Israel. Israel would reciprocate, and the US would host the dialog. The seed of this idea, planted in 1975, did not begin to take root until 1988, when Yasser Arafat announced that the PLO accepted UN resolution 242 ), which recognizes the territorial independence and integrity of all states in the region and their right to live in security. Nonetheless, the significance of the change in US policy was not lost on observers at the time. In December of 1975, Time Magazine noted:

Last month then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders submitted a document to the House Committee on International Relations that stressed the importance of the Palestinian question as "the heart of the conflict" in the Middle East. The Saunders paper raised the possibility of negotiations between Israel and the P.L.O. on the future of a Palestinian state if the P.L.O. would renounce terrorism and recognize Israel's right to exist.

Half Loaf. The Saunders testimony, even as it profoundly disturbed Israelis, profoundly intrigued Palestinian moderates, including Yasser Arafat. According to some reports, he is ready to accept a "half a loaf solution to the Middle East problem -- a state on the West Bank and in Gaza, instead of all Palestine.  Although they are still a distinctly minority voice, at least five dovish ministers in the Israeli Cabinet have called for a new policy under which Israel would announce its willingness to negotiate with any group of Palestinians that would recognize Israel, renounce the use of terrorism against it, and accept the Security Council's resolutions on the Middle East. Proponents of this policy argue that it would help Israel regain some support in world opinion. Time Magazine, December 15, 1975

This initiative in the making was overtaken by events, and perhaps quashed by Israeli anger that the US did not veto an observer's seat for the PLO in the UN Security Council. Time magazine may have also been the first to introduce an erroneous quote and an erroneous interpretation of Saunders' speech. Saunders had said "In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict."  Subsequently, as in the above, the qualifier was often dropped, and Saunders was interpreted as saying that the Palestinian dimension is the only important aspect of the conflict. He did not say that.

However, in a subsequent interview, Saunders revealed that he did feel, essentially that the Palestinian issue was central, though it is not possible to know whether this account, given in 1994, after the Oslo accords, reflected the events that had occurred since 1975, more than the reality of the original context (highlighting added):

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mfdip:@field(DOCID+mfdip2004sau01)

 ...

SAUNDERS: Yes, I did. I mentioned earlier that in the Fall of 1975, Lee Hamilton, then the Chairman of the Middle East subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, held a series of hearings focussing on the Palestinian dimensions of the Arab-Israel peace process. He asked the administration to send a witness to his hearings. Kissinger didn't want to go because his words would have been taken as a major policy statement. Sisco didn't want to do it for similar reasons. Roy was otherwise engaged, so the task fell to me as the Deputy Assistant Secretary most closely involved in the peace process. I could be characterized as the senior professional; that is not a political appointee with policy making powers. I was an expert and therefore my views could always be disowned. The hearings were one indicator of the increasing attention that the Palestinians were attracting. Kissinger was aware of this new dimension as well. Assad, for example, wanted Kissinger to meet the PLO representative in Damascus. Sadat wanted to do the same with the PLO representative in Cairo. It was clear that the Arabs were giving us signals that the Palestinians had to become involved in the process. That pressure started with the Arab summit held in Rabat in the Fall of 1974. It was then that the Arabs declared the PLO as the "sole and legitimate representatives" of the Palestinian people.

I was attracted to the idea of Palestinian involvement. I have always viewed conflict as not just a matter between states, but rather between people. The heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict lay in the question of the rights of two national group who both claimed the same territory. It seemed to me increasingly, until that issue was addressed, you really could not solve the larger problems. Egypt might sign a peace treaty with Israel, but the other Arab states would wait until the Palestinian problem was appropriately dealt with. So I saw the heart of the Arab-Israel conflict lying in Palestine--or whatever one wished to call that territory. When I was asked to testify, I noted that the most that the US government had ever had to say about this core issue was contained in a Ford-Brezhnev communiqué issued after their meeting in Vladivostok which took place in the Fall of 1974. In general that statement said that the legitimate interests of the Palestinian people had to be dealt with. That was as far as the US government had gone. In preparation for the hearings, I wrote out a four-five page statement which I gave to my office directors and other professionals in the Department. We spent a weekend scrubbing out of the statement any word or punctuation that might upset anybody. I wanted the most dispassionate, analytical and straight forward statement that could be produced. It was as dry as dust and therefore as unassailable as possible. Sisco was out of town at the time. I showed it to Roy who found it acceptable. Roy and I went to see Kissinger; he made some changes which we incorporated. That meant that the Secretary of State had approved my statement. I delivered it to the subcommittee sometime in November. Then came the questioning. Hamilton pushed me very hard on the question of why we were not talking to the PLO or bringing it into the process. He, of course, knew the answer; I took the administration line that we could not engage the PLO until it was willing to recognize Israel, but I added that I thought that we had to find some way to include the Palestinians. The key sentence went something like "In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict". That captured my belief and posed the issue that we would have deal with before stability returned to the area. There was no media representative in the room, even though it was an open meeting. I guess the press didn't think the hearing important enough to cover it. But as soon as I left the hearing room, an Israeli correspondent ran up to me and asked me to repeat what I said in the hearing room. I told him to get a hold of my statement. He proudly told me later that he took that statement, glanced at it, went to a pay phone, called his newspaper and dictated a story. I have never read the story but I was told that when the story appeared in the Sunday editions in Israel--just before the regular Sunday Israel Cabinet meeting--the Cabinet condemned my statement. I doubt whether they had seen the full text, but they reacted on the basis of the newspaper story. In light of the Israeli condemnation, the Arabs felt that it must have been great, even though they probably had not read it either. It certainly was the longest statement ever made on the Palestinians. There is now a volume of the Journal of Palestine Studies which includes what they called the "Saunders Document".

So I did see the Palestinian dimension as the heart of the Arab-Israel conflict and felt that until that issue was addressed we would not be dealing with the core of the conflict. That did not mean that I was pro-Palestinian, although as Abba Eban once said "if you are not 100% for us, you are against us!". In the 1970s, the Israelis did not want to recognize the Palestinians as a discrete people nor were they really willing to acknowledge their existence; my statement made them uneasy. From those hearings on through the studies conducted in 1976 we learned about the Palestinians. So when the Carter administration decided to consider the Palestinian dimension in the Middle East peace process, we were ready, having done our analytical homework. Carter went to a town meeting in Clinton, Massachusetts in March 1977 where he mentioned a "homeland" for the Palestinians. Bill Quandt has always wondered where he got that word. As far as we know, Carter coined it himself. I think he felt at that moment that he could break some of the semantic crockery because he was a new boy on the block; he probably felt he was in a position to get the Palestinian issue on the agenda. So the knowledge we had acquired during our study period coupled with a President willing to raise the issue made for a very fortuitous confluence of internal forces.

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Ami Isseroff and Joseph M. Hochstein

* Prepared statement of Harold H. Saunders, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East.

Mr. Chairman, a just and durable peace in the Middle East is a central objective of the United States. Both President Ford and Secretary Kissinger have stated firmly on numerous occasions that the United States is determined to make every feasible effort to maintain the momentum of practical progress toward a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

We have also repeatedly stated that the legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account in the negotiation of an Arab-Israeli peace. In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict. Final resolution of the problems arising from the partition of Palestine, the establishment of the State of Israel, and Arab opposition to those events will not be possible until agreement is reached defining a just and permanent status for the Arab peoples who consider themselves Palestinians. . . . The U.S. has provided some $620 million in assistance -- about sixty-two percent of the total international support ($1 billion) for the Palestinian refugees over the past quarter of a century.

Today, however, we recognize that, in addition to meeting the human needs and responding to legitimate personal claims of the refugees, there is another interest that must be taken into account. It is a fact that many of the three million or so people who call themselves Palestinians today increasingly regard themselves as having their own identity as a people and desire a voice in determining their political status. As with any people in this situation, there are differences among themselves, but the Palestinians collectively are a political factor which must be dealt with if there is to be a peace between Israel and its neighbors.

The statement is often made in the Arab world that there will not be peace until the "rights of the Palestinians" are fulfilled, but there is no agreed definition of what is meant and a variety of viewpoints have been expressed on what the ultimate objectives of the Palestinians are:

Some Palestinian elements hold to the objective of a binational secular state in the area of the former mandate of Palestine. Realization of this objective would mean the end of the present state of Israel, a member of the United Nations, and its submergence in some larger entity. Some would be willing to accept merely as a first step toward this goal the establishment of a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza.

Other elements of Palestinian opinion appear willing accept an independent Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza, based on acceptance of Israel's right as an independent state within roughly its pre-1967 borders.

Some Palestinians and other Arabs envisage as a solution a unification of the West Bank and Gaza with Jordan. A variation of this which has been suggested would be the reconstitution of the country as a federated state, with the West Bank becoming an autonomous Palestinian province.

Still others, including many Israelis, feel that with the West Bank returned to Jordan, and with the resulting existence of two communities -- Palestinian and Jordanian -- within Jordan, opportunities would be created thereby for the Palestinians to find self-expression.

In the case of a solution which would rejoin the West Bank to Jordan or a solution involving a West Bank/Gaza state, there would still arise the property claims of those Palestinians who before 1948 resided in areas that became the State of Israel. These claims have been acknowledged as a serious problem by the international community ever since the adoption by the United Nations of Resolution 194 on this subject in 1948, a resolution which the United Nations reaffirmed and which the United States has supported. A solution will be further complicated by the property claims against Arab states of the many Jews from those states who moved to Israel in its early years after achieving statehood.

In addition to property claims, some believe they should have the option of returning to their original homes under any settlement.

Other Arab leaders, while pressing the importance of Palestinian involvement in a settlement, have taken the position that the definition of Palestinian interests is something for the Palestinian people themselves to sort out, and the view has been expressed by responsible Arab leaders that realization of Palestinian rights need not be inconsistent with the existence of Israel.

No one, therefore, seems in a position today to say exactly what Palestinian objectives are. . . . What is needed as a first step is a diplomatic process which will help bring forth a reasonable definition of Palestinian interests -- a position from which negotiations on a solution of the Palestinian aspects of the problem might begin. The issue is not whether Palestinian interests should be expressed in a final settlement, but how. There will be no peace unless an answer is found.

Another requirement is the development of a framework for negotiations—a statement of the objectives and the terms of reference. The framework for the negotiations that have taken place thus far and the agreements they have produced involving Israel, Syria, and Egypt, has been provided by United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. In accepting that framework, all of the parties to the negotiation have accepted that the objective of the negotiations is peace between them based on mutual recognition, territorial integrity, political independence, the right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders, and the resolution of the specific issues which comprise the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The major problem that must be resolved in establishing a framework for bringing issues of concern to the Palestinians into negotiation, therefore, is to find a common basis for the negotiation that Palestinians and Israelis can both accept. This could be achieved by common acceptance of the above-mentioned Security Council resolutions, although they do not deal with the political aspect of the Palestinian problem.

A particularly difficult aspect of the problem is the question of who negotiates for the Palestinians. It has been our belief that Jordan would be a logical negotiator for the Palestinian-related issues. The Rabat Summit, however, recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." . . .

However, the PLO does not accept the United Nations Security Council resolutions, does not recognize the existence of Israel, and has not stated its readiness to negotiate peace with Israel; Israel does not recognize the PLO or the idea of a separate Palestinian entity. Thus we do not at this point have the framework for a negotiation involving the PLO. We cannot envision or urge a negotiation between two parties as long as one professes to hold the objective of eliminating the other -- rather than the objective of negotiating peace with it.

There is one other aspect to this problem. Elements of PLO have used terrorism to gain attention for their cause. Some Americans as well as many Israelis and others have been killed by Palestinian terrorists. The international community cannot condone such practices, and it seems to us that there must be some assurance if Palestinians are drawn into that negotiating process that these practices will be curbed.

This is the problem which we now face. If the progress toward peace which has now begun is to continue, a solution to this question must be found. We have not devised an American solution, nor would it be appropriate for us to do so. This is the responsibility of the parties and the purpose of the negotiating process. But we have not closed our minds to any reasonable solution which can contribute to progress toward our overriding objective in the Middle East—an Arab-Israeli peace. The step-by-step approach to negotiations which we have pursued has been based partly on the understanding that issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict take time to mature. It is obvious that thinking on the Palestinian aspects of the problem must evolve on all sides. As it does, what is not possible today may become possible.

Our consultations on how to move the peace forward will recognize the need to deal with this subject. Secretary Kissinger has said, "We are prepared work with all the parties toward a solution of all the issues yet remaining -- including the issue of the future of the Palestinians.” We will do so because the issues of concern to the Palestinians are important in themselves and because the Arab governments participating in the negotiations have made clear that progress in the overall negotiations will depend in part on progress on issues of concern to the Palestinians. We are prepared to consider any reasonable proposal from any quarter, and we will expect other parties to the negotiation to be equally open- minded.

[end]

Source: Lacqueur, W. and Rubin, B, The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, Penguin Books, 1984 revised and updated edition.