Arab League summits have functioned as the defining institutional forum for inter-Arab politics since the 1960s. Few studies, however, have investigated the processes of political maneuvering and negotiation that occurred behind the scenes at these summits. This gap presents a challenge in assessing the extent to which summits have succeeded in their goals of mediating rivalries and fostering inter-Arab cooperation. This paper investigates the negotiations behind the October 1974 Rabat Conference as a case study in the competing roles of state interests versus claims of legitimacy in a critical Arab summit. The Rabat Summit marked an inflection point in the Arab-Israeli conflict by recognizing the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, thus foreclosing the possibility of Jordan negotiating with Israel over the future of the West Bank. By examining the political maneuvers of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat before and during the Rabat Summit, the paper argues that Sadat cynically clothed the pursuit of Egyptian state interests at the summit in the language of Palestinian rights and Arab unity. Sadat embraced the recognition of the PLO as a tactical maneuver, to prevent either Jordan or Syria from presenting a viable alternative to continued Egyptian dominance over the course of the Arab-Israeli peace process. By foreclosing Henry Kissinger’s preferred “Jordan Option” for the West Bank, Sadat ensured that Kissinger depended on Egypt as his sole Arab partner. Sadat also used the Rabat Conference to begin Ba’thist Iraq’s reintegration into the mainstream of Arab politics. While Sadat couched this move in the language of Arab unity, the paper examines how Sadat facilitated Iraq’s reintegration primarily to weaken his rival, Syrian President Hafez al-Asad. The inner-workings of Arab summits are understudied in part because of the lack of open diplomatic archives in Arab states. In the case of the Rabat Conference, however, a rich collection of declassified US government documents, including records of meetings with Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and Moroccan leaders, allows a reconstruction of its diplomacy and politics. The paper combines these US sources with Jordanian, Egyptian, and Palestinian memoirs and publications. Although Sadat and other Arab leaders believed they could reverse the Rabat decision on the PLO if it served their interests, the decision proved impossible to retract. Arab regimes limited their subsequent flexibility when they employed summits as a means to outmaneuver their rivals, as summit decisions took on a life and legitimacy of their own.

Forty years after the ink dried on the Camp David Peace Accords between Cairo and Tel Aviv, the domestic political context in which former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat operated often still remains poorly understood. While IMF-mandated price-hikes sparked spontaneous mass civil unrest in January 1977, opposition to the so-called ‘peace process’ with Israel, by contrast, seemed isolated and small-scale; neither Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, nor the Camp David Accords in 1978/9, generated any spectacular instances of public protest. The absence of mass demonstrations has given rise to a perception that Sadat’s conclusion of a separate peace agreement with Israel, though unpopular in some quarters, nonetheless was tolerable to most ‘ordinary’ Egyptians. The present paper seeks to challenge this view by showcasing a little-known incident of politically-motivated hostage-taking in rural Qalyubiya that was timed to coincide with the investiture of Israel’s first ambassador to Cairo in February 1980. While Sa‘d Halawa’s day-long stand-off with the security forces received scant news coverage inside Egypt, this paper argues that Halawa’s demand for the abrogation of diplomatic relations with Israel and Sadat’s resignation nevertheless resonated with the public on a deeper level. Drawing on an oral history project conducted by an investigative journalist a few years after the events in question, it reconstructs the frequently sympathetic attitudes of eyewitnesses. Parsing the villagers’ recorded testimonies, it explains how official investigations into Halawa’s death have obscured the prevailing pulse of public opinion and the regime’s use of violence. This reappraisal of the peasants’ beliefs and the subsequent appropriation of Halawa’s act by the left-wing urban intelligentsia indicate that the possibility for oppositional mobilization inspired by Arab nationalist ideals continued to exist latently at a time when Islamists seemed to go from strength to strength and the organized left suffered a massive crackdown. Halawa’s doomed operation suggests that, beneath the highly visible political ruptures of the late 1970s, a sizeable body of public opinion in Egypt continued to adhere to Nasserite ideals in ways that cut across presumed rural-urban or elite-subaltern divides. The peasants’ reactions to Halawa’s act thus imply that political quiescence in this period is better understood as a function of the state’s policies of coercion rather than supposed public apathy: they demonstrate that many ordinary Egyptians sought to preserve, reinforce, and adapt the legacies of Nasserism to the changed realities their country faced in the early 1980s.

Iranians before and after the Iranian Revolution have identified and sympathized with the struggle in Palestine. In the 1970s, for example, leftist Iranian guerrillas bombed Israeli targets in Iran both in solidarity with the Palestinians and to defy their monarch’s proximity to the Israelis. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic situated the emancipation of Palestine at the core of its ideology and foreign policy. In other words, the legitimacy of the Palestinian movement amongst revolutionary circles in the 1970s was afforded state sanction in the post-revolutionary period. That state sanction amounted to the government raising an entire generation after the revolution with the tenets of Palestinian liberation, the changing of the aesthetic landscape of the country, the establishment of Jerusalem Day, and much more. In 2009, a generation of Iranian youth raised under the authority and ideology of the Islamic government negated such legitimated Palestine-centered discourse in order to condemn that very state. The slogan “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life is only for Iran” (na ghazzeh, na lobn?n, j?nam fad?’-ye ?r?n) on Jerusalem Day (September 18, 2009) is well-documented and known. What is less known and more strategic, however, is how certain segments within the uprising did not negate Palestine as a symbol, but co-opted it to legitimate their uprising and castigate the government. They equated themselves with the legitimacy of the oppressed Palestinians, and the Iranian state with the occupation of power akin to Israel. The paper will outline how pre- and post-revolutionary Iranians heralded Palestine as a political symbol of monumental significance, and that history is important because it gives that very symbol tremendous weight and meaning in the Iranian milieu. The paper will then proceed to chronicle how the Green Movement harnessed this weight and meaning when it appropriated the state’s hegemonic discursive control of Palestine as a symbol, and wielded it with all its emotive power against the Iranian state in 2009.