Word: arab
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Egyptian President Anwar Sadat spearheaded the Arab peace initiative. Convinced that only the U.S. can work out a Middle East settlement, he hopes to win the same kind of support from President-Elect Jimmy Carter that he had from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Sadat also intends to make the prospect of ending the state of war so attractive to the West that the Israelis will have to accept. As one Egyptian official put it last week, "If the Israelis appear to be refusing to end the war, I wonder if they can again get $5 billion from the American...
...timing of Sadat's initiative was not dictated merely by the necessity of wooing the new Administration. For one thing, Syrian armed might has resolved that distracting obstacle to peace, Lebanon's civil war. For another, the October Arab summits at Riyadh and Cairo left Western-oriented moderates-principally Sadat, Syrian President Hafez Assad and Saudi Arabia's King Khalid -in undisputed control over Arab strategy. The so-called rejectionists like Iraq and Libya, which oppose a permanent settlement with Israel, emerged largely discredited...
...civil war in Lebanon, seems far away. Arafat's enforced meekness is even further removed from 1974, when he stood before the United Nations General Assembly, riding the crest of Third World acclaim and proclaiming the ascendancy of the Palestinian liberation movement. But resurgent optimism about a final Arab-Israeli peace still focuses on Arafat, that mysterious figure in the middle, and the central question has become: will he accept half a loaf for the Palestinians...
Despite the plethora of attention Arafat receives in the news, the English-speaking world actually knows very little about him. While this is partly the result of a general lack of thoughtful and unbiased news coverage of the Arab world (particularly in the United States), it is also due to the myth which Arafat himself has built up around his activities. Thomas Kiernan's efforts in his recent books to unveil that myth are long overdue. While many gaps in our knowledge of Arafat necessarily remain, it is reassuring to see that Kiernan has been able to produce a portrait...
Arafat opens with the 1929 Wailing Wall riots in Jerusalem which began an era of escalating violence and established the reign of terror of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti (Muslim religious leader) of Jerusalem, the extremist leader who created "the Palestinian problem" by rejecting moderation and sowing intra-Arab dissension prior to the founding of Israel. The turbulent childhood of Rahman al-Qudwa (in later life Yasir Arafat) is shadowed by Palestinian fear and hostility to a growing influx of foreign Jews; it is the conflict between opposing reactions to this threat which marks young Rahman's coming...