Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Throughout, the conference was heavily policed by throngs of bull-necked security agents. The opposition Socialist newspaper Al Mouharrir drily commented: "If the Arab League can isolate Israel as completely as the security forces isolated the Casablanca Prefecture, and if the League can divert the Jordan waters as successfully as traffic was diverted in downtown Casablanca, then the conference will have been a great success...
Private Bickering. If Bourguiba's memo was a devastating blast at Nasser, he was not the only critic. At the opening meeting of the Arab League, the conference host himself, Morocco's King Hassan II, repeated Bourguiba's themes but in milder terms. As conference chairman, Nasser weathered the storm with considerable aplomb, pointing out that the conferees would get nowhere if they limited themselves to diatribes. Then he cleared the hall of all but the twelve heads of state so that the Arab leaders could bicker on in privacy...
Nasser was not the only target of abuse. Egypt's Lieut. General Ali Ali Amer, commander of a proposed army of allied Arab states, bitterly complained that Jordan and Lebanon refused to allow foreign troops to be stationed in their countries. Jordan's King Hussein replied stubbornly: "This is just not the right time." Tiny Lebanon was again assailed for its reluctance to get moving on the long-delayed project to divert the Jordan River and deny its waters to Israel...
Ahmed Shukairy, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was outraged that not a single one of the 13 Arab League states had paid the assessments levied last September in Alexandria to build a Palestinian-Arab army, and only Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt had paid their dues for the political arms. In response, the deadbeat states demanded that Shukairy account for the funds he had already received, and one member accused Shukairy of spending $8,400 for custom-made suits at Rome's chic Caraceni tailors...
...meeting's end, as usual, the League members came up with a bland six-point peace plan that called for, among other things, solidarity against Israel, noninterference in one another's domestic affairs, an end, once and for all, to press and radio diatribes against other Arab states...