Fayez Abdullah Sayegh - Palestine Research Center (1968)

Bill: Today, our speaker is Dr. Fayez Sayegh, who is the senior consultant to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the United Nations Delegation and the Embassy of the State of Kuwait. Dr. Sayegh is an educator, a scholar, an author, an Arabist, and an internationalist. He has taught at various universities in this country, including Yale and Stanford. And he has also taught at the American University at Beirut. Dr. Sayegh is the author of several books in Arabic, which have been translated into Russian, Spanish, English, French, and German, as well as several books in English, including one entitled Arab Unity. In 1965, he founded the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, of which he was the director general. He has served as the president of the Palestine Arab Congress, and he's received the highest decoration from the government of Lebanon. He has been and is closely associated with the United Nations. He has served as advisor to the Lebanese delegation to the United Nations, as counselor to the Yemen delegation to the United Nations, as charge d'affaires of the Arab States delegation office at the United Nations, and has also served as a program officer for the Middle East in the United Nations radio division and as social affairs officers in the United Nations Division of Human Rights. He is admirably qualified to discuss his topic today, which is the future of Arab-Israeli relations. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Fayez Sayegh.

Fayez Sayegh: Gentlemen, the future of Arab-Israeli relations, as indeed the future of any conflict based on profound grievances is decisively contingent upon whether or not those profound grievances are remedied. If they are not remedied, if the causes that engender the conflict are not removed, then either one party will have to capitulate to the other and acquiesce in its plight while the other party, overpowering, will exercise tyranny over it, or the prospects are those of an indefinite and endless confrontation. If, on the other hand, the causes that generate the conflict are remedied, then, sooner or later, the prospects of harmony and conciliation become bright. It would follow, therefore, that we cannot talk about the future of Arab-Israeli relations without understanding the profound grievances which have for 20 years generated the endemic, the chronic Arab-Israeli conflict. For this is the beginning of wisdom in any attempt to understand the Middle Eastern situation. There is a conflict because there are grievances. There is no conflict because people simply want to be in conflict with one another. And these grievances revolve around and center upon an entire nation. The people of Palestine, those who within the last 20 years have witnessed the world proclaim as a cherished ideal respect for fundamental human rights and basic human liberties, but have witnessed themselves being concretely and in practice deprived of their basic human rights and fundamental liberties. And the people who have witnessed in the past 20 years, 55 peoples in Asia and Africa alone rise to sovereignty and enjoy self-determination while they alone have been subjected to a new form of denial of even the opportunity to have on their own homeland self-determination. There are grievances in the Middle East. And until and unless these grievances are remedied, the prospect is one of endless and continued confrontation rather than of harmony and conciliation. For gentlemen, two million Palestinians, the entirety of the nation of Palestine, without a single exception, today find themselves in one of three categories. They are either exiles living away from their homes and being unable to return to their homes and property, and the bulk of these two million fall into this category, or they are members of a community which last June was placed under military alien occupation. Or thirdly, they are in their own land members of a minority that is subordinated and made to feel that it lives under the rule of a state to which it does not belong. Every Palestinian without exception is either an exile or living under military occupation, or thirdly, a member of a subjugated minority. And when you have a situation like this, when you have two million human beings, men and women and children, Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs, living like this, experiencing this, you cannot expect them all and when to turn the other cheek and say, we acquiesce, we capitulate, we give our blessings to those who have inflicted this misery upon us. In order to appreciate the full measure of all the dimensions of this human tragedy, we ought to recall four features of the process which has led to the Palestinians living under this kind of situation. feature is that the displacement and dispossession of the Arabs of Palestine did not simply happen to take place. It was not a coincidental byproduct of a process of confrontation between the Arabs living in Palestine and determined to defend their rights on the one hand and the Zionists coming from 110 different lands to Palestine on the other hand. On the contrary, that these Palestinians were dispossessed was already implicit as an essential prerequisite of the very goals of Zionism from the day Zionism was born. For if you seek to create an exclusively Zionist society, or at any rate a predominantly Zionist society, in a land already inhabited by non-Zionists, you can do so only by doing away with those non-Zionists. There is incompatibility between the continued existence of the native inhabitants of the land and the creation on that land of a society exclusively composed of others. And this is not simply guesswork, nor is it only a case of logical derivation of conclusion from premises, but there is evidence. in the most authoritative pronouncements of the most representative leaders of the Zionist movement that the dispossession of the Arabs of Palestine was premeditated and planned from the time Zionism was born. Dr. Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, the creator of the Zionist organization, the father of Israel, writing in his diaries as early as June 12, 1895, 73 years ago, volume one, page 88, for those of you who would like to read it directly, said, when we occupy the land, we shall expropriate the private property and spirit the penniless population across the frontiers. I have a photostatic copies of this statement in my briefcase right here for any skeptic. When the King Crane Commission went in 1919 at the behest of President Wilson to the Near East, it reported in August of that year to the president that in all its conferences with all the Zionist leaders, they told the commission that they looked forward, and I'm quoting it again, to a practically complete dispossession of the existing non-Jewish communities. And I remind you that those existing non-Jewish communities then represented 93% of the people of the country. It was not then a simple accident of history that the Arabs were uprooted from Palestine. it was an indispensable prerequisite of the attainment of the goals of Zionism, proclaimed as such by the leaders of that movement from the very first day. A second feature that you ought to recall also is the how of this dispossession. Were these Palestinians made to leave their homes by persuasion? Were they talked into a mass exile, or perhaps was their land purchased, and then they found themselves with no land to live on? Well, the British government, which conducted the affairs of Palestine on behalf of the world community from 1917 until 1947, reported to the United Nations in that year, 1947, in a book called Survey of Palestine Paragraph 520, it reported that during the preceding 50 years of Zionist settlement in Palestine, all that the Zionists managed to purchase and legally acquire was 1,588,000 dunams out of a total area of 26,320,000 dunams. some 6% of the land. And believe me, the Zionists are as good at arithmetic as any of us. And they calculated that if it took them 50 years to buy 6% of the land, it would take them, if my arithmetic is correct, 767 years to take the remaining 94% of the land. And not many of them were prepared to wait that long in order to establish their state by peaceful means. And therefore, immediately a shortcut was devised. As soon as the British forces began to withdraw, the Zionists, armed and trained by the British government, would launch attacks on one Arab town after another and one Arab village after another, conquer it militarily, evict its population by force, confiscate its land, and bring in new settlers from outside the area to settle on where the Arabs lived and moved and had their being. The dispossession, which was planned and premeditated, was perpetrated by force and violence. Thirdly, such dispossession was not endorsed or sanctioned by any international body, nor was it licensed in any of the international instruments on the basis of which Israel posits its claim to legal validity. In its proclamation of independence, Israel said that it bases its legal validity on the Balfour Declaration, on the mandate of the League of Nations, and on the partition recommendation of the United Nations. The Balfour Declaration, after saying that the British government favors the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, immediately proceeds to say, provided that this does not prejudice the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The mandate not only reiterated this provision, but in Article II and in Article VI enjoined the British government to guard against any prejudice to the rights of the existing Arab community in Palestine. and the partition recommendation of the General Assembly of 29 November 1947, tied the hands of Israel in advance by saying that Israel shall not and must not be permitted to oust a single Arab or to confiscate his property. All these were safeguards before the fact, and after the Arabs were dispossessed, the General Assembly, in 20 successive resolutions, beginning with 11 December 1948 and ending with 19 December 1967. And in five additional resolutions of the Security Council, ordered Israel to take them back. And they have not yet been taken back. Fourthly, gentlemen, this dispossession of a whole nation, premeditated, perpetrated by violence and force, and in violation of international agreements and instruments, is far from satisfactory to Zionism and to the state of Israel. For Zionism has served notice on the world as early as February 1919 in a formal memorandum to the peace conference that the minimal territorial desiderata of that movement are not only all of Palestine, but southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. southern Syria up to Damascus, all of Transjordan and Sinai in addition to Palestine. And we have witnessed Zionism begin with nothing, then be given half of Palestine by the United Nations, then evict the people of that half, then occupy 3 quarters in 48, then occupy 5% more in 49, and then occupy the rest of Palestine and southern Syria and Sinai in 67. And if its logic is to persist, there is still southern Lebanon to go, part of southern Syria still to go, and Transjordan still to go before Zionism can be satisfied. So gentlemen, put yourself in my shoes. A Palestinian Arab who cannot go to his hometown and cannot visit his home, where I'm told a Czechoslovak Jewish family now lives, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in the city of Tiberias, where my father was the Presbyterian pastor of the congregation. Put yourself in my shoes. I and my people have been made the victims of a movement that deliberately came to dispossess us, that did dispossess us. And that is still far from satisfied because it still wants to dispossess the rest of us and still wants to acquire additional territory and evict its population. Put yourself in our shoes. View this problem with our eyes. How ready would you be prepared if this had happened to you, to acquiesce, to capitulate, and to say, God bless you, Israel. I recognize you, and I want to make peace with you. There are two avenues. It would seem to me, gentlemen, that would characterize the future of these Arab-Israeli relations. Either the avenue that says, what has happened has happened. What has been created is there to stay. Let the Arabs accommodate themselves to this reality, and there will be peace. Well, the Arabs reject this avenue. Two million human beings who live in the misery of exile and in the spiritual hunger of being deprived from what every people or almost every people in the world today enjoys, the right to self-determination, would not accept. We ask, are we not human beings? Is it only wrong for the world to persecute the Jews and right for the Jews to persecute the Arabs? Must the Arabs pay? at the hands of Zionism for the guilty conscience of the West and for the guilt of Christian Europe against the Jews, this path, this avenue of let bygones be bygones and start from the present day reality and accept it and acquiesce in it is a blind alley. There is the other avenue, the avenue of saying there can be no peace which is durable and which is lasting unless it is based securely on restoring rights to those who have been deprived of them, on restoring justice to those who have been the victims of injustice for 20 years. Within this framework, the Arab of Palestine, if he is permitted to return to his country and to reacquire his private property which he has not sold and has not surrendered, can then coexist side by side with the Jew from Europe and elsewhere. For in our background, in our history, of which we are very proud, when Jews were being persecuted in Spain and Poland and Russia, and discriminated against in England and France and Italy, until the United States opened its doors to them, the only place in the world to which they could go, assured of a warm welcome and hospitality, and assured of a life without discrimination and without persecution, was the Arab world. When they were coming as individuals, they were accepted, and they became parts of the society to which they went in the Arab world, coexistence between the rightful inhabitants of Palestine, when they return to their homes and lands in their country, and the newcomers in a new society, not the pure exclusivist society of the Zionists, but the mixed society, not the pure society of Jews that Israel says it is, but the society of human beings, Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs and non-Arab Jews, all together living in one land, working together to establish a state that represents their common interests and whose institutions represent their common will. This, in my opinion, is the path of peace based on justice, of conciliation, and of tranquility in the Middle East. To be sure, gentlemen, to be sure, there will be international guarantees required. Those guarantees should be forthcoming. To be sure, there might be some Palestinians who would not want to come back to Palestine. They should not be forced to return. But by the same token, there might be some Jews in Israel today who might not want to stay behind in a country that is a mixed country, who have gone there because they wanted to be in an exclusively Jewish state. They must not be prohibited against their will from leaving. According to the statistics of Israel itself, for every eight Jews who went to Israel in the past 20 years, one has left Israel. There are some who even came back to Germany, preferring to live once again in the homeland of Nazism, than to stay in the dreamland of Zionism. And according to the information from the various embassies in Israel, the waiting lines at the visa sections of their consulates are long waiting lines for many more who want to leave. They should not be prohibited from leaving. There will be radical transformation. The Arabs will come back, those of them who choose to, and the Jews who choose to stay will stay. The Arabs who don't want to come back will not be forced to return. The Jews who want to leave will not be forced to stay. To be sure, there will be international aid required for the resettlement of Arabs who want to stay behind outside Palestine and Jews who want to leave Palestine. But it will be much cheaper for the world to resettle these two categories than to continue to bear the brunt of a continuing and endless Arab-Israeli conflict. To be sure, there will be strains and tensions but they will be much less grave and much less explosive than the strains and tensions that exist now and that will continue to exist for as long as Israel, as an exclusive state of aliens, continues to rest on the land emptied of its rightful Arab inhabitants. Gentlemen, sacrifices on both sides will then be required. The Arabs will have to forget the misery of a generation. The Zionists will have to forego the exclusiveness of their society. But all told, this will be far more profitable for both sides and for the world than the continued confrontation of today. For I can assure you, except on this basis, Arabs will not acquiesce and capitulate. They may be powerless today. to alter the facts. But you see, we view things from the vantage point of 5,000 years of history, in which we have witnessed one conqueror come after another. And we have witnessed these conquerors leave. And we view the present intruder as only another conqueror. And there is no reason why we should believe that he is going to be more permanent than the dozens of his predecessors. And furthermore, we are at the very beginning of our national awakening. Our resources have not been mobilized, our potentialities have not been actualized. We view the future with certitude, whatever the present may mean. There will be continuous and endless confrontation. until the day comes when either israel destroys all the arabs from morocco to kuwait or the arabs destroy israel or both destroy one another and perhaps you with them the only alternative gentlemen is the alternative of peace based on justice of two million human beings being given their rights of harmony and reconciliation on that basis when that happens then the holy land whose plight in the past 20 years has been a barrier to peace, will once again become a bridge for cultures. And then the area that has threatened the peace of the world for so long may once again be diffused by justice and compassion and harmony. And once again, the Holy Land may become the Holy Land. Thank you.

Bill: Thank you, Dr. Cyag. And now the president of the Commonwealth Club of California, Mr. Johnson, will conduct the question and answer period.

Mr. Johnson: Thank you, Bill. And doctor, if you will join me here. The first question is, would the influence of the United States be superior to that of the UN in enforcing the 1947 partition plan and causing the Israeli forces to withdraw to the set boundaries of 1947?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, the influence on whom? Surely, the influence of the United States on Israel is today superior to the influence of the United Nations. Israel, the beneficiary of the United Nations intervention, has been proverbial in its repeated violations of the will of the United Nations. There are, and I have the full text with me, 57 resolutions of the United Nations condemning or rebuking Israel in the past 20 years. And Israel hasn't occurred. Whereas the United States has certain abilities to influence Israel, which it has not even begun to use. Now, what about the influence on the Arabs? I fear to say that I must be blunt in answering this question. The Arabs would have been influenced far more greatly by the United States had they had evidence in the past 20 years that the counsel coming to them from the United States is an impartial counsel based on the rights of the two parties and on an impartial appraisal of those rights. But we have witnessed the United States increasingly and progressively, save for a brief period in the middle of the past 20 years, we have witnessed the United States take an increasingly more partisan attitude committed to the positions and to the interests of Israel in disregard completely of our rights and of the United Nations. I fear unless there is a more convincing evidence that the United States will be truly impartial, its counsel will fall on many deaf ears among the Arabs.

Mr. Johnson: This questioner says, my experience in the Mideast and Israel questions your description of the plight of the Arabs in Israel. I believe they own land, business, and so forth, and function well in Israel. Please answer.

Fayez Sayegh: I will be glad to. I said there are three categories into which the Palestinians fall. The large bulk of them are the exiles, those who do not own land in Israel because that land has been confiscated and cannot go back to see it. Then there are those who are living under military occupation since last June, some of whom have had their land confiscated even in Jerusalem. And then there are the Arabs who lived in Israel in the past 19 years. True, some of these gentlemen have not had their lands confiscated, although some of them have. And these people who are the best off among the three categories, these people live virtually the life of a second class citizen. Or I should correct myself and say the life of a third class citizen. Because the European Caucasian Jew has the first class status. The Oriental Jew has the second-class status in Israel, and the Arab has the third-class status. They are deprived of many of their civil rights, and those rights they do enjoy. They do not enjoy inequality with the Oriental Jew, and certainly not inequality with the European white Jew in Israel.

Mr. Johnson: This may be the opposite of that question, doctor. It reads, if peace could be attained between the Arab states and Israel, Could not the technical knowledge of the Israelis in both industry and agriculture be of great value to the Arab nations?

Fayez Sayegh: The technical knowledge of anyone could be of great value to anyone who does not have that technical knowledge. But for this value to become actual and not to remain potential, there is a question of will involved. In other words, superior knowledge of and by itself is no... guarantee of benefit to him whose knowledge is inferior unless he who has the superior knowledge wants unselfishly to share it. Now, the experience of the Arabs with Zionism over the past 70 years and with Israel over the past 20 is very much like the experience of Africans with European colonizing powers. Surely, the underdeveloped would benefit by osmosis, if by nothing else, from the superiority of technical knowledge of the developed. But there is at the same time a great degree of exploitation in the process. The resources are developed more than the native would develop them by his own present knowledge, but they are developed largely for the profit of the more advanced and not for the benefit of both. So unless the question of will, or if you want to use an old-fashioned word which some ears are jarred by, the question of spirit. Unless the question of will and spirit is settled, unless Zionism ceases to be exclusivist and becomes actually human in the scope of its concern, the superior knowledge of the Israelis is only a greater threat to the Arabs and not a source of greater benefit.

Mr. Johnson: I'm going to join these next two questions and ask you to answer them one after the other. The first one reads, is not Soviet Russia the real troublemaker in the Near East? And the next one, is not Nasser the main menace to peace in the Middle East?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, I don't know about your chronology, whoever the two gentlemen were who asked these questions. I know that the Soviet regime came to power in 1917. And I know that Zionism came into being in 1897. 20 years before there was even a Soviet Union, there was already a danger to the Arabs in Palestine. You could not attribute a movement that made its plans and entered into history in 1897 to something that was born in 1917. Now, surely, today, in the present phase of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States, in their competition for influence and as a result of other factors that influence their foreign policies, find themselves on opposite sides of this conflict in the Middle East. But to attribute the present day phase of this conflict, to attribute to the present day phase of this conflict the entire totality of the conflict is, it would seem to me, to put the cart before the horse. Gentlemen, I, as a Palestinian, do not need a Soviet Union or anyone else to remind me that as long as I'm in exile and as long as my home has been taken away from me by force and as long as I cannot go back to it and as long as I cannot enjoy self-determination on any square inch anywhere in the world, that I'm an unhappy person. I don't need the Soviet Union to remind me of that. Nor, by the way, do I need Nasser. Nasser, after all, came to power in 1952. His name was not known to anyone outside his immediate friends and his circle of associates before 1952. And yet in 1948, there was already war between the Arabs and Israel. How can we say Nasser is the cause? Nasser is the product of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nasser came to prominence in the Arab world because he accepted He accepted to champion the cause of the Palestinians. Had Nasser failed to champion the cause of the Palestinians, you probably would not have heard of him. Nasser is the product and not the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mr. Johnson: This questioner asks, have the Arabs ever been paid for the lands and the property taken from them by Israel?

Fayez Sayegh: Not one penny.

Mr. Johnson: Does any uncensored news ever come out of Israel?

Fayez Sayegh: Yes? But much censored news also comes out of Israel.

Mr. Johnson: Why doesn't the wealth of the Arab countries give housing and decent living to the refugees instead of the filth and squalor in which they are living?

Fayez Sayegh: I try to restrain myself when I hear a question like this. And believe me, I'm trying hard now. If I had a tranquilizer, I'd take it. I tell you, a human being has been deprived of his property, of his God-given right to dignity. And you tell me, why doesn't his brother give him a home somewhere else? Instead of saying, why doesn't he who deprived him of his home give him back his home? The question is not economic. The question is not a matter of poverty or wealth only. It is not a matter of hunger or satisfaction only. The question is of human dignity. Do you understand what it means that a human being can look at the world around him and see 55 peoples, most of them less developed than he, become independent during the very period when he was kicked out of his country and deprived of the opportunity to enjoy self-determination? If you understand what this means, you wouldn't suggest that someone else give him a little of his wealth. This is not to say that the Arab states that are wealthy have not been sharing their wealth with the Palestinians. Do you believe that these Palestinians have remained living for 20 years on the four cents of food a day that the United Nations gives them? It is the additional help of the Arab states that has enabled them to survive. The Arab states are feeding them. The Arab states are making possible many of the services, educational and health services, from which they have been enjoying. But the question is, are these people to remain exiles? Are they to remain deprived of their property? They say no. Kuwait now has 80,000 Palestinians living in it, feeding 400,000 of these refugees. Do you think one of these Palestinians has applied for Kuwaiti citizenship? No, because they want to go back to Palestine. And the same could be said of the other Arab states. These refugees are helped by the Arabs, but the question is greater than financial help. The question is one of restoring dignity and rights to people who have been deprived of them. Are we human beings or are we not? This is the question. on which the future of the Middle East revolves.

Mr. Johnson: This questioner says or asks, who owns the land that the Arabs and Israelis are fighting over? I think you touched on this, doctor, but you may want to enlarge on it.

Fayez Sayegh: The Palestinians in Palestine constituted, at the turn of the century, 95% of the population and owned 97 and 1 half percent of the land. The Zionists, during British control, bought 3 and 1 half percent, bringing in 1947 their total property in Palestine to 6% according to the British records. The remainder is the individual and corporate property of the Arab people of Palestine.

Mr. Johnson: Why does Lebanon stay out of the fighting? Is it to be the Switzerland of the Near East

Fayez Sayegh: No. Lebanon stays out of the fighting. And it's not true that it did stay out of the fighting. There were several air battles over Lebanese skies last June. I was in Beirut when it happened. Three Israeli planes were shot down over Lebanon. And one Lebanese plane in these air battles. The war that Lebanon did not participate in was the land war. And it did not participate because its land was not attacked. Its frontiers were not attacked by Israel. Its turn apparently had not come according to the timetable of Zionist expansion. Lebanon can be taken care of very easily by Zionism the moment the other Arab states have had the territories that Zionism of their lands occupied by the Zionists and the moment they have acquiesced in it. Lebanon's turn would come and it would be easy then for Israel to dispose of Lebanon in that way.

Mr. Johnson: Dr. Sayeh, if there is no successful resistance by the Arabs, what will be the ultimate limit of Israeli territorial expansion?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, I said that the Zionist movement has officially notified the world of what are its minimal desiderata. Of course, the maximal desiderata have ranged beyond these lines. For example, Herzl wanted to go up as far as Beirut in Lebanon and not to stop at the Litani River. They have ranged between different points. And the very maximum, of course, has been the resort to the biblical phrase, from the Nile to the Euphrates. But the minimal territorial desiderata accepted by all Zionists and formally submitted to the world went as far as the Litani River in southern Lebanon, as far as Damascus in southern Syria, as far as the Hijaz Railway in Transjordan, and the rest of Palestine and Sinai.

Mr. Johnson: What should the Arab states do to regain the lost territory?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, there are only two ways, as I tried to indicate. If you accept the rule of conquest, you set in motion an endless process in which the aggrieved party would try by counter-conquest to regain what he lost. If not in our lifetime, we can wait in the lifetime of our children. if not in their lifetime, in the lifetime of their children. Remember, I told you we have 5,000 years of history. And therefore, our sense of time is different from yours. We're in no rush, if need be. We are not prepared to give up our rights only because today and tomorrow we may not be able to regain them by force. But the second alternative would be through the formula whose framework I tried to define. Through doing justice to human beings letting them come back to their homes. And then the new society would not be Israel, but a Palestine of Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs and non-Arab Jews. And then the conflict and all its manifestations will cease to have a raison d'etre between this recreated Palestine and the surrounding Arab states.

Mr. Johnson: Dr. Fayez Sayeh, you have been a very interesting and informative speaker. On behalf of those who had the pleasure to hear you here today in the Ralston Room at the Sheraton Paralyst Hotel, I want to thank you. On behalf of the more than 12,000 members of the Commonwealth Club, some of whom will have the opportunity to hear you on radio, I extend their thanks, too. We have time for one more question, at which point this meeting will be adjourned. The question is, Are the UN debates fruitful, or are we dealing with a partisan rooting section devoid of justice and equity?

Fayez Sayegh: The United Nations is a reflection of the state of the mood of the world. Let us make no mistake about it. No organization can be better than its components. To the extent to which power politics and self-interest continue to animate a large majority of the member states, the members of the nation-state system, to that extent an international organization will only reflect this way of thinking about international problems. On the other hand, the United Nations must not be belittled. It is a meeting place. It is a place for discussion. It is a place for airing grievances. It is a place where a certain minimum of principles on which all have agreed have been inscribed in the charter. And occasionally, the United Nations lives up to its charter. So rather than despair of the United Nations, as a human being now and no longer as an Arab, let me say, rather than despair of the United Nations, let us work to fortify it, to make it a better instrument that is capable of making our world a better world. Our choice is either to go back to the pre-UN era of pure power politics or to go forward, slowly perhaps and precariously and with setbacks sometimes, but still to go forward to an orderly world that has rules of the game and more often than not plays according to those rules.

William L. Hudson: This is William L. Hudson. Across the microphone from me sits Dr. Fayez, I. A. Sayegh, senior consultant to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the state of Kuwait, who spoke before the weekly general meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California here at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco on the topic, the future of Arab-Israeli relations. Dr. Sayegh has also represented other of the Arab nations in the past and has been a professor at various universities, both in this country and in Lebanon. Dr. Saig, what is the basic contingency in which the future of Arab-Israeli relations must be based, in your opinion?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, of course, the basic contingency and the inescapable one is that those who have been the victims of the process of transformation which has overtaken the Middle East in the past 20 years and created the conflict, those who have been the victims of that should receive remedy for their plight. I'm referring to the people of Palestine, the two million Palestinian men and women and children, Christian and Muslim Arabs, most of whom are now exiles, having been evicted by force, some of whom are living now under military Israeli occupation, and a few of whom are living as a subordinated minority inside Israel.

William L. Hudson: In your talk to the Commonwealth Club, Dr. Sayegh, you referred to I think an ambiguity in regard to the way these people see things. Could you mention this? Well, I wouldn't call it really an ambiguity.

Fayez Sayegh: These people look at the world around them and see that these 20 years have been characterised by great progress in cherishing human rights. At the same time, they themselves have had their human rights, their basic rights to property, to living on their land, trampled over. Similarly, they have seen in the past 20 years 55 new nations. achieve freedom and exercise self-determination on their own territory, while they, the two billion Palestinians, have been denied even the opportunity to have self-determination in the meantime. This is the anomaly that they experience and against which they rebel.

William L. Hudson: Israeli and the Palestinian Arabs and others all live in the same land at peace, Doctor?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, as you probably recall, that was my formula for a real peaceful future in the Middle East. If the intruders, those who came by conquest and by force, exiled the Palestinians, If they would only permit the Palestinians to go back to their homes and re-occupy their lands, and along with them run the new society, there can be peace. Because in the past, Jews were running away from persecution elsewhere and coming to us. We coexisted with them. We were the only society, until America opened its doors, that enabled Jews to come into our midst and live as equal citizens. We can coexist with Jews again in our land. But now we are not even permitted to go back to our land.

William L. Hudson: Are you from Palestine yourself originally? Yes, sir.

Fayez Sayegh: I'm from Tiberias on the beautiful Sea of Galilee, which I can't see now.

William L. Hudson: Who's living where you used to live?

Fayez Sayegh: I'm told by some American tourists whom I asked to go and visit my house, they tell me that there is a Czechoslovak Jewish family. that lives there. And this is something I want to emphasize. I did not in my life go to Czechoslovakia. I did not steal a pin from a Czechoslovak. I did not push a single Czechoslovak out of his home. But a Czechoslovak Jewish family lives today in my house without my will, without purchasing my house from me, without paying me rent, without paying me compensation for it. And my story is a story of two million Arabs.

William L. Hudson: non-Jewish people were there in Palestine at the time of, say, the Balfour Declaration?

Fayez Sayegh: The Palestinian Arabs at the time of the Balfour Declaration constituted 93% of the population. And most of the 7% Jews were newcomers who had come as refugees from elsewhere and whom we received in our midst.

William L. Hudson: How was the exile of the Palestinian Arabs brought about?

Fayez Sayegh: I must reemphasize what I said in my speech, that it was part of the very ideology of Zionism to establish a purely Zionist state. Now, if you want to establish a purely Zionist state in a land that is already saturated with non-Zionists, you could do so only by driving them out. And as Herzl said in his memoirs in 1895, he said, when we occupy the land, we shall expropriate the property and spirit the population across the borders. Now, they tried to do so by buying us out, but the Palestinians would not sell. Only 6% of the land of Palestine was purchased in 50 years by the Zionists. Therefore, a shortcut has to be found. If you cannot buy the land of the Palestinians and you want it, then you kick them out. And this is what happened beginning in 1948. The Zionists, armed and trained by the British, would invade one Arab town after another, conquer it by force, evict the people, sometimes at gunpoint. Sometimes the people would run away in panic before even the Zionists have entered, because they saw what happened to those who didn't run next door. And after having emptied the land and occupied it by force, they would bring in Jews from outside to settle on the homes of the Palestinians in order to prevent their return.

William L. Hudson: Well, Dr. Sayegh, aren't there certain documents on which the Israeli base their claim for the land of Palestine, and what are those?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, of course, the State of Israel, in its proclamation, lists three such instruments, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, given by Great Britain, the League of Nations Mandate of 1922, and the United Nations Partition Recommendation of 1947. Now, the first two did not speak of a state. They spoke only of a national home. And they said that this shall be created provided it does not prejudice the rights of the existing Arabs. When the United Nations decided to create a Jewish state in half of Palestine, it too said that the Arabs living there shall be permitted to continue to live there and to enjoy their basic rights and fundamental human liberties. In fact, it said if Israel enacts legislation or takes measures that infringe on these rights, such measures and such legislation shall be declared here and now null and void. So after the Israelis kicked out several hundred thousand of the Palestinians, the United Nations ordered Israel to permit them to return on 11 December of 1948. And every year since then, in December, it has been reiterating that order. And yet they have not been allowed to come back.

William L. Hudson: Well, Doctor, do you think that Israel is now satisfied with the territory she has?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, if the Israelis are to be trusted in their own words, and if their record is to be an indication of their future action, the answer is no. Because they have formally announced to the peace conference as early as 1919 that the least that would satisfy them would be all of Palestine. all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, all of southern Syria up to Damascus, all of inhabited Transjordan up to the railroad and Sinai, as well as Palestine. Now, progressively, they have been taking them by the piecemeal, by the installment plan. First, they were given half of Palestine. They took three quarters. In the following year, they took another 5%. Then, in 67, they took the rest of Palestine and portions of southern Syria and Sinai. If their record and their words are to be considered a guide to the future, then surely there is still some southern Lebanon to go, there is still portions of southern Syria, and there is still Transjordan to go before Israel will be satisfied. And the peoples of these countries will still have to be evicted before a purely Jewish state can be created in those enlarged, greater Israel.

William L. Hudson: Well, now, Dr. Sveig, some people say that... The Arab should accept the fact that something has happened and go on from there. What do you think of that?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, in the first place, I think no one has a right to tell someone else whether or not he wants to accept that his property has been taken from him by force and acquiesce in that fact and capitulate to it. If any of my listeners now has had the experience of having a burglar come and burglarize his home, or a bully come and kick him out of his house, then he would know whether he would have been predisposed after that experience to say, God bless you for doing that. And then he will have a right to ask me to accept that situation. No person is likely to accept the surrender of his rights to sheer violence and force, unless perhaps those who feel they cannot do otherwise, they cannot regain their rights. Now, we don't happen to feel that we cannot regain our rights. We believe that we are, in the final analysis, more capable of outliving the intruder in our midst than he is capable of outliving us. We have 5,000 years of history. We have witnessed one conqueror after another come, and we have witnessed them all go. And now what we are witnessing is another conqueror, and we have no reason to believe he's going to be permanent. Well, now, is there any avenue to peace, Doctor? Yes. I mentioned it already, and I would say it is the only alternative to endless hostilities and prolonged confrontation in which war will continue until either Israel destroys all the Arabs, or the Arabs destroy Israel, or both destroy one another and the world with them. The only alternative to this very horrifying thought is that the rights of the Arabs of Palestine, the two million human beings, be restored to them, that they be treated as human beings. that they go back to their homes, reacquire their land, and live together with the Zionists who came and evicted them in the same Palestine. If some of them don't want to go back, they shouldn't be forced to return. If some of the Zionists want to leave Israel, they should not be forced to stay. Then there can be coexistence between the rightful owners and their guests in a new society and a new state, not a purely Jewish state as Israel claims itself to be, but a Palestinian state for Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs and non-Arab Jews altogether.

William L. Hudson: But would the Jews be any better able to buy some of this property than they were before?

Fayez Sayegh: This has to be the individual decision of the individual Palestinian. No one can tell the Palestinian, you have to sell.

William L. Hudson: Won't this kind of a thing result in strains and tensions for a long period?

Fayez Sayegh: I would give anything to be able to think of a formula that would replace the present impossible situation in Palestine without any strains and tensions. You cannot really put an end to a situation that has had 70 years of growth and 20 years of warfare behind it, put an end to it overnight without any strains. I think these strains will be minimal compared to the strains that will continue to exist if justice is not done to the Arabs of Palestine.

William L. Hudson: What about the recent Soviet penetration of that area? Does that bother the Arabs?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, it bothers most thoughtful Arabs to have any penetration into the area by any outside power, and particularly by an outside power whose system and ideology go contrary to the religious beliefs of the Arab Muslim and the Arab Christian. But when you are put in a corner and all your exits have been blocked, and there is only one exit, You have to take it. To us, as long as the West and the United States show such partisanship in favor of Israel, even today Israel is being armed after its full superiority was demonstrated last June, while arms are being withheld from most of the Arabs. As long as this contains, we must choose either to remain militarily naked while an enemy who proclaims he wants to get more of our territory exists near us, or we have to accept arms from any source. And we have chosen to accept arms from the only source available to us, namely the Soviet Union.

William L. Hudson: Well, now, getting over to the UN, do you think that in the long run, the UN will be able to help in this matter?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, the UN has constantly, over the past 20 years, judged and ruled and pronounced But of course, the importance of these judgments is in their being put into effect. Israel has been condemned 57 times by the United Nations, yet nothing has been done to call it to task, to bring it to play the rules of the game correctly. The United Nations is not lacking in the vision or in the principles. It is lacking in the ability to put into effect its decisions and judgments.

William L. Hudson: Thank you very much, Dr. Fayez A. Sayegh, senior consultant of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the state of Kuwait, who spoke before the Commonwealth Club of California here at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco on the topic, the future of Arab-Israeli relations. I might mention that the Commonwealth Club earlier this year has had two speakers who were generally favorable to the Israeli position. Next week, the Commonwealth Club speaker will be Sam Cagle, attorney, professor of law at the University of California, who mediated the San Francisco newspaper strike, is subject to labor, management, and the Civil War.

Fayez Sayegh: As I stand before you now, the whole world looks to the United States to congratulate it on the repetition of its feat in placing man on the moon, on the repetition of its technological and organizational feat in creating a flying bridge between Earth and moon. And in seeing to it that while man once again leaves his tracks on the face of the moon, he does so in the full view of the eyes of anyone in the world who wants to see. But it is only coincidental that I stand before you today in a congratulatory mood to congratulate you on an American accomplishment. For my main and principal theme is the exact opposite While America is accomplishing constructively so much, a quarter of a million miles away on the face of the moon, the United States government has been responsible for much misery and much destruction in my part of the world on this earth. And while American accomplishments in the moon are open for everyone to see, America's accomplishments in the Middle East are as a result of a variety of techniques concealed from the eyes and the minds and the consciences of most Americans. I come here to speak on an Arab critique of United States foreign policy in recent times in my part of the world, in the Arab world, in the Middle East. And there are four or five factors or elements of this policy that I should like to dwell upon if my 27 minutes permit me to cover them all. Two of them are of a general nature, and three are more specific. Two apply to American policy throughout the past quarter of a century. The remaining three apply in particular to recent American policy. First and foremost, I believe it can be said that United States policy is predicated in the Middle East on failure to recall and to significantly recognize the fact that the very initial American interventions in our area created situations of injustice and resultant situations of aggrievement which cannot be ignored in any effort to either formulate a policy towards those situations or in any effort to resolve those situations in a permanent settlement. The United States, to put it briefly, intervened in the fate of Palestine a country which since time immemorial was inhabited and owned preponderantly by Palestinian Arabs. It intervened in the fate of that country in order to set up in the greater part of that land a state for alien settlers coming from all parts of the world to dispossess and displace the settled indigenous population. Now, whatever you may think about what prompted you to take this position, whatever your government may have thought at the time justified its taking this position, there is no excuse No justification for the United States failing to realize that the victims of that arrangement, the men and women and children who were to be displaced and dispossessed, would not like what was happening to them and would nurse a grudge against what was happening to them. I say even if we ignore for the time being the rightness or wrongness of what the United States was party to in Palestine, the United States could not, in good reason, in good sense, much less in good faith, could not ignore the fact that the arrangements it contrived, the arrangements to the accomplishment of which it significantly contributed, were arrangements which created misery to untold numbers of men, women, and children, and that that misery could not be ignored as a fact of life in the situation of the Middle East, nor could it be ignored in the formulation of any policy towards that evolving situation or any attempt to resolve it. And so the United States stands convicted in our eyes And this is the first element in my bill of particulars against American policy. The United States stands convicted of, while having been instrumental in creating a situation, failing to recognize the psychological and moral grievances resulting from that situation. And therefore, the United States proceeded, as soon as that situation was created, on the assumption that the two sides had an equal starting point. that the two sides started from an equal point of departure, which is anything but the case. For as I said, whether you argue for or against the establishment of Israel, it cannot be forgotten that in creating Israel, the vast majority of the indigenous population of Palestine was dispossessed and was displaced, and was denied return to its land, and was denied access to its property, and was denied the opportunity to exercise the God-given right to self-determination on its own soil. And that cannot be forgotten. The second general element in my Arab critique of US foreign policy, and as I say, it applies to the policy over the past quarter century, is a certain short-sightedness, if you forgive the term. And may I here interject and say that I ask for your forgiveness in advance for my candor and bluntness. But I am a sort of a veteran in speaking before the Commonwealth Club of California. This is my fourth appearance before you. And if I have judged my past acquaintances with you correctly, I have reached the conclusion that you do not want a speaker to come here and give you platitudes and tell you what you like to hear. You expect the speaker to come and speak straight from the shoulders and tell you exactly what he is convinced about. And this is what I'm telling you. I say it is a certain shortsightedness on the part of the US government in evaluating the consequences of its policies in the area. I speak specifically about the advent of the Soviet Union into the Middle East. The Soviet Union had had no inroads into the Middle East before the evolution of American foreign policy to the point where the United States began to constantly take the side of the new state of Israel, which America had helped create at the expense of the people of Palestine, against the position of the Arab states and the people of Palestine. And while both sides were seeking an equal access to American assistance, whether in terms of economic aid or in terms of military aid, the United States, once it created Israel, adopted the one-sided policy of furnishing Israel lavishly with economic aid and with military aid and withholding the same thing from the Arab states. And I'm speaking now of the late 40s and the early 50s. And when after some seven years of waiting patiently for this situation to be corrected, the Arabs gave up hope that it would be. And one Arab state accepted the proffered hand of the Soviet Union, accepted arms offered it for sale by Czechoslovakia, the wrath and fury of the United States descended upon its head, and reprisals were fast coming. The United States had chosen to corner the Arab states in a corner, to block all exits except one. And when the Arabs took that exit, the United States chose to punish them for having done the only thing left for them to do except to reconcile themselves to total inferiority, permanent inferiority to their enemy. The United States chose to permit the Soviet Union to enter into the Middle East. And the United States subsequently chose to reprimand and punish the Arabs for having allowed the Soviet Union to enter into the Middle East. This is the shortsightedness I've been speaking about. And as a result of this, we have now reached the point where almost any mention of the Arab-Israeli conflict becomes inextricably intertwined in the vicissitudes of the US-USSR conflict. Whereas the two conflicts are intrinsically, historically, and in terms of their internal realities, unrelated. There are many American statesmen who appear when they deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict to be forgetting that it is an autonomous conflict with its own rules and its own logic and its own ingredients. and they only deal with it as an auxiliary to as a manifestation of as an extension of the us ussr conflict this is what i say the united states has continuously erred in it created the situation for the involvement of the soviet union in the area and it blames the arabs for having when they had no other choice excepted the Soviet assistance that the United States constantly withheld from them. These are the two general and constant elements in US policy in the Middle East. But then there are three particular elements pertaining to the recent evolution of that policy. The first and most important, in my opinion, of these is the fact that the United States had formally and solemnly pledged itself as soon as the Arab-Israeli hostilities of 1948 came to an end in 1949, it pledged itself solemnly and formally to freeze the territorial aspect of those hostilities and prevent any change of the demarcation lines delineated in the armistice agreements between the two parties by force. And therefore, in 1950, on the 25th of May of 1950 to be exact, the United States government announced that along with the government of the United Kingdom and the government of France, the three Western powers would guarantee the territorial extent of Israel and of the Arab states against any change by the use of force by either party. This has been known as the Tripartite Declaration of 25th of May of 1950. One American administration after another one American president after another, one American secretary of state after another, constantly repeated that this is the cornerstone of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, that now Israel exists, the Arab states exist. The United States, along with its two Western allies, intend to see to it that neither will the Arab states destroy Israel, nor will Israel destroy the Arab states. that neither will the United States permit the Arab states to encroach on territory currently occupied by Israel, nor will the three Western powers permit Israel to encroach upon and occupy territory occupied by the Arab states. I counted up until October of 1956, 18 such solemn pronouncements by American presidents and secretary of state. And then I believed that they meant it, and I stopped counting. Had I continued counting, I suppose there would be now in my files probably 36 reiterations of this policy and this pledge by the United States government. Some of these statements might interest you. And while I will not read to you all the texts of all the statements, I would like to read to you one or two of them. there was a statement made by Mr. Dulles, Secretary of State under the Eisenhower administration. In his first report to the nation on the 1st of June, 1953, he said, today the Arab peoples are afraid that the United States will back the new state of Israel in aggressive expansion In an effort to calm these fears, the United States joined with France and Britain in the declaration of May 25, 1950. That declaration, when it was made, did not serve to reassure the Arabs. It must be made clear that the present U.S. administration stands fully behind that declaration. There was recognition that the Arabs did not believe this was a two-way street. that the Arabs believe America would, in fact, stop them from occupying part of Israel's territory. But America would not, in fact, stop Israel from occupying Arab territory. And therefore, the statement was made, this is a double edged sword. This is a pledge that works against every aggressor and every expansion from any side. This was even more emphatically made a little bit later. by the Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Henry Byroad, who spoke in Philadelphia on the 1st of May, 1954, in a statement that was publicized as having been read and approved by the President and the Secretary of State. He said as follows, and I quote, I believe the Arab world today believes that the United States would not allow an attack by them upon Israel with the purpose of driving her into the sea. I also believe, however, that in general, the Arab people are not convinced that the opposite is true and that they question our ability to fulfill our obligations in opposing aggression under the tripartite declaration of 1950 if Israel herself should decide upon expansive aggression. They wonder at our ability to follow through. They wonder if the domestic political aspects of such a problem in the United States might not make it impossible for us to live up to our stated intentions. I know the Arabs are wrong in this interpretation of the American people. America would back no state. including Israel, in a matter of expansive aggression. Its opposition would be equally strong regardless of which side started such a move. End of quote. How often have I wondered since the 5th of June of 1967 what the color of Mr. Bayreuth's face was. How often have I wished to be a fly on the wall wherever he might be to see the change in the color of his face. This assurance, this pledge, this commitment formally and solemnly made by the United States government was repeated again and again by President Kennedy and by President Johnson until the 3rd of June when Mr. Johnson repeated it in New York. And on the morning of the 5th of June, believe it or not, Mr. Rusk repeated it once again. Because until then, the expectation was that it would be the Arabs who would attack, it would be the Arabs who would occupy a part of Israel's territory. But the moment it was Israel that attacked, the moment it was Israel that occupied part of Arab territory, these assurances were forgotten as though they had never existed. I have read every single statement made by President Johnson and President Nixon since the 5th of June of 1967, and by Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of State Rogers. Not one of them has ever made a reference since the 5th of June of 1967 to the tripartite declaration and to the United States commitment under it. You speak of a credibility gap. Think of the credibility gap between the American administration and the Arab peoples as a result of such a phenomenon. But silence has been only the least evil of America's policy since the 5th of June. It was not only that America forgot about its commitments and its pledges. It was also that the United States government steadily followed a policy which defeated the purposes of this declaration. At the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly From the 5th of June, 67 on, the United States opposed any resolution which called for withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories, unless such resolution also called upon the Arabs to do something in return. The pledge was for unconditional withdrawal by any occupier. America's policy has been for conditional withdrawal as part of a bargain. American policy had been the aggressor should not reap any benefits, whether military, territorial, or political, as a result of the use of force. American policy since June 67 has been that Israel must reap political and juridical advantages in return for withdrawing from the territory it occupied. And then, not only was occupation made conditional, contrary to international law, contrary to American pledges, but it was subsequently made incomplete. President Nixon, speaking before the General Assembly of the United Nations on the 16th of September of 1969, permitted he countenanced certain non-withdrawal by the Israeli occupation forces, although he called it insubstantial non-withdrawal. He never bothered to define what is substantial and what is not substantial. And now, therefore, American policy stands neither for unconditional withdrawal nor for complete withdrawal, while the pledges were for both. Moreover, the United States government has added to these retreats from the solemn and formal pledges made over 18 years to both Arabs and Israelis. Additionally, the United States government has been enabling Israel to perpetuate its occupation by giving Israel all the economic aid and all the military aid she needs in order to stay on in the occupied territories with impunity and with immunity. political assistance, economic assistance, and military assistance in order to safeguard Israel's continued occupation of Arab territories. Need I remind you of the half a billion dollars promised to Golda Meir only last fall? Need I remind you of the hundreds of phantoms and skyhawk jets? given Israel to permit Israel to stay on in the occupied territories. Need I remind you of the diplomatic assistance given at the United Nations to permit Israel to do the same thing? The fourth element of my bill of particulars against the United States pertains to the people of Palestine. The United States seems to have forgotten that the conflict between Israel and the Arab states is only the result of Israel's prior encroachment upon the rights and mode of life of the people of Palestine. The United States government stood virtually alone, only with A few other countries who take their lead from Washington on the 8th of December of last year, when the United Nations General Assembly made its momentous decision, recognizing the right of the people of Palestine to self-determination and recognizing that unless this right is respected, there can be no progress towards a just and durable peace in the Middle East. The United States delegation not only voted against this resolution, it openly cajoled and urged and otherwise influenced any dependent delegation to vote against it as well. And nevertheless, the resolution was passed by more than a 70% majority of the members present and voting. When cornered, American statesmen tell us, we cannot give a people rights to self-determination if those rights appear to infringe upon the rights of a state. But what has the world been doing over the past 25 years? It has been recognizing the right of 70 peoples to self-determination at the expense of imperial powers and states that were denying them those rights and with the United States blessing. Has this not been what has been happening throughout Asia and Africa in the course of the past quarter century, when 70 peoples until recently deprived of the right to self-determination were granted the opportunity to enjoy that right at the expense of some state that had been encroaching upon those people's rights to self-determination? We argue thus with the US statesmen, and their report is states have primacy over peoples. I beg to remind you that were this principle to be true, there would be no United States of America today. The United States of America represents a revolution in the process of human history under which it was proclaimed that individuals and peoples have primacy over states and not the other way around. And then when further cornered, US statesmen tell us, where are the Palestinians with whom we should speak? There are no Palestinians ready to accept our point of view. Ambassador Yost said that to me in a public statement at the General Assembly of the United Nations last December in reply to my statement replying to his earlier statement. He said, who are the Palestinians? We search far and wide and find no Palestinians who are ready to agree with us in order to talk with them. And I asked him, and I repeat my question here today, I said, Ambassador Yost, if the only dialogue you can maintain with Palestinians has to be conditioned by your finding Palestinians who agree with you, are you then intending to speak to Palestinians or are you intending to speak to America? Will it be the United States negotiating with Palestinians or will it be the United States negotiating with the United States when you insist that the only Palestinians you will talk to are the Palestinians who accept your terms of reference and your point of view to begin with? The whole world now recognizes the Palestinian people as a factor in this tragedy, the Palestinian people as the primary victim of this tragedy, the Palestinian people, therefore, as a people whose satisfaction is conditional for the creation of a just and lasting peace, except for Israel, the United States, and those countries that take their cue from them. The World Council of Churches, in its Nicosia statement, the Organization of Islamic Organizations in its Bandung Statement, the World Youth Assembly in its New York Statement, the Christian Conference for Palestine in its Beirut Statement, the General Assembly in its resolution of 8 December of 1970 have all recognized what the United States alone adamantly continues to refuse to recognize. Finally, gentlemen, the last element of my bill of particulars is the following one. When cornered and cornered and cornered, US policymakers say, we really have no power to make Israel withdraw. We have no power. to make Israel withdraw or to impose upon Israel a settlement that involves withdrawal. I speak now more in sadness than in anger. As an Arab who has spent more than half his life in the United States, who has done his undergraduate work in the largest American university overseas, and his graduate work in an American university in Washington, DC, who has taught American youth on the campuses of five American universities, and who has also encroached upon the American people by selecting a fair American lady for his wife. As an Arab who has this experience in America and with America, I feel I have the right and the duty to say that this position I have just paraphrased reflects a lowering of American vision. For on the one hand, America appears to believe that it can coerce any enemy. whatever the rightness or wrongness of its position, by the use of sheer force to make the enemy accept its settlement. But America cannot use its persuasion, cannot use its vast aid to make a dependent client obey its obligations under international law and accommodate America's own commitments. This, gentlemen, this greater faith in America's military power than in America's moral and persuasive power, this show of greater interest in how to discipline an enemy than in how to make a dependent friend conduct himself and behave himself according to the law. This is the saddest manifestation of American policy in the Middle East, for it reflects a lowering of America's view of its own power. Thank you very much.

William L. Hudson: Question and answer period will be conducted by the club president, Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: An important part of the weekly luncheon of the Commonwealth Club of California held here in the Sheraton Palace Hotel is the stimulating and challenging question and answer period. Now, if the honorable Sayegh would kindly return to the rostrum, we have some very stimulating questions this afternoon. The first one is, isn't Abraham of old the common forefather of both Jew and Arab? If so, and the answer is yes, how could we dispossess Arabs by supporting repossession of Israel? Dr.

Fayez Sayegh: This is a question from a friend, I'm sure. And I'm glad to know that I have friends here. But I suppose this is a question that I should address to Americans rather than they to me, because this is my perplexity. How does the United States permit the displacement of one by another? if they are cousins, but even if they weren't cousins, how does America permit the displacement of one by another? This is my perplexity that I would come to Americans to ask them to explain to me rather than expect Americans to ask me to explain to them. It is one of those manifestations of America's mistakes that constitute my bill of particulars. And I am always open to enlightenment on the motives of America in being party to such a situation.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: Why pick on the United States when Israel's formation was a United Nations mandate?

Fayez Sayegh: It is always easy to shirk responsibility. It is always easy to say I wasn't alone in making the mistake. The whole class threw stones at the teacher, why pick on me? The fact of the matter though is the following. The General Assembly of the United Nations in the first two straw votes taken on the 26th of November of 1947 did not give the partition recommendation the two-thirds majority. That would have been required for the passage of the recommendation. And then there was a request that the assembly adjourn for the Thanksgiving festivities. And while Americans were thanking God for their blessings and enjoying their turkey, their government was busily putting pressure upon six key votes, the votes of countries like the Philippines, which was, at that time, awaiting a Senate resolution granting it some loans. Countries like Greece, which I, as you remember at that time, was imperiled by the encroachment of communist enemies from different sides of her border. Countries like Liberia, whose dependence on the United States does not need any elaboration, and other such countries, to change their vote when the final vote is cast. And when the morning of the 29th of November came, lo and behold, the two-thirds majority was easily obtainable thanks to these pressures. These pressures have been described by someone who knew them much better than I do. the late Secretary Forrestal, a member of the Truman cabinet at the time, who in his diaries has described the pressures put by the United States government upon these smaller dependent countries to change their vote as, and I quote, bordering onto scandal, unquote. The United States responsibility for the adoption of this recommendation by the General Assembly is unmistakable. Had it not been for the pressures of the United States, there would have been no recommendation from the General Assembly.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: The next questioner asks, how many Arabs were forced out of Palestine? Were any of them paid for the homes they abandoned?

Fayez Sayegh: According to the latest report of the Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who is an American, by the way, Dr. Mitchell Moore, submitted to the General Assembly last September as he annually submits such reports, the statistics were as follows. The total number of Palestinians made refugees as a result of the 1948 war is today a million and a half in round figures, and there are some 500,000 additional ones made refugees or made for the second time refugees as a result of the 1967 war. These are the figures of the United Nations Agency, which is headed by an American. Of course, not all these refugees live on international aid. Only some 800,000 of them are on the relief rolls of UNRWA, the agency I mentioned. The remainder are making their living as a result of their breadwinners having jobs in one Arab state or another and supporting their families. And once a refugee holds a job, his name and the names of his dependents are struck off the relief lists. But they remain on the roster of names. And now in the country of Kuwait, for example, which I represent at the United Nations, There are about 100,000 Palestinians in a total population of half a million. And each of these Palestinians earns a living and supports a wife, in most cases, and probably two or three children. And their names are automatically struck off the list of the relief roles of UNRWA. But the total numbers are a million and a half of refugees from the first hostilities and half a million, some of whom overlap with the first million and a half as a result of the 67 hostilities.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: What is your response to the charge that Arab nations have made no effort to resettle Palestinian refugees, preferring instead to have them in misery for propaganda purposes?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, my reply to this charge, this ill-informed charge, is the following. In the first place, it is not the right of any Arab state to decide for Palestinians what should be done to them. According to the United Nations General Assembly, in a resolution passed on the 11th of December 1948 and almost unanimously passed every year since then, in most cases unanimously except for the vote of Israel. it is the right of these refugees to go back to their homes if they so choose. And if they choose not to return, it is their right to be compensated for their property. So far, there has been no compensation. So far, there has been very, very limited repatriation, limited to the first three years in which if the wife and children had stayed in Israel and the husband was outside, the husband was allowed to join his family, or vice versa, the wife would be allowed to join her husband and children. about 10,000 to 20,000 were returned that way. Therefore, so far, only some 10,000 to 20,000 were allowed to return and none has been compensated. Now, these refugees say, we will not accept forced resettlement anywhere else. We want to go back to our own homes. And if the Arab states were to resettle them, the Arab states would be doubling their tragedy by forcing upon them for the second time a fate they choose not to undergo. And the Arab states do not want to be a party to forcing upon their fellow Palestinians for the second time the fate of compulsion.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: All of your statements are based on assumption that Israel was the aggressor. What evidence do you have that it started the war?

Fayez Sayegh: Apparently, the questioner has not been reading the Israeli statements since the 7th of June. There were only two days in which Israel tried to equivocate and say we did not attack first. But from the 7th of June 1967 on, there has been no effort by Israel to deny that its Air Force attacked the Arab Air Force on the early morning hours of the 5th of June. There has been no effort whatsoever by Israel herself to deny that fact. On the contrary, there have been attempts to excuse that fact, to justify it. They say, by Nasser's closing the Tehran Strait, He so threatened to strangle our economy that we had the right in defense of ourselves to attack. They do not deny that they attacked. They only introduce the element of justification for the attack. So now the question is, why do I base my statements upon a premise which even Israel does not care to deny? I find that really a question that I don't understand.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: Has Nasser's death had any effect on the prospects of a peaceful settlement?

Fayez Sayegh: While Nasser lived, all enemies of the Arabs focused all their hate upon him and said he was the obstacle to peace. Before he was even buried, they began to worry about peace as a result of his death. This is one ironic commentary on the kind of comments one reads in the Western press about the Arab-Israeli conflict. President Nasser had certain attributes which made him for some time about the only existing Arab leader who might envisage and countenance certain concessions towards a final settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. His death would undoubtedly for some time deprive the Arab world of a leader with his caliber and his popularity who can afford to do some of the things he could afford to do. And to that extent, there may be some influence on the course of events. But I would say most emphatically that even Nasser himself and certainly any of his successors, would not have dared and will not dare to come to a peaceful settlement with Israel if it does not entail two important elements. The first is withdrawal from occupied territories, which is an absolute duty upon Israel under international law and an absolute right of the Arabs to demand. And the second, a just, fair settlement of the problem of the people of Palestine in accordance with existing resolutions of the United Nations. Without either or both of these ingredients, there can be no progress towards peace, no matter how many times the ceasefire is extended, no matter what any leader says. And the key to these two elements is not in the hands of any Arab leader. The key to these two elements is in the hands only of Israel and of the United States. Only Israel, can decide to withdraw. And only the United States can make it withdraw. Only Israel can decide to permit the Palestinians to return to their homes. And only the United States can persuade it so to do. It is not in the hands of Arab leaders. And therefore, the death of Nasser is relatively unimportant in terms of the prospects of a just and real peace in the Middle East.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: Mr. Sayegh, we have a number of questions on the oil situation. I've taken this one as representative. Do you anticipate an early settlement of the oil tax dispute in the Mideast? Is this a significant element in the Mideast conflict?

Fayez Sayegh: Well, of course, this is the recent crisis between the OPEC countries and the 22 oil companies is wider than the Middle East. After all, you have one country in your own backyard, Venezuela. You have Indonesia. You have a non-Arab country, Iran, involved in the difficulty of the recent weeks. But it remains true that the 7 out of the 10 OPEC members are Arab members, and I'm certain that the deterioration in political relations between the United States and the Arab world as a result of America's policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict is behind the deterioration of the economic relations between the Western oil companies and the mainly Middle Eastern oil exporting, oil producing countries. There is no doubt whatsoever, it seems to me, that the political deterioration is at the back of the recent economic deterioration. Oil companies, particularly in the West, appear to labor under the illusion. Economics can be permanently insulated against the political context. Now, oil happens to be a commodity which is essentially international. Oil is an international commodity in this sense. Countries that produce it are other than the countries whose companies extract it and are largely other than the countries which consume it. Therefore, by definition, the oil industry has an integral relationship with international relations. There can be no insulation of the course of economic relations between companies and or consumer countries on the one hand and the producer countries on the other. And yet the oil companies have buried their head in the sand all these years and acted as though they could completely isolate their future in the Arab world from the outcome of American-Arab relations rapidly deteriorating as a result of America's wholehearted, blind support of Israel in this conflict.

Dr. Edmund Patrick Gaynor: The Honorable Fayez Sayegh, we have time but for one more question, and when you have answered this, the meeting will stand adjourned. Before asking it, however, I wish to thank you on behalf of more than 14,000 members of the Commonwealth Club of California for your very interesting discussion here this afternoon. The question is as follows. Why do the Palestinian guerrillas want to overthrow the King of Jordan?

Fayez Sayegh: I always like to tell my Arab friends, particularly my associates in the Arab League offices, that it is not my best performance of my functions to carry over to the United States intra-Arab quarrels. But while I don't intend to take the initiative in doing so, I certainly am not a person to duck a question about this. Now, the question, it seems to me, already entails or implies an accusation that the guerrillas want to overthrow Hussein. My knowledge of the leaders of the Palestinian resistance movement leads me to say without hesitation that if Hussein were to offer his throne to them tomorrow, they would turn it down. They don't want to become governments They don't want to become embroiled in the problems of highways and sewage systems and municipal taxes and all the other difficulties that a government, a civil administration will have to attend to and divert their attention from their main purpose, which is to resist the occupier of their land and to emancipate their occupied countries. It would be diverting their attention from their mission and their purpose to make them a government elsewhere. Now, of course, on the other hand, they do insist on certain prerequisites. In order to be able to resist in the occupied territories, they have to have their bases outside the occupied territories intact. They have to have freedom of movement. They would not tolerate restrictions upon their movement. Now, here is the Greek tragedy situation. On the one hand, the King of Jordan, as a king representing the sovereign authority, feels that he cannot share his power with any autonomous group within his kingdom. especially if that autonomous group by its actions invites sometimes ruthless retaliatory raids by Israel on his land. On the other hand, here is a revolutionary movement that has but one purpose, to liberate its occupied land and can countenance and tolerate no restriction on its freedom of operation. Between these two positions, there is a built-in situation of confrontation, which regrettably, and regrettably perhaps to me more than to any other person, both as a Palestinian and as a spokesman for both the King of Jordan and the liberation movement of Palestine. At the same time, regrettably, we have here a built-in situation of confrontation and explosion, which has erupted in June, which erupted again in September, which erupted last month, and which may very well erupt again and again in the future. It is one of those unfortunate situations that owes its origins to the occupation of the occupied territories by Israel. I can assure the questioner that if he is very keen on safeguarding the throne of King Hussein, there can be no safer way to do it than to press his congressmen and the State Department and the White House to press Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.