Arabs (74 page)

The other two PFLP operatives succeeded in boarding the El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York. In command was Leila Khaled, the hijacker of TWA 840. Having suffered a string of attacks since 1968, El Al had intensified its security measures: cockpit doors had been reinforced, and air marshals were now posted on all flights. Shortly after takeoff, Leila and her comrade attempted to seize control of the aircraft. They met with determined resistance from the Israeli air marshals and crew. Some fourteen shots were fired, leaving an Israeli steward critically wounded and hijacker Patrick Arguello dead (Leila Khaled claimed he was summarily executed on the plane). Khaled was overpowered and disarmed. The pilot made an emergency landing in London to evacuate the wounded steward. The British authorities took the dying Arguello off the plane and arrested Leila Khaled. The Popular Front was quick to respond, hijacking a British BOAC airliner in Bahrain on September 9, where it joined the Swissair and TWA aircraft in Jordan’s “Revolution Airport.”

The multiple hijackings, combined with the destruction of the Pan Am aircraft in Cairo, captivated the international media. In terms of air piracy, the events of September 1970 would not be surpassed until September 2001. With three aircraft in Jordan still under its control, the PFLP began to make its demands: the release of Leila Khaled, three guerrillas held in West Germany, three other guerrillas held in Switzerland, and an unspecified number of Palestinians held by Israel. If its demands were not met within three days, all hijacked aircraft—which held a total 310 passengers
and crew—would be destroyed. In fact, the Popular Front was still loath to alienate international public opinion by killing hostages, and it began to release women and children. Accounts of the hostages’ experiences dominated the front pages of the world’s press. On September 12, the remaining passengers were taken from the aircraft by armed PFLP guards and held hostage in a hotel commandeered by the Popular Front in central Amman. Charges were laid in the empty aircraft, which were destroyed in a series of spectacular explosions, captured by the television cameras of the world press.

A bigger explosion would follow five days later, when the Jordanian army declared war on the Palestinian revolution. For King Hussein and his army, the Palestinian factions had outstayed their welcome. The euphoria of Karamah had given way to Black September (as the war to drive the Palestinian revolution from Jordanian soil came to be called). The Popular Front had made no attempt to hide its wish to overthrow the monarchy and turn Jordan into the launching pad for the liberation of Palestine, and its decision to stage its hijacking outrage on Jordanian soil was the final straw. Fatah denounced the actions of the Popular Front, but the Jordanians no longer drew distinctions between Palestinian factions. There was not room for both the Palestinian revolution and the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.

Both King Hussein and his army were outraged by the PFLP’s audacity in seizing Jordanian territory for its terror operations. When segments of Jordan’s army attempted to intervene in the hijackings at Dawson’s Field, the Palestinian guerrillas countered with threats to the hostages. The Jordanian soldiers withdrew and held their fire, waiting for the hostage crisis to be resolved before taking action. This inaction in the face of Palestinian threats seemed to strip the Jordanian soldiers of their sense of manhood, taking them to the verge of mutiny against their monarch. One anecdote that gained wide circulation at the time was that when King Hussein reviewed his armored units, they flew women’s lingerie from their antennae in protest. “It’s we who are the women now,” a tank commander told his monarch.
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On September 17, Hussein ordered his army into action. Black September was all-out war. For ten days Palestinian guerrillas fought the Jordanian army in a conflict that threatened to broaden into a regional conflagration. As head of a conservative monarchy in a divided Middle East, Hussein came under threat by his “progressive” Arab neighbors who wished to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians. Hussein faced a serious threat from Iraqi troops that had been posted to Jordan since the Six Day War, and an actual invasion of his northern provinces by Syrian tanks flying the colors of the Palestine Liberation Army.

With his army overstretched by what was now a two-front war—against the Palestinians and the invading Syrians—Hussein invoked his friendship with the United States and Britain and even sought Israeli assistance to protect Jordanian airspace
from outside attack. Western intervention, however, risked provoking a Soviet response in defense of its own regional allies. Nasser called on the other Arab states to broker a resolution to the conflict before it spiraled out of control.

It took Nasser’s authority to bring Arafat and Hussein together in Cairo on September 28 to resolve their differences. In a deal negotiated by the Arab heads of state, the Jordanians and Palestinians agreed to a total cease-fire. The remaining Western hostages from the hijack drama were released from the hotel and the different holding rooms to which they had been taken by the PFLP. The British authorities released Leila Khaled and a number of Palestinian guerrillas in a covert operation. But the damage done could not be repaired—even by Gamal Abdul Nasser. An estimated 3,000 Palestinian fighters and civilians had been killed in the Black September war; the Jordanians had also suffered hundreds of casualties. The city of Amman had been shattered by the ten days of fighting, and the Palestinian camps in the city had been reduced to ruins.

 

The days of intense negotiation had taken their toll on the Egyptian president. After seeing off Hussein and Arafat on September 28, 1970, Nasser returned home, where he suffered a massive heart attack and died at 5:00 P.M. that very evening.

Cairo Radio interrupted its regular programs to broadcast a solemn recital of verses from the Qur’an. After a suitable delay, Vice President Anwar Sadat announced the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. “The effect was both instantaneous and fantastic,” Mohamed Heikal recalled.

The grief over-spilled Egypt’s borders to spread across the Arab world. Mass demonstrations filled the major cities of the Arab world. Nasser, more than any other leader before or since, embodied the hopes and aspirations of Arab nationalists
across the Middle East. Yet Arab nationalism had already died before Nasser. Syrian secession from the United Arab Republic, the inter-Arab war in the Yemen, and the massive defeat of 1967 and the loss of all of Palestine had dealt Pan-Arab aspirations successive blows from which it would not recover. The events of Black September cast the deep divisions between Arab states in sharp relief. Only Nasser seemed to transcend the fault lines growing between the Arab states, increasingly divided along Cold War lines into allies of the United States and partisans of the Soviet Union.

By 1970 the Arab world was firmly divided into distinct states with their own interests to uphold. There would be further high-profile unity schemes between Arab states after 1970, but none ever challenged the integrity of the states involved, and none endured. The unity schemes of the 1970s and 1980s were public relations exercises designed to confer legitimacy on Arab governments that knew that Arab nationalism still held a strong appeal to their citizens. Governments continued to pay lip service to common Arab themes of fighting the Zionist enemy and liberating the Palestinian homeland. But they were all looking out for their own interests. And a new force was taking hold of the Middle East, as the region’s oil resources began to generate tremendous wealth and give the Arabs influence over the world economy.

CHAPTER 12

T
he Arab world was shaped by the power of oil in the eventful years of the 1970s. Nature spread oil unevenly among the Arab states. With the exception of Iraq, where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers have supported large agrarian populations for millennia, the greatest oil reserves are to be found in the least densely populated Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Persian Gulf states, Libya, and Algeria in North Africa. Token discoveries have been made in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, though not enough to meet local demand.

Oil was first discovered in the Arab world in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For four decades, Western oil companies enjoyed unfettered control over the production and marketing of Arab hydrocarbons. Rulers in oil-producing states grew wealthy and in the 1950s and 1960s initiated development schemes to bring the benefits of oil wealth to their impoverished populations.

It was only in the 1970s, however, that a convergence of factors turned oil into a source of power for the Arab world. Growing global dependence on petroleum, the decline of American oil production, and the political crises that jeopardized the export of oil from the Middle East to the industrial world combined to generate unprecedented oil prices in the 1970s. Increasingly over the course of that decade, the Arab states took control of their oil, and the power that came with it, from the Western oil companies.

Oil more than any other commodity has come to define Arab wealth and power in the modern age. Yet oil represents an illusive sort of power. The great wealth that oil confers also makes a state more vulnerable to outside threats. The wealth of oil can be used for development, or, through arms races and regional conflicts, for destruction. Ultimately, oil conferred little security on the Arab states to enjoy its mixed blessing, and even less on the region as a whole, during the tumultuous 1970s.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when oil exploration in the Middle East began in earnest, relations between oil companies and oil-producing states had been governed by concessions—licenses issued by governments to companies to explore for and exploit petroleum resources in return for a fee. Commercial quantities of oil were discovered in Iran (1908) and Iraq (1927); beginning in 1931, Western oil men turned to the Arab shores of the Persian Gulf. Initially, cash-strapped local rulers sold rights to British and American firms that assumed the full risk and expense of prospecting for oil.

The risks were very real for the oil pioneers in the Persian Gulf. Some companies drilled for years without so much as an oily rag to show for their efforts. Yet, increasingly in the 1930s the oil men struck it big in Arabia. Standard Oil of California discovered oil in Bahrain in 1932. CalTex found major reserves in Kuwait in 1938, and Standard Oil of California had its first strike after six years of disappointment in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, also in 1938.

When they did strike oil, the companies paid royalties to the host nation and kept the rest of the profit for themselves. Arab rulers had no complaints, for oil money came without any toil on their part. Revenues from petroleum soon exceeded all other sources of national income in the Gulf states, while the oil companies themselves bore the enormous costs of transporting and refining Arabian oil for global markets. Extracting oil from the Arabian Peninsula was a massively expensive undertaking, particularly in the early years: pipelines had to be laid and fleets of tankers had to be commissioned to carry the oil, while new refineries had to be built to convert Arabian crude to marketable products. It seemed perfectly fair to the oil companies that they should enjoy full control over the production (how much oil to extract) and marketing (setting the price in an increasingly competitive market) of a resource that they and they alone had extracted at great risk, expense, and effort.

By 1950, however, the oil-producing states had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the terms of the original concessions. Now that the infrastructure for extraction, transport, and refining was in place, the oil companies reaped tremendous profits from their investment. Aramco, the consortium of four American firms (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco) that enjoyed exclusive rights to Saudi oil, reaped three times the profits enjoyed by the Saudi government in 1949. Worse yet, the taxes Aramco paid to the federal government exceeded the Saudi take by some $4 million—meaning the U.S. government made more off Saudi oil than did the Saudis themselves.
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The Arab Gulf states demanded a greater share of those profits. After all, it was
their
oil and the main source of wealth for their growing economies. The oil men had recouped their original outlay and had been handsomely rewarded. Arab leaders now felt it was time the producing states got their fair share of the profits—both for
their increasingly ambitious development plans and to provide for the future in anticipation of the day when oil would run out. There was precedent for their demands: in South America, Venezuela had managed to secure a 50:50 division of oil returns with its concession holders in 1943. The Arab states were determined to achieve the same division of oil revenues. The Saudis negotiated a 50:50 deal with the Aramco consortium in December 1950, and the other Arab oil states were quick to follow suit. There was a tidiness about this division of royalties, suggesting an equal partnership that both sides were willing to accept. But the oil companies resisted any effort to break the 50-50 split for fear that the producing nations would gain the upper hand over them.