From Reflections on Things Past

By Peter Lord Carrington

Beirut, 1981

The [British] ambassador's brother-in-law entertained us—a very rich and very charming man who happened to be a Palestinian. His family had lived in Jaffa since the second century AD: they had introduced the oranges! Now, over 1,700 years of continuity had been broken and he was a (very wealthy) exile. He spoke without bitterness, but he made gently clear that in his view the Palestinians had a grievance; and he didn't need to emphasize that, unlike him, for most of them the grievance was compounded by material loss and actual suffering.

On the same visit I met a number of university professors, also Palestinians. Moderate, civilized men, who would not have been out of place in any Oxford senior common room, and they felt very strongly on this matter of Palestine. And to exacerbate the original fact of Israel and the fact of exile and expropriation, there was now the forcible incorporation into Israel of the West Bank of Jordan, in the aftermath of war. I appreciated very vividly that the Palestinians—historically among the best educated and most intelligent of the Arab peoples—did not lack skillful and persuasive advocates for their cause among the Arab nations; most of whom, of course, also harboured large numbers of Palestinian refugees.

On meeting Arafat in Damascus, 1981

I formed and retained the view that the Palestinians had not only a case but a strong case; and that there was something in the often-expressed Arab view that the Christian and European peoples expiated their guilt for centuries of sporadic anti-Semitism, culminating in an enormous and horrendous crime, by creating Israel—at the expense of Arab peoples, themselves Semitic, who had never evinced anti-Semitism in any form.

I told the House of Lords in my first year as Foreign Secretary [1979] that there could be no Middle East peace until Israel recognized the rights of Palestinians and until the Palestinians including the PLO-recognized the state of Israel. . . The fact that most of our [Foreign] Service could understand the Arab viewpoint, could sympathize with Palestinian grievances and could regret the more intemperate Israeli actions from time to time did not prove bias. It demonstrated objectivity, and it was wholly consistent with British interests, which, above all, demand harmony not discord in the Middle East.

The major factor is the Middle East is always the attitude of the United States. That does not mean that America is always right, or should be invariably placated, but no initiative can proceed far without American involvement. The Carter administration—and, indeed, their Republican opponents—disliked the Venice Declaration. They disliked our reference to the necessity for the association of the Palestinians with any negotiation. The Jewish lobby in America is powerful and many of them dearly thought the Europeans were minded to betray Israel and sell out to terrorism. They were wrong—and something not dissimilar to the Venice Declaration was adopted by the Reagan administration a few years later.

I believed American perceptions were faulty in this matter. They tended to underestimate the difficulties which "moderate" Arab states and their rulers had in remaining "moderate," whether on Israel or anything else. Americans were apt to take the view that these people depended on the United States, couldn't do without them, didn't need much humoring. I, on the other hand, reckoned that these same "moderates" needed to show their peoples that moderation paid: paid possibly in material terms, but paid very definitely in terms of results in the great struggle for an equitable settlement with Israel over Palestine. If moderate rulers were unable to show some sort of progress in the international sphere from time to time they would ultimately be succeeded by a more extreme and demagogic sort of style, whether fundamentalist Islamic or whatever. It wasn't in our interests that that should happen. It wasn't in America's interests that that should happen.