THE AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN THE DRAFTING OF SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 242 (1967)

By Arnon Gutfeld & Boaz Vanetik*

In this article, we wish to examine the formulation of U.N. Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967 KHUHDIWHU³5HVROXWLRQ´ , through an analysis of the interests, challenges and constraints that influenced the senior officials and policy makers in the months that followed the Six Day War. Their aim was to outline a plan that would start a diplomatic process leading to peace in the Middle East. The outbreak of the Six Day War in June 1967 and its results forced President Lyndon Johnson's administration and especially the US Department of State, headed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to devote concentrated efforts in order to attempt to promote a process of diplomatic negotiations that hopefully would result in a peace process.1 Indeed, the war and its outcome led to an intensive and continuous American effort to resolve the Arab- Israeli conflict.

The outcome of the war presented to Washington the necessary tools to act as a senior mediator in the attempts to initiate a peace process despite the fact that numerous Arab states severed relations with the U.S. during the war, and still the USSR's stature in the Middle East experienced much more severe blows.2 ¶s crushing total victory against , Jordan and constituted a devastating blow to the prestige of Soviet arms and the Soviet military doctrines that the USSR imposed on the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces for over a decade. The Arab States headed by Nasserite Egypt realized during the war that the key to the return of the territories that they lost in the war was in Washington and not in Moscow as the U.S. was the only nation

* Prof. Arnon Gutfeld is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History in Tel Aviv University. Dr. Boaz Vanetik is a High School teacher in Israel and was a history lecturer at the Achva Academic College in Israel. 1 D. Ross, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.- Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, 94 ± 102 (2015); M. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 156 -157 (2002). 2 After the annihilation of the Egyptian air force on June 5, 1967, Egypt's President and his deputy Field Marshall Abdel Hakim Amer invented the fable about ³the joint Anglo-American involvement in the Six Days War´. This was to explain the shameful total destruction of the Egyptian air force and in order to spur the USSR into a more direct involvement in the war. See Oren, supra note 1 at 287. Syria and Iraq, both with a pro-Soviet orientation followed Egypt and severed relations with the U.S. as did Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania and Sudan.

237 238 ISRAEL YEARBOOK ON HUMAN RIGHTS that could exert pressure on Israel to withdraw from the areas it had occupied during the war. On June 9th, a day before the cease fire, Nasser, whose relations with the U.S. were strained, in a conversation with his close friend and ghost writer, the editor of al-Ahram, Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, said that he must resign the presidency because the leader that would follow him after the war would have to work very closely with the U.S. in order to successfully retrieve the lost Egyptian territories.3

Another important result of the Six Day War was the strengthening of the ³Special Relationship´ between the U.S. and Israel that began during the Kennedy administration in the beginning of the decade.4 After the Six Day War the U.S. became Israel¶s main weapons supplier and its most important economic and political supporter. Israel¶s performance in the war raised the importance of Israel as a ³strategic asset´ for the U.S. in the Cold War in the Middle East and as Washington¶s most important and reliable ally in the region.5 Those developments led the U.S. to search for ways to protect Israel¶s security by searching for a diplomatic solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. To American policy planners, it was clear that unlike previous wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors that ended with armistice agreements they had to assume a dominant role in leading the nations of the Middle East to a diplomatic solution that would ensure Israel¶s security and that would lead to a more stable Middle East. This, in turn, would serve U.S. interests and stature in the region at the expense of the Soviet influence. Both Great Powers considered the Middle East a strategically vital area in the Cold War battle for dominance. Since the end of World War II, in 1945, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Middle East was economically, politically and geo-politically an important arena in which the U.S. and its Western allies attempted to curtail Soviet influence. All American administrations assigned great importance to the oil±rich nations in the region and especially to Saudi Arabia. This was particularly the case because

3 Ibid. 4 Letter from President John F. Kennedy to Levi Eshkol, 2 Oct. 1963, MH 3377/10, Israel State Archives; On the genesis of the ³Special Relationship´ between the U.S. and Israel see A. Ben-Zvi, The Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance: The Jordanian Factor (2007); A. Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship (1993); A. Ben-Zvi, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance (1998); Ross, supra note 1 at 66-75; Y. Bar Siman-Tov, ³The United States and Israel since 1948: A µSpecial Relationship¶?´ 22(2) Diplomatic History 231 -262 (1998); A. Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the US-Israeli Alliance (1998).  5 A. Ben-Zvi, Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel: In the Shadow of the Hawk (2002).