Summary
Reagan’s secretary of state from July 1982, who in Perceptions of Palestine’s account came to office criticizing Israel’s West Bank policies and speaking of Palestinian “political aspirations”, authored the Reagan Plan, and then evolved into what AIPAC officials by 1987 called “a friend beyond words” to Israel — adamant in refusing to deal with the PLO, telling Sharon the PLO “must be scattered and its credibility destroyed”, blaming the Arabs for the Reagan Plan’s failure, discouraging Peres’s international-conference attempts, and relenting on a U.S.-PLO dialogue only after Arafat, on December 14, 1988, said exactly the words in exactly the order the United States dictated (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2094-2110, 2120-2127, 2416-2419).
Details
- Walid Khalidi’s account of Shultz’s contacts, given here: before becoming secretary Shultz twice passed Palestinian messages on, but after taking office his old Palestinian friend was told to desist from any contact, even socially, and Khalidi and the other Palestinian met a Shultz aide furtively in the State Department parking lot — an indication, in Khalidi’s reading, of “how mesmerized American officials are with fear vis-à-vis the pro-Israeli lobby” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2112-2119).
- In March 1988, at the intifada’s height, Shultz told a prominent Palestinian American he did not want to talk about the PLO because, in his words as recalled, “It’s too complicated” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2174-2179).
- Shultz described a catalog of U.S. grievances against Israel over Lebanon in his memoirs but in the end, Christison reports, was able to think only of the U.S. need “to lift the albatross of Lebanon from Israel’s neck” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2228-2229).
- He denied Arafat a U.S. visa to address the UN after the November 1988 PNC declaration, dismissed that platform as too “blurry and ambiguous”, and had, one diplomat is quoted as saying, a “visceral hatred” for Arafat (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2410-2417).
Related pages
Ronald Reagan, Reagan Plan, Yasir Arafat, Walid Khalidi, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, First Intifada