Summary
President of the United States whose administration, in Perceptions of Palestine’s account, reverted to the pre-Carter, Israel-centered frame: Reagan had no sympathy for the Palestinians, viewed the Palestinian issue through Begin’s eyes as a containable “running sore”, surrounded himself with neoconservative and ardently pro-Israeli advisers, refused to deal with the PLO even if it accepted Resolution 242, disdained the Fez Plan, allowed the Reagan Plan to die after Israel rejected it, formalized closer strategic ties with Israel after the Lebanon debacle — and was in the end, after the intifada and the PNC’s November 1988 platform, forced to authorize a U.S. dialogue with the PLO (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1988-1999, 2420-2437).
Details
- Reagan’s world was black and white, good against evil, and the Soviet Union, in his 1980 campaign words, underlay “all the unrest that is going on”; Israel was for him “the only stable democracy we can rely on in a spot where Armageddon could come”, a nation and a symbol, and Jews part of his “‘us’ group” — he had no Arab friends and no empathy for Arab concerns (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2000-2004).
- As late as his 1990 memoirs he propounded Arab “pathological hatred” of Israel and that “savagery … forever lies beneath the sands of the Middle East”; he seldom referred to “the Palestinian people”, questioned whether the PLO represented the Palestinians, and in his 1980 campaign put forward the Likud “Jordan-is-Palestine” position, contending Jordan had 80 percent of the responsibility for the refugee problem and Israel 20 percent (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2008-2015, 2054-2059, 2286-2289).
- Reagan asserted during the 1980 campaign, adopting Eugene Rostow’s position, that Israeli settlements were legal and Israel had a “right” to construct them; no one in his administration ever again called the settlements illegal (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2046-2051).
- After the 1982 Lebanon invasion he was shocked by television images of Palestinian children injured and killed, and launched the Reagan Plan on September 1, 1982, but backed down at the first sign of difficulty and never again mentioned the initiative to Israel for all intents and purposes (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2100-2110, 2140-2141, 2166-2167).
Related pages
George Shultz, Alexander Haig, Reagan Plan, Fez Plan, Menachem Begin, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Neoconservatism, First Intifada