Abstract
In early 1949, Walter Eytan, the head of the Israeli diplomatic delegation at the Arab-Israeli armistice talks in Rhodes, reflected on the possibility of Arab-Israeli reconciliation. He was both sanguine and prophetic. Eytan recalled that initial animosity between the Israeli and Egyptian delegations had been, during the course of six weeks, gradually eroded. In one instance, Eytan recalled being shown photographs of his Egyptian counterpart’s family. On another occasion, he sat by the bedside of an Egyptian advisor who had fallen ill and comforted him.1 On 24 February 1949, having signed the armistice, and now awaiting the commencement of further diplomacy by the PCC, Eytan recalled:
We felt that night, and I am fairly sure the Egyptians did too, that we had not only brought the fighting phase to a formal end, but laid the foundations, if not of love and affection, at least of formal relations between our two countries.2
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Notes
Walter Eytan, The First Ten Years: A Diplomatic History of Israel, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958), p. 29.
Malcolm Kerr, The Elusive Peace in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975);
Nathan A. Pelcovitz, The Long Armistice; UN Peacekeeping and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1960 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993);
Don Peretz, Israel and the Palestine Arabs (Washington, DC: The Middle East Institute, 1959);
Saadia Touval, The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Neil Caplan, Futile Diplomacy Volume Three: The United Nations, The Great Powers, and the Middle East, 1948–1954 (London: Frank Cass, 1997). Several other studies have used primary sources to look at the work of the PCC, but they are more limited in scope. See
Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–51 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 196–7;
Candice Karp, Missed Opportunities: US Diplomatic Failures and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1967 (Claremont: Regina Books, 2005).
Michael R. Fischbach, Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugees and the Arab-Israel Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Jacob Tovy, Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Issue: The Formation of a Policy, 1948–1956 (London: Routledge, 2014).
Earl Berger, The Covenant and the Sword: Arab-Israeli Relations 1948–56 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 44–5.
James G. McDonald, My Mission in Israel, 1948–51 (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1951), p. 161.
Pablo de Azcarate, Mission in Palestine, 1948–1952 (Washington, DC: The Middle East Institute, 1966), p. 135.
Touval, The Peace Brokers, pp. 89–90; In Chapter 5 of Michael E. Jansen’s 1970 study The United States and the Palestinian People, it is argued that important US officials — James McDonald in Tel Aviv and Mark Ethridge — were Zionist sympathizers and that they affected Washington’s position, see Michael E. Jansen, The United States and the Palestinian People (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970), pp. 106, 111; also see Khouri, ‘United Nations Peace Efforts’, pp. 33–4.
Candice Karp, Missed Opportunities: US Diplomatic Failures and the Arab– Israeli Conflict 1947–1967 (Claremont: Regina Books, 2005), p. 85.
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© 2015 Simon A. Waldman
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Waldman, S.A. (2015). Diplomatic Deadlock: The Palestine Conciliation Commission and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Part 1). In: Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1948–51. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431523_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431523_4
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