EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

It is nearly nine months since Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdallah presented his path-breaking proposal for peace with Israel. The initiative was delivered in Beirut to a summit of leaders representing all 22 members of the League of Arab States, who endorsed it unanimously.

America's highest ranking officials immediately praised the proposal, as did the heads of more than 60 countries. To this day, U.S. government leaders and their counterparts in many other nations continue to do so. Yet despite this collective Arab presentation of an olive branch containing all that Israel's national leaders have asked for over a period of 55 years, neither Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon nor any other Israeli leader has accepted the offer. This fact alone has endangered the near-term prospects for peace, stability, and security in a region of vital importance to all of humanity.

The essay that follows, by Dr. John Duke Anthony, revisits the context and content of this one of a kind pan-Arab initiative. In so doing, he draws on his study of the Kingdom's long involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian Question since its inception. He demonstrates why there is every reason to seek the furtherance of Crown Prince Abdallah's initiative as the boldest and most far-reaching Arab peace proposal ever submitted to the Israeli people.

Dr. Anthony makes the case that only through a willingness by Israel to respond positively to this unprecedented Arab peace offer will there be a chance to bring to an end not only the suffering of Arabs and Israelis born of this long-festering conflict. He illustrates as well how the conflict's resolution would remove the single oldest, largest, and most pervasive impediment to restoring goodwill towards the United States among Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

Crown Prince Abdallah's Peace Initiative 
By John Duke Anthony

Ever since it was first presented to the Arab League Summit in Beirut this past March, there has been a discordant chorus of American and Israeli voices against the Middle East peace proposal of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdallah.

One voice claims that Saudi Arabia has never before interjected itself into the Arab-Israeli peace process and, thus, ought not to be allowed to do so now.

A second postulates that the intentions and timing of the Kingdom's proposal are deceptive.

A third faction maligns the Crown Prince's intentions by claiming the Kingdom does not genuinely desire dynamic engagement in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rather, he seeks to deflect the media spotlight from the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers who committed the September 11 attacks were Saudi Arabians.

A related purpose, reason a fourth wing of critics, is to make the Kingdom look good by shifting attention from the fact that a significant number of the suspects incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay are Saudi Arabians.

A fifth sector alleges that the Kingdom's only reason for identifying with the Palestinians' plight is to successfully divert the anger and frustration of the Saudi Arabian people from their own government.

All of these assertions are bogus.

The Truth

History provides overwhelming, documented evidence that from the outset, outside Israel's immediate Arab neighbors, Saudi Arabia has been the longest, most closely associated Arab country intricately involved in trying to end the Arab-Israeli dispute.

The Kingdom has many reasons for its lengthy identification with this conflict, but none of them have anything to do with the fraudulent ones alleged above.

The Reasons

One reason is sheer twentieth century chronology. Saudi Arabia's involvement with this problem is factually evidenced prior to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish State.

Saudi Arabia was the only developing country to enter into the community of nations in the last century as a new country not through independence from a Western power.

Therefore, Saudi Arabia saw the unfolding saga of modern day Palestine through its own unfiltered lenses.

The veracity of this statement needs to be underscored, for analysts almost always overlook this unique perspective.

The evidence that the Kingdom's top leaders have been intimately close with the debate over Palestine's sovereignty, political independence, and territory is abundant.

FDR, "Ibn Saud" and King Faisal

One of the most prominent Saudi Arabians who grew up with the unfolding tragedy of Palestine was the late King Faisal (r.1965-1975).

An essential insight into understanding the Kingdom's peace initiative is to appreciate Faisal's unique role in educating his and the Crown Prince's father, King Abdalaziz bin Abdalrahman Al Sa'ud, "Ibn Saud," on the question of Palestine.

Faisal was barely in his teens when sent by his father as the Kingdom's Special Envoy to London prior to the League of Nations' post-World War One decision to award a Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain.

This initial foray into the international world of politics and diplomacy proved auspicious.

Faisal thereafter spent more than three decades, as Minister of Foreign Affairs before becoming the Kingdom's head of state.

Carrying on as Foreign Minister for the past quarter century has been Faisal's son, HRH Prince Sa'ud Al-Faisal.

The fact that two generations of father and son have searched for a just and durable resolution to this conflict puts to rest the disinformation of any who imply that the Kingdom is newly intervening in the conflict.

Faisal, first, as Foreign Minister, and then as King, was as intricately involved in the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic considerations related to Palestine as any Arab leader.

Faisal was more than a clear thinker and an astute analyst. From the 1920's, earlier than most, he was prescient in foreseeing the tragedy that lay in store for the Palestinian people. He knew as well as anyone what the negative fallout would be for his own and other Arab and Islamic countries' national interests in the event the Mandate were to be terminated at the expense of legitimate Palestinian rights and aspirations.

This, in his view, was inevitable in light of what he knew would, soon enough, be Saudi Arabia and America's burgeoning roles in world affairs.

In this way, Faisal was not unlike the great American statesman, George Catlett Marshall, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Secretary of Defense, architect of the Allied War effort in World War Two, and author of the plan bearing his name that restored Europe's economy.

As Secretary of State, Marshall told Truman that if he insisted upon the partition of Palestine in 1947, he would personally vote against him in the 1948 Presidential election.

Marshall echoed the views of many when he emphasized to Truman that American support for an unjust partition of Palestine would be calamitous.

As America's top foreign policy strategist at the time, Marshall was certain that such a decision would cause endless regional tensions and consequent threats to American national security interests, and not just in the immediate region, but elsewhere, given the vastness of the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Broken Promises

In this, Marshall was prophetic. So were three other high-ranking U.S. foreign policy makers who agreed with him: Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Warren Austin.

But whereas the advice of Marshall, Forrestal, Lovett, and Austin failed to move President Truman, Faisal's counsel to his head of state had more effect.

In the meeting between President Roosevelt and King Abdalaziz on February 14, 1945 aboard the USS Quincy, the Saudi Arabian monarch spoke extensively about Palestine.

Subsequently, Roosevelt said, "I learned more about Palestine from that man in five minutes than I had learned in a lifetime of study about the subject up until then."

Consequently Roosevelt promised King Abdalaziz that he would do nothing that might unduly affect a just solution to the Palestine problem without first consulting him.

Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt as President, had different views on this issue.

Openly admitting that he was putting partisan political purposes above what was essential to the national welfare and vital American national security interests, Truman broke that pledge.

Lessons Not Learned

The United States, Israel, Palestinians and other Arab peoples have been paying for that decision ever since.

Some lessons are indeed poorly learned, for history reveals that President Richard M. Nixon made a similar pledge to King Faisal himself and like Truman, broke his promise to the Saudi king.

In the midst of the October 1973 War, Israeli forces were still deeply entrenched in the Sinai Peninsula which Israel had invaded and illegally occupied since June 1967.

Nixon, without consulting King Faisal, asked in a joint session of Congress for 2.2 billion dollars in emergency aid for Israel.

Upon learning that Nixon had broken his word to him, King Faisal, no longer bound by their mutual pledge, decided to join the Arab oil embargo.

Contrary to myth, the oil embargo had been declared earlier by nearly every Arab oil exporter but Saudi Arabia, which remained true to Faisal's word solemnly given Nixon.

In one fell swoop, a United States President unwittingly made a decision that he and his successors have rued ever since.

550,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian oil were instantly removed from the market, as a result of Nixon's breach, sending the international price of oil skyward and the world changed.

Putting Paid to the Past

To truly comprehend the context, background and perspective of what led to the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince's peace proposal, an examination of both the foregoing as well as subsequent litany of key Saudi Arabian-centric milestones preceding the proposal is essential.

Several milestones predate Israel's establishment but strongly influenced a significant portion of the Kingdom's policies and official attitudes towards it both before and after 1948.

King Faisal was deeply concerned by Communism and Zionism, which he regarded as having nearly equally dangerous effects on the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Faisal's concerns were not academic but hammered out on the anvil of empirical experience.

Faisal visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s for nearly a month, but he returned to his country profoundly influenced forever by what he had seen.

In the Stalinist campaign to inculcate a nation with the values of Marxism-Leninism, Faisal saw the antithesis of everything that Islam and Saudi Arabia represented and hoped to become.

Consequently, the Kingdom refused to have diplomatic or other relations with Moscow from the 1930s throughout the Cold War.

Faisal believed that the campaign to implement political Zionism in Palestine, much like Moscow's quest to gain footholds in the region, bore ill tidings for the future. This belief left an indelible imprint on his musings about the essential ingredients to produce and prolong a framework of order and evolutionary development in the Middle East.

In the run-up to the partition of Palestine, Faisal anticipated that