The Third World War: The Untold Story

Before we examine how actual negotiation turned into a more dangerous confrontation between the superpowers, it is necessary to say a word or two further about Jerusalem. It had always been clear that there could be no peace in the Middle East without peace in Jerusalem. Yet real peace in Jerusalem was unobtainable through divided domination; it had to be brought about through united freedom. Jerusalem itself had to become a kind of gateway to peace. Concurrently, therefore, with the diplomatic activity in the Security Council during late 1983, European initiatives in the General Assembly, with Great Britain taking a particular lead, had led to the adoption of a Resolution dealing with Jerusalem, the implementation of which was intended to be in parallel with that of the broader Resolution of the Security Council. It’s essential outlines, after the preamble dealing with the Holy City’s future role as a symbol of peace and freedom, recognized and respected by all mankind, were these:

(1) There would be an Israeli Jerusalem and an Arab Jerusalem each exercising full sovereignty within its own territory but with no barriers and no impediment to freedom of movement between them.

(2) The Secretary-General would appoint an impartial boundary commission to hear representations from those concerned and make recommendations to the Security Council as to the boundary between the Israeli Jerusalem and the Arab Jerusalem.

(3) The Holy City would be completely demilitarized.

(4) The Secretary-General would appoint a high commissioner (and deputy) to be stationed in Jerusalem, to represent the United Nations and to work with all concerned to secure and ensure the purposes of the Resolution, and to report appropriately for the information of the General Assembly and the Security Council.

Thus not only had the need for concerted international action to bring permanent peace to Jerusalem and the Middle East been reaffirmed, but both a formula and machinery for its implementation had been established. We need not at present concern ourselves with the detailed working of this machinery during the last months of 1983 and the early part of 1984. It is the end which mattered, rather than the means. But what must now command our attention is what happened in Syria in the summer of 1984, which nearly brought the whole peacemaking procedure to a close and the two superpowers to the brink of war in the Middle East itself one year before actual war on the Central Front of Europe.

It became plain at this time that as well as peacemakers, there were peacebreakers at large. It seemed at first as if a whole series of peacewrecking events was being directed by implacable extremists. Yet so capricious and multitudinous appeared to be the motives and targets, that paradoxically these events might have been the work of a single internationally organized network, such as Black International, or even a combination of Black and Red International. The connection was never firmly established. It was suggested by Western sources that a kind of multinational strike force had been structured round the Palestinian Rejection Front, which had, of course, been armed by the Soviet Union, and was now — so argued these sources — being directed from Moscow. It was hardly surprising that the Soviet Union and its associates took a different stance, and put all the blame squarely on to the CIA. All such views were coloured of course by the political attitudes of those who expressed them. Initially, however, it was not so much the direction behind the terrible events which ensued that mattered. It was the effect of the events themselves.

The bomb explosions in Cairo airport were bad enough, killing or maiming as they did more than 350 people. Then came the assassination of the President’s special envoy in Tel Aviv, which caused some cynics to observe that this was the best blow for peace the PLO had so far struck. The murder of sixteen members of the United States contingent in the UN peacekeeping force in Sinai was similarly attributed to the Palestinian Rejection Front — certainly the bullets found in them had been fired from Soviet-made weapons. All this soured the United States view of the Soviet commitment to peace. Nor was the Soviet Union less sceptical about the USA’s real intentions when the former’s representatives at the peace conference were kidnapped, tortured and executed. There may have been evidence to show that it was the doing of the Italian-Nazi-Maoist group, but this did not prevent the Soviet Union attributing the whole affair to the CIA. These accusations and misunderstandings hardly made for smooth progress at Geneva.