Born From The Holy Land
By 1970, the world's geopolitical momentum had shifted dramatically from a decade before, a product of a massive nuclear energy boom, economic progress and the by-and-large halted spread of communism across the globe. The Vietnam War had only been the crowning achievement of the world's geopolitical shifting sands. Nikita Khrushchev had said in 1958 "we will bury you!" in front of the United Nations, but by 1970 the Soviet Union, now under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, was broadcasting a much more conciliatory tone, brought about by continued economic, social and technological progress in the West that was increasingly building a gap between the USSR and its allies and the nations of the West.
Oil, once a key advantage of the Soviet Bloc (and one whose huge funds in the 1960s had given the USSR and the Middle East alike a massive economic boom) was increasingly becoming less of one as new sources came online - in the 1960s, oil discoveries in the North Sea, Grand Banks, Bay of Campeche, Alaska's North Shore, Karafuto and Brazil's continental shelf had added to the still-productive fields of Venezuela, Texas, Western Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran and countless others to reduce the import of oil from the Middle East to the Amigos to virtually nothing, while Europe had seen its imports from the Soviet Union and Middle East dramatically reduced. While India and China continued to buy from the Middle East, Iran had taken over as the largest supplier of oil to Europe (outside of the USSR itself), a position that was making Iran a truly enormous amount of money. Nuclear energy was now a key source of energy in the West, and new homes built in the 1960s overwhelmingly were using either natural gas-fueled or electric forced-air heating, and the latter was becoming ever more common, while transportation uses, reduced by the shift to freight on railroads (that were in many cases being electrified) and the growth of mass transit usage was having a similar effect, while the nuclear revolution had all but eliminated the burning of coal for power on the Atlantic Seaboard and was making it a dying breed on the West Coast, and the 1970s would see the shifting of the trains once used to carry coal to power plants being directed to synthetic fuel production plants. Despite the reduction in demand in the West, the economic growth of many countries (particularly in Asia, where the Asian Tigers of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore had now been joined by Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia in the world of rapidly-growing economies, driving up their demands for energy, a situation shared with several other locales - Southern Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, Iran, India - which kept fuel prices high and kept the funds flowing in for those who had the forethought to invest the money wisely. By the 1970s, there were a lot of these nations, and the result was the steady rise in living standards and levels of investment in many nations around the world.
While the Sixties had seen much of the world's geopolitics focused on Southeast Asia, the shifting sands of the Middle East and North Africa made the headlines in the Seventies, centered primarily on what was becoming a dramatic rift in the Muslim world. While the Soviet-dominated Middle East continued to be troublesome, Iran had made it clear in no uncertain terms where their alliances laid (and were in the early 1970s in the middle of a giant military modernization that had seen them buy vast amounts of new equipment from the Amigos and Europe) and North Africa was shifting dramatically. Already much more connected to Europe, the nations to the West of Egypt of the Muslim world - Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in particular - had by 1970 figured out who was going places and who was spinning their wheels, and while Arab solidarity meant much to these nations, it didn't mean so much that they were willing to impoverish themselves. Libya had gone the furthest here - joined at the hip with their former colonial power in Italy, Libya had begun shifting during the leadership of King Idris, but an attempt at a coup by officers of his armed forces in 1965 got the move to reform moving in earnest, and by the early 1970s Libya's oil wealth was allowing for a major expansion in social spending, even as Idris began to pass political power to others in the early 1970s. It was a similar story in Algeria, while Morocco and Tunisia, not having the benefit of oil but still taking advantage of location, worked with European powers to raise their standards of living. By the 1970s, the Europeans, well aware of the Amigos dominance of relations with Israel, had begun to make low-level efforts to try to figure out a solution between Israel and the Arabs.
The flaring in the Middle East blew up again in October 1971, as Egypt, Jordan and Syria made another attempt to attack the Israelis, the former having to push past British and French troops stationed in the Canal Zone. While the Egyptians this time sought to avoid conflicts with the Europeans - they had their hands full with the Israelis - their efforts didn't get far owing to logistical problems, but the Jordanians and Syrians did rather better at first, but after five days of bitter fighting, the Israelis once again shoved the Syrians back over their previous ceasefire line in the Golan Heights, while the Jordanians' attempt to push into the West Banki had only limited success before the enraged Israelis shoved the Jordanians back over the Jordan River. While Israel's ownership of the Sinai remained despite the Egyptian attack and the Syrians and Jordanians were pushed out of Israel, the cost to Israel had been ghastly - over 4000 dead and 10,000 wounded - and the Arabs had fared worse than that, causing a situation where both sides, finally, were prepared to begin talking peace.
For Egypt, clearly the most important player in the situation, their strategic goal was to try to get back territory for themselves first, and failing that, try to get it for Arabs in general. Syria and Jordan faced the same problems, but on July 17, 1972, Jordan was hit hard by a coup, led by royalist officers who claimed that the Communists had failed catastrophically and that King Hussein (who had been living in Europe) should come back to try to re-establish Jordan's positions as an honest broker in the Arab world. While this coup was a nasty, bloody affair that claimed over 700 lives, the Soviets, clearly seeking a detente with the West (and angered that the Arabs hadn't sought Soviet approval for their war against Israel the year before) refused to support the communist forces in Jordan, and with the majority of their armed forces still badly broken from the chaos the year before, the coup was successful, and King Hussein, after fifteen years away, returned to Amman on July 27, stating that his objective was to "Restore the glory and honor of Jordan." Initially unfazed by this, the other Arabs didn't take long to discover that Hussein during his exile had plenty of times spoken to the Israelis and they had little objection to his return provided that Jordan was willing to talk peace - which after the 1971 losses, they were. Similarly, after the embarassment in 1971, Sadat was basically facing the same needs, and with an angered-at-his-failure populace at his back, Sadat and Hussein spoke for the first time in fifteen years over the phone on August 14, both agreeing during the phone call to present a united negotiations front with Israel. That done, the Jordanians began to make it be known through third parties of their desire to negotiate over the future of the Palestinians.
Israel didn't take long to respond. The Israelis, hoping that this time the Arab negotiations would be genuine, began to send messages to the Jordanians and Egyptians in the winter of 1972. This broke in the media in January 1973, resulting in a coup attempt against Sadat on March 2, 1973, that was broken up by an enraged Sadat and many veterans of the 1971 War, who by this point were well aware of the coming negotiations and had a desire to see them at least be attempted. That failure led to the Royal Saudi Land Forces beginning to gather in northwestern Saudi Arabia - near the Jordanian border - in March, only for those forces to be bombed by the Israeli Air Force on March 22 and 23, forcing a pull back of the Saudi buildup and basically putting Jordan under the Israeli Air Force's umbrella. Realizing this, Hussein directly began negotiating with the Israelis in April 1973, and with Golda Meir's approval, he invited Sadat to a meeting between the three leaders. That news quickly made it to the West, and the Brits offered to host it at their facilities on the island of Socotra. This meeting, which happened on June 14, 1973, was the first of what would be many trilateral meetings between the three nations, and this first meeting also made clear that both the Israelis and Arabs welcomed anything the West could do to help negotiate out the differences between the two sides.
1974 would see much happen to advance these causes. With the desires for peace in the Middle East sought by pretty much everyone - though admittedly for entirely different reasons - it wasn't long before the positions began to firm up. The first outsides powers, of course, were Britain and the Commonwealth, which resulted in Canada (a key Israeli ally going back to Israel's respect for the Men of Honour) getting the Amigos involved. It wasn't hard for anybody to be convinced of the positives of negotiations, and that drew in others. Iran publicly offered to make massive contributions towards the economic rehabilitation of the Palestinians, the Commonwealth offered to station military troops in Israel to assist in its security and the United States offered to deploy Marine and Navy units to new bases in Israel or Palestine at the desire of either nation. During this came Sadat's Infitah economic policy, which allowed for much greater quantities of private sector investment in many portions of Egypt's economy, in many ways a reversal of Nasser's policies. While uptake on this from the Amigos and Commonwealth was slow - they remembered Nasser's antics all too well - the mainland Europeans were much quicker to get to this, particularly Germany, aiming to have Egypt become a foothold to the rest of the Middle Eastern markets. By the summer of 1974, a major international conference was set up for that fall to come to the beginning of a final solution to the Israel-Palestine fights.
That conference, held on September 16-19, 1974, was once again hosted by the British - this time, it was hosted by Queen Elizabeth II herself at her Windsor Castle at Berkshire in England - and went a long ways towards moving the process beyond talks. There, the Israelis, Jordanians and Egyptians all agreed that the final goals would be a "viable nation state" for the Palestinians and, with that completed, the recognition of Israel's existence as a nation and the place of Jews in the Middle East. This commitment to this end had been the primary goal of the conference, as well as the Arabs recognizing that there would surely be Western armed forces deployments to the region as part of a commitment to Israel's security. Sadat got a huge win when he accepted that in return for the Suez Canal being an international waterway, the Egyptians would have the right to enforce tolls on ships traveling through the Canal and, if the negotiations came to a successful outcome, that the UK and France would relinquish their ownership shares, effectively gaining in a negotiation what Nasser had failed to do so spectacularly eighteen years before. (This win ended and real organized objections to Egypt's peace positions - from here on out, Cairo was full steam ahead on the issue.) Jordan insisted on Jerusalem being an international city, but made it clear that international meant Jews would have every right to live there and that the Arabs would accept a need for their to be some semblance of Israeli authority in the city, though what form that was wasn't entirely agreed upon at the Conference. This was initially a big win for Jordan, but it would ultimately score big for Israel as well. After the Conference, Israel began to move people out of its settlements in the West Bank, understanding that it wouldn't be too long in the future before these places would be part of Palestine.
By the spring of 1975, the Middle East's bitter divisions were boiling. Egypt and Jordan were pushing ahead with negotiations with the Israelis, seeing that the opportunity to solve the Palestinian question was opening and wanting to take advantage of it. Lebanon had joined them at the table, as had Tunisia and Morocco, with Libya following in April 1975 and Algeria a month after that. Iran was already in on it (and were directly funding the PLO's political wing, Fatah, after the PLO declared a complete ceasefire with the Israelis in October 1974) and the entire Western World was aiming for its success. The Soviet Union, looking for all kinds of economic and technological help, were keen to not rock that boat, as by this point both China and India were also on the side of such a deal being sorted out. The Arab world and the Turks, by contrast were seething with anger, resulting in countless unfriendly air dogfights and multiple military skirmishes with the Israelis on the Golan Heights and the Jordanians in and around Aqaba. The Egyptians, fed up with the latter problem, began deploying their own air forces to Jordan to get the Saudis to back off in March 1975, while Royal Air Force (and after July 1975, USAF) units began operating from Socotra to patrol the Red Sea. By the summer of 1975 there was a clear gap between the interests and desires in the Middle East, the Saudis, Gulf Arabs, Iraqis, Sudanese and Turks loudly and angrily continuing to demand the complete destruction of Israel and the North African, Jordanian and Lebanese Arabs wanting peace to prevail. Syrian and Soviet sea deployments led to the US Navy deploying regularly to the Eastern Mediterranean in August 1975, making an already tense situation more tense still.
Despite this tension, full-blown war was averted, and on August 24, 1975, the second "Conference For The Future of the Holy Land" began, this time hosted by Indira Gandhi at the awesome Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, India, went beyond basic agreements to developing borders and conditions. To the surprise of many, Egypt agreed to the Israelis holding the east bank of the Suez Canal, while over half of the Sinai would become part of the state of Palestine, including a northern coastline up to the edge of Lake Bardawil, while Israel would absorb a smaller piece of the eastern Sinai to allow a larger port at Eliat, while the rest of the Sinai coastline down to Sharm al-Sheikh and up the Suez Gulf up to Abu Zenima, as well as a line up to Qalet el-Nakhi would become part of Palestine, as well as a wide strip of territory up to the Mediterranean Coast, in essence making it impossible for the rest of Israel proper to be reached from Egypt without going through Palestine. Israel's plans for a naval base on the Great Bitter Lake drew no objections from the Egyptians, and the plan was devised that there would be a territorial connection through the Palestinian territory through Arish and Abu al-Fita (both to become part of Palestine) and through the Israeli communities of Lahav, Lehavim, Gilat, Maslul, Yesha and Naveh, which would be free for both sides to travel through to reach the other country without restriction, but people had to follow the laws of the nation which owned the territory while doing so and nobody could be forced by either side to leave it. (Almost immediately after the agreement, Israel announced plans to a major highway through their section of the territory, with a railroad, power system connection and water pipeline later added to this corridor, improvements that the Palestinians rapidly agreed to.) This territorial agreement was more than the Palestinians had expected, and they were only too happy to support it. Jerusalem was a thorny subject that, unlike the other borders, wasn't agreed to at the New Delhi Conference. Both sides recognized that the other having complete authority over it wasn't going to be accepted, but it wasn't quite sure how a third party could run it.
But in November 1975, a solution was found, and from a place that seemed unlikely at first, but when thought about, made perfect sense - the Vatican.
Pope Paul VI had been a keen observer of the negotiations over the Holy Land - it was sacred ground to Christians, too - and when word came out about the problems Jerusalem posed, the Pontiff proposed on November 7, 1975, that Jerusalem be considered an international city under the leadership of three clerics nominated by their respective congregations - a Muslim chosen by Arabs, a Jew chosen by Israelis and a Christian chosen by Christian Arabs. These three would have governing authority over the city, which would be open for the residency of all citizens of Israel or Palestine and would allow both to claim it as their capital. The clerics would have access to a security force of a third party agreed upon by the Israelis and Arabs, while the city's civic government would be run by two mayors - one Israeli and one Palestinian - and all criminal offenses committed in Jerusalem would be tried using the law of either Israel or Palestine at the choice of the accused. All government functions aside from the armed forces or security services would be allowed to be based in Jerusalem.
It was an elegant solution, and one which while not giving either side everything they wanted was recognized as a fair compromise. The possibility of the loss of Jerusalem under Israel's sole control led to an uproar in the Israeli Knesset, but the population of Israel, altogether too aware of the brutal losses inflicted on the Jewish state during a generation of repeted wars, made it clear in elections in March 1976 where they stood as pro-treaty candidates and parties won vast shares of seats in the Knesset. The Israeli right made one more last-ditch attempt to sabotage an agreement by massively increasing the size of the city of Jerusalem to be made international, trying to get the Palestinians to balk, but PLO leader Yasser Arafat saw right through that nonsense and made it clear that such an expansion wouldn't stop their willingness to sort out an agreement. With that completed, the national leaders gathered one final time, this time in the United States, to sign the final agreement.
In keeping of the meetings at a vast, beautiful place worthy of so many great leaders, the Americans hosted the meeting at the famed Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the immense estate being exactly the sort of environment meant to show what prosperity could do - and President John F. Kennedy, who opened the meeting on May 10, 1976, had intended just that to happen, and it did. The participants - Yitzhak Rabin representing Israel, Yasser Arafat representing the Palestinians, Anwar Sadat representing Egypt and King Hussein II representing Jordan - had asked Kennedy and others to be signatories to the agreements, out of a desire for it to be seen in the Arab World as being the world supporting their efforts. This wasn't hard to accomplish, and as such there would be signatures to the document from the United States, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Iran, the leader of the nation acting as the leader of the Commonwealth of Nations at the time (in 1976, this was Canada) and the Soviet Union, signed by the relevant leaders - President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Paul VI, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Prime Minister Robert Stanfield and Premier Leonid Brezhnev. With the final agreements worked out, the Treaty of Asheville was signed in a grand ceremony by the leaders involved on May 16, 1976, the signing on a Sunday Afternoon at Biltmore coming after a massive TV ceremony including speeches broadcast around the world - for many in the West, it was the first time they had ever heard Brezhnev or Pahlavi speak, and perhaps fittingly (and while this was totally unplanned), after the final signature on the paper - that of Arafat - Arafat made a point of shaking hands with Rabin, while Sadat and Hussein watched from behind Arafat and Elizabeth and Kennedy stood behind Rabin, and the image of the handshake being the front page on countless newspapers around the world the following Monday morning.
The Treaty of Asheville made it clear that the legal changes were to be sorted out by a date meant to be Day of Independence for Palestine. The two sides agreed to that date on the agreement - it would be September 1, 1977. A lot needed to be done, but no sooner had everyone returned home than plans got into motion. The Commonwealth, which now had responsibility for army locations in northern Israel, gathered a massive force - a British armored division, two infantry regiments from Canada and one apiece from Australia and India - and delivered them to Israel, them setting up Camp Lightfield (named for the famed Canadian MP and ringleader of the Men of Honour), the base activating on June 21, 1977. The Arabs and Israelis agreed on the first guardians of Jerusalem to be Canadians, who had a good rapport with both countries, and the Canadians duly dispatched their famed Royal Canadian Regiment - whose honours went back to the North American War - to Jerusalem for the duty. The Egyptians made good on their ends of the bargain, officially renouncing the ownership of the Sinai to Palestine and Israel on May 15, 1977 and officially recognizing Israel's right to exist. The three clerics were announced to the world on August 15, 1977, and on the morning of September 1, they issued their first directives to the Royal Canadian Regiment soldiers and the two civil mayors of Jerusalem, officially beginning Israel's new world. The following day, Friday, September 2, 1977, Palestine became the world's newest nation, with Arafat as its first President. Both Israel and Palestine recognized the other's existence in a high-profile ceremony in Tel Aviv on the following Monday, September 5, 1977.
The results of the Treaty and the end of the Israel-Palestine conflict ended up being profound in a way that even many of the treaty's creators and signatories couldn't have imagined. The Treaty's supporters and opponents would spend decades arguing about its worth, but what wasn't in dispute was what came after it. With a permanent peace at last achieved, Israel was able to back down much of its budget-stretching military spending, though the release of many of these people directly led to an entrepreneur-driven high-tech boom in Israel in the 1980s. Palestine's improvements were even more profound, as the millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt were quick to make tracks to their newly-established nation and set about reversing what had been for long known as the Nakba. Helped along by tens of billions of dollars in available funds for their rehabilitation, the Palestinian refugees in particular were quick to pour into the coastal Sinai regions that were now theirs and make them into their homelands. The northern Sinai felt the effects first, as the completion of a major desalination plant East of Arish in March 1981 began the process of making the region bloom. Recognizing the possibilities in tourism and hospitality that the warm, pretty southern Sinai represented, Sharm el-Sheikh and the communities along the coastal Sinai on both the Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba side rapidly developed tourist hotels and resorts and restaurants as well as other attractions, providing jobs and income that was to rapidly snowball into much more as civil infrastructure projects boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Superhighway and rail lines through the travel District were completed in 1986, allowing ever-faster travel between the two nations. Jerusalem flourished under the leadership of the clerics and their third-party protectors, it's population growing by nearly 70% and its economy growing to two and a half times its original size between 1977 and 2002.
Beyond the massive economic progress, though, was an even more massive cultural shift. Having already been among the more worldly of the Arabs before the Nakba and a generation of being refugees having reinforced so many of the cultural expectations of the Palestinians, they took to the building of their nation with a powerful will and a recognition that the fates of them and the Israelis were intertwined whether they liked it or not. This recognition led to a willingness to work with each other, and with successful meetings and deals came a trust between the two sides. By the dawn of the 1990s the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews had come to have a very deep and complex relationship, with economies, transportation systems, utility grids, water and food supplies shared between them. Israel's tech entrepreneurs built factories in Palestine and vice versa, while many of those same Israelis vacationed at the resorts of the Sinai.
Having seen the success of both the Muslim cultural shifts of the West and the success of the Palestinians, Iranians and others, the world of Islam was basically split into two by the mid-1980s, as Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco moved away from the harder line interpretations of Islam and towards more moderate and open societies. This didn't necessarily mean democracy (at least at first, though virtually every one of the above nations was moving in that direction by the mid-1990s), but did mean a massive growth in education, tolerance of religious differences (not to the degree of the West, of course, but still enormous improvements) and dramatic improvements in civil rights. With this progress came wealth, as the West, unashamedly hoping for success for these places, funded and supported their efforts with money, knowledge and supplies. Nuclear energy came to Israel and Palestine in the 1980s and to Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon in the 90s, while vast portions of the Sahara in several countries became covered in vast solar power stations. Universities and technical schools trained millions of Arabs in everything from civil engineering to nuclear science to modern agriculture, and they came up with more than a few tricks of their own in the process. As their progress grew, these places developed a brain drain from the Arabian Peninsula that came to be a real problem for Syria in particular by the 1990s. As this trend grew, with it came demands for reform in many of these nations.