ABSTRACT
On January 12, the Israeli and Egyptian delegations landed in Rhodes. Bunche did not want one of the delegations to have to wait too long for the other to arrive, and made sure to coordinate their arrivals.1 Egypt turned down his request to appoint politicians to its delegation. Its prime minister stressed that the talks would address a purely military matter, so they would send only military men to Rhodes.2 In light of the Egyptian decision, Israel retreated from its intention to send Sharett to the talks, as Bunche had requested.3 Instead, the delegation was headed by the director general of the Foreign Ministry, Walter Eytan. The delegation also included Shiloah and Sasson, the experts on Arab affairs, and the
legal advisor, Shabtai Rosenne. The military wing of the delegation was led by the head of the Operations Branch in the General Staff, Brig. Gen. Yigael Yadin, along with two officers who served in advisory and intelligence positions, Maj. Aryeh Simon and Maj. Yehoshafat Harkabi. Brig. Gen. David Shaltiel and Col. Yitzhak Rabin also took part in some of the talks. The Egyptian delegation was headed by two colonels, Muhammad Ibrahim Seif al-Din and Muhammad Kamal al-Rahmani. They were both outstanding soldiers. (In his memoirs, Rabin described al-Rahmani as “one of the finest officers in the Egyptian army, who conquered Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim.”4) Col. Isma’il Sherine, King Farouk’s confidant and soon-to-be brother-in-law, was supposed to be a key member of the delegation, because of his direct line of communication with the royal court. Dr. Ahmed Mustafa served as the legal advisor to the delegation; Omar Lutfi and Abd al-Munim Mustafa were the political counselors. There was mutual respect between the two delegations. Sherine may not have lived up to the hopes placed in him (“a nice young fellow” but “he doesn’t seem to understand half of what’s going on,” Bunche wrote5), but Abd al-Munim Mustafa, the director of the political department of the Arab League, demonstrated great ability and knowledge that filled in the gaps; the Israelis saw him as “the real boss.”6 “The Egyptian delegation had been skillful, tenacious and wellbriefed,” Eytan wrote in his memoirs.7 The Israeli delegation, too, received high
marks from outside critics. Bunche may have believed that Israel was too rigid in the negotiations, but in his diary, he praised most members of the delegation and noted that Sasson and Shiloah’s ability to speak Arabic with the Egyptians was extremely useful. There were occasional differences of opinion between the military men and the Foreign Ministry representatives, but Eytan, with his forbearing and diplomatic approach, made sure to preserve unity in the ranks and kept Bunche and the Egyptians from being aware of the disagreements.8 The UN personnel included everyone whom Bunche called “the few veteran Palestine experts.”9 By this, he meant the handful of Secretariat officials who had worked with UNSCOP and linked their destiny to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Two of them deserve particular mention: Stavropoulos, who was responsible for the legal aspects, and Vigier, who helped Bunche with verbal formulations and later played key roles in the talks with Lebanon and Syria. Also present was General Riley, who oversaw the talks on military issues, including demarcation of the border and details of withdrawal of the forces. Bunche stood at the head of the pyramid; his leadership won him the unquestioning trust of his aides. “Bunche is surrounded by all his expert staff, and they are trying their hardest to make this show a success,” Eytan wrote to Sharett the day after the delegation landed in Rhodes.10 Bunche was determined to succeed on Rhodes. Despite the ostensibly limited goal of the armistice talks, Bunche was no stranger to disappointments and he was aware of the magnitude of the task; for himself, he probably saw the armistice agreements as a sort of closing of the circle. At the beginning of the armistice talks, though, he thought that the starting position would yield an agreement in relatively short order and was quite optimistic.11 In retrospect, this assessment was mistaken and his optimism exaggerated, but the situation in mid-January was indeed conducive to such thoughts. Both Israel and Egypt came to Rhodes to put an end to the state of war between them. Although the two countries had been striving to reach this objective for a long time, the situation on the ground following Operation Horev made it even more critical. Israel was afraid that the British were planning a joint attack with the Iraqi army and the Arab Legion, whose goal was to deprive it of the territory it had conquered in the Negev. In hindsight, we know that the British were not planning such an operation. Nevertheless, their landing of forces in Aqaba in January 1949, after Israel’s downing of RAF aircraft, was seen as threatening, and a series of intelligence reports heightened the concern. The negotiations with Egypt were intended to separate the Egyptians from the British and their military plans and perhaps to minimize the odds of a British attack, since the British would not launch it while Israel was negotiating an armistice under UN auspices. “The talks in Rhodes came at the right time,” wrote Ben-Gurion in his diary.12 Egypt, whose army on the Palestine front was in increasingly bad straits (chiefly because of the arms embargo, which was still in force), had long been seeking a way to stabilize the military situation. The UN resolutions that demanded an Israeli withdrawal in the Negev, which would have allowed it to reclaim the territory it lost in the fighting, encouraged it to enter the armistice
talks. The Egyptian regime was extremely concerned about agreeing to negotiations, both because of the need to explain its motives to the Egyptian public (which depended on Egyptian media reports and was blissfully unaware that its army had been routed) and because the Egyptian leaders had announced day and night that they would never agree to negotiate with Israel. Now they had to find an excuse for their retreat from this principle. The Egyptian leadership did manage to blame the UN in a way that solved these problems. It announced that the Security Council had forced it to relinquish the fruits of its military victory and begin talks with Israel. “During the last months of war in Palestine, it was not Israel that emerged victorious but the Security Council, which functioned as an ally of Israel,” explained Gamal Abd al-Nasser, the future president, who was an officer with the Egyptian forces trapped in Fallujah.13 The Egyptian prime minister feigned innocence to the Amer ican ambassador in Cairo: “To the question, ‘Why has Egypt stopped fighting in Palestine?’ Abd al-Hadi replied: ‘Because the Security Council so decreed.’ ” He repeated the same message in press interviews, and even claimed that the Security Council had ordered Egypt to hold its fire when the Egyptian army was at its peak strength.14 This was the spirit in which Egypt laid the groundwork for the armistice talks, accompanied by a few brief, dry items in the Egyptian press that the delegation had left for Rhodes. These articles emphasized that the talks would be limited to military issues and that the two sides would not speak directly, but only in the format Bernadotte had employed.15 This picture paved Egypt’s path to Rhodes, and the lack of a public reaction encouraged the leadership to move ahead with the talks.
