A Summit Born from Catastrophe: The Arab World After June 1967
In June 1967, Israel’s military offensive — known to Palestinians and Arabs as the Naksa, the Setback — resulted in the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights in six days. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced for a second time in a generation. The Arab states that had confronted Israel were shattered militarily and politically. It was in this atmosphere of profound loss and humiliation that Arab heads of state convened in Khartoum, Sudan, between 29 August and 1 September 1967 — barely two months after the ceasefire.
The Khartoum summit was not a council of defiant rejectionists plotting another war. It was, as historian Avi Shlaim documents in The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, a gathering of governments grappling with catastrophic defeat, exploring how to recover territory through political means while managing internal pressures not to appear to capitulate. Understanding what was actually decided at Khartoum — and what was not — matters enormously, because the distortion of this record has been used for decades to foreclose Palestinian and Arab diplomatic agency.
What the Resolution Actually Says: Paragraph 3 and the “Three Nos”
The phrase “three nos” — no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel — has been repeated so often in Western and Israeli political discourse that it has acquired the weight of established fact. It is regularly invoked to argue that Arab states, and by extension Palestinians, categorically refused any diplomatic path after 1967, thus placing sole responsibility for the impasse on the Arab side.
The problem is that this formulation does not appear verbatim in the Khartoum Resolution. The actual language of paragraph 3 of the resolution, as preserved in the Arab League archives and reproduced by the Institute for Palestine Studies and the UN’s UNISPAL document collection, reads that the Arab states agreed on “the main principles by which the Arab states abide, namely: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.”
Even taking this language at face value, Shlaim’s analysis in The Iron Wall is instructive: the resolution must be read in its full diplomatic context. The same document explicitly called for “efforts at the international and diplomatic level” to eliminate the consequences of Israeli aggression and to secure withdrawal from occupied Arab territories. The summit authorised continued contact with international parties, including the United Nations, and supported the diplomatic track that would shortly produce UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 1967). This was not the posture of a bloc that had slammed every door.
The Political Logic Behind the Language
Avi Shlaim, drawing on declassified Israeli, American and British records alongside Arab sources, argues in The Iron Wall that the “three nos” functioned primarily as a political safeguard for Arab leaders facing domestic audiences who would not accept any appearance of rewarding aggression. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein — whose countries had lost the most territory — were both, paradoxically, among those most interested in a diplomatic resolution. Within weeks of Khartoum, Hussein was engaged in secret contacts with Israeli officials, and Nasser was signalling to Washington that he could accept a peace framework based on full Israeli withdrawal.
The Institute for Palestine Studies has long contextualised the Khartoum summit within a tradition of Arab diplomatic signalling that Western and Israeli governments frequently chose to misread or ignore. The “nos,” in this reading, were refusals to grant unilateral recognition or sign a separate peace without a guarantee of Palestinian rights and Israeli withdrawal — not a permanent, absolute foreclosure of any settlement.
For Palestinians, the distinction is not academic. The flattening of the Khartoum Resolution into a slogan of Arab intransigence erases the actual Palestinian demand embedded in paragraph 3 itself: “insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.” The people whose land had been occupied in 1948 and again in 1967, who were living under military rule or in refugee camps, were not absent from the text — but they are almost always absent from the Western retelling of it.
A Distortion with Lasting Consequences
The myth of the “three nos” as an absolute, irrational refusal has served a specific narrative function: it positions Israel as the perpetual seeker of peace and the Arab and Palestinian side as congenitally opposed to it. Shlaim’s scholarship, alongside the documentary record held by UNISPAL and the Institute for Palestine Studies, makes clear that the history is far more complicated — and that the Khartoum Resolution of 1967, read carefully, reflects a political world in which Palestinians and Arabs were attempting to assert rights and leverage in the aftermath of a catastrophic military defeat, not simply slamming the door on history.
Recovering that complexity is not a matter of rehabilitating Arab governments of the 1960s. It is a matter of historical accuracy — and of understanding how the suppression of Palestinian political agency has been sustained, in part, by the deliberate misreading of documents like this one.
Sources
- Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Chapter 9 (W. W. Norton, 2000)
- Arab League, Khartoum Resolution full text — Arab League Secretariat, lasportal.org
- UN UNISPAL Document Collection — un.org/unispal
- Institute for Palestine Studies — palestine-studies.org
- UN Security Council Resolution 242 (22 November 1967)
