Page 407 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

404 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

states when the conference ended at midday on 6 November contained not a
word about the oil crisis or the predicament of the Netherlands. Instead, it was
wholly taken up with mawkish appeals to the Israelis and Arabs to respect the

resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council in the last week of
October, to return to the cease-fire lines of 22 October and to enter into
negotiations to secure a just and lasting peace between themselves. It ended
with some sickly fudge about the states of the EEC recalling ‘on this occasion
the ties of all kinds which have long linked them to the littoral states of the
south and east of the Mediterranean’.

The signatories of the declaration were pleased to describe it as a ‘first
contribution’ by the EEC ‘to the search for a comprehensive solution’ to the
Arab-Israeli problem, while Home extolled it as a ‘success for the process of
political consultations of the Nine’. In truth, it was something far less grand,
being little more than a pathetic and contemptible attempt by the majority of

the EEC to wriggle out of the obligations inherent in the Treaty of Rome, and
to save themselves from any discomfort that a reduction in oil supplies might
bring. How Israel was to regard such a biased concoction as a ‘contribution’ to
‘a comprehensive solution’ of her conflict with the Arabs defies understanding,

especially as the admonition to the adversaries to retire to the cease-fire lines of
22 October was all too transparently a device to help the Egyptian Third Army
to extricate itself from the trap on the east bank of the Suez Canal into which it
had been forced by the Israelis since that date. It is equally incomprehensible
why a document reeking of servility and pusillanimity should have had any
effect upon the Arabs, other than to confirm them in the contempt in which

they already held the powers of Europe. What other outcome could have been
expected from the Brussels meeting when, in the same week, the Egyptian
foreign minister called upon the British prime minister in London to proffer
reassurances of the continued flow of oil and to receive in return assurances of

an unrevealed nature? Or when, the day before the meeting began, the new
arbiters of Europe’s economic destiny, OAPEC, met in Kuwait and increased
the cut-back in oil production from 10 to 25 per cent, with Yamani driving the
message home with the ominous reminder that ‘if any other European country
tries to supply oil to the Netherlands, we will reduce our oil shipments to them

in an equivalent amount’?
legality of the Arab oil embargo Yewh °penly “ cha,lenge d,e
None of the major Western
United Naticmc • r &°‘ ^el embargo was a direct violation of a

affairs of states ^.ra^On 1965 on the inadmissibility of intervention in the
internadLa 1 ’ fU"her dec>^ation in t97o on the principles of

charter of rhe rt re,at*ons between states in conformity with the

charter of the Untted Nations. Both declarations affirmed in part.
mMcnrpc USe °r enLC0Urage USe economic> political or any other type of
erce another state in order to obtain from it the subordination of the

xercise o its sovereign rights and to secure from it advantages of any kind.