King Hassan II of Morocco ascended the throne on March 3, 1961, following the death of his father during routine surgery. He had been educated in France, received a law degree in Bordeaux, and is considered thoroughly Westernized, although, like his fellow Moroccans, he desires to assert an authentic Arab identity.
Like his predecessors of the Alawi dynasty, he has always accorded his nation’s Jewish minority the fullest measure of tolerance and equality. In 1985, Jo Ohanna, a Jew from Meknes, a city that has no Jewish community, was elected to the Moroccan parliament. Shimon Levy of Casablanca has been repeatedly reelected as a member of the city council. And David Amar, president of the Moroccan Jewish community since 1956, is a close confidant of the King.
Upon assuming power, Hassan legalized the emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel. The organizational requirements of Jewish emigration created a framework of contacts between Moroccan and Israeli authorities, as well as a climate of trust conducive to cooperation in other fields of central importance to Morocco.
The King has periodically called for a fusion of “Jewish genius and Arab might” in order to accelerate the development of North Africa. In addition, since 1975 Morocco has received unpublicized Israeli aid in fighting the Algerian-supported Polisario guerrillas in the western Sahara.
TWO ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS
Libyan-backed terrorists attempted to assassinate Hassan in July 1971 and again in August 1972. In the summer of 1977, Israeli intelligence services discovered a Libyan plot to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. King Hassan arranged a meeting in Casablanca between the Israeli and Egyptian intelligence chiefs in which the plot by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was revealed.
Sadat’s reaction was two-fold: he launched a retaliatory strike against Libya, and he agreed to send his Deputy Prime Minister, Hassan Tohamey, to Rabat to meet with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan. The Tohamey-Dayan talks became the first step in the road that led to Camp David and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.
HASSAN’S VIEW OF THE PALESTINIAN PROBLEM
In “Breakthrough: A Personal Account of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” the then Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan recounted that King Hassan told him in 1977 that he believed the Palestinian problem to be basically an Arab problem, and should therefore be considered and solved by the Arab countries, and not by Israel or the United States.
He believed that “the Arab states should assume collective responsibility over the Palestinians, maintain supervision over them, and devise security measures which would satisfy Israel.” (A Jordanian-Palestinian federation would constitute a threat to Jordan, according to Hassan.)
The King acknowledged that the territories occupied by Israel were its ultimate guarantee of security, and the relinquishment of that guarantee would necessitate its replacement by mutual security agreements between Israel and the Arab states. He believed that even Syrian President Hafez Assad would ultimately be persuaded to join the pursuit of peace in exchange for his lost territories.
(This belief also provided the justification for Hassan’s deployment of a Moroccan brigade to fight alongside the Syrians in the Golan Heights in 1973.)
‘A MIXED BAG’
Moroccan-Israeli relations have been characterized by veteran Israeli diplomat Gideon Raphael as “a mixed bag of discreet assistance and public hostility, of open participation in the war against Israel and undercover support of its peace efforts.”
By geographic necessity — it is further west than all of Europe — Morocco is less directly involved in Middle East affairs than the eastern Arab states. Although he belongs to the Arab League — King Hassan, in fact, is its chairman — Morocco’s foreign policy is based primarily on regional (North African) considerations rather than on Arab nationalist ideology.
Hassan interprets the 1982 Fez Arab summit resolutions as an implicit recognition of Israel. He reluctantly accepted the chairmanship of the Jerusalem Committee of the Islamic Conference on the grounds that he is a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and de jure head of Islam in Morocco rather than out of any compelling personal conviction.
Hassan is obviously more concerned with Algerian and Libyan-sponsored insurgence against Morocco and Tunisia than he is with the lack of a formal peace treaty between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Nevertheless, the King genuinely desires peace between the Arab states and Israel, and is apparently willing, as Sadat was, to risk his stature in the Arab world for what he considers to be a greater good.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
