When Hassan II Urged Israel’s Entry Into the Arab League [1/3] |
Long before the Abraham Accords, long before Oslo, and long before Camp David reshaped Middle Eastern geopolitics, Morocco’s King Hassan II had already articulated one of the most extraordinary political ideas of the 20th century: that Israel should be recognized, integrated, and even admitted into the Arab League. What makes this moment extraordinary is not only what he proposed, but when he proposed it.
This proposition – today still shocking for many, and virtually unknown to younger generations – was not made during the diplomatic openings of the 1990s, nor in the hopeful diplomatic climate of the post-Cold War peace efforts, but in 1958-1959, at a private dinner in Lebanon, at a time when merely whispering such an idea could end a political career, while much of the region was still intoxicated with anti-Israel populism.
Well before peace was even part of the regional vocabulary in the 1990s, and years ahead of the traumatic wars that defined Arab political consciousness, Hassan II had already concluded that the Arab world would one day have to confront a simple geopolitical truth: Israel was not going to disappear.
This vision – radical, heretical, and prophetic – is preserved in La Mémoire d’un Roi (The Memory of a King), published by Plon in 1993, in which Hassan II recounts the arc of his political life, his philosophy of statecraft, and his direct role in nearly every Arab-Israeli diplomatic development between the 1950s and 1980s. The book, crafted as a long-form dialogue between Hassan II and journalist Éric Laurent, is unlike any other memoir produced by an Arab ruler.
Structured as a series of extended interviews, it is neither a memoir in the traditional sense nor a political manifesto; it is a window into the mindset of a ruler who believed that reason, not rhetoric, should guide the future of the Arab world. It is not defensive, not propagandistic, and not written to impress foreign allies or domestic constituencies.
Instead, it is the intellectual archive of a monarch who believed that statesmanship demanded lucidity, historical awareness, and freedom from the intoxicating illusions of Arab populism. The book offers page after page of frank, unfiltered analysis. It contains bombshell statements, candid reflections, and political diagnoses that – if uttered today – would still make headlines.
Among the most striking........