The Arab League summit in Khartoum closed on September 1, 1967. The final communiqué contained eight points on the war concluded two months prior. The third point became doctrine. It stated the league's collective position: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. The resolution also pledged continued assistance to the “states which have been attacked”—Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—to “ensure the withdrawal of the aggressive Israeli forces.” It was a stance of maximum defiance from a position of profound defeat.
The summit gathered kings and presidents still reeling from the Six-Day War. Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The Arab military reputation lay in ruins. Yet the political atmosphere, fueled by public humiliation and anger, prohibited any appearance of concession. The “three noes” were a political necessity, a public reaffirmation of rejectionism that papered over significant private strategic disagreements. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Libya agreed to provide financial subsidies to Egypt and Jordan, which allowed those front-line states to rebuild militaries without immediately returning to war.
The Khartoum Resolution is often misread as a monolithic, permanent Arab refusal to engage. In practice, it was a brittle public front. Just five years later, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat began the diplomatic maneuvers that would lead to the 1973 war and, eventually, a separate peace with Israel. The resolution provided political cover for behind-the-scenes contacts and interim agreements like the 1970 ceasefire. It was a statement of principle that reality gradually eroded.
Its legacy is one of entrenched public posture. The Khartoum Resolution codified the official Arab position for a generation, making any overt move toward diplomacy a act of betrayal. It placed the Palestinian issue firmly within the framework of Arab national consensus, but a consensus defined by what it was against, not what it was for. The three noes delayed direct negotiations for decades and established the zero-sum rhetoric that still defines the conflict's public discourse, even as private channels and separate peace treaties quietly undermined its absolutism.