The Khartoum Resolutions (1967)

The Khartoum Resolutions are the political and economic declaration issued by the Arab League summit held in Khartoum, Sudan, from 29 August to 1 September 1967, best known for the line that shaped two decades of Arab policy toward Israel: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. The summit met eight weeks after Israel’s decisive victory in the Six-Day War, and its answer to that defeat, delivered as formal state policy rather than street rhetoric, was to rule out any direct settlement with the Jewish state.

Who met, and who stayed away

Delegations from across the Arab League convened in the Sudanese capital, with eight heads of state attending in person, among them Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein, the two rulers whose armies had just been broken and whose territory, Sinai and the West Bank, had just been lost. Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal and the oil-producing Gulf states attended as well, carrying the financial weight the front-line states now needed. Syria’s Baathist government refused to send its head of state, judging the summit likely to compromise too much; the Palestine Liberation Organization, then still a young umbrella body under Ahmad Shukeiri, sent its own delegation and pressed for the hardest possible line. No Israeli or Western government had any role in drafting the text; it was an internal Arab League consensus document, not a negotiated agreement with any outside party.

Why the Arab states gathered

The context was total defeat. In six days that June, Israel had destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian air forces on the ground, captured the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Arab publics knew the event by a different name than the one that stuck in the West: the Naksa, the “setback,” a term chosen to distinguish 1967’s military rout from the earlier and more foundational 1948 defeat. Khartoum was the Arab League’s attempt to decide, as a bloc, whether the catastrophe would push its members toward a negotiated settlement or toward doubling down. It chose the latter, at least in public.

What the resolutions actually said

The political section, agreed on the summit’s final day, laid out the framework in one sentence that has been quoted, and occasionally misquoted, ever since:

“This will be done within the framework of 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.”

Those are the “Three No’s.” The resolutions also affirmed that “the occupied lands are Arab lands” and that recovering them was the responsibility of all Arab states collectively, not Egypt’s or Jordan’s alone. On the economic side, the oil-producing states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya among them, agreed to underwrite the reconstruction of Egypt’s and Jordan’s shattered militaries with ongoing subsidies. In the same breath, the summit quietly ended the brief oil embargo Arab producers had imposed on Western states during the war, judging that withholding oil revenue hurt the Arab economies more than it hurt the West, a practical retreat that got far less attention than the rhetorical “no.”

What happened as a result

Khartoum became the operative Arab League line for the next decade, and it collided almost immediately with the diplomatic track the United Nations was building: UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed that November, called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the war in exchange for peace, a formula whose ambiguity, “territories” rather than “the territories,” became its own decades-long point of dispute, but whose premise, a negotiated peace, was precisely what Khartoum had just ruled out.

The Three No’s did not hold forever, and they broke one state at a time. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem in 1977, signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, and made peace with Israel in 1979, an act for which Egypt was expelled from the Arab League for a decade. Jordan followed openly in 1994 with its own peace treaty. The PLO under Yasser Arafat broke with all three principles at once in the 1993 Oslo Accords, recognizing Israel’s right to exist and entering direct negotiations, even though the underlying PLO Charter calling for Israel’s elimination was never fully rescinded. And in 2020, the Abraham Accords brought the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and, in a detail with some historical irony, Sudan itself, the country that hosted the 1967 summit, into normalized relations with Israel.

Legal status and how it is misused today

The Khartoum Resolutions were never a treaty and carry no binding force in international law; they were a political consensus statement of an Arab League summit, and each government that has since made peace with Israel simply walked away from it. What survives is rhetorical. Rejectionist groups, Hamas among them, still invoke the spirit of the Three No’s to argue that no Arab or Palestinian leader has the standing to recognize Israel at all, treating a 1967 summit communiqué as though it were still governing law more than half a century after most of its signatories abandoned it. The opposite distortion also circulates: some accounts flatten Khartoum into pure maximalism, ignoring that Nasser was already exploring a diplomatic exit through the UN even as his delegation held the public line, and that Jordan’s Hussein maintained long-running secret contacts with Israeli officials throughout the years his government’s declared policy was “no negotiations.” The honest reading is that Khartoum was real, was taken seriously by the governments that signed it, and blocked settlement efforts for years, but it was never the ironclad, eternal Arab consensus that either its defenders or its harshest critics now claim it was.

UN Resolution 242 · Camp David Accords, 1978 · The Oslo Accords · The Abraham Accords, 2020 · Who attacked first, every war