BOOKS EDITED BY BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

International Terrorism: Challenge and Response

Terrorism: How the West Can Win

Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu (with Iddo

Netanyahu)

BOOKS WRITTEN BY BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

Fighting Terrorism
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Copyright

The song, “Jerusalem of Gold,” on page 195 is printed by permission of

Naomi Shemer

Warner Books Edition

Copyright ©1993, 2000 by Benjamin Netanyahu
All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.,

Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue,
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: October 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-56476-2
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TO YONI

I grieve for thee, my brother Jonathan;

A great comfort hast thou been to me.
Thy love to me was wonderful….

II SAMUEL 1:26
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CONTENTS

Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Preface
Introduction
1. The Rise of Zionism
2. The Betrayal
3. The Theory of Palestinian Centrality
4. The Reversal of Causality
5. The Trojan Horse
6. Two Kinds of Peace
7. The Wall
8. A Durable Peace
9. The Question of Jewish Power
Chronology
APPENDIXES
A. The Arab-Jewish Agreement at Versailles
B. Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence
C. The League of Nations Mandate 24,1922
D. Ribbentrop Promise to Mufti to Destroy Jewish National Home
E. The PLO Charter
F. Security Council Resolution 242, November 22,1967
G. The Pentagon Plan June 29,1967
H. Security Council Resolution 338, October 22,1973
I. The Phased Plan
Notes
Acknowledgments to A Durable Peace
Acknowledgments to A Place Among the Nations
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LIST OF MAPS

1. Israel and the Arab World

2. Israel’s Relative Size
3. 1920: The Jewish National Home Under British Administration
4. 1920: The Jewish National Home After Creation of Trans Jordan
5. 1947: UN Partition Plan
6. 1949: Armistice Lines After War of Independence
7. 1967: Armistice Lines After Six Day War
8. 1992: Israel Before the Oslo Accords
9. Israel’s Strategic Vulnerability, 1949–1967
10. Israel’s Exposed Shoreline, 1949–1967
11. The Pentagon Plan for Israel’s Security Needs, June 18, 1967
12. 1998: Israel After the Oslo Accords
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PREFACE

Writing anything while you are still in office is a hazardous task. Writing
anything after leaving office can be equally hazardous. For one is supposed
to have the perspective of detachment and introspection to secure the
desired objectivity. I profess at the outset: While I have done a great deal of
thinking since leaving office, I am neither detached nor objective when it
comes to securing the future of the Jewish state. In fact, I plead unabashed
and passionate partisanship in seeking to assure the Jewish future. This is
the conviction that guided me as the Prime Minister of Israel between 1996
and 1999, and this is the conviction that will guide me for the rest of my
life.
The historical imperative of preserving the Jewish state was reinforced
on a visit to China in 1999. The President of China, Jiang Zemin, expressed
to me his great admiration for the legacy of the Jewish people, who
produced such geniuses as Albert Einstein. “The Jewish people and the
Chinese people are two of the oldest civilizations on earth,” he said, “dating
back four thousand and five thousand years respectively.”
I concurred, adding India to the list.
“But there are one or two differences between us,” I said. “For instance,
how many Chinese are there?”
“1.2 billion,” replied Zian Zemin.
“How many Indians are there?” I pressed on.
“About 1 billion.”
“Now how many Jews are there?” I queried.
No answer.
“There are 12 million Jews in the world,” I said.
Several Chinese jaws dropped in the room, understandably, given that
this number could be contained in an enlarged suburb of Beijing.
“Mr. President,” I said, “since the Jews have been around for thousands
of years that is a remarkably low number. Two thousand years ago the Jews
constituted ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire. Today there
should have been 200 million Jews.”
“What happened?” asked the Chinese president.
“Many things happened,” I replied. “But they all boil down to one big
thing. You, the Chinese, kept China; the Indians kept India; but we Jews
lost our land and were dispersed to the four corners of the earth. From this
sprang all our calamities, culminating in our greatest catastrophe in the
twentieth century. This is why for the last two thousand years we have been
trying to retrieve our homeland and re-create our independent state there.”
I was trying to impress upon the Chinese leadership the importance of
refraining from supplying Iran with nuclear weapons technology. That
would jeopardize not merely the modem State of Israel but threaten to wipe
out forever an ancient and admired civilization. (Jiang Zemin assured me
that China was not selling such technology to Iran, something I verified
with our intelligence just in case.)
This, then, is the perspective that guided me as Israel’s Prime Minister
and that ought to guide anyone concerned with the future of the Jewish
State: assuring that the people of Israel have what they need to survive and
thrive in the next millennium, the fifth of their existence. I am convinced of
one thing: The Jewish people will not get another chance. There are only so
many miracles that history can provide a people, and the Jews have had
more than their share. After unparalleled adversity the Jews came back to
life in the modern State of Israel. For better or worse, the Jewish future is
centered on the future of that state. Therefore we must be extra careful not
to toy with Israel’s security or jeopardize its defenses, even as we pursue
peace with our neighbors, for what is at stake is the destiny of an entire
people.
In the long run, what will stand are not the passing praises of those who
seek a quick fix for the Middle East’s problems, but the bulwarks of a
durable peace—one that can be credibly defended by a strong Israel. Any
other kind of peace will not last. Achieving peace treaties with the Arabs is
relatively easy. All you have to do is give in to the Arab demands.
Achieving peace agreements that will stand the test of time is much harder
to do.
This is what I set out to achieve as Prime Minister. I insisted on a secure
peace, stressing the fundamental principle that in the Middle East peace and
security are intertwined. A peace that undermines Israel’s defenses and
leaves unresolved central issues, such as the fate of Jerusalem and the Arab
refugees, is one that is sure to crumble over time. It should be passed over
until a more sustainable, more realistic peace is achieved.
This “stubbornness” in defense of a tough-minded peace did not make
me, nor would it make any leader of Israel, popular in the diplomatic and
press salons of the world. But it is the right policy and it is worth fighting
for. If one possesses a millennial perspective, the slings and arrows of
criticism are meaningless compared to the awesome responsibility of
protecting the Jewish people and their one and only state.
I am confident that such persistence will pay off. The Jewish people
have shown a remarkable capacity to overcome hardship, and surely they
have the will and intelligence to pursue a genuine peace. The second half of
the twentieth century offers indubitable proof of this.

Neither the present nor the future are free of problems. But they pale
compared to those that faced the Jewish people in the ghettos of Europe just
a few decades ago. This tells us how far the Jewish people have traveled
and it fires our imagination and infuses us with hope as we begin the next
fifty years.
This was the central fact of Jewish existence as Israel celebrated its first
half-century. In the ancient Jewish traditions, jubilees were a time for both
celebration and reflection. Indeed, there is much to celebrate. Half a century
ago, at the close of World War II, it was not clear at all that the Jewish
people would survive. A third of all Jews were consumed in the fires of the
Holocaust, and the remaining two-thirds faced the dual threat of persecution
and relentless assimilation. Stalin targeted the Jews of the Soviet Union as
class enemies, and the Jews of America and Europe were rapidly embracing
assimilation and intermarriage. Absent a vital center, Jewish numbers would
have shrunk further, and the Jewish people, after four millennia of
unparalleled struggle for their place under the sun, would have finally
yielded to the forces of history and disappeared.
This has not happened. The pivotal change in Jewish destiny occurred
with the founding of the Jewish state. This seminal event of reestablishing
Jewish sovereignty in the ancient Jewish homeland was preceded by nearly
a hundred years of renewed Jewish settlement activity in the Holy Land and
by over fifty years of Zionist agitation, heralded by the prophetic and
inspired genius of Theodor Herzl. Indeed, the Jewish state changed
everything for the Jewish people. From a fledgling beachhead on the
Mediterranean coast, struggling to survive the Arab onslaughts aimed at
exterminating the Jewish presence in the land, the Jews were able to repel
the attack; build a state; create one of the world’s finest armies; defeat the
much larger Arab forces in successive wars forced on Israel; unite their
ancient capital, Jerusalem; bring in millions of immigrants and refugees,
including a million beleaguered Jews from the former Soviet Union and the
imperiled Jewish community of Ethiopia; revive an ancient language; build
an astonishing scientific and technological capability; develop the most
thriving economy in the Middle East, and one of the most advanced in the
world; create a vibrant cultural life, which includes some of the leading
artists and musicians of the world; and maintain a staunchly democratic
ethos amidst a sea of despotic regimes.
By any criteria, these achievements are nothing short of miraculous. But
they are all subsumed under the one greater accomplishment: The Jewish
people, after long centuries of exile, has once again seized control over its
destiny. And within the next decade or two it will realize the dream of ages,
the Ingathering of the Exiles. For the first time since the era of the Second
Temple two thousand years ago, the majority of the Jewish people will live
in the Jewish homeland. This is a momentous development, the one
guarantor of the Jewish future. For it is also true that in the last fifty years, a
significant threat to Jewish survival has been the accelerating rate of
intermarriage, assimilation, and loss of identity among Jews of the
Diaspora, especially the Jews of the West. While the Jewish population of
Israel grew from 600,000 in 1948 to five million in 2000, the population of
American Jewry stayed flat and is beginning to show alarming signs of
steady decline. In Israel itself the threat of assimilation is nonexistent. And
to the extent that Jewish identity has been maintained and strengthened in
important parts of American Jewry, this is due to the strong identification
that these Jews have with the State of Israel. In simple terms, the future of
the Jewish people depends on the future of the Jewish state.
For the Jewish people, therefore, the history of the twentieth century
may be summed up thus: If there had been a Jewish state in the first half of
the century, there would have been no Holocaust. And if there had not been
a Jewish state after the Holocaust, there would have been no Jewish future.
The State of Israel is not only the repository of the millennial Jewish hopes
for redemption; it is also the one practical instrument for assuring Jewish
survival.
Assuring that survival is not free of problems. Israel has yet to complete
the circle of peace around its borders, a peace that must be based on
security if it is to last. I view this as the first task facing the country, and any
prime minister must dedicate himself to its completion. This of course does
not depend on Israel alone, but on the willingness of its Arab neighbors to
forge a true compromise with Israel and genuinely accept its right to exist.
Perhaps the most difficult agreements to be completed are the Oslo Accords
with the Palestinians. This will require the Palestinians to keep their
commitments, especially to fight terror, and Israel to maintain adequate
security defenses. Much of this book was written before the Oslo Accords,
and I have amended and added a few segments to indicate how I believe the
Oslo process could be completed so as to provide Israel with peace and
security.
During my three years as Prime Minister (1996–1999), I firmly pursued
these principles for a realistic peace, despite a torrent of criticism and abuse
from those who cavalierly refuse to understand that in the volatile Middle
East, peace without security is a sham. Such shortsightedness ought not to
deflect Israel from pursuing a lasting peace that will endure not a flicker of
time but for generations to come.
Assuring its security will also require Israel to address new threats on
the horizon, presented by radical regimes developing fearsome weapons
and the means to deliver them. Even if Israel completes the circle of peace
with its immediate neighbors, and it should strive to do so, this threat will
loom large in the coming decades. What if Iraq or Iran detonates nuclear
devices? This will send infinitely greater Shockwaves around the world
than the addition of India and Pakistan to the league of nuclear nations. The
possession of atomic bombs by Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollas of Teheran
is not merely a mortal threat to Israel’s existence. It is a threat to the peace
of the world. The community of responsible nations will have to make
every effort to contain or eliminate this threat. But surely for Israelis, once
again they recognize that the one guarantor of their survival against these
dangers is their own strength and capacity to deter and punish aggression
directed against the state.
The transformation of the Jewish condition from one of utter
powerlessness to one of effective self-defense marks the great change that
the founding of Israel introduced into Jewish life, in fact making that life
possible. As Herzl and the founding fathers of Zionism foresaw, the
founding of the Jewish state would not necessarily stop the attacks on the
Jewish people, but would assuredly give the Jews the means to resist and
repel those attacks.
Naturally, such a momentous change in the life of a nation does not
occur without internal turbulence and turmoil. Israel is undergoing the
adjustment pains as it moves from adolescence to maturity. If initially its
governing socialist class wanted to strait-jacket all Israelis into one
European socialist prototype, they have had a hard time accepting the fact
that this will not happen, that the currents of life and the natural desire for
unrestricted diversity and pluralism are more powerful than any rigid
ideological construct. Israel after half a century is a rich tapestry of Jews
from a hundred lands, each bringing to the national fabric its own unique
strands of culture, folklore, and memory. Modern Hebrew is laced with
Russian, Arabic, and English slang, and with expressions liberally
borrowed from the Jews of Poland and Morocco alike. Each community
affects the other, creating a dynamic synthesis that enhances the national
culture. There are of course some lingering sharp divides, as between
Israel’s Jewish majority and its non-Jewish minority and, in the Jewish
population, between the secular majority and an ultra-orthodox minority. It
takes a crisis in the Persian Gulf to remind Israelis that inflying Iraqi
missiles do not distinguish between religious and non-religious Jews, and,
in fact, between any of the groups that make up Israel’s population. Yet I
believe that despite the inevitable frictions that accompany this
extraordinary maturation of an immigrant nation, the forces that unite the
people of Israel are infinitely greater than those that divide them: a common
past in a sacred ancestral homeland, and a millennial desire to return to this
land and forge in it a common future.
This of course is not the picture of Israel presented by many observers,
as Israel celebrated its jubilee. The foreign press amplified the Israeli press,
which regularly amplifies the grievances of the old elites that complain of
giving way to the new realities. This chorus of gloom is an episodic and
irrelevant footnote in the larger tale of Jewish revival in the last fifty years.
After all that we have struggled against, and all that we have achieved, I
have no doubt that Israel can meet with equal success the remaining
challenges of external and internal peace.
Israel at the start of the twenty-first century is undoubtedly one of the
greatest success stories of the twentieth century. Communism, fascism,
socialism, and so many other “isms” have crumbled into dust. But Zionism,
the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, the one true
liberation movement amidst so many false ones, has far from crumbled. It
has fended off powerful foes, and is on the verge of creating the second
most successful technological society on earth, the “Silicon Wadi,” as it is
becoming known. In a profound sense, Zionism has achieved its central
purpose of securing Jewish independence in the Jewish land, and it can look
to the future and its challenges with confidence.
It can do so with the remarkable kinship and support of the American
people. The friendship of the United States of America has been a
cornerstone of Israel’s modern history. It is a partnership based on common
values and common ideals, and it remains constant. The New York Times,
which affords ample space for the discontent of the Israeli left, expressed in
noteworthy honesty its surprise at a Jubilee year poll commissioned by the
newspaper, which showed that instead of waning, American support for
Israel had reached a twenty-year high. Non-Jewish Americans from every
part of that great land identified with Israel and not with its adversaries.
They deeply valued the special relationship between Israel and the United
States. Many thought of Israel as the biblical promised land upon which
America was modeled. They saw Jerusalem as the original city on the hill
and strongly believed that it must never be divided again. They viewed
Israel’s struggle as one of a solitary democracy surrounded by dictatorships,
resolutely fighting terrorism. Beyond the swirl of daily events and the often
tendentious coverage of Israeli affairs, this is what emerges in the American
mind when the name of Israel is evoked. It need not surprise anyone for a
simple reason: It is true.
Yet the truth has often eluded discussions about modern Israel. Israel has
been portrayed as an aggressive obstacle to peace, a force bent on
physically and economically colonizing its neighbors, a twister and bender
of the Jewish soul. I believe that all of these slanders, like so many others
that afflicted the Jewish people down the ages, will also pass in due time. I
wrote this book not only to help accelerate their demise, but to express my
boundless faith in the Jewish future, my unreserved confidence that the last
fifty years have shown that the Jewish people will survive, and that against
all obstacles the Jewish state will prevail.

During the Gulf War, Israel sustained thirty-nine Scud missile attacks
that rained down on its cities. Deafening sirens warned Israelis to don their
gas masks in the tense minutes as the missiles headed for their targets. In
the course of one such alert I was being interviewed, with a gas mask on, at
the CNN television headquarters in Jerusalem. After the alert subsided, the
CNN bureau chief, evidently moved by the experience, asked me to show
the network’s viewers Israel’s position on the map of the Middle East.
“Show them what you showed me in your office the other day,” he said,
producing a map of the Middle East in front of the camera.
“Here’s the Arab world,” I said, “walking” across the map with my
hands open wide. It took me a number of handbreadths to span the twenty-
one Arab countries.
“And here is Israel,” I added, easily covering it with my thumb.
The results of this simple demonstration were astonishing. For months
after the war, I received hundreds of letters from around the world
expressing sympathy and support for Israel. But the one thing that
repeatedly appeared in many of those letters was the shock experienced by
viewers from as far afield as Minnesota and Australia concerning the walk I
took across the map. One viewer wrote: “Most Americans, myself included,
have little real knowledge of the kind of danger and turmoil that confronts
your part of the world.” But when presented with the simple geographic
facts, she said, “suddenly the picture came into focus for me—and I think
for many Americans.” In other interviews I used the opportunity to spell out
the basic facts of Israel’s predicament, prompting a viewer from Britain to
confess that this “changed my way of thinking…. I went to the library to
find out more about the Arab-Israeli problem and realized I knew very little
about it.” A third said these facts represented “the first real view I’ve had of
the Jewish side to all this…. I began to feel with you.” 1 This was the refrain
I heard again and again as the letters filled one binder, then a second, then a
third.
I had been aware of the general lack of familiarity with the facts of
Israel’s physical circumstances, but this torrent of mail brought home to me,
as nothing else had, the gaping void in the world’s knowledge of my
country and its struggle. Here were people who clearly wished Israel well,
yet who did not know something so elementary as the fact that the Arab
world is more than five hundred times the size of the Jewish state. (See
Maps 1 and 2.) They did not realize that the Israel they were incessantly
hearing about and seeing every day on their television screens is all of forty
miles wide (including the West Bank), and that if it were to give up the
entire West Bank, it would be ten miles wide.
If an image of a country, its scenery, and its history is repeatedly
implanted in people’s minds, it tends to assume overblown dimensions.
Contrary to the common view, this is not just the result of the distorting
prism of television. Sunday-school instruction a hundred years ago had a
similar effect. Here is what Mark Twain wrote of his visit to the Holy Land
in 1869:

I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have

somehow absorbed concerning Palestine…. I have got everything
in Palestine on too large a scale. Some of my ideas were wild
enough. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague
suggestion of a country as large as the United States…. I suppose it
was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large
a history. 2
These lingering misimpressions are not limited to the geographic
realities of Israel’s existence. They are matched by a widespread lack of
familiarity with the political and historical circumstances of Israel’s birth
and its efforts to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. Twain, at least,
knew the history of the land in considerable detail, and he was up to date on
the contemporary conditions of the Jewish people. This is not the case with
many of those who shape, and receive, opinions about Israel today.
Over the last twenty-five years, since my days as an Israeli student in an
American university following the Yom Kippur War, I have had no choice
but to engage in the Sisyphean labor of trying to roll back this boulder of
ignorance, which has grown increasingly heavy each year. For with each
passing season, the facts of Israel’s emergence as a modern state, although
readily ascertainable in any library, recede further and further from memory.
What has been inserted in their place is a facile misrepresentation of reality.
Moreover, there has been a growing tendency in the United States and in
the West to use this distorted view of Israel to explain away the region’s
complicated conflicts. Many people have come to believe that all the
turbulence of the Middle East is somehow associated with the Jewish state.
This is dangerous on two counts: It is losing Israel’s vitally needed support
abroad, and it has skewed Western policy away from a sober appraisal of
Middle Eastern politics and of the danger that this region’s endemic
instability poses for the peace of the world.
This book is an attempt to restore to public awareness what were once
evident truths to all fair-minded students of the region. I have tried to focus
on the main assumptions concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict and to analyze
their truthfulness. I have also concentrated on Israel’s current predicament
—its position in the world, its internal administration, and its relationship to
the Jewish people worldwide—which is often glossed over in public
discourse. Though I have used available historical material, I do not intend
this to be a comprehensive chronicle of events. Nor is this a personal
narrative, notwithstanding the references to my family that appear in the
text; in its own way, each Israeli household tells the story of Zionism, the
movement for Jewish statehood, and gives testimony to its unfolding saga.
In the same vein, I have included experiences from my military service,
diplomatic postings, and work in government that can help the reader better
understand why many Israelis have come to hold views similar to my own.
The fact that they do hold such views may have been obscured by the
victory of the opposition Labor party in the 1992 elections over the Likud
government, in which I served, and by the vocal opposition from the left to
my own government, which came into power in 1996. The ebb and flow of
Israeli politics creates an impression of a great divide in Israel over every
aspect of national life. Nevertheless, the differences that divide Israelis on
political matters are dwarfed by the enormous areas of agreement that bind
them together. The attentive reader will find that these disagreements over
policy represent only a small part of what is covered in this book. On most
of the subjects, I believe my approach is representative of the views of the
majority of Israelis, wherever they fall on the political spectrum.
I write as an Israeli who wishes to see a secure Israel at peace with its
neighbors, and who profoundly believes that peace cannot be conjured up
out of vapid pronouncements. Unless it is built on a foundation of truth,
peace will founder on the jagged rocks of Middle Eastern realities. Indeed,
the Arab world’s main weapon in its war against the Jewish National Home
has been the weapon of untruth. For many people around the world, and for
some in Israel itself, the fundamental facts of this conflict have been
distorted and obfuscated—about the nature of Zionism, the justice of its
cause, the sources of the Arabs’ intractable hostility to the Jewish state, and
the barriers that have locked peace out of a violent region.
The Jewish people has had to contend with defamation for generations.
But the scale of this century’s slanders against it and against Israel, their
reach, effectiveness, and devastating consequences, have far exceeded
anything seen before. Nevertheless, I am convinced that these slanders can
be refuted and the battle for truth can be won—that open-minded people
can tell the difference between the endless calumnies leveled against the
Jewish state and the unvarnished truth, when the facts are presented before
them.
When the battle for truth is won, it will open the way for an enduring
peace between Arab and Jew. That such a peace can be achieved I have no
doubt. It will necessitate an understanding of the special conditions required
to sustain peaceful relations in the Middle East. I have attempted to spell
out what such a peace would be like, and what changes are needed to
produce it—changes in Western policies toward the region, in Arab
approaches to Israel, and in Israel’s own attitudes.
We are entering a historical period that portends both threat and promise.
The old order has collapsed, and the new one is far from established. The
final guarantor of the viability of a small nation in such times of turbulence
is its capacity to direct its own destiny, something that has eluded the
Jewish people during its long centuries of exile. Restoring that capacity is
the central task of the Jewish people today.
No one yet knows what awaits the Jews in the twenty-first century, but
we must make every effort to ensure that it is better than what befell them
in the twentieth, the century of the Holocaust. The rebirth of Israel, its
development and empowerment, is ultimately the only assurance that such
will be the case. More is at stake than the fate of the Jewish people alone.
Since biblical times civilization has been riveted by the odyssey of the
Jews. If after all their fearful travails the Jewish people will have rebuilt a
permanent and secure home in their ancient corner of the earth, this will
surely give meaning and hope to all of humanity.
1. Israel and the Arab World
2. Israel’s Relative Size

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Introduction

The reemergence of the Jews as a sovereign nation is an unprecedented

event in the history of mankind. Yet for all its uniqueness, one cannot truly
understand the struggle of the Jewish people to bring the State of Israel into
existence in isolation from the universal longings of nations to be free. The
rise of the Zionist movement to restore a Jewish state can be comprehended
only with reference to the more universal conflicts between nations and
empires, between demands for self-determination and the supranational
ideologies of colonialism and Communism that have characterized the
history of the last two centuries. It is for this reason that the cataclysmic
events at the close of the twentieth century will have a profound impact on
Israel’s future.
Seldom has the world witnessed such a spectacular disintegration as that
of the Soviet Union. Shredded to confetti are the Soviet dreams of global
grandeur to be acquired through the assimilation of provinces from Eastern
Europe to Latin America. Equally remarkable has been the evaporation of
the belief in Communism as the great organizing principle for world order
and human justice—a principle in which millions had vested a faith
bordering on the religious. Such a dual collapse of the greatest empire in
history (in terms of territory) and the greatest “church” in history (in terms
of the number of people under its sway) cannot occur without unleashing
political tidal waves that will wash over every nation and state in the world.
It will be impossible to make any sense of events without paying due
attention to the unfolding search for a new organizing principle, or
principles, with which to assist in settling an unsettled world. Obviously,
the focus of this search will first be on the newly liberated Soviet republics
and the countries of the former Communist bloc. But the arrangements that
are devised to meet the needs of these newly freed peoples will have far-
reaching consequences for the rest of the world and for the ways in which it
will resolve its various disputes.
In the search for a new order, the international community is going back,
almost against its will, to where it was before it was so rudely interrupted
by the rise of Communism. For the spread of Soviet totalitarianism and the
resulting Cold War was a glacier that buried beneath itself, in a state of
invisible but perfect preservation, many of the great unresolved problems of
the nineteenth century. Of course, to some the nineteenth century did not
seem problematic at all. After the decisive defeat of Napoleon in 1815, it
was perhaps the most peaceful century in two millennia—since the Pax
Romana. The world was nicely divided up among rival empires: no major
wars, no major calamities. But underneath the calm surface of empire there
was great ferment. Historical tribal groupings, regional duchies, and
medieval city-states were coalescing into nations across Europe, and
millions of people were moving from the hinterland to the rapidly
industrializing and politically conscious metropolises, processes that were
to ripple from Europe into Asia and Africa in our own century.
The rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century clashed with the world
order of the day, and the resultant national uprisings were summarily put
down in 1848, the brief Spring of Nations. But when the old order finally
did collapse after World War I, the various and often competing demands of
nations for self-determination, and the problem of nationalism as a whole,
required an immediate solution. Thus, following their victory in World War
I, the Allied powers convened to launch a “new world order,” signing the
Treaty of Versailles, establishing the League of Nations, and promulgating
President Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination.
The Versailles Conference was actually only the first in a seemingly
interminable series of international conferences held between 1919 and
1923 to determine the “outcome” of World War I. Britain’s prime minister,
David Lloyd George, one of the chief architects of the postwar settlement,
himself attended no fewer than thirty-three such conferences, the most
significant of which (for the Jews) were Versailles (beginning in January
1919), the First Conference of London (February 1920), the San Remo
Conference in Italy (April 1920), and the Sèvres Conference in France
(August 1920). 1 For simplicity, I will refer to the decisions taken by the
nations of the world at these various conferences as the Versailles
settlement.
Versailles and the series of conferences that followed it produced a
blueprint, however imperfect, for determining who got what and why. It
was generally predicated on Wilson’s premise that distinct national groups
were entitled to countries of their own and to the freedom to pursue their
own destinies according to their own lights. In some cases, as in what
became Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, several nations were clustered
together in a single state where this was deemed practicable. But such cases
were more the exception than the rule. Thus, the Baltic nations of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania, each with a unique language, history, and culture,
received independent national domains. So did Poland, which for over a
century had been divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. So did
Hungary, which like Czechoslovakia had hitherto been controlled by the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the same token, Armenia, Georgia, and
Azerbaijan were supposed to be free from the Russian yoke. Largely Greek
portions of western Anatolia were to be transferred to Greece, Albania was
to be given independence, and Kurdistan was to be granted autonomy. For
the first time, Australia, Canada, and South Africa received recognition as
sovereign nations. And similar recognition was also accorded to one more
nation: the Jews. 2
The case of the Jews was unique because, unlike the other peoples, they
were a scattered nation, exiled for many centuries from their homeland. But
this in no way affected the judgment of the civilized world at the beginning
of this century that the Jews were entitled to a land of their own. Moreover,
it was widely recognized that they were entitled to restore their national life
in their ancient homeland, Palestine, * which up to 1918 was controlled by
the crumbling Ottoman Empire. If anything, the tragic dispersion of the
Jews through the centuries strengthened rather than diminished the belief
that they deserved a state of their own—and an end to their wanderings.
Zionism was accorded the kind of consideration given to other national
movements seeking to realize their national goals.
Now that the ice of the Cold War has melted, the world of Versailles that
was buried underneath is being revealed once again. The tenets of Versailles
are being dusted off, its arrangements reinstated, and its unsolved problems
(as in the Balkans) are erupting, as though the intervening century had not
intervened. Baltic independence has been restored, as has the freedom
Versailles promised to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. The
passage of time appears to have made little difference. Even the much-
celebrated and anticipated monetary union of Western Europe, meant by
some to erase national allegiance, shows no sign of achieving such a radical
shift away from basic national loyalties. The relevance of nationalism as a
central driving force in global affairs is being demonstrated daily, as is the
durability of many, though not all, of the arrangements conceived at the
beginning of the century in response to the demands for independence of
diverse peoples. Most of these arrangements have endured and gained the
world’s acceptance.
But this has not been the case with the Jewish national restoration. For
what was accepted at Versailles as a just solution to the question of Jewish
nationhood is today shunned by governments and chancellories the world
over. They accept, most of them, that the Jewish people is entitled to a state.
But they reject the Versailles conception of the size and viability of that
domain, preferring to toss the Jews a scrap at best from the original
offering. The promise of Versailles to the Jewish people was that it would
be allowed to build a nation in the land of Palestine—understood then to
comprise both sides of the Jordan River (see Map 3). This area, now
referred to as Mandatory Palestine (the area in which Britain was charged in
1920 to secure a Jewish national home), included the territory of the
present-day states of Jordan and Israel. In fact, many people now argue that
the Jews do not deserve even 20 percent of this territory (that is, present-
day Israel, including the West Bank), and they demand that the Jewish
people be satisfied with a mere 15 percent of the original Mandate (Israel
minus the West Bank, which comprises the heart of the country). This
would leave the Jews with a state ten miles wide, its cities crowded along
the Mediterranean, with radical leaders peering down at them from the
Samarian and Judean mountains that dominated the country. All that would
be left of the Versailles promise to the Jewish people, of a small but
nonetheless viable country capable of accommodating fifteen million Jews
and their descendants, would be a truncated ghetto-state squeezed onto a
narrow shoreline.
What a curious transformation: Versailles promised the Jewish people a
national home in its historic land, five times the size of the present-day
State of Israel. This promise was given as a result of the universal
recognition of the Jews’ right to be restored to the land from which they had
been forcibly exiled, a recognition reinforced by the knowledge of the
extent of Jewish suffering over the centuries as a result of that exile. No one
gave more eloquent expression to this direct relationship between the
removal of the Jews from their land and their subsequent suffering than
Lord Byron in his melancholy “Hebrew Melodies,” and at Versailles the
whole world echoed his sentiments.
Yet today, nearly eighty years after Versailles, after the destruction of six
million Jews in the Holocaust, a horror that Byron could not possibly have
imagined, and after five wars launched by the Arabs to annihilate the
survivors who had gathered in a fraction of the land promised to the Jews,
the Jewish people are now being told that this is still too much. Worse, they
are told that the desire to have a country not ten but forty miles wide is
proof that they are expansionist, aggressive, and unreasonable.
How is it that Zionism, which enjoyed such universal goodwill at the
beginning of the century, is under such relentless attack at its close? How is
it that a movement that was enthusiastically supported by the leading
statesmen of the day, such as Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George,
Georges Clemenceau, and Tornáš Masaryk, has come under increasing
criticism and pressure from today’s world leaders? How is it that the very
word Zionist, once proudly espoused by Christian and Jew alike, has
acquired an odious or at least suspect connotation? How did these
transformations come about? To answer these questions, we must examine
Zionism’s spectacular rise, assisted by the foremost powers of the world,
and its equally spectacular betrayal by these very powers.
OceanofPDF.com
1

THE RISE OF
ZIONISM

In the autumn of 1895, Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent of the

influential Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, called on his friend, the
eminent writer Max Nordau. Herzl wanted to hear Nordau’s reaction to his
thesis that the Jews of Europe were being placed in unprecedented danger
by the rise of anti-Semitism. This would produce Jewish activists for
Communism, he suspected, and further grist for the anti-Semites. Such
developments, Herzl believed, would lead to catastrophe, not only for the
Jews but for Europe as a whole. The only solution was the immediate
establishment of a Jewish state and the exodus of the persecuted Jews to it.
Herzl was candid with Nordau about the reception that established
quarters of European Jewry were giving his ideas. One of his friends had
suggested that he explain his project to Nordau because Nordau was a
psychiatrist. “Schiff says that I’m insane,” Herzl said, leaving the obvious
question unasked. Nordau, who had written extensively about the decline of
European civilization, turned to his friend and said, “If you are mad, then I
am mad as well. I’m behind you, and you can count on me.” 1
Herzl’s recruitment of Nordau began a unique partnership between two
of Europe’s leading Jewish intellectuals, combining prophetic genius with
pragmatic purpose, which was to found political Zionism, the movement
that revolutionized modern Jewish history. To these men, Mount Zion in the
heart of Jerusalem symbolized the reestablishment of a Jewish state in
which the scattered Jewish people would reassemble and begin anew its
national life. Herzl’s Zionism, of course, had many antecedents, from the
continuous longings of Jews since ancient times to restore their sovereign
life in their homeland, to the aspirations for national salvation of Rabbi
Yehudah Alkalai in Serbia of the 1840s and of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer
in Prussia in the 1860s, to the yearnings for Jewish redemption of the
secularist Moses Hess. Hess had begun his quest by inventing Communism,
which he instilled in his ungrateful student Karl Marx, only to end up
discarding it in favor of the idea of a Jewish national home. 2
Above all, Herzl’s Zionism was preceded by the Jewish national
movement that emerged in Russia in the 1880s under the leadership of M.
L. Lillienblum and Leo Pinsker. Pinsker’s short but powerful tract, Auto-
Emancipation, published in 1882, one year after a wave of pogroms in
Russia, touched on most of the major themes that Herzl later developed. It
galvanized the dormant Jewish national consciousness in a large segment of
Russian Jewry, and it made a mass movement of the drive toward
settlement in Palestine that had begun as a trickle around 1800. Herzl had
not read Pinsker before he wrote The Jewish State in 1896, but he arrived at
the same conclusions independently, much as in the seventeenth century
Leibniz and Newton had both invented calculus without knowledge of each
other’s work. Nor did Herzl know, when he put forth his ideas, that a fertile
field had already been prepared to receive them in the Jewish communities
of Eastern Europe. But he soon became acquainted with this movement as
his ideas reverberated throughout the Jewish world.
Yet Herzl was unlike any Jewish idealist or dreamer before him.
Prompted into action by the spectacle of the anti-Semitic Dreyfus trial in
Paris in 1894, which he covered as a reporter, Herzl was soon able to offer a
concrete program to solve a real problem: a series of practical steps to
establish a modern Jewish nation-state in Palestine as a haven and a home
for the millions of Jews whose life in Europe, Herzl knew, was rapidly
drawing to a disastrous end. Herzl sought to obtain commitments from the
leading powers of the world to support an autonomous Jewish settlement in
Palestine, to be protected by its own military force. He sought to harness
Jewish financial resources around the world to this goal, and he founded the
Jewish Colonial Trust (today Israel’s Bank Leumi) and the Jewish National
Fund for the purchase and restoration of the Land of Israel.
It was the political nature of Herzl’s version of the age-old Jewish dream
of returning to the land that ignited the imagination of millions of Jews and
non-Jews around the world. One of the innumerable spirits moved to action
by Herzl’s message was my grandfather Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, who
was converted to Zionism as a youth in the 1890s and became one of its
foremost orators, spreading its message to Jews from Siberia to Minnesota.
Later, in 1920, he followed his own exhortations and, sailing from Trieste to
Jaffa, took his large family to settle in Palestine. I have a photograph of him
as a delegate to one of the early Zionist Congresses originated by Herzl.
The photo is from the congress of 1907, one of the first to be convened after
Herzl’s premature death. For my grandfather, then a young man of twenty-
five, this was the first congress. Not so for Chaim Weizmann, who later led
the liberal General Zionists and who would become the first president of
Israel; nor for the gifted author and orator Vladimir Jabotinsky, who later
led the Revisionist movement in the campaign for Jewish independence
under the British Mandate. Over the next three decades these two men were
to clash over the destiny and direction of the Zionist movement, but in 1907
they were still united on many of the issues. The congress drew not only
political activists; Haim Nahman Bialik, the great Hebrew poet of modern
times, attended the same gathering.
Such was the brilliance and power of Herzl’s idea that within a few
years many of the best Jewish writers, scholars, and artists in Europe had
dedicated themselves to the cause—winning sympathizers in every civilized
nation and in every humane government, founding the institutions of the
Jewish national government, and inspiring the mass resettlement of the
barren and broken Jewish homeland.
Initially, Herzl found greater receptiveness among non-Jews than among
his own people. He succeeded, for example, in obtaining an audience with
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. (It would perhaps be easier today for a
private person from an unimportant country to get an audience with the
leader of China than it was for a young Jewish journalist to receive an
audience with the Kaiser a hundred years ago.) Herzl’s secret was that he
was the first Jew in modern times to rediscover the art of politics and the
idea of cohering interests. To the Kaiser he described Zionism as a plan that
would not only divert the energy of some of Germany’s young radicals but
create a Jewish protectorate allied with Germany at the crossroads of the
Middle East, thus opening a pathway to the East for the Kaiser. (Herzl made
the case for German sponsorship of Zionism on the basis of political gain
for Germany, but the Kaiser was also interested in ridding his realm of
some of its “radicals.”) Appealing again to self-interest, Herzl was able to
secure another unimaginable audience with a world potentate of the day,
this time with the Ottoman sultan, in Constantinople in May 1901. Invoking
the story of Androcles, who removed the incapacitating thorn from the
lion’s paw, Herzl told the bankrupt sultan: “His Majesty is the lion, perhaps
I am Androcles, and perhaps there is a thorn that needs pulling out. The
thorn, as I see it, is your public debt.” And this thorn Herzl proposed to
remove with the help of the great Jewish financiers. 3
The remarkable speed with which world leaders hastened to give a
hearing to Herzl’s unfamiliar, fledgling cause demonstrates the success of
his approach and the power of his personality. By October 1898, only a year
after Zionism had made its debut at the First Zionist Congress, he had met
with the Kaiser three times.
The receptivity that the great courts of the day accorded him in no way
blinded Herzl to the primacy of winning Jewish adherents to Zionism. After
Nordau, his greatest conquest among Jewish intellectuals was the celebrated
English writer Israel Zangwill, who used his talents and influence to spread
the creed of Zionism in Britain, which at the time was the foremost world
power. Yet his most fervent support came not from the comfortable Jewish
salons of Central and Western Europe but from the multitudes of
impoverished Jews in the East—in Poland and Russia. There he found an
emerging Jewish intelligentsia that embraced Zionism with the enthusiasm
of youth, rebelling as they were against the cloistered ghettos in which most
of their people still lived.
Herzl began his public campaign when he was thirty-six years old. He
died only eight years later, at the age of forty-four. But in those brief eight
years he wrought a revolution without parallel in the history of nations.
Indeed, Herzl’s clairvoyance was anything but mad. Within five decades,
both the horror and the triumph of his stunning vision had come to pass.
The separate anti-Semitic fires were collected into one vast conflagration
that destroyed the millennia-old Jewish communities of Europe. At the
same time the Jewish people, again precisely as Herzl foresaw, stood on the
threshold of the creation of the State of Israel.
Why was international opinion so ready to receive Herzl’s ideas? At the
beginning of the twentieth century, the widespread support for Zionism in
the leading countries of the world was grounded in a view of the Jews that
had developed in the wake of the European Enlightenment two centuries
earlier, a movement that stressed the natural rights and liberties of all
mankind. Many, though by no means all, of the Enlightenment’s leading
thinkers (Voltaire being a conspicuous exception) believed that the Jews had
been unjustly condemned to suffer an unparalleled deprivation of these
rights, with all the misery that this deprivation entailed; hence the Jewish
people were entitled to be reinstated to a position of dignity and equality
among the nations.
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of so many of the most
powerful ideas of the Enlightenment, who put his finger on the uniqueness
of the Jewish situation:

The Jews present us with an outstanding spectacle: the laws of

Numa, Lycurgus, and Solon are dead; the far more ancient ones of
Moses are still alive. Athens, Sparta and Rome have perished and
their people have vanished from the earth; though destroyed, Zion
has not lost her children. They mingle with all nations but are not
lost among them; they no longer have their leaders, yet they are still
a nation; they no longer have a country, and yet they are still
citizens. 4

The solution to the problem of the Jews initially seemed obvious. The
Jews would be granted civic and religious equality in the societies in which
they lived. In America, where a new society was being created according to
the principles of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson wrote with considerable
satisfaction that he was “happy in the restoration of the Jews to their social
rights.” 5 Similar advances were being made in Europe. The Jewish problem
was well on the way to being solved.
Or was it? Rousseau, at once arch-revolutionary and arch-skeptic, also
sounded one of the earliest chords of skepticism. After the legacy of
“tyranny practiced against them,” he was not at all sure the Jews would be
allowed or able to partake of the new liberties envisioned in the new
society, including the most basic one, freedom of speech:

I shall never believe I have seriously heard the arguments of the

Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities [of their
own], where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then
will we be able to know what they have to say. 6

In this, Rousseau was among the first to condition personal freedom on

national freedom. Although in our century of dictatorships, many have
wrongly believed that national freedom can happily exist without individual
freedom, 7 Rousseau was hinting here at a contrary idea: that the Jews could
never be truly free as individuals unless they possessed a free state of their
own.
This idea was later developed and modified by the Zionists, who said
that the Jews would never be equal unless their persecuted members came
to live in a state of their own, and that even those who were left behind as
fully enfranchised minorities would suffer from a sense of inferiority unless
they too had somewhere a sovereign homeland that would bolster their
sense of identity and to which they could choose to go—much as the Irish
in America had Ireland, the Italians had Italy, the Chinese had China.
But the fact was, and it was plainly evident to the leading thinkers of the
Enlightenment, that the Jews did not have such a homeland to which they
could return. As Byron evocatively captured it in his “Hebrew Melodies”:

The wild dove hath her nest

The fox his cave
Mankind their country
Israel but the grave. 8

Slowly at first, then with great rapidity, the idea began to take hold that
civic equality was necessary but insufficient as a remedy for the Jewish
problem. Only a Jewish national restoration in the Jewish homeland would
produce a satisfactory solution. It would restore the Jews to a condition of
normalcy not only as a nation but as individuals as well, much as Rousseau
had intimated. As U.S. President John Adams put it, “I really wish the Jews
again in Judea an independent nation, for as I believe… once restored to an
independent government and no longer persecuted, they would soon wear
away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character.” 9 The need
of the Jews to be reinstated in Israel was recognized by Napoleon, who
apparently understood that extension of citizenship to the Jews of France
could not substitute for Jewish national restoration. In 1799, when his army
was twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, he proclaimed: “Israelites arise!
Now is the moment… to claim your political existence as a nation among
nations!” 10
The stream of sympathy for the Jews grew progressively stronger in the
nineteenth century. The increasing frequency of Western travel to the Holy
Land, the emergence of a small but growing movement for Jewish
immigration, and the appearance of concrete plans for large-scale Jewish
settlement of Palestine all contributed to the rapid growth of non-Jewish
support for Jewish national restoration. Just as the romance of renascent
Greek nationalism elicited enthusiastic support from Byron, and just as the
Italian national revival excited many of the greatest minds in Europe, the
prospect of the rebirth of Jewish nationhood had a similar effect. British,
American, and French writers, journalists, artists, and statesmen all became
ardent proponents of facilitating the return of the Jews to their desolate
homeland.
There was, for example, Lord Shaftesbury, who wrote in 1838 that he
was

anxious about the hopes and destinies of the Jewish people.

Everything [is] ripe for their return to Palestine…. the inherent
vitality of the Hebrew race reasserts itself with amazing
persistence… but the great revival can take place only in the Holy
Land. 11

In 1840 the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, offered protection

to the Jews in Palestine and undertook to convince the Ottoman sultan that
it would be to his advantage if “the Jews who are scattered throughout other
countries in Europe and Africa should be induced to go and settle in
Palestine.” 12 Lord Lindsay, too, wrote in 1847 that the “Jewish race, so
wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence
open to them, may once more obtain possession of their native land.” 13 And
in 1845, Sir George Gawler, a governor of southern Australia and the
founder of the Palestine Colonization Fund, urged: “Replenish the farms
and fields of Palestine with the energetic people whose warmest affection
are rooted in the soil.” 14 British statesmen who declared their support for
Jewish national restoration were a “who’s who” of prime ministers and
elder statesmen, including not only Palmerston and Shaftesbury but
Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Manchester. In the United States,
successive presidents made declarations of sympathy for Zionism, including
William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. 15
From the nineteenth century on, modern Zionism thus enjoyed long,
intimate, and ultimately successful support from powerful forces working
within the non-Jewish world, support that expressed itself in the literature
of the day in passages that are hauntingly prophetic of the ideals that would
later be espoused by the Zionist movement. In 1876 the great English
author George Eliot foresaw in these terms the rebirth of Israel in her
influential novel of Zionism, Daniel Deronda:

There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity,

grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality
of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of
our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of
Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East…. For there will
be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and
the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom. 16

With this humanist stream converged another important current that

became ascendant in the last century—that of Christian Zionism, a
movement that promoted the belief that the spiritual redemption of mankind
could occur only if it were preceded by the ingathering of the Jewish exiles,
as foretold in the Bible. After all, to both Christians and Jews, Zionism was
the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. “[He] will assemble the outcasts of
Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judea from the four corners of
the earth,” said Isaiah. “He that scattered Israel will gather him,” promised
Jeremiah. “For I will take you from among the nations and gather you out
of all countries and will bring you into your own land,” Ezekiel foretold. 17
Christian clergymen’s application of these verses antedates the modern
Zionist movement by at least half a century. As early as 1814, a New York
pastor named John MacDonald published a famous sermon demonstrating
the central role that Isaiah had envisioned for the new American state in
restoring the Jews to their land. “Rise, American ambassadors,” called the
pastor, “and prepare to carry the tidings of joy and salvation to your
Savior’s kinsmen in disgrace…. send their sons and employ their substance
in his heaven-planned expedition.” In 1821, the missionary Levi Parsons
averred: “There exists in the breast of every Jew an unconquerable desire to
inhabit the land which was given to their Fathers…. Destroy, then, the
Ottoman Empire, and nothing but a miracle would prevent their immediate
return from the four winds of heaven.” And as Jewish settlement of
Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron increased, and international interest grew, so
the unfolding prophecy became increasingly clear. By 1841, a full half-
century before the First Zionist Congress, the Mormon leader Orson Hyde
could declare: “The idea of the Jews being restored to Palestine is gaining
ground…. The great wheel is unquestionably in motion, and the word of the
Almighty has declared that it shall roll.” 18
Just in case it did not, some were ready to push the wheel along. In
1844, Warder Cresson became the American consul in Jerusalem and hoped
to be able to missionize among Palestine’s Jews. Instead, he helped
establish a Jewish settlement in Jerusalem’s Valley of Refaim, supported by
a joint Jewish-Christian society in England. Half a century later, Christian
Zionism had gathered considerable force. In 1891, after pogroms in Eastern
Europe had led to mass Jewish emigration, the American evangelist
William Eugene Blackstone was able to muster the support of over four
hundred prominent Americans—including John D. Rockefeller, J. R.
Morgan, and leading congressmen, jurists, and newspaper editors—for a
petition to President Benjamin Harrison to work for the reinstatement of the
Jewish people in their land. “For over seventeen centuries they have
patiently waited for such a privileged opportunity,” wrote Blackstone. “Let
us now restore to them the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled.” 19
So committed was Blackstone to the idea of the return of the Jews to their
land that when the possibility of a Jewish national home in Africa was
being discussed, he sent Herzl a copy of the Old Testament—with the
prophetic references to the Jewish return to the Land of Israel clearly
marked.
The rise of Christian activism coincided with the emergence of an
entirely secular phenomenon in the non-Jewish world: a growing scientific
interest in studying the biblical heritage. Throughout the nineteenth century
the novel techniques of archaeology, philology, and cryptology were
applied successfully in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the Middle East. But
the land of the Bible beckoned like no other object of study. Were the
biblical accounts historical fact or fiction? Did the places mentioned in the
text really exist? Where precisely were they located? What could be
discovered by excavating them?
The scientific effort to answer these questions was international in
scope. It involved ingenious pioneers, each expanding on his predecessor’s
findings: the American Edward Robinson (surveying in 1837–38 and again
in 1845–47), the German Titus Tobler (1845–46), the Frenchman H. V
Guerin (1852–75), and the Englishman Claude Conder (1872–77). The
American archaeologist Frederick Jones Bliss, who excavated in Palestine
in the 1890s, summed up the pivotal contributions of these pioneers:

The work of these four men shows a logical progression. Robinson

established the correct principles of research. Tobler applied these
more minutely, but over a limited geographical range. Guerin
endeavored with the same minuteness to cover the whole field—
Judea, Samaria, Galilee * —but was subjected to the limitations of
an explorer travelling singly and with straitened resources. Conder,
heading a survey expedition adequately manned and splendidly
equipped, was enabled to fill in the numerous topographical
lacunae left by his predecessors. 20
Their ranks were joined by Sir Charles Wilson and Sir Charles Warren
(who made important contributions to the archaeology of Jerusalem),
Charles Clermont-Ganneau (who identified the biblical city of Gezer), and
Flinders Petrie (who systematized the study of pottery as a means of
archaeological dating).
Several European governments encouraged such surveys by their
nationals, for under a scientific cover the potential military and political
benefits of the land might also be explored. No government seized on
biblical exploration with greater alacrity than Great Britain. On June 22,
1865, under the auspices of Queen Victoria, a distinguished array of British
statesmen, scholars, and clergymen established the Palestine Exploration
Fund (PEF), which was to have a decisive impact on the attitude toward
Palestine evolving in Britain and elsewhere. It was the PEF that later
commissioned many of the above explorers, but undoubtedly its most
influential project was to dispatch Conder to carry out his monumental
survey of western Palestine. Assisted by an able team that included the
twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Horatio Herbert Kitchener (later Lord
Kitchener, of Khartoum and World War I fame), Conder produced the first
modern map of the country—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean,
from the consigned Lebanon to the Sinai.
The scientific exploration of the land had the important effect of
demystifying its place in the international psyche. For if Palestine had
hitherto been confined to the realm of biblical imagination, now it was
made concrete and real again. Jerusalem was not in heaven but very much
on earth. So were Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron, and Jaffa. These places
may have become impoverished and pitifully underpopulated, but they did
not have to remain that way. Studying the land, its climate, and the history
of its deterioration, many of the researchers concluded that it could be
restored to its ancient prosperity—provided that the Jews were permitted to
return to it. Thus, in 1875 the archaeologist and explorer Sir Charles Warren
published The Land of Promise, in which he proposed British colonization
of Palestine, “with the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew.”
To Warren it was obvious that the land could support the Jews. Therefore,
he believed:

Israel are to return to their own land…. That which is yet to be

looked for is the public recognition of the fact, together with the
restoration, in whole or in part, of Jewish national life, under the
protection of some one or more of the Great Powers. 21
To Claude Conder as well, it was clear that no other people would have
the enthusiasm and energy for such a restoration; 22 and it was equally clear
that once applied, such energy would bring the land back to life. Thus, for
Jew and non-Jew alike, scientific exploration made the promise of Zionism
tangible and realizable.
This scientific enthusiasm produced practical plans of settlement, such
as Sir Laurence Oliphant’s 1879 proposal to settle Jews in Gilead on the
East Bank of the Jordan, a project that received the support of the British
prime minister, the British and French foreign ministers, and the Prince of
Wales. In 1898, after a century of religious and scientific attention focused
on the land, Edwin Sherwin Wallace, the U.S. consul in Palestine, captured
the growing international mood:

Israel needs a home, a land he can call his own, a city where he can
work out his salvation. He has none of these now. His present home
is among strangers…. the lands in which he lives are not his
own…. Israel’s hope of a homeland is possible of realization, but it
will be realized only in Palestine.

He concluded:

My own belief is that the time is not far distant when Palestine will
be in the hands of a people who will restore it to its former
condition of productiveness. The land is waiting, the people are
ready to come, and will come as soon as protection of life and
property is assured. 23

The writings, philanthropic activities, exhortations, and explorations of

non-Jewish Zionists, British and American, secular and religious, directly
influenced the thinking of such pivotal statesmen as David Lloyd George,
Arthur Balfour, and Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the century. These
were all broadly educated men, and they were intimately familiar with the
decline of Palestine and the agonized history of the Jews. “My anxiety,”
wrote Balfour, “is simply to find some means by which the present dreadful
state of so large a proportion of the Jewish race… may be brought to an
end.” 24 Thus, it was the non-Jewish Zionism of Western statesmen that
aided Jewish Zionism in achieving the rebirth of Israel.
But still another factor was even more important than biblical heritage,
the scientific rediscovery of the land, and the awareness of Jewish suffering
in persuading these leaders of the justice of Zionism. The men of Versailles
were first and foremost political thinkers, and it was primarily from
prevailing political conceptions of national rights and the question of self-
determination that they addressed the problem of the Jewish restoration, just
as they approached the problem of other national claims within this
framework. It was in these terms that the Jewish Zionists were able to
appeal to them successfully.
Indeed, the leaders of Zionism from Herzl onward formed a ready
partnership with the leading statesmen of the day.(That partnership in some
cases developed out of earlier ties; well before becoming prime minister of
the British Empire, Lloyd George had served as Herzl’s lawyer,
representing the Zionist movement in Britain, and he had drawn up its
proposal to build a British protectorate.) 25 Herzl, Nordau, and their
followers understood that if Zionism were to succeed in its extraordinary
task of ingathering a nation scattered in a hundred lands to a dusty corner at
the edge of Asia, it had to have broad international support, and it had to
muster and deepen the widely held conviction of the historical justice and
the political necessity of this remarkable undertaking. The Jews, the
Zionists said, must have a state of their own in Palestine, and the world’s
leaders agreed, even though they knew that such attempted re-creation of a
state was unprecedented. Furthermore, they knew the effort might come
into conflict with the possible interests of the local population, which might
make a political claim to that same land. Yet at the beginning of the century,
public opinion unhesitatingly adjudicated in favor of the Jews.
Why was this so? The Arabs now assert that at the time of Versailles, the
Jews had no political rights over the land, that these developed upon the
Arabs then inhabiting it—and that therefore the original sin in favor of
Zionism was committed by the international community not in 1948 (the
year of Israel’s founding) or in 1967 (the year Israel gained control over
Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) but in 1917, when the British government
endorsed the Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a national home in
Palestine.
Yet clearly the leaders of the international community of the day viewed
things differently. They believed the Jewish people enjoyed a unique
historical and political right to the land, one that took precedence over any
potential claim by the local residents in that small backwater of the recently
defunct Ottoman Empire.
What were the sources of the widespread recognition of the Jewish
people’s historical rights to the Holy Land? To answer this question, we
must first examine the nature of such historical rights generally.

There are those who believe that a theoretical discussion of the rights of
nations is meaningless, and that in practice the configuration of states is a
product of many competing forces that ultimately settle themselves by
means of a simple rule: The more powerful prevails. This may be true if the
question is raised in purely empirical and not in moral terms. If might
makes right, then the last conqueror is always right. Israel, by this
definition, is therefore the rightful and undisputed sovereign in the land. But
this is clearly not the criterion with which to address the Jewish national
restoration. If, as Winston Churchill said in 1922, “The Jews are in
Palestine by right, not sufferance,” 26 then it is crucial to understand the
moral basis of the Jewish state.
In the case of the Jewish national claim, the central issue is this: Does a
people that has lost its land many centuries ago retain the right to reclaim
that land after many generations have passed? And can this right be retained
if during the intervening years a new people has come to occupy the land?
Advocates of the Arab case commonly present these questions, and they
answer both of them in the negative. Further, they add, if the Jews have a
historical “quarrel” with anyone, it is not with the Arabs but with the
Romans, who expelled them from their land in the first place. By the time
the Arabs came, the Jews were gone.
These arguments, forcefully and clearly presented by the Arab side, are
seldom challenged by the Jews and their supporters, but they deserve to be
addressed. Most people have some familiarity with the first millennium of
Jewish history, the period described in the Bible: how the Hebrew slaves of
Egypt were transformed into a nation by their flight to freedom and their
adoption of the Law of Moses, and how they returned under Joshua to build
their national home in the land of their fathers. Fused into a unified state by
David in 1000 B.C.E., * they subsequently pursued their unique quest for
political and religious independence against a succession of empires. The
biblical historical account ends shortly after the restoration of Jewish
autonomy under the Persian king Cyrus (“the Persian Balfour”) in 538
B.C.E. Alexander the Great, who took over the land from the Persians, did
not grant the Jews sovereignty, but in 167 B.C.E., under the Hasmoneans,
they successfully revolted against his successors, only to lose their
independence once more to Rome in 63 B.C.E. 27 Yet while the Jews were
subjugated for considerable parts of this first millennium and a half of their
history and even experienced exile (the deportation of the northern ten
tribes by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E., and the Babylonian
Exile in the sixth), they responded by driving their national roots deeper
into the soil.
How, then, were the Jews finally forced off the land? The most prevalent
assumption is that the Jewish people’s state of homelessness was owed
solely to the Romans. It is generally believed that the Romans, who had
conquered Palestine and destroyed Jewish sovereignty, then took away the
country from the Jews and tossed them into an exile that lasted until our
own century. However common this view, it is inaccurate. It is true that the
Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. was a highly important factor in
the ultimate decline of Jewish power and presence in Palestine. But it was
not the exclusive factor; nor did it depopulate the country of its Jewish
inhabitants. Therefore, the common refrain about “two thousand years of
exile,” uncritically repeated by many Jews and non-Jews alike, is
misleading. The Diaspora did not begin with the Roman destruction of
Jerusalem—vibrant Jewish communities in Alexandria, Babylon, and
elsewhere had antedated the Roman conquest by centuries. Nor did the
Romans end Jewish national life in Palestine. That did not come until many
centuries later. Thus in 135 C.E., sixty-five years after the razing of
Jerusalem, the Jews under Bar Kochba revolted once more against Rome,
“until the whole earth seemed to have been stirred up over the matter,”
according to the third-century Greek historian Dio Cassius. 28
Although this three-year Jewish revolt against Rome was also brutally
crushed, the country remained primarily Jewish, and shortly thereafter the
Jews were granted a considerable measure of autonomous power, an
authority that was recognized by Rome and later by Byzantium. In 212
C.E., when the Roman emperor Caracalla bestowed Roman citizenship on
most subjects of the empire, he denied that privilege to those who lacked a
country of their own. The Jews were granted Roman citizenship, because
they were recognized as a people with their own country. 29 This is not to
say that they did not continue to rebel, attempting to expel Rome yet again
in 351. And it should be noted, too, that the great Jewish legal works of the
Mishna and the Jerusalem Talmud were composed in Palestine during the
centuries of Roman and Byzantine domination, reflecting the dynamic
Jewish intellectual life that persisted there even in the face of occupation. In
614 the Jews were, incredibly, still fighting for independence, raising an
army that joined the Persians in seizing Jerusalem and ousting the
Byzantines from Palestine. The size and vitality of the Jewish population at
the beginning of the seventh century may be judged by the fact that in the
siege of Tyre alone, the Jews contributed more than twenty thousand
fighters. 30
But in 636, after a brief return of the Byzantines under Her-aclius, the
Arabs burst into the land—after having destroyed the large and prosperous
Jewish populations of the Arabian Peninsula root and branch. The rule of
the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it was under the Arabs that
the Jews were finally reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be
a national force of any consequence in their own land. The Jews initially
vested their hopes in the “Ishmaelite conquerors” as they called them in
contemporary sources, but within a few years these hopes were dashed as
Arab policy became clear. Unlike previous conquerors, the Arabs poured in
a steady stream of colonists, often composed of military battalions and their
families, with the intention of permanently Arabizing the land. In order to
execute this policy of armed settlement, the Arabs relied on the regular
expropriation of land, houses, and Jewish labor. In combination with the
turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest, these policies finally
succeeded in doing what the might of Rome had not achieved: the
uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil. 31 Thus it was not the Jews who
usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from
the Jews.
Why is this important? After all, more than twelve hundred years have
passed since this change occurred. Nations come and go, and history moves
on. Even if it was the Arabs who finished off the Jewish presence in
Palestine, what of it? They conquered the land, and it has become theirs.
In many ways the argument between Jews and Arabs over their
respective historic rights to a national home resembles an argument over the
rights of an individual owner to his house. If the original owner is tossed
out of his home but never relinquishes his right to return and reoccupy the
premises, he may press his claim. But suppose a new occupant has fixed up
the place and made a home of it while the original claimant is still around
but prevented from pressing his claim? In such a case, even if the new
occupant has resided there for a considerable period of time and improved
the premises, his claim to the place is considered inferior to that of the
original owner. Yet if in the meantime no one has set up house and the place
has become a shambles, there can be no rival claim, and the original owner
is clearly entitled to have his property returned to him.
The two crucial questions to ask about the conflicting Jewish and Arab
historical claims to the land are therefore these: First, did the Jews sustain
their claim to the land over the centuries? Second, did the Arabs create a
unique national claim to the land after the Jews departed?
Clearly, conquest alone does not endow a conqueror with national rights
to a particular land. It is the emergence of a separate, distinct people with
continuous ties to a defined territory that is at the heart of all national
territorial claims. This is the basis of the Jewish claim. And this is why the
Arabs, in their efforts to overturn it, are now careful to assert that centuries
ago a separate and distinct Arab nation was created in Palestine—the
“Palestinians.”
Unlike civil disputes over property rights between individuals, the
passage of time alone does not necessarily resolve claims to the ownership
of a national home, as we are seeing in the current resurfacing in Eastern
Europe of national conflicts going back hundreds of years. Consider the
case of the Arabs’ subjugation of Spain in their great expansion. The Arabs
conquered Spain in the year 711 and held most of it for centuries. The
Spaniards retained only a tiny patch of the mountains in the north, and the
entire composition of the country was transformed. The Christians became
a minority, the Moslems a majority. By the time the Spaniards began their
slow and painful reconquest, Spain had become a different country socially
and politically. Seville and Cordova were recovered by the Spaniards after
five centuries of Arab rule; the Kingdom of Granada after eight. Yet despite
the enormous span of time between the Arab conquest and the restoration of
Spanish sovereignty, Spain never ceased to be the Spaniards’ homeland—
notwithstanding Moorish Arab attachment to the land and the creation of an
impressive Arab civilization there. This is an important reason why no one
seriously suggests that the Spaniards who rolled back the Arab tide that had
swept over their land committed a “historic wrong.”
What the Spaniards achieved after eight centuries, the Jews achieved
after twelve—but the principle is identical. More important are the
differences in the manner and circumstances in which the two national
restorations were accomplished. The Spaniards reconquered their land with
fire and blood; the Jews embarked on a peaceful resettlement, resorting to
arms only in self-defense. The Spaniards battled against a Moorish nation
that had built one of the great intellectual and cultural centers of mankind
there, and they regained a land that had largely been cultivated. What the
Jews found when they returned to Palestine was a ruined land, largely
unpopulated.
What is common in the cases of Spain and Israel is the continued
existence of the people whose country had been conquered, and the
persistent aspirations of that people to be reestablished in its national
home. The Spaniards, to be sure, retained a corner of their country from
which they could begin their restoration, but this merely facilitated the task;
it did not create their basic right of recovery.
Against the accepted reasons for Jewish restoration such as these, some
sympathizers of the Arabs tried to invent arguments to weaken the Jewish
case. The British historian Arnold Toynbee, for example, who resented the
Jewish people for not behaving according to his iron laws of history
(“fossils,” he believed, do not come back to life), argued that a statute of
limitations should be imposed on national claims, just as in civil disputes. If
the Arabs were to recover Palestine from the Jews within, say, fifty years of
Israel’s establishment, that would be a legitimate reconquest. But if the
Jews had taken the land from the Arabs after a longer period, that could not
be considered legitimate. While applicable in certain civil cases, statutes of
limitations are woefully unsuited for these kinds of national claims.
Toynbee’s toying with numbers aside, the mere passage of time cannot
render a national claim obsolete. If the claim is historically laid, it
disappears only with the disappearance of the claimant. * 32
Here, indeed, is where the case of the Jews differs from that of all other
nations. Dispersed for more than a thousand years, they refused to
disappear. History is replete with examples of nations that have succumbed
to forced dispersion. But in all other cases of exile, the displaced peoples
were assimilated over time into other nations, or occupied a new land for
themselves that then became their national home. The Jews refused to do
either. As individuals, some Jews have assimilated (a process much in
evidence in the West today). But as a collective body, the Jews rejected this
course. They also rejected the notion of establishing an independent Jewish
polity anywhere other than in their historical home. When this idea was
offered to them in modern times, they refused Birobidzhan, Argentina,
Uganda, even Manchuria as possible alternatives to a permanent Jewish
homeland, and insisted on returning to the Land of Israel. In 1903, in the
wake of the Kishinev pogrom in Russia, the Zionist movement faced a
schism over the question of whether to consider even a temporary home in
British East Africa in order to save the lives of Eastern Europe’s Jews. The
controversial “Uganda Plan” was later abandoned when the Eastern
European Jewish leadership refused even to consider the option, insisting
on the Land of Israel as the only possible Jewish home. Perhaps in
retrospect one can appreciate Herzl’s rationalist view that a haven, any
haven, was needed to save millions of European Jews. But the Jewish
people’s attachment to the Jewish land was more powerful, and only its
force could ultimately harness the Jewish masses to concerted political
action. Herzl tried in vain to explain that he viewed Uganda as a mere way
station, not as the final destination for the Jewish people, which could only
be the Land of Israel. When Vladimir Jabotinsky voted against Uganda, he
admitted that he did not know why. It was “one of those ‘simple’ things
which counterbalance thousands of arguments.” 33
My own grandfather, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, was more explicit in
explaining why as a young man he resolutely opposed and finally helped
defeat the Uganda Plan at the Zionist Congress of 1905. Twenty-five years
later, after the relationship between Britain and Zionism had soured, my
father asked him if the opposition to Uganda had derived from the belief
that the project was impractical and that the British would not see it
through. He clearly remembers my grandfather’s reply:

On the contrary. We believed that the British would be faithful to

their word. In those days England enjoyed a great reputation among
the Jews. But it was precisely because we believed that the project
could be carried out that we were all the more opposed to it. For so
many centuries the Jewish people had made so many sacrifices for
this land, had shed their blood for it, had prayed for a thousand
years to return to it, had tied their most intimate hopes to its revival
—we considered it inconceivable that we would now betray the
generations of Jews who had fought and died for this end. It would
have been a terrible moral and emotional collapse. It would have
rendered the whole of Jewish history meaningless. We had to
oppose it.

Indeed, throughout the centuries, the Jews kept alive the hope of Return
to their old homeland. This desire was no mere sentimental impulse, soon to
be discarded. Indeed, rather than diminishing with the passage of time, it
got stronger. It contained the essence of Jewish peoplehood, the memory of
the Jews’ unique history and struggle, and their desire to rebuild their
national and spiritual life in their ancient land now occupied by foreign
conquerors—not merely because it was the land of their forefathers but
because it was the irreplaceable crucible in which their identity and faith
had been forged and could be reforged anew after centuries of formless,
helpless wandering.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the idea of the Return in

Jewish history and its centrality to the rise of Israel. Yet the fashionable
ahistoricism prevalent today assumes that the Holocaust was the main force
that propelled Jewish statehood. Undeniably, the Holocaust was a pivotal
event not only in Jewish history but in all history. Undeniably, too, it moved
many to sympathize with the suffering of the Jews. But it was the ultimate
act of destruction, wiping out the millions of Jews whose hearts had been
set on Zion, almost obliterating the human basis for a durable Jewish state.
It was the culmination of the tragic—and to the founding Zionists,
predictable—trajectory of ever-growing calamities of pogrom and
expulsion that had afflicted the Jews of England in the 1290s, the Jews of
France in the 1390s, the Jews of Spain in the 1490s, the Jews of the Ukraine
in the 1640s, the Jews of Russia in the 1880s.
Without the idea of the Return, the Holocaust could have elicited a
horrified sympathy but not much more. The addition of millions of Jewish
corpses could have spelled only the final death blow to the Jewish people.
Had this destruction not been preceded by a millennial yearning for Return
and restoration, by a century of Zionist activists, and by the Jews’
tremendous efforts to rebuild and revive a desolate land, the State of Israel
would never have come into being. The Jewish remnants would have been
scattered even farther afield, and denied a vital center, the Jewish people
would have declined into irrelevance and oblivion.
The idea of the Return is therefore an integral part of the secret of
Jewish longevity. It was the driving force in the rebirth of Israel, and it is
the key to Israel’s future. This dream was preserved intact from antiquity
into modern times through the unique nature of Judaism itself. Westerners
often assume that Judaism, like Christianity, is only a faith and is therefore
lacking in national consciousness. But from its genesis, Judaism comprised
both nation and religion, and while it readily accepted converts, such
converts not only joined the faith but became “naturalized citizens” of the
Jewish nation as well. (As Ruth, one of the most famous converts, tells
Naomi: “Your people will be my people.”)
In the Jews’ dispersion, the dual nature of Judaism assumed vital
importance. Stripped of their homeland, their government, and their
language and dispersed into myriad communities, the Jewish religion
became the primary vehicle by which the Jews maintained their national
identity and aspirations. Into this vessel they poured their dreams of Return
and ingathering in the Land of Israel. The Jewish religion—with its cycle of
bitter fast days mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, its thrice-daily
supplications to “gather up the exiles from the four corners of the earth,”
and its smashing of the glass at every joyous occasion “lest I forget thee, O
Jerusalem”—became the repository for their memory of an inspiring past
and a hope for a better future in their ancestral home. 34
This concrete attachment of a particular people to a particular place
distinguishes Judaism from all other religions. Catholics, for example, do
not pray, “Next year in the Vatican.” In other religions, pilgrimages are
periodic journeys to holy sites where the faithful can achieve a heightened
sense of communion with God. But when in a hundred different lands,
century after century, Jews prayed, “Next year in Jerusalem,” they meant
something entirely different: not merely an individual’s desire to return to a
holy site for prayer, but the wish of an entire people to return and rebuild its
life in its own national home, of which Jerusalem was the heart. 35 This
powerful longing was so unique that it was sometimes dismissed as the
pitiful gasp of a dying race. It was nothing of the kind. The persistent
yearning to return was an expression of the very life force of the Jewish
people, the idea that held it together, a distilled defiance of its historical
fate.
The final undermining of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was
followed by an unbroken centuries-long tradition of intellectual and popular
longing for restoration of Jewish sovereignty, most frequently evoked in
religious themes. Pick a century at random, and you will find not only wide
expression of this Jewish yearning among the common people but moving
poetic and philosophic longings penned by virtually every leading man of
genius. Thus in the tenth century, the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon:

May it be your will, O Lord our God, that this era may mark the
end of the dispersion for your people the House of Israel, and the
time for the termination of our exile and our mourning. 36

In the twelfth century, the great Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, writing of
Jerusalem, in Hebrew, from Spain:

O great King’s city, mountain blessed!

My soul is yearning unto thee
From the furthest West.
And who shall grant me, on the wings of eagles,
To rise and seek you through the years,
Until I mingle with your dust beloved
The waters of my tears? 37

Later in the same century, the philosopher Moses Maimonides declared

that the return to Israel was the only hope of an end to Jewish suffering at
the hands of the Arabs, of whom he writes that “Never did a nation molest,
degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.” But he promises,

The future redeemer of our people will… gather our nation,

assemble our exiles, [and] redeem us from our degradation. 38

In the thirteenth century, the scholar Nahmanides went further, ruling

that the return to live in the Land of Israel was an obligation morally
binding on every Jew 39 —a stricture he would dutifully fulfill by coming to
the land and helping to rebuild the Jewish community there that had been
nearly annihilated during the Crusades.
By the sixteenth century, the idea of a Christian-Jewish alliance taking
the land back from the Moslems elicited enthusiasm from many Jews in
Italy and some of the Marranos (Christians of Jewish descent) of Portugal. 40
Jewish exiles from Spain rebuilt the Jewish quarter in Hebron, and the
Portuguese Jew Don Joseph Nasi rebuilt the city of Tiberias with the
permission of the sultan. This wave of return also sparked an unprecedented
intellectual and cultural revival in the Galilee city of Safed, which drew
between ten thousand and twenty thousand Jewish immigrants by the end of
the century. The renowned Rabbi Yehuda Leowe of Prague, known as the
Maharal, was no less clear that full-scale Return would have to come:

Exile is a change and departure from the natural order, whereby the
Lord situated every nation in the place best suited it…. The place
[the Jews] deserved according to the order of existence was to be
independent in the Land of Israel. 41

In the seventeenth century among the Jews of Poland, large-scale

preparations for the Return began (and a few years later abruptly ended)
with the rise and fall of the would-be Jewish “messiah” Shabtai Zevi.
Despite this disappointment, the Gaon of Vilna and the Ba’al Shem Tov, the
foremost leaders of eighteenth-century European Jewry, both inspired their
students to organize groups to come and settle in the land. One of the Gaon
of Vilna’s students described the great sage’s insistence that his pupils
personally take up the responsibility of realizing the Return:

Who is greater among us in all the recent generations than our

teacher, the Gaon of Vilna, who with his impassioned words urged
his students to go up to the Land of Israel and to work to ingather
the exiles, and who frequently exhorted his students to speed the
end of the exile, [and] to bring the redemption closer by means of
settling the Land of Israel. Almost every day he would tell us with
trembling emotion, that “in Zion and Jerusalem the remnants will
see salvation,” and that we should not miss it. Who can describe in
words the concern of our teacher when he told us these things in his
exalted spirit and with tears in his eyes…. 42

Indeed, when the Zionist pioneers began arriving in the Land toward the
end of the nineteenth century, they found the small communities, built by
the disciples of these great religious figures and by other Jews already on
the Land, in Jerusalem comprising the majority of the city’s inhabitants.
Thus, in spurts and trickles, sometimes even in streams, Jews went back
to their land throughout the centuries. Some walked the plains of Russia
and, after pausing in Damascus or Beirut, entered Palestine from the north.
Others sailed a pirate-infested Mediterranean and landed in Jaffa. Once
there, they joined the Jews of Hebron, Safed, or Jerusalem who down the
ages had kept an uninterrupted vigil over a ruined land. As a consequence,
there was no period during which the land was devoid of Jews. (In the
villages of Peki’in and Shefar’am in the Galilee, Jews have lived
continuously from ancient times until the present.) 43
But a truly large-scale return was not possible until the emergence of
modern Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the
traditional longing for Zion on the part of the Jewish multitudes and the
scholars of the exile first found practical political expression. Such works as
Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) and Leo Pinsker’s Auto-
Emancipation (1882) were able to build on ancient feelings to contribute to
a belief in the possibility of contemporary action. In the wake of the great
anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881, these longings were quickly
translated into an emotional proto-Zionist movement for the settlement of
Palestine called Hovevei Zion, the “Lovers of Zion,” which in turn fostered
the first large-scale immigration to Palestine.
It was these towering ideas, emotions, and traditions that set the stage
for the appearance of political Zionism a hundred years ago, when the next
to last of the series of empires that had occupied the land began collapsing
of its own weight. It was then that men of vision like Theodor Herzl and
Max Nordau emerged, foreseeing the historic opportunity presented by the
Ottoman Empire’s decline. In addition to offering a concrete political
solution—namely, the founding of a Jewish state—Herzl also established
the institutions, such as the World Zionist Organization and the successive
Zionist Congresses, beginning in 1897, that were to put his plan into action.
What Herzl was able to do was to translate a native, emotional Zionism
that beat in millions of Jewish hearts into a political movement that took
account of the modern world. He understood the forces of politics and
power, of personality and persuasion; above all, Herzl was animated by a
profound understanding of history and by a vision of the impending tragedy
of European Jewry and of the triumphant possibility of revived Jewish
statehood. He therefore pressed the Zionist claim with all the urgency he
could muster.
While his disciples in many countries propelled the ideas of political
Zionism toward the concrete goal of the founding of the state, Zionist
pioneers undertook the massive effort of settling a land that had been
allowed to fall into disuse by absentee Arab landlords living the good life in
Beirut and Damascus. The Jews turned barren scenery, alternating between
rock and swamp, into productive farmland, dotted first with villages, then
towns, then cities. This effort was assisted by a few wealthy Jews, most
notably Moses Montefiore and Baron Rothschild, who put up the funds for
many of the pivotal early projects. The first such enterprise was
appropriately titled Rishon Le-Zion (“The First of Zion”), an agricultural
settlement founded in 1882 by Russian Jewish settlers who soon received
Rothschild’s assistance.
When Abraham Markus, my maternal great-grandfather, arrived at
Rishon Le-Zion several years later, in 1896, it was still a cluster of red-tiled
whitewashed houses springing up in the middle of a sandy wilderness.
(Today it is prime real estate, minutes away from Tel Aviv on the coastal
highway.) One of the “Lovers of Zion,” Abraham wanted to be a scholar-
farmer, planting almond trees by day and studying the Talmud at night. By
the time my mother was born in nearby Petah Tikva (“Gate of Hope”) in
1912, the family was living, amid orchards they had planted, in a fine house
with a promenade of palm trees leading up to it.
But these luxuries were enjoyed only by the few “established” families;
newcomers had to face much tougher conditions. When my paternal
grandfather Nathan arrived in Palestine in 1920, there were hardly any
paved roads and virtually no modern transport. The family disembarked
from the ship in rowboats, as there were no mooring facilities in the port of
Jaffa at the time. After spending some time in Tel Aviv, the new Jewish
suburb of Jaffa, they traveled for two days on a dirt road to Tzemah on the
southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. There my grandfather and my father
boarded a boat to take the luggage to Tiberias five miles away, while the
rest of the family continued by carriage. It was late afternoon, and the
sudden violent gales so typical of the lake nearly smashed the vessel in two.
They stayed overnight in Tiberias, then made their way by horse-drawn
carriage up the steep slopes to Safed, changing horses in Rosh Pina, another
point of Jewish settlement in the barren wilderness that was otherwise
relieved only by sparse Bedouin encampments. As late as 1920, the trip
from Jaffa to Safed took more than three days. Today it can be done
comfortably in three hours.
Beginning with the first wave of Zionist immigration in 1880 and
continuing through successive waves before and after World War I, the
country was rapidly transformed. The Jews built roads, towns, farms,
hospitals, factories, and schools. And as Jewish immigration increased their
numbers, it also caused a rapid increase in the Arab population. Many of the
Arabs immigrated into the land in response to the job opportunities and the
better life afforded by the growing economy the Jews had created—so
much so that in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was moved to
observe that “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly
exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.” 44
The improved economic conditions that the influx of Jewish industry
and commerce created fueled a steep rise in income and industrialization
among the Arabs of Palestine that had no parallel in any neighboring Arab
country. Thus by 1947, the wages of the Arab worker in Haifa were twice
what his counterpart was receiving in Nablus, where there was no Jewish
presence. 45 Similarly, the number of factories owned by Arabs increased
400 percent between 1931 and 1942, while the number of their employees
increased tenfold between 1931 and 1946. 46
The most dramatic increase in Arab immigration was to the areas of
Jewish habitation. Between 1922, the advent of the Mandate, and 1947, the
Arab population in the Jewish cities grew by 290 percent in Haifa, 158
percent in Jaffa, and 131 percent in Jerusalem, as compared with 64 percent
in Hebron, 56 percent in Nablus, and 37 percent in Bethlehem, where there
were few or no Jews. 47 But the fact that Arabs migrated into what would
eventually be a domain of millions of Jews hardly altered the prevailing
international conception that this was to be a Jewish land, albeit one with an
Arab minority. Thus, the unceasing Jewish claim to the land has been
backed up in the last hundred years by unrelenting Jewish efforts to settle it
and bring its open wastes back to life.

***

However valid the Jewish claim has been, its relevance would have been
mitigated if the Arabs had been able to show an equally persistent claim to
the land over the prior centuries. The Arab side makes precisely this claim
today—that in recognizing the Jewish historical claim, the men of Versailles
disregarded the presence of a nation that had come into being in the
intervening period and that had developed unique cultural and historical ties
to the land that overshadowed and superseded those of the Jews. The
world’s leaders, the Arabs claim, erred in believing that they were “giving a
people without a land a land without a people.”
Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Woodrow Wilson, and many of the other
statesmen of Versailles were men of education, intelligence, and vision. But
were they really so fired up with the passions of biblical restoration and
humanist ideals that they were simply blinded to the basic demographic and
national facts on the ground?
In fact, they were not. They acted from a reasonable assessment of the
well-known and well-documented situation in Palestine in their day—
anchoring their policies in facts that have since grown increasingly
unfamiliar to many people.
The basic Arab claim is that the Jews seized Palestine from an Arab
people who had lived there for ages and was its rightful owner. At his
speech at the United Nations in 1974, Yasser Arafat declared:

The Jewish invasion began in 1881…. Palestine was then a verdant

area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building
its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture. 48

Arafat and Arab lore thus date the beginning of the Zionist invasion at
1881, when the first wave of the modern Zionist immigration began. (By
then, Jews had outnumbered Arabs in Jerusalem for sixty years.) 49
By now, the idea that the Zionists stole the land from its age old native
inhabitants has been so deeply implanted by Arab spokesmen that in many
circles in the West it is almost impossible to dislodge. But it is not
supported by history. The description offered by Arafat and others of
Palestine before the return of the Jews as a verdant area teeming with
people is flatly contradicted by the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of
European and American visitors to the Holy Land in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, including the reports of the great archaeological
explorers from Robinson onward.
In recent centuries, as the interest in biblical scholarship and
archaeology grew in Europe and America, diplomats, writers, scholars,
soldiers, and surveyors toured the Holy Land in increasing numbers. They
produced detailed records of what they saw, most often in the form of
books, travelogues, and articles published in various periodicals. Without
exception, they give an account of the demographic and physical condition
of the country that is completely different from the one the Arabs offer
today. As early as 1697, Henry Maundrell wrote that Nazareth was “an
inconsiderable village,” that Nablus consisted of two streets, that Jericho
had become a “poor nasty village,” that the fortress city of Acre was
“nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin.” 50 In 1738, English
archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote of a land of “barrenness and scarcity…
from the want of inhabitants.” 51 In 1785, Constantine François Volney
described the “ruined” and “desolate” state of the country:

[W]e with difficulty recognize Jerusalem….[The population] is

supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand…. The second
place deserving notice is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem…. [A] s is the
case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon about six
hundred men in this village capable of bearing arms…. The third
and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the most powerful
village in all this quarter, and… able to arm eight or nine hundred
men. 52

Yet in 1843, Alexander Keith wrote that “in his [Volney’s] day, the land
had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and
depopulation.” 53
In 1816, J. S. Buckingham had described Jaffa as “a poor village,” and
Ramleh as a place “where, as throughout the greater portion of Palestine,
the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited.” 54
By 1835, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine gave this description:

Outside the gates of Jerusalem, we saw indeed no living object,

heard no living sound. We found the same void, the same silence as
we should have found before the entombed gates of Pompeii or
Herculaneum…. a complete, eternal silence reigns in the town, in
the highways, in the country… The tomb of a whole people. 55

And in 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported back
to England, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants
and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.” 56
Perhaps the most famous traveler to the Holy Land was Mark Twain,
who visited Palestine in 1867 and wrote of his experiences in The Innocents
Abroad:
Stirring senses… occur in this [Jezreel] valley no more. There is
not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty
miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of
Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride
ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

For dreary solitude, Twain recommended the Galilee:

These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that

never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines … ;
that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias,
slumbering under six funereal palms…. A desolation is here that
not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action….
We reached [Mount] Tabor safely…. We never saw a human being
on the whole route.

In “the barren mountains of Judea,” as he called them, he found more of

the same:

Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s

miracle left it more than three thousand years ago….[Bethlehem,]
the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by
night, and where the angels sang, “Peace on earth, good will to
men,” is untenanted by any living creature.

And around Jerusalem:

The further we went… the more rocky and bare, repulsive and
dreary the landscape became. There could not have been more
fragments of stone… if every ten square feet of the land had been
occupied by a separate and distinct stone-cutter’s establishment for
an age. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive
and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost
deserted the country…. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest
name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and become a
pauper village.

And for the country as a whole, he gave this bereaved lamentation:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a

curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies….
Palestine is desolate and unlovely…. It is a hopeless, dreary,
heartbroken land. 57

Twain’s observations were echoed fourteen years later in the report of

the eminent English cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley on Judea: “In
Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was
no appearance of life or habitation.” 58
Stanley wrote these words in 1881—the very year that Arafat designates
as the beginning of the Zionist “invasion” and the “displacement” of the
dynamic local population. That Arafat is caught in another lie is by itself
unimportant. What is important is that this lie, endlessly repeated, refined,
and elaborated, has displaced what every civilized and educated person
knew at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely
empty and could afford room to the millions of Jews who were living in
intolerable and increasingly dangerous conditions in the ghettos of Europe
and who were yearning to return to the land and bring it back to life.
It is true, of course, that there were Arabs living in Palestine, and that in
the middle of the nineteenth century they outnumbered its Jewish
population. But by the third quarter of the century the total population of
the entire country, Arabs and Jews, was still only 400,000—less than four
percent of today’s figure. 59 By the end of World War I, that number had
reached 900,000 on both banks of the Jordan, and roughly 600,000 in
western Palestine (the present state of Israel), although these are still
insignificant numbers when compared with the overall potential of
settlement and habitation. 60 As the German Kaiser, who visited Palestine in
1898, said to Herzl, whom he met there, “The settlements I have seen, the
German as well as those of your own people, may serve as samples of what
may be done with the country. There is room here for everyone.” 61
When intelligent and humanitarian men such as Woodrow Wilson and
Lloyd George considered this wasteland of Palestine, they understood that
its minuscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available
land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a
serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of
their own—especially when the vast reaches of Arabdom (which extends
over five hundred times the area of today’s Israel and the administered
territories combined) * would be considered a homeland for the Arabs. As
Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky put it a few years later, in his testimony
before the Peel Commission:

I do not deny that [in building the Jewish state]… the Arabs of
Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country of
Palestine. What I do deny is that that is a hardship. It is not a
hardship on any race, any nation, possessing so many National
States now and so many more National States in the future. One
fraction, one branch of that race, and not a big one, will have to live
in someone else’s State…. I fully understand that any minority
would prefer to be a majority, it is quite understandable that the
Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State
No. 4, No. 5, No. 6. [Today there are twenty-one Arab states]… but
when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish claim to be
saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of
starvation. 62

In trying to shore up their historical claim to Palestine, the Arabs have

not merely distorted the demographic and physical conditions of the
country in the nineteenth century. They have tried to persuade the world
that the Arabs of Palestine had forged a distinct and unique national identity
over the centuries; otherwise, they knew, they would not qualify for self-
determination. Thus, they claimed that when the Jews “invaded,” they took
over what had been an independent country, “Palestine,” inhabited by a
distinct nation, “the Palestinians.”
But this claim, too, makes a farce out of history. As Bernard Lewis
states, after the Arab conquest there was no such thing as Palestine: “From
the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the
area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no
frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial
subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.” 63 The
Turks parceled the land out among four distinct administrative districts, or
sanjaks. The Jerusalem District included the Sinai and stretched into Africa,
while Samaria, Galilee, and Transjordanian Palestine were three additional,
separate districts. A succession of rulers had carved up the country’s
territory and distributed the parts among the various districts of their
empires, so that there was never an Arab state of Palestine, or even an Arab
province of Palestine. Even the very name Palestine fell into disuse among
the Arabs, only to be revived by the British—and appropriated from them
by the Arabs in this century.
Who were the champions of the presumed Palestinian nation under the
two centuries of Mamluk dominion or under the four centuries of Turkish
rule? In what political organizations, social institutions, literature, art,
religion, or private correspondence were expressed the ties of this phantom
nation to that carved-up land? None can be cited. Throughout this long
period the Arab inhabitants of Palestine never showed a hint of a desire for
independent nationhood, or what is called today self-determination. There
were Arabs who lived in Palestine, as elsewhere, but there was no such
people as Palestinians, with a national consciousness, or a national identity,
or a conception of national interests. Just as there was no Palestinian state,
so too there was no Palestinian nation or culture. Such was the conclusion
of the 1937 British Royal Commission, which attempted to determine what
should be the disposition of the land:

In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab
conquest, Palestine has virtually dropped out of history… In
economics as in politics, Palestine lay outside the main stream of
the world’s life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it
made no contribution to modern civilization. 64

Some may argue that by the 1930s the issue had already become
politicized and therefore that the historical truth cannot be ascertained from
pronouncements from that decade. But no such objection can possibly apply
to eyewitness accounts of visitors to the Holy Land from a century earlier.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of Swiss scholar Felix Bovet, who
visited Palestine in 1858 and reported on the state of civilization he found
there:

The Christians who conquered the Holy Land never knew how to
keep it, and it was never anything to them other than a battlefield
and a graveyard. The Saracens [i.e., Arabs] who took it from them
left it as well and it was captured by the Ottoman Turks. The
latter… turned it into a wasteland in which they seldom dare to
tread without fear. The Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants,
cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their
tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined
cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the
land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought
them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving
behind them any sign of their passage through it. 65

When Edward Robinson, Claude Conder, and the other archaeologists

first toured the land, they could identify the ancient Jewish sites with
relative ease because the Arabs usually had not bothered to give them new
Arabic names, leaving the original Hebrew names in place (albeit slightly
modified to be more easily pronounced in Arabic). The Hebrew names the
explorers found virtually intact included: Jeremiah’s birthplace of Anatoth
(Antha), the Maccabee battlefields at Lebonah (Luban) and Beth Horon
(Beth Ur), the site of Bar Kochba’s last battle at Betar (Batir), the site of the
tabernacle at Shiloh (Seilun), Arad (Tel Urad), Ashkelon (Asqalan),
Beersheba (Bir es Saba), Benei Brak (Ibn Ibreiq), Beth Shean (Beisan),
Beth Shemesh (’Ain Shams), Adoraim (Dura), Eshtamoa (Es-Samu), and
hundreds of others. 66 In fact, in the twelve centuries of the Arab presence in
Palestine before the return of the Jews in modern times, the Arabs built only
a single new town—Ramleh. 67 These obvious facts moved Sir George
Adam Smith, author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, to
write in 1891, “Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that
could take the place of the Turkish except that of the Jews who… have
given to Palestine anything it ever had of value to the world.” 68
Hence, when the world leaders at Versailles weighed the question of
competing Jewish and Arab claims, they were justifiably not concerned
with any “Palestinian” national claim. No Arab leader at Versailles (or in
Palestine, for that matter) came forward to present such a claim. Headed by
Feisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca and later to become King Feisal of Iraq,
the Arab delegation was preoccupied with securing independence for an
Arab state that they envisioned would include present-day Syria, Iraq, and
the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, they saw the Zionists as potentially useful
allies. In January 1919, a month before the opening of the Versailles
Conference, Feisal signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann calling for
“the closest possible collaboration” between the Jewish and Arab peoples
“in the development of the Arab State and Palestine,” and stating that the
constitution of Palestine should “afford the fullest guarantees for carrying
into effect the British Government’s [Balfour] Declaration of 2nd
November, 1917,” and that “all necessary measures shall be taken to
encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large
scale.” In return, the Zionist Organization agreed to “use its best efforts to
assist the Arab State in providing the means for developing the natural
resources and economic possibilities thereof.” The Arab and Jewish peoples
also undertook to “act in complete accord… before the Peace Congress.” In
March, Feisal wrote to Felix Frankfurter, who was then a member of the
American delegation: “Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with
the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace
Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.… We will wish
the Jews a hearty welcome home.” (These documents are reproduced in full
in Appendixes A and B.)
It should be noted—again, contrary to present claims—that both the
British and the League of Nations knew full well that some of the local
Palestinian Arabs were resisting the arrangement whereby a small part of
the Middle East was to be excluded from Arab sovereignty for the purpose
of creating a Jewish home. Full civil rights had been guaranteed to them,
and since Palestine contained not much more than 5 percent of the millions
of Arabs whom Britain had just liberated from the Ottoman Empire, Lord
Balfour insisted that a compromise such as Feisal’s was perfectly fair. To
Balfour, Zionism was “rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in
future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the
700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” 69 The Versailles
signatories concurred, granting the Mandate over Palestine to Britain at the
San Remo Conference in April 1920—after agitators from Damascus
inspired violent outbreaks in Jerusalem, in which six Jews were beaten to
death and hundreds more were wounded. Significantly, the Palestinian Arab
rioters demanded the incorporation of Palestine into an independent Syria. 70
British policy clearly expressed the consensus that there were two
peoples, Arab and Jewish, and that both would receive their due. In
December 1917, immediately after the signing of the Balfour Declaration,
Assistant Foreign Secretary Lord Robert Cecil had proclaimed his country’s
policy simply: “Our wish is that Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs,
Armenia for the Armenians, Judea for the Jews.” 71
Looking back on the results of Versailles years later, Lloyd George was
outraged by the claim that the Arabs had somehow been treated unfairly in
Palestine and elsewhere:

No race has done better out of the fidelity with which the Allies
redeemed their promises to the oppressed races than the Arabs.
Owing to the tremendous sacrifices of the Allied Nations, and more
particularly of Britain and her Empire, the Arabs have already won
independence in Iraq, Arabia, Syria, and Trans-Jordania, although
most of the Arab races fought throughout the War for the Turkish
oppressors…. [In particular] the Palestinian Arabs fought for
Turkish rule. 72

Similarly, the South African Jan Smuts, a member of the British War
Cabinet who was actively involved in the discussions behind the Balfour
Declaration and the Versailles Treaty, recalled the views of the British
Cabinet in deciding to favor a Jewish homeland in Palestine:

It was naturally assumed that large-scale immigration of Jews into

their historic homeland could not and would not be looked upon as
a hostile gesture to the highly favoured Arab people… [who,]
largely as a result of British action, came better out of the Great
War than any other people. 73

It therefore came as no surprise that Balfour formally wrote down these

sentiments on November 2, 1917, in his letter to the British Zionist
Federation via Lord Rothschild: Britain favorably viewed Jewish
aspirations for a Jewish National Home in Palestine, aspirations that were
commonly known to include the establishment of a Jewish majority there
and the ultimate administration of the country by the Jew. This letter
became known as the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in

Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use
their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it
being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may
prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed
by Jews in any other country.

As for the Arab inhabitants, the Balfour Declaration specifically

stipulated that they should enjoy “civil and religious rights” in Palestine. It
was believed that there was nothing wrong with an Arab minority living
among the Jews so long as their individual rights were guaranteed, which is
precisely what the declaration required.
When the League of Nations charged Britain with the Mandate for
Palestine at the San Remo Conference in 1920, it did so based on Britain’s
pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration of 1917, which it incorporated into the
language of the Mandate. Thus, the Mandate dictated, “The Mandatory
shall be responsible for placing the country under such political,
administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of
the Jewish national home.” It also called for facilitating Jewish immigration
and “close settlement by Jews on the land.” (The full text of the Mandate
can be found in Appendix C.)
Britain felt justified in making such an arrangement because it had just
liberated the Arabs from four centuries of Turkish rule and had given them
immense lands for their national self-expression. It also felt that the Jews
deserved special recognition for their loyalty and service in World War I.
Many Jews had fought in the Allied armies and thus had contributed to the
liberation from Ottoman rule of Arab and Jew alike. But the Arabs had
done practically nothing to shake off the Turks (most Arabs and, as Lloyd
George noted, Palestinian Arabs in particular, had supported the Moslem
Turks), with the exception of a few forays against the Hejaz railroad line
made by irregular bands led by T. E. Lawrence, who later did much to
promote and inflate their (and especially his) contribution to the war effort.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had served in the
Allied armies, 74 the special Jewish Battalions formed by the Zionist
leadership and led by Colonel John Henry Patterson made a tangible
contribution to the British campaigns against the Turks in Samaria, Galilee,
and Transjordan. *
Thus, both as a reward for services rendered and as a recognition of
historical Jewish national rights, British policy was clearly committed to the
historical Jewish claim to Palestine. It was British statesmen who
introduced this Jewish right into the wording of the Mandate at the League
of Nations—not a difficult task, since this right was then widely recognized.
In fact, the wording of the League of Nations Mandate did not give the Jews
the right to the land, but recognized a right understood to already exist,
stating that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection
of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting
their national home in that country.” It was possible to extend such
recognition only because educated men believed that the Jewish right to the
land had been granted to the Jewish people by history and by the unceasing
yearning of the Jews to be restored to their national life.
The recognition of this right was most eloquently championed in 1921
by Lloyd George’s one-time protégé, Winston Churchill:

It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national

centre and a national home to be re-united, and where else but in
Palestine, with which for three thousand years they have been
intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for
the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also
good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine… they shall share in the
benefits and progress of Zionism.

Churchill was a firm believer that the Jews could build their home in
Palestine while benefiting the Arab residents. He told Arabs who petitioned
him to keep the Jews from buying land in Palestine and settling there, “No
one has harmed you…. The Jews have a far more difficult task than you.
You only have to enjoy your own possession; but they have to create out of
the wilderness, out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they
bring in.” Attacked in the House of Commons for granting the Jews
concessions for hydroelectric projects on the Jordan River, Churchill said:

I am told the Arabs would have done it for themselves. Who is

going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine
would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the
irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been
quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in the
wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan
continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea. 75

As noted, these sympathetic attitudes toward Zionism were widely

shared on both sides of the Atlantic. It therefore came as no surprise that the
United States soon recognized the Balfour Declaration. It was accepted in
June 1922 by both Houses of Congress, then in September by President
Warren G. Harding, who signed a bill endorsing it.
So it was that in 1922, after decades of political activism, Zionism had
reached a peak of international appeal. Its cause was widely viewed as just,
its leaders were admired and respected, and its basic goal of establishing a
Jewish homeland on both sides of the Jordan River was increasingly
accepted worldwide. True, the home for the Jews was to be of modest
proportions, much of it covered by swamp and sand and all of it exposed to
an unforgiving sun. But it was empty and roomy enough, and it would do.
Had not their ancestors tilled the soil of Gilead east of the Jordan, built
terraced vineyards in Judea in the west, fished in the Sea of Galilee to the
north, and set off to sea from Jaffa on the coast? Their descendants would
do all that and more. As Herzl had envisaged it in his novel Altneuland
(“Old-New Land”), the Jewish state would revive ancient traditions
alongside its thriving science and technology, creating, precisely as George
Eliot had foretold, a republic “carrying the culture and sympathy of every
great nation in its bosom” and bringing “the brightness of Western freedom
amid the despotism of the East.” In 1922, despite the ominous clouds
gathering over the Jewish community of Europe, the creation of a safe
haven and a home seemed imminent. The Jewish future had not seemed
brighter for two millennia.
OceanofPDF.com
2

THE BETRAYAL

But it was not to be. Even before Britain was granted the Mandate to build
a Jewish National Home at the San Remo Conference in 1920, forces within
the British imperial establishment had started working to dissolve Britain’s
commitment to the promise of Versailles. By the time the council of the
League of Nations confirmed the Mandate in 1922, the will of British
policymakers to actually implement the Balfour Declaration had begun to
evaporate.
Under its changed policy, Britain turned its back on the promises it had
undertaken in the Balfour Declaration. What had been regarded as obvious
moral truths and obligations before the British had formally received the
Mandate were now quickly discarded as policies unsuited to the moment.
Britain tore off Transjordan from the Jewish National Home in 1922: With
one stroke of the pen, it lopped off nearly 80 percent of the land promised
the Jewish people, closing this area to Jews for the remainder of the century
(see Map 4). It sanctioned the entry into Palestine of Abdullah, the
Hashemite chieftain from Mecca, titled him emir, and created a new country
called Transjordan (now Jordan), which to this day suffers from the
artificiality of its birth. At the end of the 1920s, claiming that the settlement
of Jews had “provoked” anti-Jewish rioting, Britain issued a White Paper
that severely restricted Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by
Jews. By the eve of World War II, after successive White Papers, the British
had choked off Jewish immigration almost entirely and had limited Jewish
land purchase to a tiny fraction of the country, prompting President Franklin
Roosevelt to declare to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “I was at Versailles,
and I know that the British made no secret of the fact they promised
Palestine to the Jews. Why are they now reneging on their promise?” 1
Why, indeed? Where had this shift come from? What political forces
were able to drive the most powerful nation on earth to unilaterally abandon
the commitment it had made to a national home for the Jewish people—
leaving the Jews homeless and helpless just as Hitler’s machine of
destruction was rolling across Europe?
The government of Lloyd George had adopted the Balfour Declaration
and pursued it at Versailles for two reasons not dissimilar to those that many
Americans have used for supporting Israel today. Lloyd George believed
that British support for the Jewish National Home was morally correct
because of the justice of the Jewish cause. But he had also advocated
supporting Zionism for a second reason, no less important: that Zionism
was in Britain’s own interest. Lloyd George believed (as had the Kaiser
before him) that the Jews were a power in the world to be reckoned with,
and that an alliance with a Jewish nation in Palestine, situated by the crucial
Suez Canal and straddling the land route to India, would be a lasting asset
to Britain. 2 He was therefore convinced that strengthening the Jewish
people in Palestine would in fact strengthen the British people and
ultimately the Western values of which he believed Britain was the
guardian.
The shift to an anti-Zionist Britain over the course of the next few years
entailed a dual change in British governmental opinion. British
policymakers came to believe, first, that an alliance with the Arabs, rather
than with the Jews, was in Britain’s interest. Second, since many Arab
leaders rejected Feisal’s diplomacy and opposed the settlement of Jews in
Palestine, British officials came to believe that it would be unjust to
override local Arab opinion and support Zionism. Fixed during the interwar
period, these British positions on both interest and justice have retained
their vitality well into the second half of the century. Laying the foundations
for a remarkable readiness to accept even the most exaggerated claims of
later Arab propaganda as truth, they have had immense influence in
determining Western, and most recently American, policy toward Israel up
to our own time. It is therefore necessary to understand the genesis of these
beliefs and to gauge how well the policies based on them actually served
the causes of justice and interest.
Clearly, the rejection of the Jewish National Home was not the policy of
either Balfour or Lloyd George. Rather, it came from the imperial
calculations of the officials of the British War Office and Foreign Office,
who grabbed much of the Arab world from the Ottomans during World War
I. The idealism of Wilson and Balfour was fine for wartime propaganda, but
once Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Arabia were actually in British hands,
someone had to govern them—and that someone was a small army of rather
clannish Foreign Office “Arabists,” who had spent their lives learning to
speak Arabic, moving about places such as Cairo and Khartoum, and
becoming intoxicated with the romance of the “noble” Bedouin. Dreaming
of a vast pro-British Arab federation from the Sudan to Iraq (creating a
continuous overland empire from South Africa to India), these men had
spent the war fighting zealously for the “liberation” of the Arabs. They had
schemed tirelessly to manufacture Arab “leaders” who could bring the
scattered and chronically divided Arab tribes of the Ottoman Empire into an
alliance with Britain—and with one another. Strangely, these Arabists seem
to have been untroubled by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Arabs
were fighting and dying for the Moslem Ottomans and that only the most
lavish “subsidies” and the most exorbitant promises of future independent
Arab kingdoms could pry a few thousand disunited Bedouin raiders away to
side with the Western Allies.
To the Arabists, the small, relatively backward Arab population of
Palestine was of little interest. But Palestine itself, as the land bridge
between Cairo on the one hand and Damascus and Baghdad on the other,
was an indispensable link in their chain. Restless to win the affections of
their new Arab subjects, they were more than eager to co-opt the Arab
antagonism toward Zionism into their policies in Palestine, which they at
first believed might be incorporated into a British-dominated Syria.
As early as the British conquest of Jerusalem on December 11, 1917,
one month after the Balfour Declaration, resistance to Zionism was
manifest among the imperial administrators, who saw their job not in terms
of serving justice or even keeping British promises but in winning over the
Arabs. Thus, General Sir Edmund Allenby’s chief political officer,
Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton, worried that the declaration had been a
mistake: “We have… to consider whether the situation demands out and out
support for Zionism at the risk of alienating the Arabs at a critical moment.”
3
His argument to the pro-Zionist Sir Mark Sykes foreshadows the
argumentation of generations of Arabists:

I must point out that, by pushing [for] them [i.e., the Zionists] as
hard as we appear to be doing, we are risking the possibility of
Arab unity becoming something like an accomplished fact and
being ranged against us. 4

In this Clayton was backed by the high commissioner in Egypt, Sir

Reginald Wingate, who warned Allenby that “Mark Sykes is a bit carried
away with ‘the exuberance of his own verbosity’ in regard to Zionism and
unless he goes a bit slower he may quite unintentionally upset the
applecart.” 5
The new military governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, also worked to
cool British enthusiasm for Zionist plans and declarations. He urged
sympathy for the point of view of the local Arabs and demanded that any
changes come about only “gradually,” so as not to leave “an abiding
rancour.” 6
For his part, General Allenby refused even to allow the publication of
the Balfour Declaration in Palestine. Instead, the military government
issued a declaration of its intentions of “encouraging and assisting the
establishment of indigenous government and administrations in Syria and
Mesopotamia,” which the local Arab notables assumed to apply to them
since they understood Palestine to be part of Syria (and since the British
went to the trouble of sending them copies). Jabotinsky summed up the
approach of the administration as being “to apologize to the Arabs for a slip
of the tongue by Mr. Balfour.” 7
Soon, reports of this resistance to official policy began to alarm the
Foreign Office in London, which was still under Lord Balfour. On August
4, 1918, the British administration in Palestine received a cable explicitly
ordering it to consider the Balfour Declaration to be British policy. 8
But to no effect. The British administration’s contempt for the Jewish
National Home policy and for the Jews themselves only grew more open.
General Arthur Money, Allenby’s successor as head of the military
administration who complained about Lloyd George’s “hook-nosed
friends,” 9 ordered that government forms should be printed in English and
Arabic only 10 and refused to stand for the playing of “Hatikva,” the Jewish
national anthem. 11 The military governor of Jaffa, Lieutenant-Colonel J. E.
Hubbard, organized and funded the first political organizations among the
Arabs with the intention of relying on the opinions of these
“representatives” to undermine Zionism. 12 Hubbard was reputed to have
announced that if the Arabs wished to riot against the Jews, he would not
stop them. 13 As for allowing Jews to actually come and live in the land,
British Intelligence feared the effects of this bold step as well, and it urged
the Foreign Office to deny immigration applications to Jews until the
military situation could be resolved. 14 Jabotinsky, who had been an ardent
advocate of cooperation with the British, was now forced to conclude
ruefully that the British administration had been swept up in “an
unprecedented epidemic of anti-Semitism.” He wrote: “Not in Russia, nor
in Poland had there been such an intense and widespread atmosphere of
hatred as prevailed in the British army in Palestine in 1919 and 1920.” 15
But the British establishment continued to boast a handful of genuine
Zionists, who waged a tireless (and ultimately futile) battle to implement
the policies of Lloyd George and Balfour. These few believed the exact
opposite of what the proponents of Arab appeasement were advocating.
They thought that Britain ultimately could not rely on the Arabs, and that
even those Arabs who were in league with Britain were weak and unstable.
They believed that it was in the interest of Britain to help the Jews build a
solid Western base in the heart of the Middle East—which paradoxically
would help stabilize the Arab domains around it.
No one argued this more forcefully than Colonel Richard
Meinertzhagen, the British chief of intelligence in the Middle East who had
used brilliant deception techniques to help drive the Turks out of Palestine
in 1917. Although himself a onetime anti-Semite, Meinertzhagen’s opinion
of Jews and Zionism had changed after he started using Jewish and Arab
agents in the Middle East. By the time he was appointed chief political
officer in Palestine in 1919, Meinertzhagen had become one of the greatest
non-Jewish Zionists in history, a commitment that eventually culminated in
his meeting with Hitler to try to rescue Jews from Germany and bring them
to safety in Palestine. Meinertzhagen was a thoroughly independent-minded
British patriot, and his approach to Zionism was fashioned first and
foremost by its coherence with British interests. The remarkable character
of this man is revealed in his first meeting with Hitler. The Fuhrer marched
up to Meinertzhagen, extended his arm, and said, “Heil Hitler!” Not
missing a beat, Meinertzhagen responded: “Heil Meinertzhagen!” 16
As the representative of Balfour’s foreign office in Palestine,
Meinertzhagen found himself “alone out there among gentiles, in upholding
Zionism.” 17 Nevertheless, he argued that support for the Jewish National
Home was unassailably in Britain’s interest:

The force of nationalism will challenge our position. We cannot

befriend both Arab and Jew. My proposal is based on befriending
the people who are more likely to be loyal friends—the Jews….
Though we have done much for the Arabs, they do not know the
meaning of gratitude; moreover they would be a liability; the Jew
would be an asset…. The Jews have moreover proved their fighting
qualities since the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. The Arab is a
poor fighter, though an adept at looting, sabotage and murder….
[Mine] is a proposal to make our position in the Middle East more
secure. 18

Three decades before Israel’s independence, Meinertzhagen was

convinced that the alliance with the pro-Western Jews would ultimately be
the only way to defend Britain’s position in the Middle East:

We [will] cease to control the Suez Canal in 1966; by that time we

shall have been pushed out of Egypt[,] who can then close the
Canal against our shipping….

I have always regarded Palestine as the key to Middle East

Defence. I therefore approached Weizmann last week with a view
to ascertaining whether, when and if Palestine becomes a Jewish
Sovereign State, Great Britain would be granted air, naval and
military bases in Palestine in perpetuity. Moreover the Jews can be
relied on to keep agreements, the Arabs can never be relied on.…
With British Bases in Palestine our position in the Middle East is
secure forever. 19

The struggle between Meinertzhagen and the British anti-Zionists over

the future direction of the Mandate finally boiled over in March 1920 with
the installation of Feisal, the candidate of the British Arabists, as king of all
Syria—including Palestine. The British administration in Palestine, unable
to officially recognize his kingship over Palestine, 20 orchestrated violent
demonstrations demanding the end of the Jewish National Home policy and
the incorporation of Palestine into Syria. In coordination with Feisal, Storrs,
the governor of Jerusalem, and his chief of staff, Richard Waters-Taylor,
had cultivated a coterie of Pan-Arabist radicals led by Haj Amin al-
Husseini, who they believed could be counted on to support the
incorporation of Palestine into a British-controlled Syria under Feisal’s
family, the Hashemites. According to Meinertzhagen (who had been forced
to plant agents to monitor the anti-Zionist activities of his own
government), Waters-Taylor approached these Arabs in early 1920 with the
idea of organizing “anti-Jew riots to impress on the Administration the
unpopularity of the Zionist policy” Both Storrs and Feisal were informed of
this effort. 21
Waters-Taylor met with Husseini to emphasize the importance of the
riots, as Meinertzhagen later related:

Waters-Taylor saw Haj al Amin on the Wednesday before Easter

and told him that he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the
world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish
domination in Palestine; that Zionism was unpopular not only with
the Palestine Administration but with Whitehall; and if
disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter,
both General Bols and General Allenby would advocate the
abandonment of the Jewish National Home. 22

On the day of the rioting Jerusalem was covered with posters reading:
“The Government is with us, Allenby is with us, kill the Jews; there is no
punishment for killing Jews.” 23 Arab inciters shouted, “Long live our King
—King Feisal! In the name of our King we urge you to fight the Jews!” 24
Jewish police officers had been taken off duty, and the security forces were
nowhere to be found (except for some of the Arab policemen who took part
in the rioting), as the Arab mob beat, raped, and looted for three days. Most
of those whom the British detained were released again before the violence
had ended and simply went back to rioting. 25 Six Jews were killed and 211
wounded. When order was finally “restored,” the British had arrested two
Arabs for raping Jewish women and twenty Jewish men (including
Jabotinsky) for having organized a Jewish self-defense unit. Husseini, who
had orchestrated the mayhem, slipped out of the country. At a meeting of
Moslem notables immediately following the riots, a leading agitator, Aref
el-Aref, said: “Fortunately, the British Administration is on our side and we
shall not be hurt. My advice, then, is to continue the assault on the Jews.” 26
In the aftermath of the rioting, it looked at first as though
Meinertzhagen’s views might prevail. His protests to the still-sympathetic
Foreign Office and his subsequent testimony before the commission of
inquiry so shocked the government in London that it determined to
dismantle the military government. General Sir Louis Bols and Waters-
Taylor were dismissed, and in July 1920 Palestine was turned over to a high
commissioner, Lord Herbert Samuel, who was a professed Zionist.
Jabotinsky and his men were amnestied for their activities during the riots.
Meanwhile, the French invaded Damascus and deposed the British-installed
Hashemite government, staking their own claim to Syria and ruining
forever the Arabist scheme of incorporating Palestine into a British Syria.
But within months it became clear that the battle for Britain’s fulfillment
of its commitments would be protracted and bitter. “Bols went,” wrote
Colonel Patterson, “but the system he implanted remained. The anti-Semitic
officials that he brought with him into the country remained.” 27 The well-
meaning Lord Samuel proved inadequate to the task of resisting his
subordinates, and the situation rapidly deteriorated. These underlings
harangued ceaselessly about the hatred that was growing against Britain
because of the Jews, and they saw to it that key non-British positions were
filled by Arabs, even in the security services. 28 They prevailed upon Lord
Samuel to pardon Husseini as a “gesture” and allow the instigator of the
riots to return to Jerusalem, where he immediately resumed orchestrating
more of them.
Worried about being “led into a clash with our Arab friends,” 29 Samuel,
after some initial opposition, finally acquiesced in the scheme to detach
Transjordan from the rest of Palestine. When the post of Mufti (Moslem
religious leader) of Jerusalem became vacant, Husseini grew determined to
use the prestige and financial muscle of the post against the Jews, and he
ran for the position. Although he lost the election, coming in fourth, the
anti-Zionists in Samuel’s administration deposed the actual winner and
duped Samuel into believing that Haj Amin alone represented Palestinian
Arabs. Samuel appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini to the newly manufactured
post of “Grand Mufti,” Mufti for life—in one fateful stroke legitimizing the
most violent and radical element among the Palestinian Arabs to a position
of preeminent leadership and establishing a pattern that was to continue
through the rest of the century. “He hates both Jews and British,” wrote
Meinertzhagen. “His appointment is sheer madness.” 30 “Samuel is rather
weak,” Lloyd George concluded glumly 31
By 1921, hostility to Zionism was quickly making inroads in London as
well. In that year, the authority over Palestine was transferred from the
Foreign Office to the new Middle East Department at the Colonial Office,
made up of old empire-building hands from colonies such as Kenya, Sierra
Leone, the Gold Coast, and southern Rhodesia. 32 The new department was
headed by Sir John Evelyn Shuckburgh; a man “saturated with anti-
Semitism, [he] loathes Zionism and the Jews.” 33 Shuckburgh was among
the leaders of the effort to convince the government that it could maintain
Britain’s hold on the Middle East by opposing Zionism and thereby earn the
gratitude and loyalty of its new Arab subjects in Egypt, Iraq, and the Gulf.
Although they were captivated by the mystique of the Arab, the British
Arabists had another, much less romantic interest in backing the Arabs. In a
peculiar combination of patronizing sympathy and subconscious contempt,
they believed that the Arabs were a backward people who could be more
easily controlled than the Jews and indefinitely manipulated to postpone
demands for independence—as long as their disdain for Jews did not rile
them into opposition to British domination. Shuckburgh was joined in the
Colonial Office by veterans of relations with the Arabs during the war,
including T. E. Lawrence. “Lawrence of Arabia” had been made famous in
Britain and America by a widely exaggerated stage-show about the war
effort against the Ottomans—which had depicted him and his minuscule
band of Arab raiders as the heroes of the war. In order to substantiate this
undeserved reputation, Lawrence worked doggedly to promote the
impression that Britain owed a great deal to the Arabs in general and to
Feisal and the Hashemites of Mecca in particular. 34 Seasoned subordinates
like Shuckburgh and Lawrence were able to play on the inexperience of the
new minister above them (as had happened to Lord Samuel and countless
other top officials over the course of this century) and convert him to their
policies: In this case, the man in charge was the mercurial colonial
secretary, Winston Churchill.
Churchill took office as a man of outspoken sympathy for Zionism. In
February 1920, he sent chills down the spines of government Arabists by
telling the Sunday Herald that he envisioned “a Jewish State by the banks
of the Jordan… which might comprise three or four million Jews.” 35 In this
he was heir to the tradition of Versailles, which had clearly supported the
idea that, as in biblical times, the Jewish nation was to be reinstated on both
banks of the Jordan River. On this matter Lord Balfour had written to Lloyd
George that Palestine’s eastern border had to be well east of Jordan “for the
development of Zionist agriculture.” 36 Lord Samuel had concurred that

… you cannot have numbers without area and territory. Every

expert knows that for a prosperous Palestine an adequate territory
beyond the Jordan [River] is indispensable. 37

The Times, too, had argued that Palestine needed a “good military
frontier… as near as may be to the edge of the desert.” According to the
Times, the Jordan River

… will not do as Palestine’s eastern boundary. Our duty as

Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State but
one that is capable of a vigorous and independent national life. 38

Lord Arnold, the Undersecretary for the Colonies, retrospectively

summed up the position of official Britain during the war for Parliament a
few years later:

During the war we recognized Arab independence, within certain

border limits…. There were discussions as to what territories these
borders should take in. But there was no dispute as to Trans-Jordan.
There is no doubt about the fact that Trans-Jordan is within the
boundaries to which the [Balfour] Declaration during the War
refers. 39

Even Abdullah, the emir of the new entity of Transjordan, recognized

that Transjordan had been intended by the British to be part of the Jewish
National Home:

[God] granted me success in creating the Government of

Transjordan by having it separated from the Balfour Declaration[,]
which had included it since the Sykes-Picot Agreement [in 1916]
assigned it to the British zone of influence. 40

Like his brother Feisal, Abdullah was apparently convinced of the value
of Jewish immigration to building Transjordan’s economic base, and at
various points between 1924 and 1935 he attempted to arrange the sale and
lease of land in Transjordan to Jews from western Palestine. These efforts
were eventually aborted by the British government in western Palestine. 41
With such strong currents in favor of Jewish settlement east of the
Jordan, it was clear that Churchill, if left to his own devices, might well act
out his idea of “a Jewish State by the banks of the Jordan”—and the
functionaries of the new Middle East Department moved quickly to ensure
that he did not. It was Shuckburgh, Lawrence, and their associates who led
Churchill to believe that Transjordan had been promised to Feisal and the
Hashemites of Mecca during the war. They thereby triggered the installation
of Feisal’s brother Abdullah and his army of two hundred Bedouins as
rulers of Jordan—despite the objection by High Commissioner for Palestine
Sir Herbert Samuel and others that Jordan was part of Palestine. Lloyd
George, too, insisted that even if there were no choice but to make
Transjordan Arab, it had to be considered an ‘Arab province [of] or adjunct
to Palestine.” 42
But Churchill’s subordinates were convinced that by throwing such
favors to the Arabs, they would earn the Arabs’ loyalty. They told Churchill
that making such a gift would really not harm the Jews—a line which
Churchill, like so many other Western leaders after him, did not know
enough to refute. Meinertzhagen, who had been assigned to the Middle East
Department in London, once again found himself alone in attempting to
maintain the commitment that Britain had made to the Jews:

The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe

[i.e., anti-Semitic], the worst offender being Shuckburgh who is
head of the Middle East Department….
I exploded on hearing that Churchill had severed Transjordan
from Palestine…. Abdullah was placated at the expense of the
Jewish National Home which embraces the whole of Biblical
Palestine. Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced
him…. This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of
Biblical Palestine. The Colonial Office and the Palestine
Administration have now declared that the articles for the mandate
relating to the Jewish Home are not applicable to Transjordan….
This discovery was not made until it became necessary to appease
an Arab Emir.

Outraged, Meinertzhagen insisted on seeing Churchill:

… I went foaming at the mouth with anger and indignation[.]

Churchill heard me out; I told him it was grossly unfair to the Jews,
that it was yet another promise broken and that it was a most
dishonest act, that the Balfour Declaration was being torn up by
degrees and that the official policy of His Majesty’s Government to
establish a Home for the Jews in Biblical Palestine was being
sabotaged; that I found the Middle East Department whose business
was to implement the Mandate, almost one hundred percent
hebraphobe…. Churchill listened and said he saw the force of my
argument and would consider the question. He thought it was too
late to alter[,] but a time limit to Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan
might work.
I’m thoroughly disgusted. 43

To Churchill’s credit, he rejected effort after effort to persuade him not

to implement the Balfour Declaration west of the Jordan River. But his
rejections were not enough to discourage the Arabs, who correctly
recognized that Britain was caving in under the pressure of their violence.
Less than two months after Churchill’s decision, in March 1921, to establish
Abdullah in Transjordan, Arab mobs, somehow not appeased, again went
on the rampage. A British judge in the Mandatory government named
Horace Samuel (no relation to Lord Herbert Samuel), who was involved in
the subsequent trials, recorded the events in Jaffa:

The Arabs of Jaffa… started to murder, wound, and loot the Jews
under the official protection and assistance of a substantial number
of Jaffa police.… A mob of Arabs… began to attack [the Zionist
Commission immigration depot] with stones and sticks, but were at
first successfully kept at bay by the immigrants. Finally,
reinforcements for the attackers were supplied by certain Arab
policemen, well equipped with rifles, bombs, and ammunition. The
door was forced by the police, and under their leadership and escort
the mob burst into the building. Thirteen of the immigrants were
murdered.

Faced with the murder of Jews, the British instantly knew what to do. As
Judge Samuel explained:

The riots of the 1st of May and the massacre of the Jews at the
Immigration Hostel were a pretty broad hint that the Jaffa Arabs
resented any further Jewish immigration into the country. Under
these circumstances the High Commissioner [Lord Samuel],
preferring a policy of tact to one of drastic repression, within forty-
eight hours of the massacre telephoned Mr. Miller, the Assistant
Governor of Jaffa, instructing him to announce to the Arabs that in
accordance with their request, immigration had been suspended. 44

Still unappeased, Arab mobs spent the following week attacking Jewish
communities all over the country. British soldiers were under orders not to
shoot. 45 In the end, thirty-five Jews were left dead and hundreds more
wounded. According to Judge Samuel, Storrs argued for a policy of
“throwing the Arabs as many sops as they could swallow, in the hope of
thereby getting them to desist from open revolt.” 46 His view prevailed, and
a general freeze on Jewish immigration was imposed for the first time. And
while the freeze lasted only two months, it set a precedent of sacrificing
Jewish rights to Arab blackmail, which was soon to replace the Balfour
Declaration as London’s policy.
But by this time, many of the Arabists did not see the Arab threats as
blackmail at all. On the contrary, the Arabists found themselves in
sympathy with Arab revulsion against this “nowhere very popular people,”
as Storrs called them. 47 With astonishing hypocrisy, these avowed
imperialists and colonialists began to argue that “foreign” Jewish control of
Palestine was an injustice to the indigenous Arabs. Thus in 1920 the new
foreign minister, Lord Curzon, a staunch colonialist, argued that the
Mandate, which “reeks of Judaism in every paragraph,” was inherently
unfair to the local Arabs. 48 He was joined in his opinion in 1921 by the new
commander of the British Army in Palestine, General W N. Congreve, who
circulated a memorandum to his troops decreeing that while the army of
course was not supposed to have political opinions, it could not ignore the
injustice being done to the Arabs by allowing the Jews to settle in Palestine.
49
The effect of this new moralizing on the part of the British imperial
establishment had an almost immediate effect on the execution of British
policy It propelled Lord Samuel’s adviser on the Arabs, Ernest Richmond,
to conclude that the Zionist policy was “inspired by a spirit which I can
only regard as evil” 50 —and to engineer the appointment of Haj Amin al-
Husseini to the post of Grand Mufti as a curative.
In London the increasing distaste for Zionism and fear of Arab threats
hobbled support for constructing a strong, pro-Western Jewish Palestine,
and British policy became mired in equivocation. The trend in matters of
Jewish immigration and settlement affected strategic issues as well, as
Meinertzhagen found out in 1923, when he tried to arrange an agreement
for future Jewish-British military cooperation in Palestine:

[Churchill] did not wish me to bring it up to the forthcoming

Committee on Palestine as it would have a hostile reception. I
asked if the government still stood by the Balfour Declaration; he
said it did but that things must go slow for the moment as the
Cabinet would never agree to a policy which would antagonize the
Arabs. Appeasement again.
We are backing the wrong horse and, my God, we shall suffer
for it if and when another war is sprung on us. 51

Devotion to the Balfour Declaration flickered on in the form of a

handful of British parliamentarians such as Lord Josiah Wedgwood,
Wyndham Deedes, and Leopold Amery but within a few years their
influence had almost entirely waned.
In August 1929, on the Jewish fast day of Tish’ah beAv, which marks
the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Arab mobs attacked Jews in
Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed, and elsewhere. They rampaged for eight days,
killing 113 Jews, wounding hundreds more, and destroying six Jewish
settlements entirely, including the ancient Jewish community of Hebron.
The British once again withheld fire but worked to confiscate any “illegal”
arms they found among the Jews. In despair, the Hebrew daily Davar asked,
“Is there a law which compels our men to deliver their lives and the lives of
their children to massacre, their daughters to rape, their property to plunder?
What theory and what kind of regime is it that demands such things of
men?” 52
Despite the fact that Jewish immigration to Palestine had declined
sharply over the preceding two years, the Colonial Office under Lord
Passfield (Sidney Webb, the noted Fabian Socialist) again concluded that
Jewish immigration had been one of the causes of the bloodshed. Once
again capitulating in the face of Arab demands, Lord Passfield announced
the severe curtailment of the land available for Jewish settlement, called for
strict controls on Jewish immigration, and urged the Zionists to make
concessions on the idea of a Jewish National Home. 53 The Arabs also
demanded that Jabotinsky be banned from Palestine because he advocated a
Jewish state, and in this, too, the British administration obliged. 54
For anyone with sober vision, it was suddenly and completely clear that
Britain was prepared to betray the idea of the Jewish National Home. But
incredibly, many Jews did not see this. They were frustrated by Britain’s
policies, but after each rebuff they were mollified by the government’s
public declarations of its friendliness and irrevocable commitment to the
Jewish people. Having been stateless for so many centuries, the Jews now
suffered from an acute political myopia and refused to recognize the true
motives of British policies and the catastrophic consequences of failing to
forcefully challenge them—much as Jews in Europe did not recognize
where Nazism was leading a few years later.
The handful like Jabotinsky who did understand had to overcome the
tendency of the majority not to want to understand, for this would
necessarily involve a confrontation with Great Britain, then the preeminent
world power. For the majority of Jews, schooled in centuries of submission
to the powers that be, such a confrontation with Britain was unthinkable. As
a result, the Jewish people remained largely docile during the period
between the two world wars, as their patrimony and national rights were
progressively whittled away and as millions of their fellow Jews were being
imperiled.
True, there was some reaction in public opinion to the anti-Zionist
measures that the Colonial Office took in 1930. For example, the League of
Nations Mandates Commission stripped the British of their moral standing
in the dispute by announcing in 1930 that Britain had caused the Arab riots
in Palestine by failing to provide sufficient police protection. 55 But what
influence the League still had evaporated when it gaped helplessly while the
Japanese violated the Kellogg-Briand Pact and invaded Manchuria in 1931
and while Mussolini conquered Ethiopia in 1935. The idea that the new
world order would honor the commitments that the great powers had made
to the smaller nations was on its last legs. And in the case of Britain this
was just the dress rehearsal for its final abandonment of Zionism, which
was to come a few years later.
In 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany. Within three years, the
Jewish population of Palestine had almost doubled. Anti-Zionists, British
and Arab alike, understood that the promise that Palestine would be a safe
haven for Jews who were fleeing for their lives was being acted out before
their eyes. If action were not taken immediately, a Jewish majority would
materialize in Palestine within a few years, and then a Jewish state. The
dream of a continuous Arab realm under the control of the British Empire
was in serious trouble.
On April 19, 1936, an Arab general strike was declared that was
intended to cripple the country and bring it to its knees if Jewish
immigration were not suspended. The British collaborated by permitting the
strike. Gangs in the pay of the Mufti, numbering several thousand, imposed
a reign of terror on the country. For three years they maintained the “revolt”
by torturing and murdering Arab dissenters, while seeking out Jewish
victims when and where they could get them. Through much of the uprising
the British Army withheld fire, continuing its policy of disarming the Jews
while allowing weapons and Arab volunteers from neighboring countries to
pour across the border into the Mufti’s hands. In all, more than five hundred
Jews were killed out of a total Jewish population of a few hundred
thousand. Surveying the carnage, Meinertzhagen sensed what was coming:
“God, how we have let the Jews down. And if we are not careful we shall
lose the Eastern Mediterranean, Iraq, and everything which counts in the
Middle East.” 56
Even at this late date, there were still a precious few within the British
administration who argued that the Arab violence proved that only the Jews
could be relied upon to protect the interests of Britain in the area. Most
important among them was Captain Orde Wingate, who largely on his own
initiative recruited and trained Jewish antiterror units known as the Special
Night Squads, which were used to take offensive action against the Arab
insurgents. Wingate explained the need for Jewish troops:

The military, in spite of their superior armanent, training and

discipline, are in comparison with the guerilla warrior at a
disadvantage as far as knowledge of the ground and local
conditions are concerned; it is advisable to create mixed groups of
[British] soldiers and faithful local inhabitants. The Jews are the
only local inhabitants who can be relied upon. They know the
terrain well and can speak the languages fluently. Moreover, they
grasp tactical training quickly and are well disciplined and
courageous in combat. 57

In 1939 Wingate was summarily removed from Palestine with the

specific order not to return. He later died in Burma. In the face of continual
upheaval in Palestine, the inclination of most people in the British
government was to capitulate to Arab demands. They believed that it was
Jewish immigration that was driving the Arabs to oppose the British and
support the Nazis, threatening everything they had worked so hard to create.
As Evelyn Shuckburgh, attaché in the British embassy in Cairo, wrote to his
Arabist father, John, in 1937, succinctly capturing the essence of Western
Arabism for the rest of the century, “How can we risk prejudicing our
whole position in the Arab world for the sake of Palestine?” 58
London agreed. In July 1937, the Royal (Peel) Commission gave
explicit sanction to Arabist policy. The Mandate for a Jewish National
Home in Palestine, it concluded, simply could not be filled in the face of
Arab sensibilities. Instead, it recommended that Palestine be partitioned:
The Jews would receive their “state,” which was to consist of parts of the
coastal strip and the Galilee (roughly 5 percent of the original homeland
granted the Jews by the Palestine Mandate), the British would retain
Jerusalem and Haifa, and an Arab state (to be merged with Transjordan)
would receive everything else—more than 90 percent of Palestine. Yet the
Arabs, recognizing a complete loss of nerve when they saw one, rejected
the plan unequivocally and demanded everything. In September 1937, Arab
terrorists assassinated the new British district commissioner for Galilee,
whom they believed to be working to implement partition. The uprising
resumed with the same demands: a complete end to all Jewish immigration
and a complete renunciation of the Jewish National Home.
In the end the British complied. Early in 1939, Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain concocted the formula that was to bring “peace in our time” to
the Middle East. His solution to the Arabs’ unhappiness with the Balfour
Declaration was to abrogate the declaration once and for all. The
Chamberlain White Paper of May 1939 was issued four months before the
outbreak of World War II and the final countdown to the Holocaust. It
decreed that Jewish immigration was to be finally terminated after the entry
of another seventy-five thousand Jews, and that Britain would now work to
create a “bi-national” Arab-Jewish state. Anyone who could read and count
understood that this meant that Chamberlain had finally dealt a death blow
to the idea of a Jewish state. A mere six months after he betrayed the
Czechs at Munich, Chamberlain went on to betray the Jews. The League of
Nations Mandates Commission rejected the British action as not in accord
with the Mandate, but the League’s opinion was no longer of interest to
anyone. 59

The extent of the British betrayal of the Jews can be understood only in the
context of what was happening in Europe in the 1930s and thereafter.
Responding to pressure from the Arabs, the British restriction of Jewish
immigration (there was no analogous restriction on Arab immigration) cut
off the routes of escape for Jews trying to flee a burning Europe. Thus,
while the Gestapo was conniving to send boatloads of German Jews out
onto the high seas to prove that no country wanted them any more than
Germany did, the British dutifully turned back every leaking barge that
reached Palestine, even firing on several. 60 To some, such as
Meinertzhagen, the meaning of these events was all too clear:

The Nazis mean to eradicate Judaism from Germany and they will
succeed. Nobody loves the Jews, nobody wants them and yet we
are pledged to give them a home in Palestine. Instead we slam the
door in their faces just at the moment when it should be wide open.
We even whittle down their home at a moment when we should
enlarge it. The action of His Majesty’s Government in Palestine is
very near to that of Hitler in Germany. They may be more subtle,
they are certainly more hypocritical, but the result [for the Jews] is
similar—insecurity, misery, exasperation and murder. 61

For over ten years the British shut the doors of the Jewish National
Home to Jews fleeing their deaths. In so doing they not only worked to
destroy the Jewish National Home, which no one believed could survive
without immigrants, but made themselves accomplices in the destruction of
European Jewry.
Of the ideals that had led Britain to promise the Jews a national home,
Foreign Minister Lord Halifax (who imposed the restrictions) averred:
“There are times when considerations of abstract justice must give way to
those of administrative expediency.” 62 When news of the destruction of
Europe’s Jews reached the Colonial Office during the war, pleas to open the
gates and allow some to be saved were dismissed by John Shuckburgh as
“unscrupulous Zionist sobstuff.” 63 He explained: “There are days in which
we are brought up against realities, and we cannot be deterred [from our
policies] by the kind of perverse, pre-war humanitarianism that prevailed in
1939.” 64
Indeed, the British adhered to their policy of opposing “perverse
humanitarianism” with a vengeance. During all the years of World War II,
as European Jewry was being fed into Hitler’s ovens, Britain regularly
turned away Jewish refugees seeking to reach the safe shores of Palestine.
Some managed to “illegally” run the blockade, and they and their children
now live in Israel. Most were unsuccessful and were forced to return to
Europe, sent by the British to their deaths. No other country would have
them, and the only place that would was cruelly blocked.
By war’s end in 1945, the pro-British Chaim Weizmann was forced to
give up the leadership of the Zionist movement (although he was later to
receive the ceremonial post of first President of the State of Israel). In his
last address as chairman of the Zionist Organization, he bitterly surveyed
the end result of a quarter of a century of unflagging faith in British
goodwill:

Sometimes we were told that our exclusion from Palestine was

necessary in order to do justice to a[n Arab] nation already
endowed with seven independent territories covering a million
square miles; at other times we were told that the admission of our
refugees might endanger military security through the war…. It
was easier to doom the Jews of Europe to a certain death than to
evolve a technique for overcoming such difficulties. 65
Astonishingly, not even the confirmation of the destruction of most of
Europe’s Jews and the photographs from the death camps could melt the
stone hearts of British policymakers, who had determined that no Jewish
state would be allowed to come into existence at any price, and who were
prepared to make sure that every last survivor of the Holocaust stayed in
Europe. 66 Britain continued to fight tooth and nail after 1945 to prevent the
entry of the survivors into Palestine, resorting to deportations to Cyprus,
Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Earlier, in the middle of World War II in
1942, they refused passage to Palestine to the ship Stuma, which
subsequently sank taking down with it 768 refugees from the Holocaust.
There was only one survivor. The pathetic number of Jews permitted to
enter Palestine fell even lower than it had been during the war. 67 As if this
were not enough, the British equipped the Arab armies preparing to wipe
out the Jewish communities in Palestine. In April 1948, with Arab
irregulars already pouring over the borders, the dying British administration
used its last breath to keep out the Jews. 68
Yet for all this, the British anti-Zionist policy was an abysmal failure.
The British lost their influence with the Arabs—not, of course, because of
the Jews, but because of the overall decline of British power in the world.
This was coupled with the antipathy of the Arabs toward any Western and
Christian power—a resentment that had been suppressed only by the
overwhelming force of British troops and the overwhelming enticement of
British subsidies. The Arabs’ unrelenting antipathy to the West was such
that neither their liberation from the oppressive Ottomans, nor the
consistent British hostility to Zionism, nor the return of boatloads of Jews to
the European inferno succeeded in winning their affections. As
Meinertzhagen had predicted, when the first big test of Arab loyalty to
Britain came during the darkest days of the British battle for survival during
World War II, the Arabs repaid the British as they saw fit: In Iraq, in Egypt,
and in Syria they openly allied themselves with the Nazis, flocking to
Berlin to enlist in the war effort and lobby Hitler for favors. They even
formed an Arab Legion in Berlin that eventually became part of the SS. 69
A popular song at the time caught the spirit of the Arab masses as they
enthusiastically waited to rid themselves of the detested British and French
who were working so hard to win their affection:
No more Monsieur, no more Mister
In heaven Allah, on earth Hitler. 70

Later, when he was asked about this Arab abandonment of the Allies to
whom they owed their independence, the Palestinian Arab leader Jamal al-
Husseini replied, “I have read somewhere that it was a Jewish war anyway”
71

The Jews of Palestine, on the other hand, formed a Jewish Brigade that
fought with distinction under the British command, again confirming
Meinertzhagen’s prognosis. After the war, at a point when the fate of a
hundred thousand Jews in the displaced persons camps hung in the balance,
David Niles, one of President Harry Truman’s closest advisers, used the fact
of Palestinian Jewish support for the Allies as an argument to advocate
Jewish immigration to Palestine:

I am also inclined to think that 100,000 [more] Jews would be of

great assistance to us in that area, as the Jews of Palestine were
during the second World War, which is generally admitted by
everybody who is familiar with the situation. The Allies got no help
from the Arabs at all, but considerable help from the Jews in
Palestine. 72

Bartley Crum, a member of the committee investigating the situation of

the refugees, echoed this sentiment:

[I] t should never be forgotten how the entire Jewish community of

Palestine set aside its differences with Britain and gave its complete
support to the defeat of the Nazis…. They wrote a glorious chapter
which is yet to be told in full. In contrast the Arab community was
largely indifferent to the war. 73

But British Arabist policy drew no such lessons and never wavered from
its course. Within a few years, every inch of the British Middle Eastern
empire was lost, as the lands they had so carefully contrived to control had
spun out of their grasp forever. Britain’s policy of catering to Arab
“sensibilities” had led to the loss of every toehold, every garrison, and
every privilege it had had among the Arabs. All that remains of its presence
today is a nostalgic attachment to British habits in Jordan and Oman.

Britain’s policy of appeasing the Arabs at the expense of the Jews, which it
pursued for three decades, gained it nothing and cost the Jews a great deal.
But it had yet another pernicious result whose effects are very much alive
today: the transmission of British policy preferences to almost every foreign
ministry and foreign policy establishment in the world. Britain, after all,
was the dominant international power between the two world wars, its
diplomats venerated, its policies everywhere emulated.
Thus, the Arabist thinking of Richard Waters-Taylor and John
Shuckburgh spread from the British Colonial and Foreign offices to the
American State Department—especially after American companies
developed huge petroleum reserves in Arabia in the 1930s. Reserves of oil
in the Persian Gulf were being systematically uncovered during the first
four decades of this century: in Iran (1908), Iraq (1923), Bahrain (1932),
Saudi Arabia (1937), Kuwait (1938), and Qatar (1940). Although the cost
of finding and developing this oil was substantial, the enormous size of the
reserves and the high yield for each well drilled more than made up for the
investment. The oil industry underwent a tremendous expansion during
World War II and in its aftermath, as rapid industrialization in the West and
elsewhere increased the worldwide demand for oil. By the early 1960s,
Arab oil amounted to 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.
When the Arab oil-producing states imposed an oil embargo on the West
in 1973, some people thought that the Arabs could control the world’s
energy supply forever, raising prices higher and higher. But it soon became
clear that this was not the case when other, previously uncompetitive
producers such as Norway and Britain came onto the market with the
development of North Sea oil, as did suppliers of alternative energy such as
natural gas. Further, the Western economies retooled their industries to
become more energy efficient and produced vehicles that consumed
considerably less fuel. As a result, by 1981, the real price of oil had fallen
dramatically. To the surprise of many, it turned out that the oil market was
just that—a market—and that not even the Arabs could corner it.
But back in the 1930s, none of this was known. (Even a half-century
later, when it did become known, the psychological hold of Arab oil
producers on the Western political psyche remained significant.) It is thus
hardly surprising that the excitement of the first petroleum discoveries in
Arabia led many American officials to be particularly considerate of Arab
demands, including the demand to curtail Zionism. Indeed, the State
Department quietly but consistently supported the Chamberlain White
Paper and then the closing of Palestine to immigration during World War II,
74
and it continued to oppose the immigration of Jews to Palestine
throughout the postwar period and up to the creation of the State of Israel.
When President Harry Truman, against the opposition of virtually his entire
administration, decided to support the Partition Plan creating a Jewish state,
George Kennan, the head of the State Department planning staff, wrote that
“U.S. prestige in the Muslim world has suffered a severe blow, and U.S.
strategic interests in the Mediterranean and the Near East have been
seriously prejudiced.” 75 Truman later wrote that during the entire period,
“the State Department continued to be more concerned about the Arab
reaction than about the suffering of the Jews.” 76
This concern was promoted most forcefully by a coterie of Arabists who
had entrenched themselves in the 1930s in the Near East and Asian Affairs
Bureau of the State Department. Thus, while public opinion in the United
States has traditionally supported the Jews and later Israel and is often
unsympathetic or downright antagonistic to the Arabs (even after years of
negative portrayal of Israel in the media), the American foreign policy elite
often exhibited exactly the opposite attitude. In the corridors of the State
Department, where plans are daily laid for the new world order that is heir
to Britain’s, the Arabist belief that wresting concessions from the Jews or
forcing them to relinquish valuable assets will somehow win the favor and
loyalty of the Arabs endures among many to this very day. And it is as
shortsighted today as it was in the 1930s.
Nor has the influence of British Arabism in the United States and
elsewhere been limited to the professional diplomats. In every capital there
is a foreign policy establishment consisting of academics, politicians, and
journalists who specialize in foreign affairs. Long before the gush of Arab
oil wealth in the 1970s and the rapid expansion of Arab influence in the
West that followed, most of these foreign policy establishments were
already following their present pro-Arab courses. Half a century after the
Jewish state was created, the notion still endures among Arabists that
somehow Israel was conceived in geopolitical sin—that sin being, in
Arabist eyes, that its very existence deprived the West of cherished Arab
support.
It is hard to understand how tenaciously a very small but influential
circle of diplomats still clings to this notion. They seldom voice it in public,
and some may not even admit it to themselves, but a great many of them
believe it nonetheless. This was brought home to me one afternoon in New
York, on my last day as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, when I
was saying good-bye to several Western diplomats. One of them, an
American with whom I had a cordial relationship, invited me for a drink.
After several vodkas, he turned to me and said, “It’s all a mistake.”
Knowing he was critical of many of Israel’s policies, I asked which policy
he was referring to. “No,” he said, “not a policy. I’m saying the whole
damned country is a mistake. We should have prevented it in the first place
and saved everyone the trouble.”
But after the Holocaust, not even the powerful Arabist establishments
were able to prevent the reemergence of the popular sentiment that justice
must be done with the Jews—that they must finally, after their
incomparable suffering, be enabled to have a state of their own. By then,
Arab pressure and Western complicity had reduced the territory originally
promised to the Jews to a pittance, but to a brutalized people barely hanging
on to life, even a pittance was better than nothing.
The Jews could wait no longer. At the end of World War II, the Jewish
underground movements redoubled their campaign to break open the gates
of Palestine to the survivors of the Holocaust and to oust the British
administration. The campaign lasted several years, gathering momentum
through concerted military actions of escalating boldness against the British
Army in Palestine. These actions—led most prominently by Menachem
Begin’s Irgun (National Military Organization) and the Lehi (Fighters for
the Freedom of Israel, of which Yitzhak Shamir was operations officer), and
joined for a time by the Hagana (Defense Organization) under David Ben-
Gurion—eroded and eventually broke the will of the British government to
retain its hold on the country. The majority of these attacks were launched
against the installations used by the British authorities to control the
country. The targets included bridges (in one night in 1946, a Hagana-led
operation blew up twelve critical bridges), railway lines, police stations,
army bases, officers’ clubs, military headquarters, and prisons in which
jailed underground members were being held—including the Irgun-led
breakout in 1947 of 251 inmates from the Acre prison fortress, previously
thought to have been impregnable. * A few months later, when the British
intended to hang a number of captured Irgun members, the Irgun warned
that this would lead to the hanging of two captured British sergeants.
Tragically, both acts took place. The unfolding of these events shocked
public opinion in Britain and strengthened the hand of Churchill, who was
by then in opposition, in demanding that Britain depart from Palestine.
The effect of the Jewish campaign on British rule in Palestine was
decisive. The British Empire, tottering and drained of energy at the end of
World War II, could not afford to keep an army of a hundred thousand men
there. British public opinion demanded that the troops be brought home. In
1947, Britain finally declared its intention to evacuate, and it
unceremoniously handed the decision as to what to do with the country to
the United Nations.
Thus was born UN Partition Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947.
Although it granted the Jews a mere 10 percent of Mandatory Palestine,
with the rest going to the Arabs (see Map 5), this resolution at least
reinstated the principle that the Jews must have an independent state. Not
that it would amount to much, many of the professional Arabists believed.
The consensus in the governing circles of the West, friendly and unfriendly
alike, was that the pinhead-size state would instantly be overrun by the
Arabs, and Western military strategists concurred. The international
community could clear its conscience by according the Jews a
gerrymandered state that was smaller in area than the Bahamas, and the
combined might of the Arab armies would do the rest.
Nevertheless, the Jews of Palestine accepted the Partition Resolution.
The Arab world unanimously and unequivocally rejected it and called for
war. Arab irregulars began pouring into Palestine immediately after the UN
vote, seeking to prevent the Jewish state from coming into existence, and
they were followed within months by the regular armies of Egypt, Syria,
Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. By the time the Jewish state was officially
declared on May 14, 1948, upon the departure of the British, the War of
Independence against the invading Arabs was already under way. The
common belief was that it was only a matter of time before the Jewish state,
hardly in its infancy, would be terminated.
Israel was coming into its War of Independence with severe handicaps
imposed on it by the British. The British had reduced almost to nothing the
territory accorded to the Jews and the number of Jews who were allowed to
immigrate into it, then proceeded mercilessly to prevent the Jews from
arming themselves while allowing progressively more substantial armament
of the Arabs in Palestine (reinforced by troops crossing the border from
neighboring Arab lands, whom the British seemed not to notice). The result
was that Israel’s ragtag forces were overwhelmingly outnumbered and
outgunned, possessing virtually no tanks, no artillery, and no planes. As the
Arab armies invaded, Israel’s life hung in the balance. In those twenty
horrible months of fighting, the carnage consumed six thousand Israelis,
quite a few of them recent survivors of the Nazi death camps. (This is out of
a population of 600,000 and is the proportional equivalent of 2.5 million
Americans dying today.) By June, the Jews had come close to a state of
complete exhaustion. Yet even on the brink of disaster, they somehow held
on. Not fully realizing how weak Israel was, the Arabs agreed to a cease-
fire. Israel used it to rearm and mustered its forces to roll back the Arab
onslaught (see Map 6). The Jewish state was now a fact. It had come into
the world after an agonizing labor. It would have no happy childhood,
either, with frequent cross-border attacks by Arab marauders and daily
promises from Egypt’s President Nasser and other similarly disposed
neighbors that Israel would shortly be “exterminated.”
Yet, Arab bellicosity aside, the young state enjoyed a relatively
hospitable international clime during its early years. In the first two decades
of its life, the influence of professional Arabist hostility was tempered by
the worldwide moral identification with Israel in the aftermath of the
Holocaust and in the wake of the courage and tenacity shown by the Jews in
their War of Independence. During this time, before Arab propaganda
organized its later campaign and before the Arabists themselves could
regroup, this innate sympathy produced enthusiastic support for the
fledgling nation across Western Europe and North America. In Holland,
France, Denmark, Italy, Britain, and above all in the United States, acclaim
for Israel was acclaim for the good guy. As at Versailles, there was on this
point not confusion but perfect clarity. But as the Holocaust and the miracle
of Israel’s birth receded from memory, so did the influence of this
sympathy. (It resurged most forcefully in the days of siege before the Six
Day War, then steadily declined in the aftermath of Israel’s stunning victory,
only to be rekindled during the Iraqi Scud attacks during the Gulf War,
which briefly reminded the world who was the victim and who the
aggressor.)
In the first half of this century, political anti-Zionism had been led by
British imperial interest and aided by the Arabs. The second half of the
century saw these roles reversed: The initiative now passed on to the Arabs
themselves, who were aided by Western Arabists. The newly independent
Arab states found themselves in control of modern presses, radio, and later
television, as well as embassies and diplomatic services—and the enormous
wealth to make use of all this. At first they showed little recognition of the
power of these resources as international political weapons. Early Arab
propaganda against Israel was largely directed inward, with the aim of
convincing the Arab populations themselves, rather than outward, toward
Westerners. The newly installed Arab regimes had not yet mastered the art
of propaganda; only later were they to begin couching their antagonism in
more moderate and palatable phraseology. Thus, the bulk of Arab
pronouncements came out sounding like King Saud of Saudi Arabia in this
statement from 1954:

Israel to the Arab world is like a cancer to the human body, and the
only way of remedy is to uproot it just like a cancer.… Israel is a
serious wound in the Arab world body, and we cannot endure the
pain of this wound forever. We don’t have the patience to see Israel
occupying part of Palestine for long.
We Arabs total about fifty million. Why don’t we sacrifice 10
million of our number and live in pride and self respect? 77

In this way, the Arab regimes were able to satisfy the need they felt to
fire the passions of their own people and troops. Quite apart from their
animus, Israel was a useful scapegoat on which they could pin all their
failings and shortcomings. Still, these early efforts did little to rejuvenate
the flagging forces of international anti-Zionism, since few people in the
West could accept such stark language and the purposes evident behind it.
Thus, the respite in international public opinion that Israel enjoyed
between 1948 and 1967 resulted from the combined effect of a basic
Western sympathy for the Jewish state and Arab apathy toward Western
audiences. The Arabists were still calling the tune in Washington, urging
Eisenhower, for example, that Israel should trade the Negev (the southern
half of the country) in exchange for peace. 78 But during those years there
was little public sympathy for officials who had treated the Holocaust as
“Zionist sobs tuff.”
This grace period came to an end after the Six Day War in 1967. As
opposed to Western governments, Western public opinion has tended to
support whomever it perceives as the under dog. For some Westerners, the
Israeli victory in the Six Day War instantly transformed Israel from
underdog to superdog in the space of the few days it took to win the war—a
perception reinforced by the cockiness of some Israelis, who believed that
single brilliant victory would end Israel’s ongoing struggle to survive
against a hostile Arab world of immense size and wealth. The Arabs soon
exploited this reversal in public opinion, portraying Israel as a frightening
power that preyed on its weaker Arab neighbors. Further, the fact that in the
ensuing years Israel was militarily administering territories from which it
had been attacked was soon stripped of that wartime context, and the
unprovoked nature of the Arab attack was forgotten. The only thing that
remained clearly fixed in public opinion was the fact that Israel was
governing territories on which a substantial Arab population lived—or, as
the parlance would soon have it, it was “occupying Arab land”—thereby
removing the mantle of culpability from the shoulders of the Arabs and
placing it on the Jewish state.
The Arabs exploited these propaganda benefits, but the results of the Six
Day War nonetheless presented them with a difficult military obstacle to
their designs on Israel. The Israeli victory pushed the border from the
outskirts of Tel Aviv to the Jordan River, a few dozen miles to the east over
a range of mountains, cliffs, and wadis. It became clear to the Arabs that
Israel could no longer be crushed with one swift blow. If they were to
excise Israel from their midst, they now realized, Israel would first have to
be territorially reduced—to the starting conditions of the Six Day War.
The Arabs came to perceive that they could not achieve this goal
militarily—that they could attain it only if the West, especially the United
States, applied overwhelming political pressure on Israel. But in the wake
of Israel’s astounding victory in the Six Day War, a powerful sentiment was
developing in the United States to form a political and military alliance with
Israel as the new preeminent regional power. This sentiment was translated
into a liberal infusion of military aid to Israel’s army, making the Arabs’ job
of overcoming Israel still more difficult. The shrewder political minds
among the Arabs, however, slowly parted from the view of America as
irreversibly committed to supporting Israel and came to see the usefulness
of cultivating the old Arabist lines of argumentation, albeit suitably adapted
to a more contemporary Western audience. Moreover, they grew to
appreciate the decisive role that Western public opinion played in making
and maintaining policy—a public opinion that had been none too keen on
the Arab cause up until then. Hence the principal effort of the ongoing Arab
war against Israel since 1967 has been to defeat Israel on the battlefields of
public opinion: in the media, in university lecture halls, and in the citadels
of government.
In order to capture the sympathy of the Western public, its beliefs
concerning the history, causes, and nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict had to
be revised. No Westerner was interested in hearing that the Jewish state was
a “cancer” that had to be “uprooted.” A new history had to posit plausible
explanations for the relentless Arab campaign against Israel, along with
reasons for the West to abandon its support for the Jewish state. The core of
the new history had to be the critique of the birth of Israel itself in moral
terms comprehensible to Westerners. For if the very creation of the Jewish
state could be presented as a moral error, a vehicle not of justice but
injustice, as the British Arabists had claimed it was, then the West could
become sympathetic to efforts to redress the “injustice” that had been
committed.
In this, the Arabs found that all the foundations had already been laid.
The British Arabists had already spent decades injecting the West with the
idea that Jewish immigration to Palestine was based upon a moral mistake;
that such immigration had “caused” Arab violence against the Jews (rather
than the Arabs causing it themselves); and that the presence of the Jewish
home in the Middle East would compel the Arabs to unite against the West,
gravely harming Western interests. After 1967, the Arabs gave new life to
all these arguments, parading them before the West to explain international
Arab terrorism, Arab fulminations at the UN, and the Arab oil embargo of
1973. By the early 1970s, all eyes (and cameras) were turned to the Arab
governments, as they rehearsed for a world audience the themes that the
British colonialists had invented in the 1920s.
In the court of public opinion, as in any court, the question of who
attacked whom—who initiated an assault and who acted in self-defense—is
central to the verdict. The Arab states embarked on an unprecedented
campaign to persuade the West that it was not they, the Arabs, who had
attacked Israel, but Israel that had attacked them. Thus, the results of their
own aggression against Israel—the bloodshed, the refugees, the capture of
Arab-controlled land—were instead presented as its causes. These were
now deemed unprovoked evils that had been perpetrated by the Jews,
grievances that the Arabs were now merely and innocently trying to redress.
It was not the Arabs who were the guilty party, but Israel that had fended
off their attacks. (See Chapter 4, “Reversal of Causality.”)
Still, the task of the Arabs was far more difficult than that of their
Arabist predecessors had been. The British Arabists had had only to convert
the Colonial and Foreign offices to their views in order to bring the absolute
authority of the Mandatory government and the British Army to bear
against Zionism. But to create American opposition to an independent State
of Israel that had many friends and admirers in Washington would require a
much more sweeping, much more comprehensive campaign of
disinformation than had ever been conceived by the British anti-Zionists. It
would entail the fabrication of ancient historical rights to nullify those of
the Jews; the obliteration from memory of Versailles, the League of
Nations, and the Balfour Declaration; and a complete revision and rewriting
of the Arab wars against the Jews following the establishment of Israel.
Before a lie of such incredible proportions could hope to make any
headway against the common sense of the common man in the west or of
his government, the ground would have to be prepared by means of a direct
assault on Zionism itself as a moral movement, as a movement seeking
justice. The Arabs aimed to render the rest of their arguments plausible by
building their house of canards on the bedrock of Israel’s inherent
immorality: The post-Holocaust-era view of the Zionist as the good guy had
to be forcibly brought to an end.
For this ambitious undertaking, the Arabs attacked Israel through every
channel, at every gathering, from every platform. But none of these forums
proved to be as effective as the most powerful of instruments available to
the Arabs, an instrument of universal reach and appeal that at the time
enjoyed not only respectability but reverence, and that therefore was trusted
by many around the world—the United Nations.
And at the UN, as elsewhere, the Arabs also found a new ally. The
British Empire had capsized, but a new empire had arisen that quickly
replaced the British as the patron of Pan-Arab aspirations. Cultivating
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and a string of other despotisms, the Soviet
Union, much like the British Arabists before it, came to see Israel as a
challenge to its imperialist ambitions in the Middle East and in the eastern
Mediterranean. The Soviets were accomplished masters of propaganda,
who had taught expressions such as “peace-loving” and “self-
determination” to every anti-Western terror organization in the world. And
it was the Soviets who hit upon the precise formulation that the Arabs
needed to stab at the heart of Israel’s moral standing in the West.
In Mexico City in 1975, the Soviet and Arab blocs took over a United
Nations Conference on Women and forced it to adopt one of the great
slanders of all time. They then brought this resolution to an obedient UN
General Assembly, which confirmed it. They achieved this aim by means of
political and economic intimidation. At the time, the Arab oil blackmail was
at its height, and it seemed that nothing could stand in its way. Many
countries that should have known better, that did know better, nevertheless
succumbed.
Thus in November 1975, a mere eight years after their great defeat in the
Six Day War, the Arabs achieved their greatest victory on the field of
propaganda: The General Assembly of the United Nations, by a vote of 72
to 35, with 32 abstentions, resolved that Zionism, the national movement of
the Jewish people, constituted “racism.”
Such an achievement had eluded even the great anti-Semitic propagandists
of our millennium like Torquemada and Joseph Goebbels. For what they
and their disciples had failed to do in the Inquisition and in the Holocaust
had at long last been achieved by the General Assembly of the United
Nations. Never before had anti-Semitism acquired a tool of such universal
dissemination as the UN. Never before had any of the slander of the Jewish
people, of which there had been so many, been promulgated and applauded
by an organization that purported to represent humankind.
The Arabs knew that Israel’s strength was not rooted in its numbers, its
size, or its resources. In all these areas the Arabs were far stronger. Israel’s
greatest shield, they understood, was its moral stature. They therefore
sought to tarnish that shield, to crack it, and ultimately to crush it. Their
weapon was an extraordinary vilification of a movement that had inspired
millions. For Zionism is a unique moral phenomenon that has won the
support of many people of goodwill around the world. The Jewish people
had suffered degradation, humiliation, oppression, and mutilation like no
other. But the Jewish legacy is one of the principal founts of Western
civilization, contributing above all to advancing the concepts of freedom
and justice. The Zionist movement had come into being to seek for its own
people freedom and justice. After two millennia of bondage, the Jewish
people was entitled to its own liberation as an independent nation.
This is the true and only meaning of Zionism. At the close of World War
I, and again after World War II, it had been so understood not only by the
Jewish people but by virtually the entire world. Many nations and peoples
had admired the tenacity, courage, and moral strength of the Zionist
movement. They had marveled at Israel’s achievement in rebuilding a
modern state on the ruins of an ancient homeland. They had applauded the
ingathering of the exiles from a hundred lands and the seemingly
miraculous revival of an ancient tongue. And they had thrilled at Israel’s
ability to maintain its democratic and human ethic in the face of one of the
most remorseless campaigns of hatred in history. All this had been
appreciated by people not only in Europe and America but in Africa and
elsewhere in the developing world, where Israel and Zionism had served as
a shining example of the independence and progress that so many other
nations, coming out from under the heel of empire, hoped to achieve.
These realities were not lost on the Arab regimes or on the Soviets.
Indeed, their attack on Israel was not driven by political interest alone.
Deep down, they experienced an unforgiving resentment. For nothing so
effectively unmasks dictators and despots who hide behind the rhetoric of
“liberation” and “self-determination” as a genuine movement of national
liberation. Israel and Zionism, by their very existence, exposed the claims
of the tyrants and totalitarians for the sham that they are.
But the sham was particularly preposterous in labeling so completely
color-blind a movement racist. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern
Zionism, had himself declared the plight of blacks to be a cause of
fundamental concern to him, like that of the Jews:

There is still one problem of racial misfortune unresolved. The

depths of that problem, in all their horror, only a Jew can fathom.…
I mean the Negro problem. Think of the hair-raising horrors of the
slave trade. Human beings, because their skins are black, are stolen,
carried off, and sold…. Now that I have lived to see the restoration
of the Jews, I should like to pave the way for the restoration of the
Negroes. 79

Almost a century later, Israel’s rescue of Ethiopia’s Jews showed

Zionism to be the only movement in history to transport blacks out of
Africa not to enslave them but to liberate them.
In 1985, on the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the resolution
defaming Zionism, I organized a symposium on the United Nations
premises to attack this infamy. The Arab states and the PLO were especially
irked by this affront (how dared we convene a conference on “their”
ground?), and they tried unsuccessfully to block it. But what irritated them
even more was that one of the speakers, Rahamin Elazar, was an Ethiopian
Jew. He described in moving terms his own personal salvation in coming to
Israel. Since then, tens of thousands of members of his community have
followed in their great exodus from Ethiopia. An accusation of racism
against the Zionists by the Arab world—whose contemporary customs
include the keeping of indentured black servants in the Gulf states and a
prolific history of trading along the slave coast of Africa, as well as the
repeated massacres of blacks by the Sudanese Arabs—should have been
received like a witless joke.
It wasn’t. The combined power of the Arab and Soviet blocs gave them
complete control of the UN, its microphones, and its printing presses. To be
sure, even without the campaign against Israel, one would have been hard
pressed to consider the UN General Assembly a pure arbiter of moral truth.
Indeed, what can be said of an institution that failed to curb in even the
slightest way the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, a war that claimed a
million lives and turned five million people into refugees; that for seven
years did not lift a finger to stop the sickening carnage of the Iran-Iraq War,
in which another million perished; that did not even address, much less
remedy, such outrages as the genocide in Cambodia, the horrific slaughter
of the Ibo in Biafra, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians
in Uganda under Idi Amin, all in flagrant violation of the UN’s own
Universal Declaration of Human Rights? 80
Yet despite all these and other enormous affronts to conscience, nothing
injected such calumny into the arteries of international opinion as the
Zionism-racism resolution did against Israel. It may be tempting to dismiss
this resolution as a meaningless absurdity, especially after its belated
renunciation in December 1991. 81 But that would be a mistake. We must
remember that the Arabs had a full sixteen years to drive home their racism
message, and that even after its formal renunciation, this defamation lives
on in the minds of many nations and their leaders. I stress again that, for the
first time in history, a world body had given its stamp of approval to the
libeling of an entire people. In the very century of the Holocaust, one must
not forget the insidious power of uninhibited libel. Without the torrents of
slander poured on the Jews by the Nazis, the Holocaust would never have
been possible. Had the Nazis not succeeded in brainwashing Germans and
non-Germans alike into believing that the Jews were reprehensible,
subhuman, and in fact a different species, they would not have secured the
collaboration of thousands upon thousands of ordinary people in moving
the machinery of genocide.
We know that in the two or three European countries where such
collaboration did not take place the majority of Jews were saved. Well
known is the example of Denmark, in which the king himself declared that
if any of his subjects wore the yellow badge, then he too would wear it;
Denmark’s Jews were successfully smuggled to safety in Sweden. Less well
known but equally dramatic is the case of Bulgaria, where the entire
educated elite of the country opposed the implementation of official anti-
Semitism. Thus, the Union of Bulgarian Lawyers and the Union of Writers
respectively denounced the German-imposed anti-Jewish legislation as
“socially damaging” and “very harmful.” The head of the Bulgarian
Orthodox Church described the directives as “thunder from a clear sky.” A
German report attributed Bulgarian disobedience of these laws to the
“inactivity of the police and the complete indifference of the majority of the
Bulgarian people.” Particularly telling is the explanation that the German
ambassador in Sofia offered to his superiors in Berlin: He told them that the
“Bulgarian public lacks the understanding of the Jewish question in
historical terms.” This failure of understanding was in fact directly due to
the stubborn refusal of the country’s leadership—writers, clergy, teachers,
politicians—to spread the Nazi slander, as a consequence of which
Bulgarian Jewry was saved. 82
In other words, libel is the prelude to murder. It is a license to kill. The
libeling of an entire people separates that people from the rest of humanity,
making the lives of its members dispensable, its oppressors and murderers
immune to blame.
Appearances notwithstanding, the libel of “Zionism equals racism” is
the very same libel that was preached by the Nazis. It is the same anti-
Semitism dressed up in trendy terminology. For the bitter truth is that the
horrors of the Holocaust did not make anti-Semitism unfashionable; they
only made some of the old terminology embarrassing. Zionism and Zionist
now serve as euphemisms for Judaism and Jew. And since there is no worse
epithet in today’s lexicon than racist, it is the term that is used to replace the
whole range of old-fashioned invective. It is the contemporary equivalent of
Christ-killer, traitor, usurer, international conspirator All this has stolen into
vogue under the sham disclaimer of “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m just anti-
Zionist”—the equivalent of “I’m not anti-American, I just think the United
States shouldn’t exist.”
Building on the Zionism-racism resolution, the Arab propaganda
machine has now been at work for a quarter of a century, ever since the Six
Day War, spinning a web of falsehoods that have permeated every issue and
colored every opinion on the subject of Israel. Even now, with the
resolution overturned, the spires of untruth that it erected and buttressed
remain standing, having taken on a terrible life of their own. So successful
has been the demonization of the Jewish state that many people are willing
to overlook the most heinous crimes, to pardon virtually any excess on the
part of the Arabs, since, after all, one has to take into account their “plight”
and “all they have suffered.” Just as they had planned, the Arabs have
succeeded in foisting their historical fabrications into the media and from
there onto the world public and its representatives everywhere. With this,
the Arabs have achieved an astonishing transformation, making themselves
over into the aggrieved party demanding justice, and Israel into an
“entity”—unnatural, alien, immoral—capable of virtually no right because
its very existence is itself an irredeemable wrong.
Thus it is that Zionism, once considered a noble and legitimate national
movement worthy of broad international support during the establishment
of the new world order at the opening of the twentieth century, is itself the
odd man out at the initiation of the new world order at the close of the
century. Israel is the only nation on the face of the globe that important
sections of opinion consider to be guilty for being a nation—wrong for
claiming its homeland as its own, culpable for building its homes, schools,
and factories on this land, and unjust for trying to defend itself against
enemies who wish its destruction. This is the view that the British
colonialists fashioned for their own purposes, but today it has been accepted
as truth by many who have no conception of where these ideas came from
—or where they might lead.
Of course, there are many people who argue that they have not given up
on the basic promise that was made at Versailles to the Jews. After all, they
say, we have no desire to see Israel destroyed—we are only looking for
balance between Israel and the Arabs. But this position obscures what is in
fact an astonishing disregard for the most basic demands of Israel’s
survival. Hence many in the United States, which measures its strategic
depth in terms of thousands of miles, chastise Israel for its insistence on
having a few tens of miles of strategic depth. Hence while Western leaders
constantly blare warnings that Israel must seek peace, they allow their arms
dealers to sell the Arab states almost twenty times the weaponry they sell
Israel, including the pick of the most advanced systems in their arsenals.
Hence some European countries provide the means to produce even nuclear
weapons clearly aimed at Israel’s destruction to the most fanatical of its
enemies, then condemn Israel for acting against the menace. Hence
important political figures, knowing full well that without immigration
Israel’s position is precarious at best, are cynically willing to impede or
endanger the movement of Jewish refugees to Israel, for the dubious end of
ingratiating themselves with the Arabs.
True, the betrayal of Zionism by the West cannot today be found in
explicit calls for an end to the Jewish state. Rather, the betrayal is found in
the nonchalance with which virtually the entire Western world demands that
Israeli governments accept risks that no elected official in any Western state
would ever willingly accept for his own country. It is found in the
insistence, backed up by increasingly militant political and economic
coercion, that Israel is an aggressor when it behaves like any other nation,
and is righteous only when it passively sits by and waits for the next blow
to land. This creeping annulment of Israel’s right to self-defense constitutes
a continual erosion of the promise of Versailles. For once a nation no longer
has the means to freely defend its existence, its very right to exist is put into
question. A right that cannot be defended is eventually rendered
meaningless.

As we have seen, the extraordinary constriction of the support for Zionism’s

geographic and demographic needs has largely been the result of a
systematic campaign, originating with Western anti-Zionists in the first half
of the century and led by the Arab world in the second half, aimed at
undermining belief in the justice of Israel’s cause. This campaign could not
have achieved such dramatic results without synchronizing its message with
an appeal to Western self-interest. The argument that wringing concessions
from Israel is in the West’s interests, and particularly America’s, is identical
to that which was presented to the British during the 1920s and 1930s—and
that led them to try to prevent the development of the Jewish state by force
of arms. It took a mere twenty years for Britain to be transformed from the
sincere protector of the Jews and the guarantor of their national restoration
to one of the principal opponents of the restoration, abandoning the Jewish
nation at the brink of annihilation. The engine for this transformation was
the idea that it was in the interest of Britain to concede to the demands of
the Arabs in their hatred of the Jewish nation. Like the British, who were
told that they would earn the gratitude of the Arabs if only they would
prevent the immigration of the Jews to Palestine, America is now told that it
will earn that same gratitude if only it will force Israel to give up the West
Bank and curb immigration—steps that would purportedly cure all the
problems of the Middle East, thereby stabilizing world peace and assuring
the flow of oil. In the next chapter I will examine how this exceptionally
implausible claim has been rendered plausible.
OceanofPDF.com
3

THE THEORY OF
PALESTINIAN CENTRALITY

The first casualties of the 1991 Persian Gulf War were not people but
cows. For years, opponents of Israel had tended and nurtured a herd of
sacred cows, unchallengeable axioms that had come to constitute the basis
for a false and misleading—but very widely held—conception of the nature
of the Middle East and Israel’s role in it. Only the harsh reality of Iraqi
armor grinding over a defenseless Arab state was finally able to drive some
of these creatures from the field of rational discourse.
First among the sacred cows to be crippled in the Iraqi onslaught was the
belief that all the turbulence in the Middle East was somehow the
consequence of what had come to be known as the “Palestinian Problem.”
Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, this untouchable assumption had been the
linchpin of nearly all analyses of the region’s problems, as well as of
proposals for resolving them. For years, not a day had passed without a
spokesman for some Arab nation or organization declaring that the “core”
or “root” or “heart” or “underlying cause” of the Middle East conflict was
the Palestinian Problem. Those who made such pronouncements were
always careful to refer to “the conflict”—in the singular—as though life in
the Middle East would have been idyllic were it not for this solitary,
frustrating sticking point. Consequently, the impression relentlessly
presented to the media and the world was that all one had to do was to solve
that Palestinian Problem, and there would be peace in the Middle East.
The proponents of this account of the endless turmoil in the region were
by no means only the representatives of the Arab regimes. The choir
chanting the monotonous tones of the Theory of Palestinian Centrality
included numerous Third World governments, in addition to the leadership
of the then-still-vibrant Soviet bloc. With the help of the United Nations,
this theory was ceaselessly proclaimed and endlessly elaborated.
Nor did it take long for Westerners to join the chorus. At nearly all the
diplomatic functions I can remember, from the day I first came to
Washington as deputy chief of the Israeli mission in 1982 right up to the
day of the invasion of Kuwait, Western diplomats of all ranks and
extractions would solemnly point out that peace would not be achieved in
the Middle East as long as the Palestinian Problem was not resolved. And
each one of them was utterly convinced that this was so “because, after all,
it is the core of the conflict in the region.” Thus, what had started out two
decades earlier as a transparent slogan of Arab propaganda had assumed,
through constant embellishment, a patina of self-evident truth—and had
been accepted as such by many of the men and women responsible for the
safety and governance of our world.
Then, in August 1990, came Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It is difficult to
appreciate the astonishment with which the international community
received this unexpected event. For here was one Arab country (Iraq)
invading a second Arab country (Kuwait) and threatening still other Arab
countries (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states)—all with no discernible
connection to the Palestinian Problem, nor to anything else that was directly
or indirectly attributable to Israel. Worse, a few months later, Saddam
Hussein began to launch daily Scud missile attacks on Israel, even though
he knew full well that some of the Scuds might undershoot Israel’s cities
and instead hit the Palestinian areas in the territories (which some of them
actually did). When Saddam was asked how he could possibly justify such
callous disregard for the very people whose champion he was supposed to
be, he replied that he did not concern himself “with sorting beans.”
The true nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime came as a genuine
shock to countless well-meaning officials the world over, including many
who count themselves friends of Israel. After all, during the preceding
decade, Saddam had been regarded not merely as unthreatening but as a
friend of the West and the Gulf states, and he had been wined, dined, and
fed extraordinary quantities of assistance and armaments based on this
premise. During the Iran-Iraq War, numerous op-ed pieces in the American
press by so-called experts on the Middle East advocated a “tilt toward Iraq”
as serving the best interests of the United States. So when Western leaders
finally realized that Saddam hadn’t been named the Butcher of Baghdad by
his own people for nothing, it came not as an insight but as a revelation.
Still, one cannot help but feel amazed at the amazement that then
prevailed in political circles in the West. After all, one did not have to wait
for the destruction of Kuwait to realize that the Middle East is rife with
wars that are utterly unconnected to the Palestinian Arabs. Barely a year
before the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq itself had emerged from a nine-year
crusade against neighboring Iran, a devastating conflict that had claimed
well over a million lives and demolished vast sections of both countries.
And even the most cursory survey of the region would have readily
revealed that such bellicosity had never been confined solely to Iraq. Ever
since independent Arab states emerged in the first half of this century,
virtually every one of them had been involved in wars, attempts at
subversion and assassination, and unending intrigue against one or more of
its Arab neighbors—and against its non-Arab neighbors, too.
In North Africa, for example, Libya has clashed with Tunisia and
bombed the Sudan, and in 1977 it narrowly avoided a war over the
penetration of Libyan tanks into Egyptian territory. (These are all countries
that Qaddafi has wished to persuade to “merge” with his.) Declaring its
support for various “liberation movements” as part of Muammar Qaddafi’s
“Third Universal Theory,” Libya has financed numerous efforts to topple
other Arab regimes or assassinate their leaders, including those of Egypt,
Iraq, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Somalia. It has also announced a
campaign to liquidate Libyan exiles in the West. Similarly, Egypt under
Nasser tried to assassinate the leaders of Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. In 1958
Egypt attempted to impose its regime on Syria, and in 1962 it began a brutal
occupation of the nation of Yemen that sputtered on in various forms for
half a decade. In the meantime, for years Algeria coveted the Colomb-
Bechar and Tindouf regions claimed by Morocco. It clashed with Moroccan
troops along the border and finally went to war with that country in 1963.
Since 1975, Algeria has channeled its antagonism toward Morocco into a
relentless war in the Western Sahara, which it pursued through its Polisario
proxies. 1
No more pacific has been life on the Arabian Peninsula, where until
recently South Yemen regularly launched subversive forces into the Dhofar
in an attempt to tear this region away from Oman. North Yemen and South
Yemen have each viewed the other as an integral part of its own territory,
actively promoting subversion and intrigue against each other. Hostilities
erupted into border incursions and armed conflict in 1972 and again in
1979, after the President of North Yemen was killed by an envoy from
South Yemen carrying a booby-trapped briefcase. 2 In 1991, a union of the
two was once again attempted, and it remains an uneasy one. When they
had not been fighting with each other, both Yemens lived in constant fear of
Saudi Arabia, which under its founder Ibn Saud raided not only the territory
of Yemen but those of Oman, Kuwait, and the other Gulf emirates, as well
as Iraq and Jordan. 3 More recently, Yemen had to contend with absorbing
the hundreds of thousands of former Yemenis who had been forcibly
expelled by the Saudi regime, which in turn feared Yemeni subversion
during the Gulf War. 4
The fact that Kuwait had fretted for years over Saudi encroachment on
its territory, even though it was Iraq that had actually invaded the country in
1973, is especially worth contemplating. Only the second Iraqi invasion of
1990 seems to have stilled Kuwait’s fear of Saudi Arabia, at least for the
moment. But Iraq itself had racked up an impressive record of aggression
long before it attacked Kuwait. For years, it had carried out an energetic
campaign of subversion and terrorism against a number of Arab states,
including its traditional enemy, Syria, and its western neighbor, Jordan.
Hostilities with Syria reached a peak in 1976, when Iraq closed an oil
pipeline through Syria, leading Syria to completely seal its border with Iraq
for two years. Iraqi efforts to depose the Syrian government continued
throughout the Iran-Iraq War because of Syrian support for the Ayatollah
Khomeini. 5
Syria, too, qualifies as a predator of considerable standing. It has
repeatedly threatened Jordan, murdered its diplomats, set off bombs in
Amman, and even invaded Jordanian territory. It has vilified its fellow
Ba’thists in Iraq and openly and tirelessly worked to overthrow the regime
in Baghdad, its main rival for control of the Euphrates River basin and
therefore of crucial parts of “Greater Syria.” Similarly, the reason for
Syria’s ongoing and brutal occupation of almost all of Lebanon is neither to
topple a regime that has already been vassalized, nor to change a border that
it treats as meaningless, but to swallow the country whole. These designs go
at least as far back as 1946, when both countries gained independence; even
at the time, Syria refused to accept the existence of a separate state in
Lebanon or extend it diplomatic recognition, a policy that has endured to
this day. Since the early 1970s, Syria has declared Lebanon to be part of its
“strategic defense sphere,” and it has flooded the country with its troops. In
pursuit of a thorough Syrianization of Lebanon, the Assad regime, with
impeccable impartiality, has slaughtered any Lebanese who thought to
oppose it—whether Christians, Moslems, or Druze. To justify this conquest,
Syria has always maintained that its forces in Lebanon are a “peace-
keeping” force mandated by the Arab league (and “invited” into the country
in 1976 by a desperate Lebanese government), and that only an all-Arab
directive could terminate its mission. 6 Finally, in 1991, with all eyes on the
crisis in the Persian Gulf, Syria did to Lebanon what Iraq had failed to do to
Kuwait. It devoured its neighbor outright, then asserted legitimacy for its
action with a fake Syrian-Lebanese amicability treaty.
Just as Syrian regimes have always claimed Lebanon to be an integral
part of Syria, so too have they always asserted that Palestine is part of
Syria. Anyone who has any doubts as to what kind of relationship would
exist between Syria and a Palestinian Arab state, should one ever come into
existence, ought to consider what Syrian president Hafez Assad once told
PLO leader Yasser Arafat:

You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this

one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no
Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the
Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is
we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the
Palestinian people. 7

Indeed, Syria savaged Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon in 1976, and in 1983 it

backed a successful military effort by pro-Syrian Palestinians to expel the
PLO from Tripoli in northern Lebanon.
With such a record of chronic aggression against their brothers, it can
hardly come as a surprise that Arab regimes have also created problems for
their non-Arab neighbors. Libya, for example, conquered a large part of the
country of Chad, sent a suitcase full of explosives to its cabinet, and even
succeeded in installing a puppet regime in the capital, until it was pushed
out of Chad following the American raid on Tripoli in 1986. Qaddafi has
trained special units to bring down black African governments and has been
implicated in plots as far afield as Senegal. 8 As the Egyptian government
has testified, he has been engaged in conspiracy on a global scale,
commissioning the assassination not only of fellow Arab rulers in Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates but also of such non-Arab
leaders as Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, and Zia al-
Haq of Pakistan.
Like that of Libya, Syria’s appetite does not limit itself to Arab prey.
Syria claims for its own, for example, the region and city of Alexandretta in
Turkey. The dispute was supposedly settled in 1939, but official Syrian
maps continue to include Alexandretta within Syrian territory, and the
government has on occasion assured the press that it fully intends to regain
this land. 9 The Syrians have supported both Kurdish and Armenian rebel
groups in Turkey, providing them with training and money and helping
them infiltrate the country.
The Gulf War made Iraq the Arab regime best known for its
aggressiveness. Yet a full decade before the Gulf War, Saddam had sought
to move on Kuwait. He amassed troops on its borders, rekindled Iraq’s
alleged historical claims to the country, and proceeded to fabricate border
provocations in preparation for an invasion. But then Saddam’s attention
was suddenly drawn to what he thought were better pickings:
postrevolutionary Iran, which he perceived as weak and ripe for plunder
after the collapse of the Shah. Saddam swiftly renounced the border
agreement he had signed five years earlier with the Shah and seized the
disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which abuts Iran’s oil-rich provinces. The
result was the Iran-Iraq War, which raged nearly a decade during which
chemical weapons and poison gas were used and civilian populations were
targeted, exacting a toll in lives horrific even by the standards of this
century’s bloody wars. 10
Nor is the violence in the Middle East limited to aggression across
borders. Many Arab regimes are also ready practitioners of violence against
the citizens of their own countries, relying on force and the threat of even
greater brutality in order to stay in power. This habitual willingness to resort
to violence against their own citizens is a feature of most governments
throughout the Arab world. Not surprisingly, many of them are military
dictatorships. Thus, Libya is ruled by a colonel and a small clique of
officers, as Algeria was for many years. In Saudi Arabia, not one but two
armies (they watch each other) protect the princes from their own subjects.
In Syria, an officer corps dominated by the minority Alawite sect
suppresses dissent with the assistance of no fewer than five independent
intelligence organizations (which also watch one another). To such a
regime, not even the slaughter of a significant part of the population of an
entire Syrian city is too great a price to pay for staying in power—as Assad
demonstrated in 1982, when his tanks ringed the city of Hama, thought to
be sympathetic to the Moslem Brotherhood, and leveled the city center,
killing an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 civilians. 11
It is little consolation that most of the movements for “democracy” in
the Arab world, such as in Algeria and Jordan, are dominated by Moslem
fundamentalists seeking not to break down and distribute the government’s
absolute monopoly of power but to transfer that power—to themselves.
With opponents such as these, it is difficult to judge which is more
oppressive, the people’s current rulers or their would-be liberators. The
difficulty is greatest in Lebanon, where a kaleidoscope of armed gangs of
various persuasions have for two decades competed for the right to brutalize
the country. This nightmare out of Hobbes has finally been ended only
through the imposition of an even more ruthless Pax Syriana—a “peace”
extorted through the application of limitless fear. Remove the Syrian boot,
and the internecine violence will be unleashed again.
Like Arab aggression across borders, domestic violence within the Arab
states is also applied to non-Arabs. A powerful Arab nationalism regards
the area from Morocco to the Persian Gulf as belonging exclusively to
Arabs, despite the presence of numerous other peoples and religious
minorities throughout the area—Berbers, Kurds, Copts and other Christian
denominations, Druze, Jews, Circassians, Assyrians, blacks, and others—
constituting a substantial proportion of the overall population. And while
the presence of these non-Arab or non-Moslem peoples is usually tolerated
by Arab governments, they are accepted only in a state of subjugation,
never as equals. Those who have refused to agree to this arrangement have
been suppressed, often mercilessly.
In 1933, the Iraqi authorities massacred the ancient Assyrian Christian
community and incited the Arab population to murder and plunder the
survivors. Thousands fled the country. 12 On December 15, 1945, the Kurds
of Iraq declared an independent republic that was immediately aborted by
the Iraqi army. 13 The Kurdish quest for independence began anew in 1961
and was savagely suppressed. Tens of thousands of Kurds were killed and
200,000 were left homeless, but this was not the end of Kurdish suffering.
In the 1970s, Saddam drove another 200,000 Kurdish refugees into Iran. 14
Hundreds of thousands more have been forcibly resettled in barren regions
outside their homeland, a method perfected by Saddam’s precursor and hero
Nebuchadnezzar as a means of destroying peoples. (Saddam likes to have
his bust juxtaposed with that of the famous Babylonian conqueror.) The
Kurds were promised at Versailles that they would at least be granted
autonomy, but Kurdistan was subsequently incorporated into Arab Iraq
because of Britain’s desire to maintain control over the oil of the Kurdish
region of Mosul. The continued absence of any international interest in
keeping the Versailles promise has given Saddam free rein in his efforts to
“Arabize” the Kurdish areas. Still, Kurdish attempts to achieve
independence continue to this day. One recent attempt was crushed by Iraq
after it lost the Gulf War.
Other minorities have not fared much better. Syria massacred its
Christian community in the 1920s and drove tens of thousands of
Armenians out of Syria after World War II. Under the Syro-French
agreement of 1936 the Druze were promised autonomy in the Jebel Druze
(Mount Druze) region of Syria, where they constitute a majority, but their
efforts to assert this autonomy have likewise been ruthlessly crushed. 15
Nasser’s Egypt expelled its Greek Christian community in the 1950s and
continued to encourage public violence against the Coptic Christian
community for years thereafter. Even more tragic has been the fate of the
Christian blacks in the southern part of the Sudan. Sudan’s Arab
government has waged a series of campaigns of forced conversion,
starvation, and chattel enslavement against them since 1956. Conservative
estimates put the number killed during the height of this campaign in the
1970s at 500,000, but other sources say the toll is actually in the millions.
Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring countries, despite efforts
by the Arabs to trap them in the Sudan.
Thus, the penchant for violence of many Arab rulers has led to the
continual prosecution of wars against Arabs and non-Arabs abroad, and the
continual persecution of Arabs and non-Arabs at home. With such a record,
it is hardly a surprise that these rulers have been paid back with a fusillade
of assassination efforts, a considerable number of them successful. Listed
chronologically, this gallery of victims is a who’s who of leaders in the
Arab world, as one can see from the table below.

Partial Chronology of Arab Violence Against Arab Rulers

1949 President Zaim of Syria is executed by a military court after being

overthrown by a pro-Hashemite coup.
1951 King Abdullah of Jordan is assassinated by agents of the Mufti for
holding secret talks with Israel.
1958 King Feisal of Iraq is murdered, along with the regent, Nuri Said,
during the revolution that ends the monarchy in Iraq.
1960 Prime Minister Majali of Jordan is killed by Egyptian agents in an
attempt on the life of King Hussein.
1963 President Qassem of Iraq is murdered by the cabal of Ba’th activists
and nationalist officers that topples his regime.
1964 President Shishakli of Syria is assassinated by a Druze in revenge
for the bombing of Jebel Druze during his rule.
1967 President Boumedienne of Algeria barely survives an attempt by
military officers to overthrow his regime.
1971 Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tal of Jordan is assassinated in Cairo in
November 1971 by the PLO in revenge for the massacre of
Palestinian Arabs in Jordan a year earlier.
1972 King Hassan of Morocco escapes the aerial bombing of his royal
palace by renegade fighter planes of the Moroccan Air Force.
1975 King Feisal of Saudi Arabia is assassinated by his nephew, who is
then executed for the murder.
1977 President Hamdi of North Yemen is assassinated, probably by a pro-
Saudi group.
1978 President Ghashmi of North Yemen is killed by an envoy from
South Yemen carrying a booby-trapped briefcase.
1981 President Sadat of Egypt is murdered by Islamic fundamentalists
during a parade marking the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
1982 President Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon is killed in the bombing of
the Christian Phalanges headquarters in Beirut.
1984 Colonel Qaddafi of Libya is attacked in his residence in Tripoli by
the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.
1985 President Numeiri of the Sudan manages to escape with his life
from the coup that ousts him from power.
1987 Prime Minister Rashid Karameh of Lebanon dies when his
helicopter is blown up in mid-air.
1989 President Renee Mouwad of Lebanon is killed by a car bomb just a
few days after taking office.
1992 President Boudiaf of Algeria is assassinated by an Islamic
extremist, four months after his imposition of martial law to prevent
an Islamic takeover of the country.
1995 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s motorcade is attacked shortly
after his arrival in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Mubarak
escapes unharmed.
1995 Crown Prince Hamad bin Khlifa Al Thani of Qatar ousts his father,
Emir Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, in a bloodless coup and assumes
power.
1996 Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s son Uday is wounded in a drive-
by shooting by unknown assailants.
1998 Colonel Qaddafi of Libya is reportedly injured in an assassination
attempt near Benghasi.

For the sake of brevity, I have omitted the countless assassinations and
attempted assassinations of lesser ministers, opposition leaders,
intellectuals, journalists, diplomats, and minor officials. Nor have I focused
in detail on the smaller Arab countries, which unhappily have not escaped
this phenomenon. One scholar examined political life in the string of tiny
despotisms that make up the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf and
published his findings in 1977:

Sheikh Zayid of Abu Dhabi had overthrown his brother Shakhbut

in 1966; Rashid of Dubai had deposed his uncles in 1932; Ahmed
of Umm-al-Qaywayn had shot an uncle who had just murdered his
father; Saqr of Ras-al-Khayma had expelled his uncle in 1948; and,
in a more recent coup, 1972, Sheikh Sultan of Sharja assumed
power after his brother Khalid had been shot by his cousin and the
former ruler, Saqr ibn Sultan. In Abu Dhabi, the core state of the
federation, 8 of the 15 emirs of the Al bu Falah dynasty of the Bani
Yas tribe, which had ruled uninterruptedly since the 1760s, have
been assassinated. 16

While it may be true that the frequency of such assassinations in the

Arab world has declined in the last decade, this is primarily because the
regimes have consolidated their domination over their populations (as in
Syria and Iraq) and have drastically improved their capacity to wipe away
all traces of internal opposition.
A disturbing aspect of the continual bloodletting in Arab political
conflicts is that many of its practitioners accept no limits to their violence,
either in the means they choose to pursue it or in the victims they select as
its targets. At least three of the exceedingly rare uses of gas warfare since
World War I have been by Arab states. Nasser used gas in Yemen in the
early 1960s; more recently, Saddam repeatedly gassed both the Iranian
army in Baghdad’s war against Teheran and the Kurdish civilians in his own
country. (In the only gas attack against the Kurds for which figures are
available, two thousand people died.) 17 During the Iran-Iraq War, both sides
incessantly bombed the neutral shipping of many countries. And in the Gulf
War, Saddam’s flooding of the seas with crude oil and his positioning of
military matériel at archaeological sites served notice that not even nature
and history were out of bounds. 18
But against the West, the use of such brazen violence has been the
exception, not the rule. The radical Arab regimes have understood that the
West is simply too powerful, and that frontal assaults on Western interests
or nationals may therefore be too dangerous. As a result, these regimes have
resorted to the much safer technique of terrorism. Terrorist warfare has
allowed Arab regimes to attack Western targets while denying any
responsibility for these attacks. Sovereign Arab states such as Syria, Iraq,
and Libya have provided arms, embassies, intelligence services, and money
to various terror organizations operating against the West and other objects
of their animosity, thereby transforming terrorism that had been a local
peculiarity of Middle Eastern politics into an international malignancy. For
international terrorism is the quintessential Middle Eastern export, and its
techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that
invented it. The hijacking and bombing of aircraft, the bombing of
embassies, the murder of diplomats, and the taking of hostages by Arab
terrorists have since been adopted by non-Arab terror organizations the
world over. Indeed, before a determined policy under the leadership of the
United States curtailed its operations, Arab terrorism’s sphere of operations
had grown to include the entire world outside the Communist bloc. Its
victims, both Arab and non-Arab, were as likely to be attacked on the
streets of London and Paris, of Bangkok and Karachi.
Its attacks on the West notwithstanding, Arab terrorism has also exacted
a terrible toll on the Arabs themselves. It has probably killed more people in
Lebanon alone than in the entire non-Arab world combined. In 1984,
Muhsen Muhammad, editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Gumhuria, lamented
the penchant of Arab terrorists for choosing Arab targets:

The number of terrorist organizations in the Arab and Moslem

world has grown. These are organizations which kill Arabs and
Moslems everywhere…. some of these were created by
governments [specifically for the purpose of] killing [Arab]
opponents, adversaries, emigres, and refugees in all countries of the
world. 19
True, not every Arab state is Syria or Libya. Although some Arab
regimes are truly predatory, others are more often prey. Still, this does not
alter the picture before us, a picture that is unpleasant to contemplate, but
that must be understood if one is to form any reasonable opinion about the
politics of the Middle East. Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of
nearly all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with
opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab.

So far, I have not mentioned the Arab-Israeli dispute. There is a simple

reason for this: Virtually none of the above conflicts and none of the
violence they have produced has anything to do with Israel. Yet it is
undeniable that almost every discussion on the subject of “achieving peace
in the Middle East” begins and ends with Israel and the Palestinians, as a
consequence of a deliberate campaign to divert attention from the true
sources of perennial turmoil in the Middle East. As we have seen, this is
achieved by implanting belief in a false center of this maelstrom: the
Palestinian Problem.
Nowhere have the efforts to bury the true character of the Middle East
been more intense than in the United States. When I first came there as
Israel’s ambassador in late 1984, I discovered that every year the UN
devotes not one but two full sessions of the General Assembly, each lasting
close to a week, to promoting the Theory of Palestinian Centrality. In the
first session, called “The Question of Palestine,” country after country, Arab
and non-Arab, lines up to excoriate Israel for its various alleged crimes
against the Palestinians and demands that Israel comply with its ideas of a
just solution to the Palestinian Problem. These ideas often range from
Israel’s gradual dismemberment to its immediate dissolution.
The second session is entitled “The Situation in the Middle East.” To my
chagrin, I discovered that this consisted of the same harangues against
Israel, almost word for word, that were delivered during the first session.
When I rose to speak during such a session in 1985, I asked about the
purpose of having two separate debates; after all, if the same claims and
arguments are to be made twice, the UN could save everyone the time, the
trouble, and the money and have just one discussion. The only possible
justification for this second debate, I suggested, could be to discuss the
subject of the session’s name, the situation in the Middle East. I proceeded
to distribute to the delegates a compendium of Middle Eastern violence for
1985, compiled by the impartial American Foreign Broadcasting
Information Service, which regularly monitors news reports from the
Middle East. I had excluded reports of incidents relating to Israel. “Those,”
I said, “were discussed in the ‘Question of Palestine’ debate, in the UN’s
Second Committee, in a host of Special Committees, reports, letters and
other documents.” (After four years at the UN, I had to wonder if there was
a forum in which this subject was not discussed.)
Given that 1985 was widely considered an “uneventful” year in the
Middle East, this was a remarkable compilation. It was a catalogue of
bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, executions, coups, hijackings, and
border incursions, alongside the outright war raging at the time between
Iran and Iraq. The targets were diplomats, journalists, embassies, and airline
offices. The victims were Iraqis, Moroccans, Sudanese, and Libyans,
bearing almost every passport in the Arab world, as well as Americans,
British, French, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Soviets, Japanese, and many others.

Calendar of Middle East Violence, April 1985

1 Egypt uncovers Libyan plot

April
1 Amal hijacks Lebanese plane
April
1 Dutch priest killed in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
April
2 Saharan People’s Liberation Army claims it killed 120 Moroccans
April
3 Sidon, Lebanon, fighting kills 54
April
3 Iraq bombs Teheran
April
4 Jordanian plane attacked in Athens by group calling itself “Black
April September”
4 Iraq downs Iranian plane
April
4 Jordanian embassy in Rome attacked by Syria 6 April Coup in
April Sudan
12 Islamic Jihad group bombs restaurant in Madrid, killing 20
April
13 Assassination attempt on Lebanese imam
April
16 United Arab Emirates oil minister escapes assassination attempt
April
16 Iraq downs Iranian plane
April
17 Amal surrounds refugee camps in Lebanon
April
18 Murabitoun headquarters destroyed in Tripoli
April
23 Iraq shoots down three Iranian planes
April
30 Iraqi terrorist plots against Libyan and Syrian embassies
April uncovered

SOURCE: U.S. Foreign Broadcasting Information Service

Such a list—a single month of which is reproduced in the table above—

could hardly have been obtained from any other region in the world,
because the Middle East has for decades consistently been the most violent
area on the globe. Yet virtually none of the conflicts enumerated has
anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Needless to say, none of the
violence listed was found suitable for discussion in the General Assembly.
The Arab delegates were quite peeved to be handed this compendium. By
what right, they wanted to know, does the Israeli representative meddle in
the “internal affairs” of the Arab world? These are all disputes within “the
Arab family” and do not belong under the UN’s purview of international
matters. (I was hearing this last rejoinder at a time when both Iran and Iraq
were declaring that the road to liberate Jerusalem went through each other’s
capital. On this, the Iranians at least had geography on their side.)
In the UN, as in the media and diplomacy generally, the Arabs were
adept at sweeping all inter-Arab and inter-Moslem violence under the rug.
Yet there is something uncanny about the world’s capacity to focus on the
Arab-Israeli dispute (with total casualties estimated at 70,000 dead over five
decades) in the face of the carnage of the other Middle Eastern conflicts,
such as the Egyptian invasion of Yemen (250,000 dead), the Algerian civil
war (1,000,000 dead), the Lebanese civil war (150,000 dead), the Libyan
incursion into Chad (100,000 dead), the Sudanese civil war (at least
500,000 dead), and the Iran-Iraq War (over 1,000,000 dead). Even the least
of these conflicts far outstrips the entire half-century of Arab-Israeli tension
on any devisable scale of casualties or misery. But especially after the Gulf
War (at least 100,000 dead, and possibly many more), no fair-minded
person can accept the pretense that the turbulent conflicts raging
everywhere in the Middle East can be forced into the Palestinian
straitjacket.

If the Palestinian Problem is not the core of the Middle East conflict, then
what is? Where can we look for the political, social, or psychological roots
of phenomena so powerful that they have reduced to habitual strife the
entire Arab nation 150 million strong, a people that once hosted impressive
centers of scholarship and culture that influenced all of civilization? To
answer this question, we must consider three forces that have largely been
obscured in the view of the Arab world that is commonly held in the West:
the crisis of legitimacy, the yearning for a unified Arab domain, and
resentment against the West. Each of these forces feeds upon the others in a
circle of unending instability and violence.
Ever since the end of Ottoman rule after World War I, the absence of any
popular consensus as to what constitutes a legitimate Arab government has
ensured that even the most towering political structures in the Arab world
have rested on foundations of quicksand. The demise of the empire that had
subjugated the Arabs for centuries left the Arab world in the hands of a
patchwork of British and French colonial administrations. Their interests
were primarily material, and when it proved unfeasible for them to maintain
direct control over the vast reaches of the Arab lands, they sought to grant
independence to the newly fashioned Arab “states” in a manner that would
least interfere with the functioning of their economic empires, particularly
with the supply of oil to their industries. They carved the region into
numerous states (today there are twenty-one members of the Arab League),
each of them far too small to become a world power in its own right, and
they granted sole proprietorship of these new entities to friendly Arab clans
who were considered likely to be favorable to maintaining relations with
their European benefactors. Thus was born a collection of monarchies from
Morocco to Iraq. 20
The Middle East, of course, had no tradition resembling that of the
Western nation-state, which is predicated on the existence of separate
nations. The French are sharply aware and even genuinely proud of those
elements of character and culture that distinguish them from the Spanish,
the English, and the Germans, and the feeling is at least mutual. The special
institution of the European nation-state, like that of the Greek and Italian
city-states before it, could catch on among the people in Europe precisely
because the French, for example, naturally consider themselves to be loyal
to and bound to obey the government of France, whatever government that
might be, and no other. But as many Arabs are quick to point out, this is not
the case among Arabs, who consider themselves loyal principally to their
family or clan, 21 and beyond that to the Arab people as a whole. The
intermediate state-unit was generally taken to be an arbitrary, unnatural, and
undesirable division imposed on the Arab people—much as Americans
would probably feel if outsiders were to make each of the fifty states into an
independent country. Thus a tension between subjects and rulers was
introduced into the Arab states from the very start, with the European-
appointed “king” demanding a loyalty that his subjects were at best
ambivalent about granting. Often the monarch was therefore not so much a
national leader expressing the general will of his people as the scion of a
particular fief-holding family, interested in the state apparatus mostly as a
means of assuring himself and his relations a lush life, usually with ample
help from interested foreigners. As Amir Shakib-Arslan, a Lebanese who
was one of the most popular writers in the Arab world between the wars,
put it:
Moslems offer help to these foreigners betraying their own
brethren, and enthusiastically assist them with advice against their
own nation and faithfully cooperate with these foreigners from
greed and perfidy. But for the assistance obtained by the foreigners
through the treachery of one section of the Moslems and the zeal
with which the latter rendered them help… these foreigners would
have neither usurped their sovereignty… [nor] contravene[d] and
supersede[d] their religious laws…, nor would they have dragged
down the Moslems into the valley of the shadow of death and led
them to a disgraceful death. 22

The readiness of the Arabs to reject their own monarchs, their own
states, and the borders that divide them is thus a consequence of a general
crisis of political legitimacy. Since they accepted the governments and
boundaries that the Europeans devised only superficially, if at all, there was
nothing other than force that could silence the cacophony of claims to
legitimate rulership (because of superior pedigree or ideology) over any
particular parcel of land. And since every one of these claims has been
backed by the threat of insurrection or coup, the result has been terminal
instability. Most of the Arab regimes have by now mastered the suppressive
techniques of “crowd control” and have thus gained a measure of apparent
solidity, but the underlying problem remains the absence of any notion of
legitimacy for either the various governments or the borders that separate
their countries.
This explains the preoccupation of Arab leaders not only with their fears
of coup and assassination but with “mergers” of one sort or another—each
merger (like many corporate mergers) thinly masking one government’s
effort to delegitimize and dissolve the other government. Thus Nasser
attempted to fuse Egypt, Syria, and Iraq; Iraq tried to merge with Jordan
and absorb Kuwait; Qaddafi has attempted marriages with Tunisia, Sudan,
and even Morocco; and Syria has absorbed Lebanon as an interim step in its
effort to build a Greater Syria. All these unions failed for lack of any real
willingness by any Arab leader to cede any power (except for Lebanon’s
absorption into Syria in 1991, which was pulled off at gunpoint), fulfilling
Lawrence’s prophecy that “it will be generations before any two Arab states
join voluntarily.” It is the Arabs’ frustration over their inability to unite and
stabilize their domain that explains why Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait
inspired jubilation throughout the metaphorical “Arab street” that runs from
Morocco to Mesopotamia—notwithstanding the fears of some Arab rulers
that they might be Saddam’s next victims. For the majority of ordinary Arab
people, the arbitrary divisions that Europeans scrawled all over the Arab
map were an injustice far worse than any cruelty that Saddam might inflict
on the Kuwaitis. They cheered for an Arab Bismarck who would erase the
borders and unify the Arab realm, earning their respect through the ruthless
application of force and thereby creating for himself, out of the ruins of
Kuwait, legitimacy
This feeling was particularly evident among Palestinian Arabs, both in
Israel and in Jordan, who backed the destruction of Kuwait with a
unanimous enthusiasm that was incomprehensible to most Westerners. For
Palestinian Arabs, Kuwait symbolized the kind of colonial intrusion into
Arabdom that they associate with Israel and Lebanon. The dismantling of
the Western-leaning principality of Kuwait seemed to be a step toward the
dismantling of Israel. Thus an opinion poll in August 1990, following Iraq’s
invasion, suggested that 80 percent of Palestinian Arabs supported Saddam.
23
When The New York Times interviewed Palestinian Arabs, it came away
with opinions such as: “Saddam is our leader, and I’d go fight for him to
remove the Americans.” And: “This is an Arab problem. America has no
right to be here…. Saddam is… the second Saladin.” And: “If Saddam
succeeds in getting the oil weapon, he will show the world there is another
power, an Arab power, and he will use the weapon for us.” Meanwhile, the
Mufti of Jerusalem, during the Gulf War, called upon Saddam to “abolish
the filth of the American Army and their collaborators from the holy lands.”
In the following days, the Times reported that the Arabs of the West Bank
were holding mass demonstrations at which they chanted, “Saddam, we are
with you until victory.” 24
These dreams of recapturing lost Arab glory and the popular resentment
against the artificial colonial borders serve as the backdrop for Pan-Arab
nationalism, which by the end of World War II had become the most
powerful movement in the Arab world. Pan-Arab nationalism demands the
rectification of all wrongs committed against the Arab people through the
immediate dismantling of these borders and the unification of the Arab
people into a single Arab superpower “from the Atlantic Ocean to the
Persian Gulf.” In practice, this first means the eradication of the
monarchies, which are considered to be a continuation of the humiliation
and exploitation of the Arab people at the hands of the West. One by one,
military coups inspired by Pan-Arabism have replaced the kings with
leaders like Nasser, Qaddafi, and Saddam—each of whom has contributed
his own efforts to pulling more monarchical governments down. By now,
only a handful of the monarchies remain (in Jordan, the Gulf states, and
Morocco), and their grip on power is continuously challenged by radicals,
precisely because they are viewed as the last vestiges of an era that will
soon pass.
Because the explicit rallying point of Pan-Arabism is its desire to
overcome borders, any government that is Pan-Arabist is convinced that the
entire Middle East, or at least a significant part of it, belongs to it—and it
alone. This explains Nasser’s 1962 invasion of Yemen (which had been a
crucial toehold on the Arabian Peninsula for the Pan-Arabists before it
came to serve the same function for the Communists), and Saddam’s wars
to liberate the “Arab lands” in Iran and later in Kuwait. It likewise explains
Syria’s “friendship treaty” with Lebanon of May 1991, which effectively
grants control of all of Lebanon to Syria. The most famous Syrian attempt
to overrun Jordan was that of September 1970. When Israel issued a
warning to Syria that it would intervene on Jordan’s behalf, it saved
Jordan’s existence as an independent state.
Yet despite its passionate rejection of all current political divisions, the
most obvious failing of Pan-Arab nationalism has been its inability to
overcome the very Western-defined borders that its adherents believe have
shackled and shamed the Arab nation. As though consciously acting out
Lawrence’s prediction, Pan-Arab nationalism has never been able to offer a
method for determining the ruler of the proposed unified Arab state. There
is no lack of claimants to the throne. The official national map of Libya, for
example, shows Qaddafi with outstretched arms embracing the entire Arab
world. Pan-Arabists in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq have each always sought to
make the future Arab superpower theirs. Ironically, the divisions among the
Pan-Arab nationalist governments of the various states have proven to be
one of the greatest obstacles to unification. Thus it is that the bile spilled
between Assad of Syria and Saddam of Iraq has been among the most bitter
in the Arab world, for their fight was over which of these two potential
centers of the new empire—to which both were committed—will consume
the other.
In the last two decades, full-blown Pan-Arabism in the style of Nasser
has been somewhat on the wane and is being replaced with the more limited
aspirations of rulers to dominate first a single region of the Arab world,
such as North Africa, the Gulf, or the Fertile Crescent. Since no leader has
emerged to succeed Nasser as the clear champion of the Arab masses, and
since the various contenders to the title have only managed to stalemate one
another, enthusiasm for Pan-Arab nationalism has been dampened. But
should a leader again arise with enough power to dangle a promise of unity
before the Arab world, Pan-Arab nationalism would be instantly rekindled
—as is evident from the heady response of Arabs across the Middle East in
the first days after Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait.

The thirst for Arab unity amid disunity remains unquenched. If Pan-Arab
nationalism is not up to satisfying it, another force awaits in the wings. For
the weakening of Pan-Arabism in recent years has been countervailed (not
accidentally, I believe) by an almost universal resurgence of Islamic
fundamentalism. Nothing could stir the caldron more. Sometimes working
together with Pan-Arabism (as in Libya) but more often at odds with it (as
in Iran, Egypt, and Syria), Islamic fundamentalism is a force somewhat
more familiar in the West than Pan-Arabism, thanks to the attention-riveting
activities of the Islamic revolution in Iran, especially after its disciples held
hostage the entire American embassy in Teheran. Perhaps because images
of this extraordinary event were broadcast directly into American living
rooms every night for over a year, Westerners seem to be more willing to
understand that fundamentalist Islam is unreasonable, dangerous, and
odious. Westerners take its claim that it aims to consume Israel and the
West seriously, whereas they dismissed the similar claims of Pan-Arab
nationalists as “posturing” or “saber rattling.” This difference also explains
Western readiness to regard the Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic
fundamentalist movement) as a genuine menace to Israel and an obstacle to
peace, whereas the Palestinian Authority, which systematically violates its
commitments, continues to be treated as a force for genteel moderation and
is seldom if ever even lightly reprimanded for excesses against human
rights and peace.
The celebrated goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to secure the
worldwide victory of Islam by defeating the non-Moslem infidels through
jihad, or holy war. But in practice the immediate targets of the
contemporary jihad are not the non-Moslem governments, which are
usually too powerful to be attacked in the first instance, but Moslem ones.
Fundamentalists thus seek the overthrow of all “heretic” governments in
some forty Moslem states and the elimination of these states altogether in
favor of a unified Islamic dominion. (The sequence of these two projected
developments varies depending on whether it is a practical or a utopian
fundamentalist who is speaking.) Its immediate targets are therefore the
secularizing rulers of the Arab states, including the soldiers controlling the
Pan-Arab nationalist regimes. These regimes have proven to be particularly
hostile to Islamic fundamentalism, arresting, torturing, and murdering
Islamic activists in the tens of thousands. Ten years in Nasser’s jails drove
the leading Islamic theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, to reject Pan-Arab
nationalism. Before his execution in 1966 he wrote:

[Jihad] is solely geared to protect the religion of Allah and his Law
and to save the Realm of Islam and no other territory…. Any land
that combats the faith, hampers Moslems from practicing their
religion, or does not apply Islamic Law, becomes ipso facto part of
the Realm of War. It should be combated even if one’s own kith and
kin, national group, capital and commerce are to be found there. 25

The same idea was expounded by ’Ab al-Salam Faraj, the ideologue of
the Islamic group that murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981 (Faraj, too, was
executed):

There are some who say that the jihad effort should concentrate
nowadays upon the liberation of Jerusalem. It is true that the
liberation of the Holy Land is a legal precept binding on every
Moslem…. but let us emphasize that the fight against the enemy
nearest to you has precedence over the enemy farther away. All the
more so since the former is not only corrupted but a lackey of
imperialism as well.… In all Moslem countries the enemy has the
reins of power. The enemy is the present rulers. It is hence a most
imperative obligation to fight these rulers. 26

Although the goal of Islamic fundamentalism to subjugate the entire

world to Islam may appear to be rather distant, when the call for it is joined
with traditionalism and the promise of heaven, it makes for a combination
of remarkable potency. The startling appeals of the most radical Islamic
fundamentalists for “greater democracy in the Arab world” indicate how
confident they are of being able to carry the great mass of the Arab
population with them in an election. In some cases, they are clearly correct.
The Algerian military’s 1992 imposition of martial law preempted election
results that would have granted Islamic fundamentalists control of Algeria.
Here, too, ideology is the key to making sense of events. Iran’s war with
Iraq, while defensive at first, was later prosecuted as a war to liberate “the
holy places,” which are located in Saudi Arabia and Israel, both occupied
by the infidel. (Saudi Arabia’s cruel, literal enforcement of Koranic
punishments ought to qualify it as an Islamic fundamentalist state, but the
ruling Wahabi sect nevertheless is perceived as heretical in the eyes of
many other Moslems who consider its practices to be a rejection of received
Islamic law.) This strain in Arab thought also explains Qaddafi’s incessant
meddling in the black countries of Africa, as well as his undying enmity
toward America, which is regarded less as a Christian nemesis than as a
“Great Satan” (to use Khomeini’s phrase) that seeks to tempt the people of
the world away from the path of God with promiscuity and VCRs. The
removal of this “cancerous” influence from the Middle East was the
purpose of overthrowing the pro-Western Shah, as well as countless acts of
fundamentalist violence. Fear of Islamic revolution caused the Saudi
massacre of four hundred fundamentalist pilgrims in Mecca in 1987, and
the Syrian destruction of the rebellious city of Hama in 1982.
The competition between Islamic fundamentalism and Pan-Arab
nationalism, as well as the influence of each movement on the other, has
had tragic consequences not only for Arabs and Moslems. The refusal to
accept anything less than a unitary Arab state and a unified Islamic domain
has meant the rejection of all claims for political and religious
independence by non-Arabs and non-Moslems. The various splinters in the
Arab world may not be able to decide who will rule the unified realm, but
they are nonetheless absolutely united in their uncompromising conviction
that it will be an Arab and Moslem realm. This belief derives in no small
measure from the Islamic division of the world into Islamic and infidel
domains (the “Realm of Islam” versus the “realm of War”) locked in eternal
struggle. 27 Within the lands of the Islamic domain, the Koran enjoins the
nonnegotiable inferiority of all non-Moslems. The Arabs have seen
themselves as the stewards and rulers of all Islam ever since the earliest
Islamic conquests, and there is little indication that they are ready to give
this up now. But as we have seen, the vast region from the Atlantic Ocean
to the Persian Gulf that the Arabs designate as exclusively theirs contains
people of many other ethnic groups and faiths who do not necessarily or
readily accept the supremacy of Moslem Arabs. These groups, numbering
in the tens of millions, form an important part of what is commonly referred
to as “the Arab world.” No matter—they will all be made to accept Moslem
Arab hegemony in a unified Arab state.
It is in these terms that we may grasp the special opposition of the Arab
world to Israel. For centuries, the Jews suffered degradation, persecution,
and periodic massacre at the hands of the Arabs, 28 as did other minority
peoples. But of all of the minority peoples strewn across the vast reaches of
the Arab realm, the Jewish people is the only one to have successfully
defied subjugation and secured its independence. Worse, the Jews were able
to establish an “alien” sovereignty smack in the center of the realm,
splitting the Arab world in two and dividing its eastern from its western
part. Still worse, the people who succeeded in this ultimate act of defiance
are both non-Moslem and non-Arab. Thus, the specific Arab enmity
currently directed toward Israel is rooted in older, more generic
antagonisms that would have existed even if Israel had never come into
being.

The durability of the twin fanaticisms of Pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic

fundamentalism—their militarism, xenophobia, irredentism, and irreducible
hatred of the existing order—is the true core of conflict in the Middle East,
and of much of the violence that emanates from that region to the rest of the
world. While many Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East have no desire
to follow the hellish courses that these ideologies offer, fear of their
disciples effectively prevents the emergence of a leadership willing to speak
out against them. The absence of any democratic tradition in the Arab world
stifles any such voices, just as it prevents the peaceful adjudication of the
ongoing rivalries and claims in accordance with rights legally respected
under the rule of law. Yet the absence of such Western political ideas in the
Arab world is no accident. The rejection of democracy is but a part of the
Arab world’s abiding resentment of the West and is so deeply ingrained that
it must be considered the third core component of Middle Eastern strife.
The least understood of the forces at work beneath Arab political
turbulence, this burning resentment of the West may perhaps be the most
important for understanding the international aspects of the conflicts in the
Middle East. Again, to make any sense of the Arab obsession with the West,
one must look at history.
Just as surely as individuals, nations undergo traumatic experiences in
parts of their history that continue to shape their behavior and attitudes. All
Americans, for example, bear the formative imprint of their Civil War, the
Depression, and Vietnam, even if they themselves were not around to
witness these events personally. For the Jewish people, an older nation, the
two most indelible traumas in the last two millennia were the razing of
Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., which marked the collapse of Jewish
sovereignty until our own time, and the Holocaust in this century, which
destroyed European Jewry. Both experiences overshadow countless other
disasters, however awful, that took place during the intervening centuries.
The result of these two historical traumas is the present tenacity with which
Jews strive to recreate and sustain sovereign Jewish power, especially the
power to defend themselves. The destruction of the Temple at the hands of
the Romans while Jewish factions in besieged Jerusalem were literally
knifing each other to death also gave rise to the emphasis now placed on
Jewish unity and the taboo on political killings among Jews, which has
resulted in the virtual absence of civil war among Jews for two thousand
years. With remarkably few exceptions, Jews do not kill Jews over politics.
29
This is why the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was so shocking to Israel
and the entire Jewish people.
I relate these examples because many people in the West, and especially
in the relatively young United States, tend to underestimate the influence of
pivotal historical experiences on the Arabs (or on anyone else). Yet it is
precisely such national traumas that have molded the Arab attitude toward
the West. The Arabs burst onto the world scene in the seventh century, after
Mohammed had forged a new religion, Islam. In a remarkably short time
they conquered the entire Middle East and North Africa and plunged deep
into Europe. To Arab eyes, these lightning victories were clear evidence of
provident design and signified the supremacy of Arabdom and Islam over
Christianity and the West. They were regarded as the prelude to the world
dominion promised by Mohammed. The glory that was to belong to Arab
Islam is described by Amir Shakib-Arslan in 1944 in Our Decline and Its
Causes.

[Islam] gathered together and consolidated the scattered races and

tribes of Arabia…. Renovated and inspired by this dynamic force
they made themselves masters of half the world in the short span of
half a century. But for the internecine strife… no power on earth
could have prevented them from conquering the whole world. 30

But it was not to be. Almost as rapidly as the expansion took place, the
Arab world empire began to contract. In 732, Charles Martel turned the
Arabs back at Poitiers, 180 miles from Paris, signaling the beginning of the
centuries-long Christian reclamation of lost ground. In some parts of
Europe, this reconquista took longer than in others; it took 250 years to
regain Sicily, but a full eight hundred years in the case of Spain. The
durability and success of Western Christendom’s opposition to the dreams
of grandeur marked Western civilization as the enemy for subsequent
generations of Arabs. Furthermore, the humiliation of the West’s early
victories over Islam was repeated in 1099, when the numerically inferior
but highly organized Christian Crusaders captured Jerusalem. Although the
Moslem leader Saladin finally expelled the Western interlopers from
Jerusalem in 1268, his victory was short-lived because the Arabs were soon
themselves conquered by the Mamluks, then subjugated by the Turks for
four hundred years. (The Islamic Turks proved no less intent on conquering
Christendom than the Islamic Arabs had been, and they succeeded in
extending Turkish rule deep into Europe. But the Moslem bid for
dominance of Europe was finally lost in 1683, when the Ottoman armies
were defeated outside Vienna.)
The Arab world’s next pivotal encounter with the West came with
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. By now, it was a different West. It
had undergone the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and had produced a
modern, technologically superior civilization. Napoleon’s conquest of
Egypt with only a few thousand men could not have been more shocking to
the Arabs. The historical enemy, whom they had always looked down upon
with scorn, had left them far behind. Even Napoleon’s withdrawal from
Egypt was the result of pressure not from the Arabs but from Europe.
Nor did the Europeans stay away for long. By the 1830s, the French and
British had set up permanent bases in Algeria and on the coast of the
Arabian Peninsula respectively, setting the stage for their assault on the
heart of the Arab world. The British conquered Egypt in 1882, and those
parts of the Arab world that British, French, and Italian expansion had not
already taken before World War I fell into European hands after it, with the
overthrow of Ottoman control. The entire Arab world remained under
European rule up to the middle of the twentieth century. To Arab
sensibilities, this was the ultimate humiliation, the complete turning of the
tables. The Europe that they had once nearly made their own was now
everywhere supreme in the Arab world, the descendants of Charles Martel
lodged in Damascus and Algiers, and the descendants of Richard the Lion
Heart flying the cross over Cairo and Baghdad.
This ultimate defeat at the hands of the arch-nemesis produced a crisis
of confidence and identity that permeates the outlook of the Arab world to
this day, even after the achievement of Arab independence. Particularly
prominent among Arabs is the sense of frustration and alienation, the
constant fear of discovering and rediscovering Arab inferiority, which was
described by the Moroccan nationalist Abdallah Laroui:

In February 1952 [the influential Egyptian author] Salama Musa

entitled one of his articles, “Why Are They Powerful?” The “they”
has no need to be defined; “they,” “them” are the others who are
always present beside us, in us. To think is, first of all, to think of
the other. This proposition… is true at every instant of our life as a
collectivity…. For a long time the “other” was called Christianity
and Europe; today it bears [the] name… of the West. 31

Yet despite this pervasive fear, the power of the West is precisely what
the Arab finds all around him. According to Amir Shakib-Arslan:

It may be said without exaggeration about the Moslems that their

condition, spiritual as well as material, is deplorably unsatisfactory.
With very few exceptions, in all countries where Moslems and non-
Moslems live side by side, the Moslems lag far behind in almost
everything…. [Moslems cannot] come any-where near the nations
of Europe, America, or Japan. 32

Even more significant, the West has penetrated Arab and Islamic society,
infesting it with the philosophy, science, law, and ideology of the victors,
thereby making defeat total and final. This pervasive shame and alienation
was expressed by the Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Nuwayhi:

In truth, anyone who reflects on the present state of the Islamic

nation finds it in great calamity. Practically, changing
circumstances have forced it to adopt new laws taken directly from
foreign codes,… to arrest its ancient [religious] legislation…. The
nation is tormented and resentful, plagued by inner contradictions
and fragmentation, its reality is contrary to its ideals and its
comportment goes against its creed. What a horrible state for a
nation to live in. 33

The despair over the dominance of Western ideas was given grim voice
by Salah al-Din al-Bitar, the disfavored founding father of the Ba’th party, a
few months before he was assassinated in 1980: “The Arabs,” he said,
“have not created an original idea for the last two hundred years, instead
devoting themselves entirely to copying others.” 34
Nor has political independence allayed Arab resentment and frustration;
rather, it has provided a more effective means for expressing both—in the
form of Pan-Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist governments
claiming to be reviving the Arab people and returning it to the justly
deserved glory of which the West has deprived it. Anti-Westernism and
Arab power were therefore at the heart of the nationalist socialism of
Nasser, whose regime hung banners in the streets telling Egyptians: “Lift
your head, brother, the days of humiliation are over.” 35 Indeed, the theme of
settling the score with the West was the cornerstone and raison d’être of
Nasser’s politics. In 1954, he declared, “I assure you that we have been
getting ready, ever since the beginning of the revolution, to fight the great
battle against colonialism and imperialism until we achieve the dignity the
people feel is due to Egypt.” 36
Much the same is true of the Ba’th Pan-Arab nationalism of Hafez
Assad and Saddam Hussein, as expressed by Ba’th founding father Michel
Aflaq: “Europe today, as in the past, fears Islam, but it knows that the force
of Islam… has revived and appears in a new form which is Arab
nationalism. For this reason Europe turns all its weapons against this new
force.” 37 Likewise, the strength of Muammar Qaddafi’s fundamentalist
Islamic version of Nasserism is built on a foundation of anti-Western
sentiment. Qaddafi’s manifesto The Third Way declares:

We were prey, but now… the prey is standing on its own two feet
and desires to resist its predators…. The Arabs, deformed by
colonialism, were beginning to doubt themselves. It was becoming
impossible for them to believe that the foundations of
contemporary civilization were laid by Arabs and Moslems… that
the Arabs or the Moslems created the science[s] of astronomy…
chemistry, accounting, algebra, medicine…. The time has come to
manifest the truth of Islam as a force to move mankind, to make
progress, and to change the course of history as we changed it
formerly…. [T]he truths about which we speak were present before
the formation of American society. 38
Arab anti-Westernism does not stop at words. It has manifested itself in
the pro-Soviet orientation of the leading Arab states up to the collapse of
the Soviet Union as a superpower, in the anti-Western agitation of the Arabs
among the “nonaligned states” and at the UN, in the terrorism launched
from the Arab world at Western targets, and in the particular glee that the
Arab rulers showed at the height of the oil embargo, imposed in 1973, when
they throttled the Western economies. In many Arab eyes, this last was a
vindication that history was finally coming full circle, and that a renascent
Arab nation was delivering the West its due, as American congressmen rode
bicycles to work and chief executives in New York, London, and Paris
waited in line for gasoline.
The friendliness of a few Arab rulers toward the United States deludes
some Westerners into believing that this reflects the real sentiments of the
Arab masses. But such rulers frequently represent only a thin crust lying
over a volatile Arab and Islamic society. It is instructive to recall that
“moderate” and “pro-Western” states like Iraq and Libya were transformed
overnight into centers of anti-Western fanaticism after the toppling of King
Feisal and King Idris. (The same phenomenon was in evidence in non-Arab
but Moslem Iran, with the toppling of the Shah.) Any Western reliance on a
friendly Arab regime is basically a reliance on individuals, not on peoples.
These individuals may disappear in a flash, often swiftly replaced by
elements pandering to the deep-rooted attitudes of the population.
Only against the background of this intense animus toward the West can
the Arab rejection of Israel be truly grasped. In the theology of Arab
resentment, Israel, a state founded by European Jews and built on the model
of the liberal states of the West, is understood as a tool or weapon by which
the Western governments can inflict further defeats and humiliations upon
the Arab nation. As early as the 1930s, Emil Ghouri, architect of the
slaughter of Arab “collaborators” in Palestine, declared that the 1929
massacre of the Jewish residents of Hebron was an assault on “Western
conquest, the [British] Mandate, and the Zionists”—in that order. 39 This
worldview was directly incorporated into Nasserist Pan-Arab nationalism,
as expressed in Nasser’s Egyptian National Charter:
Imperialist intrigue went to the extent of seizing a part of the Arab
territory of Palestine, in the heart of the Arab Motherland, and
usurping it without any justification of right or law, the aim being
to establish a military fascist regime, which cannot live except by
military threats. The real anger is the tool of imperialism. 40

It was this imagery of Western usurpation that Nasser invoked on May

29, 1967, to whip the Arabs into a fury one week before the Six Day War:

We are confronting Israel and the West as well—the West, which

created Israel and despised us Arabs and which ignored us before
and since 1948. They had no regard whatsoever for our feelings,
our hopes in life, or our rights.… If the Western powers disavow
our rights and ridicule and despise us, we Arabs must teach them to
respect us and take us seriously. 41

This spirit was the animating force of the Ba’th nationalist rejection of
Israel on the eve of the Six Day War, when the Syrian chief of staff
announced his reason for warring against Israel:

I believe that Israel is not a state, but serves as a military base for
the Imperialist camp.… He who liberates Palestine will be the one
to lead the Arab nation forward to comprehensive unity… [and]
can throw all the reactionary regimes into the sea. 42

Similar beliefs were expressed by Saddam Hussein when he said:

“Imperialism uses Zionism as a strategic arm against Arab unity, progress
and development. This is a well-known fact.” 43
Nasser, the archetypal Pan-Arabist dictator, was instrumental in
establishing the PLO in Cairo in 1964, and he suffused it from the start with
his fervent Pan-Arab approach. His legacy can be seen in the anti-Western
venom of the various PLO factions, each of which adhered to its own Pan-
Arab ideological basis for the rejection of Israel as an outgrowth of the
imperialist West. Thus, PLO executive member Mubari Jamal Tsurani said
in 1986: “Nothing that is called peace is likely to come about. What is
possible is a state of cease-fire. As long as imperialism exists, and as long
as Israel is there, peace will not be possible.” 44
In our age, when history is often either unknown or disregarded, it is
easy for Arabs to plant the view in the West that if only Israel had not come
into being, the Arab relationship with the West would be harmonious. But
in fact, the Arab world’s antagonism for the West raged for a thousand years
before Israel was added to its list of enemies. The Arabs do not hate the
West because of Israel; they hate Israel because of the West.
From day one, the Arab world saw Zionism as an expression and
representation of Western civilization, an alien implantation that split the
Arab world down the middle. Indeed, a common Arab refrain has it that the
Zionists are nothing more than neo-Crusaders; it is only a question of time
before the Arabs succeed in uniting themselves under a latter-day Saladin
who will expel this modern “Crusader state” into the sea. That, in this larger
anti-Western context, the Arab world perceives Israel as a mere tool of the
West to be used against the Arabs can be seen in the constant references
made by Saddam, Assad, and Arafat to Saladin. As Arafat is fond of saying,
“The PLO offers not the peace of the weak, but the peace of Saladin.” 45
What is not stated but what Arab audiences understand well in its historical
context is that Saladin’s peace treaty with the Crusaders was merely a
tactical ruse that was followed by Moslem attacks, which wiped out the
Christian presence in the Holy Land.
Perhaps this is why Syria’s Hafez Assad displays in his office a large
painting of the triumphant Saladin expelling the last Crusader. 46 The
powerful appeal of the idea of reenacting Saladin’s victories in modern
times has stimulated Arab leaders to make not only repeated attacks on
Israel but repeated subversions aimed at toppling pro-Western Arab rulers
and continual attempts to drive the Western presence out of the Middle East
—as Iraq tried to do in Kuwait in 1991, and as Syria has by now more or
less succeeded in doing in Lebanon. The fact that, in the wake of the Soviet
collapse, regimes such as Syria’s are forced to make a tactical peace with
the West should not be allowed to obscure the contempt and antagonism for
the West that lurks just beneath the surface, and that could resurface
instantly at any sign of Western weakness or with the emergence of
powerful new forces on the world scene.
We can now appreciate what has prevented a resolution of the Arab-Israeli
dispute year after year. The Arabs’ wars against Israel and their smoldering
hostility in between those wars stem from three mutually reinforcing factors
that together constitute the true core of the many conflicts in the Middle
East: the Pan-Arab nationalist rejection of any non-Arab sovereignty in the
Middle East; the Islamic fundamentalist drive to cleanse the region of non-
Islamic influences; and the particularly bitter historic resentment of the
West. In all three, it is clear that Arab antagonism directed at Israel in its
origins is in no way specific to the Jewish state. Rather, Arab enmity toward
Israel and the Jews is merely a particular instance of far more generalized
antipathies that would have existed even had Israel never been established.
It is also clear that the grievances the Arabs present as grounds for
attacking Israel are mere pretexts. For Arabs were already attacking Jews,
killing any they could without mercy, thirty years before there was a Jewish
state—which is to say thirty years before there was a single refugee who
could qualify as a “Palestinian Problem.” The three causes I have described
explain why Arabs were committing pogrom after pogrom against Jews
outside Palestine, both before and after the founding of Israel, even though
the Jews of Arab lands presumably had nothing to do with any “Palestinian
Problem.” They explain why the Arabs went to war with Israel repeatedly
before there was a single Jewish settlement or a single Israeli soldier in the
Golan Heights, Judea, or Samaria. After all, the wars of 1948 and 1967
were both waged against a truncated Israel, without the disputed territories.
What is more, the years between those wars saw thousands of terrorist raids
and arbitrary assaults by Arab armies against Israeli civilians—in which
hundreds of Jews died. Sniper fire across the border was an everyday
occurrence, not only against Jewish farmers working the fields of the
Galilee but even across divided Jerusalem. 47
The Arab campaign against Israel is hence rooted not in a negotiable
grievance but in a basic opposition to the very existence of Jewish
sovereignty. To hope for the abandonment of such a deeply entrenched
animosity while Pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism—both
of which thrive by fueling this fire—wrestle for control of the Arab psyche
is to hope for too much, too quickly. This is not to say that peace is
impossible between Arabs and Israelis, or between Arabs and Arabs, for
that matter. But it does point to the special nature that peace must have in
the Middle East and the special requirements that must be satisfied if it is to
endure. (I will discuss these issues in Chapter 6.)
There flickers in the West a tendency to see the end of the Cold War as
the “end of history,” the end of the threat of major upheaval and violence.
Within this context, it is thought that since the conflict between the
superpowers had ended in peace, it must be a matter of only a little bit of
pressure and a little bit of compromise, and peace will come to the Middle
East as well. But while the end of the Cold War has thankfully deprived the
Arabs of their Soviet patron, it unfortunately has little to do with
terminating Middle Eastern bloodshed, a perpetual-motion machine that
requires no outside assistance to maintain itself or to threaten the peace and
stability of other regions. Long after fears of Soviet expansionism have
become blurry memories, Israel and the West, and quite a few Arabs, will
still be contending with radical Arab regimes, immersed in their culture of
violence, mesmerized by their successes, and bent on furthering their
ambitions of conquest and domination.
It is easy for Westerners to dismiss the threat that any Arab state poses
as exaggerated. After all, the populations of the Arab states (except for
Egypt’s) are rather small, their military capacities are still questionable, and
they are far away. But to dismiss the threat would be a terrible mistake.
When even a minor regime like Libya, which rules over only four million
people, used the machinery of a sovereign state to act out its ruler’s twisted
fantasies, the result was a campaign of global terrorism. When a more
substantial and more powerful country like Iraq (seventeen million people)
armed itself feverishly, the threat exceeded that of Libyan terrorism a
thousand times. Indeed, Saddam’s Iraq was, and still is, a menace of the sort
that has previously been the stuff only of suspense novels: a terrorist state
with a leader seeking to graduate from car bombs to nuclear bombs. If
Saddam’s continuing quest for a nuclear capability were ever to succeed, it
would be the first time in history that a nuclear weapon could be launched
on the decision of a single individual, without the moderating and
restraining influence of any scientific, political, or military echelons who
were actually willing or able to voice disapproval. The threat to world peace
would be unprecedented—as would also be the case if nuclear weapons fell
into the hands of Syria or Iran.
During the 1980s, instead of heeding Israeli warnings that the threat
posed by Iraq was imminent, foreign governments fell into the trap that
Arab propaganda had set for them and accepted the assertion that endemic
instability in the region either did not exist or was rooted somehow in the
Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian Problem and could be mitigated or
eliminated altogether with Israeli concessions. Such was the power of the
Theory of Palestinian Centrality that it entirely obscured Iraq’s feverish
building of its arsenal for an entire decade, between 1980 and 1990, and it
even served as a cover for Western supplies to that burgeoning arsenal.
Israel’s protestations fell on deaf ears.
In 1981, when Israel destroyed Saddam’s nuclear reactor, which was
primed to produce nuclear bombs, the entire international community,
including the United States, condemned it. No nation has yet apologized to
Israel or even withdrawn its condemnation to this day. It goes without
saying that there have been no expressions of gratitude. (Although there
was some unofficialjubilation: Over the years, Iraq’s representatives at the
UN had referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity.” I am told that when news
of the Israeli raid on the Osiraq reactor reached the Pentagon situation
room, a triumphant cry was heard: “Hurray, the entity strikes back!”) Even
after the Gulf War, it is tragically clear that the world has simply failed to
perceive what was clear to T. E. Lawrence in 1928: that many Arab regimes
are “tyrannies cemented with blood”; that whatever the nonradical Arab
governments may wish in private, they are ultimately under the thumb of
the more extreme positions in the Arab world; and that only external force
will curb Arab dictators and terrorists who, in possession of a modern state
apparatus, will use it again and again to pursue their Pan-Arabist or Islamic
fundamentalist visions.
Western perception of this has been successfully obscured by an Arab
world steadily spouting the Palestinian Problem, caused by Israel, as the
explanation for all strife in the Middle East. By 1990, a quarter-century
after the Six Day War, this axiomatic truth had spread to every corner of the
earth. The sacred cow of Palestinian Centrality appeared inviolable.
Until the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait. For Saddam’s invasion forced many
Arab leaders to make some quick calculations. As much as the Arab states
resent the world’s discovery of the true face of inter-Arab conflict and its
peering into what they traditionally call their “internal disputes,” they also
understand that they cannot afford to neglect the dangers that Saddam poses
to them.
When Saddam himself realized that he would face a coalition that
included Arab states, he sought to emphasize his Pan-Arab appeal by
transforming the invasion of Kuwait into an Arab-Israeli dispute, a
transformation that was to be achieved by invoking the apparently
irrelevant Palestinian Problem. The invasion of Kuwait, he claimed, was a
blow to the West and its Arab lackeys; it was the necessary first step toward
building an Arab state that would be strong enough to liberate Jerusalem.
He backed up this claim by demanding that any concessions he made in
Kuwait be preceded by Israeli withdrawals from Palestinian land.
At that point the Arab countries poised against Saddam found
themselves in the incredible position of having to refute the central tenet
that they themselves had worked so laboriously to plant in Arab and non-
Arab minds. No, said Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi spokesmen, the invasion
of Kuwait has nothing to do with the Palestinian Problem. Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak admitted, “If we say we want to link the two
issues, this means we do not want to solve anything at all.” 48 Likewise,
according to the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington:

[W]e see no linkage whatsoever between these crises…. [I]f

anyone thinks that Saddam Hussein is caring for the interests of the
Palestinian people or the Lebanese by invading and killing their
brothers in Kuwait [he] is completely mistaken. 49

This forced admission of the truth, even if it was brought to the surface
for only a few weeks, did much to damage the Arabs’ most basic success:
their creation of a false idea of a Palestinian core to all Middle Eastern
conflicts. For the first time in decades, many in the West (and in the East)
were exposed to the complex inter-Arab turbulence as they had never been
before. After the Gulf War it was difficult, at least temporarily, to
completely disregard the intensity and influence of inter-Arab and inter-
Moslem hostilities.
But the sacred cow of Palestinian Centrality is by no means dead. It is
still limping along, patched up by convoluted attempts to explain that one
way or another Israel drives or exacerbates all conflict in the region. And
with the passage of time, the Kuwait invasion slips from memory and the
idea of Palestinian Centrality is allowed to rise once more, again obscuring
the real picture of the Middle East. To understand the consequences of this
obfuscation, we need only think back to the period immediately preceding
the Gulf War.
On a visit to the United States in May 1990, I was besieged by some of
Israel’s staunchest Jewish-American allies who were concerned about an
altercation that had occurred near St. John’s Hospice in East Jerusalem. A
yeshiva had rented, with Israeli government aid, a building adjacent to a
Christian monastery and turned it into a dormitory for its students. The
furor that arose when the church objected to this arrangement gave much
comfort to Israel’s enemies and much discomfort to its friends. Some of
these friends, members of the Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations, were now pressing me on how Israel’s government, which
was then led by the Likud party, could allow such a “fiasco” to take place.
“You’re right. It’s a big problem for us now,” I said. “But it will blow
over in a week. There’s a much bigger problem that won’t go away.”
“What’s that?” they asked.
“Saddam,” I answered. “Saddam Hussein is the Middle East’s, and
Israel’s, number one problem.”
The response to that was as dismissive as it was scornful: “Come on,” I
was told in exasperation. “That’s just a Likud diversion.”
Few incidents illustrate the distortion of Middle Eastern reality that is
rendered by the Theory of Palestinian Centrality as well as this exchange,
three months before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Israel’s friends and foes
alike falsely believed the “Palestinian Problem” to be synonymous with the
“Middle East Problem.” This perversion of truth is a monument to the
success of the Arab propaganda machine, and it certainly has done great
damage to Israel. But a still more far-reaching effect has been its capacity to
cloud Western perceptions of the real nature of the Middle East and the
dangers that loom inside its fabric of fanaticism for the security and well-
being of the world.
OceanofPDF.com
4

THE REVERSAL OF
CAUSALITY

No less successful than the Arab campaign for the Theory of Palestinian
Centrality was the campaign for the Reversal of Causality. If in the first
instance, the Arabs said that all the problems in the Middle East were
telescoped into the Palestinian Problem, they now proceeded to explain
exactly what that problem was: not a by-product of wars in which the Arab
states attacked Israel, but in fact the cause of those attacks in the first place.
With each year’s harvest of propaganda, the reality of the Arab world’s
war against Israel began to recede in the popular mind, leaving only the
image of Israel against the Palestinian Arabs. (Sad-dam’s missile attacks on
Israel during the Gulf War were a rude but brief reminder of this larger
context.) The Arab Goliath was turned into the Palestinian David, and the
Israeli David was turned into the Zionist Goliath. Not only were size and
power reversed, so was the sequence of events. In the Reversal of Causality,
it is not the Arabs who attacked Israel, but Israel that attacked the Arabs—
or more specifically, since the Arab states deliberately substituted
“Palestinians” for “Arabs,” it was Israel that attacked the Palestinians. In a
nutshell, the new chain of reasoning went like this: All the problems in the
Middle East are rooted in the Palestinian Problem; that problem itself is
rooted in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Ergo, end that occupation
and you end the problem.
This elegant construct, nonexistent before Israel’s victory in the Six Day
War, came into being with amazing speed. By the 1970s, it had made its
way from Arab to Western capitals. I recall a conversation with a British
diplomat, perhaps the foremost Arabist of the British Foreign Office, in
which I pointed out that Israel’s reluctance to cede the administered
territories to the Arabs was based in no small measure on its fear of being
attacked from these territories again. His reaction startled me. “Come now,”
he sniffed, “you don’t seriously expect us to believe that. After all, it was
you who started the Six Day War.”
What are the facts? After their attempt to destroy the newborn Jewish
state in 1948 failed ignominiously, the Arab regimes resorted in the 1950s
to a relentless campaign of cross-border terrorism. Attacks were leveled
against Israel from all sides, especially from terrorist bases that had been
established for this purpose in the Gaza Strip, which was then under
Egyptian control. Ending these deadly raids was the primary aim of Israel’s
foray into Sinai in 1956. The Sinai campaign eliminated the Arab terrorist
bases and temporarily brought the Sinai under Israeli control. It was
returned to Egypt a few months later under Soviet-American pressure,
despite the absence of any indication by Nasser that he would renounce his
oft-stated intention of destroying Israel. (The Americans were especially
irked that, unknown to them, Israel had coordinated its military action with
Britain and France, which had landed paratroops in the Suez Canal zone in
an attempt to roll back Nasser’s takeover of the international waterway.)
After a short respite, the Arab terror campaign began gathering steam
again in the early 1960s. Attacks on Israelis from the Syrian-controlled
Golan Heights became a commonplace, and by 1966 the recently
established PLO was launching escalating terrorist attacks from the
Jordanian-controlled West Bank as well. In November 1966, Israel
launched a retaliatory raid on the village of Es-Samu (the biblical
Eshtamoa), wiping out the terrorist bases there. Tension increased. In April
1967 the Israeli air force downed six Syrian MiGs over a Syrian attempt to
divert the headwaters of the Jordan River—the source of much of Israel’s
water. The Egyptian military had by then fully recovered from its earlier
defeat. Emboldened by the acquisition of the latest weaponry from the
Soviet Union (and from Britain, in Jordan’s case), Syria, Jordan, and Egypt
prepared to attack Israel in May 1967. Arab states farther afield also readied
their military forces to be sent to what many of them confidently assumed
would be the final assault on the Jewish state. Arab leaders were not
reticent in proclaiming their aims. “The problem before the Arab
countries,” declared Nasser in May 25, “… [is] how totally to exterminate
the State of Israel for all time.” 1 “Our goal is clear: to wipe Israel off the
map,” declared President Aref of Iraq on May 31. 2 “The Arab struggle must
lead to the liquidation of Israel,” explained Algerian president
Boumédienne on June 4. 3 And on June 5, the day the war broke out, Radio
Damascus exhorted simply: “Throw them into the sea.” 4
Six days earlier, on May 30, King Hussein of Jordan had gone to Cairo
to sign a mutual defense pact with Egypt, effectively fusing his army into a
joint military command with Egypt and Syria and tightening the noose
around Israel’s neck. 5 Egypt had already escalated the crisis into an outright
state of war by cutting off Israel’s southern shipping through the Gulf of
Aqaba. Israel asked the Jordanians to stay out of any Arab assault, but on
June 5, when the fighting began, King Hussein joined in as well, shelling
the entire Israeli frontier, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Israel’s
international airport at Lod. On June 7, Hussein broadcast this to his army:
“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your arms, with your
hands, with your nails and teeth.” 6
What had led the Arabs to adopt this heady approach was a combination
of Soviet deception (the Soviets falsely told the Arabs that Israel was
amassing troops along the Syrian border) and the Arabs’ own belief that,
having licked their wounds from their previous defeats and having
stockpiled an enormous arsenal in the interim, they could easily finish the
job of overrunning the outnumbered and outgunned Israeli army. (The ratio
of artillery was five to one in the Arabs’ favor, planes 2.4 to one, and tanks
2.3 to one.) 7
The promise of victory was especially beckoning, since all the Arabs
had to do was slice Israel into two at its narrowest point, between the
Jordanian border and the Mediterranean, where it was only ten miles wide.
In a combined attack, with Egypt in the south and Syria in the north, even a
mediocre Jordanian tank commander could hope to cross that minuscule
distance swiftly and reach the sea. In fact, since the Jordanians probably
had the best of the Arab commanders, the temptation for Hussein to join the
attack turned out to be irresistible. Moreover, Jordan had the full strategic
backing of Iraq. As in 1948, approximately one third of the Iraqi army
crossed Jordan and by June 5 was approaching the Israeli border.
Furthermore, after Egypt flooded the Sinai with 100,000 troops in May (in
flagrant violation of the armistice agreements of 1956, following the Sinai
campaign, which stipulated that the Sinai would be demilitarized), Nasser
felt that from the old Egyptian-Israeli border he was in easy striking
distance of the densely populated Israeli coastal plain. Tel Aviv, after all, is
only about forty miles from the Gaza district, which was then under
Egyptian control, and the Israeli city of Ashkelon is less than five miles
away. Finally, Syria, poised on top of the Golan Heights, from which it had
tormented the Israeli settlements in the valley below for nineteen years,
could launch a quick assault from its superior high ground, penetrate the
Israeli Galilee, and reach the vital coastal plain from the north.
In hindsight, it is easy, as some do now, to dismiss the Arab military’s
belief that with such promising starting conditions they could overrun
Israel. Indeed, the Arabs were encouraged in this belief by political
developments. Israel’s pleas to the United States, Western Europe, and the
United Nations to help break the siege that the Arab states had thrown up
fell on deaf ears. Three weeks before the war, when Nasser closed the
Straits of Tiran, Israel’s vital sea outlet to the south, Israel turned to the
United States and asked that it live up to its commitment to keep that
channel of water open (a promise that the United States and the European
countries had given to Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the
Sinai in 1956). In Washington, no friendlier American administration could
have been imagined. The president was the sympathetic Lyndon Johnson,
the undersecretary of state was the supportive Eugene Rostow, the UN
ambassador was the lifelong Zionist Arthur Goldberg. Yet when Israel
asked that the written commitment that the Americans had given be
honored, this friendliest of all possible administrations hemmed and hawed
and said it could not find a copy of the commitment. 8
The noose was tightening, and although public opinion was squarely
behind Israel, the world’s governments did nothing. Israel stood alone.
The mood of the country was somber. War was not new, and the threat
of war still less so. But the last time Israel had experienced a full-scale
military conflict was eleven years earlier, during the battle over Sinai.
Although I had been born and raised in Israel, my own experience with that
war was sharp but not traumatic. I remember as a seven-year-old taping the
windows and pulling the blinds in case the Arabs attacked Jerusalem. My
clearest recollection from that war is of the father of the boy next door,
wearing dusty fatigues, sweeping into the neighborhood, splotches of sand
still covering the floor of his army jeep. “Here,” he said with an
outstretched hand, “this is for you.” He gave the children of the
neighborhood Egyptian chocolate that he had brought from El Arish, a town
in the northern Sinai that had just fallen to Israel. “I bought them,” he added
with extra emphasis, to make it clear to us that he hadn’t just taken them.
The Arabs didn’t attack our cities—that time. But now, eleven years
later, as war rushed toward us, the windows were taped again. This time it
proved necessary. On the morning of June 5, I was awakened by a
deafening noise outside the apartment. I ran to the roof and watched in
fascination as Jordanian shells exploded yards away from my building in
the heart of Jerusalem. Most of the shells fell in open spaces, but a number
slammed into residences, killing twenty civilians and wounding hundreds.
The parliament building of the Knesset and the Israel Museum, housing the
ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, were also targeted but were not hit.
This was a new sight for me. I was eighteen years old, and I had spent
the last three years in an American high school in Philadelphia, where my
father was doing historical research. In the latter part of May, as the Arab
intention to go to war became clearer, I had taken my exams early and set
off for Israel. My parents did not try to stop me. They merely asked, ’Are
you sure there will be a war?”
“Positive,” I answered. “The Arabs will go through with it. Besides, I
want to see Yoni before the war starts.” Yoni was the Hebrew nickname by
which we called my older brother, Jonathan. This sealed the argument.
When I landed in Lod Airport near Tel Aviv on the evening of June 1,
the airfield was enveloped in utter darkness, including the runways. After
staying overnight in an equally darkened Jerusalem, I set out to find my
brother. At twenty-one, he had been released a few months earlier from
service as an officer in the paratroops. In the last week of May he had been
mobilized again (Israel’s army in wartime consists of virtually all of the
able-bodied men in the country called up for reserve duty). The problem
was where to find him. “Look in the orchards around Ramleh,” I was told
through the unofficial grapevine that instantly and mysteriously spreads
classified information to people who need to know in Israel, and to them
alone. “That’s where you’ll find Brigade Eighty.” The trouble was, there are
an awful lot of orchards around Ramleh. The reserve paratroop brigade was
bivouacked under its leafy shade, the better to hide it from possible aerial
reconnaissance. I walked into one of the groves along the road leading from
Ramleh to Gedera. Several reservists were preparing coffee on a makeshift
stove. They were in their early thirties at most, but to me they looked far too
old for this. They should have been home with their families, I thought.
“Yoni?” One of them scratched his head. “Oh yeah, the young guy. Look
in the next grove.”
I wandered through the next cluster of citrus trees, but I didn’t find him.
Then, at the other end of a long row of trees, I saw him staring at me in
utter disbelief. “What are you doing here?” he asked, and broke into his
broad grin as we ran toward each other.
Over a cup of “military coffee” (a sickeningly sweet blend of coffee and
residues of tea with which I was to become intimately familiar over the next
five years of my own army service), I asked him what he thought was going
to happen. “We’ll win,” he said simply. “We have no other choice.”
The next time I saw him was ten days later, in a hospital bed in Safed.
His unit had landed in helicopters at Um Katef, behind the lines of the
Egyptian forces poised to choke the Negev, smashing their fortification and
paving the way for the sweep of Israeli armor into the Sinai. From there
they were taken up to the foothills of the Golan, where they fought their
way up the steep incline nine hundred feet to the plateau above, on which
the Syrian guns were still trained downward on the Israeli villages that lay
spread like a map beneath them.
Three hours before the end of the war, Yoni led a three-man advance
squad to reconnoiter the storming of Jelabina, a Syrian outpost. A sudden
burst of machine-gun fire tore open the neck of the soldier next to him. As
Yoni leaned forward to grab the stricken man, his own elbow was shattered
by a Syrian bullet, leaving the nerve exposed and causing horrific pain. He
later said that as he crawled back to safety on that scorched field, bullets
whizzing past him, he felt for the first and only time in his life that he was
going to die. When he reached Israeli lines, he stood up on his feet.
“Can you make it on foot to the field hospital?” he was asked. “No
problem,” he answered, and promptly collapsed.
Now in Safed, with the war ended just a day earlier, I entered the long
orthopedic ward. His was the last bed on the left. His arm was in a heavy
cast. He was the only patient in the ward who was not an amputee.
“You see,” he said with quiet sadness, “I told you we’d win.”
Seven hundred and seventy-seven Israeli soldiers died in the Six Day
War. In less than a week they and their comrades had purchased a brilliant
military victory against those who sought to snuff out Israel’s life. King
Hussein lost control of all the territories his grandfather’s troops had
forcibly seized in 1948—Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. Syria lost
the Golan Heights; Egypt lost the Sinai and Gaza. Israel, which before the
war had been a tiny country, now became a small country (see Map 7). The
border, which had previously been ten miles from the sea, was pushed back
to the Jordan River forty miles away. The Sinai provided a large buffer
against Egypt, as well as supplying most of Israel’s oil needs. And on the
Golan Heights the tables were turned, with the Israelis gazing down at the
Syrians for the first time.
Whatever it was that had made the Arabs drop all caution in word and
deed on the eve of the Six Day War, this was the last time they would
unreservedly expose before the entire world their undisguised goal of
annihilating Israel. They did not anticipate Israel’s preemptive air strike
during the first three hours of the war, which destroyed the entirety of
Egypt’s air force, the backbone of Arab air power. Later in the day, after
Syria and Jordan attacked, Israel destroyed their air forces as well. (This
gave Israel’s armored divisions complete freedom to maneuver on the
ground with total Israeli air supremacy in the skies above, a devastating
combination in desert warfare that was to disappear by the time the next
war came around.)
Israel did not fire a shot on the Syrian and Jordanian fronts until it was
attacked from these lines. On June 5, hours before the Israeli operation
began, the Syrians bombed the Israeli air force base at Megiddo, as well as
targets in Haifa and Tiberias, and spewed fire at Israeli positions from the
Golan. The war on the Jordanian front began when Jordan opened up a full-
scale bombardment on Israeli targets. 9
Thus my Arabist colleague may have been right in saying Israel fired the
first shot in 1967—but only against Egypt, which in any case had already
committed an act of war by closing the Straits of Tiran. Faced with the
choice of either eliminating the escalating threats to its life or being driven
into the sea, Israel chose to live. It took decisive and unforeseen action to
avoid the fate that the Arabs had planned for it. This mood is captured in a
story told among the Israeli troops during the tense days before the outbreak
of the war, which Yoni related in a letter he wrote from the orchards of
Ramleh on May 27, 1967, a week before the war:

We sit and wait. What are we waiting for? Well, it’s like this: An
Englishman, an American and an Israeli were caught by a tribe of
cannibals. When they were already in the pot, each of them was
allowed a last wish. The Englishman asked for a whiskey and a
pipe, and got them. The American asked for a steak, and got it. The
Israeli asked the chief of the tribe to give him a good kick in the
backside. At first the chief refused, but after a lot of arguments, he
finally did it. At once the Israeli pulled out a gun and shot all the
cannibals. The American and the Englishman asked him: “If you
had a gun the whole time, why didn’t you kill them sooner?” ’Are
you crazy?” answered the Israeli. “And have the U.N. brand me an
aggressor?” 10

But that is exactly what the UN (and most of the world) proceeded to do.
It would soon condemn Israel for refusing to be stewed in the pot that
Nasser and the Arabs had prepared for it. This did not happen right away.
The resolutions adopted by the Security Council, written under threat of
veto by the United States, were initially “evenhanded,” calling for restraint
and negotiations toward peace on all sides. But not the resolutions of the
General Assembly. There, all the shame the Arabs felt over their defeat
exploded into tantrums of impotent rage, which the Soviets and their
servants joined for reasons of their own. Having “invaded Africa”
(according to a prevalent Third World interpretation) by capturing the Sinai,
Israel was not only the aggressor but a neocolonialist regime—not merely
the tool of imperialism but an oppressor empire in its own right. All over
the East bloc and the Third World, states severed diplomatic relations and
condemned their newly discovered aggressor foe. China declared of Israel’s
act of self-defense: “This is another towering crime against the Arab people
committed by U.S. imperialism and its tool Israel, as well as a grave
provocation against the people of Asia, Africa and the rest of the world.” 11
Pakistan asserted that it was “[n]efarious and naked aggression… against
the territorial integrity of the United Arab Republic and the adjoining Arab
States…. Israel is an illegitimate child born of fraud and force.” 12 In
Bulgaria, it was felt that “[t]he adventures and aggressive actions of Israel
arouse disgust and anxiety among world public opinion.” 13 And Moscow,
which had helped to trigger the war by feeding the Arabs false intelligence,
piously informed the world that “in view of the continued Israeli aggression
against Arab States and its gross violation of the Security Council
resolutions, the Soviet government has decided to sever diplomatic relations
with Israel.” 14
That all this could occur because Israel had succeeded in defending itself
was no ordinary propaganda victory. Still, the Arabs understood that such
condemnations, coming from the Soviet bloc, China, and the Third World,
would not suffice. The shock of their defeat in the Six Day War led them to
a fundamental reevaluation of their tactics. Having lost areas strategically
vital to waging war against Israel, especially the commanding heights of
Judea and Samaria, the Arabs realized that no easy military solution would
be forthcoming until they first forced Israel to retreat to the vulnerable pre-
1967 lines. This would require the exertion of enormous political pressure,
and such pressure could be effective only if it came from one place: the
West. Israel, after all, was a Western country dependent on Western, and
especially American, support. The Arab states would therefore have to win
over public opinion in the West by means of a lengthy, sophisticated, and
comprehensive campaign. They would have to change the terms of the
conflict so as to obscure its real nature and present it in a manner that would
be plausible, even persuasive, to audiences outside the Middle East.
For one thing, the kind of open declaration of intent that they had made
so freely up to the eve of the Six Day War would have to be muted or even
dispensed with. Obviously, it would not do to speak again of driving the
Jews into the sea. To much of the world, this was simply unacceptable.
New arguments would have to be marshaled to justify continued
hostility against Israel. And what better proof of Israel’s innate
aggressiveness could there be than the incontestable fact that it had come
out of the war a bigger country than when it entered it? All the territories
that the Arabs had lost in 1967, territories that had been used by Arab
leaders as staging areas for a war that they themselves had brought on, were
now held up as examples of unbridled Israeli expansionism. The
consequences of Arab aggression were thereby presented as its causes.
The Arab leaders now demanded that these same territories be handed
over to them. That they have managed to persuade many people of the
justice of their demand is, to say the least, curious. They present, after all,
an entirely new theory in international relations. Never before have states
that lost territory in wars of aggression assumed so easily the mantle of the
aggrieved party. Germany after World War II certainly did not. Neither did
the other aggressor states from that same war. In fact, there is hardly a case
in history in which a repelled aggressor was permitted to demand anything,
much less the territory from which his aggression was initiated.
The wide acceptance of the idea of Israel’s relinquishing Judea and
Samaria has much to do with the notion, promulgated in the UN Charter,
that the acquisition of land by force should be considered illegitimate. 15 The
advocates of this position like to remind us—frequently—that taking land
by force is like stealing the property of an individual. But there is no small
amount of hypocrisy in the fact that this principle is today so piously
preached by states that only a few years ago were themselves ardently
pursuing international empires spanning the globe—with force the preferred
method of acquisition. When it comes to their own interests, these states,
including Western ones, have no real regrets over past uses of force, and
they continue to use it to keep what they have captured whenever they see
fit.
Yet Israeli “acquisitions” of territories by force stand in marked contrast
to most examples that one could adduce, including American actions
against the Indians and against Mexico, by means of which the continental
United States came into being. For Israel has at no point set out to conquer
anything. It has been repeatedly forced into wars of self-defense against
Arab regimes ideologically committed to its destruction.
Of paramount importance is the fact that the lands in question—the
mountain ranges of Golan, Samaria, and Judea—were all used as
springboards by the Arab armies to attack Israel during the Six Day War
and as staging areas for terrorism during the years before the war. Syria, as
we have seen, used the Golan to threaten Israel’s water supply as well. In
such a case, the argument over the use of force to acquire territory is like
the argument over whether you may use force to take a gun away from
someone who has already fired two shots at you and is about to fire a third
time. Countries that have been the object of aggression have a legitimate
interest in protecting themselves against potential attacks, a principle that
has been recognized repeatedly in international relations, even in cases in
which the threats were considerably less than those facing Israel.
Thus, for three decades after World War II, the United States kept
Okinawa (eight thousand miles from California) as a hedge against the
possible resurgence of Japanese aggression, while East Germany, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were kept under Soviet control
(with American acquiescence) as a hedge against renewed German
aggression. The actual possibility that a “next war” would be launched from
either of these utterly ruined, disarmed, and subjugated opponents was
almost nonexistent, but neither the Americans nor the Soviets were willing
to take even the slightest risk where their national security was concerned.
Compare this to Israel’s case: The West Bank—the Judean heartland of the
Jewish people—is only a few miles from the outer perimeter of Tel Aviv,
and the Arab regimes surrounding Israel continue to arm themselves
feverishly, rarely bothering to disguise their plans to use the territory
against Israel once more should Israel vacate it.
But what is even more amazing is the fact that the Arab-inspired myth of
“Israeli expansionism” persists, even though in 1979 Israel, in pursuit of
peace at Camp David, willingly agreed to give up 91 percent of the territory
it had won in a war of self-defense, land containing billions of dollars of
investments and the oil fields that it had developed and that met most of its
energy needs. Further, Israel ceded additional territories to Palestinian
control under the Oslo Accords. No victor in recorded history has behaved
similarly. What other nation would give up its oil supply and become
dependent on imported oil for the sake of peace?

Clearly, however indignant some Arab leaders may be over the loss of
territory in 1967, this loss cannot have been the cause of a conflict that
began much earlier. If not the loss of territory, are the Palestinian Arab
refugees the cause of the conflict? Prior to 1967, in fact, it was “the refugee
problem” that was the constant refrain of the Arab chorus in explaining the
Arab enmity toward Israel. But there was no such thing as the refugee
problem when the Arabs embarked upon their first full-scale war against the
fledgling Israel in 1948. On the day five Arab armies invaded the new State
of Israel, Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League, declared:
“This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will
be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” 16
In several cases—as in Haifa, Tiberias, and in other well-known
examples documented by the British authorities and Western
correspondents on the scene at the time—the Jews pleaded with their
Palestinian Arab neighbors to stay. This was in sharp contrast to the
directives the Palestinian Arabs were receiving from Arab governments,
exhorting them to leave in order to clear the way for the invading armies.
No matter: The idea that Israel expelled the refugees, repeated ad nauseam,
has caught hold over the decades since. But in the years immediately after
the conflict, there were many moments of candor. For example, the
Jordanian newspaper Filastin wrote in February 1949, “The Arab States
encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to
be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.” 17 And in the New York
Lebanese daily Al-Hoda in June 1951:

The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured

the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv
would be as simple as a military promenade…. Brotherly advice
was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and
property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest
the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down. 18

In 1954 the Jordanian daily Al-Difaa quoted this telling comment from
one of the refugees: “The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can
get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.” 19 As late as 1963, the Cairo
Akhbar al-Yom was still able to write: “May 15th arrived.… [O]n that very
day the Mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the
country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their
stead.” 20
Not only have the Arab leaders chosen to forget this history, they have
created a new one, at once absolving themselves of any responsibility for
the refugees and pinning the blame on Israel. Again, as with the territories
lost in 1967, the consequence of the 1948 war—Arab refugees—was
presented as its cause.
But to make this scheme work, the refugees had to be maintained as
refugees, permanently wretched, perpetually unsettled. Most people
unfamiliar with the Middle East are shocked to learn that the PLO actually
has acted to prevent Palestinians from leaving the refugee camps, as have
various Arab states. For the PLO, these camps served as a propaganda
bonanza and fertile soil for the recruitment of new “fighters,” and it was
willing to resort to violence to keep them intact. For some reason, the
Western press seems to have had little interest in reporting on this sordid bit
of manipulation.
The consistent refusal of Arab leaders to solve this problem is
particularly tragic because it would have been so easy to do. After all, since
World War II there have been well over fifty million refugees from many
countries, and almost all have been successfully resettled. 21 The truth of this
assertion is driven home by the fact that in 1948 Israel, with a population of
650,000 Jews and a crushing defense burden, successfully absorbed
800,000 Jewish refugees from the same war that produced the Arab
refugees. Israel, of course, did not incarcerate its refugees in special camps
as the Arabs did, but quickly integrated them into Israeli society. That the
fifty million Arabs in 1948 could not absorb 650,000 Arab refugees—and
have not finished the job even after half a century, and even after the
fantastic multiplication of their oil wealth—is an indication of the merciless
cynicism with which the Arabs have manipulated the refugee issue to create
reasons for world censure of Israel. As Dr. Elfan Rees, the adviser on
refugees to the World Council of Churches, noted: “The Arab refugee
problem is by far the easiest post-war refugee problem. By faith, by
language, by race, and by social organization, they are indistinguishable
from their fellows of the host countries.” 22
Indeed, after 1948 foreigners seeking to resolve the refugee problem
were singularly impressed by the desirability of the refugees’ absorption
into the Arab states. Thus, a U.S. congressional study mission sent to
investigate the situation of the refugees in 1953 reported: “The status of the
refugees as a special group of people who are wards of the United Nations
should be terminated as soon as possible. The objective should be for
refugees to become citizens of the Arab states.” 23 And a Chatham House
study in 1949 concluded that, given international financial support, the
great majority of the Arab refugees could be absorbed by Iraq and Syria,
both of which boasted millions of acres of undeveloped land suitable for
agriculture. 24 Similarly, a 1951 study by the International Development
Advisory Board found that the entire Arab refugee population could be
absorbed by Iraq alone. 25
Still, despite the deliberate Arab policy to keep the problem alive, the
reality that Dr. Rees noted has proved even stronger than Arab intent. For
over the years, nearly all of the refugees have been absorbed into the
economies and societies of the countries of their residence. Indeed, most
Palestinian Arabs have homes. Many of them, in fact, live as full citizens in
eastern Palestine—today called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Similarly, most of the Arabs of Judea-Samaria are not homeless refugees;
they live in the same homes they occupied before the establishment of
Israel. The number of actual refugees is close to nil. Some live on the West
Bank, but most live in Gaza (although most of Gaza’s residents are not
refugees). Israel’s attempts to dismantle the remaining camps and
rehabilitate their residents were continuously obstructed by the PLO and the
Arab world. Now that the Palestinian population lives entirely under
Palestinian rule, it is the job of the Palestinians themselves to dismantle the
remaining camps.
A serious case of genuine Palestinian homelessness was created in the
wake of the Gulf War, when Kuwait embarked on a campaign of vengeance
against its own large Palestinian population, which had collaborated with
Saddam in conquering and occupying the country. More than three hundred
thousand Kuwaitis of Palestinian origin were driven from the country (the
largest forcible transfer of Palestinian Arabs in history). Almost all of them
fled to Jordan, which accepted them all as citizens. If a comparable number
of Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria and Gaza remained unintegrated,
until recently it was because political pressure from the Arab world and
PLO terror have prevented their rehabilitation. Yet the theme of
“homelessness” persists, having been repeated endlessly—not without
success—as a powerful weapon in the Arab political arsenal against Israel.
As the years passed, however, Arab propagandists discovered that their
claims about “usurped territories” and “homeless refugees” could not
withstand critical examination. Before knowledgeable audiences, the
embarrassments of chronology and causality could not be waved away.
They were compelled to resort, therefore, to a third and final argument.
Brandishing the ever-popular slogan of “self-determination,” they asserted
that the “Palestinian people” have been denied their “legitimate rights,” and
that one of the rights that has been denied, they claimed, is the right to a
“homeland.” Significantly, the slogans of “Palestinian self-determination”
and “legitimate rights” were introduced into common currency only after
the failure of the Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1967.
For it is an uncontested fact that during the nineteen years of Jordanian
rule over Judea-Samaria, the Arab leaders, the Arab media, and Arab
propaganda said virtually nothing about a “homeland” or “legitimate rights”
for the Palestinian Arabs living in Judea-Samaria. When “Palestinian
rights” were spoken of, it was always in reference to Israel behind its 1967
lines, to Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre, and the message was crystal clear: Israel
was to be destroyed in order for the Arabs to obtain those rights.
It is noteworthy that under the British Mandate, it was the Jews of the
country who called themselves Palestinians. The Pales-tine Post and the
Palestine Philharmonic were Jewish. Likewise the Jewish soldiers who
made up the Jewish Brigade of the British Army were called by the British
“Palestinians,” a term that at the time referred mainly to Jews. There were
thus Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs, although in those days the
Arabs did not stress a distinct Palestinian nationhood but always
emphasized that they were part of the larger Arab nation.
This deep-rooted identification with the Arab nation did not diminish
over the years. Passer Arafat, head of the PLO, has said, “The question of
borders does not interest us. Palestine is only a small drop in the great Arab
ocean. Our nation is the great Arab nation extending from the Atlantic to
the Red Sea and beyond.” 26 And Zuhair Mohsin, a member of the PLO
executive, put it this way: “There are no differences between Jordanians,
Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are one people.” 27 Yet soon after
1967, the Arab world began speaking with one voice about the newly
occupied “Palestinian people,” as though a distinct Palestinian nation had
somehow come into being out of thin air.
The process of forming a separate nation is a complex one. The
development of a unique “peoplehood” is always a long historical process,
and its culmination is expressed by the emergence of several shared
attributes, most often a distinct language, culture, religion, and history. But
let us grant that through a miraculous telescoping of history, what took
other peoples centuries was achieved by the Palestinian Arabs almost
overnight, by dint of declaration, and that they are entitled to a national
home. But who are the Palestinian Arabs, and where is their homeland? Let
us hear what the Arab leaders themselves say.
The PLO, supposedly committed to “Palestinian self-determination,”
asserted from its inception in 1964 that its design encompasses the entirety
of Palestine, both its western and eastern parts, both Israel and Jordan. This
was underscored time and again, as in the Palestine National Council’s
Eighth Conference, in February–March 1971:

In raising the slogan of the liberation of Palestine… it was not the

intention of the Palestine revolution to separate the east of the river
from the west, nor did it believe that the struggle of the Palestinian
people can be separate from the struggle of the masses in Jordan. 28

Given the embrace between the PLO and Jordan after the Oslo Accords,
PLO leaders were naturally reluctant to publicize this long-standing claim.
But their candid statements in the past are revealing. For example, Chafiq el
Hout, a PLO official, said in 1967, “Jordan is an integral part of Palestine,
just like Israel.” 29 And Arafat made this same point in his speech before the
United Nations in 1974: “Jordan is ours, Palestine is ours, and we shall
build our national entity on the whole of this land.” 30
Some would expect the Jordanians to contest this claim. But until some
years ago they did not. In 1970, Crown Prince Hassan, addressing the
Jordanian National Assembly, said, “Palestine is Jordan, and Jordan is
Palestine. There is one people and one land, with one history and one
destiny” 31 King Hussein (also—significantly—before an Arab audience)
said on Egyptian television in 1977, “The two peoples are actually one.
This is a fact.” 32 In an interview with an Arab newspaper in Paris in 1981,
Hussein said, “The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.”
33
And in 1984, he told the Kuwaiti paper Al-Anba that “Jordan is
Palestine…. Jordanians and Palestinians must… realize that their fate is the
same,” and that “Jordan in itself is Palestine.” 34 In 1988 the PLO leader
Abu Iyad reemphasized precisely the same point: “We also insist on
confederation with Jordan because we are one and the same people.” 35
In recent years, to ward off the inevitable conflict between them over
who will control eastern Palestine (Jordan), Hussein and the PLO had
somewhat amended such pronouncements. But whether whispered or
spoken out loud, these declarations of the Arabs themselves confirm what
both history and logic tell us: The area of Palestine is indeed the territory of
Mandatory Palestine, as decreed by the League of Nations, and comprises
the present-day states of Israel and Jordan. It is absurd to pretend that an
Arab in eastern Palestine who shares the language, culture, and religion
with another Arab some ten miles away in western Palestine, an Arab who
is often his close relative if not literally his own brother, is a member of a
different people. Indeed, the PLO’s officials and Jordan’s rulers have been
the first to admit this.
We must therefore wonder: How many Palestinian Arab peoples are
there? Is there a “West Palestinian Arab people” on the West Bank, and just
across the border an “East Palestinian Arab people” in Jordan? How many
Arab states in Palestine does Palestinian Arab self-determination require?
Clearly, in eastern and western Palestine, there are only two peoples, the
Arabs and the Jews. Just as clearly, there are only two states in that area,
Jordan and Israel. The Arab state of Jordan, containing over four million
Arabs, for a long time did not allow a single Jew to live there—it expelled
those Jews who came under its control in 1948. Jordan also contains four-
fifths of the territory originally allocated by the League of Nations for the
Jewish National Home. The other state, Israel, has a population of five
million, of which one-sixth is Arab. It contains less than one-fifth of the
territory originally allocated to the Jews under the Mandate. In the territory
disputed between these two states (Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem) live
another 1,150,000 Arabs and 300,000 Jews (another million or so Arabs
live in Gaza).
The claim that none of the Palestinians have been granted “self-
determination,” then, is misleading. For the inhabitants of Jordan—which
Hussein’s grandfather Abdullah originally wanted to call the Hashemite
Kingdom of Palestine—are all Palestinian Arabs (Arabs from Palestine),
and within that population western Palestinian Arabs—those whose
families came from the part of Palestine west of the Jordan River—are the
decided majority. It cannot be said, therefore, that the Arabs of Palestine are
lacking a state of their own, the ultimate expression of self-determination.
The demand for a second Palestinian Arab state in western Palestine, and a
twenty-second Arab state in the world, is merely the latest attempt to push
Israel back to the hopelessly vulnerable armistice lines of 1949.
No one interested in the future of Mideast peace would challenge the
legitimacy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. I certainly do not.
Regardless of the tortuous history of eastern Palestine, and the broken
promises of the League of Nations to the Jewish people, the modern state of
Jordan is a fact. By integrating its Palestinian population into all levels of
Jordanian society, the modern state of Jordan has assumed a respectable
legitimacy that all who are committed to peace should acknowledge.
Equally, the Jewish people, while attached historically to the Gilad and
Moab regions of Jordan, must recognize that the Jewish historical claim to
these lands has no practical consequence at the close of the twentieth
century. Moreover, it is in Israel’s best interest to see Jordan stable, secure,
and prosperous. This is why, as opposition leader in 1995, I led the vote of
the Likud party in the Knesset approving the peace treaty between Israel
and Jordan, thereby helping to seal the peace between Jordan and all parts
of Israeli society.
I believe that a permanent agreement of peace can be reached between
Israel and the Palestinian Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. I have been
advocating such a peace settlement because I believe it is in the best interest
of Israel and the Palestinians alike. This final peace would achieve a
balance between the Palestinians’ understandable desire to run their own
lives and Israel’s need to preserve vital national interests, foremost of which
is security. In fact, arrangements that would give the Palestinians of the
West Bank and Gaza effective control over their lives have been in great
part implemented by now, since the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo
Accords directly controls over 98 percent of the Palestinian population. A
final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians would resolve
primarily the outstanding questions of any additional territory (virtually
empty of Palestinians) that might be handed over to the Palestinians, and
the all-important question of who controls crucial powers such as external
security. If peace is to prevail, Israel must retain these powers.
The civil enfranchisement of the Palestinians is by now a moot issue,
since they have their own flag, their own passports, and, most importantly,
their governing institutions and the ability, however one may criticize it
from a Western democratic perspective, to vote for their representatives and
leadership. What I am stressing here is that the issue at the core of the
Palestinian conflict with Israel is not lack of Palestinian self-determination
as such, but the Palestinian demand for unlimited self-determination,
beyond their current integration in Jordan and the arrangement for self-
governance in a final peace settlement with Israel. That Palestinian demand
for unbridled self-determination is not in itself a demand for greater
freedom to insure Palestinian liberties, but a demand for the freedom to
extinguish the liberty and life of the Jewish state. For unbridled Palestinian
self-determination would mean a Palestinian state armed to the teeth, in
league with such regimes as Iraq (whose leader, Saddam Hussein, has been
repeatedly adulated by the Palestinians), and with powerful elements like
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, inspired by Iran, all openly calling for Israel’s
destruction. Such a radical state, strategically poised on the hills above Tel
Aviv, would make Israel’s existence a precarious one at best.
If the Palestinians’ wish is merely to control and better their lives, that
wish could have been accommodated many times during the twentieth
century. It certainly can be fulfilled in a final peace agreement with Israel.
But if the Palestinians continue to harbor a desire not to run their own
affairs but to free themselves of Israel’s very existence, that wish will bury
any chances for a true and lasting peace. It is my fervent hope that the
mainstream elements of Palestinian society will rid themselves of this
poisonous ambition, so that a genuine and enduring peace may finally be
established between our peoples.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, therefore, is not rooted in the territories that

changed hands in 1967, nor in the refugees that resulted from the Arab
attack on Israel in 1948, nor in any claimed lack of self determination for
the Arabs of Palestine. The real root of the conflict is the persistent Arab
refusal to recognize Israel within any boundaries.
These devices of Arab propaganda, especially the most recent one of
self-determination, have been directed solely against Israel and therefore
have received the credulous support of many governments. These
governments will soon have to reexamine just how tenaciously they wish to
support this claim. For the Arab campaign against Israel has developed
what I call the Palestinian Principle, which dictates that any minority that
does not want to be a minority does not have to be one. The Arabs, I should
emphasize, were not demanding civil rights for the Palestinian population in
the West Bank and Gaza. If that were the demand, Israel could have
satisfied it by annexing the territories and making all the Arabs citizens of
Israel or offering them full individual rights under Israeli law as resident
foreign nationals who would retain their present Jordanian citizenship.
The Arab governments and the PLO summarily rejected such options.
They refused to consider the Arabs of the territories living under an Israeli
state in any condition, even as equal citizens. They were not interested in
civil rights. Instead, they demand national rights over the territories—which
means the creation of still another Arab state, another Arab regime, another
Arab army. It is not enough that the Palestinians enjoy full integration in
Jordan, a country with a solid Palestinian majority encompassing the
majority of the territory of Palestine. It is not enough that members of the
same people living across the border from Jordan in the West Bank and
Gaza should enjoy equal civil rights and self-governance in any political
settlement. On the contrary, we are told that the Palestinian Arabs of Judea-
Samaria, a tiny area sixty miles long by thirty miles wide, should be given a
state of their own, as demanded by the Palestinian Principle. That is, the
Palestinians demand unlimited self-determination, with no limitation of
potentially destructive sovereign powers.
What will this Palestinian Principle do to the post-Communist world? I
described in the opening of this book how the international community is
going back to Versailles to seek organizing principles for according
sovereignties to various national groups. While Wilson at Versailles strove
for a world in which each distinct nation has its own distinct state (a
demand that the subsequent conferences could not universally fulfill),
neither he nor his disciples ever said that each minority should have its own
state—that is, in addition to a homeland in which the co-nationals of that
minority constitute a majority. The issue here is not whether the Lithuanians
are entitled to have a state of their own, independent from Russia. The
issue, rather, is whether the Russian minority in Lithuania is entitled to have
its independence from Lithuania despite the existence of an independent
Russia. Similarly, the issue is not whether the Czechs and the Slovaks
should have retained their union or formed independent states, but rather
whether the Hungarian minority within Slovakia can legitimately agitate for
independence despite the existence of an independent Hungary. Eastern
Europe is replete with examples of minorities of one national population
overlapping into the national territory of another people. So is Western
Europe, for that matter. So are all the republics of the former Soviet Union.
So is Africa. So are vast parts of Asia. Will each and every one of these
minorities have its own state?
The United States is not exempt from this potential nightmare. In a
decade or two the southwestern region of America is likely to be
predominantly Hispanic, mainly as a result of continuous emigration from
Mexico. It is not inconceivable that in this community champions of the
Palestinian Principle could emerge. These would demand not merely
equality before the law, or naturalization, or even Spanish as a first
language. Instead, they would say that since they form a local majority in
the territory (which was forcibly taken from Mexico in the war of 1848),
they deserve a state of their own. “But you already have a state—it’s called
Mexico,” would come the response. “You have every right to demand civil
rights in the United States, but you have no right to demand a second
Mexico.” This hypothetical exchange may sound farfetched today. But it
will not necessarily appear that way tomorrow, especially if the Palestinian
Principle is allowed to continue to spread, which it surely will if a new
Palestinian state comes into being.
Ironically, the inevitable effect of the Palestinian Principle is to diminish
respect for minority rights internationally. For if every minority can be
considered a serious threat to the long-term integrity and viability of any
state, then governments will find themselves seeking ways to suppress and
ultimately eliminate all recognizable minority groupings within their
borders. What this means could be seen recently in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
where Serbian nationals were engaged in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”
against a Moslem minority that constituted a local majority. The mentality
behind the horrifying efforts to drive the Moslems from their homes is not
unrelated to the Palestinian Principle. For if every minority has the right of
secession, it is not surprising that some wrongly conclude that they had
better expel the minority and avoid the trouble altogether.
What I am arguing is that the Palestinian Principle has potentially
divisive and destabilizing consequences in the search for a new world order.
It is a political fragmentation bomb that will explode the civil and national
peace of many lands, not only because the Arabs have promoted the
incendiary idea that no minority must remain a minority, but also because
the PLO until very recently demonstrated grisly methods to pursue its
realization: terror, blackmail, extortion, and the co-option of the entire
world stage without moral inhibitions or limits. Up until the collapse of
Communism, it was possible for many governments to subscribe to the
Palestinian Principle without thinking too carefully about its consequences
for themselves. The Cold War not only froze the national conflicts within
the vast territories controlled by the Soviet empire; it put a cap on the
amount of leeway that contending sides in national disputes had outside the
direct Soviet dominion. The United States and the Soviet Union may have
supported competing sides in Latin America or Asia or Africa, but they
made sure that things would not get out of hand. Now that the superpower
rivalry has abated, the paradoxical result is less order and less security in
national conflicts, not more. New champions of unlimited self-
determination proclaiming their “national rights” can crop up in the most
surprising of places, and if the feverish attempts of the arming of Iraq, Iran,
and other countries with weapons of mass destruction is any indication,
their capacity to acquire formidable weapons to exercise their perverted
versions of “self-determination” is expanding, not shrinking.
This, then, is the new threat posed by a new Palestinian state in the
Middle East. It is not merely the obvious physical threat to Israel, which I
will discuss in detail in Chapter 7. It is not even the danger to peace and
stability in the Middle East as a whole, which will surely be threatened by
the emergence of such an independent state capable of purveying terror and
other dangers. Even more than these, it is the impact that the creation of
such a state will have on the problem of limiting the demands of minorities
for sovereignty the world over.
At present, the chief contribution of the Palestinian Principle has been to
obstruct the achievement of a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli
dispute. For it is important to make one point clear: No matter how the
borders are drawn, any durable settlement would leave a significant number
of Arabs living side by side with their Jewish neighbors under Israeli
sovereignty. (Twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs.) It has long been
recognized that being a minority is not necessarily a tragedy. All nations
have their minorities. The tragedy is to be everywhere a minority This was
precisely the situation of the Jews before the creation of the State of Israel.
But the Arab rejectionists employ the reverse logic: For them, it is a tragedy
that Arabs should be a minority. anywhere in the Middle East. They find it
intolerable that some Arabs should live as a minority in Israel, even as non-
Arab peoples live as minorities in their midst—and this despite the fact that
the Arab citizens of Israel enjoy the civil liberties and rule of law that are
denied to many non-Arab peoples living under Arab regimes.
The Palestinian Principle is not a standard that the Jewish state can
apply to its Arab minority, and it is not a standard the Jewish people has
ever applied to itself. The Jews who constituted significant minorities in
many lands for centuries before the Holocaust (for example, 10 percent of
Poland’s population) never demanded a state of their own in the areas in
which they formed a local majority. Nor did the Jews, once they had
attained statehood, possess twenty-one states and ask for more, as the Arabs
today demand for themselves.
The Palestinian Principle has been, of course, enthusiastically accepted
by Moslems all over the world, who see it as the logical extension of the
idea of a Realm of Islam. The American writer Charles Krauthammer was
able to point out that the intifada (the mass violence of Palestinian Arabs
against Israel) is not restricted to the Arab-Israeli dispute—it is a worldwide
enterprise directed at many non-Moslem governments by radical Moslem
minorities demanding secession: in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan from the
Soviet Union before their independence; in Kashmir from India; in Kosovo
from Yugoslavia; in Xin Jian from China; and so on. The Palestinian
Principle seems to mean that if there is ever a significant Moslem majority
in any section of Britain or France, there will eventually be a demand for
secession there as well.
If the Palestinian Principle is transparently false and obviously
dangerous, how is it that it has been accepted by so many people around the
world? The first reason is that the Arabs took pains to invent a new
Palestinian identity in the West Bank, in effect creating a “West Bankian”
people presenting the demands of an entirely new “nation.” If the issue had
been presented in irredentist terms—that is, that the Arabs in Samaria and
Judea wished to be reunited with Jordan—the conflict would have been
reduced to a squabble over where the border should be drawn and the whole
issue would have lost its hold on Western imaginations so captivated by the
idea of self-determination.
The second reason for the virtually unchallenged spread of the
Palestinian Principle is Arab oil. One cannot overlook the power and
influence of the Arab League and OPEC, which in the 1970s transformed
themselves into mighty propaganda machines for the cause of self-
determination of the Arabs of Palestine. The Palestinian cause was critical
for the oil sheikhs of the Persian Gulf, who were able to get away with
subsidizing the PLO and anti-Zionist propaganda instead of actually
shelling out the funds necessary to build homes for the refugees. Thus the
participation of the oil states became a decisive factor in focusing attention
on the Palestinian Arabs. It is quite likely that if there were 150 million
Basques in twenty-one Basque countries controlling 60 percent of the
world’s oil supply, incessantly agitating and fulminating for a quarter of a
century about the need for self-determination for the Basques of Spain (all
the while threatening oil cutoffs and aircraft hijackings if this self-
determination were not granted), many would believe today that the main
obstacle to peace in Europe, possibly in the world, is the “Basque Problem.”
In this regard the Arab world’s campaign against Israel is not the first
time that totalitarian regimes have used a perversion of the concept of self-
determination in concert with threats of force as a weapon against a small
democracy. The most striking precedent for this strategy in this century is
Nazi Germany’s campaign against Czechoslovakia. This campaign deserves
a reexamination because so many of its particulars are being eerily
reenacted today against Israel.
Czechoslovakia was strategically placed in the heart of Europe, and its
conquest was central to Hitler’s plans for overrunning Europe. Though
small, Czechoslovakia could field over 800,000 men (one of the strongest
armies in Europe), and it had a highly efficient arms industry. To complicate
matters from Hitler’s point of view, it possessed a formidable physical
barrier to his designs in the shape of the Sudeten mountains, which
bordered Germany and guarded the access to the Czech heartland and the
capital city of Prague only miles away. A system of fortifications and
fortresses had been built in the mountains over many years, making passage
by force a very costly proposition, perhaps even impossible. We now know
from the Nuremberg trials and other sources that Hitler’s generals were
utterly opposed to an assault on the Czech fortifications. After the war,
numerous German generals stressed the point, including Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German high command:

We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military

operation because… we had always been of the opinion that our
means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia
were insufficient. From a purely military point of view we lacked
the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the frontier
fortifications. 36

Worse, from Hitler’s point of view, the Western powers had promised at
Versailles to guarantee the Czech border against any aggressive attack.
France, which in 1938 could field one hundred divisions (an army 50
percent larger than Germany’s), had agreed in writing to come to the
Czechs’ defense, and Britain and Russia were committed to joining in if
France did so.
Since an outright military victory seemed impossible, Hitler embarked
on an unprecedented campaign to politically force the Czechs to give up the
land, and with it any hope of being able to defend their capital or their
country. The inhabitants of the Sudetenland, he said, were predominantly
German, and these three million Sudeten Germans deserved—what else?—
the right of self-determination and a destiny separate from the other seven
million inhabitants of Czechoslovakia; this despite the fact that the country
was a democracy and that the Sudeten Germans enjoyed economic
prosperity and full civil rights. To buttress his claim, Hitler organized and
funded the creation of a new Sudeten political leadership that would do his
bidding, which was, in the words of the Sudeten leader Konrad Henlein, to
“demand so much that we can never be satisfied.” 37 Henlein was instructed
to deny that he was receiving instructions from Germany. As William
Shirer, who was a reporter in Europe at the time, succinctly summarizes it:

Thus the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was

merely a pretext… for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted,
undermining it, confusing and misleading its friends and concealing
his real purpose… to destroy the Czechoslovak state and grab its
territories…. The leaders of France and Great Britain did not grasp
this. All through the spring and summer, indeed almost to the end,
Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier apparently
sincerely believed, along with most of the rest of the world, that all
Hitler wanted was justice for his kinsfolk in Czechoslovakia. 38

In addition, Hitler backed the establishment of a Sudeten liberation

movement called the Sudeten Free Corps, and he instigated a series of well-
planned and violent uprisings that the Czechs were compelled to quell by
force. 39 Further, he secretly summoned Henlein to Berlin and briefed him,
instructing him in great detail precisely how he should agitate for the so-
called Sudeten independence. (Occasionally, Hitler would replace his
principal demand for Sudeten independence with his second demand for
reunification with Germany, literally mixing self-determination with
German irredentism.)
Most important of all, Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels orchestrated a
fearful propaganda campaign of fabricated “Czech terror” and oppression of
the Sudeten Germans. The Czech refusal to allow the Sudeten territories to
return to their rightful German owners, Hitler prattled, was proof that the
Czechs were the intransigent obstacle to peace. For what choice would
Germany have but to come to the assistance of its oppressed brethren living
under intolerable Czech occupation? Rejecting plans for Sudeten autonomy,
he insisted on nothing less than “self-determination.” 40 Moreover, the
Germans reversed causality, claiming that the Czechs were trying to
precipitate a European crisis in order to prevent the breakup of their state,
that the choice between war and peace in Europe was in Czech hands, and
even that “this petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race.” 41 But
there was a simple way to simultaneously avoid war and achieve justice,
Hitler said. The Western powers—meaning Britain and France—could
force the Czechs to do what was necessary for the sake of peace:
Czechoslovakia had to relinquish the occupied territories.
And it worked. With astonishing speed, the governments and opinion-
makers of the West adopted Hitler’s point of view. Throughout 1937 and
1938, mounting pressure was exerted on Czechoslovakia by the leading
Western powers “to go to the utmost limit” to meet Sudeten demands. 42
Czech leader Edvard Beneš was reviled as intransigent. The Western press
published articles lamenting Czech shortsightedness and its total disregard
for the cause of peace in Europe, as well as the injustice of not allowing the
Sudetenland to be “returned” to Germany (despite the fact that it had never
been part of Germany). The British envoy who was dispatched to
investigate the situation even went so far as to demand that Czechoslovakia
“so remodel her foreign relations as to give assurance to her neighbors that
she will in no circumstances attack them or enter into any aggressive action
against them.” 43
On September 18, 1938, under the gun of Hitler’s September 28
deadline, a meeting was held between the British Cabinet and the French
prime minister and foreign minister, in which it was determined that
democratic Czechoslovakia must accede to Hitler’s demands. Despite the
fact that the West had promised in writing at Versailles to go to war to
defend Czechoslovakia’s borders, it agreed that the Czechs must give up the
Sudetenland for “the maintenance of peace and the safety of
Czechoslovakia’s vital interests.” In return, the Czechs would receive from
Britain and France “an international guarantee of the new boundaries…
against unprovoked aggression.” 44 If the Czechs did not accept the plan and
thereby save the peace of Europe, they were informed by the leaders of the
free world, they would be left to fight Hitler alone. In Neville
Chamberlain’s immortal words: “It is up to the Czechs now.” 45
But in fact it was not even left to the Czechs. Chamberlain realized that
if the Czechs were to fight, France and Britain might be forced to fight too.
As the Czechs and the Germans mobilized, Chamberlain became
increasingly hysterical about averting war by buying off Hitler with the
Czech defensive wall. He shuttled repeatedly to Germany to try to arrange
the payoff. Finally, minutes before his September 28 deadline, Hitler
“agreed” to Chamberlain’s proposal for an international peace conference to
bring peace to Central Europe. At Munich, Britain and France pleaded with
Hitler for eleven and a half hours to “compromise” and take the
Sudetenland peacefully. In the end Hitler agreed.
Having grasped the fact that his supposed democratic allies had allowed
themselves to become tools in Hitler’s hand, Prime Minister Beneš
announced Czechoslovakia’s capitulation to the demands of the
totalitarians. “We have been basely betrayed,” he said. 46
The Western leaders returned in triumph to London and Paris. In
government, in parliament, in the press, Chamberlain and Daladier were
praised, cheered, thanked for having traded land for peace. “My friends,”
said Chamberlain, “I believe it is peace in our time.”
On September 30, the Czech army began its withdrawal from the
Sudetenland, from the strategic passes, the mountain fortresses, the major
industrial facilities that would have been the backbone of Czechoslovakia’s
effort to defend itself. But this was only phase one of Hitler’s plan. The
German annexation of the Sudetenland was followed by a renewed list of
demands on the Czechs. The Nazis continued to invent incidents of
violence and oppression against the ethnic German minority in what was
left of the Czech state. Less than six months later, on March 15, 1939, the
Nazi war machine rolled through the rest of Czechoslovakia. Shorn of their
defenses in the Sudeten mountains, the Czechs were now powerless to
resist. Phase two had been implemented. “It was clear to me from the first
moment,” said Hitler, “that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-
German territory. That was only a partial solution.” 47
The Western powers again did nothing. Once more, all their assurances
proved worthless.
Unfortunately, the parallels to today’s effort to gouge the remainder of
Judea and Samaria out of Israel are all too easy to see. Like
Czechoslovakia, Israel is a small democracy with a powerful army much
aided by defensive terrain. Like the Sudeten district, the West Bank is
mountainous territory, a formidable military barrier that guards the slender
and densely populated Israeli shoreline and Israel’s capital city. Like the
Germans, the Arabs understand that as long as Israel controls these
mountains, it will not be overrun. They understand too that a military
campaign to seize these mountains is at present unthinkable, and that
Israel’s removal from them can be achieved only by the application of
irresistible political pressure by the West on Israel to withdraw.
The Arab regimes have therefore embarked on a campaign to persuade
the West that the Arab inhabitants of these mountains (like the Sudeten
Germans, comprising roughly a third of the total population) are a separate
people that deserves the right of self-determination—and that unless such
self-determination is granted, the Arab states will have no choice but to
resort to war to secure it. As in the case of Czechoslovakia, Israel’s
insistence on not parting with territories strategically vital for its defenses is
presented as the obstacle to peace. Echoing Munich, the Arabs repeatedly
advocate “active” American (and European) involvement, in the hope that
an American Chamberlain can be found to force “the intransigent party” to
capitulate where it is otherwise unwilling to compromise its own security.
That the Arabs have borrowed directly from the Nazis in this, as in so
many of their other devices against Israel, is not surprising. What is
surprising, or at least disappointing, is the speed and readiness with which
this transparent ruse has been received, digested, and internalized by the
elite of the Western world. Not a day passes without some somber editorial
or political comment from august quarters in America or Europe asking
Israel to voluntarily accept the same decree that Czechoslovakia was asked
to accept. Israel is told that it should divest itself of its large Arab minority,
making itself ethnically more homogenous for the sake of securing internal
security and demographic bliss. The London Times, the leading newspaper
of the world in 1938, published a celebrated editorial that summed it all up:

It might be worthwhile for the Czechoslovak government to

consider whether they should exclude altogether… making
Czechoslovakia a more homogenous state by the secession of that
fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with
which they are united by race…. The advantages to Czechoslovakia
of becoming a homogenous state might conceivably outweigh the
obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district. 48

Substitute Israel for Czechoslovakia, and Palestinian Arab for Sudeten

German, and you could insert this same editorial into the leading
newspapers of the West today without so much as raising an eyebrow.
Israel, still the object of genocidal designs by some of the Arab world, has
become in the view of many Western opinion-leaders the intransigent party,
the obstacle to peace; Arabs who seek Israel’s destruction and say so openly
within the Arab world are often presented as reasoned and moderate.
We now know that the propaganda weapon of “self-determination” is
aimed at the Achilles’ heel of the West. Westerners, and in particular
Americans with their tradition of inalienable rights and sympathies for
national freedom, find it easy to identify with the exaggerated national
aspirations of the Palestinians today, just as others found themselves moved
by the plight of the German ethnic nationals in Czechoslovakia in the time
of Hitler. Thus the argument of self-determination has been able to succeed
where earlier Arab efforts to portray the conflict as one over refugees or
Israeli territorial aggression had largely failed. As soon as the Arabs
recognized the susceptibility of the West to the image of an “oppressed
people struggling to be free,” the entire Arab propaganda machine was
retooled to churn out arguments on this basis. The Arabs were suddenly
capable of persuading Western opinion-makers of what they had been
saying since 1967: that Israel’s presence in the territories was based on an
inherently immoral act, and that any effort to strengthen the Jewish state
was therefore fundamentally wrong as long as it hung on to these territories.

Two things greatly assisted in driving home these ideas to the West: the
outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, and the ongoing controversy over the
Jewish settlements in the territories. In recent years these issues have served
as lightning rods in the campaign against Israel, focusing all the anti-Israeli
energy in the international scene and directing it to reverse the great
injustices that Israel has allegedly committed against the Palestinian Arabs.
The intifada came as a godsend to a PLO that had been losing ground in
the Arab world and internationally ever since 1982, when the Israeli army
had entered Lebanon, destroying the PLO bases that had been built up there
for over a decade, and depriving the PLO of the staging area it needed to
launch attacks against Israel. An indication of how low the PLO’s fortunes
had sunk came in 1987, when an Israeli bus was bombed by PLO terrorists
in Jerusalem, prompting (again, for the first time in anyone’s memory)
Palestinian Arab leaders in the territories to condemn this act of terror and
those responsible for it. Such a brazen act of repudiation against their own
“sole legitimate representative” was what the PLO had most feared for
years, and with good reason.
Meanwhile, although it was far from paradise, life in the territories had
been steadily improving for years. The West Bank that Israel had found in
1967 had been only lightly touched by the twentieth century. There was
scarcely any industry, medical treatment was primitive, and higher
education did not exist. The vast majority of the residents lived in homes
without electricity or running water, and most of the women were illiterate.
Soon after the Six Day War, Israel adopted a liberal policy aimed at
radically improving the lives of the Arabs. Universal education was
instituted, universities were opened, hospitals were built, and modern roads
were cut into the hills. By 1985, the number of telephone subscribers had
grown by 400 percent, ownership of automobiles had risen by 500 percent,
and the annual rate of construction in Judea and Samaria had risen by 1,000
percent. By 1986, 91 percent of Arab homes in Judea and Samaria had
electricity (as opposed to 23 percent under Jordan), 74 percent of homes
had refrigerators (as opposed to 5 percent), and 83 percent of homes were
equipped with stoves (as opposed to 5 percent). By 1987, these Palestinian
Arabs had become the most educated segment in the Arab world, infant
mortality had dropped drastically, and the economy had grown by an
amazing 40 percent. 49 The improvement in Gaza was even more dramatic.
Ironically, the Palestinian Arabs were also enjoying rights denied to other
Arabs in the Middle East, with a press consisting of newspapers
representing various factions (some openly sympathetic to the PLO), and
the right to appeal all government decisions directly to the democratic
Israeli court system. Furthermore, Israel kept the Allenby Bridge to Jordan
open, affording every Palestinian Arab the right to visit other Arab
countries and see whether living conditions were better elsewhere. Most of
them decided they were better off in the West Bank.
This is not to say that the Arabs in the territories had suddenly become
Zionists or acquiesced in Israeli control. That is never the case with a
population living under military government, especially if that government
must contend with the constant threat of terrorism. Palestinian Arabs have
thus had to go through such trying experiences as roadblocks, identity
checks, curfews, closings of workplaces and schools, and searches of their
homes. And there has been no option for speedily bringing this state of
affairs to an end. During the twenty years after the Six Day War the
territories’ political future was kept in limbo, first by the unwillingness of
Israeli governments immediately after 1967 to annex or bargain away the
territories, and then after the Camp David Accords of 1978, when the Arab
side refused to follow through on the agreed-upon negotiations for
determining the future of the territories. As a result, the Palestinian Arabs
inhabiting these territories lived for over two decades under military
administration, without knowing what the future disposition of the
territories would be. Such uncertainty produces inevitable political tensions
that a final political settlement would otherwise reduce. For example, the
Arabs of the Galilee lived uneasily under an Israeli military administration
during the 1950s and became full-fledged citizens of Israel once that
administration was removed. The decades that have passed since then may
not have been idyllic, but the fact that Israel’s Arab citizens can take part in
Israeli society, and that they have a mechanism for political expression
(including representation in the Knesset), has produced a relatively quiet
coexistence for Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens that has defied the earlier
prognostications of many.
But no such definitive political settlement or mechanism for political
expression was to be found in the territories. Virtually the entire Arab world
rejected the Camp David Accords, refusing to rescind its totalist and
immediate demand for a Palestinian state in the territories, thereby making
it impossible to make progress along the path of negotiations with Israel.
Thus, by 1987, two decades after the Six Day War, a new generation of
Arabs had grown up in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that was at once uncertain
about the future of these areas and continuously subjected to virulent PLO
agitation that filled the political void. Inevitably, this generation adopted
ever more extreme and implacable positions.
But here too the PLO could not deliver on its own incitements, and
increasingly the rage of the younger Palestinian Arabs was directed not only
against Israel but against the leadership of the PLO itself, which was seen
as living the good life in villas along the Côte d’Azur or on the languorous
beaches of Tunisia, on the other side of the Mediterranean. Like their
troubled counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world who are seduced by the
facile promises of religious fanaticism, more and more of these youngsters
were turning to the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement as a vehicle to
vent their rage. Fundamentalism spreads most rapidly in poverty-stricken
areas and is therefore at least in part a by-product of the Arab world’s
investment in weapons as a substitute for refugee rehabilitation.
This was the background for the outbreak of the “intifada,” which
unleashed these frustrations into widespread violence. The intifada began
on December 8, 1987, when an Israeli truck accidentally ran down four
Palestinian Arabs in Jebalya, near Gaza. Within hours the rumor spread that
this was a deliberate act of murder, touching off weeks of mass rioting.
Sensing a chance to regain its standing, the PLO joined in fanning the
flames. On the day after the accident, Al-Fajr, a pro-PLO newspaper in
Jerusalem, described it as “maliciously perpetrated.” 50 In Baghdad, Arafat
used the frenzy of the rioting as an excuse to promise that Israel was about
to be annihilated:

O heroic sons of the Gaza Strip, O proud sons of the [West] Bank,
O heroic sons of the Galilee, O steadfast sons of the Negev: the
fires of revolution against the Zionist invaders will not fade out…
until our land—all our land—has been liberated from these
usurping invaders. 51

Arafat sometimes has let his guard down. Here he was summoning
Arabs to rise up and liberate “all our land,” in which he specifically
includes not only the West Bank but the Galilee and the Negev—that is,
Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries. And when Bethlehem’s moderate
Christian mayor Elias Freij suggested a temporary halt to the violence,
Arafat responded: “Whoever thinks of stopping the intifada before it
achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest.” 52
Within a few weeks this violence was being organized and funded by the
PLO, gathering Arab youths into “intifada committees” that really believed
what Arafat told them: that victory was at hand. They attacked Israeli
civilian traffic with rocks and gasoline grenades and enforced repeated
strikes by setting up roadblocks to prevent Arabs from going to work,
firebombing Arab stores, and threatening Arab merchants who tried to keep
their shops open. Raiding the schools during class time and forcing the
children into the street, the activists made their riots look more popular and
simultaneously increased the tragic toll of children among the intifada’s
casualties. Afraid of being outdone, the fundamentalist Hamas movement
organized rival committees, and for the next four years the two networks of
violence competed in trying to push the Palestinian population to
bloodshed.
In all this the Israeli army did precisely what is required of it by the
Fourth Geneva Convention: It tried to defend the Arab and Jewish civilian
populations by patrolling the highways, dismantling the roadblocks, and
arresting the instigators of the violence. * The intifada “committees”
responded by attacking the soldiers with axes, bricks, and gasoline grenades
—gaining glory for themselves and media coverage for the PLO. The PLO
sent out an order not to use guns, lest they spoil the underdog image of the
uprising and provoke the army to take serious action.
The West may have imagined that the young Arab hotheads in Nablus
wished for nothing more than the liberation of their backyard, but the
“committees” saw it otherwise. Their goals were just as Arafat and the
Hamas had dictated them: to drive the Jews from every inch of Israel. They
published widely circulated Arabic-language communiqués explaining this
goal to those they expected to follow them. A leaflet circulated by Arafat’s
Fatah faction, dated January 21, 1991, said that Jews were “descendants of
monkeys and pigs,” the inference being to treat them accordingly. The
Hamas, in a typical counterleaflet, declared, “There will be no negotiations
with the enemy. There will be no concession on even one centimeter of the
land of Palestine. The way to liberation is through jihad.” As for their
Jewish neighbors in Judea and Samaria, the leaders of the intifada called
upon their followers to “burn the ground out from under their feet.” 53
On rare occasions, the Western press actually bothered to send a
translator along and interview some of the intifada leaders about what they
wanted. When Bob Simon of CBS News tried this novel approach, he
received a straightforward answer from the leader of a group of seven
masked intifada activists he interviewed: “I want all of Palestine, all of it
entirely…. Palestine is indivisible. Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Galilee, Nazareth—
all of these are parts of Palestine.” 54 None of these “parts of Palestine” is on
the West Bank. These are pre-1967 areas of Israel, the regions of densest
Jewish population, which the intifada’s leaders believed would eventually
fall into their hands.
But after a few months, all but the most extreme grew tired of pursuing
this chimera, and the intifada began to lose its glitter. The interminable
strike destroyed the booming economy that had been painstakingly built up
since 1967, ruining businesses and impoverishing many. Law enforcement
was transferred into the hands of competing gangs of local toughs funded
and directed by competing PLO factions, * who used their power to abuse
anyone they considered to be “collaborators“: the well-to-do, the educated,
political rivals, and so on. Indeed, the great majority of intifada violence
ended up turning inward: against rival factions and anyone else considered
undesirable. In 1990, the third year of the intifada, the total number of
people killed in this grisly inter-Arab strife in the territories was one
hundred, as compared to a total of fifty killed in confrontations with the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a ratio of two to one. 55 The bodies of scores of
Arabs were discovered covered with burns, swollen from beatings,
disemboweled, dismembered, decapitated. Wives of “collaborators” were
raped, and their children molested and beaten as warnings. The intifada was
literally devouring its children.
Little publicized has been the virulently anti-Christian dimension of the
intifada. In Christian towns such as Bethlehem, a campaign of violence,
firebombings, and blackmail has been directed against Christians, with the
intention of forcing them to sell their holdings to Moslems and leave the
Holy Land. In an article in the Catholic journal Terra Santa, Father Georges
Abou-Khazen wrote that Arab states have been pouring money into the
effort to “Islamicize” the country, and that he feared the complete
eradication of the Christian presence in the Holy Land. According to Father
Abou-Khazen, Christians have been too terrified to speak out, fearing for
their lives. 56
Not that any of these horrors reached most of the programs of the
international television networks covering the intifada. As in the mass
expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, no one seemed to care when
Palestinian Arabs were being harmed unless Israel was doing the harming.
Ignoring the Arab reign of terror in the Palestinian streets, the media created
for themselves nightly installments of a popular romance-drama: heroic
underdog in search of self-determination taking on a terrifying Israel tyrant.
This drama was not too difficult to create since democratic peoples do not
like violence, and they do not like soldiers. They are especially revolted by
the sight of a soldier beating a nonsoldier or glaring at a child. Since
viewers were being told that this was an “army of occupation”—that is, it
had no right to be there in the first place—the media managed to transform
even the most necessary aspects of maintaining law and order into
unforgivable crimes.
Utterly lost from the images on the screen was the organized nature of
the rioting, the internecine violence, and the terrorized lives of the innocent
Arabs (and Jews) who were ground under the intifada’s heel. Similarly lost
were the restrictive firing orders that stayed the hand of every Israeli
soldier, and the swift trials of the 208 Israelis who in any way disobeyed
these orders 58 —as against the tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers and
reservists who followed the regulations with impeccable restraint.
The bashing that Israel received in the media was particularly
instructive, given that next to nothing was said, either now or at the time,
about the way the Arab governments of Jordan and Egypt had put down
their intifadas in these very territories before 1967. We can, for instance,
compare the actions taken by the Israeli military to that of the Jordanian
Legion during the period when Jordan was the occupying power in the West
Bank (which it had invaded in 1948 and illegally annexed in 1950). In
October 1954, Beirut radio reported the outbreak of riots and
demonstrations in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jordanian-held Jerusalem.
The army was called in, and a state of emergency was declared. The official
Jordanian announcement said that fourteen were killed and 117 injured.
Unofficial media reports claimed that ninety were killed. 59 In April 1957,
riots in Jerusalem and Ramallah led King Hussein to resort to emergency
measures: A curfew was imposed on Jerusalem and Ramallah, newspapers
were closed, municipal councils were dismissed in Bethlehem, Nablus,
Tulkarm, and Jenin, and there were widespread arrests, including 169 UN
teachers. 60 In April 1963 in Jerusalem, eleven were killed, 150 wounded
(including seventeen schoolgirls); in Ramallah one person was killed and
thirty-five were wounded; in Jenin and Irbid dozens more were wounded;
120 politicians were arrested. 61 On November 19, 1966, riots broke out in
Nablus and Hebron and police opened fire into the crowds. The next day
tanks were brought in and opened fire. Fifty were killed or wounded in
Nablus alone. More were killed at the funerals. 62
Similar treatment was accorded the residents of Gaza by the Egyptian
army. In fairness, it should be noted that Jordan had at least given most of
the Palestinian Arabs Jordanian citizenship. But Egypt refused them even
this elementary amenity, deliberately keeping the entire population of Gaza
in a humiliating condition of statelessness, almost half of them as
passportless refugees.
With such summary treatment, it is not surprising that none of these
intifadas lasted very long or amounted to very much. For the Jordanians and
the Egyptians were willing to resort to means of “restoring order” in the
territories that Israel would never dream of using—the Israeli army did not
roll tanks in front of crowds and fire away. But the Jordanian Legion was
free from such restraint: Its soldiers used not rubber bullets but lead ones.
Nor were they under orders to fire only when their lives were in danger. If
Israel had used the Jordanian methods, casualties would have climbed to
twenty-five or fifty per day rather than the much smaller rate that did result
from mass encounters with the IDF. In all likelihood, Israel’s intifada would
have died the same quick and bloody death as did its precursors under Arab
regimes. But Israel, of course, was unprepared to adopt such methods,
knowingly prolonging the intifada and taking upon itself punishing political
costs (including claims about the inhumanity and depravity of Israeli
methods) in order to avoid the use of uninhibited force.
When such a comparison is raised, Western diplomats and journalists
commonly respond by claiming that Israel must be held to a higher standard
than the Arab dictatorships. True enough. Undoubtedly a democracy should
be judged by the standards of democracies. Indeed, during the years of the
intifada several violent outbreaks occurred in democratic countries, the
most noteworthy in Venezuela and India. In Venezuela, in two days of
rioting in 1987, the government put down the violence with a toll of 119
dead and 800 wounded, while in India during the ten-day siege of the
Golden Temple, 133 people died in clashes between secessionist Sikhs and
the government. 63 (These were greater than the number killed in a full year
of intifada confrontations with the IDF.) When violent looting, the stoning
of vehicles, or the firebombing of shops occurs in a democracy, it must take
forceful action, since the first obligation of government—of any
government—is to keep the peace. When such rioting occurred in
America’s major cities in the mid-1960s, the death toll in eruptions of
rioting lasting only a few days was thirty-four in Los Angeles, twenty-six in
Newark, forty-three in Detroit, and scores of others elsewhere. Tens of
thousands were arrested. When renewed rioting in 1968 hit 125 cities, the
American government had no choice but to apply massive force: 55,000
soldiers and policemen were brought in to quell the disturbances. In all,
forty-six were killed and over 21,000 arrested. 64 Lest anyone believe that
these explosions were a thing of the past, rioting in Los Angeles in May
1992 left fifty-one dead in three days—and resulted in widespread criticism
of the Los Angeles police for not having responded with enough force.
Not only rioting but stone-throwing has its parallels in other countries.
In 1991, two Maryland teenagers were caught hurling rocks at passing cars,
sending a fifteen-year-old girl who was a passenger in one car into a coma.
(In the territories several Jewish passengers have lost their lives and others
have been crippled for life by rocks hurled through the windshields of their
vehicles.) Although the average person in the West is not accustomed to
thinking in such terms, a rock the size of a baseball hurled into a car
traveling at sixty miles per hour is a weapon at least as deadly as a knife or
an ax. The offenders in Maryland were charged with ninety counts,
including “assault with intent to murder, assault with intent to maim, assault
with intent to disable, assault and battery, and malicious destruction of
property.” They were sentenced to five hundred years in prison, assuring
that they will spend the rest of their adult lives behind bars. 65 The “harsh”
military administration in Judea and Samaria naturally insists on similar
penalties, though it should be pointed out that the penalty for those rock
throwers who do not succeed in inflicting substantial damage is a modest
fine.
That Israel was not judged according to these international norms
indicates that there is not a double standard at work, but a triple one—one
standard for the Arab dictatorships, a second for the democracies, and still a
third—separate and special—for Israel. This third standard rests on the oft-
repeated assumption that Israel is morally wrong to be in the territories at
all, and that its every act there is therefore a derivative wrong. Based on this
premise, the Israeli army is held to be wrong in its every use of force, no
matter how restrained or proportional, no matter how necessary. It is a
standard against which no country can possibly be judged favorably, and as
such it has been used with consummate skill by Arab propagandists to
demonize Israel during the intifada riots, obliterating for many both the
history and causality of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For like the Arab
campaign of international terrorism before it, the intifada’s purpose soon
evolved to serve as a stage in the PLO’s media war against Israel. After the
first weeks of spontaneous rioting, the intifada’s “main events” were
increasingly calculated purely from manipulating public opinion: the use of
crowds of children in confrontations, the staging of riots for the press, the
orders against the use of firearms, the prominent display of English-
speaking Palestinian advocates of “civil disobedience,” the silencing of
dissent which might harm the image of “unity”—all combined with the
PLO’s pronouncements that no one had the power to stop the intifada, and
that only a Palestinian state (under its rule) could end the violence by giving
the Palestinian people in the “Israeli-occupied West Bank” their just deserts,
i.e., self-determination. (Some correspondents obligingly explained that the
“Palestinian people” had been “occupied for centuries” by the Byzantines,
the Turks, the British, and the Israelis and were now “finally” prepared to
seize their destiny and their independence.)
Despite the decline in the widespread rioting that characterized the
beginning of the intifada, the years of bombardment by the carefully crafted
Arab media blitz took their toll, and in the minds of many in the West the
Reversal of Causality is now an established fact. For them, it is clear that
the Israelis have dispossessed and oppressed the Palestinian people. After
all, they saw them doing it on television.

But no matter how potent the intifada has been as a stage for political and
journalistic attacks against Israel, it had a limited media-life and therefore
limited political usefulness. The campaign against Israel’s “usurpation” of
Palestinian self-determination therefore focused on another controversy
between Israel and the Arabs: the settlements. These, at least, had the
benefit of not going away. They could be brought up again and again as
proof of Israel’s continuing efforts to “steal” the land away from its rightful
owners, the Palestinians. And they had the added benefit of being opposed
by a faction within Israel itself that agitated for a curtailment of settlement
activity.
The right of Jews to live in Hebron, Nablus, and East Jerusalem (that is,
the “West Bank”) was recognized by the nations of the world at the same
time as the right of Jews to live in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and West Jerusalem—in
the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations
Mandate. At the time there was no such thing as the West Bank, and no one
had ever suggested that Samaria and Judea could somehow be distinguished
from the rest of Palestine, certainly not from western Palestine. On the
contrary, Judea and Samaria were the very heart of the land, in which
virtually every event of importance in pre-exilic Jewish history took place:
Elon Moreh, where Abraham was promised the land, and Hebron, where he
buried Sarah; Beth El, where Jacob dreamed of the ladder to heaven, and
Bethlehem, where he buried Rachel; Jericho, where Joshua entered the land,
and Shechem (Nablus), where he read the people the law and buried Joseph;
Shiloh, which housed the tabernacle and served as the center of the Jewish
people for four centuries before Jerusalem; Beth Horon, where the
Maccabees defeated the Seleucids; and Betar, where the second great
Jewish revolt against Rome was finally crushed. Above all, there was the
Old City of Jerusalem (today, “East Jerusalem”), the physical Zion of the
Jews, the heart and breath of the Jewish people since the time of David and
the prophets, and the center of its spiritual and political aspirations. At
Versailles, when the Zionists claimed Palestine and when Wilson, Lloyd
George, and Clemenceau recognized the claim, it was places such as these
of which they thought above all others.
Hence it comes as no surprise that Jewish immigrants chose to come to
these places during the period of the British Mandate. In Jerusalem and
Hebron there were already large Jewish communities that were joined by
new immigrants, and the immigrants founded new ones as well; Kalia and
Beit Ha’arava in the Jordan River Valley; Atarot and Neve Ya’akov in
Samaria; Ein Tzurim, Re-vadim, Massuot Yitzhak, Kfar Etzion, and Ramat
Rachel in Judea; and Kfar Darom in Gaza. All of these “West Bank
settlements” were founded before there was such a thing as a “West Bank,”
and no one knew that they were different from any of the other Jewish
villages and towns sprouting all over western Palestine. No one questioned
the right of Jews to live in any of these places—except for those who
rejected the right of Jews to live anywhere in the land at all.
Any fair-minded observer must be moved to ask: If the right of Jews to
live in Judea and Samaria was recognized by the League of Nations and
was undisputed by most of the international community when Jewish
communities were being founded there before the establishment of Israel,
just when did Jews lose the right to live in these places?
In fact, they never did lose that right—only the practical ability to
exercise it. The disappearance of that capacity can be dated to Israel’s War
of Independence in 1948. The Jordanian Legion of King Abdullah crossed
the Jordan River unprovoked and uninvited and seized Judea, Samaria, and
the eastern reaches of Jerusalem (including the Old City, with its ancient
Jewish community). Everywhere the Jordanians came, they destroyed what
they could of the Jewish presence. In East Jerusalem, the Jewish quarter
was almost completely leveled by the invading Jordanians. Thousands of
Jews were expelled from their homes, synagogues destroyed, and Jewish
cemeteries desecrated. * The Jewish settlers of Kfar Etzion were not so
lucky. Their attempts to raise a white flag and surrender were ignored, and
the Jordanians kept firing until they had killed 240 people. The
communities themselves were destroyed and abandoned.
In 1950, Abdullah formally annexed what he now called the “West
Bank” to Jordan. This was so obviously the spoils of an illegal and
aggressive war that only two countries, Britain and Pakistan, ever
recognized the annexation. In 1954, a year after Hussein succeeded to the
throne, Jordan formally promulgated the law prohibiting Jews from living
there—a law which is on the books to this day. And while the 1949
armistice agreement with Israel stipulated that Jews should be allowed into
Jordanian-held Jerusalem to visit their holy sites, the agreement was
systematically violated to prevent Jews from entering the kingdom.
When Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, it captured land that was
almost entirely empty. Outside of the small urban centers such as Shechem
(Nablus), Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, there was a scattering of
villages along the crude roads connecting them, and an occasional Bedouin
farther afield. The Jordanian government took direct control of most of the
open space and for the nineteen years of Jordanian control made virtually
no effort to develop it. Hussein’s policy was to develop the East Bank
alone, and he in fact was successful in moving what little industry there had
been on the West Bank before 1948 across to the other side of the Jordan
River.
In 1967 Jordan again attacked Israel. This time it lost all the land it had
won in 1948. The Israeli army reentered the Old City of Jerusalem, Hebron,
and Shechem, and Israel reasserted the right of Jews to live in these cities
and towns, which the discriminatory Jordanian law had obstructed for
nineteen years. The ruined Jewish communities in the Old City, Hebron,
and Gush Etzion were rebuilt, in some cases by the children of those who
had been driven from their homes by the Arabs in 1948. Over time, close to
300,000 Israelis have chosen to exercise their right to return to these
communities and the new ones built next to them. This figure includes
150,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, 10,000 on the Golan, 3,000
in Gaza, and another 150,000 in the Old City and the sprawling suburbs of
East Jerusalem. (On occasion, the U.S. explains that it considers any Jewish
real estate purchases, construction, and habitation in the Old City and
eastern Jerusalem to be West Bank settlement. At other times, it stresses
that Jerusalem will not be divided again.) 66 But as is evident from the
historical and political facts, these communities, whether called
“settlements” or “suburbs” or anything else, represent no new Jewish claim
and no new Jewish right. They are firmly founded on the same right that
was recognized by the international community at Versailles and freely
exercised by the Jews up until the Jordanians forcibly suppressed that free
exercise in 1948.
Nevertheless, many Western leaders have grown increasingly strident
about Jewish “settlement activity”—despite the fact that their own
governments were signatories at Versailles and party to the decision to grant
the Mandate recognizing the right to Jewish settlement. “Never mind that,”
they say. “You have no right to be tossing Arabs off their land.”
This remarkable example of diplomatic and historical forgetfulness
might conceivably be justified if Jews were taking land away from Arabs.
Careful manipulation of the media by the Arabs has left many Westerners
with the indelible impression that Arab paupers are being kicked out of
their hovels in droves to make way for Jewish suburbs in the “densely
populated West Bank.” Yet the West Bank is anything but densely
populated. It is in fact sparsely populated: Its population density of 150
people per square kilometer is less than 2.5 percent (one-fortieth) of the
population density of Tel Aviv (6,700 per square kilometer). 67 This density
is equivalent not to that of the suburban areas outside New York, London,
or Paris, but to that of rural regions beyond the metropolitan belts of such
cities. Four Arab cities located along the crest of the mountains, together
with East Jerusalem, account for the bulk of the Arab population, while
taking up only a small fraction of the land. The rest remains in large part
vacant.
After years of looking at television shots from refugee districts, the
average viewer in the West cannot help believing that Judea and Samaria
are one large, squalid, teeming cluster of shanties packed one on top of the
next, all the way from Tel Aviv to Jericho. The myth is readily punctured by
a one-hour outing. Driving from Tel Aviv due east toward the Jordan River,
one sees mountain after mountain after mountain covered with—nothing.
No Arabs, no Jews, no trees, nothing. When here and there one finally
comes to an Arab village or two, or a Jewish village or two, they are
followed by yet more nothing. To the unaided eye, it is instantly obvious
that entire cities can be built here without taking anything away from
anyone.
This is not only a physical fact but a legal one as well. In 1967 the
Israeli government took direct possession of the roughly 50 percent of the
land that had been owned by the Jordanian government, 68 the vast majority
of it land on which no Arabs were living and over which Arab individuals
had no legal claim. In fact, Israeli courts admit Jordanian land law as the
decisive factor in determining legal title to West Bank land (except for those
provisions in Jordanian law that prohibited Jews from owning land at all),
and while there have been cases in which West Bank Arabs have taken the
government to court and won land to which they had legal title, the simple
fact is that most of it was not taken from anyone. It was simply empty
public land.
It is to this land, virtually as barren and lifeless as it was when Mark
Twain and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley visited it over a century ago, that Israel
is now bringing life. The Jewish West Bank town of Ariel, for example,
now has fifteen thousand residents, a shopping mall, a hotel, a college, an
orchestra, and an avenue named after George Bush for his role in the war
against Saddam. The town is planned for more than a hundred thousand
people, and from the car window you can see why: There’s nothing in the
way. Ariel was built on an empty hill, and there is plenty more where that
came from in every direction you look. And the same is true for Ma’aleh
Adumin, Immanuel, Elkana, Oranit, Givat Ze’ev, Efrat, Betar, and other
major urban settlements.
Not surprisingly, the reassertion of the right of Jews to build their homes
and their lives in East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria after an absence of
nineteen years has raised howls of protest from the Arabs, and particularly
from the PLO. It is this decision to grant Jews the right to live where Arabs
do not want them that has sired the entire international campaign castigating
Israelis for their “settlement activity”—which is to say, for moving into the
neighborhood.
In this campaign, the sour logic of the Reversal of Causality is at its
most pernicious. For what is manifestly occurring is that the West, which so
sharply condemned anti-black apartheid in South Africa, is being used by
the Arabs as an enforcer of the anti-Jewish apartheid that pertains in the
Arabs’ own countries. The Arab states generally prefer not to have Jewish
residents (Morocco being the only real exception), but some are more
devoted to this than others. Most zealous are some of the other “moderate”
monarchies. Saudi Arabia will not honor any passport if it indicates that the
bearer has ever been to Israel. In Jordan, the sale of land to a Jew was
punishable by death. Yet rather than criticizing the patently anti-Semitic
laws in force in Jordan and Saudi Arabia or asking these governments to
alter these laws (much less imposing a UN resolution or economic sanctions
to prompt them to do so), the United States and the other democracies
issued statement after statement in favor of the application of apartheid to
Judea and Samaria, demanding that Jews submit to Arab anti-Jewish
strictures and stay out of territory that the Arabs wished closed to them.
More incredible, the West regularly demands Israeli government
intervention to prevent Jews from going to live where only Arabs
supposedly should live. And this from people who would recoil in disgust if
they heard that Jews were being told they had no right to move into any
neighborhood or any suburb in any other part of the world.
The absurdity of this approach is most pronounced in the international
tumult that erupts every time a Jew attempts to buy or rent a house in
Silwan, a neighborhood not far from the center of municipal Jerusalem.
Silwan had Jewish residents until 1948, when it ended up on the Jordanian
side of the cease-fire line (by a few hundred yards) and the Jews were
thrown out. Today Jews buying homes there are challenged not only on the
basis of individual property claims, which can be settled in court, but by an
additional principle that Jews are forbidden to live there even if their
individual property rights are unassailable. Silwan is the Arabization of the
Hebrew name Shiloach, given to the spring and pool that supplied water to
Jerusalem in ancient times. It was around this waterworks, described in the
Bible in detail and very much intact today, that King David first built and
fortified the capital of the Jewish people. Silwan, in fact, is the City of
David. It is this place, two hundred yards from the Western Wall, that
Jewish “settlers” are told to stay out of.
Usually the demand to stay out of such neighborhoods and the 150
Jewish cities and towns in the territories is not presented in terms of
dismantling them but in terms of a “freeze” on Jewish construction (no one
ever speaks of a freeze on Arab construction). This term became even more
familiar under Israeli’s Labor government between 1992 and 1996, which
committed to freezing some of the settlements. But freezing these
communities is condemning them to gradual and certain death, as is
ultimately the case with anything alive. A freeze would prevent the natural
growth and health of these communities, ensuring that there would be no
new hospitals or clinics, no new schools, no new stores, libraries, or
services of any kind. It could mean that children could not build homes near
their parents, that struggling young communities would be doomed to keep
struggling forever. Why would anyone want to live in such places, frozen in
time as though in a fairy tale? The answer, of course, is that no one would,
which is why a “freeze” is such a handy euphemism for people who wish to
find a polite way of saying, “No Jews.” This is perhaps why in practice the
policy did not materialize under the Labor government. Between 1992 and
1996 the Jewish population of the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria
grew an unprecedented 50 percent. Life has a power of its own.
But it is not only the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria that
would be devastated by a freeze. Most of the “settlers” live in what in the
West is usually known as a suburb: a large-scale industrial and residential
development, ringing an urban center that is crucial for the natural
development of all cities—and which normally develops without any
relation to politics. Thus, the great majority of the 250,000 Jews living in
what are being called “settlements” are for the most part suburbanites,
living in much the way that New York City commuters whose homes are in
New Jersey or Long Island live, driving twenty or thirty minutes from “the
heart of the West Bank” to downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. With out its
suburbs, a city would become overcrowded, living conditions would
decline, and industry would be forced to relocate. The ultimate result of
constraining the development of suburban areas is the strangulation of any
metropolis and its eventual decay. Yet Tel Aviv is only a few miles from the
West Bank, and Jerusalem is surrounded by the West Bank on three sides.
(In fact, more than half the city, “East Jerusalem,” may be said to be on the
West Bank.) To imagine the effect on these cities if all contiguous real
estate were forbidden for development, one has to imagine what New York
City would be like today if New Yorkers had never been allowed to “settle”
New Jersey, Connecticut, or Long Island. Throttled, the city would have
declined long ago.
The campaign of delegitimization that has challenged the right of Jews
to live in the heartland of Israel and in its capital is predicated on the bizarre
idea that Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem are “foreign land,” seized by
Jewish interlopers from those who had owned them since antiquity. To
entertain this idea, of course, requires an astonishing flight of historical
amnesia. For these were places where Jews had lived—for millennia in
places like Hebron and Jerusalem, and for decades preceding the War of
Independence in the emerging Jewish communities in Judea and southern
Samaria. When my parents were students in the Hebrew University campus
on Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem in the early 1930s, a common pastime
was to go down to bathe at the Jewish resort of Kalya on the Dead Sea and
find refuge from the scorching sun in the orchards of Jericho. The
destruction of the Jewish communities in 1948 did not mean that the Jews
of Israel lost their attachment to the lands that were abruptly cut off from
them. From 1948 to 1967, when the territories were occupied by Jordan,
Israelis knew much of this “foreign terrain” by heart from their studies of
the Bible and subsequent Jewish history. Some could look out their
windows and see the hills of Samaria rising above their homes. Others
knew the land from their parents who had lived in Judea before being
driven out by the Jordanians. Most of all, Israelis remembered the Western
Wall, the hallowed rampart of the Jewish Temple that was buried inside the
Arab-controlled section of divided Jerusalem. The holiest place of Judaism
was barred to them as Jews—even though it was only a few hundred yards
away across a no-man’s-land.
The eerie feeling of imprisonment, of being so close and yet so very far
away from the cradle of Jewish history, was hauntingly captured a few
weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War by the publication of Naomi
Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” a song that deeply moved the entire country:

Amid the slumber of trees and stone

Imprisoned in her dreams
The city dwells alone
Within her heart a wall

How have the wells gone dry

The market square forsaken
And no one climbs the Temple Mount
In Old Jerusalem

In the caves carved in the stone

The winds cease not to cry
And none descend the Dead Sea road
By way of Jericho 69

After the walls dividing the city suddenly came down during the Six
Day War, thousands of Israelis streamed through the Old City to the wall—
following the steps of the soldiers to the place where, just hours earlier,
secular, battle-weary paratroops had wept to a man over the privilege
granted to them of sewing back together the broken heart of the Jewish
people. Like the soldiers, the citizens of Israel stood before the ancient
Wall, touching the massive stones in wondrous awe. From there, in the days
and weeks that followed, they made their way, at times wide-eyed with a
barely contained excitement, to Bethlehem, Hebron, Shechem, Jericho,
Beth El, and all the other places in whose names, landscape, and history
was cemented the identity of the Jewish people.
This exhilaration was felt by almost all Israelis, and each one
experienced it in a different way. My brother Yoni, like many Israelis,
would often spend his weekend leaves from the army exploring such sites:

It seems that the cradle of world civilization is all around us,

everything dating back thousands and thousands of years. A few
Saturdays ago I visited the Biblical Gibeon and saw the remarkable
ancient pool there. It’s this pool that’s mentioned in Second Samuel
in connection with Avner ben Ner and Joab ben Zeruya [Saul and
David’s generals] who “met together by the pool at Gibeon” and let
“the young men arise and play [i.e., do battle] before them.” The
entire country is like that. 70

I myself remember the experience less from weekend leaves than from
the training that I underwent in a reconnaissance unit. We would criss-cross
the hills and mountains in exhausting marches and hikes aimed at honing
our navigating skills. Inevitably, if there was a craggy peak along the route,
we would climb it; a steep gorge, and we would descend into it. As the shirt
on your back stiffens into a mixture of sweat and dust and the soles of your
feet burn as if on fire, it is difficult to feel deeply for a country. But not
impossible. I remember nights when we would come to a sudden halt at the
foothills of Shiloh, the first capital of the Israelites after the exodus from
Egypt; or stop midway up the steep pass of Beth Horon, where the
Maccabees triumphed over the Greeks in their desperate struggle for Jewish
independence; or gaze up at the fortress of Betar, where Bar Kochba’s
revolt met its tragic end at the hands of the Roman legions. We would stand
there, a handful of youngsters barely nineteen, taking in the night air and
gulping water from our canteens, saying nothing. Because what we felt did
not need saying. We had come back—for all the generations of Jews who
had suffered oppression, degradation, and humiliation while they dreamed
and prayed that we would return to this land.
Moshe Dayan captured this sentiment a few weeks after the Six Day
War in a ceremony on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, marking the
reinterment of the soldiers who had fallen in Jerusalem in the battle for the
city in 1948:
Our brothers who fell in the War of Independence: we have not
abandoned your dream nor forgotten the lesson you taught us. We
have returned to the [Temple] Mount, to the cradle of our nation’s
history, to the land of our forefathers, to the land of the Judges, and
to the fortress of David’s dynasty [the Old City]. We have returned
to Hebron, to Sh’chem, to Bethlehem and Anatoth, to Jericho and
the fords over the Jordan. 71

For the normally uneffusive Dayan this was an uncharacteristic

outpouring of feeling. Israeli culture does not encourage outward displays
of profound emotion, and in the years following the Six Day War many
Israelis kept their deepest sentiments about this, the heart of their land, to
themselves. The ones who expressed it more openly were the religious
members of the settlement movement, who spearheaded the drive to rebuild
the ancient (and modern) Jewish cities in the largely barren land. Even
though many Israelis who did not go to live there supported their activities,
the result was that the world came to believe that the claim to the land was
espoused only by a “radical fringe” of the Israeli public. This erroneous
view was heightened by the emergence of a vocal movement on the left that
for a variety of reasons argued that Israel should leave “the territories.”
Successive Israeli governments did not bother to articulate the emotional
connection that so many Israelis, including a significant number on the left,
felt toward the land, choosing rather to stress the more readily explainable
security arguments against relinquishing the land outright. That—and the
fact that, unlike most Israelis, the Arabs had no compunction in expressing
their attachment and their claims, almost always embellished with a false
history that few in the international media had the knowledge to debunk—
soon combined to produce a commonly accepted view that the Jews had
taken an Arab patrimony to which they had no moral rights and no enduring
ties. Quickly forgotten was not only the fact that it was the Arabs who had
driven the Jews out in 1948 and attacked them again from these territories
in 1967, but also the entire course of Jewish history, the focus of which was
the great Return. Return to what? Certainly not the quaint cafés of Tel Aviv
or the lush villas of its wealthy suburb Savion, both of which had been sand
and swamp until a few decades earlier and which had never before existed
in Jewish history or Jewish memory. When the Jewish people yearned to
return to their land, when they actually did so in the course of this century,
their souls were enthralled by the idea of returning to all the places that
Moshe Dayan enumerated, and to many more that he did not, in the
mountains of Samaria and Judea.
Yet the endless parade before the television cameras of Palestinians
castigating Israeli “occupiers” was able to erase all of this from the public
mind. It was asserted that Israel had taken “foreign land,” and that Israel
must return it to its “rightful owners”; if it did not, it would suffer the risk
of war.
This was not the first time in Jewish history that the Jews reclaimed
these very lands from which they had been barred. More than twenty-one
hundred years ago the Maccabees had done the same after a thirty-year war
of liberation. It is instructive to read today the exchange of letters between
the Seleucid king Antiochus and the Jewish leader Simon, the only survivor
of the five Mac-cabee brothers who fell leading their people in the long
struggle for freedom. Antiochus, just as convinced that the land was an
inextricable part of his Seleucid Greek empire as the Arabs today are
convinced that it is an inextricable part of their realm, demanded:

You hold control of Joppa and Gazara and the citadel of Jerusalem;
they are cities of my kingdom. You have devastated their territory,
you have done great damage in the land, and you have taken
possession of many places in my kingdom. Now then, hand over
the cities which you have seized…. Otherwise we will come and
conquer you.

Simon’s reply could have been written today:

We have neither taken foreign land nor seized foreign property, but
only the inheritance of our fathers, which at one time had been
unjustly taken by our enemies. Now that we have the opportunity,
we are firmly holding the inheritance of our fathers. 72
This land, where every swing of a spade unearths remnants of the Jewish
past and where every village carries the barely altered Hebrew names of
old; this land, in which the Jews became a nation and over which they shed
more tears than have been shed by any other people in history; this land, the
loss of which resulted in an exile of the Jews such as has been suffered by
no other people and the spilling of a sea of blood such as has been spilled
by no other nation; this land, which never ceased to live as a distant but
tangible home in the minds of Jewish children from Toledo in medieval
Spain to the Warsaw ghetto in our own century; this land, for which the
Jews fought with unsurpassed courage and tenacity in ancient as well as in
modern times—this is the “foreign land” that world leaders now demand be
barred to Jews and that Israel unilaterally forsake. This is an unjust demand.
The Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank now live under Palestinian rule.
The remaining territories are almost entirely uninhabited by Palestinians,
but are replete with historical significance for Israel.
The Arab campaign to keep all the West Bank free of Jews, like the
campaign of the 1930s to keep Palestine free of Jews, may have garnered
international support, but it is based, now as then, not on justice but on
injustice. Thus the Jewish state, which was squeezed by violations of
international promises and by Arab conquest to an indefensible coast, that
saw Jews forcibly expelled from the ancient Jewish cities they had come to
rebuild, that was attacked by Arab forces from the surrounding mountains,
is now being told by virtually the entire world that it must accept a confined
and stifling existence on the narrow shoreline dominated by a hostile,
Judenrein Palestinian state on these same mountains, the very heart of the
Jewish home. If Lord Cecil had proclaimed “Judea for the Jews, Arabia for
the Arabs,” the world was now saying, ’Arabia for the Arabs—and Judea
too.” The Reversal of Causality was now complete.
OceanofPDF.com
5

THE TROJAN HORSE

False reductionism is the central technique of the Arab campaign against

Israel. Reduce all the Middle East conflicts to the Arab-Israeli one, reduce
the Arab-Israeli conflict to a Palestinian-Israeli one, and you are then ready
to take the next logical step: Reduce all the various Palestinian communal
groupings and points of view to a single, anti-Israel “liberation movement,”
the Palestine Liberation Organization. This completes the role reversal
whereby Israel is transformed into the heartless villain, challenged by a
united band of dedicated, popular, even romantic revolutionaries, Arafat’s
PLO—if not George Washington and the Minutemen, then at least the
Hollywood version of Emiliano Zapata and his freedom fighters.
In no time, the PLO became the “sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people.” No matter that until the Oslo Accords its officials
weren’t actually elected by anyone and then, too, by dubious methods. No
matter that its only claim to unchallenged support lay in the fact that it
slaughtered any Palestinian opponent who dared dissent. Throughout the
Arab world, it was accepted that the PLO had to be pushed front and
forward when discussing Israel—so that the attention of Western public
opinion would remain focused on the purported sins of Zionism against the
Palestinians, rather than on, for example, the Arab states’ feverish arms
buildup aimed against Israel and against each other. So obvious was the
utility of this strategy that even the PLO’s fiercest Arab antagonists
supported its claim to being the “sole” spokesman for the “sole” (or at least
principal) aggrieved party of the entire Arab-Israeli dispute.
Where did this organization come from, and what was its purpose? Was
its espousal of terror a result of current political frustrations, or did it have
deeper roots? And was its campaign of “armed struggle” against Israel
developed in response to the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands” after
the Six Day War of 1967, as the PLO repeatedly claims, or did it have an
earlier genesis?
The PLO was founded in Cairo in 1964, three full years before the
outbreak of the Six Day War. It was established by Egypt’s Nasser as a
means of continuing his unsuccessful war against Israel, and of
destabilizing Jordan. 1 Since these two states together constituted the
territory of Mandatory Palestine, they both readily fell under the PLO
Charter’s goal of liberating “all Palestinian lands.” Notice that at that time
Israel, the prime target, did not have an inch of what are now termed the
“occupied territories” of the West Bank and Gaza. When the PLO was set
up to liberate “Palestinian lands occupied by Israel,” this unambiguously
meant the State of Israel, especially the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and
Haifa, where three-quarters of all Israelis live. It was the coastal plain from
which most of the PLO leadership had originated, and it was the coastal
plain to which they intended to return.
Thus, in its founding meeting, the Palestine National Council (PNC), the
“legislature” of the PLO, adopted its infamous “constitution,” the PLO
Charter, * which laid out the PLO’s most fundamental purpose:

ARTICLE 19: The partitioning of Palestine [by the UN] in 1947

and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, [and
remains so] whatever time has elapsed….

ARTICLE 20: The claim of a historical or spiritual tie between

Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities nor with
the constituents of statehood in their true sense….

ARTICLE 21: The Palestinian Arab people, in expressing itself

through the armed Palestinian revolution, rejects every solution that
is a substitute for a complete liberation of Palestine….

ARTICLE 22: [T]he liberation of Palestine will liquidate the

Zionist and imperialist presence….

(For the full text, see Appendix E.) While the PLO repeatedly
committed itself to amend the charter (first in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and
again in the May 1994 Cairo Agreement, the September 1995 Oslo 2
Accords, and the January 1997 Hebron Accord), no changes have been
made despite occasional claims to the contrary. So long as it has not
formally been repealed by the Palestinian National Council, the charter
stands as compelling proof that the basic Palestinian grievance against
Israel remains existential and not merely territorial.
Indeed, this is a central problem with the negotiations with the
Palestinians. Whenever there is a major disagreement between the two
sides, the Palestinian Authority ignites violent outbursts against Israel.
These are often preceded by a wave of incitement in the Palestinian media
and by senior Palestinian officials, who invoke language and ideas
reminiscent of the Palestinian Charter in an attempt to demonize Israel.
Amending the charter, or failing to do so, thus takes on added significance.
The charter’s central claim is that Israel is an illegal and criminal entity:
“The establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, whatever time
has passed”—that is, regardless of the location of its borders or the size of
the territory under its control. The attachment of the Jewish people to the
land for thirty-five hundred years, an attachment of unparalleled duration
that has left an indelible mark on humanity from the Bible to the Balfour
Declaration, is expunged with a wave of the hand: “The claim of a
historical or spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with
historical realities….” And the charter’s central purpose is that Israel be
destroyed: “[The] liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and
imperialist presence….”
The goal of what has been termed policide—the eradication of an entire
country—is such a rarity that many people have difficulty believing that it
could actually be the motive of organized political activity. That nations
fight wars over borders, natural resources, colonies, and even forms of
government is well known. But there is hardly a case in modern history in
which an antagonist has sought to completely annihilate a rival nation. Not
even World War II, the most terrible of wars, resulted in such an outcome.
The defeat of Hitler and the capitulation of Hirohito were nowhere
understood as opportunities to eradicate Germany and Japan. Yet it is
precisely this most extraordinary goal, the erasure of an entire nation and its
people, that the PLO had chosen to emblazon on its banner. (For this reason
I insisted on the charter’s annulment as part of the Wye Accords.)

To make sense out of such a movement, it is necessary to go beyond the

pretense that 1967 and the “occupation of the West Bank” are the starting
point of “resistance” against the Jews. The Arab war against the Jews is in
fact as old as this century, and the PLO itself dates the formative period of
Palestinian consciousness and resistance to Jewish settlement back to the
1920s and 1930s, the crucial decades before the creation of the State of
Israel. Throughout this period, Arab bands launched murderous raids on
Jewish farms and villages, assassinated Arab moderates, and rejected
Jewish peace overtures and concessions. This ferocious and relentless
campaign claimed hundreds of Jewish lives over two decades, yet it cannot
be traced to any of the grievances that are offered today to explain the
source of Arab opposition. This campaign had nothing to do with refugees,
for at the time there were none. It had nothing to do with disputed borders,
for there were none of those, either. Moreover, it had nothing to do with
Palestinian Arab sovereignty, for the Arabs never claimed to be fighting for
it in those days, and they rejected it when it was offered to them under the
UN Partition Resolution in 1947. The conflict was driven not by any of
these factors but by an irreducible rejection of any Jewish presence in the
area.
Those who pursued this blind obsession trampled anything that stood in
their way. Their favorite targets were Arabs who refused to acknowledge
the “exclusive representation” of the “Arab cause” that the extremists
claimed for themselves. Above all, the extremists rejected anyone who
embraced the notions of compromise and coexistence, which are anathema
to fanatics everywhere.
Perhaps the most prominent leader of Arab reductionism before the
establishment of Israel in 1948 was the PLO’s revered forebear, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. As we have seen, Husseini was
the preeminent agitator of the bloodiest Arab assaults on Jews in the first
half of this century. A central figure in the PLO pantheon, he was the
founding father of the PLO in both spirit and practice. No other figure has
had such an influence on the PLO leadership. Over time, many of the
Mufti’s lieutenants and henchmen have assumed near-mythic status in PLO
lore, among them Emil Ghouri and Abed al-Kader al-Husseini. In fact,
when he was a young radical in Cairo in the early 1950s, Arafat sought to
enhance his anti-Jewish image by taking the name Yasser (his real name is
Abed al-Rahman) in memory of Yasser al-Birah, a leader of the Mufti’s
reign of terror in the 1930s. 2 Nor did it hurt his standing that he was related
to the Mufti, being a member of the Al-Qidwah branch of the Husseini clan.
Arafat has referred to the Mufti as his mentor and guide. In 1985, for
example, during the thirtieth commemoration of the Bandung Conference
of 1955 (an international forum of “unaligned” revolutionaries), Arafat
extolled the Mufti with great reverence. He said that he took “immense
pride” in being able to follow in the footsteps of the Mufti, who participated
in the original conference. He emphasized that “the PLO is continuing the
path set by the Mufti.” 3 4
What is that path? And what did the Mufti represent? We can gain an
important insight into the goals and methods that the PLO pursued by
examining the period of emerging Arab nationalism in Palestine that shaped
not only the future course of the PLO as an organization but the path of its
leaders, many of whom grew up in the Mufti’s movement. For as in the case
of Arabist attitudes toward Zionism, the interwar period proved to be
pivotal in shaping the Arab nationalists’ enduring concepts regarding the
Jews of Palestine.
Haj Amin al-Husseini was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the
British in 1921, less than a year after they convicted him for instigating the
murderous anti-Jewish riots in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Mufti’s
incitement and organization of enforcement gangs to back his ideas led to
even more severe anti-Jewish riots across Palestine in 1921, then to the
great massacres of August 1929. But the Mufti’s main targets were actually
Arabs. With his henchman Emil Ghouri and with funding from the Nazis
and Italian Fascists, 4 he organized the torture and murder of moderate Arab
leaders, landowners willing to sell to Jews, and anyone else he believed had
betrayed his virulent creed. According to one scholar:

These poor people were not always immediately murdered;

sometimes they were kidnapped and taken to the mountainous areas
under rebel control. There they were thrown into pits infested with
snakes and scorpions. After spending a few days there, the victims,
if still alive, were brought before one of the rebel courts, or
commanders, tried, and usually sentenced to death, or, as a special
dispensation, to severe flogging. The terror was so strong that no
one, including ulema [learned men] and priests, dared to prepare
the proper burial services. In some cases, the British Police had to
perform this duty; in others, the corpses were left in the streets for
several days after a shoe had been placed in the mouth of the victim
as a symbol of disgrace and as a lesson to others. 5

Entire clans of Arabs who objected to the Mufti’s policy, like the
Nashashibi family of Jerusalem Arabs, were either wiped out or exiled, the
total number of Palestinians murdered was in the thousands, and forty
thousand Arabs were driven into exile. 6 The result of this consistent reign
of terror was that by the end of the 1930s, moderate Arab opinion had been
completely silenced in Palestine. When the Round Table Conference of
Middle Eastern leaders, convoked by Britain, met in 1939 to determine the
future of Palestine, the heads of the Husseini clan could claim to be “the
sole representatives of the Palestinian Arabs.” 7
But for the Mufti all of this was still small change. He sought to tie his
campaign to a more powerful, global engine that could ensure the creation
of a Pan-Arab empire under his command—and the systematic, final
annihilation of the Jews. Such an engine he believed himself to have found
in the 1930s with the rise of the Fascist movement in Europe.
The Mufti first approached the German consul in Jerusalem in 1933, the
year Hitler came to power, and he soon began drawing parallels between
Nazi Pan-German nationalism and Pan-Arab nationalism. This analogy
caught on quickly among many Arabs. Like the Arab world, the German-
speaking world prior to Prussian unification had been fragmented into
scores of feuding principalities and communities, many of them under
foreign rule. The German psyche, too, had been wracked by a century-long
crisis of confidence summed up in the question of Was ist Deutsch? (“What
does it mean to be German?”) And the profound German resentment of the
Western powers for the “dismemberment” of their empire and their state at
Versailles struck a sympathetic chord in Arab ears.
The German crisis of identity finally resolved itself in an emphatic,
negative definition of Pan-German nationalism: German meant not Jewish,
not Bolshevik, not polluted by the effeteness of the West. This was a
formula that many Arabs found compelling as well, as evidenced by the
founding of Arab national-socialist movements, parties, and youth
organizations in the 1930s, the widespread dissemination of Nazi anti-
Jewish literature, and the overall sympathy for Hitler’s cause among the
Arabs. Thus, Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland met with
jubilation among Arabs as a demonstration of the power of the oppressed.
The future King Khaled of Saudi Arabia dined with Hitler on the night of
Czechoslovakia’s capitulation, and he raised his glass in a toast in honor of
the heroic undertaking. 8 Other Arabs sympathetic to Hitler’s work included
key figures such as Nasser, the founders of the Ba’th Pan-Arab nationalist
socialism currently in power in Syria and Iraq, and some of the guiding
lights of Islamic fundamentalism. Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the
fundamentalist Moslem Brotherhood, described the benefits of fascism this
way:

The world has long been ruled by democratic systems, and man has
everywhere honored the conquests of democracy…. But men were
not slow to realize that their collective liberty had not come intact
out of the chaos [caused by democracy], that their individual liberty
was not safe from anarchy…. Thus, German Nazism and Italian
Fascism rose to the fore; Mussolini and Hitler led their two peoples
to unity, order, recovery, power, and glory. In record time, they
ensured internal order at home, and through force, made themselves
feared abroad. Their regimes gave real hope, and also gave rise to
thoughts of steadfastness and perseverence and the reuniting of
different, divided men. 9

One of the early Ba’thist leaders wrote of this time:

We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books.… We were

the first to think of translating Mein Kampf. Whoever lived during
this period in Damascus would appreciate the inclination of the
Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could
serve as its champion. 10

In Palestine the Mufti’s clan founded the Palestinian Arab party, which
party leader Jamal Husseini asserted was based on the Nazi model. 11 The
party youth division was even briefly called the Nazi Scouts. 12 The
outbreak of World War II found the Mufti in Iraq, where he organized Arab
contacts with the Axis powers and solicited support for pro-Nazi
insurrections in Iraq and Syria (the latter with the help of Salah al-Din al-
Bitar and Michel Aflaq, the founders of the Ba’th). 13 In 1941 a Pan-Arabist
regime allied with the Mufti deposed the British-installed Hashemite
monarchy of Iraq and declared war on the Allies. The British army
succeeded in propping its man up again, but not in saving the six hundred
Jews who were slaughtered in Baghdad before British forces reentered the
city. 14
From Baghdad, the Mufti made his way to Rome and Berlin, where he
offered the services of the Arab nation to the war effort on the condition
that they “recognize in principle the unity, independence, and sovereignty of
an Arab state of a Fascist nature, including Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Trans-
Jordan.” 15 In October 1941 the Nazi government issued a formal
communiqué in Berlin promising to help in the “elimination of the Jewish
National Home in Palestine.” 16 The Mufti then flew to Berlin and met Hitler
in person for the first time on November 28, 1941. Husseini expressed his
willingness to cooperate with Germany in every way, including the
recruitment of an Arab Legion to fight for the Nazis. Hitler told the Mufti
that the two of them shared the common goal of the destruction of
Palestinian Jewry. 17
The Mufti proceeded to work energetically on behalf of the Nazis. He
made repeated broadcasts over Nazi radio urging Moslems everywhere to
rise up against the Allies, and he organized sabotage and espionage in Arab
lands. A representative broadcast from 1942 points out the stark relevance
of the Axis war effort to Arabs:

If, God forbid, England should be victorious, the Jews would

dominate the world. England and her allies would deny the Arabs
any freedom and independence, would strike the Arab fatherland to
its heart, and would tear away parts of it to form a Jewish country
whose ambition would not be limited to Palestine but would extend
to other Arab countries….
But if, on the contrary, England loses and its allies are defeated,
the Jewish question, which for us constitutes the greater danger,
would be finally resolved. 18 [emphasis added]

The Mufti also recruited Moslems from the Soviet Union and the
Balkans for Arab units of the German army being organized by a fellow
Palestinian Arab named Fawzi Qawukji in Berlin. The Mufti’s tour of
Yugoslavia won six thousand recruits, who were eventually reorganized into
a Waffen SS mountain unit that served in the campaign to destroy Yugoslav
Jewry. “Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” he said. “This pleases God,
history and religion.” 19
Basing himself in Berlin from 1942 to 1944, the Mufti worked to
prevent the rescue of Jews from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia,
countries which, although allied with Hitler, were willing to let Jews flee to
Palestine and elsewhere. He protested that not enough Nazi resources were
invested in preventing the escape of Jewish refugees from the Balkans. 20 A
Nazi official, Wilhelm Melchers, said in evidence taken during the
Nuremberg trials on August 6, 1947: “The Mufti was making protests
everywhere—in the offices of the Foreign Minister, the Secretary of State
and in other S.S. Headquarters.” 21 These protests had the aim of urging the
Nazis to greater thoroughness in preventing the escape of Jews from
Europe. For example, on May 31, 1943, the Mufti personally delivered to
German foreign minister Ribbentrop a letter protesting the plan to arrange
the emigration of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria. 22
But the Mufti was again not satisfied. He had a larger objective in mind
than merely preventing the escape of some Jews. He wanted, as Melchers
pointed out in the Nuremberg trials, to see “all of them liquidated.” 23 As in
the case of the Balkan Jews, he worked feverishly toward this goal. Adolf
Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, said that Husseini

played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews. The

importance of this role must not be disregarded… the Mufti
repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was
maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Himmler,
the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this an
appropriate solution to the Palestinian Problem. 24

Eichmann’s deputy gave eyewitness testimony about Husseini’s

involvement:

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination

of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of
Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one
of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to
accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say that
accompanied by Eichmann he had visited incognito the gas
chamber of Auschwitz: 25 [emphasis added]

How did such a war criminal escape punishment? Throughout Europe,

Nazi war criminals were exposed and brought to justice. Not so in the Arab
world, where Nazis and Nazi collaborators were greeted as heroes.
Hundreds of German Nazis found refuge, and employment as advisers in
murder, in Arab capitals. This was especially true of Egypt, which was a
fierce rival of the South American dictators in trying to attract Nazis to its
service, 26 netting such prizes as SS General Oskar Dirlewanger, who
murdered thousands of Jews in the Ukraine and became Nasser’s
bodyguard, and Dr. Heinrich Willerman, who experimented on live human
beings in Dachau. The notorious SS killer Alois Brunner spent decades in
Damascus as a guest of the Syrians until his reported death there in the
summer of 1992. The PLO, too, has avidly continued the Mufti’s tradition,
consistently collaborating with neo-Nazis (and often with paleo-Nazis, as
well), who have naturally found its goals and methods appealing. *
Nazism may have been defeated in Europe, but it was very much alive
in the Middle East. After the war, the many Arab soldiers and agents who
had fought for Hitler were warmly received back into the Arab world. 27 The
Mufti himself set up shop as a guest of the Egyptian government, and went
back to work spreading his poisonous doctrines throughout the Middle East.
He and his cousin, the Palestinian Arab military leader Abed al-Kader al-
Husseini, organized units that sought to liquidate Israel in 1947 and 1948,
led by such veterans of the Nazi war effort as Fawzi Qawukji and Mahmud
Rifai, a Syrian who had fought in the German paratroops 36 and was inspired
by the Mufti’s famous plea: “I declare a Holy War. Murder the Jews.
Murder them all!” In September 1948 they assembled a “Government of all
Palestine” whose seat was to be in Gaza. This Palestinian “government”
was supported by the Egyptians as a rival to King Abdullah’s government
in Transjordan—which also claimed all of Palestine. 37 Yasser Arafat’s
brother Gamal, who had served with Abed al-Kader al-Husseini’s forces,
became secretary in the Mufti’s “government.” Arafat himself claims to
have fought alongside Husseini, and there is a report that he served as his
personal aide. 38 When, after the Arab defeat, Abdullah of Jordan showed
signs of a willingness to make peace with Israel, he was murdered by the
Mufti’s agents in 1952. 39 This was an important escalation of the earlier
practices of assassination, for the targets now were not merely prominent
men but the leaders of whole countries. This ultimate system for
intimidating entire nations, perfected by the Mufti and his disciples, is still
very much with us.
Determined to keep the Mufti’s radicalism firmly in line, King Farouq of
Egypt allowed his guest little room to maneuver. When the Mufti actually
tried to go to Gaza to take the reins of his “government,” Farouq quickly
had him shipped back to Egypt. 40 The Mufti eventually fled to Beirut,
where he died, but he lived long enough to see his revenge. King Farouq of
Egypt was overthrown in 1952 and replaced by the Arab world’s first
totalitarian state: the Pan-Arab nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser,
which set the vast machinery of government to work inculcating the hatred
of the West and the dream of vengeance. Through Nasser and his pupils, the
Mufti’s legacy of hate was transferred intact to the most extreme quarters of
the Arab world, especially to the radical Palestinians who matured in the
intense political heat of Nasserist Cairo.
Such radicals, whose families had left Israel before or during the War of
Independence, were plentiful in Cairo in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some
of them, like Arafat, claimed not only spiritual but genealogical kinship
with the Mufti, sprinkling, so to speak, the dust of royalty on their family
tree.
It did not take much or long for such men to be harnessed to the Pan-
Arab cause. Nasser, a would-be Saladin, daily promised Israel’s destruction,
having quickly realized that leading the crusade against Israel’s was a sure
means of securing his place at the head of the Arab world. The youths who
later constituted the leadership of the PLO—including Arafat, Abu Iyad,
and Abu Jihad—all received their first military training in special anti-Israel
Palestinian units assembled and indoctrinated by Nasser in the early 1950s.
In 1964, Nasser invited the heads of state of the Arab world to Cairo for
the first-ever Arab summit to discuss the only thing they were likely to
agree on—how to eliminate Israel. Nasser’s proposal was the creation of an
organization of Palestinian Arabs who would agitate internationally for the
eradication of the Jewish state. The Arab states responded enthusiastically,
agreeing to bankroll the group and to have it led by Nasser’s tool Ahmed
Shukeiri. It was Nasser’s original intention that the PLO be a mindless
implement in the hands of his Pan-Arab nationalism, slinging Palestinian
slogans but otherwise under tight control, to prevent a backlash from Israel.
Nasser needed time for a military buildup, and some bluster over Palestine
seemed a good way of bolstering his image after his invasion of Yemen in
1962 had ended in disaster. For this job, Shukeiri—whom the Irish diplomat
and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien called “the windbag’s windbag” for his
earlier performances as the Saudi ambassador to the UN 41 —was ideally
suited.
But the PLO soon developed other ideas. Nasser’s relatively inert
creation was quickly upstaged by the active terrorism of Arafat’s Fatah
faction (sponsored at the time by the Syrian Ba’th regime and named after
an earlier Syrian Pan-Arab nationalist group), which was involved in scores
of raids into Israel from Jordan. The acclaim that these largely unsuccessful
raids earned forced Nasser’s hand, first pushing him to allow Shukeiri a
string of terrorist attacks of his own, and finally causing him to reconstitute
the PLO with the Fatah as its nucleus and Arafat as its head.
Gradually, the PLO was able to cut itself loose from Nasser and pursue a
far more radical strategy. Under Arafat, it hoped to be not a spearhead but a
tripwire. By staging raids calculated to elicit Israeli responses against the
Arab states, the PLO believed it could produce an escalating cycle of
violence leading inexorably to an all-out war to wipe out Israel—whether or
not the Arab states decided they were ready for it at any particular moment.
Thus, for the next two decades Arafat believed that while the Arab states
might be deterred from going to war because they feared defeat, the PLO
could force their hand. Arafat became the Arab world’s perennial advocate
of war: “The war of attrition against the Zionist enemy will never cease.…
It is in my interest to have a war in the region, because I believe that the
only remedy for the ills of the Arab nation is a true war against the Zionist
enemy” 42
Accordingly, up to 1967 the PLO terror campaign was directed at
penetrating Israel’s borders and igniting a new Arab-Israeli war. This
strategy was based on the results of the fedayeen terror raids, which were
encouraged by Nasser in the early 1950s. The fedayeen were Arab
marauders who periodically crossed into Israel from Egyptian-controlled
Gaza and from Jordanian-controlled Judea and Samaria, murdering civilians
and bombing vehicles, then returning to their bases across the border. Israel
responded with daring retaliatory raids against the terrorist bases. The
escalating fedayeen attacks, combined with Nasser’s move to block Israel’s
southern shipping lane through the Red Sea, triggered Israel’s Sinai
campaign against Egypt in 1956, which succeeded in wiping out the bases.
The PLO carried out its early terrorist attacks with the aim of triggering
a larger war against Israel. Nasser, whose army was decimated by Israel in
1956, proved unwilling to permit the PLO the freedom to conduct these
raids from Egypt. As a result, the PLO moved its staging area to Jordan,
which in any case it considered to be part of Palestinian territory. King
Hussein found himself unable to refuse their presence for fear of retaliation
from the Pan-Arabist regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, all of which were
clamoring for the presence of a “Palestinian liberation army” in Jordan. But
it was also clear that these states fully intended that this Pan-Arabist
Palestinian army should replace the Jordanian monarchy at the first
opportunity. Nasser had already been responsible for an attempt on
Hussein’s life in I960 that had left the Jordanian prime minister dead. The
president of Syria had openly called for Hussein’s overthrow, saying that
“the liberation of Jordan means the liberation of Palestine.” 43 And Shukeiri
himself had pronounced Hussein to be a “hired lackey” of the West and
threatened the destruction of the “Jordanian entity,” which was still “under
colonial control by the Hashemite family,” if Hussein did not allow the PLO
to establish itself in Jordan. 44
The PLO made its forays into Israeli territory from the then Jordanian-
held West Bank. These attacks prompted progressively fiercer Israeli
responses against Jordan, most notably the Israeli raid on Es-Samu in late
1966. Thus PLO terror, while by no means the sole or decisive factor,
contributed to the escalation of tensions that culminated in the PLO’s
hoped-for war of total annihilation against Israel—the Six Day War.
But obviously the war did not go as the PLO and the Arab states had
expected. Far from being destroyed, as Shukeiri had confidently predicted
days before the war, 45 Israel had dealt the Arab armies a stunning defeat and
was now in possession of the former PLO staging areas of Judea and
Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza. This meant that new raids had to be
staged from the East Bank of the Jordan, bringing the PLO into direct
conflict with Hussein’s authority in Amman.
Hussein found himself too fearful to reject the presence of these gunmen
on Jordanian soil. The more he acquiesced in the PLO buildup, the bolder
the terrorists became, encouraged in their belief that the “liberation” of the
East Bank (Jordan) would be a stepping-stone to the “liberation” of the
West Bank (Israel). By 1968, the PLO had entered into an open alliance
with three organizations outlawed in Jordan—the pro-Nasser Arab National
Movement, the Ba’th, and the Communists—with the aim of taking control
of the country. 46 The great flaw in this plan was that Hussein was not
particularly enamored with the idea of losing his kingdom, and clashes
erupted as Jordanian troops resisted the occupation of pieces of the country
by armed and uniformed PLO cadres who exacted their own taxes,
conscripted civilians, and issued demands concerning the composition of
the government. In the summer of 1970, Arafat’s men finally went too far.
In response to the jailing of a number of terrorists, they rampaged through
the Jordanian capital of Amman, seizing hotels and taking hostages,
murdering the American military attaché, and raping several women. 47 In
September, King Hussein announced war on the PLO. In the civil war that
followed, Hussein’s army slaughtered ten thousand Palestinians, including
many women and children in the refugee camps, and utterly eradicated the
PLO in Jordan. Many Palestinian gunmen and noncombatants who survived
the ordeal voted with their feet and tried to flee to the Israeli side of the
Jordan River, begging to be taken prisoner by the Israeli soldiers. Some
succeeded in reaching Israel, where they received food and medical
attention. The rest were gunned down en route by the Jordanian army. 48
Having failed to destroy Israel by seizing Jordan, the PLO moved on to
the easier task of seizing Lebanon. (The PLO has proved remarkably
flexible as to the location of the territory it seeks to liberate.) With the other
Arab states all but closed to PLO operations, Lebanon appeared to be the
ideal stage for its renewed assaults against Israel. Unlike the exposed terrain
of the Sinai and the natural divide of the Jordan River Valley, southern
Lebanon forms a geographic continuum with the north of Israel; its hilly
terrain, covered with lush vegetation, affords good cover and good escape
routes. As early as 1969, the Lebanese army had fought PLO units that were
trying to carve out a “Fatahland” in southern Lebanon, and the conflict had
spread as far north as the capital. Arafat announced that he had no wish to
interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab state (a cruelly laughable pledge,
given the PLO’s track record in Jordan, Lebanon, and later Kuwait); the
Syrians threw their weight behind the terrorists in the hope of undermining
the Lebanese government; and by 1975, the PLO had established a de facto
state, extending from West Beirut south to the Israeli border.
From there, PLO terrorists launched repeated missions against Israeli
targets, almost none of them military. The massacres of 1974 in Kiryat
Shemona, in which eighteen Israeli civilians were murdered, and Ma’alot,
in which the terrorists gunned down twenty-six Israelis, most of them
schoolchildren, originated in southern Lebanon. So did the Coastal Road
massacre of 1978, in which a PLO hijacking of an intercity bus ended with
the deaths of thirty-five Israeli hostages. So did the Nahariya slayings of
1974 and 1979. (In the latter attack, a PLO “fighter” crushed the skull of a
five-year-old girl in front of her father, then murdered him as well.)
In addition, the PLO used the territory of its de facto state to shell Israeli
cities and towns. For years, the entire population of the northern border
towns and villages was regularly driven into underground bomb shelters by
barrages of PLO-launched Katyusha missiles, the little brothers of the Scud
missiles that Iraq launched against Israel in 1991. By 1982, the population
levels of Kiryat Shemona and Nahariya had fallen ominously; factories,
schools, and beaches were being closed repeatedly to avoid mass casualties
during the shellings; and fear of economic ruin and depopulation had
spread. 49
As in Jordan, this buildup had two consequences. The first was an
internal Lebanese civil war, in which Shi’ites and Christians did battle with
the PLO in an attempt to expel the Palestinian overlord from their midst.
More than anyone else, they could testify to what a PLO state would be
like, since they lived in one: unbridled confiscation of property, wanton
murder, wholesale rape, and the forcible induction of children as young as
twelve into the PLO’s service. Those who sing the blessings of a PLO state
would do well to refresh their memories as to how the dress rehearsal went
by reading the documentary material assembled in The PLO in Lebanon by
Raphael Israeli. 50 The tab for the imposition of this PLO dominion and the
subsequent civil war came to more than a hundred thousand lives, paid for
by the Lebanese.
The second consequence of the rise of the PLO in Lebanon, as it had
been on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, was an Israeli response. Israel
took action to defend its northern towns and kibbutzim in the form of armed
intervention in PLO-controlled Lebanon, first in the Litani Operation in
1978 and later in Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982. Much maligned at
the time, this latter operation indeed lived up to its name. Since the PLO’s
expulsion from Beirut in 1982 and the establishment of the security zone in
the south of Lebanon thereafter, there have hardly been any successful
terrorist penetrations from southern Lebanon into the north of Israel. And
though the Peace for Galilee Operation did result, as the PLO had long
hoped, in a war with Israel by at least one Arab state, Syria, it was a limited
war, waged on the soil and over the skies of Lebanon (and Lebanon alone)
during June 1982. While Israel’s aim was the uprooting of the PLO bases, it
encountered resistance from the Syrian armed forces that were, and still are,
occupying most of Lebanon. Israel destroyed Syrian missile batteries and
almost one hundred Syrian fighter aircraft, while losing only a single plane.
(These successes decisively demonstrated the inferiority of the weaponry
upon which the Soviet bloc was relying for its air defenses, and
foreshadowed the techniques that were to be used by the United States in
the Gulf War nine years later.) But even though Israel was pushed to
commit what in Arab eyes was a most egregious sin, entering an Arab
capital (West Beirut was the head of the PLO octopus in Lebanon), the oft-
promised mobilization of the entire Arab world to assault Israel, or even to
save the PLO, never materialized.

Having backfired on every geographic front, the PLO strategy seemed to

have been an abysmal failure. But it was not. For alongside the “land war”
that the PLO unsuccessfully waged on all Israel’s borders was another war,
as spectacular in its fireworks as it was in its political success. I am
referring to the campaign of international terrorism that the PLO launched
at the close of the 1960s and that engulfed the entire world throughout the
next two decades.
Early on in its campaign of terror, the PLO embarked on a series of
massacres inside Israel: Kiryat Shemona, Ma’alot, Beit Shean, the Savoy
Hotel in Tel Aviv. In each of these attacks, the PLO held innocent Israelis
hostage in the hope that this time Israel would capitulate to its demands—
usually the release of jailed terrorists. Israel did not. The demands of the
PLO were never met, and the terrorists themselves inevitably ended up
dead. Increasingly, the PLO favored war against international air traffic
going to and from Israel, which afforded a greater chance of hitting Israelis
where the PLO imagined they could not be defended.
The air war opened with the hijacking of an El Al plane to Algeria in
1968, followed by the midair seizure of an El Al flight out of London and a
ground attack on Israeli aircraft in Zurich. When Israel began developing
methods to defend its flights, the PLO switched to non-Israeli carriers,
blowing up American airliners in the Jordanian desert and hijacking a
Belgian Sabena airliner to Israel in 1972. When the Sabena plane was
hijacked, I was an officer in the Israeli special forces. My unit was assigned
to storm the plane, which we did with improvised techniques. But the rapid
accumulation of terrorist incidents quickly transformed such improvisations
into an effective, professional discipline.
Building on the experience it gained from the repeated terrorist attacks,
Israel was soon able to make its own international airport and its national
carrier, El Al, almost immune to terrorist assault. As a result, the PLO had
to go farther and farther afield to inflict damage on Israeli targets. In 1976,
Palestinian gunmen pulled off what they thought was the greatest of
hijackings: they seized an Air France jet over Europe and forced it to fly to
Entebbe, Uganda, where the government of Idi Amin afforded the hijackers
a safe haven and the protection of his army. There, in the heart of Africa,
the non-Jewish hostages were released, but 106 Jewish hostages were
herded into an abandoned air terminal and held by Arab and German
terrorists who threatened to execute them if the Israeli government did not
release convicted terrorists from its prisons. In an operation unprecedented
in military history, Israeli troops flew two thousand miles to this hostile
country, eliminated the terrorists and the Ugandan soldiers who
collaborated with them, freed the hostages, and returned them to Israel. In
the Entebbe raid, three hostages lost their lives, as did my brother Jonathan,
who commanded the rescue force.
Operation Jonathan, as it is now officially known, proved to be the
decisive battle in the war against international terrorism. The Entebbe raid
inspired a series of bold counterattacks by Western security forces. Less
than a year later, Dutch marine commandos simultaneously stormed a train
and a school that had been taken over by South Moluccan terrorists, freeing
160 hostages. Months after this, a German team liberated eighty-six
hostages aboard a German airliner that had been hijacked by Iranian
terrorists to Mogadishu airport in Somalia. And in 1980 the British Special
Service successfully freed the Iranian embassy in London after terrorists
had held it for a week. Thereafter, the taking of hostages and skyjacking
itself passed from international terrorist fashion (with a brief reappearance
in the mid-1980s), and the PLO was forced to revert to other forms of
terror.
From the start, the PLO was joined by others in practicing terrorism. For
the PLO was not just another terrorist organization or another “liberation
movement.” It was the quintessential terrorist organization of modern times.
It practically invented the craft of terrorizing people internationally,
pioneering the arts of hijacking aircraft, blowing them up in midair, seizing
hostages, assassinating diplomats, massacring schoolchildren, athletes, and
tourists, and various other outrages. These methods were emulated by a rash
of terrorist groups the world over, for the success of terrorism in one part of
the world breeds imitation elsewhere. But the PLO did more than serve as
an example to be imitated. From the early 1970s until Israel ousted it from
Lebanon in June 1982, the PLO’s de facto state in Lebanon was a veritable
factory of terror, providing a safe haven and a launching ground for terrorist
groups the world over. Who didn’t come to the PLO bases in Beirut and
Sidon? The Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the
IRA, the Japanese Red Army, the French Action Directe, the Turkish
Liberation Army, the Armenian Asala group, the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards, and terrorists from all over Latin America as well as neo-Nazis
from Germany—all were there. 51 They came to Lebanon, were trained
there, then set off to murder their victims elsewhere. From this unpoliced
PLO playground of horrors, the virus of terror was spread throughout the
Western world, often with the aid of Arab governments and, until the
exposure of its complicity in terror proved too embarrassing, with the aid of
the Soviet bloc as well.
But what was the impact of this campaign on Israel itself? Certainly, the
PLO liked to claim great damage for each operation. (Abul Abbas, a
commander of one of the PLO’s smaller splinters, announced that his
abortive 1990 raid on the Tel Aviv beachfront claimed five hundred Israeli
dead or wounded and did over five billion dollars in damage to Israel’s
tourist industry. 52 In fact, no one was hurt.) But in physical terms, the
damage of terrorism has actually been minor. The toll exacted in human
lives was also considerably smaller than in outright war. Twenty-five years
of PLO terrorism have claimed the lives of a few hundred Israelis, as
compared with more than sixteen thousand killed in the wars. Every life lost
to terrorism is a tragedy, but in aggregate terms the human and material
costs of terrorism pale before those of all-out war.
Yet the PLO’s terror succeeded where its land war failed—by inflicting
significant political losses on Israel. Terror put the PLO on the world stage
and gave credibility to its claims of desperation born of oppression.
Initially, the terrorist attacks were seen not as the acts of a well-financed,
well-oiled machine that enjoyed the support of a dozen states, but as the
work of frustrated individuals who had nothing to lose. Every time a bomb
exploded in Paris, London, or Rome, the PLO promptly explained that this
violence was “due to the Palestinian problem” and would not end unless the
Israeli “occupation of Palestinian lands” ended as well.
Shortly after I came to the United States for college in 1972, the PLO
carried out its notorious massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich.
Before this outrage, the PLO had carried out such actions as blowing up
two American planes in the Jordanian desert and murdering an American
ambassador, but it was not yet a household name. The news from Munich
reached me at the home of an Israeli professor who was teaching at
Brandeis University.
“Well,” said one of his guests, “at least now everyone will know just
who these people are.”
“Exactly,” the professor responded grimly. “In a very short time,
everyone will know who these people are.”
He was right. Within a short time, the PLO had made its way into the
living room and the consciousness of every person in the West. And as its
fame spread, so did the power of its argument that “Palestine” had to be
“liberated.” Country after country was swayed, if not by the perverted claim
of the terrorists that they were fighting for human rights (even as they were
trampling human rights), then by the power of sheer intimidation and black-
mail. So successful was the endless parade of ghastly slayings, maimings,
and hostage cliffhangers that the PLO was literally able to bring much of
the West to consider the plight of the Palestinians to be the chief injustice
crying out to be remedied in the modern world. By 1976, an American
president, Jimmy Carter, had come to believe that underneath the savagery
was a reasonable grievance that could be redressed with a negotiated
settlement, just as the homelessness of the Jews had been redressed with the
creation of Israel. Carter wrote:

There is no way to escape the realization of how intimately and

intertwined are the history, the aspirations and the fate of the two
long-suffering peoples, the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs…. The
Palestinians are suffering from… circumstances of homelessness,
scattered as they are throughout many nations, and their desire for
self-determination and their own national homeland has aroused
strong worldwide support. 53

Even as its terrorism quickly bullied the West into craving an immediate
solution to “the Palestinian Problem,” the PLO leadership was aware that if
it were to capitalize on this effect and become the beneficiary of any
solution, it would have to evade or at least minimize its own responsibility
for the atrocities it was committing. Terror was useful for getting attention,
but it had diminishing returns when it came to garnering respectability.
Hence the PLO embarked on a campaign of denial. Even as the terror
plague was at its height, it practiced an elaborate campaign of diplomacy
and disinformation aimed at attributing the grisly deeds to “extremists” who
were beyond its control, as opposed to the PLO itself, which was
“reasonable” and “moderate.”
By the mid-1970s, PLO speakers were covering the globe, proclaiming
the organization’s commitment to peace, its abhorrence of violence and
terror, and its new-found realism and pragmatism. 54 The PLO was then
awash with money it had extorted from wealthy Arab regimes like those of
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. (Kuwait put a quintessentially Moslem twist on
Lenin’s famous phrase by providing the rope with which literally to hang
Kuwaitis, as the PLO’s henchmen proceeded to do following Saddam’s
takeover of Kuwait in 1990.) It therefore could easily afford a network of
offices around the world from which to sell its message of moderation to a
world audience that was becoming exceptionally eager to buy anything that
could be used to “solve the Middle East conflict.” (By now, that “conflict”
had also brought them the oil embargo.) Articulate, well dressed, and soft
spoken, PLO representatives in Europe and North America, Latin America,
Asia, and Australia presented their moderate wares on television, in the
press, in Rotary clubs, in churches—even in synagogues.
Thus, while PLO-sponsored terror was reigning everywhere, the PLO
was busy denying. Indeed, this subterfuge had already been fully
operational in 1970, when Black September, the first of a swarm of
ostensibly independent terrorist splinters, was manufactured in order to
carry out the assassination of Jordanian prime minister Wafsi Tal, the
slaying of American ambassador to Khartoum Cleo Noel and his aide Curtis
Moore, the Munich Olympic massacre, and other outrages. Arafat claimed
to have no connection to Black September up until 1973, when a top PLO
operative fingered Abu Iyad, his second in command, as its direct
commander. 55 When Arafat was finally forced to admit that Black
September and the PLO were one and the same, he was able to turn even
this to public relations advantage by claiming that the PLO had since grown
more “moderate.”
In addition to concealing its involvement in terror by renaming itself, the
PLO has tried to come out of the attacks as the hero by “negotiating” the
release of hostages being held by its own gunmen. This is a ruse that has
even succeeded on occasion, as in 1979, when the PLO negotiated the
release of hostages whom a mysterious group called the “Eagles of the
Palestinian Revolution” had seized in the Egyptian embassy in Turkey. The
Turkish government was so grateful for the end of the crisis that it granted
the PLO diplomatic recognition. Later, it transpired that the PLO
“negotiator” had masterminded the hostage crisis in the first place. 56
The most infamous example of this technique is the 1985 murder of a
wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer on the
Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro. Klinghoffer was shot at close
range and then thrown overboard. Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO
executive and an Arafat protégé, arrived in Egypt and told the press that he
had come at Arafat’s behest to mediate an end to the hijacking, 57 for a
moment gaining the hijackers their freedom. But this time, the matter did
not end quite as planned. Freed hostages described how the killers had
hailed Arafat as they beat elderly passengers. Intercepted communications
revealed that the murderers were not renegades but were minions of the
PLO, directly under the command of Abul Abbas himself. American fighter
planes nabbed the escaping PLO killers in a spectacular midair operation. In
short order, the PLO was forced to switch from denying any relationship to
the terrorists to denying that they had murdered anyone and asserting that
the killing was a “big lie fabricated by the intelligence services of the
United States.” 58 (Farouq Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” added
insult to iniquity by suggesting that it was Mrs. Klinghoffer who had
pushed her husband overboard in order to collect the insurance money. 59
Abul Abbas’s version was, “Maybe he was trying to swim for it.”) 60
Despite these efforts to deflect blame from itself, the PLO was running into
trouble because terrorism itself was running into trouble. The Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had led to the dismantling of the terror empire
that the PLO had built in that country for over a decade, and to the
expulsion of the PLO to Tunisia, where it was stripped of much of its power
to wreak havoc. By the mid-1980s, an organized political counterattack had
begun to undermine the political effectiveness of terrorism by exposing its
Arab sources and the involvement of states behind the scenes—as well as
pointing out the unacceptability of terror, regardless of the identity of its
perpetrators or their professed motives. * Evidence was carefully marshaled
that proved that terror, far from being the work of frustrated individuals,
was in fact the product of a dismal alliance between terrorists and
totalitarians.
The United States led the West in fighting back against terrorism, most
notably in the midair arrest of the Achille Lauro gunmen and in the raid on
Libya in 1986, in which American and British bombers struck targets in
Libya, narrowly missing Qaddafi himself. In 1987, the U.S. Congress
passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, ordering all PLO offices on American soil
shut down, and declared: “The PLO are a terrorist organization and a threat
to the interests of the United States and its allies.” After twenty years of
laissez-faire terrorism, these actions finally established the principle that
neither terrorists nor the terror states behind them would be allowed to get
off unpunished. The greater awareness of the methods of the terrorist
groups, combined with the risk of further American raids, threatened to
topple the entire scaffolding of international terrorism—and the PLO’s hope
of gaining legitimacy along with it. The climate had suddenly turned
inhospitable to international terrorism, and the PLO faced the loss of its last
means of inspiring the respect of the Arab world and its funding by Arab
governments.
By early 1988, the PLO had reached one of its lowest points since the
organization had been founded. From its faraway seat in Tunis, unable to
act out its bravado calls for the continuation of the “armed struggle” against
Israel, it was fast being consigned to political irrelevance. Indeed, at the
November 1987 summit of the Arab League held in Amman, Jordan, the
Palestinian issue was put on the back burner for the first time in anybody’s
memory. (The front burner was at long last devoted to the Iran-Iraq War,
which at that point had been raging for most of the decade.) 62
For the PLO, all this spelled the urgent need to make a radical break
with the terror image it had previously evaded only with partial success, and
to find other ways to demonstrate that it was still capable of “liberating
Palestine.” After 1986 it became clear that for the PLO to earn acceptance
in the West it must not only make increasingly vehement denials of its
terrorist methods but also try to show the United States that it had changed
its basic goal with regard to Israel.
Thus, for example, there was a self-conscious shift toward the use of
terminology that expressed the same goals but could readily be
misinterpreted in the West. Consider, for example, the PLO’s incessant use
of the phrase occupied territories to denote those Arabs that it seeks to
liberate, or to which it will restrict its operations. The entire PLO leadership
uses this term to mean all of Israel (“occupied” in 1948), while being fully
aware that in the West it is understood to mean only Judea, Samaria, and
Gaza (“occupied” in 1967). Occasionally, however, a PLO member makes a
gaffe and spills the beans. Thus, in an interview with the BBC in 1985, Abu
Iyad, head of the Fatah’s military department, said, “When we say occupied
Palestine… we consider all Palestine occupied…. Our resistance will be
everywhere inside the territory and that is not defined in terms of the West
Bank and Gaza alone.” 63
Similarly, Farouq Kaddoumi, in the French daily Quotidien de Paris that
same year.:

When we speak of the armed struggle, whose legality is recognized

by the United Nations, we are speaking of all the occupied
territories of Palestine.… It is our right to fight the enemy that has
taken over our land, whether this be in the 1967 occupation or in
the previous one in 1948. 64

But in the Western press such candor was extremely rare. Most of the
time the PLO took pains to obscure its intentions. Indeed, one of the most
successful devices for creating the impression of moderation in the PLO’s
goals has been the game of Declaration and Retraction, whereby PLO
leaders have issued ambiguous statements that could be interpreted as
signifying a concession, such as the recognition of Israel’s right to exist,
only to have them withdrawn immediately thereafter. A famous illustration
of this technique is a document that Arafat purportedly signed in his
besieged bunker in Beirut in 1982 in the presence of visiting American
congressman Paul McCloskey. According to McCloskey, Arafat said that he
was prepared to recognize Israel in the context of all UN resolutions, a
statement he had actually made before and whose value was dubious even
then. But McCloskey, apparently enthralled by his proximity to what he
believed to be a world-changing event, promptly announced this
“breakthrough” to the press, which dutifully trumpeted the news of Arafat’s
new openness to the world—only to have the entire event denied by the
PLO a few hours later. 65
As in each of its previous Western-oriented stratagems, the principal aim
of the PLO “recognition of Israel” game has been to conceptually conquer
Washington. Long before the ultimate collapse of Soviet power, it had
become clear to the majority in the PLO leadership that the road to putting
real pressure on Israel passed through the White House, the Congress, and
the American voting public—a realization that has gradually dawned on all
the Arab world, most notably on Syria after the American victory in the
Gulf War in 1991. The PLO strategy was thus built logically on Arab
propaganda concepts that had already gained currency. Having reduced all
Middle East turbulence to the Arab-Israeli conflict, having reduced that to
the Palestinian-Jewish dispute, and having reduced the Palestinians to the
PLO, the Americans and the West were now to be asked to accept the last
link in the chain: The PLO was to be shown as the party of compromise and
peace, Israel as the obstacle resisting peace. America would then respond
by engaging the “moderate” PLO and pressuring the “intransigent” Israelis.
Getting this campaign off the ground required that the PLO overcome
one major hurdle. In 1975, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had
signed a memorandum with Israel that obligated the United States to refrain
from negotiating with the PLO as long as the organization did not recognize
Israel’s right to exist and rejected UN Resolution 242. The United States
subsequently undertook not to deal with the PLO until it had ceased
engaging in terrorism. To meet the memorandum’s demands, the PLO’s
objective of destroying Israel had to be laundered and ironed into a form
that could be worn about Washington without violating this dress code.
Gaining acceptance in American eyes would therefore entail that the PLO
“moderate” itself enough to meet these two demands, while still uttering
nothing but readily retractable doublespeak.
The PLO achieved this late in 1988, when it finally reached an agreed-
upon formula for its absolution with the Americans. Arafat, debating to the
last every dotted “i” and every crossed “t,” would finally utter some
approximation of a position tolerable to the United States at a Palestine
National Council conference in Algiers in November and, with some
necessary corrections from the Americans, again at a press conference in
Geneva a few days later.
Leaving aside the peculiar view that words alone suffice for the political
redemption of tyrants and terrorists, a view contradicted by a long list of
despots in this century who have habitually lied to achieve their ends, it
must be noted that these words, which the Americans extracted from the
PLO the way one pulls a tooth, did not amount to much. Here is what
Arafat finally did say in Geneva about terrorism:

[The PNC has] reaffirmed its rejection of terrorism in all its forms,
including state terrorism…. This position is clear and free of all
ambiguity. And yet, I, as chairman of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, hereby once more declare that I condemn terrorism in
all its forms, and at the same time salute those sitting before me in
this hall who, in the days when they fought to free their countries
from the yoke of colonialism, were accused of terrorism by their
oppressors….
I also offer a reverent salute to the martyrs who have fallen at
the hands of terrorism and terrorists, foremost among whom is my
lifelong companion and deputy, the martyr-symbol Khalil al-Wazir
[Abu Jihad], and the martyrs who fell in the massacres to which our
people have been subjected in the various cities, villages and camps
of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and South Lebanon. 66

Certainly Arafat condemned “terrorism”—but only to slip the meaning

of the word out from under our feet in the very next sentence. “Terrorism,”
according to Arafat, is what Israel has done to the Palestinians, and this he
is willing to condemn. As for the actions of the PLO itself, he “salutes”
those who have been “accused of terrorism“: the PLO, and Abu Jihad, who
orchestrated the Na-hariya slayings in 1974, the Coastal Road massacre in
1978, the murder of three Israeli merchant seamen in Barcelona in 1985,
and more. Nowhere does he agree to alter the policies of the PLO in any
way. Most important, nowhere does he renounce “the armed struggle,” the
term the PLO has always used universally for what the West refers to as
terrorism.
Likewise, the PLO’s alleged recognition of Israel’s right to exist was
achieved with mirrors:

More than 40 years ago, the United Nations, in its Resolution 181
[the 1947 partition plan], decided on the establishment of two states
in Palestine, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish. Despite the
historic wrong that was done to our people, it is our view today that
the said resolution continues to meet the requirements of
international legitimacy which guarantee the Palestinian Arab
people’s right to sovereignty and national independence….
The PLO will seek a comprehensive settlement among the
parties concerned in the Arab-Israel conflict, including the State of
Palestine, Israel and other neighbors, within the framework of the
international conference for peace in the Middle East on the basis
of Resolutions 242 and 338 and so as to guarantee equality and the
balance of interests, especially our people’s rights in freedom,
national independence, and respect the right to exist in peace and
security for all. 67

Nowhere amid these serpentine locutions did Arafat actually say that the
PLO recognizes Israel or makes its peace with it. Worse, the prominent
position of Resolution 181—the partition plan of 1947—ensured the
meaninglessness of the entire performance, since that resolution calls for
granting the Palestinians not only the West Bank and Gaza but large
sections of pre-1967 Israel, including major Jewish urban centers such as
Jaffa, Lod, Ramleh, Beersheba, Acre, Nahariya, Kiryat Gat, Ashdod, and
Ashkelon, as well as major portions of Galilee and the Negev—not to
mention tearing away Jerusalem and placing it under international control
(see Map 5).
This is in line with the standard PLO practice of talking of peace with
Israel “in the context of all relevant UN resolutions.” That formulation is
much beloved by the Arabs, because all relevant UN resolutions—some
thirty-five of them—include resolutions that tear away the Golan and
Jerusalem from Israel, flood its coastal plain with Arab refugees, slap an
arms embargo and economic sanctions on it—amounting, in short, to the
dismantling of the country. Being offered peace on the basis of “all relevant
UN resolutions,” or Resolution 181 for that matter, is like being told that
someone will be your friend if you let him yank your legs off.
Nevertheless, what Arafat said at Algiers and later at Geneva, and which
was so painstakingly negotiated by American officials, had been built up by
the media frenzy around it into an epoch-making event. The United States
and Britain immediately used the speech as a pretext for opening
negotiations with the PLO, and French president Mitterrand used it as a
pretext for receiving Arafat in Paris. The world’s leading press
organizations heralded it as a watershed almost on a par with Camp David
—The New York Times, for example: “American perceptions about Arab-
Israeli relations are in flux…. Last month [Arafat] renounced terrorism and
more or less recognized Israel’s right to exist. He thereby transformed the
playing field.” 68
In analyzing the rhetoric emanating from the PLO, it must be
remembered that what counts with the PLO, as with all non-democratic
movement, is not what it tells the outside world but what it says to its own
people. When I was at the UN, the Soviet representative spoke many times
about the fervent desire of the Soviet Union for peace in Afghanistan.
Everyone knew these words meant nothing, and the Soviets routinely went
on with the business of slaughtering Afghanis. But when the Soviet press
started interviewing Soviet soldiers from the front in the Pangshir Valley
about the need to end the war, and this was heard in the streets of Moscow
and Kiev, everyone knew that a real change was afoot. (In fact, such press
reports heralded the beginning of glasnost and perestroika.) The same is
true of the PLO. What it says at the UN in New York, and what it whispers
to diplomats in the corridors of Geneva is largely meaningless. What counts
is not what it proclaims to the West in English or in French, but what it says
time and time again to its own people—in Arabic. Here the PLO exposes
itself unreservedly for anyone who bothers to look.
In fact, within days after Arafat’s supposed renunciation of terror and
recognition of Israel, the carefully crafted structure of PLO moderation
began to wobble. PLO spokesmen were explaining to the Arabic press that
Arafat’s statement had been made within the framework of the PLO’s long-
standing policies, and that in fact nothing at all had changed. First to go was
the notion that the PLO had abandoned its policy of terror. In deliberately
equivocating language, Arafat first modified his stance before a Western
audience on December 19, 1988—just five days before speaking in Geneva.
Speaking on Austrian television, he said that he “did not mean to renounce
the armed struggle” 69 (a.k.a. terrorism)—and that he and other leading
figures in the PLO had stated that the armed struggle would not end.
But in the Arabic media, all pretense of defending the supposed
intention of the Geneva statement rapidly vanished. A little over a week
after Geneva, Salim Za’anoun, deputy PNC speaker and member of the
Fatah Central Committee, said, “The armed struggle must continue
everywhere against the Zionist enemy and its allies.… We have no
alternative but to carry on our armed activity in order to vanquish the
enemy and establish our state.” 70 And Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, reiterated:
“The PLO has never obligated itself to stop the armed struggle, and it will
not renounce it.” 71 As Hani al-Hassan, a close Arafat adviser, averred:
“Palestinian armed struggle has not come to an end.” 72 Nayef Hawatmeh,
leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the
PLO’s third largest faction, said:

The popular revolution in Palestine is resolved to continue the

struggle until the Zionist occupation is abolished, thereby liberating
Palestine from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River, and
from the south to the north. 73

He was followed by Abu Iyad again: “We have never interpreted

[renouncing] ‘terror’ as meaning a suspension of military operations.” 74
When Farouq Kaddoumi was asked about Arafat’s renunciation, he said:
“That is a misrepresentation of Chairman Arafat’s statements…. We
denounce terrorism, especially the state terrorism by Israel.” When asked
by the interviewer whether this did not empty the meaning from the pledge
on which Secretary of State George Shulz had based America’s dialogue
with the PLO, Kaddoumi responded, “Shulz can go to hell. I suppose he is
already on his way there.” 75
The same fate met the PLO’s supposed recognition of Israel, which Abu
Iyad flatly denied to Arabic-speakers everywhere. On February 11, 1989, he
said: “There was no PLO recognition of Israel, neither in the PNC decisions
in Algiers, nor in Arafat’s address to the UN in Geneva.” 76 He was
supported by the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP) splinter of the PLO, George Habash: “The decisions of the PNC did
not mention in any manner the recognition of Israel or Israel’s right to exist.
We did not recognize Israel.” 77 On August 8, 1989, Arafat’s Fatah adopted a
resolution in Tunis calling for the “intensification and escalation of armed
action and all forms of struggle to eliminate the Zionist occupation of
Palestine,” a resolution that the entire PLO executive committee affirmed
on January 31, 1990. 78 This decision underscored a joint statement that
Arafat with Muammar Qaddafi made that month in Libya: “The State of
Israel was an outcome of the Second World War and should disappear, as
the Berlin Wall has, along with the rest of the consequences of that war.” 79
The entire performance was repeated shortly thereafter with that other
famous Arafatism from the days after Geneva—the supposed renunciation
by Arafat of the PLO Charter and its explicit mandate that Israel be
destroyed. On the rare occasions before Geneva when Westerners had
pressed Arafat on the question of the PLO Charter, he had usually changed
the subject. But cornered during his visit with Mitterrand in Paris less than
six months after Algiers and Geneva, it became impossible for him to evade
the question of how he could recognize Israel in outright contradiction of
the PLO’s Charter: “As for the charter, I believe there is a French
expression which says: C’est caduc,” he announced—using a French word
variously translated as “irrelevant” or “null and void.” 80
As usual, a media circus ensued that flooded the world with reports that
Arafat had renounced the PLO Charter. Also as usual, within hours the PLO
and Arafat himself had explained that the word caduc has several meanings,
that Arafat had been misinterpreted, and that he in any case did not have the
authority to abrogate the charter. By mid-January in Saudi Arabia, Arafat
had demurred: “[Caduc] was legally the most appropriate description of the
current state of this fundamental document…. One of [my] advisers had
suggested using the word ‘obsolete.’ I said no, ‘obsolete’ is not the right
term.” 81 Hakkam Balawi, a PLO representative in the dialogue with the
United States, explained:

Yasser Arafat’s use of the French word caduc, which means null
and void, obsolete and antiquated, when talking about the
Palestinian National Charter to the French media, did not at all
mean the nullification of the Charter…. The word has various
established definitions in the dictionaries, and the West can choose
whichever one it wants…. The Palestinian leadership has the right
to stick to the definitions which it believes are correct, and which
embody the meaning it wants to convey. 82

As Abu Iyad put it, “Neither Arafat, Saleh Khalef [Abu Iyad], nor any
other leader can cancel the charter, because it belongs to the PNC,” 83 which
requires, incidentally, a two-thirds majority to repeal it. As for the
suggestion that the PLO remove from its charter Article 19, which declares
the State of Israel caduc, Abu Iyad responded, “We in the PLO do not
accept the removal of Article 19 from our Charter.” 84
Indeed, the PLO proceeded to back up its claim with a renewed
campaign of terror. In the months following Arafat’s December 1988
statement, PLO factions that had participated in the PNC deliberations and
that had supposedly accepted its “decision” not to engage in terrorist attacks
against Israel launched dozens of infiltration attempts by terror cells across
Israel’s border. Most of these raids, as Israel learned by interrogating the
surviving terrorists and by looking at the maps of kibbutzim and other
civilian settlements that the gunmen were carrying with them, were
intended as frontal assaults on civilians. Especially galling was the fact that
several of these raids were conducted by units of the DFLP, one of whose
top commanders was Yasser abd-Rabbo, a member of the PLO executive
and also the PLO’s chief negotiator with the Americans. Israel protested to
the United States, but the American administration chose to turn a blind
eye.
The PLO, encouraged in its audacity by American reticence (much as it
had been encouraged in 1970 by Jordanian reticence), chose to escalate its
attacks. In May 1990, in a sea-borne assault on the Jewish festival of
Shavuot aimed at the beaches of Tel Aviv, the PLO’s Abul Abbas faction
attempted a spectacular massacre of Israeli civilians. It launched an armada
of speedboats, each of which was equipped with a heavily armed terror
squad, past the crowded shorefront. The intended targets included not only
sun-bathers and tourists but the leading international hotels on the Tel Aviv
beach, yards away from the American embassy on Hayarkon Street.
Luckily for Israel, the Israeli army foiled this attempt at mass murder in the
nick of time. Unluckily for the PLO, this was the final straw, and the U.S.
administration finally decided it could no longer play the fool. The
American Congress had already passed legislation, the Mack-Lieberman
bill, requiring the U.S. administration to make a quarterly accounting of the
PLO’s compliance with the commitments it had given the United States.
The beachfront attack, and the congressional and media spotlight that was
focused on it, prompted the American administration to sever the talks with
the PLO, which were then barely a year old.

Yet the PLO had not convened the entire machinery of the PNC in Algiers
and spent long days drafting and adopting resolutions just to mislead
Western opinion. Algiers, as the PLO carefully explained in the Arabic
press, had been a very real conference, in which an all-too-real decision had
been made. As Rafiq Natshe explained on January 8, 1989, just days after
Geneva, “Our present political approach is rooted in the Phased Plan.” 85 In
this, he was echoing a statement by Arafat’s deputy Abu Iyad, who had said
prior to the convening of the PNC in November 1988: “We must propose a
political initiative which is not new in terms of the Phased Plan…. The
initiative which will provide new instrument for moving the Phased Plan
along.” 86 Days after Algiers, Abu Iyad confirmed that this is precisely what
had been done there.
The PNC decisions… are a refinement of the Phased Plan adopted
in Cairo fourteen years ago. As the years passed, this plan remained
undeveloped and without a mechanism for implementation. The
PNC session in Algiers was meant to revitalize the Phased Plan and
to implement it. 87

And herein, in the activation of the Phased Plan, under the very eyes of
the West, lies the greatest feat of PLO double-talk of them all.
What is the Phased Plan? In the first years after the PLO’s establishment
in 1964, the organization believed that it could achieve the destruction of
Israel in one fell swoop—if only, as we have seen, it could trigger a general
Arab war against the Jewish state. Not even the Arab defeat in 1967,
however calamitous, could convince the PLO to modify this strategy. The
PLO was confident that the Arab states would rearm, regroup, and resume
their attack on Israel, as Egypt and Syria indeed did in the surprise attack on
Yom Kippur in 1973. But to PLO eyes, the results of this war were equally
disappointing. King Hussein, whose forces had been pushed beyond the
Jordan River in 1967, chose to stay out altogether in 1973. With sufficient
strategic depth in the Golan and the Sinai to absorb the attacks, the Israeli
army quickly took the offensive, within three weeks reaching the gates of
Cairo and Damascus. The PLO’s dream of conquering Haifa and Jaffa had
never been further away.
A few months after the Arab failure in the Yom Kippur War, the PNC
met in Cairo to consider the situation. It concluded that Israel in its post-
1967 boundaries could not be destroyed by a frontal military assault. What
was required was an interim phase in which Israel would be reduced to
dimensions that made it more convenient for the coup de grace. Thus was
born the Phased Plan, adopted by the PNC in that meeting on June 8, 1974.
The Phased Plan had two important stipulations: First, create a Palestinian
state on any territory vacated by Israel (Article 2); second, mobilize from
that state a general Arab military assault to destroy a shrunken and
indefensible Israel (Article 9). The precise language of this resolution, in
cumbersome but nonetheless clear PLO jargon, can be found in Appendix I.
Although the Phased Plan was formally adopted by the PNC, it was
often disputed within PLO ranks. There were those, like the PFLP’s George
Habash, who thought that fussing with an interim phase was an unnecessary
bother, since the force of an escalating campaign of terrorism in and around
Israel, and especially spectacular terrorist action worldwide, would
ultimately be sufficient to achieve the PLO’s aims. But Arafat and Abu Iyad
clung tenaciously to the view that bombs and diplomacy were infinitely
more potent than bombs alone—a view reinforced by the growing Western
resolve, led by the U.S. secretary of state, George Shultz, to take concrete
action against terror. After the American air strike on Libya in 1986, the
powerful American message that governments and organizations would
henceforth be held responsible for the terror they spawned was registered in
Damascus, Teheran, and other terror capitals of the Middle East, but most
especially in PLO headquarters in Tunis. The PLO quickly circumscribed
its field of terror operations. By 1987, the organization was fading fast.
Then came the intifada. Though it was not started by the PLO, it gave
the organization new life and purpose. Equally important, the nightly
bashing of Israel on the world’s television screens created enormous
pressure on Israel to vacate the West Bank and Gaza, and it gave the
champions of the Phased Plan within the PLO a supreme advantage over
the doubters. The dispute finally ended in the PNC conference in Algiers in
1988, when Arafat and Abu Iyad lined up all the main PLO factions behind
the concept of the gradual destruction of Israel.
Abu Iyad in particular was celebrating a personal victory. More than
anyone, even more than Arafat, he had tirelessly advocated this strategy. A
year earlier, for example, he had explained:

According to the Phased Plan, we will establish a Palestinian state

on any part of Palestine that the enemy will retreat from. The
Palestinian state will be a stage in our prolonged struggle for the
liberation of Palestine on all of its territory. We cannot achieve the
strategic goal of a Palestinian state in all of Palestine without first
establishing a Palestinian state [on part of it]. 88

Days after the PLO’s supposed recognition of Israel at Geneva, Abu

Iyad spelled out PLO strategy: “At first a small state, and with the help of
Allah it will be made large, and expand to the east, west, north, and
south.… I am interested in the liberation of Palestine step by step.” 89 On
other occasions he was even more concise: “The Palestinian state will be
the springboard from which to liberate Jaffa, Acre, and all of Palestine.” 90
As the leading ideologue of the PLO, Abu Iyad painstakingly explained
that the Phased Plan in no way contradicted the PLO Charter seeking
Israel’s elimination. On the contrary, it was merely a tactical response to
changing geopolitical circumstances and would provide the means to
implement the charter. As he put it, “the Phased Plan reflects the current
situation… and does not require the casting aside of the charter.” 91 On
December 6, 1988, he said:

We swore that we would liberate even pre-’67 Palestine. We will

liberate Palestine stage by stage…. The borders of our state as we
declared it represent only part of our national aspirations. We will
work to expand them in order to realize our aspirations for all the
land of Palestine.” 92

Noting that a gradual approach was indispensable for worldwide

acceptance of PLO moves, he basked in his victory after Arafat’s statement
in Geneva: “The armed struggle must be accompanied by a strong political
basis which will help the world accept the results of the armed struggle. The
PLO acts through the rifle and diplomacy.” 93
Terror and duplicity had won out over terror alone. This view was not
limited to Abu Iyad. In the heady days after the PLO’s supposed recognition
of Israel, its leaders lined up to spell out exactly what it was that they were
now committed to. Thus, in 1990 Yasser Arafat again gave voice to the
same sentiment that all PLO leaders have continuously stressed:

The Palestinian people’s struggle will continue until the complete

liberation of the Palestinian land…. The Palestinian people’s
struggle ought to be assisted until the complete liberation of
Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the Sea. 94 [emphasis added]

Once more—in Arabic, of course—we see that Arafat did not limit the
Palestinian Arabs’ goal to recovering the West Bank, the territory from the
Jordan River to the old Israeli border, but the territory right on through to
the Mediterranean. Farouq Kaddoumi, head of the PLO’s political
department and in charge of its foreign affairs, had this to say: “The
recovery of but a part of our soil will not cause us to forsake our land…. We
shall pitch our tent in those places where our bullets shall reach…. This tent
shall then serve as the base from which we shall pursue the next phase.” 95
This was echoed by Sheikh Abdel adb-Hamid al-Sayah, speaker of the
PNC:

Even if the PLO succeeds in establishing a state in the West Bank

and the Gaza Strip, this would not prevent a continuation of the
struggle until the liberation of all of Palestine.… If we succeed in
gaining a part of Palestine upon which we will establish a state, we
can later ask the world at large, while standing on Palestinian soil,
to act so we may obtain our right as a nation and as a people.… We
are working to achieve what is possible in the present phase, and
later we will demand more. 96

And Sayah again: “The PNC has accepted an interim solution, implying
that we will accept whatever territories we can get. Then we will demand
the rest of Palestine.” 97
Every one of the PLO’s recalcitrant factions lined up behind this
“moderate” policy of liquidating Israel by stages. Here is the statement of
the PFLP, the PLO’s second largest faction, formerly a stubborn opponent
of the Phased Plan:

The establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza

will be the beginning of the downfall of the Zionist enterprise. We
will be able to rely on this defeat in order to complete the struggle
to realize our entire goal, which is the complete liberation of the
national Palestinian soil. 98

The PFLP’s Al-Hadaf publication put it squarely on April 9, 1989: “We

seek to establish a state that we can use in order to liberate the other part of
Palestine.” 99 So did Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the DFLP, another “extreme”
constituent PLO organization: “The Palestinian struggle should now be
aimed at creating a state in the West Bank and Gaza. This will not prevent
us from achieving our final aim of liberating all of Palestine.” 100
Thus with the adoption of the Phased Plan, the divisions between the
“extremists” and the “moderates” in the PLO vanished. Now, with such
unprecedented harmony among the PLO’s constituent parts, the ideological
rift between the “one-steppers” and the “two-steppers” shifted elsewhere: It
shifted in fact to the split between the PLO, led by Arafat’s Fatah, and the
Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that was quickly gaining
ground among Palestinian Arabs. Noticing this trend, many in the West
urged Israel to hurry and cut its deal with the PLO “moderates,” lest the
Jewish state find itself having to deal with the religious extremists instead.
The well-wishers could have been usefully tutored by Rafiq Natshe, a
member of the Fatah central committee and PLO representative to Saudi
Arabia, who succinctly summarized the difference between the rival
movements:

[Hamas says] all of Palestine is ours, and we want to liberate it

from the river to the sea in one blow. But Fatah, which leads the
PLO, feels that a Phased Plan must be pursued. Both sides agree on
the final objective. The difference between them is on the way to
get there. 101

There are those who claimed that an exception to this bleak landscape of
extremism could be found among those West Bank Palestinian Arabs whom
the PLO first designated as its spokesmen in the Madrid Peace Conference.
While it was certainly hoped that moderates will eventually assume
positions of leadership among the Palestinian Arabs, these PLO media-
workers regrettably do not deviate one iota from the PLO line. Among the
most prominent is Feisal al-Husseini, the son of Abed al-Khader al-
Husseini. Just weeks before being received by President Bush at the White
House in December 1992, Husseini explicated the Phased Plan for
destroying Israel at some length in a Jordanian newspaper:
A “grand strategy” is the product of dominant interests and
principles, which are unrelated to the political slogans of the
movement or to any particular period. Thus Russia, for example,
has had a permanent interest—which still holds true today—in
attaining “warm water [ports].” In the same manner Germany has
had a permanent interest in dominating Europe, for which reason it
embarked on the two world wars in which it was defeated; but it
has not given up on this strategic aim, and still holds fast to it.
The stage in which we are living—as Palestinians, as
Jordanians, and as Arabs—is an historic opportunity which will not
repeat itself for a long time. It is similar to what occurred after
World War I and World War II, periods when nations and countries
were wiped off the map of the world. It is incumbent upon us… to
work with all possible diligence in the face of these new historic
circumstances to position ourselves… to form new alliances which
will bring us closer to [realizing] our grand strategy….
We must bear in mind that the slogan of the present phase is not
“from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River.”… [Yet] we
have not and will not give up on any of our commitments that have
existed for more than seventy years.
Therefore, we must bear in mind that we have within the united
Palestinian and Arab society the abilities to contend with this
uncompleted Israeli society…. Sooner or later, we must force
Israeli society to collaborate with a greater society, our own Arab
society, and later we will bring about the gradual dissolution of the
Zionist entity. 102

Thus, according to Husseini, the Arabs must not lose sight of what is
really meant by the slogan demanding “only” a West Bank state. For just as
the Russian Czars and Soviet leaders never gave up on extending their
empire to the Mediterranean, and just as the Kaisers and the Nazis never
gave up on ruling Europe, so too the Palestinian-Jordanian-Arab people can
never give up its seventy-year-old “commitment”—“the dissolution of the
Zionist entity.”
What emerges from all this is that the PLO produced not one but two
basic documents that guide its long-term activity. Both were adopted in
pivotal PNC meetings in Cairo—one at the PLO’s founding in 1964, the
second ten years later. The first is the PLO Charter, which set the political
goal of destroying Israel. The second is the Phased Plan, which spelled out
the political method of achieving that goal. Though many people in the
West are familiar with the charter, it is only in conjunction with the less
familiar Phased Plan that the overall PLO strategy can be understood. Thus,
explains Ahmed Sidki al-Dejani, a member of the fifteen-man PLO
executive: “We in the PLO make a clear distinction between the charter and
the political programs. The first includes the permanent political objective,
and the second includes the step-by-step approach.” 103 And Rafiq Natshe
sums it up: “The PLO Charter is the basis of the political and military
activity of the PLO. Our present political approach is rooted in the Phased
Plan.… We must aim at harmonizing the various political decisions with the
Charter and the Phased Plan.” 104
Thus, far from breaking with the virulent hatred of the Mufti, ending
decades of terrorism, and giving up on its dream of an eventual war of
annihilation, the PLO did precisely the opposite. Its commitment to the
Phased Plan merely united the PLO’s warring camps as never before,
permitting even the most fanatical among them to justify partial gains from
Israel as a step toward the land war they hoped to ignite in the not-too-
distant future from their sovereign, if initially truncated, State of Palestine.
It remains to be seen whether the leadership of the Palestinian Authority is
genuinely and fully prepared to break with the past.

But the land war launched from a future West Bank state was not the only
poisoned arrow being prepared for the PLO’s quiver. The PLO has also
maintained at the top of its list of demands what it refers to as the “right of
return” of all Arabs who lived in Palestine before 1948 to the cities that
they abandoned. Teaching this futile dream to the generations of children
who are trapped in the refugee camps has been one of the cruelest and most
cynical of schemes in the entire PLO palette. In the camps, the
wretchedness inflicted by the Arab states that refuse to absorb the refugees
is blamed on Israel, ensuring that the pain of 1948 is not allowed to heal.
While many refugees have left the camps and been assimilated into the
surrounding Arab populations, others have been forced to remain in the
camps by Arab pressure. There the PLO teaches them that the only way out
is to return to Haifa and Jaffa— thereby guaranteeing itself another
generation of recruits for acts of terrorism.
If there has been any effort to alleviate the refugee problem since 1967,
it came not from the Arab governments but from Israel. As part of an
ongoing program, Israel attempted to dismantle some of the worst camps in
Gaza, spending Israeli government funds to build modern apartment
buildings for eleven thousand families so far. 105 But if the refugees have
apartment buildings in which to live, this means that they are no longer
homeless, no longer refugees, and no longer the embittered people the PLO
prefers them to be. This rehabilitation was violently opposed by the PLO. In
the end, Israeli security had to be brought in to protect families that wanted
to move into apartments against PLO threats.
About a year after the outbreak of the intifada, I learned firsthand of the
power of this PLO stratagem when I visited the Jabaliya refugee camp in
Gaza. By then, the large-scale riots had subsided and there was relative
calm. I left behind my military escort and strolled with an interpreter
through the alleys of Jabaliya. Next to one cement structure I found an
elderly Arab, with whom I struck up a conversation.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Majdal,” he answered, using the Arab name for the Israeli town of
Ashkelon, a few miles north of Gaza.
“And where are your children from?” I asked.
“Majdal,” he answered again. Since his children were probably my age,
it is conceivable they had been born there. On a hunch I queried him
further.
“Where are your grandchildren from?”
“Majdal,” he answered.
“And will you go back to Majdal?” I asked.
“Insh’allah,”—“God willing”—he replied. “There will be peace, and
we will all go back to Majdal.”
“Insh’allah,” I repeated. “You’ll go to Majdal, and we’ll go to
Jabaliya.”
His smile vanished. “No, we’ll go back to Majdal. You’ll go back to
Poland.”
With tens of thousands of refugees ready to repeat this Palestine
liberation fantasy to any journalist or diplomat who asks, these camps have
become a political weapon used to fuel a desire for a right of return that
does not exist, and to fan Western opposition to Jewish immigration to
Israel. After all, the Arabs often ask Westerners, how can it be that an Arab
born in Jaffa cannot return there, while a Jew from Odessa who has never
before set foot in Israel is welcomed with open arms? Rather, as Hani al-
Hassan, an aide of Arafat’s, recently explained, the return of the Arabs
should be the world’s priority:

Americans and Soviets interested in the Middle East peace process

have to understand that the problem requiring solution is not the
immigration of the world’s Jews to Palestine, but how to return
Palestinian refugees to Palestine…. The Arab states will not be
willing to settle the Palestinian refugees…. Every refugee from
1948 or 1967 must be allowed to return to Palestine. 106

Thus, the “right of return” is intended to mimic, counteract, and annul

the Jewish dream of return by means of a false symmetry: The Jews have
returned, and now the Palestinian Arabs must return. Yet the Arab refugees
of 1948 cannot be viewed without considering the Jewish refugees of 1948,
who were expelled in roughly equal numbers from the Arab states. (Most of
the Arab refugees left voluntarily, out of fear or because of the exhortations
of Arab leaders to “clear the way” for the Arab armies, as noted in Chapter
4.) At a cost of $1.3 billion, the fledgling Jewish state took in Jewish
refugees from Arab states from Morocco to Iraq and housed, educated, and
employed them, so that today they are no longer distinct from any other
Israelis. 107 For the vast, oil-glutted Arab states to now demand that tiny
Israel also resettle all the Arab refugees is preposterously unjust. There was,
in fact, an even exchange of populations between the Arab and the Jewish
states as a consequence of the Arabs’ war against Israel and their expulsion
of the Jews from their lands. Such exchanges of population have occurred a
number of other times this century: Millions of people were exchanged
between Bulgaria and Greece in 1919, between Greece and Turkey in 1923,
between India and Pakistan in 1947, and so on. In none of these cases has
anyone ever seriously suggested reversing the exchanges, let alone
reversing only one side of them.
That half a century later the Arab regimes say that they refuse to accept
their side of an equation that they themselves formulated is particularly
telling. For the Arab leaders are well aware that if Israel were to agree to
such a Palestinian “right of return,” the country would be demographically
overwhelmed and destroyed. The “right of return” is therefore nothing but a
subterfuge to undermine the Jewish state. As Qaddafi himself has said: “By
then [i.e., the return of the refugees], there would be no more Israel…. If
they accept, then Israel would be ended.” 108
Nevertheless, the demand of the “right of return” has never been
renounced by the PLO, and it remains at the top of its list of preconditions
for any step toward a permanent peace settlement with Israel. Arafat has
made this clear: “The Palestinian uprising will in no way end until the
attainment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the
right of return.” 109 Likewise, the PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s right to exist
(as required by Resolution 242) is predicated on the Palestinian “right of
return,” which Qaddafi says would destroy Israel. As the PLO’s
representative to Saudi Arabia, Rafiq Natshe, confirms: “all members of the
[PLO] executive committee reject [Security Council Resolutions] 242 and
338 if the declared rights of the Palestinians are not understood to include…
return of the refugees to their birthplace.” 110 In the same vein, Arafat also
sets the “right of return” as a precondition for peace in the entire Middle
East. In 1991, he said:

There will be no peace and stability in the region as long as the

inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people are ignored,
including the right of return, self-determination, and the
establishment of its independent state whose capital is Jerusalem. 111
[emphasis added]

This last statement is revealing in itself. If all the PLO wants is an

independent state on the West Bank, why bother to include the redundant
terms “self-determination” and “right of return”? After all, an independent
West Bank “Palestine” ought to satisfy the supposed yearnings for self-
determination of all Palestinian Arabs and absorb the remaining refugees.
But in separating these terms, as it habitually does, the PLO is indicating to
an Arab audience in a well-understood code that a West Bank state is
merely one part of its plan to bring an end to Israel. The term self-
determination is intended for the Arab communities inside Israel who, after
the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, will claim the
right of self-determination (that is, independence) in regions with an Arab
majority in Galilee and the Negev. And if these multiple amputations are
not enough to finish Israel off, the “right of return” will ensure that the
Jewish remnants are asphyxiated by a flood of Arab refugees.
This trinity—West Bank State, Self-Determination, Right of Return—
alongside the PLO Charter, the Phased Plan, and the Armed Struggle, form
the PLO’s catechism. This doctrine gives direction and guidance to its
disciples as they pursue under changing circumstances the unchanging goal
of a holy war, a jihad aimed at Israel’s ultimate destruction. Even in the
midst of peace negotiations between Israel and the Arabs, Arafat continued
to extol the same holy war he has espoused since the founding of the PLO
in 1964. Thus, on March 15, 1992, the chairman of the PLO exhorted:

Through the peace negotiations… the creative Palestinian mind has

created the third side of the triangle of [which the first two are] the
Palestinian struggle and jihad toward certain victory. We are
involved in a political-cum-diplomatic battle.… We have to
intensify the struggle and continue the sincere and honest jihad….
The jihad is our way and Palestine is our road. 112

Scarcely a word about this PLO strategy reaches the newspapers and
television news programs of the West, which almost never bother to report
on the PLO’s actions inside the Arab world or PLO statements made in
Arabic. Little more reaches Western leaders. When they are asked why no
attention is paid to the PLO’s incessant promises to destroy Israel and its
elaborate laying of plans to do so, Western political leaders and media
figures, if they can be persuaded to address the issue at all, habitually shrug
it all off as meaningless “posturing” or even as a kind of joke or game,
certainly an irrelevance—with an implied, condescending message: “Never
take anything an Arab says seriously if he’s only speaking to Arabs.” But
this stands logic on its head. Dictatorial regimes and organizations will tell
foreigners any lie that suits their ends; it is only what they say to their own
followers that in any way reflects their designs. To understand this is to
understand much about the PLO, which continues to peddle peace in the
West while ceaselessly promising terror and the annihilation of Israel to
Arab audiences in the Middle East.
How can it be that the PLO’s fabrications are understood in the West to
be truth, while the truth itself, no matter how often rehearsed in word and
deed, is taken to be of not even the slightest consequence? In fact not even
“believing” Westerners believe everything the PLO says to them. For
instance, not even the most avid consumers of PLO lies were willing to
swallow Arafat’s infamous “secret map” that supposedly proved Israeli
designs on the entire Middle East—which a few years ago he announced he
had discovered on the back of an Israeli coin. In a specially convened press
session at the United Nations in Geneva, Arafat presented to a crowded hall
of journalists a map of an Israel encompassing most of the Middle East,
reaching as far as the Nile and the Euphrates and into Southern Turkey.
Arafat explained that this “map,” appearing in rough contour, comprised the
lands that the territorially expansionist Israel intended one day to claim as
its own. It had been etched on Israeli coins so that every Israeli could share
in the unspoken conspiracy every time he fumbled through his pockets.
As Arafat was leaving his press conference, surrounded by an army of
aides (in all my years at the UN, where I encountered most of the world’s
leaders, I had never seen such a huge procession), I walked into the
conference room he had just vacated. I produced the coin (a ten-agora
piece, roughly equal to a nickel in value) and explained that the pattern
imprinted on it is the impression of an ancient coin from the reign of the
Jewish king Mattathias Antigonus (40–37 B.C.E.). Most modern Israeli
coins include impressions of such ancient Jewish coinage. I showed a
photograph of the original coin that had been used to make the impression:
Arafat’s “secret map” was nothing more than the outline of its corroded
edges.
Although Arafat’s attempt to manufacture yet another lie met with
immediate failure in this case, what struck me was that so many of the
PLO’s other lies are just as outrageous, even if they don’t lend themselves
to instant visual puncturing. Yet most people in the West receive the
overwhelming majority of these falsehoods as either the truth or else a
reasonable approximation of it. Uncontested, this particular flight of fancy
might also have become a regular part of the PLO’s web of slanders and
falsifications—just like the PLO’s purported recognition of Israel, and its
alleged willingness to be satisfied with a state on the West Bank.
It therefore seems that the ignorance of both the media and the
politicians about the basics of PLO politics is not merely due to the facility
with which the PLO spews forth its fabrications. It is at least as much due to
a profound Western desire to believe what the PLO is saying. Westerners
deeply wish to believe that everyone can be reformed and that even the
worst enemies can eventually become friends. This is why, despite the
termination of the American talks with the PLO on the grounds of its
continuing terrorism in 1989, the view that the PLO must be engaged
persisted in Washington and European capitals. Ways were constantly
sought to bring the PLO back into the fold openly. Behind the scenes,
feverish maneuvers took place, through PLO-approved middlemen, to get
the PLO’s agreement to this or that American move. The goal was
ultimately to restore PLO legitimacy in the eyes of the American public and
Congress and to ensure its continued participation in the political process.
Schooled in compromise, Westerners found it difficult to realize that the
PLO’s obsession with destroying Israel was not a passing “interest” or
“tactic.” In fact, this goal defined the very essence of the PLO. It is the
PLO’s reason for existing, the passion that has united its members and wins
their loyalty. This is what distinguishes the PLO from the Arab states, even
the most radical ones. While these states would clearly prefer to see Israel
disappear, neither Libya nor Iraq, to take the most extreme examples, sees
its own national life as dependent on Israel’s destruction. But the PLO was
different. It was constitutionally tied to the idea of Israel’s liquidation.
Remove that idea, and you have no PLO.
Indeed, if Western governments genuinely wanted to test whether the
PLO was interested in reforming itself, they would have to ask it to take
practical steps to stop being the organization for the “liberation of
Palestine.” They would have demanded that the PLO formally abrogate its
charter and the Phased Plan, as well as the various other PLO resolutions
calling for steps toward Israel’s destruction. They would have demanded
that the PLO dismantle its terror apparatus and accede to international
monitoring to ensure that it has done so. They would have demanded that it
cease its organized inculcation of hatred in Palestinian youngsters in
refugee camps, and that it quit obstructing the rehabilitation and
resettlement of the Palestinian refugees. Such elementary demands were
seldom made because it is intuitively clear to even the most befuddled
observer that the PLO would find it hard to accept all of them, let alone
implement them. What must be asked is why. And the answer is that many
of the PLO leaders are committed, sinews and flesh, tooth and nail, to the
eradication of Israel by any means.
Can there be no deviation from this line? Are there no dissidents? There
were, but they didn’t last long. They met the fate of PLO dissidents like
Issam Sartawi, who was cut down in cold blood in 1983 for calling for
negotiations with Israel, or of the Moslem religious leader Imam
Khossander, who was murdered in Gaza in 1979 during a spree of PLO
killings of Arabs who had supported Sadat’s arrival in Israel. 113 Farouq
Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” explained the rationale behind such
executions in chilling terms:

The PLO and the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and
outside them know very well how to use such methods to prevent
certain personalities from deviating from the revolutionary path.
Our people in the interior recognize their responsibilities and are
capable of taking the necessary disciplinary measure against those
who try to leave the right path. 114

Hundreds of other, lesser-known Palestinians who tried to deviate “from

the revolutionary path” by advocating a genuine peace with Israel received
“the necessary disciplinary measure” and were summarily cut down—a
practice that the intifada death squads enthusiastically took up in murdering
over seven hundred Palestinian Arabs, including nurses, teachers, and
students accused of “collaborating” with Israel. 115
I have spoken with quite a few prominent Palestinian Arabs, mostly in
discreet meetings. Invariably, they said that they would seek a genuine
compromise and coexistence with Israel but were afraid to say so openly for
fear of PLO or Hamas terror. These people were not pro-Israel by any
stretch of the imagination. But they had given up on the PLO’s wild
fantasies of drowning Israel with returning refugees or of conquering Haifa
and Jaffa. Most of all, they would like a negotiated solution that would
enable them to throw off the ideological yoke, initially imposed from the
PLO base in Tunis a thousand miles away, and to take charge of their own
destiny.
This is why it is so ironic to hear some people speaking in such lavish
terms about the “new local spokesmen” who emerged as “Palestinian
leaders” during the intifada and while accompanying the Palestinian
negotiators at the Madrid Peace Conference. Seeing Western-educated West
Bankers on television sporting the latest in verbal accessories has given
many in the West the impression that these are Palestinian Arab leaders who
have built their own independent base of power and are rising to challenge
the unpolished Arafat and his coterie. Precisely the opposite is true. The
intifada was a highly efficient instrument of intimidation for the PLO, and
left in its wake there were virtually no Arabs in Judea and Samaria who
were willing to deviate from Arafat’s bidding (unless, that is, they were
even more intimidated by the fundamentalist Hamas, or “protected” by it
Mafia-style). As was first demonstrated at Madrid when these new
spokesmen left the conference in midcourse to fly to Tunis and confer with
Arafat, they were spokesmen for no one but the PLO.
That the West found this so hard to accept is a symptom of the much
deeper problem underneath: No matter what the evidence, the West is
entirely confounded by fanaticism if it wears a suit and tie. Equally, it
cannot seem to comprehend the fact that the PLO genuinely likes and
admires totalitarianism—despite its own extraordinary openness on this
point. While the nations of the free world condemned China when Chinese
government tanks massacred thousands of defenseless nonviolent, pro-
democracy demonstrators in 1989, Arafat sent a public message of
congratulations to Beijing:
I take this opportunity to express extreme gratification that you
were able to restore normal order after the recent incidents in the
People’s Republic of China. 116

While Saddam Hussein devoured his Arab neighbor Kuwait, Arafat

cheered him on:

I say welcome, welcome, welcome to war…. Iraq and Palestine

represent a common will. We will be side by side after the great
battle, God willing, we will pray together in Jerusalem…. The Iraqi
fighters and the Palestinian stone-throwers have an appointment
with victory. 117

And as the neo-Stalinist coup seemed to end democracy in the Soviet

Union in August 1991 and plunge the world back into the Cold War, the
PLO praised the putsch:

The PLO has always viewed this experiment in perestroika with

great skepticism, and with trepidation mingled with sadness. 118

In midcoup, the official PLO organ, Radio Palestine, added further

clarification: “What happened in the USSR proves that the [struggle against
the West] is natural and inevitable, and that perestroika was the anomaly.” 119
In the West, those few commentators who even noticed that the PLO was
evincing such a sweet tooth for oppression insisted on lamenting that it
“always seems to back losers”—just another bad roll of the dice.
But it is not luck that is responsible for the PLO’s choice of friends. It is
its chronic affinity for the goals and methods of tyranny, which has
consistently allied it with the likes of the Nazis and the Soviets, terror
organizations of almost every description, and Arab despots from Nasser to
Saddam. The PLO pedigree of tyrannophilia goes all the way back to June
1940, on the occasion of the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and France, when the Mufti sent his personal congratulations to
Hitler:
[I wish] to convey to his Excellency the Great Chief and Leader my
sincerest felicitations on the occasion of the great political and
military triumphs which he has just achieved…. The Arab nation
everywhere feels the greatest joy and deepest gratification on the
occasion of these great successes…. The Arab people… will be
linked to your country by a treaty of friendship and collaboration. 120

It is impossible to escape the perverse but utterly consistent logic that

has compelled the PLO and its progenitors to follow the path from the
Mufti’s pact with Hitler to “destroy the Jewish National Home,” to
Shukeiri’s pact with Nasser to “drive Israel into the sea,” right down to
Arafat’s pact with Saddam to “burn half of the Jewish state.” They may all
have failed, but their legacy of hatred persists, following a straight,
unbroken line.
Someday, it will be one of those famous historians’ riddles how
terrorists and totalitarians who murdered Westerners for decades were able
to manipulate the Western democracies into besieging the solitary
democracy in the Middle East on their behalf. But we can solve the riddle
with a myth—the myth of the Trojan horse. For the PLO is a Pan-Arab
Trojan horse, a gift that the Arabs have been trying to coax the West into
accepting for over twenty years, so that the West in turn can force Israel to
let it in the gates. The Arabs paint their gift up prettily with legitimacy, with
the pathos of its plight, with expressions of love for the cherished ideas of
freedom, justice, and peace. Yet no matter how it is dressed up to conceal
the fact, the ultimate aim of this gift remains: to be allowed within Israel’s
defensive wall, to be parked on the hills overlooking Tel Aviv, whence it
can perform its grisly task. Every inch of Western acceptance—the cover
stories, the banquets, the observer status, the embassies, and any territory
the PLO has ever been able to get its hands on—it uses to push it ever
closer to its goal. And while it is difficult for uninitiated Westerners to
imagine the Arabs destroying Israel as the Greeks laid waste to Troy, it is all
too easy for anyone familiar with Israel’s terrain to imagine, precisely as
Arafat has promised, that a PLO state implanted ten miles from the beaches
of Tel Aviv would be a mortal danger to the Jewish state.
That the West has succumbed to such a ploy is a remarkable failing, of
memory and of a sense of justice. For how long ago was it that Yasser
Arafat had Americans and Europeans murdered? That Israel, which knows
the PLO, has not averted the increasing acceptance of this Trojan horse is
also a remarkable failing: of communication, of concern for the importance
of ideas, and of common sense in seeing that it must take the truth straight
to the people who count—the citizens of the democratic nations. Israel has
no choice but to begin, even at this late date, to explain what the Trojan
peace proposed by the PLO means to Israel, and what it means for the
world. And Israel must explain what kind of a peace it demands instead.

The above chapter was written (with very few amendments) one year before
the Oslo Accords, in which Israel signed a preliminary peace agreement
with the PLO. The basis of the Oslo agreement was that Israel first would
hand over the areas populated by Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza
to the control of the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat. The Palestinian
Authority in turn would suppress in these areas anti-Israel terrorism, annul
the PLO Charter, and fulfill other commitments, such as ceasing anti-Israel
propaganda, thus heralding a new era of peace between the two peoples.
While Israel kept its part of the bargain, the Palestinian Authority did not.
While the PLO itself eventually refrained from terrorist attacks, the
Palestinian Authority enabled the enormous expansion of the terrorist
organizations of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others in the areas under its
jurisdiction. Contrary to the specific promises given to Israel in the Oslo
Accords (and yet again in the Hebron Accords of 1997, which I concluded
with Arafat, with the United States underwriting the agreement), the
Palestinian Authority did not dismantle the terrorist organizations, did not
collect their illegal weapons, did not extradite terrorists to Israel, did not
stop incendiary incitement to violence in the Palestinian-controlled media,
and did not cooperate consistently and systematically with the Israeli
security agencies to fight terrorism. In fact, on many occasions, Palestinian
Authority leaders, including Arafat himself, engaged in vitriolic calls for
violence, gave the green light for terrorism to the Hamas terrorists, and
lionized the suicide bombers who murdered scores of Israeli civilians,
calling these killers “heroes of the Palestinian nation” and naming public
squares after them.
The result was an unprecedented explosion of terrorism in Israel’s cities,
coming on the heels of the agreement to end all terrorism. In the two and a
half years after the Labor government signed the Oslo Accords to end all
terror, two hundred and fifty Israelis died in these savage attacks, equivalent
to ten thousand American dead. The people of Israel reached one
conclusion: This is not peace. While many agreed to continue with the Oslo
agreement, with all its flaws (Yitzhak Rabin described it as “being
perforated with more holes than Swiss cheese” because its central
framework had not been cleared in advance with Israeli’s military and
security chiefs), they nevertheless demanded two things: that Arafat keep
his commitments under Oslo and that Israel maintain the necessary security
defenses.
This is precisely the platform on which I was elected as Prime Minister
in 1996 and which my government proceeded to implement thereafter. We
have insisted that the Palestinians carry out their part in the agreement, most
notably to fight terrorism and to annul the PLO Charter. At our demand, the
Palestinian Authority annuled the passages in the PLO Charter calling for
Israel’s destruction. This was done in the presence of President Clinton to
make backtracking difficult. Our insistence of this symbolic act was the first
step on the long road of Palestinian acceptance of Israel, but many steps
remain. Equally, we have been prepared to withdraw from additional
territories, but not at the expense of Israel’s security. These demands are
consistent not only with the agreements we signed but also with common
sense. They are the minimal safeguards to assure us that the PLO has
abandoned the strategy of the Trojan horse, and they provide Israel with
secure and defensible boundaries in case it hasn’t.
OceanofPDF.com
6

TWO KINDS OF
PEACE

By now, readers must be asking themselves if the attainment of peace is at

all possible in this Middle Eastern morass of depravity and duplicity. If
Arab politics is so predisposed to violence and strife, if non-Arabs and non-
Moslems are hardly tolerated, if much of Arab society manifests an
incorrigible anti-Westernism that finds its focus in anti-Zionism, is it even
possible to conceive of, let alone achieve, a durable peace between Arab
and Arab, and between Arab and Jew?
I answer this question with a clear affirmative. This may sound
surprising in view of what I have presented thus far, but there is no need for
either surprise or despair. It is possible to reach peace in the Middle East,
provided that we know what kind of peace it is we are setting out to
achieve.
The most important step is to recognize that there are two kinds of
peace. The first is the kind we mean when we use the word peace in the
West: open borders, commerce, tourism, mutual exchange and cooperation
in areas such as science, education, culture, the environment, the
curtailment of hostile propaganda, the absence of fortifications and standing
armies, the elimination of military preparations and preparedness, and
above all, the absolute certainty of the absence of any aspiration for armed
conflict. This is the kind of peace that prevails in North America between
the United States and Canada, the United States and Mexico, and for that
matter between Canada and Mexico. It is the kind of peace prevailing
among the countries of Western Europe, where you can literally cross the
border from one state to another without noticing it until you actually have
to buy something. (With the introduction of a common European currency,
that too may be changing.)
This is not to say that there are no conflicts, even acute ones, among
these states. Canada regularly accuses the United States of polluting its
forests with acid rain that American industry produces across the border.
The United States has serious problems with drug smuggling along the
Mexican border, not to speak of the entry of millions of illegal immigrants
from Mexico into American territory. In fact, if you scratch the surface, you
will find a multitude of grievances over trade imbalances, environmental
problems, border controls, and the like harbored by each of these states
against each of its neighbors. In addition, there are often national jealousies
and bigotries, as well as historical rivalries whose psychological dust has
not yet settled and that whirl up again at any time.
Yet clearly these nations are irrevocably at peace with one another,
because just as clearly they will not resort to war to settle any of these
disputes. This is not because of a balance of power and the fear of the
response that armed action might elicit from their neighbors. Certainly the
more powerful among them would have no military difficulty in squashing
their neighbors. But the reason they will not resort to force is that it is
simply unthinkable—because they are immersed in a physical,
psychological, and political state of peace.
There is one attribute common to all countries that are in such a state of
peace: They are democracies. They share a system of values that is
inherently antagonistic to the initiation of the use of force. In this century,
modern democracies have shown a marked reluctance to initiate wars. This
is not to say that they have not responded to attacks, impending or actual.
But even these responses, whenever they required a full-scale war (as
opposed to a limited operation of a few days’ duration), have generally been
undertaken only with exceeding caution. Witness, for example, the
hesitation of the United States to enter World War I (joining only in the last
year of the war, 1917), World War II (its fleet in Pearl Harbor had to be
bombed first by the Japanese, despite the obvious threat posed by Hitler),
and the Gulf War (in which the United States undertook a campaign to
reverse naked aggression only after months of agonizing domestic debate).
Even the Vietnam War, which many believe the United States entered too
hastily, was characterized throughout by a marked ambivalence as to
whether the war should be prosecuted, and ended with an American
withdrawal as a consequence of growing domestic opposition. Similar
examples can be drawn from the democracies of Western Europe. Indeed, in
the postcolonial world it is difficult to provide examples in which
democratic nations have pursued unprovoked aggression against other
nations and have done so in full-scale war.
One reason for this is that democracies require the consent of the
governed to go to war, and that is not easy to secure. Parents will not readily
vote for a government that endangers their sons in unnecessary military
adventures. But there is a second reason connected to the first that is less
obvious and that relates to the inherent predisposition of democratic
societies against violence. After all, within a democracy, the use of force is
strictly limited and applied only against violators of the law. Within the law
there is more than enough room for conflict, competition, and contest. The
sharper a dispute, the more encompassing the scope of the disagreement,
the more likely it is to become an issue on the agenda of national elections.
In other words, such confrontations are settled by ballots, not bullets. Other,
lesser conflicts are resolved in parliamentary compromises or are
adjudicated in the courts. In fact, the whole idea of politics in democratic
states is the nonviolent resolution of conflict—not harmonious agreement,
not even tolerable disagreement, but the dynamic reconciliation of opposing
views and conflicting interests. The point is that this dynamic reconciliation
is always peaceful; otherwise, the democracy is endangered internally.
It is not surprising, therefore, that this built-in psychological inclination
toward “conflict resolution” (a social science jargonism that happens to be
useful in this case) is so ingrained in the minds of the citizens of
democracies and their governments that they are inclined to apply it to all
disputes. That is, democracies tend to resolve their external disputes the
way they resolve their internal ones: by argument, even by heated
argument, by cajoling, by applying various pressures, and very often by
compromise—but not by resorting to force in the first instance, or even in
the second or third. The peaceful tendencies of democratic governments are
therefore a product of the practical limits that their electorates impose and
of the moral constraints that the system of values shared by the entire
citizenry sets upon them.
The desire for this kind of peace—the peace of democracies—may be
common in the West, but it suffers from one main drawback: It is not
necessarily common elsewhere. In fact, since modern democracies have
evolved only in the last two centuries, this “internally enforced” peace,
deriving from built-in reluctance of the citizenry to go to war, is rather new
in the history of nations and in the history of conflict. (The warlike
disposition of some of the “democractic” city-states of ancient Greece does
not alter this fact, since neither their value systems nor the regimes in
question were comparable to those of modern democracies.) Until very
recently, we should remember, most of the world was composed not of
democracies but of despotisms of one shade or another, and despots are
under none of the inhibitions and constraints described above. They
certainly have no upcoming elections they have to consider carefully.
Worse, they exhibit innate tendencies opposed to those found in the
democracies. For dictatorships, too, tend to resolve their external disputes
the way they resolve their internal ones, except that here this tendency leads
them toward, and not away from, the use of force. The very definition of
dictatorship is the maintenance of internal power not by popular consent but
by the use of force or threats of violence, a principle that despots are
naturally inclined to extend to their foreign disputes as well. This is why in
the last century virtually all the major wars and most of the minor ones have
been launched by dictatorships.
This issue used to be hotly contested before the fall of Communism in
Russia. Many people in the West explained away the Soviet Union’s
aggressive politics as “defensive” in nature, as they did the aggression that
the Soviet Union encouraged among its clients around the world. This is no
longer a plausible argument, since even before the final collapse of the
Soviet Union, Soviet leaders occasionally admitted the unprovoked nature
of their military escapades, embarrassing their former apologists in the
West. Similarly, the attacks of international terrorism against the
democracies were initiated by a coalition of Middle Eastern and East
European dictatorships, and the full scope of their involvement in terrorism
is only now being revealed.
We can see the relationship between forms of government and the
proclivity for war by looking at the cases of countries that changed from
democracy to dictatorship and back to democracy. It is not happenstance
that when such countries had military governments, they tended to initiate
military action to achieve their national aspirations. The Falkland Islands,
however tenaciously most Argentineans claimed them to be Argentinean
territory, were physically seized when a military dictatorship ruled
Argentina. Its democratic successor later agreed to enter political
negotiations with Britain to resolve the dispute. Similarly, it was the regime
of the colonels in Greece that sparked the Greek-Turkish war over Cyprus
in 1975. The subsequent democratization of both Greece and Turkey has
not ended the dispute but has diminished the prospects for a military
confrontation. The armed conflict in and around Nicaragua, which seemed
malignant and interminable, disappeared virtually overnight with the
establishment of a democratic government in Managua.
This formulation may not be foolproof, and here and there an exception
may be adduced. But few would question the powerful pattern that emerges:
Democracies tend toward peace, while despotisms tend toward war. Does
this mean that a world inhabited by despotisms cannot have peace?
Immanuel Kant may have been the first to grapple with this question in his
essay “Perpetual Peace,” written in 1795, an age that saw very few
democracies. Kant stressed the predominance of the first factor I described
—the restraining influence of a concerned electorate—as the decisive factor
for keeping the international peace:

If, as is inevitably the case under [a democratic] constitution, the

consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to
be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in
embarking on so dangerous an enterprise. For this would mean
calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing
the fighting themselves, supplying the costs of the war from their
own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and,
as the crowning evil, having to take upon themselves a burden of
debt which will embitter peace itself and which can never be paid
off on account of the constant threat of new wars.
Without democratic government, argued Kant, it is child’s play to slide
into war over and over again:

But under a [despotic] constitution… it is the simplest thing in the

world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but
the owner of the state, and war will not force him to make the
slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces and
court festivals are concerned. He can thus decide on war, without
any significant reason, as a kind of amusement, and unconcernedly
leave it to the diplomatic corps (who are always ready for such
purposes) to justify the war for the sake of propriety… [The] glory
of its ruler consists in his power to order thousands of people to
immolate themselves for a cause which does not truly concern
them, while he need not himself incur any danger whatsoever. 1

Since the examples of Stalin and Hitler and their less successful would-
be imitators were not available to Kant (Napoleon was just starting out), it
must be admitted that his assessment of the problem was prophetically
precise. His solution was to advocate a world federation of free countries
strong enough to compel the arbitration of disputes instead of war. As the
League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, show, such
federations fall apart or are of limited use when they include dictators who
have the capacity to manipulate the organization in pursuit of their next
conquest.
The issue for democracies is therefore this: how to keep the peace when
they are engaged in conflicts with dictatorships. (For obvious reasons there
is far less need to ask how to keep the peace when they are in conflict with
another democracy.) The experience of the last two centuries tells us that it
is indeed possible to maintain peace under such conditions.
In the absence of the internal restraints that prevent democracies from
going to war, the inclinations of dictatorship in this direction can
nevertheless be controlled by the application of external constraints. Even
the most predatory of tyrants can be deterred from using his state to wage
war if it is clear to him that he will lose power, land, honor, control of his
country, and perhaps his own life if he persists in warmongering.
Historically, this idea has been given the name of “balance of power,” and
most recently, in the catchy slogan of the Reagan era, “peace through
strength.” But the underlying idea is the same, and it is sound. As long as
you are faced with a dictatorial adversary, you must maintain sufficient
strength to deter him from going to war. By doing so, you can at least obtain
the peace of deterrence. But if you let down your defenses, or if it is even
thought that you are letting them down, you invite war, not peace.
This was the tragic lesson of the first half of the twentieth century, and it
has been carefully applied to Western policy in the second half. The basic
difficulty for the democracies early in the century was in distinguishing the
peace of democracies from the peace of deterrence, and the greatest
tragedies of the century occurred when this distinction was not made. In
1925, the West pushed to have all military powers sign the Kellogg-Briand
Pact, which outlawed war forever. The democracies seriously believed that
they could refrain from maintaining their armed forces and that dictators
would do the same. While Japan and Italy, and later Germany, ignored the
treaty they had signed and pursued a military buildup that enabled them to
invade other countries, the West continued to abide by its pledge until the
eve of World War II.
In the face of Nazism, the democracies thus weakened themselves and
strengthened their nemesis through a policy of appeasement that gave Hitler
one military and political victory after another: rearmament, the Rhineland,
Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. Not only did each triumph
persuade Hitler even more firmly that the West would allow him the next
victory, he gained immense physical resources with which to build his war
machine: ten million more German citizens, a dramatically improved
strategic position, vast new natural resources, and excellent industries,
including weapons industries, all intact and ready to serve the Reich.
But most important were the psychological resources that Hitler
amassed: His string of bloodless victories over the most powerful countries
of the world allowed him to cast himself in the role of hero, as the
champion and hope for the future of the oppressed Germans (and of other
peoples, such as the Arabs). It was this image of genius and invincibility
that made opposition to Hitler impossible, that robbed his opponents of
their spirit to resist. At Nuremberg, German generals testified that in the
early years of Nazi rule they had planned to depose Hitler for fear that he
would ruin the country—but that his unbroken string of victories made it
impossible to make this case to the German populace, and they were forced
to leave him in power. 2
With the fall of Hitler’s Germany and the rise of Stalin’s Russia, the
West vowed not to make the same mistake again. The democracies
promptly formed NATO, a powerful defensive alliance against the
Communist menace, which had just conquered Eastern Europe and taken
over China. Ringing the Communist empire with a chain of defense
organizations, the American policy of “containment” was reviled as being
warlike, intransigent, and an obstacle to peace through successive
administrations from Truman to Johnson to Reagan. But it was nothing of
the kind. The unflinching American stand of the 1950s stopped the
Communist juggernaut in its tracks and reduced it to a seesaw battle of
ultimately fruitless skirmishes for toeholds in the Third World. It was the
staunch American stand of the 1980s that ultimately convinced the Soviet
leadership to give up all hope of a triumph over the West and to forge peace
with it instead. In dealing with tyrants, capitulating to their whims often
accelerates the descent into war. Standing firm in the face of dictatorial
demands is not an obstacle to peace, only to aggression.
Of course, since the fall of the Communist system and the
democratization of the European republics of the former Soviet bloc, the
peace of deterrence between the eastern and western parts of Europe is
rapidly being replaced with the peace of democracies. As soon as the
Warsaw Pact was dismantled, NATO began to change its form accordingly.
There is talk of orienting it toward a more political and a less military role,
and to the extent that it retains its military functions its members do not rule
out incorporating into it the countries of Eastern Europe, even the former
Soviet Union itself. Furthermore, disarmament efforts, which previously
had advanced at a snail’s pace under the totalitarian Soviet regime, are now
hurtling along with such speed and scope that some arms experts even
suggest slowing the pace a bit. For a democratizing Russia need not be
coerced into making such concessions; it wants to make them and readily
volunteers to accelerate the process.
We can see the same principle at work in the former totalitarian regime
of Germany, and in its relations with France, its principal antagonist since
the 1800s. In the period between 1906 and 1945, France and Germany
fought four of the bloodiest wars in history (the Napoleonic Wars, the
Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II). Millions of French
and Germans died. The border between Germany and France was fortified,
with standing armies facing each other. Yet today it is an open border, shorn
of any physical barrier. This development is often held as evidence that
peace is possible between antagonists of long standing. Indeed it is. But the
question we must ask is, when did such a peace become possible? It was
realized only after the last despotism in Germany, the Nazi regime, was
destroyed and replaced with a democratic government. Once this occurred,
Germany and France reverted automatically to the first kind of peace, the
peace of democracies. All the fortifications, troops, and weapons
disappeared from the Franco-German border, and after half a century of
solid German democratic institutions, they have not come back. I hazard to
say that things will stay that way as long as German democracy displays
firmness and vitality, unlike the weak and vacillating experiment of the
Weimar Republic between the two world wars. But should there be a
weakening of German democracy in the future and a concomitant rise of
antidemocratic forces in an increasingly powerful Germany, the peace of
Europe and of the entire world will surely be threatened. I do not use
Germany as an exclusive example. The same can be said of Japan, of
Korea, and of any other country with a despotic past and a powerful
economic, and hence political and military, future. Similarly, whether the
newly liberated peoples of the former Soviet Union will be able to avoid
escalating their nationalist antipathies and territorial grievances against one
another into overt wars—as has happened in Yugoslavia—will depend in no
small measure on their abilities to genuinely democratize. If they produce
authoritarian or dictatorial regimes instead, the chances of enduring armed
conflict among them will grow accordingly.

What we have learned in the twentieth century is that there are two radically
different policies that will work to achieve peace and sustain it, depending
on which kind of peace is at stake. In a society of democracies, such as
Kant envisioned, it is possible to work to strengthen all states
simultaneously, because the cooperation and goodwill of each state will in
the long run work to the benefit of all. This is the situation that pertains in
North America and Western Europe and that may now be spreading to parts
of Eastern Europe as well. International relations in these areas consist
almost entirely of devising cooperative schemes by which the peoples of the
respective states will benefit. In such a context, concessions and
appeasement toward friends are interpreted as signs of good faith, under the
principle of “one good turn deserves another.”
But since the policy of concessions does exactly the opposite when
dealing with dictatorships, encouraging dictators to demand more, a
different policy must be pursued toward such regimes. In these cases only
the peace of deterrence is possible, and the only means of achieving it is to
strengthen the democracies and weaken the dictatorships.
Here, in a nutshell, is the main problem of achieving peace in the Middle
East: Except for Israel, there are no democracies. None of the Arab regimes
is based on free elections, a free press, civil rights, and the rule of law.
Further, they show absolutely no sign of democratizing, thereby bucking the
almost universal trend toward liberalization evident in Eastern Europe, the
former Soviet Union, Central and South America, Asia, and parts of Africa
(which many predicted could never democratize). In an era when even such
hitherto cloistered despotisms as Mongolia and Albania are undergoing
democratic revolutions, the stubborn refusal of the Arab world even to
contemplate genuine democratization, let alone implement it, should send a
warning signal to the champions of democracy in Western Europe and
America that for now this region is capable only of the peace of deterrence.
But alarmingly, no such signal is being received in the West. While the
United States had a decisive role in pressuring the dictatorships of Latin
America to democratize, as well as some of the African governments such
as the Mobutu regime in Zaire; and while both America and Western
Europe put enormous pressure (from trade sanctions to public protest) on
the Soviet bloc and South Africa to observe human rights and allow
pluralism, no such pressure, none whatsoever, has been placed on the Arab
world. It seems that the crusading zeal of the democracies stops at the
Sahara’s sandy edge.
The first order of business for those in the West who are seeking a
Western-style peace for the Middle East is to press the Arab regimes to
move toward democracy. By this, I mean not only the tolerance of political
parties or even of majority rule but the introduction of such novel concepts
as individual rights, constitutional constraints on power, and freedom of the
press. These run completely contrary to the bogus calls for
“democratization” from the Islamic fundamentalists, whose first act upon
coming to power would be to crush such freedoms, as was done in Iran.
I, for one, summarily reject the view that Arabs are incapable of
democracy. Israel’s Arab citizens (much like Arab-Americans in the United
States) have adopted the country’s democratic norms, practicing democratic
politics in the town councils and municipal and national elections with all
the feistiness of Israeli politics and with none of the violence characteristic
in the Arab world. Yet similar norms cannot and will not develop in the
Arab countries without intense and systematic encouragement from the
West.
But if the West is unprepared to agitate for democracy in the Arab
world, it should at least bolster the deterrent capacity of the Middle East’s
democracies (there is only one) and work to weaken the power of the more
radical tyrannies. This is in line with the basic principle of building the
peace of deterrence: firmness toward tyrants, friendship toward democracy.
Yet so often when it comes to this part of the world, the hard-learned
distinction between the two kinds of peace evaporates, and the West instead
does precisely the opposite: pressuring Israel for concessions, and
feverishly appeasing the tyrants with every conceivable weapon and
resource. The most obvious example is Saddam Hussein, to whom the
American government insisted on supplying loan guarantees a few days
before his invasion of Kuwait. 3 In the subsequent war, the Americans had
to fight weapons systems that had been supplied by firms from France,
Italy, Britain, Austria, and Greece and tried to bomb Saddam out of fortified
bunkers that had been built by Belgians and to gird its troops against poison
gas supplied by German and Swiss companies. 4 Now the United States is
trying to ferret out of Iraq the multiple hidden nuclear weapons projects that
Saddam has built and continues to build, using technologies sold to him by
the West. His current ill repute, of course, seems to have induced some of
his Western suppliers to switch to selling their products to Syria, which was
rewarded for its passive support of the American war against Syria’s
archenemy Saddam.
Not only does the West build up Arab dictators, it refuses to link
granting them favors to any sort of democratic reforms or to an end to
human rights violations. When it does bother to think of criticizing
oppression in the Middle East, the West focuses on Israel, the solitary
democracy in the region, whose record compares more than favorably with
that of other democracies that have faced similar circumstances. Often
enough, Western officials will even stoop to asserting that because of its
behavior, Israel cannot be considered a democracy. But such condescension
merely displays the speaker’s ignorance: of riot control in Los Angeles and
Detroit, of antiterror tactics in Northern Ireland, of the postwar Allied
military administration in Germany and Japan. Israel is a democracy at war,
and its behavior compares favorably with that of any democracy under such
circumstances.
Even a cursory glance at events in the Middle East in recent years
reveals that the Arab governments obey the rules of the peace of deterrence
to the letter. In 1975, when the Shah of Iran was at the height of his power,
Saddam Hussein signed a nonaggression pact with Iran because the Shah
was so strong that there was nothing that Saddam could gain by aggression.
But after the fall of the Shah and the collapse of his once-formidable army,
Saddam tore up the agreement and invaded Iran, starting the nine-year Iran-
Iraq War. It was only after the first years of fighting, when he realized that
Iran would not be beaten, that Saddam sued for peace. But at this point the
Iranians under Khomeini—no democrats either—thought that they could
win and refused to call off the war. It was only after Saddam had managed
to beat back the Iranian counterattack for several years that Iran too sued for
an end to the fighting, and the peace of deterrence was restored along the
original border.
Kuwait, too, lacked the capacity to defend itself against Iraq’s
aggressive designs and perished until an American-led invasion brought it
back to life. Predatory Arab regimes are limited in their aggression either by
deterrence (the two largest predators, Iraq and Syria, have never actually
warred with each other because of mutual fear) or, when deterrence fails, by
someone with superior force physically rolling back their conquests. This
was the case with Libya’s invasion of Chad, which the French intervened to
repel in 1985, much as the British had helped Yemen repel the Egyptian
invasion in the early 1960s.
In other words, peace in the Middle East means “peace through
strength.” One way the West does acknowledge this fact is through its
massive arms sales to the nonradical Arab regimes. But this policy is
chimerical, as all the weapons in the world cannot transform flimsy Kuwait
and Saudi Arabia into nations capable of fending off a military state like
Iraq, which has an army twenty times the size of theirs. They can be armed
to the teeth, but they have no teeth—as the need for direct American
protection of these states in the Gulf War has proved.
What the arms-sales policy does do, on the other hand, is build the
arsenals for the future fanatics who may one day overthrow the existing
rulers—as Qaddafi overthrew the pro-Western King Idris of Libya, and as
Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran. Similarly, Arab tyrants may acquire
weapons that their neighbors gained, through pillage (as Saddam did in
Kuwait) or through pressure of other sorts to put the weapons at their
disposal. In the Arab world, therefore, the destination of massive infusions
of weapons today is not necessarily where they will end up tomorrow; nor
is their purpose today necessarily the purpose for which they will eventually
be used.
The only certain effect of these huge arms transfers is to bolster the
conviction of the Middle East’s radicals that the wherewithal to destroy
Israel does exist in the Arab world. The more weapons the Arabs receive,
the clearer it becomes to them that the only thing standing in the way of
victory over the Jewish state is Arab disunity itself. Many people in the
Arab world are well aware that Israel cannot possibly compete against the
arms buildup currently under way. To them, the only thing lacking is the
right strongman to concentrate all this power in his hands and bring it to
bear. The policy of massive sales of advanced weapons to governments in
the Arab world is thus an inducement for adventurers such as Saddam to
make a bid for forcible unification. It is therefore a policy that works
directly to undermine deterrence—and as such is diametrically opposed to
peace.
The Arabs justify this policy by insisting on Israel’s “aggressive” nature,
a claim that they attempt to support by pointing to the fact that Israel has
gone to war several times since 1948. It is hard to believe that anyone in the
West could swallow this line, especially after the Gulf War. Night after
night, Iraq dropped missiles on the civilian populations of Israel’s largest
cities, while Israelis huddled in rooms sealed against chemical attack,
waking their children to place them in protective plastic tents and gas
masks. The attacks were unprovoked, but at the request of the United States
and in the hope of depriving Saddam of an excuse to deflect the Allied war
effort, Israel did not retaliate—even when attacks on Tel Aviv caused the
deaths of Israeli citizens. There can be no more graphic a demonstration of
how serious the “Israeli threat” is and how “aggressive” Israel is.
Notwithstanding the false Arab claims, the United States has provided
Israel with generous military assistance ever since the Six Day War. This
has helped the cause of Arab-Israeli peace a great deal by contributing to
the gradual Arab recognition of the fact that Israel will not be so easily
destroyed. Reinforcing this perception and transmitting it to Arab regimes
and organizations that have not yet assimilated it are the keys to achieving a
sustainable peace between Israel and the Arabs.
We can see precisely this kind of process occurring slowly but surely in
Israel’s relations with the Arab states. In 1948 the Arab states thought they
would have no difficulty in wiping out six hundred thousand Jews on their
thin sliver of land. In 1967 that sliver was still tempting, and Syria and
Jordan joined Egypt in trying to strangle Israel. But this attempt, too, failed.
The Six Day War immeasurably improved Israel’s strategic position. The
addition of the mountainous buffer of Judea and Samaria for the first time
removed Israel’s population centers and airfields from the possibility of
direct ground attack. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur
in October 1973, Jordan had to consider whether to join the fray. Faced with
the prospect of fighting across the Jordan Valley and up the steep
escarpment of the Israeli-held Samar-ian and Judean mountains, Jordan
chose to sit out the war, sending only a token contingent to join the Syrian
forces on the Golan.
Hence, while in 1948 five Arab armies invaded Israel and in 1967 three
Arab armies fought, in 1973 only two Arab states attacked. And in the 1982
campaign against the PLO in Lebanon only one, Syria, entered into a
limited war with Israel. Further, in the Gulf War in 1991, it was only Iraq,
having promised to “burn half of Israel,” that struck with missiles, but it did
not attempt any ground engagements—promoting one observer to describe
it as “the half-effort of a half-country.”
This represents a promising trend, provided we understand what forces
brought it about. (If we do not, we could easily bring about its reversal.)
Why has this decline in the number of countries attacking Israel taken
place? It certainly has not happened because the Arab world as a whole has
changed its opinion of Israel. Yet King Hussein’s willingness to go to war in
1967 stands in sharp contrast to his unwillingness to do so just six years
later. Whether or not he went to war was determined by which side of
Israel’s protective wall (the West Bank) his army was on when the war
broke out. Likewise, the results of the Yom Kippur War strongly influenced
Anwar Sadat in his decision to make peace with Israel. He may have
restored Arab “honor” (by not losing to Israel for a couple of weeks), and
he may have even earned the opportunity to speak of the Egyptian “victory”
in that war, but he knew full well that despite the surprise attack on Israel
that was launched on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Israeli army
soon turned the tables and reached the outskirts of Cairo and Damascus
within twenty-one days.

The declining number of warring Arab states reflects the underlying reality:
Peace between Israel and its neighbors is the second kind of peace, the
peace of deterrence. The probability of achieving it is directly proportional
to Israel’s ability to project a strong deterrent posture—the stronger Israel
appears, the more likely the Arabs will be to agree to peace. There is
nothing surprising about this. It is the classic doctrine of deterrence. It was
not lack of desire that prevented the Soviet Union from attacking the West
but the Soviet fear of retaliation. Similarly, what has decreased the
likelihood of a joint Arab assault on Israel is not the absence of hostility but
the fear of failure.
This deterrent effect not only prevents those Arabs who are in a state of
war with Israel from actually going to war, it helps keep those Arabs who
are in a state of peace from reneging on it. This is why the single peace
treaty between Israel and an Arab country, the Camp David Accords,
provides for a larger buffer space between Israel and Egypt. The
demilitarized Sinai is sufficiently vast that if Egypt were to violate the
peace with Israel, Israel would have time to mobilize its defenses and
counterattack.
In the Middle East, security is therefore indispensable to peace; a peace
that cannot be defended is one that will not hold for very long. The
relationship between security and peace is often presented in reverse—for
Israel alone, of course. Nobody would dream of telling Kuwait that its
security lies in having peace treaties with Iraq. It had such treaties, and they
were totally useless when Iraq came to believe it could swallow Kuwait
whole. But those who confuse the peace of democracies with the peace of
deterrence nonetheless tell an Israel beleaguered by heavily armed
dictatorships that it can take inordinate risks with its security for the sake of
“peace” because “peace is the real security.” On this Henry Kissinger has
remarked that all wars start from a state of peace. This is especially true of
the Middle East, which is littered with inter-Arab peace treaties and
friendship accords, not one of which ever prevented a war.
If over the next generation the Arab world internalizes the fact that
Israel is here to stay, this might produce a psychological shift in its attitude
toward Israel’s right to exist. The Arabs, like other people, will not bang
their heads against a stone wall forever. But if the wall itself is dismantled,
if Israel’s most vital defenses are suddenly stripped away, the great progress
that has been made toward peace over recent decades could be reversed at
once.
In one of his books, Max Nordau described a well-known experiment
that the German zoologist Karl August Möbius designed to study the
relationship between predator and prey. The experiment was conducted with
two fish:

An aquarium was divided into two compartments by means of a

pane of glass; in one of these a pike was put and in the other a
tench. Hardly had the former caught sight of his prey, when he
rushed to the attack without noticing the transparent partition. He
crashed with extreme violence against the obstacle and was hurled
back stunned, with a badly battered nose… He repeated his efforts
a few times more, but succeeded only in badly hurting his head and
mouth.

Slowly, wrote Nordau, the pike began to realize

that some unknown and invisible power was protecting the tench,
and that any attempt to devour it would be in vain; consequently
from that moment he ceased from all further endeavors to molest
his prey. Thereupon the pane of glass was removed from the tank,
and pike and tench swam around together… All [the pike] knew
was this: he must not attack this tench, otherwise he would fare
badly. The pane of glass, though no longer actually there,
surrounded the tench as with a coat of mail which effectually
warded off the murderous attacks of the pike. 5

No matter how compelling the reasons, there is no point in attacking

where there is no hope of success. This elementary understanding is no less
applicable to human behavior. It is precisely such an understanding that has
been slowly evolving in the attitudes of the radical Arab regimes toward
Israel. But it cannot be said that they have reached the stage of having fully
assimilated the reality of Israel’s existence. Deprived of its equivalent of the
glass partition, Israel might become the target once again of pouncing
predators. This partition, Israel’s defenses, is made up of several important
elements: the physical and human resources available to protect the country,
and the material and psychological assets deployed for the common
defense. But without a doubt, central among them is the physical partition
that separates Israel’s cities from the vast eastern-front armies of Syria, Iraq,
Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The separation consists of a wall: the dominating
heights of the Golan and the mountains of Samaria and Judea, commonly
known to the world as the West Bank, whose military value I now turn to
discuss.
OceanofPDF.com
7

THE WALL

On October 6, 1973, I was in my second year as an undergraduate at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although this was Yom Kippur, the
news traveled fast, reaching Cambridge by early afternoon.
“Haven’t you heard? War’s broken out. Egypt and Syria have attacked.”
Several of us, Israeli students studying at MIT and Harvard who were
reserve officers in the Israeli army, said good-bye to our friends and quickly
drove to Kennedy airport in New York to catch the first plane back. But that
did not prove to be simple. Israeli reservists were streaming to Kennedy
from all corners of the United States and Canada. The first Boeing Jumbo
had already left, every seat taken. There was fierce competition to go on the
second plane. I used all the pull and connections at my disposal (what we in
Israel call protektsia), calling Motta Gur, Israel’s military attaché in
Washington, and everybody else I could think of. Since I had served for five
years as a soldier and officer in the special forces, I was finally able to get
on board. The plane was bursting at the seams with doctoral students,
computer specialists, physicians, and physicists, some of whom I knew but
had not seen for years. For too many of them, this would be their final trip.
On the plane, there was a serene confidence that within a few days, a
week at most, the war would be over with an Israeli victory. But things did
not turn out that way. The Egyptians and Syrians achieved impressive initial
gains with their surprise attack. Syria sliced through the entire width of the
Golan Heights, and the forward Syrian tanks almost reached the bridges
across the Jordan and into the Galilee. The Egyptian army in the south
crossed the Suez Canal, overran the fortified Bar Lev Line, and reached as
far as the foothills of the Mitla and Gidi passes, some twenty miles east of
the canal. Worse, both armies were equipped with new and unfamiliar
antiaircraft and antitank missiles, which took a punishing toll from Israel’s
air force and a less severe but nonetheless frightening toll of Israel’s armor.
In Israel everything was in confusion. Two days into the war, the
reservists had not yet been fully mobilized—and some of the troops were
still arriving from abroad. By the time I reached my unit, it had already
scrambled to the two fronts. We formed a makeshift force of “returnees,”
equipping ourselves with armed vehicles and jeeps, and made our way to
the front facing the Egyptian army When we reached the front the
hemorrhage had been stanched and the lines stabilized, in preparation for
the counterattack across the Suez Canal that was to come days later under
General Ariel Sharon.
Our job was to protect the armored formations at night from Egyptian
heliborne commandos. We alternated between reconnoitering for marauding
helicopters and guarding the perimeter of the tank encampments. Inside the
perimeter the tank crews, exhausted from the fighting and from the endless
job of tending to the tanks, would get a few hours of fitful, grimy sleep. On
one occasion, in the pitch darkness that was enforced in the camp, I literally
bumped into a buddy I hadn’t seen in years, and wild rejoicing ensued. But
more often I learned, usually from news delivered in hushed tones, of
friends who had been killed in the first spasm of fighting. I remembered
many of them as children, and I wondered if their families had received the
news. Many more were to die in the counterattack, including soldiers from
my own unit whose framed photographs would later fill up the memorial
wall in the unit’s modest library. But these were early days, and there was
soon a tense lull across the front, the kind that comes after the first violent
exchanges in any firefight.
In the Golan Heights, where we were next taken, we found much the
same thing. In fierce fighting, the Israeli units, outnumbered ten to one by
the advancing Syrians, had managed to hold the line until the reserves
arrived. The Israeli command of the Golan at Nafah had to vacate the sea to
open terrain when Syrian tanks reached the fenced perimeter. Crews were
having their tanks shot out from under them, and the surviving soldiers
jumped into new tanks to continue the fighting. Entire brigades were wiped
out. The officers were the first to be mowed down as they exposed
themselves above the turrets in order to direct the battle. In several brigades
the command reverted to sergeants and corporals, who joined the remnants
of other units to fight with incredible, desperate tenacity, trying to ward off
what Moshe Dayan warned could be “the fall of the Third Temple.” Later,
the ashen-faced survivors—the regulars just out of their boyhood and the
reservists who were clerks, teachers, and farmers in private life—would
describe the feeling that at once overwhelmed and sustained them, that they
held the weight of Jewish history and the very fate of the Jewish people in
their hands. If they were to lose here, all would be lost. The line held.
Once the other reserves had arrived in full, the Israeli armor went onto
the offensive and quickly rolled into Syria. On the southern front, the Israeli
columns that had counterattacked and crossed the canal encircled and
trapped the Egyptian Third Army. Here the Arabs pleaded with the Soviets
and the Americans to stop the war, which they did with a Security Council
ultimatum. At war’s end, the Israeli army was twenty-five miles from
Damascus and eighty miles from Cairo.
Israel had achieved a stunning reversal. But the cost was staggering: In
the pulverizing battle to keep the front from collapsing entirely in the face
of overwhelming numbers, the army had sustained 2,552 dead—the worst
losses since the War of Independence. This was proportionately as though
the United States had taken three times the losses of the eight-year Vietnam
War in a period of three weeks.
There was an important lesson here for both Israelis and Arabs. On both
the Egyptian and Syrian fronts, the Arabs had managed to penetrate as
much as twenty miles before Israeli forces finally checked them. If the war
had begun not on the post-1967 lines but on the pre-1967 lines, and if the
Arab armies had advanced the same distances, Israel would have ceased to
exist. The Egyptians would have reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv from the
south; the Jordanians (who no doubt would once more have caved in to the
temptation to join in the attack) would have reached the sea, splitting the
country in two; and the Syrians would have cut deep into the Galilee.
Israel’s army was able, albeit by a hair’s breadth, to prevent defeat in the
face of a surprise attack under the most auspicious conditions the Arabs
could muster, including their throttling of the Western economies with an
Arab oil embargo. By hiking up oil prices and denying the world economy
the fuel it needed to run, the Arabs had mounted extraordinary international
pressure on Israel, and Israel’s relations with dozens of nations were
severed for two decades. When the United States sought to airlift
emergency assistance to Israel during the three weeks of the war, it could
not find a single country in Europe that would let the American supply
planes land and refuel there. (In the end, Portugal agreed to allow the planes
to refuel in the Azores Islands.)
But despite such enormous advantages, the Arabs were routed within the
month. That they had so little to show for an onslaught stacked so
decisively in their favor was a crucial factor in inducing Anwar Sadat
finally to come to terms with Israel. And indeed, in the aftermath of the
Yom Kippur War, Israel and Egypt ultimately negotiated the Camp David
Accords of 1979, the first peace agreement between an Arab state and
Israel. While Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, it was agreed that the Sinai
would remain for the most part demilitarized, with the bulk of Egyptian
forces staying on the western side of the Suez Canal. Three zones were
established in the Sinai delineating permissible Egyptian troop levels. An
elaborate monitoring system was established, including a multinational
observer force, to ensure that the demilitarization was observed.
The fact that the Sinai is so large (more than twice the size of Israel and
the West Bank combined) meant that any violation of the demilitarization
agreement on the part of Egypt would leave Israel with sufficient time and
depth to intercept an incoming Egyptian force before it reached the border.
Since the only kind of peace that can endure in the Middle East is a peace
that can be defended (the peace of deterrence), the only kind of peace treaty
that can be sustained is one that allows adequate defense against its possible
violation. Because of the availability of the Sinai as a buffer, it was
relatively easy to achieve such conditions along the Egyptian border,
Israel’s southern front. On other fronts, however, the situation was much
more complicated.

To understand the prerequisites for keeping peace on Israel’s eastern front,

facing Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, one must first understand the building blocks
of Israel’s military defense. Israel’s ability to deter aggression depends on
three central factors: its military strength relative to that of the Arabs; the
warning time it has to mobilize its forces; and the minimum space that its
army requires to deploy in the face of potential threats.
With regard to Israeli military strength, the Arab advantage in
armaments has been mounting steadily against Israel for years. Since the
Yom Kippur War the Arabs have spent more than $150 billion on arms and
military facilities. 1 Saudi Arabia alone annually spends as much on its
military as a major industrialized nation such as Great Britain. 2 Syria now
has more tanks than the German army used when it invaded Russia. 3 To
this arsenal are added the F-15S, AWACs planes, and Sidewinder missiles
of Saudi Arabia, and the Hawk missiles and advanced artillery of Jordan—
all supplied by the United States. To be sure, Israel has morale, training, and
other qualitative edges over the Arabs, but with the vast purchases of
weapons by the Arab regimes, the Middle East is fast reaching a point
beyond which Arab quantity translates into quality.
Military strength is also a function of manpower. In 1999, Israel’s
population is roughly six million, as opposed to thirty-five million for the
eastern front states of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. This advantage in population
allows the Arab regimes to field larger armies, and it means that they can
afford to keep most of their forces on active duty—unlike Israel, most of
whose army consists of reservists who must be called up to fight. On the
eve of hostilities in 1973, Israel’s usual contingent of sixty tanks on the
Golan was bolstered by the arrival of the Seventh Armored Brigade,
bringing the total to 177 tanks. The Israeli force was nonetheless vastly
outnumbered by the Syrian active-duty force of 900 tanks. Israel’s defense
therefore requires a capability of deterring or defending against an attack in
which its troops are initially outnumbered by a margin of five or seven to
one. This enormous Arab advantage in arms and manpower, which Israel
cannot possibly match, makes the two remaining factors in Israel’s security
equation even more critical.
For Israel, warning time is a precondition of survival. Israel needs
sufficient time to mobilize the civilian reserves that make up the bulk of its
army. This consists of calling them up from their homes all over the
country, assembling them in units, issuing them weapons and ordnance,
briefing them, and then transporting them to the lines. To mobilize several
hundred thousand soldiers simultaneously in this way is a herculean task,
and it cannot be performed in less than forty-eight to seventy-two hours.
(The Syrians have no analogous problem because their standing army is
almost as large as Israel’s entire reserve force, 4 and they therefore need
only a few hours’ notice to go to war.) Until mobilization is completed, the
survival of the entire country is literally in the hands of the few thousand
soldiers on active duty on the front at any given time. If they were to fail to
hold the front until the arrival of reinforcements, the battle would sweep
into the streets of Israel’s towns and cities.
The situation in the air is even worse. For a jet fighter, the flight time
between Jordanian air bases and Israeli population centers is five minutes,
and it is only ten minutes from Syrian bases—while the absolute minimum
time required to scramble an interceptor is three minutes, assuming that it is
waiting in a condition of highest alert. This means that without advance
warning of an attack, Israel’s coast and airfields could be bombed without a
fight. Such a scenario is so fearsome and so plausible that during the Gulf
War, Israel was forced to keep a large portion of its fighter force in the air.
In many parts of Israel during the Gulf War, you could step out of your
house and see combat aircraft circling overhead during prolonged periods—
for an entire month and a half. Moreover, this was only possible because the
Americans had announced in advance the starting date of the war. Such
readiness is impossible against a surprise attack, so the air force relies
heavily on surveillance installations that hope to shave seconds off the
period before Israel becomes aware of an impending blow.
Among the most important surveillance positions in the entire Israeli
defense system are the “early-warning stations” in the mountain peaks of
Samaria. These bases are high enough to be able to monitor troop
movements and air base activity over the mountains in Amman and the
other major cities in Jordan. At the same time, the high ground interferes
with surveillance efforts aimed at Israel. If a hostile country were ever to
gain control of these mountains, the situation would be reversed: The Arabs
would be afforded unlimited surveillance of the Israeli coastal plain, while
Israel would lose much of what it has in the way of an early-warning
system. In facing a potential threat from Saddam Hussein, for example,
these stations are critical and irreplaceable. Today, Israel’s surveillance
positions on the crest of the Samarian mountain ridge can tip off Israel to an
attack; if they were in Arab hands, the same positions would be reporting to
Saddam about the activity of Israel’s forces instead. (Jordan, for example,
has regularly shared surveillance intelligence with Iraq.)
While airborne and satellite reconnaissance is improving, these sources
of intelligence are notoriously vulnerable to bad weather and maintenance
problems. They are still prohibitively expensive, and in the case of early-
warning aircraft, they can be lost to enemy missile fire. No nation relies
exclusively on airborne or space-based early-warning and this is true for
Israel as well. For Israel, there is still no substitute for a good mountaintop.
During the critical first seventy-two hours of war, one of the most
precious commodities the handful of defenders on the line can have is
space. The Israeli army must have minimal physical room to deploy men
and hardware at the outbreak of war. Already squeezed in the country’s
present boundaries, it could not do so effectively if Judea and Samaria were
lopped off, leaving the army to deploy in the streets of Jerusalem and on the
outskirts of Tel Aviv. Worse, almost the entire zone of mobilization and
deployment would be subject to artillery bombardment, which can be
effectively directed at most of Israel’s major cities from the hills of the West
Bank. Once astride this mountain range, an enemy could easily take aim at
airfields, mobilization centers, crucial highways, power plants, and key
industries. Such intervention at the outbreak of a war would spell
substantial disruption of the entire mobilization network. By physically
shielding the coast from attack, the wall of the West Bank is able not only to
save the lives of the Israelis living below but to afford the Israeli army the
time it badly needs to get the troops to the front (see Map 9).
This is the crucial point to understand about a military buffer space:
Space buys time. The distance the enemy has to cover before it can enter
Israel’s populated areas, inflict enormous civilian casualties, and conquer its
cities translates into the time that Israel has to mobilize. The farther the
advancing column has to travel, the more likely it is that air harassment and
resistance on the ground will be able to stem the advance and thereby
purchase time for the mobilization and deployment of the reserves. The
space available for such delaying tactics is called “strategic depth,” and
NATO’s forces in Germany counted on a depth of 150 miles for tank battles
involving roughly the same number of tanks that Israel has to face along its
eastern front. 5
In addition, the topography of the Judean and Samarian mountains is
particularly well suited for the delaying actions necessary for Israel’s
defense. To an invader from the east, this range is an extraordinary obstacle
that must be overcome to reach the Israeli coastline. Such an invader enters
the West Bank in the Jordan River Valley, which is the lowest point on
earth, more than a thousand feet below sea level. He then has to fight his
way up a cliff face that rises a daunting three to four thousand feet within a
space of seven to nine miles. This is terrain that, with the exception of a few
tortuous routes, is virtually impassable to tanks and other heavy equipment.
No amount of electronic gadgetry can replace a stone wall thousands of feet
high as an obstacle to war. The West Bank thus provides Israel not only
with strategic depth but with strategic height.
In withdrawing from the Sinai, Israel took upon itself considerable risks,
but not ones that immediately jeopardized its existence. For if the Egyptians
were to violate the peace treaty by moving substantial forces into the Sinai,
it would take these forces several days to cover the 120 miles from the Suez
Canal to the border of Israel. This would give Israel sufficient time to
mobilize its ground forces and intercept the Egyptian expedition in the
desert before it reached the Israeli border. By contrast, the distance from the
West Bank to the Mediterranean is only ten miles. Were Israel to vacate the
West Bank, hostile forces could cover these distances in a matter of hours.
It is often difficult for non-Israelis to grasp just how tiny Israel is and
what kind of military odds it faces. I suppose this difficulty arises from the
string of Israeli victories, extracted from the teeth of extinction. These tend
to obscure the fact that one defeat for Israel means the last defeat. Further,
because of their lack of familiarity with Israel’s geographical and
topographical realities, people in the West have a great difficulty
understanding that Israel’s position vis-à-vis the Arabs could change from
one of relative strength to one of extreme vulnerability by shifting the
border “just a few miles.”
How is it possible that the physical circumstances of the country that the
press and television crews of the entire world cover perhaps more than any
other are so little understood by millions? After all, the map of Israel
appears routinely on the television nightly news. But there’s the rub: The
map, with no reference to scale, is usually designed to emphasize Israel and
its “occupation” of the West Bank, which the viewer naturally believes to
be, not thirty miles wide, but a substantial piece of real estate—like, say, the
west bank of the Mississippi, which stretches a thousand miles to the
Rockies.
American visitors to Israel are often astonished at its tininess. In this
they echo Mark Twain, who observed that “the State of Missouri could be
split into three Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for
part of another—possibly a whole one.” 6
It was only during the Gulf War, when the focus on Iraq required a
larger map of the region that showed Israel to be the minuscule thumbprint
that it is, that many Western viewers gasped in amazement. But not even
that conveyed Israel’s microscopic size compared with the Arab world. The
territory of the Arab countries is far larger than the land mass of the United
States. Israel in the pre-1967 boundaries is smaller than the state of
Maryland, and the West Bank is a quarter that size. 7 To put it another way,
if the Arab world were imagined as a football field, Israel could easily fit
between the goalposts on one end of the field. Its population is six million,
less than the population of greater Los Angeles, as compared with over 150
million Arabs. Further, the Arabs’ fantastic petrodollar wealth has allowed
them to invest unlimited funds in buying the latest weapons and building
formidable arsenals. Consequently, Israel’s army is one-sixth the size of the
combined armies directly facing it and one-seventh the size of those of the
entire Arab world. 8 If ever in the history of nations there was a clear-cut
case of David facing Goliath, this is it.
Israel has had to face enemies on its eastern front who in short order
could field thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, and rockets, and
millions of men, reminiscent of the eastern front faced by NATO. But
whereas the distance between the Warsaw Pact lines and the English
Channel was a thousand miles, Israel’s current width from its eastern front
to the sea is forty miles. This is bad enough, but Israel is now being
seriously asked to reduce that distance to ten miles. Against such odds, it
could not survive.
I have a special kind of familiarity with these distances. It is an Israeli
dictum that you get to know the country through your feet, a cliché
immortalized by endless blisters that Israelis acquire during military
service. When I was in the army, we used to hike the distance “from sea to
sea” in a day’s march. We’d fill up a canteen with sea water from the
Mediterranean at five in the morning and empty it into the Sea of Galilee at
five in the evening—twelve hours to cross the country on foot from west to
east. This one-day trek crosses Israel in its present width. Its previous width
lent itself to a brisk run, which is what we used to do when I entered the
army a few weeks after the Six Day War. The paratroop base where I did
basic training was situated right opposite Tuklarem, on the just-erased
Jordanian border. We used to run from the base to the sea in a little over an
hour.
How can someone living in America or Britain or France comprehend
the vulnerability of a country of such minuscule dimensions? A plane trip
from Montreal to Miami along the narrower north-south dimension of the
United States takes three hours. I recently flew into Israel with the same
kind of jetliner, which was flying east and circled back for the landing at
Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. From the time it crossed the Mediterranean
shoreline to the moment it passed over the old border, two minutes had
elapsed. By the time it reached the turn (coming up over Jerusalem),
another minute had elapsed. If it had continued eastward it would have
crossed into Jordanian air space two minutes later. In other words,
compared to the three hours it takes to fly across America’s narrower
dimension, it takes five minutes to do so in Israel. A jet fighter can cover
the distance in three.
How to defend such a speck of territory against forces that approach the
size of NATO’s is a tactician’s nightmare. It is a question that was once
asked of me in the heart of Africa. The head of an African state with which
Israel had no relations had invited me on a private and unofficial visit. After
graciously receiving me, the African leader explained that he was no enemy
of Israel, but as he was a friend of the Palestinians, he wanted to know why
we could not just give them the West Bank and be done with it. I took one
of the paper napkins that were served with the coffee and proceeded to draw
the country’s dimensions, the West Bank, and the forces arrayed against
Israel in the east. “Mr. President,” I said, “you’re a military man. Here, why
don’t you draw the minimal borders necessary for our defense?” He said he
saw my point.
In fact somebody did draw a map. That somebody was none other than
the American Joint Chiefs of Staff. On June 29, 1967, eighteen days after
the Six Day War, the then U.S. secretary of defense, Robert McNamara,
asked the joint chiefs to submit a position paper outlining the minimal
territory Israel would need to protect itself, “without regard to political
forces.” The Pentagon proceeded to draw a map based on purely military
considerations, well before political ones were introduced under Arab
pressure to muddy up the simple military facts. The map is reproduced as
Map 11, and the report accompanying it is in Appendix G. It recommends
that Israel retain four-fifths of the territories (not counting the Sinai). This
includes most of the West Bank and all of the Golan Heights. The only area
that the Pentagon thought Israel could afford not to annex was the eastern
slope of Samaria facing the Jordan River. This was the opinion of the
objective, apolitical military planners of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Twenty-one years later, in 1988, one hundred retired U.S. generals and
admirals petitioned the American administration, arguing that the
Pentagon’s conclusion from 1967 “is even more valid today“:
3. 1920 The Jewish National Home Under British Administration

4. 1922 The Jewish National Home After Creation of Transjordan

5. 1947 UN Partition Plan

6. 1949 Armistice Lines After War of Independence

7. 1967 Armistice Lines After Six Day War

8. 1992 Israel Before the Oslo Accords

9. Israel’s Strategic Vulnerability 1949–1967
10. Israel’s Exposed Shoreline 1949–1967
11. The Pentagon Plan for Israel’s Security Needs June 18, 1967
12.1999 Israel After the Oslo Accords

[Without the territories, a] dwarfed Israel would then be an

irresistible target for Arab adventurism and terrorism, and
ultimately for an all-out military assault which could end Israel’s
existence….
If Israel were to relinquish the West Bank… it would have
virtually no warning of attack…. Virtually all the population would
be subject to artillery bombardment. The Sharon Plain north of Tel
Aviv could be riven by an armored salient within hours. The quick
mobilization of its civilian army… would be disrupted easily and
perhaps irreversibly. 9

The view of the generals was forcefully elaborated upon in November

1991 by Lieutenant-General Thomas Kelly, who had served as the director
of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War and who
visited Israel later that year:

It is impossible to defend Jerusalem unless you hold that high

ground…. [I] look onto the West Bank and say to myself, “If I’m
chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, I cannot defend this land
without that terrain.”… I don’t know about politics, but if you want
me to defend this country, and you want me to defend Jerusalem,
I’ve got to hold that ground. 10

Of course, the position of successive administrations in Washington has

not been based on such cold strategic calculations. The U.S. government
cannot escape the intense politicization of the issue that has taken place
since 1967, and the version of Israel’s defense needs to which the United
States is officially committed is skewed accordingly. This is why a great
many American officials insist on ignoring their generals and asserting that
an Israel ten miles wide can count portions of the Mediterranean in its tally
of the strategic depth available for its defense, evidently believing that the
Israeli army can walk on water. But there is a limit to the number of
miracles an army can perform, and Israel’s soldiers have performed more
than most. No country should ask its army to continue to do the impossible,
especially since it would be hard pressed to perform even the ordinary
military tasks that security dictated while standing on the head of a pin.
This is obvious enough even to nonmilitary observers who have become
acquainted with Israel’s geography. Their common sense tells them what
every military planner knows: Never prepare for the previous war. But here
Israel is being asked to prepare to fight the Six Day War again, a conflict
that preceded the previous war by several wars—except that the conditions
that prevailed before June 5, 1967, and that allowed Israel to escape death
then are gone forever. For one thing, a repetition of the surprise Israeli air
strike that demolished all the Arab air forces in 1967 is impossible, because
since 1968 Arab military aircraft no longer sit on open runways but are
sheltered underground in fortified bunkers. For another, after 1969 the
Arabs acquired highly effective antiaircraft missiles, which took a deadly
toll of Israel’s air force in 1973. And with the improvement of Arab battle
strategy, the long hesitation that allowed Israel the time to mobilize its
troops, which was the fatal error of the Arab coalition on the eve of the Six
Day War, will certainly not occur again. Further, the Arab armies have
increased three- and four-fold in size. Their slow-moving infantry divisions
of the past have become rapidly moving armored and mechanized
formations. Arab artillery is no longer towed but is self-propelled.
But whereas the Arabs have plenty of space to deploy their massive
armies around Israel’s borders, a truncated Israel would find it extremely
difficult to field its army, which has also been enlarged since 1967, in the
small stretch of space between the edges of Tel Aviv’s suburbs and the
border. It is therefore absurd to assume that since Israel survived a previous
attack from the boundaries of the Six Day War, it could necessarily do so
again.
One way I have tried to get this point across to foreign visitors is by
flying with them from Sdeh Dov, the small airport on the Tel Aviv beach, to
the pre-1967 border a few miles to the east. The helicopter traverses the
suburbs of Tel Aviv and reaches the last house of the last suburb, Kfar Saba,
in minutes. From there it flies over a small field, then reaches the Arab
town of Kalkilya across the old border. Before the 1967 war, the distance
between Kfar Saba and Kalkilya used to be a number of miles. But Kfar
Saba has grown, and so has Kalkilya. “That,” I say, pointing to the few
hundred yards that currently separate the last house in Kfar Saba from the
first house in Kalkilya, “is what most of the world intends to be Israel’s
strategic depth.”
Beyond Kalkilya, we can see the wall rise up: the mountains of Samaria,
which from the air look like a castle fortress looming up over the coast.
Then I ask the pilot to fly due west to the coast, heading directly for
embassy row on Tel Aviv’s beachfront Hayarkon Street. If the visitor is
American, the pilot flies us over the American embassy; if British, over the
British embassy, and so on. The round trip takes all often minutes. When
the visitor is a diplomat from a country that is particularly dogmatic about
having Israel “return the West Bank,” he can easily imagine himself
working in an embassy all of five minutes’ helicopter flight from the new
border that his government insists Israel should have.
On one occasion I was explaining the significance of this tiny distance
to an American senator. The pilot became very excited and joined in on my
side of the discussion. It turned out that he was the brother of a prominent
civil servant who was identified with Israel’s dovish Labor party.
“Tell him who you vote for,” I said to the pilot, guessing.
“Labor,” he answered. “But what’s the difference? We all want to live.”

While this determination never to return to the pre-1967 borders is shared

by most Israelis, a small minority has emerged that does not have the same
qualms about withdrawing to these lines. Since this minority exercises
considerable influence in Israel’s media and politics (it is very potent in the
left), its argument should be paid due attention. To counter the menacing
geographic reality, the members of this school of thought argue that in the
age of missiles the amount of territory Israel holds does not matter. For if
the Arabs possess projectiles that can fly over a territorial defense and hit
Israel’s cities and military bases, what use is territory? This simple
formulation has great appeal and is receiving much currency. After all,
wasn’t Israel attacked by Iraqi Scud missiles fired from a thousand miles
way? What difference does it make whether it controls or does not control
the West Bank?
However appealing, this argument is based on a fallacy Missiles do not
win wars. They can do damage, even terrible damage, but they do not
conquer territory. The intense bombing of North Vietnam by the United
States caused considerable destruction, but since the American army did not
invade North Vietnam and take possession of its territory, the United States
could not win the war. Similarly, the devastating American air strikes
against Saddam’s troops in Kuwait and Iraq, with everything from smart
bombs to cruise missiles, could not by themselves win the war. Ground
action remained indispensable to physically drive Iraq’s army from Kuwait.
Israel might be attacked from the air, but it cannot be overrun and
conquered without being physically overrun and physically conquered. And
this can be done only by armies possessing tanks, mobile artillery, and
mechanized infantry that can move into a territory and take possession of it.
The distance they have to cover and the terrain they must negotiate at the
start of the fighting are vital factors in determining the outcome of battles.
Distance may not make much difference to missiles, but to an armored
division it makes a world of difference whether it must cover 12 miles or
120 miles to reach its target, and whether the ground it must cross is flat or
mountainous. (In point of fact, larger distances do diminish the
effectiveness of missiles as well, though in a different way The same Scud
missiles that were fired at Israel from distant Iraq are now in the possession
of nearby Syria, which would be able to pack twice the explosive payload
into each warhead because of the shorter distance the missile must travel to
reach its target.)
The physical barrier that the West Bank places before incoming
divisions is of particular value in the age of missiles. Israel must mobilize
the bulk of its army to ward off a threat, but in the age of missiles we must
assume that the time needed for such mobilization will increase. For
missiles, even unsophisticated ones like the Iraqi Scuds, can hit population
centers with ease, thereby disrupting the flow of Israeli civilians to their
mobilization centers. As one Israeli reserve officer told me, “If missiles rain
down on my city, I’ll rush to my daughter’s school to see if she’s alive
before I head for my unit.” And as the missiles get more deadly and more
accurate, they can be pinpointed on the mobilization bases themselves and
on the road intersections that lead to them, thus further delaying the
deployment of Israeli troops toward the front. If, during such an aerial
bombardment, enemy ground troops were to advance toward Israel’s
borders, Israel would be hard pressed to bring the reserves to the front to
oppose them. Initial terrain conditions would therefore be even more vital
for Israel’s small standing army as it seeks to hold off the assault of the far
larger Arab forces until the arrival of reinforcements. Israel would need
more rather than less space to absorb an attack and buy for itself the
precious time it needed to regroup. Thus, the protective wall of the West
Bank provides invaluable time and space.
The age of missiles has introduced not only long-range missiles but also
short-range missiles. For these weapons, too, territory is a vital
consideration. I am referring to such weapons as SAM-7s and shoulder-
fired American Stinger missiles that can down helicopters and fighter
aircraft with devastating effectiveness. Just how effectively they can do this
had been seen in the war in Afghanistan by the mid-1980s. The mujahideen
had been all but crushed by the Soviet army and air force when the United
States decided to supply them with Stingers. This was the turning point of
the war. A few years later, Soviet air power in Afghanistan was almost
obliterated by peasants firing sophisticated missiles from mountaintops.
Israel has recently had to contend with thousands of youngsters throwing
stones on the hills of Samaria. Imagine the situation if those youngsters
were replaced by thousands of PLO fighters carrying not rocks but rockets,
which could shoot down Israeli military and civilian aircraft. Israel’s
international airport, after all, is two miles from the West Bank, and all
except one of the Jewish state’s military airfields are within range of
various short-range missiles that could be easily placed on the West Bank,
crippling Israel’s military precisely as the mujahideen crippled the Soviet
military. Of course, such weapons were not available to the Arabs when
they controlled the West Bank twenty-five years ago. Today courtesy of
years of Soviet supplies, they are a key component of their arsenals. And
there is a growing fear in the West that the deadly Stingers that were
supplied to the Afghanis, Kuwaitis, and others have been making their way
into the hands of terrorists—such as the PLO.
The lesson for a small country like Israel is this: In the age of missiles
territory counts more, not less. Long-range missiles increase the need for
mobilization time, and short-range missiles can destroy strategic targets
within their reach. For both reasons, the control of a contiguous buffer area
becomes more, not less, important. This is the conclusion of the Jaffee
Center for Strategic Studies, whose left-leaning sympathies stand in sharp
contrast to its military recommendations:

Leaving politics aside for a moment, we can maintain that though

surface-to-surface missiles cannot be stopped by territory,… we do
have to recognize that missiles cannot win a war…. Territory is
especially vital when it permits our forces to “buy” time: in case of
a surprise attack, this enables us to mobilize our reserves and bring
them to the front lines before the aggressor succeeds in taking any
part of our vital area. 11

Israel does not ask for additional territory, only that the present strategic
depth (and strategic height) of the West Bank be left intact. Of course, for a
country the size of the United States, ceding even a large parcel of territory,
like a corner of North Dakota, would not appreciably endanger the
country’s security. There would be plenty of spare strategic depth left (and
yet Americans find it impossible to imagine ceding any part of America to
anyone). But imagine an enemy state across the Potomac, within sniper
range of the capital—and you begin to understand why Israelis feel that
territory contiguous to strategic targets is vital as well (see Map 9).
We can now understand the full danger that a Palestinian state on the
West Bank would pose. Such a state could certainly have weapons,
including sophisticated ones, brought into it. How could Israel prevent it?
The common response that advocates of Israeli territorial concessions make
is that the areas vacated by Israel will be “demilitarized.” But traditional
concepts of demilitarization cannot be applied here, for two reasons. First,
demilitarizing the area against the introduction of smaller weapons is
impossible. Unless Israel physically controls the entrances to the West
Bank, it cannot possibly prevent the smuggling of missiles and other
weapons the size of a suitcase. These can be brought in by trucks or even
cars, or flown in by civilian aircraft. Even today, when Israel fully controls
access to the West Bank and strip-searches the vehicles entering it, it cannot
prevent the smuggling of various weapons into the territories. Imagine what
would happen if it were to vacate the territories and such controls were
removed. In an open, empty, unpopulated area like the Sinai,
demilitarization can be enforced against the entry of tanks or artillery pieces
into an area, and if small weapons were somehow smuggled in, they would
be too far away from any target to be effective. But demilitarization is
woefully ineffective against the miniaturized weapons of today and
tomorrow, which can be smuggled into a populated territory such as the
West Bank with relative ease, threatening vital Israeli ground and air
installations. Demilitarization of the territories is therefore not an answer.
Where hostility is so deeply rooted, arms so readily available, and distances
so compressed, a “demilitarized zone” is wishful thinking.
Second, demilitarization could not be relied upon to protect Israel for
political reasons. For it is clear that any space from which Israel withdrew
would rapidly be filled by a PLO state, no matter what political figleaf were
chosen to obscure the fact (such as “confederation” with Jordan). The
advocates of the demilitarization of the West Bank are therefore talking
about demilitarizing an entire sovereign state—something unheard-of in the
annals of nations, and for good reason: It cannot be sustained.
Demilitarization in certain zones is hard enough to maintain for prolonged
periods. For example, the demilitarization of the German Rhineland
following World War I was intended to protect France against future
German aggression. But as neither Britain nor France was prepared to go to
war to enforce it, demilitarization proved to be no barrier to remilitarization
when Hitler chose to abrogate the commitment.
The fate of past promises of partial demilitarization by Arab states is no
more encouraging. King Hussein of Jordan had agreed to American
conditions that he not deploy on the West Bank the Patton tanks, which the
United States had supplied him, but in the weeks before the Six Day War
these very tanks were moved into position facing Jerusalem anyway
Similarly, Egypt broke its arms-control agreement with Israel not to move
antiaircraft batteries to the Suez Canal prior to the Yom Kippur War. Since
dictators have no qualms about violating demilitarization as the need arises,
it makes no sense to agree to demilitarization in cases in which a sudden
remilitarization would jeopardize the country’s security.
Yet none of these efforts at partial demilitarization compares to the
demilitarization of an entire country. Israel could not strip-search every
truck and every car that went into a hypothetical Palestinian state on the
West Bank. Nor, obviously, could it intercept every civilian plane that came
from Libya or Afghanistan, landing it first in Tel Aviv, then taking it apart
piece by piece before letting it continue on its way. What country would
allow such gross interference with its international commerce and
transport? The Palestinian state would claim the right that every state claims
to control its borders. Furthermore, it would demand the right of self-
defense—without which it would immediately fall prey to the intrigues and
intimidation of other Arab states and terror organizations—which would
very soon mean the establishment of its own army Further still, it would
demand the removal from its soil of any encampments or enclaves of a
neighbor’s army
Is there any doubt that a Palestinian state would have the backing of the
entire Arab world and of many in the international community for such
demands? The fervent desire by some to abandon the West Bank cannot be
a substitute for clear thinking, and the first order of clarity is to recognize
that the concept of demilitarization may sound like a useful panacea to offer
an Israel anxious about its security (some Israelis are willing to prescribe it
for themselves), but it cannot hold over time, indeed not even for a short
time. Even if some Palestinian Arabs could be persuaded initially to accept
demilitarization, this commitment is not one that could be expected to last
long, and Israel would find itself unable to reassert its military authority in
the area. Crossing into the West Bank in reaction to a violation of
demilitarization would mean crossing an international frontier that could
well be guaranteed by other powers. Israel would then risk triggering a full-
scale Arab-Israeli war and international sanctions.
The impossibility of maintaining demilitarization is even more evident
when one considers the strategy of the PLO’s Phased Plan: Get a PLO state,
arm it, launch terrorist attacks from it to provoke an Israeli response, prod
the Arab world into defending Palestine, and thereby set off the decisive
confrontation. In addition to the Palestinian forces that would fire rockets
from the mountaintops on a vulnerable Israel below, one cannot rule out the
entry of Arab troops from across the Jordan to assist their brethren. They
might even be flown into the West Bank hilltops in helicopters before the
actual outbreak of hostilities. If this were done at night in communication
silence, as was the case in the Yom Kippur War, Israel could find itself with
a second “October surprise.” This time, however, the Arab starting lines
would not be on the relatively distant Suez Canal or on the Golan, but a few
miles from Israel’s cities.
How Israel would avert such a disaster from the pre-1967 lines is not
obvious. If Israel were to completely withdraw from the West Bank, it
would have to field a much larger standing army, since the length of pre-
1967 Israel’s convoluted border with the West Bank is more than 3.5 times
the length of the present straight border along the Jordan River. 12 The
resultant financial cost of facing a greatly extended front would add a
crushing burden to Israel’s economy and deprive it of much-needed
manpower. But even then there is no certainty that, in the stitch of space
between a Palestinian state and Israel’s cities, the Israeli army would find
sufficient territory to deploy and fan out for battle. A PLO state on the West
Bank would be like a hand poised to strangle Israel’s vital artery along the
sea. No wonder the overwhelming majority of Israelis reject it and see in it
a mortal threat to their country.
When advocates of an Israeli withdrawal are presented with all these
facts, they usually fall back on one final argument: Israel can always
unsheath a nuclear sword, thereby ending all threats to its existence. But
Israel has promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the
Middle East, and even if it were to change its policy and introduce them, it
is unclear how even this would serve as a deterrent. Considering the tiny
distances involved, every movement of Palestinian troops could constitute a
serious threat to Israel. But would Israel really be willing to threaten nuclear
war every time a Palestinian battalion changed its position? Would nuclear
weapons be used if an Arab column crossed into Israeli territory on the
outskirts of Petah Tikva, or would they be reserved for the actual arrival of
such a force in downtown Tel Aviv twenty minutes later? Israel’s
hypothetical nuclear deterrent would suffer from lack of credibility, for who
would start a nuclear war over a border crossing? But at the same time, it
would require a dangerously sensitive hairline response, for in a ten-mile
strip, every border crossing would threaten to snuff the country out of
existence.
The idea of reducing Israel to an indefensible strip along the
Mediterranean would mean that it would have to resort to non-conventional
means to defend itself, for it would be left with precious few options. It is
not an accident, therefore, that even the most extreme territorial doves are
nuclear hawks (they cannot conceive of any other defense once they part
with the territory), while the territorial hawks are nuclear doves. Naturally, I
prefer to be counted among the latter. The idea of laying a nuclear tripwire
along Israel’s borders so that it and it alone is the real guarantor of Israel’s
security is sheer folly. Further, what would you bomb? Nablus? East
Jerusalem? Besides the horrible devastation that such an attack would
unleash, the radioactive fallout would poison the entire region, killing
Arabs and Jews alike. Atomic radiation does not recognize the “Green
Line,” Israel’s pre-1967 border.
The threat of Arab dictatorships armed with nuclear weapons is a real
and growing one, to Israel and everyone else. There are policies that Israel
can pursue to reduce that threat and to deter would-be attackers from
making good on it. They merit the detailed discussions they receive inside
Israel’s defense establishment, but I will refrain from going into such
matters here. It is, however, important to dispel one patch of fog: There are
those who argue that in an age of nuclear weaponry, conventional military
concepts such as strategic depth become irrelevant. This position is flawed
and dangerous. The fact that Israel may face a nonconventional threat to its
life is no reason for it to leave itself open to a conventional threat as well.
The fact that a country may have to defend itself against one possible
danger that may destroy it does not mean that it should subject itself to
intolerable danger on another front. In the heyday of the Cold War, the
United States did not disarm its massive conventional forces facing the
Warsaw Pact, even though it had plenty of nuclear missiles to destroy the
Soviet Union if the need arose. The wisdom of this policy was amply
demonstrated by the fact that in all the various wars that the United States
has fought since World War II, nuclear weapons were never once used—
and traditional conventional factors determined the outcome every time.
Although by no means universal, the broad consensus in Israel is
therefore that the army must retain military control of the defensive wall of
the West Bank. It is fashionable to claim that many of Israel’s generals, or at
least those who lean to the left, disagree with this conclusion. While there
are a handful who do, most emphatically do not. Like other Israelis, they
may support Israel’s withdraw from politically controlling the Arab
population, but almost all favor an Israel military presence. This
contradiction was captured in a round-table discussion with eight left-
leaning former Israeli generals in the newspaper Ha’aretz in 1988. Each of
the generals explained in turn that he favored withdrawal from the
territories, but he insisted that the IDF would have to retain control of some
aspects of the terrain so that his own particular branch of the service could
function effectively in case of war. By the time the generals were finished
itemizing what Israel would need to keep to defend itself, there was little
left to negotiate, and the correspondent for the newspaper, not exactly
known for its hawkish tendencies, had no choice but to point this out:

All of you favor withdrawal, but the conditions are [retaining] air
space, early-warning stations, the right to hot pursuit, the Jordan
River Valley, Israeli cantons…. What Arab partner would be
willing to enter into negotiations at all with conditions like these? 13

Indeed, the truth is that for Israel to protect its cities, it must retain
military control over much of the territory west of the Jordan River. The
Joint Chiefs had it right in 1967. They reported the unvarnished truth.
Only in the case of Gaza is the principal danger for Israel political rather
than strategic. Whereas the West Bank and the Golan are high ground that
completely dominates the country below them, Gaza is flat and small. It
was used, and could be used again, as a base for terrorist attacks and
Katyusha bombardment, but this danger would be reduced if the Sinai
remained demilitarized and Egypt remained faithful to the peace.
Consequently, the principal danger in the case of Gaza is that if Israel were
to simply walk away from it, the vacuum would be filled instantly by a PLO
ministate—which would use this toehold to press for application of the
Palestinian Principle to the Arabs of the West Bank and the Negev Bedouin
community just across the fence. What this means in terms of future peace
arrangements is discussed in Chapter 9. Suffice it to say here that for Israel
to defend itself it must keep effective military control of the area west of the
Jordan River, as the Pentagon planners said in their political survey.
Can military control be separated from political sovereignty for very
long? This is the difficulty with all the proposals put forward on behalf of
relinquishing the territories. The debate between Israel’s left-wing and
right-wing generals over the question of territorial compromise is ultimately
not a military debate. There is a rough strategic consensus as to what kind
of military presence must be retained in the territories in order to make
Israel defensible. Rather, the debate is one over political judgment: What
kind of sovereign arrangements must exist on the ground in order to make
Israel’s defense workable? Some have asserted that one could have an
Israeli military presence on sovereign Arab soil. But the Egyptians refused
to allow the retention of a single Israeli air base in the Sinai, and there is no
reason to expect that any other Arab government would behave any
differently. Similarly, some have asserted that Israel could permanently
control their space over an Arab country. All such schemes would break
down in the face of Arab domestic pressure—just as American control over
the Panama Canal and British authority in Suez broke down in the face of
Panamanian and Egyptian pressure—leaving Israel hopelessly vulnerable to
powerful neighboring armies. If you wish to control a territory as minuscule
as the West Bank, where the strategic points and the population centers are
in close proximity to one another, you have to control it both militarily and
politically. If you give up political control, you will ultimately have to give
up military control. This is the challenge and difficulty of reaching peace
with added security with the Palestinians. They should have all the political
powers to run their lives but none of those political powers that could
threaten Israeli security and survival.
In addition to such defense-related issues, there are other security issues
that must be taken into account. One of the most critical of security
arguments pertaining to Judea and Samaria is seldom, if ever, discussed in
the foreign media: water. No country can survive without water, and in the
Middle East there is not much of it to go around. Like its neighbors Egypt,
Syria, and Jordan, Israel is a country that is in severe water deficit, annually
consuming substantially more water than is replenished from natural
sources. The situation is worst in Syria, whose capital, Damascus, is often
without running water at night. 14 A real peace in the region would require
regional efforts to conserve water and develop alternative sources. Without
such efforts, the only thing that is likely to come of the severe and
worsening crisis is more conflict. This has been most evident in the case of
the Tigris and Euphrates, which carry fresh water from the mountains of
eastern Turkey to Syria and Iraq downstream. Turkish moves to dam and
otherwise develop the headwaters have met with outraged and bellicose
reactions from its southern neighbors in recent years, and the prospects look
no more promising for the future. 15
In Israel’s case, fully 40 percent of the available fresh-water resources
consists of ground water drawn from aquifiers wholly or partially under
Judea and Samaria. This is a supply without which Israel would be brought
to the brink of catastrophe, and no “solution” to the dispute over the
territories can be resolved without this possibility being forestalled. The
question is how? The problems that would be caused by having the most
vital of all resources under the control of an enemy do not stop at water
blackmail, a frightening enough scenario in itself. The underground water
supply could be contaminated in ways that could spread epidemics and even
destroy the aquifier permanently, either on purpose or by accident. Given
that one of the weapons of the intifada was the burning of forests all over
Israel, and that Saddam was willing to fight America by pouring millions of
barrels of crude oil into the gulf and setting oil wells afire, Israel cannot rule
out the possibility of deliberate diversion and pollution of its water supply.
(Significantly, the first attacks that Yasser Arafat’s Fatah ever launched in
the 1960s were attempts to destroy the National Water Carrier, the Israeli
pipeline that provides water from the Golan and Galilee to parched
communities and farms all over Israel.) 16
But accidental poisoning is no less a concern. The improper treatment of
sewage and other industrial and urban waste-disposal problems have an
immediate impact on the fresh-water reserves under the ground. Poorly
sealed sewers are capable of leaking toxic wastes into the aquifier for years
without detection, as are factory disposal sites. Preventing such deadly
seepage requires both a high level of governmental and public awareness,
and the dedication of substantial funds to inspection, monitoring, and
repairs. If it is difficult to muster the necessary concern over environmental
poisoning in the most advanced countries in the West, it is clear that
handing such fearsome responsibility to an impoverished and hostile Arab
regime on the West Bank would be an act of unalloyed foolishness, and no
Israeli government could seriously be expected to do it.
When one considers the crucial factor of strategic depth and height, the
topographical and geographical obstacles to invasion, and the control of the
precious water resources offered by this vital mountain ridge known as the
West Bank, one thing becomes apparent. It is the same stark conclusion that
one reaches on a clear day standing on the ridge of the Samarian mountain
of Ba’al Hazor, seeing at once the entire breadth of the country, with the
Jordan River Valley to the right and the Mediterranean to the left: that
western Palestine, the present territory under Israel, is one integral
territorial unit, dominated by one mountain range that overlooks one coastal
plain. For any nation this would constitute a tiny physical platform on
which to build and protect its physical life. To subdivide this land into two
unstable, insecure nations, to try to defend what is indefensible, is to invite
disaster. Carving Judea and Samaria out of Israel means carving up Israel.
The considerations of strategic depth, geography, and water are also
crucial in considering the future of the Golan Heights, and they render
concessions on that front extremely dangerous as well. The Golan, which
dominates the headwaters of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee,
controls another 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. Like the West Bank, it
too constitutes a natural barrier shielding Israel, rising nearly four thousand
feet above the farmland in the Hula Valley of northern Israel. The Golan is
also similar to the West Bank in that it is tiny—no more than sixteen miles
at its widest point—as opposed to the Sinai, whose 120-mile expanse
offered relatively flat approaches to Israel and not a drop of water. Thus,
while Israel could afford to be extremely generous in ceding the Sinai in its
peace with Egypt on the western front, there is no margin for similar
concessions in the Golan and the West Bank on its eastern front.
This becomes readily apparent when one considers that the conventional
military threat to Israel’s existence can come from three potential sources:
the large and powerful armies of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The well-armed
Egyptian army is separated from Israel by the Sinai desert, which affords
Israel sufficient strategic depth should Egypt ever choose to violate the
peace treaty with Israel. The Iraqi army, although reduced in strength after
the Gulf War, remains a substantial threat and is in the process of being
rebuilt. It is separated from Israel by a buffer area roughly the same size as
the Sinai—the Jordanian desert. Although the Jordanian army that patrols
this empty waste is a good one, it is too small to constitute a serious threat
to Israel on its own. Israel has always said publicly that it considers the
entire territory of Jordan to be a buffer area, and that it would under no
circumstances allow “foreign forces” to enter Jordan—a warning with
which King Hussein was never too unhappy, since it shielded him from his
Arab neighbors, just as it protected Israel itself. Thus during the Gulf War,
Israel issued repeated warnings that if the Iraqi army entered Jordan for any
reason, this would be considered an act of war. (A similar Israeli warning to
Syria in 1970 caused the invading Syrian army to withdraw from Jordan.)
Most Israelis oppose the insertion of a PLO state on the West Bank
because they do not want a state allied with Iraq and the most radical forces
in the Arab world on their doorstep. Such a state would nullify the whole
value of the buffer area on Israel’s eastern front.
But whereas Israel presently possesses sufficient strategic depth against
potential threats from the south (Egypt) and east (Iraq), it has no such
strategic depth in the case of the Syrian threat in the north. It must be
remembered that the Syrian army is one of the largest and best equipped in
the world. It is permanently deployed on the broad plateau between
Damascus and the Golan Heights, a mere sixteen miles from the Israeli
breadbasket of Galilee, and another thirty miles from Haifa and the Israeli
coastal plain. While the Egyptian and Iraqi armies face a journey of days to
reach Israel from their current emplacements, the Syrians could reach the
first Israeli population centers in a matter of hours. The only military
obstacle in their way is the necessarily far smaller Israeli force that is
entrenched on the superior terrain of the Golan Heights. For ever since the
Six Day War in 1967, Israel has looked down at the Syrians, rather than the
other way around. From the precipices of Mount Hermon and Mount Avital,
Israeli soldiers can observe the Syrian installations spread out beneath them.
It is these commanding positions that make up for the lack of strategic
depth. This is the reason that the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin
fought bitterly to retain this terrain in the 1974 disengagement agreement
with Syria—much to the consternation of the U.S. administration, which
found it difficult to understand what difference “a few miles” made.

Yet Israel is often told that, its security and water requirements
notwithstanding, it is bound by international agreement to cede the
territories to the Arabs. The Arabs invoke UN Security Council Resolution
242, which was adopted in the wake of the Six Day War and to which Israel
has always been a full subscriber. This resolution, it is often claimed,
expresses the will of the international community that Israel withdraw from
Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Gaza. By now the actual wording of the
text and the intentions of its authors have for the most part been forgotten.
As in so many other things, the version of the resolution frequently
discussed by “experts” on television has more to do with the intent of
Israel’s adversaries than with fact.
As written, Resolution 242 was originally about peace. It called for an
immediate “termination of all claims or states of belligerency”; for the
“acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political
independence of every state in the area”; and for the recognition of the right
of those states “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries
free from threats or acts of force.” (The full text can be found in Appendix
F.) Thus the bulk of the resolution is a demand by the international
community that the Arab states make peace: by ending the state of war
against Israel, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and assuring that Israel’s
borders will be secure ones. That this was the central concern of the
resolution was confirmed by Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the
UN, who was one of the authors of the resolution:

It calls for respect and acknowledgement of the sovereignty of

every state in the area. Since Israel never denied the sovereignty of
its neighboring countries, this language obviously requires those
countries to acknowledge Israel’s sovereignty. 17

It took twelve years for Egypt to comply with the Security Council
resolution. In explicitly refusing to make peace with Israel, other Arab
states flout the dictates of Resolution 242 to this day Yet with unsurpassed
hypocrisy, they reverse causality yet again and claim that it is Israel that is
in violation of a resolution with which they themselves have yet to make the
slightest gesture of compliance. Their accusations are based on an
additional clause in Resolution 242, which calls for “withdrawal of Israeli
armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Israel, claim
the Arabs, has never obeyed the directive to withdraw from “the territories.”
Why should they make peace, when Israel is still in possession of the West
Bank, the Golan and Gaza? They conveniently choose to forget that any
Israeli withdrawal was supposed to follow the signing of peace agreements,
which the Arab states adamantly refuse to sign.
Viewed through the distorting prism of Arab propaganda, it is indeed
possible to believe that the intention of the UN was unmistakably to oust
Israel from “the territories,” and that the resolution says only “territories”
(leaving out the word the) due to a printer’s error. In fact, as the very people
who drafted the resolution attest, evacuating Israeli forces from the
territories was not the central issue, and the the was left out on purpose so
that Israel could negotiate to keep a portion of the land for security reasons.
Hence Arthur Goldberg: “The notable omissions in regard to [Israeli]
withdrawal are the word ‘the’ or ‘all’… the resolution speaks of withdrawal
from occupied territories, without defining the extent of the withdrawal.” 18
This is also the view of Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the UN,
who co-authored the resolution with Goldberg:

We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the [pre-] 1967 line.

We did not put the “the” in. We did not say all the territories,
deliberately…. We all knew that the boundaries of [pre-] 1967 were
not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a ceasefire line of a
couple of decades earlier…. We did not say that the [pre-] 1967
boundaries must be forever. 19

Eugene Rostow, who was U.S. undersecretary of state for political

affairs when the American administration took the initiative to draft the
resolution, confirms the position of the authors:

Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338… rest on two principles.

[First,] Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors
make peace. And [second,] when peace is made, Israel should
withdraw to “secure and recognized borders,” which need not be
the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949. 20

But has Israel withdrawn from “territories occupied in the conflict”? It

certainly has. The Sinai Peninsula, returned in the context of Israel’s 1979
peace treaty with Egypt, is on the Israeli scale a very substantial piece of
property: twenty-five thousand square miles on which Israel had built major
airfields, developed luxury hotels, and discovered oil. In all, the Sinai—ten
times bigger than Judea and Samaria—constituted no less than 91 percent
of the territories captured by Israel in 1967. Nor does the resolution say in
any of its clauses that Israel should have to withdraw on every front (Sinai
and Gaza, the Golan, and the West Bank). This was left, precisely as
intended by the framers of the resolution, for negotiation between Israel and
its Arab neighbors.
Yet all of this misses what is surely the major moral principle embedded
in the diplomatic wording of Resolution 242: that the Arabs should make
concessions for peace. That is, if the resolution recognized an Israeli right
to secure borders and furthermore did not necessarily expect Israel to return
to the borders from which the war had started, this means that the framers
of the resolution thought it was reasonable for the Arabs to sacrifice some
of their territorial ambitions for the sake of a secure peace.
And why not? What kind of a “compromise” is it for one side to
renounce one hundred percent of its claims and the other side to renounce
zero percent? What kind of a moral position is it to say that the failed
aggressor should be given back all the territory from which he launched his
attack? And what kind of deterrence could Israel be expected to maintain if
the negative consequences of Arab aggression against it were found to be
nil for the Arab countries? Indeed, the position underlying Resolution 242
is as refreshing as it is just. Untouched by the propaganda of the decades
that followed it, it states what any rational person would have said from the
start: that peace benefits both sides, and so both sides have to share the
costs. Secure boundaries for Israel are a prerequisite for peace in the Middle
East. The Arabs have demonstrated again and again that the ten-mile strip
on which Israel lived before 1967 could not constitute a secure boundary.
This means the Arabs have to give something up for peace. There has to be
an Arab leader courageous enough to be willing to forgo some or all of the
Arab claims to the remaining land. So far none has been found. With the
support of most of the world, the Arabs continue to demand every inch of
the territories from which they attacked Israel.
Arab military strategy is simple: Squeeze Israel into the pre-1967
armistice lines, subjecting it once more to a state of intolerable
vulnerability. Arab political strategy is to harness a forgetful West to this
cause. But as President Lyndon Johnson said shortly after the Six Day War:
“We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between
them that will assure each the greatest security It is clear, however, that a
return to the situation of June 4, 1967, will not bring peace.” 21
Whatever their differences, nearly everyone in Israel—whether Labor or
Likud, government or opposition—agrees that Israel must not go back to
these boundaries, and that it must not relinquish strategic control of Judea
and Samaria. * This point was made forcefully by Labor’s Moshe Dayan in
August 1967 (two months after the capture of Judea and Samaria) at a
ceremony commemorating those who fell in the desperate defense of
Jerusalem in 1948—when the Arab armies occupied the strategic wall
surrounding the city and starved and bombarded the city of Peace without
mercy: “Our brothers, we bear your lesson with us.… We know that to give
life to Jerusalem, we must station the soldiers and armor of [the Israeli
army] in the Sh’chem mountains [Samaria] and on the bridges over the
Jordan.” 22 Thus, whatever views Israelis may have as to how to establish a
modus vivendi between Arab and Jew in the territories, few question the
necessity for continued Israeli military control of this vital space.
In those parts of the world where peace is the norm, borders, territories,
and strategic depth may appear unimportant. In the Middle East they are of
decisive importance. Given the specifics of the West Bank, the slogan “land
for peace” is singularly inappropriate: To achieve a sustainable peace, Israel
must maintain a credible deterrent long enough to effect a lasting change in
Arab attitudes. It is precisely Israel’s control of this strategic territory that
has deterred all-out war and has made eventual peace more likely.
OceanofPDF.com
8

A DURABLE PEACE

Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the
future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility
for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and
fundamentalism has now been compressed into one person—namely, me.
My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my
policies, the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would
immediately and permanently have settled themselves.
While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much
power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is
not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel
and its Arab neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison
with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the
attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader
peace in the region will remain threatened by the destabilizing effects of
Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm
themselves with ballistic missiles and atomic weapons.
Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace
with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must be built on
foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first
casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built upon half-
truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled
away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace
must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic
antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem
between the Arab world and the Jewish state.
Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border
by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s
existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel
must conduct with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a
territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories
are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to
destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world have still not had an
irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel
becomes sufficiently weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction
would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs
might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that
Israel has become vulnerable enough to attack.
That Israel’s existence was a bigger issue than the location of its borders
was brought home to me in the first peace negotiations that I attended as a
delegate to the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. In Madrid, the
head of the Palestinian delegation delivered a flowery speech calling for the
cession of major Israeli population centers to a new Palestinian state and the
swamping of the rest of Israel with Arab refugees, 1 while the Syrian foreign
minister questioned whether the Jews, not being a nation, had a right to a
state of their own in the first place. 2 (And this at a peace conference!)
Grievances over disputed lands and disputed waters, on which the
conference sponsors hoped the participants would eventually focus their
attention, receded into insignificance in the face of such a primal hostility
toward Israel’s existence. This part of the conference served to underscore
the words of Syria’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, who with customary
bluntness had summed up the issue one year earlier: “The conflict between
the Arab nation and Zionism is over existence, not borders.” 3
This remains the essential problem nearly a decade later. The fact that
the Syrians place such immense obstacles before the resumption of peace
talks with us, and the fact that the Palestinians resisted for more than a year
my call to enter fast-track negotiations for a final settlement, underscores
their reluctance to make a genuine and lasting peace with us. To receive
territory is not to make peace. Peace requires that you also give something
in return, namely arrangements not to use the land that is handed over to
you as a future staging area for attacks against Israel. Equally, peace
requires that our Arab partners educate their people to an era of mutual
acceptance, something we have failed to see in many parts of the Arab
world.
To begin resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, one must begin here. The
Arabs must be asked forthrightly and unconditionally to make their peace
with Israel’s existence. The Arab regimes must move not only to a state of
nonbelligerency but to a complete renunciation of the desire to destroy the
Jewish state—a renunciation that will gain credibility only when they
establish a formal peace with Israel. This means ending the economic
boycott and the explosive arms buildup, and signing peace treaties with
Israel. The Arab states must resign themselves to something they have
opposed for so long: not merely the fact but the right of Israel’s permanent
presence among them. This necessarily means that they will have to accept
mutual coexistence as the operating principle in their relations with the
Jewish state.
A policy of coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union
was of course promulgated in the heyday of the Cold War, and we have
become so used to hearing the phrase that we are inured to its profound
importance. For even at a time when the Communists were possessed by
doctrines of global domination, they were saying that they understood that
there was a higher interest, higher even than the Marxist cause: the survival
of their own society and of the planet as a whole.
This is a rational attitude since it allows warring societies to live, evolve,
and eventually resolve the antagonisms between them. The crucial idea of
mutual coexistence is setting limits to conflict. Yet for close to a century
Arab society and Arab politics have been commandeered by an anti-Jewish
obsession that has known no limits: It harnessed the Nazis, promoted the
Final Solution, launched five wars against Israel, embarked on a campaign
of global terrorism, strangled the world’s economy with oil blackmail, and
now, in Iraq and elsewhere, is attempting to build nuclear bombs for the
great Armageddon. This obsession must be stopped not only for Israel’s
sake but for the sake of the Arabs themselves and for the sake of the world.
It will not do to obscure the primacy of this existential opposition to
Israel as the driving force of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Such obfuscation is
fashionable in current commentaries on Israel and Arabs, in the form of a
neat symmetry imposed on their respective needs and desires. These
commentaries hold that Israel’s demand for Arab recognition of its right to
exist should be met in exchange for various Arab demands, especially for
land. Yet to treat these demands as symmetrical, as the two sides of an
equation, is to ignore both history and causality. Worse, it sets a price tag on
the lives of millions of Jews and their nation.
To see this clearly, imagine the situation in reverse. Suppose Israel
refused to recognize Syria’s right to exist and threatened to destroy the
entire country unless Syria were to evacuate a swatch of territory controlled
by Syria that Israel claimed as its own. This would be widely and correctly
viewed as lunacy. Yet the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist
unless it caves in to their territorial demands for lands from which they have
attacked Israel is accorded serious consideration, even respect, in current
diplomacy. What is overlooked is that Israel’s right to exist is no more
negotiable than is the right of Syria or Egypt to exist.
The Arabs often say that the wrong done to the Palestinians is so great
that they cannot come to terms with Israel’s existence until it is set aright.
But this argument, too, is intended only to confound the issue. The
Palestinian Arabs were offered a state by the United Nations in 1947, and
they rejected it. So did the Arab states, which not only unanimously
opposed Palestinian statehood but sent their armies into Palestine to grab
whatever they could—for themselves. Further, when the West Bank and
Gaza, which Jordan and Egypt captured in 1948, were in Arab hands, barely
a whisper about Palestinian statehood was ever heard in either place. Thus,
there is no shred of a historical connection linking the demand for
Palestinian statehood to the Arab refusal to recognize Israel.
The issue of the Palestinian Arabs requires a fair and forthright solution
that takes into account their full situation and the question of their civil
status, alongside the cardinal issues of Jewish rights and Israeli security. But
one thing must be said clearly at the outset: The grievances of the
Palestinian Arabs, real or imagined, cannot be a loaded gun held to Israel’s
temple. Today, after five major wars, Egypt and Jordan have signed peace
treaties with Israel and some of the other Arab states are prepared to
recognize Israel, but only in exchange for a Palestinian state bordering Tel
Aviv that would obviously jeopardize Israel’s existence. This prerequisite,
which is now demanded in nearly every corner of the Arab world, shows
the distance that the Arabs must still travel in permanently reconciling
themselves to the presence of a Jewish state in their midst.
This is not surprising if one considers the enormous anti-Israel
propaganda that has been directed at the Arab and Moslem masses, in
which 150 million people have been endlessly told that a tiny country in
their midst has no place under the sun, that it must be “excised like a
cancerous tumor” and “thrown into the dustbin of history,” as I heard my
Iranian counterpart at the UN say in 1984. When this notion is repeated
again and again, day in and day out, for half a century, there is no reason
why the Arab masses should alter their hostility toward Israel. To be sure,
the Madrid Conference, despite its disappointments, also offered some
glimmers of hope. Haltingly, awkwardly, Arabs and Israelis began a direct,
face-to-face dialogue that started a process that may lead to peace. But
Teheran had been touched by none of the stirrings toward change. Instead, it
tossed up a resolution, signed by delegates from all over the Moslem world,
including representatives of various PLO factions, calling once again for the
annihilation of Israel. 4
This is a symptom of a political pathology. Its essence, like that of
certain psychological pathologies in the individual, is an escape from reality
and the summoning of violence to act out irrational impulses. The first
requirement of peace is that this fanaticism not be brooked. It should be
condemned and excoriated in most vigorous terms wherever it appears.
(The Islamic conference in Teheran received hardly a murmur of protest
from any of the Western capitals.) It cannot be dismissed as posturing
because, if left unchallenged, it contaminates the views of the pragmatists
and realists among the Arabs and further inflames the passions of the “Arab
street” of which the realists must be continually wary.
While there are many in the West who are prepared to admit the moral
necessity of Arab recognition of Israel, there is also a widespread
acceptance of the Arabs’ utterly utilitarian rejoinder: What’s in it for us? If
not territorial concessions from Israel, then what do the Arabs get out of
peace? Setting aside momentarily the issue of disputed territory (I will soon
return to it), the Arabs have plenty to gain from the state of peace in and of
itself.
First, they can avoid the escalating costs of war. As the Gulf War
showed, war is becoming extremely expensive and exceedingly destructive.
With the advance of military technology, precision bombing, laser-guided
missiles, and the sheer firepower packed in today’s artillery and tanks, an
Arab leader bent on war could find his army destroyed, his capital in ruins,
his regime threatened, and if he is not lucky, his own life in jeopardy.
Saddam, after all, was very lucky. What could he have possibly put up
against Norman Schwarzkopf’s divisions if the American general had
received the order to march on to Basra and Baghdad? At best he himself
could have sought a hiding place in Iraq or escaped the country altogether,
as Mengistu of Ethiopia did when his military collapsed (although given the
skills in assassination of several of Saddam’s Arab adversaries, it is not
clear that he would have survived very long in hiding or exile).
But war today carries not only military and personal risks, it invites
unparalleled economic desolation. The bombs may be smarter, but they are
also more destructive. According to a UN report, the obliteration of Iraq’s
infrastructure of roads, bridges, railway lines, power plants, oil refineries,
and industrial enterprises meant that “food… cannot be distributed; water
cannot be purified; sewage cannot be pumped away and cleansed; crops
cannot be irrigated; medicines cannot be conveyed where they are
required.” In short, the report concluded, Iraq had been “relegated to the
pre-industrial age.” 5 This may have been an exaggerated assessment, but it
is nevertheless sobering to realize that this was a level of damage inflicted
by an adversary that was discriminate in its use of force. Iraq—which was,
to say the least, less discriminate in using force—exacted an economic toll
from Kuwait estimated to be as high as $30 billion. 6 The pursuit of modern
warfare therefore entails the triple risk of military, political, and economic
devastation on a scale that is constantly escalating. Surely after the Gulf
War the Arab leaders must ask themselves whether Israel would again sit
back in the case of armed attack. And just as surely they must know that the
answer is no. Further, if Israel were to face a threat to its existence, it would
respond with awesome power—something that no sane person, Arab or
Jew, could possibly desire.
As the cost of war rises, the benefits of avoiding war and establishing
peace rise accordingly. Not only does peace allow a country to avoid
devastation, it enables it to build on its existing economic foundation rather
than devote several years and untold resources to rebuilding ruins. And it
allows it to cooperate with its neighbors for mutual betterment.
Herein lie the greatest benefits of peace: the tremendous possibilities
inherent in mutual cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. While this fact
was always clear to Israel, it has yet to penetrate the thinking of most Arab
leaders, to the obvious detriment of their societies. For the Arab world
stands to gain as much from making peace with Israel as Israel stands to
gain from making peace with the Arabs.
What would peace be like if the entire Arab world truly believed in it?
There is no area of life that would not be affected. Take trade, as an obvious
first example. Since the Six Day War, Israel’s “open bridges” policy created
a flourishing trade between Israel and Jordan across the Allenby Bridge
over the Jordan River. The signing of the peace treaty between Jordan and
Israel significantly expanded this trade. Such trade could be further
expanded and its scope with Jordan and with other Arab countries
substantially broadened. Equally, the Arab world could have access to
Israel’s ports on the Mediterranean and to technology and to other advances
in the Israeli marketplace.
Water, too, looms large as a potential benefit of peace. This second
precious liquid (the other is oil) will be the focus of much contention in the
coming years. Agreements on water will be harder to achieve in an
increasingly parched Middle East, whose growing populations will put
mounting demands on a limited water supply. It is thus in everyone’s
interest to negotiate water agreements early on. The first to enjoy the
benefits of peace in this regard has been Jordan. With only 150 cubic meters
of water per capita per year (as compared to Syria’s 2,000 cubic meters),
Jordan is an exceedingly dry country. Israeli-Jordanian cooperation has
increased the available water supply for Jordan, and enhanced cooperation
could expand available water for both countries. This is especially true in
the Arava region, the long valley connecting the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.
The Arava is neatly divided down the middle between Israel and Jordan,
and both countries draw waters from the wells dug into its sandy soil that
exceed the capacity of the aquifer to replenish itself. This is leading to
increasing salin-ization, endangering the future water supply. A coordinated
policy could greatly ameliorate the situation. Israeli and Jordanian scientists
could study the problem and devise a joint water policy for mutual benefit;
after all, the subterranean water table does not recognize national
boundaries. Equally, peace could enable Israel and Jordan to cooperate in
the construction of a single desaliniza-tion plant of appropriate scale on the
Red Sea, a project that could prove far more economically sensible than
separate, smaller Israeli and Jordanian facilities. Such an effort could be
joined by another water-starved neighbor bordering on the Red Sea—Saudi
Arabia. 7
Syria, while on the face of it much more plentiful in water, nevertheless
feels pressed by Turkey’s plans to dam the Euphrates, which provides a
sizable amount of Syria’s water. This in turn has led to increased tensions
among Syria, Jordan, and Israel over the existing division of the waters of
the Yarmuk tributary to the Jordan River, which is bordered by all three
countries. Peace agreements would of course require review of the Yarmuk
arrangements originally negotiated by President Eisenhower’s emissary,
Eric Johnston, in 1955; but they could also assist Syria in using its other
available water much more efficiently. Israel has devised methods such as
drip irrigation to ensure that 85 percent of its irrigation water actually
reaches the crops (15 percent is lost to evaporation and runoff). In Syria the
efficiency is less than 40 percent. With the establishment of peace, Israel
could teach Syrian farmers the techniques for more efficient water usage,
just as it taught Arab farmers in Judea and Samaria to increase their
irrigation efficiency from 40 percent to today’s 80 percent. And Israeli
engineers could also help Syria build the national projects it now lacks to
carry water to arid sections of the country, just as Israel did in building its
National Water Carrier. 8
Among the other regional benefits of peace would be unfettered tourism
and even broader access of Israel’s medical facilities to the Arab states. This
is one of the best-known yet least-discussed secrets in the Arab world. On
any given day you can find in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem members of
the Saudi royal family, Jordanian jet-setters, and patients from virtually all
the rest of the Arab world who come for both routine and special medical
treatment. What are now incognito sojourns for selected patients could
become, especially if accompanied by training programs for doctors from
the Arab countries, an open service that could substantially improve health
care throughout the region. The Israeli presence on the West Bank has
resulted in a significant improvement in this regard, dramatically reducing
infant mortality and improving other health indicators. Peace could bring
overall effects like this to many Arab countries, literally improving millions
of lives.
This discussion of the benefits of peace remains largely theoretical
because it assumes a genuine transformation of Arab attitudes toward Israel.
But such a transformation is so difficult to achieve that even the
establishment of a formal peace with Egypt has not produced it. Egypt
continues to keep Israel at arm’s length, maintaining a “cold peace”
consisting of a low-profile and extremely circumscribed relationship that
has prevented the realization of the full gamut of possibilities for both
countries. If peace with Israel could bring such enormous benefits to the
Arab states, why has virtually no Arab leader stepped forward to explain
these benefits to his people and obtain it for them? Could 150 million
people be blind, almost to a person, to something so obvious?
The answer is that they are not. In every Arab society there are those for
whom no explanation is needed concerning the urgent need to end the state
of war, recognize Israel, and get on with the joint task of bringing the
Middle East into the twentieth century before the twentieth century is out.
But two obstacles stand in the way of such realism. First, while the benefits
of peace are understood by isolated individuals, such a perspective is
uncommon. Many Arab leaders who profess a desire for “peace” think of it
as a means to an end, such as regaining lost territory or securing military
supplies from the West, rather than as an end in itself. (Such payoffs to
Arab governments should not be confused with the permanent benefits that
real peace would bring to every citizen.) For much of the Arab world, peace
is a coin with which one pays in order to get something else. As such, it is
expendable at a given moment and under the right circumstances, and it
need not last very long. Peace can be signed one day and discarded the next,
once the immediate payoff has been pocketed—much to the astonishment
of Westerners, including Israelis, who have a completely different
understanding of what it means to “make peace.” (For Israelis, peace is the
goal and everything else is a means to it.) Those few Arabs whose view of
peace is more Western find themselves fighting against the tide in Arab
countries that have never known this Western concept of peace from the day
they gained independence, and which are much more familiar with the kind
of peace occasionally offered by Arafat to Israel, the “peace of Saladin,” 9
which is merely a tactical intermission in a continuing total war.
A second obstacle facing the realists is that no Arab leader or
representative wants to end up like Abdullah of Jordan, Anwar Sadat of
Egypt, or Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon—or for that matter like the many
thousands of moderate Palestinian Arabs whom the Mufti and the PLO have
butchered over this century for “betraying” the Arab cause by trying to
make peace with the Jews. For seventy years, ever since the heyday of the
Mufti, every move and every gesture toward peace has been stifled by fear
of the radical Pan-Arab nationalists and Moslem fundamentalists.
Those who are interested in something more than a pyrrhic peace in the
Middle East must recognize the harsh reality that there is always a powerful
Muftist faction among the Arabs ready to veto peace. The Mufti’s politics
of terror is no less with us today. So long as this branch of Arab politics is
powerful enough to terrorize other Arabs into playing by its rules, making
peace will be an extraordinarily difficult business. When the radicals feel
confident and powerful, the intimidated moderates run to snuggle within the
tiger claws of the dictators, much as King Hussein of Jordan snuggled in
Saddam’s paws on the very eve of the Gulf War. Without suppressing the
power of intimidation of the radicals, there can be no hope that moderates
will emerge.
This principle was much in evidence in the case of Morocco. When
Qaddafi was at the height of his power, having conquered most of Chad and
terrorized much of the West with his threats, King Hassan of Morocco—as
antithetical a figure to Qaddafi as one could conjure up in the Arab world—
entered into a bizarre “marriage” between Libya and Morocco. Yet within
months of the American bombing of Tripoli and the collapse of Qaddafi’s
forces in Chad, Hassan dissolved the union and invited Israel’s foreign
minister to an open meeting in Morocco. Similarly, when Syria came to
realize in the wake of the Gulf War that the eclipse of its Soviet benefactor
spelled a decline in its ability to resist American pressure, it suddenly
permitted King Hussein and other Arabs to enter negotiations and even
went so far as to sit at the same table with Israel itself. Pressing the radicals,
curtailing their options to intimidate, and limiting their political and military
clout are continual prerequisites for engaging in any realistic efforts for
peace.
Any Israeli diplomat who has ever dealt with the Arabs can recount
endless variations on this theme. My own experience with Arab diplomats
has taught me how readily some of them would make peace if they were
freed from the yoke of terror. When I was deputy chief of the Israeli
mission in Washington, I used to meet regularly with one such diplomat, an
ambassador from an Arab country with which Israel has no relations. On
one occasion we had set a meeting in a small restaurant. I arrived five
minutes late and asked the waiter whether a gentleman answering the
description of my Arab colleague had been there.
“Yes,” said the waiter. “He showed up, ordered something to drink, and
left suddenly.”
I called him up. “Ali, what happened?” I asked.
“I came to the restaurant at the time we’d agreed on. I sat down. Who do
you think I saw at the next table? The Syrian ambassador. I walked out.”
It is a sad commentary on the pace of political evolution in the Arab
world that many years after this conversation took place, I am still unable to
reveal the diplomat’s real name and have had to substitute a false one to
protect his identity.
This little vignette, set in a quiet corner of Washington, D.C., contains in
microcosm the story of countless foiled peace attempts throughout the
history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The nonradicals might entertain the
possibility of negotiating peace with Israel, but they fear the violent
response of the radicals. This was painfully evident in the Madrid Peace
Conference and in the subsequent talks in Washington. Once again, my
Israeli colleagues and I found that even the most reasonable among the
Jordanians and Lebanese were constantly forced to weigh every word for
fear of the PLO and the Syrians, whose threatening gaze they felt even in
the most private of conversations.
The West often aggravates this situation by strengthening the hands of
the worst radicals. It is often so grateful for any reasonable gesture coming
from these quarters that it proceeds to enter into economic and military
agreements with them. It operates on the belief that such carrots will lure a
radical regime to become a less radical one—a view whose full wisdom
was revealed in the Western arming of Saddam in the 1980s. The fact is that
the radicals should not be armed. There should be a curb on weapons sales
to the moderates as well, for the simple reason that in the Middle East
today’s “moderate” could be tomorrow’s radical, courtesy of a coup, an
invasion, or mere intimidation.
So long as freedom of expression, the rule of law, and real representative
government are absent from the Arab world, it will continue to be next to
impossible for realist Arabs to have an enduring influence on Arab policies
toward Israel. For this reason, there is a direct relationship between what
the West does to press the Arab world to democratize and the chances of
attaining a durable Middle East peace. In the cases of Germany and Japan,
of Russia and the Ukraine, of Latin America and several African
dictatorships, the powerful relationship between democratic values and the
desire for peace has been obvious to American policymakers, who for years
have tied American trade and other forms of assistance to domestic policy
reforms and democratization. For example, the United States imposed
sanctions on China after the massacre in Tienanmen Square that suppressed
the movement for democratization in that country. Similarly, when the
president of Peru suspended democratic institutions in 1992, the United
States undertook a full-court press, including economic sanctions, in order
to prevent backsliding to authoritarian rule in a Latin America it had
tirelessly worked for decades to push into democracy.
Only the Arab states have been entirely exempt from such pressure—
much to the dismay of a handful of reformist Arabs in exile in London who
have seen their fellow Arabs abandoned to the unrelenting totalitarians of
Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and to the unreconstructed dictatorships that form
much of the rest of the Arab world; and much to the dismay of Israel, which
must consider the possibility that these regimes will at any moment return
to savaging the Jewish state alongside the treatment they mete out to their
own people.
It might be argued that the West has been slowly inching toward
broaching the subject of democracy with the Arab leaders. But in the wake
of the Gulf War, which the United States waged to save a helpless Saudi
Arabia from Saddam and to resurrect a Kuwait that he had conquered, it is
clear that this is not the case. Never has a ruler been as helpless as was the
exiled Emir Al-Sabah of Kuwait, sitting in Riyadh waiting to have the West
extricate his country from Iraq’s gullet. If ever there had been a moment to
extract a commitment to basic human rights, or a constitution, or a free
press, this was it. None was asked for.
Other than the fact that the Arab world possesses a good part of the
world’s oil supply, the West seems to have granted the democratic
exemption to the Arab world for reasons virtually indistinguishable from
those the British Colonial Office held at the end of World War I: a kind of
smug condescension that the Arabs are “not ready” for democracy, that
democracy is somehow incompatible with their Islamic heritage, that “their
own traditional forms of government” should be considered “right for
them,” and so on—as though, for example, torture, amputation, slavery, a
manacled press, and absolute rule by a family of a few hundred cousins is
anything but a tyranny by any standard. Most bizarre are the attempts by
Westerners to convince themselves that the Arabs should have their
democratic exemption because what they already have is as good as
democracy, as in the periodic journalistic accounts of Saudi Arabia as a
quiet, gentle kingdom—a kind of Tibet in the sands.
Arab culture and Islamic civilization are no better excuses for an
exemption from democracy than were Japanese culture in 1945 and Russian
civilization in 1989—although neither of these had been democratic
societies before. For an enduring peace to be built in the Middle East,
America must stop coddling the various Arab dictators and autocrats and
begin pushing them to adopt the most rudimentary guarantees that will
allow those willing to live peacefully with Israel to come out of the closet,
publish their opinions, organize political parties, and ultimately be elected
to positions to make good on their beliefs. Some argue that democracy
cannot be introduced into the Arab states because it will bring the Islamic
fundamentalists to power. But of course the idea cannot simply be to
establish majority rule, and thereby hand power to the tyranny of the mob.
To advance democracy in the Arab world, the West must promote the
concepts of individual rights and constitutional limits on governmental
power, without which the existence of any genuine democracy is
impossible. Without real and concerted steps in this direction, the perennial
search for Arabs willing to make a permanent (as opposed to a tactical)
peace with Israel will be ultimately futile.
I wrote the above before I was elected Prime Minister, and my views
have substantially remained unaltered. But I have come to recognize that
neither the United States nor the Western countries are likely to act toward
the goal of democratization in the Arab world. Nor is it possible for Israel to
do so, for any action on our part would be falsely interpreted as an attempt
to destabilize neighboring regimes, changing one ruler with another—
something we have absolutely no desire to do. Consequently, we must
assume that for our generation and perhaps the next, the task of
peacemaking is with the Arab world as it is, unreformed and undemocratic.
The prevalence of radicalism in the Middle East—and the danger that, in
the absence of any democratic traditions, a nonradical regime can turn
radical overnight—means that peace in the Middle East must have security
arrangements built into it. I have already noted that for the foreseeable
future the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between Arab
and Arab and between Arab and Jew is the peace of deterrence. Security is
an indispensable pillar of peace for any resolution of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the
possibility of a future war. An Israel lacking security would eventually
invite an act of aggression that would destroy the peace. The question we
must therefore ask is, what are Israel’s minimal security requirements that
can sustain its defenses and thereby sustain the peace?
This question need not be answered in territorial terms alone. The
adoption of security arrangements between Israel and the Arab states, such
as a hotline between Damascus and Jerusalem, or procedures to alert the
other side to planned military maneuvers, can reduce the possibility of war.
Buffer zones might be created to prevent the stockpiling of weapons next to
particularly sensitive borders. Such zones would be free of heavy military
equipment such as tanks and artillery and could be accessible to the officers
of the other side. Of necessity, the configuration of these zones would have
to take into account the tremendous disparity in the dimensions of Israel as
compared with those of its Arab neighbors.
But however useful such devices may be, they cannot meet a
contingency in which Israel’s enemies decide to violate the rules and
invade. In the case of Israel, as we have seen, military distances are so tiny
and warning times so short that without minimal strategic depth to absorb
an attack and mobilize its reserves, Israel’s existence would be placed in
jeopardy. Nor can its need for strategic depth be filled by international
guarantees. Even if the guaranteeing powers summon the will to act—
which, despite a formal promise, the friendly American administration did
not do on the eve of the Six Day War—there looms the question of whether
they could physically dispatch the forces in time. Kuwait, a country almost
exactly the size of Israel (minus the West Bank), was overrun in a matter of
six hours, but liberated only after a six-month buildup of huge forces
shipped from West to East. Israel cannot be asked to play the role of
Lazarus. It will not rise from the dead, to whose ranks its defeat would
surely consign it. For unlike Arab Kuwait, no one doubts that if the Jewish
state were ever conquered by Arab armies, it would be effectively,
irredeemably destroyed. The problem with international guarantees for
Israel is therefore exactly what Golda Meir said it was: “By the time they
come to save Israel, there won’t be an Israel.”
Israel’s defenses therefore must be entrusted to its own forces, which are
willing and able to act in real time against an imminent invasion or attack.
When seeking, as we must, a peace based on security, we must necessarily
ask what secure boundaries for Israel would be. Clearly, the Six Day War
boundaries are the boundaries not of peace but of war. But how much
broader does Israel need to be? As we have seen, the crucial question is not
only additional increments of strategic depth but the incorporation of the
Judea-Samaria mountain ridge, which forms a protective wall against
invasion from the east. It is not feasible for Israel to relinquish military
control of this wall. A similar situation prevails for the Golan Heights,
which dominate the north. When these territories were in Arab hands, the
result was war, not peace. One simply cannot talk about peace and security
for Israel and in the same breath expect Israel to significantly alter its
existing defense boundaries.
Arab leaders’ promises that the Palestinian Arabs would have the whole
of Palestine in 1947, the whole of Israel in 1967, and the whole of Jordan in
1970 all proved to be impediments to resolving the problem of the
Palestinian Arabs, each one leading to the rejection of rational compromises
and to further calamity.
Jerusalem, too, has been the subject of renewed Arab demands. Arafat
has long and often said that there will be no peace so long as the PLO flag
does not fly over the city. The West has often taken this statement at face
value, and every peace plan to date that Westerners have offered has been in
some fashion gerrymandered to allow an Arab flag to fly over some section
of Jerusalem—usually over what the media like to refer to as “Arab East
Jerusalem.” Of course, there is nothing exclusively or even mainly “Arab”
about eastern Jerusalem. This part of the city consists of those portions of
Jerusalem that the Jordanian Legion was able to tear away by force in 1948.
Many Jews lived there at the time, but the Jordanians expelled them. Today
these sections of the city have 150,000 Jewish residents and a similar
number of Arab residents. (Unlike the Jordanians, who expelled the Jews
when they conquered this portion of the city in 1948, Israel left the Arab
population intact and offered it Israeli citizenship.)
Eastern Jerusalem includes the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and
the City of David. It was the capital of ancient Israel for twelve centuries,
the very heart and soul of all Jewish aspiration to return and rebuild the
Land of Israel. Israel could not under any circumstances negotiate over any
aspect of Jerusalem, any more than Americans would negotiate over
Washington, Englishmen over London, or Frenchmen over Paris. Israel is
prepared to offer the Arabs full and equal rights in Jerusalem—but no rights
over Jerusalem.
The tremendous significance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people—as well
as the indelible physical facts of Jewish neighborhoods such as Gilo,
Ramot, Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Neve Ya’akov built in
eastern Jerusalem since 1967—make the notion that somehow Jerusalem
will be redivided sheer fantasy. Yet it is not only Arabs who cling to this
fantasy. In practically every foreign ministry in the West, including the U.S.
State Department, there are maps that do not include East Jerusalem as part
of a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Indeed, most governments
refuse to recognize even West Jerusalem as part of Israel, on the grounds
that “the final status of Jerusalem remains to be negotiated,” in the hope
that it will be internationalized—this in recognition of its “special status,”
reflecting its unique importance not only to Judaism but to Islam and
Christianity as well. But it is only under Jewish rule that Jerusalem has
become a city open to all faiths, with the holy sites of all religions protected
equally for the first time in history. The Jewish belief in the universal
meaning of Jerusalem has made it today a truly universal city. To pry the
city away from the one people that has ensured unimpeded access to it for
all, to put it under a UN-type administration, would not merely violate the
historic right of the Jewish people to its one and only capital. It would
assure a descent into factionalism, where shrill partisans of Islam like the
followers of Khomeini and Qaddafi would return the city to the divisions
and sectarian strife that characterized it before 1967—something for which
no rational person could possibly wish. This is why Israel, within the
context of a peace agreement with the Arabs, is prepared to guarantee free
access to Moslems wishing to make pilgrimages to their holy places in
Jerusalem, but will in no way alter Israel’s ability to maintain Jerusalem as
a peaceful and open city under Israeli sovereignty.
It will be objected that in keeping sovereignty over Jerusalem and the
remaining territories, Israel is expecting the Arabs to renounce their claim
to what they consider part of their domain. This is precisely the case. An
entire century of Arab wars has been waged against the Jews because the
Arabs have refused to in any way temper their doctrine of never giving up
what they claim to be Arab lands. In fact, in its entire recorded history, the
Arab nation has never given up a single inch of land willingly, for the sake
of peace or for the sake of anything else. This fact was confirmed to the
point of absurdity after the cession of the entire Sinai (more than twice the
size of all of Israel), when Egypt refused to reciprocate by ceding Israel a
few hundred yards on which the Israelis had partially built a luxury hotel—
leading to a crisis of several years that finally ended when Israel gave up
the land in 1989.
But the time has finally come to recognize that peace will be possible
only when both sides are willing to strike a compromise that gives each the
minimum it needs to live. The Zionist movement and the State of Israel are
by now well acquainted with compromising on ideology for the sake of
coexistence and peace, having done so at least four times in this century. In
1919 the Zionists bitterly gave up on their claim to the Litani River (now in
southern Lebanon), which was to have been the main water source for the
new Jewish state. In 1922 four-fifths of the Jewish National Home was
made off-limits to Jews so that there could be a territory, Jordan, reserved
for the Arabs of Palestine. This was much more painful, for it meant giving
up on a large portion of biblical Israel and agreeing that the Jewish state
would be only forty miles wide. But for the sake of peace, the Jews have
given up on this claim as well, and they asked the Palestinian-Jordanian
state four times the size of Israel to give them nothing in return. In the 1979
treaty with Egypt, Israel compromised many of its most cherished
principles for the sake of peace. In giving up the Sinai, it conceded vast
lands, transferred thousands of Jews from their homes, razed houses,
schools, and farms that had been built from the desert over fifteen years,
and utterly renounced every one of the Jewish historical, strategic, and
economic claims to land where the Jewish people had received the Law of
Moses and become a nation. In 1989, Israel gave Taba, near Eilat, to Egypt
for the sake of peace and once again, in the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel
ceded land to the Palestinians.
For three-quarters of a century the Jews have repeatedly compromised
on substantive strategic, historical, and moral claims in order to placate
their Arab neighbors in the hope of buying peace. It is impossible that peace
should be attained by asking the Jews to compromise on everything and the
Arabs to compromise on nothing. The Arabs, possessing lands over five
hundred times greater in area than Israel’s, must now do a small fraction of
what Israel has done: For the very first time in their long history of
expansionism and intolerance, they must compromise. For the sake of
peace, they must renounce their claims to part of the four ten-thousandths
—.0004—of the lands they desire, which constitutes the very heart of the
Jewish homeland and the protective wall of the Jewish state. If the Arabs
are unwilling to make even this microscopic one-time concession, if they
are still so possessed by the fantasy of an exclusively Arab realm that they
cannot bring themselves to compromise on an inch of land to make the
Middle East habitable for the Jewish state, it is hard to make the case that
they are in fact ready for peace.

But what about the other side, the question of the Arabs in the zones of
Judea and Samaria? The fact that Israel is extremely circumscribed in the
territorial compromises it is capable of making necessarily raises the
question of the future of these people. By hanging on to territory, Israel, it is
said, might gain the security inherent in better terrain, but it would
encumber itself with a hostile population.
True enough. But this dilemma has been put behind us by the
implementation of the early stages of the Oslo Accords. Israel transferred to
Palestinian control most of the territory in the Gaza district, which
encompasses all the Palestinian residents of that area. Further, in the West
Bank, Israel transferred to Palestinian control the lands that encompass a
full 98 percent of the Palestinian population (the remaining 2 percent are
composed in part of nomadic Bedouin who move from place to place). Thus
the question of Israel’s retaining a hostile population has become a moot
point. As of 1995 the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank live
under Palestinian rule. The remaining issues to be resolved are not over the
human rights of the Palestinians or their civil enfranchisement. That is an
issue that they have yet to resolve among themselves: individual rights,
freedom of the press, pluralism, and democracy are matters that the
Palestinians have to resolve between themselves and the Palestinian
Authority that rules them. Israel, however interested an observer, has no
part in this debate. The Israelis and the Palestinians must resolve two
pivotal questions:

(1) the disposition of the remaining territory of Judea and Samaria; and
(2) the political status of the self-governing Palestinian entity and its
relationship to the State of Israel.

Resolving the territorial issue, though an extremely complex matter, has

been made somewhat less difficult because of the fact that the remaining
territories are largely uninhabited by Palestinians (more precisely, they are
inhabited by Jews). This terrain includes, however, areas that are crucial for
Israel’s defense and vital national interests. Accordingly, Israel seeks a final
peace settlement with the Palestinians that would leave it with
indispensable security zones. First and foremost, it requires a land buffer
that includes the Jordan Valley and the hills directly overlooking it and that
would extend southward to the ridges above the Dead Sea. At its deepest
point, this buffer will be about 12 miles wide, a minimal depth given the
fact that Israel faces a threat from a potential eastern front, which might
include thousands of Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian tanks. During the Cold War,
NATO’s generals assessed that they would need 180 miles of strategic depth
to ward off a similar threat from the east. Alas, Israel must live with
strategic depth that is less than 10 percent of that, but it cannot shrink this
depth any further. Second, Israel must have a zone of separation between
the Palestinian areas and the crowded coastline where most of its population
lives. This zone, whose widest point is a few miles, is narrower than the
eastern buffer, but is important in any future arrangement for minimizing
terrorist infiltration from the Palestinian areas to Israel’s major cities.
Furthermore, Israel must retain a security cordon around Jerusalem to
ensure that the city is not choked by adjoining Palestinian areas. Israel must
also keep its early warning stations at the heights of the Samarian
mountains, facilities that offer indispensible warning against air and ground
attacks from the east. In addition, Israel must maintain broad corridors of
territory to facilitate movement from the coastline to the Jordan Valley
buffer in times of emergency. Those corridors, not accidentally, include
much of the Jewish population in Judea-Samaria. Israel must protect the
Jewish communities and facilitate the citizens’ ability to live and travel
securely. Equally, Israel must make sure that the main aquifer that supplies
some 40 percent of the country’s water, running at the lower part of the
western slopes of the Judean and Samarian hills, does not come under
Palestinian control; it is, after all, impossible for the country to live with its
water siphoned off or contaminated by the Palestinian Authority. Israel
must take into account other special security requirements, such as
controlling the areas abutting the Tel Aviv or Jerusalem airports to prevent
terrorists from firing at civilian aircraft from these positions. Finally, Israel
must keep places sacrosanct to Judaism and the Jewish people within its
domain and guarantee unfettered access to them as was done in the Hebron
agreements, which left the Tomb of the Patriarchs under Israel’s control.
These are Israel’s minimal requirements to protect the life of the state.
Obviously, full control of the West Bank, including the Palestinian areas,
would have given Israel much greater security in an insecure Middle East.
Yet retaining the minimal elements of defense enumerated above will
enable Israel to transfer to the Palestinians additional areas that are not
included in these categories, thereby expanding the Palestinian domain
without significantly hurting Israel’s security. Equally, Israel is prepared to
make special arrangements facilitating safe passage of Palestinians through
its own territory, thus enabling direct Palestinian travel between Gaza and
the West Bank.
It is largely for these considerations that I negotiated the interim
agreement at the Wye River Planation in 1998 with President Clinton and
Yasser Arafat. My principal objective at Wye was to limit the extent of
further interim Israeli withdrawals so as to leave Israel with sufficient
territorial depth for its defense. As stipulated under the Oslo agreement,
Israel was to withdraw in three successive “disengagements” from
additional territory in Judea-Samaria, which would be handed over to the
Palestinian Authority prior to the negotiations on a permanent peace
agreement, or “final settlement.”
The Palestinian side had already received 27 percent of the territory
from the Labor government. Based on its experience of negotiating with
that government, it expected Israel to cede in these withdrawals the bulk of
the territory. As Arafat’s deputy, Abu Maazen, explained to a senior official
in my government upon the signing of the Hebron agreement in 1997:
“What about the 90 percent of the territory you promised us?” The response
was: “We didn’t promise you anything of the kind.” Whatever officials of
the previous Labor government had whispered in Palestinian ears was
irrelevant. What was relevant were the signed contracts we inherited from
Labor, and these did not obligate Israel to such dangerous withdrawals.
Indeed, since the Oslo Accords did not quantify the extent of redeployment,
we proceeded to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, or more
specifically with the United States, on much smaller redeployments.
Ultimately we agreed in Wye that the first two redeployments would
amount to 13 percent of the territory. We also agreed with the U.S. that
Israel would officially declare that the third redeployment, which the U.S.
recognized as an Israeli prerogative not subject to negotiation, would not
exceed an additional 1 percent.
Thus, instead of a process in which Israel would retreat to the virtually
indefensible pre-1967 line even before final settlement negotiations were
concluded, I sought and achieved a different result at Wye: that most of the
West Bank would remain in our hands pending the start of these
negotiations. Israel would retain some 60 percent of the territory with all the
West Bank’s Jewish population; the Palestinian Authority would have some
40 percent of the area with virtually the entire Palestinian population.
Naturally, this is a much improved position for Israel to negotiate from; one
that bolsters our defenses against external attack and the threat of terrorism,
while leaving us in an advantageous position for the final settlement
negotiations.
We aslo achieved a second objective at Wye: We incorporated the
principle of reciprocity into the agreement. Palestinians would get 13
percent of Judea-Samaria (West Bank) territory in three successive stages
only after they implemented their own commitments undertaken at Wye. No
more free lunches.
The first stage in the implementation of Palestinian commitments
involved mostly formalities, such as naming Palestinian delegates to
various joint committees and issuing decrees against incitement and the
possession of illegal weapons. The Palestinians met these obligations, and
we promptly discharged ours: We withdrew from 2 percent of area C and
transferred 7 percent of area B, hitherto under joint Israeli-Palestinian
security control, to full Palestinian control.
The second stage—which covered the next four weeks—was a different
story. At this point the Palestinians were obligated to repeal the articles in
the Palestinian Charter, which called for Israel’s destruction, and take the
first concrete steps against the terrorist infrastructure. On December 14,
they repealed the charter—a genocidal document without parallel in today’s
world—in a Gaza gathering addressed by President Bill Clinton.
Many claimed that from a strictly legal viewpoint the repeal was invalid.
According to the charter’s own provisions, it can be amended only in a
special session of the Palestinian National Council by a vote of two-thirds
of the membership—conditions that were not met in Gaza. But the purpose
of the exercise—to make the rejection of the charter irreversible—was
achieved. After renouncing the charter in a public display before the
world’s cameras and in the presence of the U.S. president, it would be
impossible to claim that it was still a valid document.
But the Palestinians seemed to feel that rejecting the charter was all they
had to do. And they expected us not only to reward them for disavowing
genocide, but to ignore their failure to discharge their other obligations.
To us, the other commitments undertaken at Wye were at least as
pertinent, for they constituted the first concrete steps to be taken by the
Palestinian Authority against the terrorist organizations. The Palestinian
Authority was supposed to arrest wanted terrorists and have representatives
of the U.S. verify their incarceration; implement the law prohibiting
membership in terrorist organizations; collect illegal weapons held by
civilians and hand over such prohibited weapons as mortars, anti-tank
missles, and land mines held by the Palestinian Authority police; cease
daily incitement to violence; stop organizing anti-Israeli riots; submit a
report on the number of Palestinian Authority police in excess of the 30,000
permitted by the Oslo agreement; and maintain “comprehensive, intensive,
and continuous” cooperation with Israel on security matters.
The Palestinian Authority complied with none of these commitments.
They did, to be sure, display a few assault rifles and handguns, presumably
confiscated from civilians, and they detained some wanted terrorists and
Hamas political leaders. But after Arafat himself asserted that there were at
least 30,000 illegal weapons in Gaza alone, the collection of a few illegal
guns for the benefit of network cameras appeared to be little more than a
public relations exercise. And the arrest of Hamas operatives was of little
consequence. Some of the most notorious participants in planning and
executing suicide bombings against Israeli civilians (some of whom were
American citizens) were among the scores of Hamas detainees released by
the Palestinian Authority within weeks after their arrest.
Adhering to the principle of reciprocity, the Israeli government
announced that there would be no further withdrawals until the Palestinian
Authority complied with the aggrement. This was the guiding principle of
my policy from the day I formed the government in 1996, and I was not
about to abandon it at this crucial time.
Insistence on reciprocity became particularly pertinent after the Wye
conference, because Arafat and other Palestinian leaders took to threatening
to unilaterally declare a state on May 4, 1999, regardless of what happened
in the negotiations. By thus predetermining the result of the Oslo process,
they made a mockery of the negotiations.
To hand over territory under such circumstances would have been an act
of national irresponsibility. The Palestinians’ refusal to combat the terrorist
groups ensured that the relinquished land would be used to facilitate attacks
against us and to shelter terrorists. And their threat to declare a state—
which by the very manner of its establishment would be hostile, dangerous,
and unbound by any agreement with us—rendered the forfeiture of territory
on our part nothing short of reckless.
I made it clear that Israeli redeployment could only follow the faithful
and complete implementation of Palestinian obligations, and that conclusive
negotiations over territory would have to await the final status talks.
The negotiations over territory will be the most complex and difficult in
Israel’s history. They will involve balancing Israel’s national interests,
foremost of which is security, with the Palestinians’ wish to increase their
own territorial domain. These negotiations will determine whether Israel
will have the territorial bulwarks necessary to defend itself and safeguard a
future peace. But they are only one of the two crucial issues for permanent
peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The second is the question of the
status of the Palestinian entity. Many in the world have blithely accepted the
notion that the Palestinians must have their own independent state. They
have not asked themselves what powers would accrue to such unbridled
Palestinian self-determination. Could the Palestinian state make military
pacts with Iran, Iraq, or Syria? Could it be allowed to place troops from
these countries on the hills above Tel Aviv? Could it build an army of its
own? Could it arm itself with the most sophisticated weapons, such as
ground-to-air missiles that can shoot down the planes of the Israeli air force,
thereby endangering Israel’s very existence? Could it bring in untold
numbers of Arabs, nonrefugees as well as refugees, under the banner of the
“right of return,” position them along the seamline with Israel, and begin to
infiltrate the country? Clearly, a Palestinian entity with all these powers is a
recipe not for peace but for disaster.
My view of an equitable and secure arrangement for the status of a
Palestinian entity is based on a simple principle: The Palestinians should
have all the powers to run their lives and none of the powers to threaten
Israel’s life. This means that the Palestinian entity can enjoy all the
attributes of self-government, which include its own legislature, executive,
judiciary, passports, flag, education, commerce, tourism, health, police, and
every other power and institution controlling the collective and individual
life of Palestinians within the Palestinian entity. In fact, the Palestinians
have by now received nearly all of these things in the first two stages of the
Oslo Accords. What remains to negotiate are those few powers relating to
external security. In a permanent peace settlement, the Palestinians should
have all the powers to administer Palestinian life; some should be shared
with Israel, such as those relating to the environment (since mosquitoes, for
example, do not recognize territorial divisions), and still a few other
powers, primarily those relating to external security, should be retained by
Israel. Thus, the Palestinian entity should not be able to form military pacts
with sovereign states, or build and arm a standing army, or import weapons
without Israel’s consent. Israel must maintain control of the airspace, vital
for its very survival, and the international entry points through which
dangerous arms and terrorists could penetrate into the Palestinian areas and
from there into Israel itself. The issue of the Palestinian refugees must be
settled responsibly. The overwhelming majority should be given full rights
and rehabilitation in the respective Arab countries where they reside. Israel
should not be put at risk of being flooded with refugees sworn to its
destruction.
These arrangements would leave the Palestinian entity with considerable
powers, and certainly all the ones necessary for self-government. Yet they
are not compatible with the idea of unlimited self-determination, which is
what many normally associate with the concept of statehood. Statehood has
a dynamic of its own, which implies powers that self-government does not
necessarily warrant. Among other things, it will enable the Palestinian
Arabs to join the United Nations, where they will easily receive the support
of most governments and quickly free themselves of any limitation that they
may contractually assume to obtain our consent. That is why when I am
asked whether I will support a Palestinian state, I answer in the negative. I
support the Palestinians’ ability to control their own destiny but not their
ability to extinguish the Jewish future. As I have indicated earlier in this
book, I believe that this functional solution, giving the Palestinians all the
powers necessary for self-administration and Israel those essential powers
necessary to protect its national life, is a model for the kind of solution that
could be replicated in many similar disputes around the world. It offers the
only reasonable alternative between two unacceptable options: military
subjugation on the one hand, and unbridled self-determination on the other.
The first option is morally unacceptable, the second a prescription for
catastrophe. But at the heart of the solution that I advocate is not only a fair
and durable division of territory and powers but also a reasoned hope that
the Palestinians will recognize that no other solution will be acceptable to
the overwhelming majority of Israelis; and that this realization in turn
would foster over time a gradual, if grudging, reconciliation with the
permanence of Israel’s existence and the need to come to concrete terms
with it. It nullifies the hope of using the Palestinian areas as a base to
launch the future destruction of the Jewish state, while offering the
Palestinians a life of dignity, self-respect, and self-government.
But it is not only Israelis and Arabs who have roles to play in bringing a
lasting peace to a region so important to the entire world. As the Camp
David Accords demonstrated, the moral, strategic, and financial assistance
of the West can play a decisive role in making peace possible. An important
step was taken with the commencement of multilateral talks under the
auspices of the peace talks begun in 1991. This international support was
later reaffirmed and expanded under the Oslo Accords. Foreign
involvement in areas such as the development of water resources and
protection of the environment would be of major significance to the region,
and it would alleviate some of the sources of tensions that could easily
contribute to renewed hostility and war.
In particular, there are two areas demanding substantial commitments
from Western governments, without which the possibility of achieving
peace would be seriously, and I believe irrevocably, impaired. The first is
the resettlement of the remaining Arab refugees. As we have seen time and
again, the various refugee districts scattered throughout the Middle East are
the breeding ground for misery and hatred. Without them the PLO would
have a hard time even existing, and a major source of instability would have
been removed from the region. In this effort, the continuation of the
problem is not a matter of disinterested morality to the states of the West.
They too have a stake in dismantling the camps as a step toward ending the
long campaign of terror that the rulers of the camps have waged against
Israel and the West. Western assistance will be necessary to undertake the
large-scale construction of housing projects and infrastructure necessary to
transform the camps into towns, as well as educational projects and
investments in businesses intended to raise the standard of living. The
Western countries should also offer to absorb those refugees who prefer a
new home in North America or Europe to continuing to live in Israel or the
Arab states. Among them, the Western countries could handily absorb even
the entire refugee population if necessary, settling the matter once and for
all.
It is true that the Arab states possess sufficient funds to easily pay for
this effort themselves, but given their past record of refugee relief (the
entire Arab world contributes less than one percent of UNRWAs budget * ),
it will be a triumph if they can be prodded into assisting at all. Such Arab
involvement in the resettling of refugees should be demanded, both because
the Arab states are responsible for originating and sustaining the refugee
problem and because their participating in resolving it would signify a real
commitment to ending the conflict with Israel.
But the West, including the United States, has so far refused to put its
foot down even on a matter as straightforward as ending the Arab fantasy of
one day implementing the “right of return.” When asked if the United States
still supported UN Resolution 194 from December 1948 (in the middle of
the War of Independence), which called for the return of the refugees, the
United States couldn’t muster the simple word no. It stammered for three
days and finally came up with a circumlocution (“The Resolution is
irrelevant to the peace process”) 10 that leaves the Arabs still with the hope
of one day thrusting upon Israel the burden of absorbing the hundreds of
thousands of people whom the Arab regimes have cruelly maintained as
lifelong refugees. On the refugee issue, as with other outdated or unjust UN
resolutions (like the 1947 UN Partition Plan allotting the Jews only half of
the present-day Israel, and the resolution calling for the internationalization
of Jerusalem), the United States and European nations must alter their
formal positions and flatly declare the resolutions to be null and void.
An essential area for international development is in the field of
nonconventional arms development in the Arab countries. Nearly a decade
after the victorious assault against Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons
facilities are still being found in Iraq, and there are probably plenty more
where these came from. As the request to clean out Iraq has proved, it is
exceedingly difficult to strip a country of the know-how and technology to
build weapons of mass destruction once it has them. The only possible way
of forestalling the day when Arab states will have the capacity to wipe out
Israeli cities (and those of other countries) at the touch of a button is to
secure a real, enforced moratorium on the transfer of such weapons and
expertise to Iran and the Arab world—and this means the imposition of
sanctions on countries that are found to be in violation of the ban. Without
such concerted international action and in the absence of the
democratization of Middle Eastern regimes, it will only be a matter of time
before one of the dictatorships in the region acquires nuclear weapons,
imperiling not only Israel and the Middle East but the peace of everyone
else on the planet.
It is possible to present all of these steps as a peace plan comprised of
three tracks: bilateral measures between Israel and Arab states; international
measures taken by the nations of the world (including assistance to joint
projects involving Israel and the Arab states); and measures taken to
improve the conditions under which Jews and Arabs live side by side in
peace with each other. Each of these elements obviously requires careful
articulation and much elaboration, which only painstaking negotiations can
produce. Such negotiations understandably might alter certain components
and possibly add others. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the approach
described in this chapter ought to serve as a blueprint for the achievement
of a realistic and enduring peace between Arabs and Israelis.
In addition to the proposals for a resolution of the question of the
disputed areas, a comprehensive approach to an Arab-Israeli peace must
include formal peace treaties between the Arab states and Israel; security
arrangements with the Arab states to protect Israel from future attacks and
to enable all sides to monitor compliance with the agreements;
normalization of relations (including an end to the Arab economic boycott
of Israel); cessation of official anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in
Arab schools and government media; an international regime to ban the sale
of nonconventional weapons or matériel to the radical regimes of the
Middle East; internationally assisted refugee housing and resettlement
projects; and regional cooperation for water development and
environmental protection.
This is the path to an Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East as it really is
—turbulent, undemocratized, and as yet unreformed of its underlying
antagonisms. Those antagonisms will be extremely slow to disappear. This
is why a genuine reconciliation, in addition to having buttresses of stability,
security, and cooperation built into it, must contain a strong element of
gradualism. Such a graduated approach would allow both sides to alter their
conceptions about achieving peace, should the basic political and military
conditions of the region undergo a substantial transformation—for the
better, one would hope.
While endless ink has been spilled in calling for various futile
resolutions to the ongoing strife between the Jewish and Arab peoples over
the disposition of Palestine, the proposal made here takes full account of
Israel’s security needs, while granting control over their own needs to the
Arabs living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Though it is certain to arouse
furious opposition from irredentists in the Arab camp, as well as from
purists on the Israeli left and right, I believe that it offers a real hope of a
lasting peace—and one in which any realist in any camp can
wholeheartedly believe.
OceanofPDF.com
9

THE QUESTION OF
JEWISH POWER

In 1987 I visited Poland, then still under Communist rule. I landed at a

military airport near Krakow and was then taken by car to the drab
countryside. We soon came across a dilapidated village whose only mark of
distinction was a sign that startled me: “Auswiescen.” Auschwitz. There
were actually people who lived there.
A few minutes beyond the village, we reached the gates of the camp,
inscribed with the infamous promise: Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you
free”). As I soon learned, the barracks of Auschwitz were not the actual
place where the great part of the destruction of some two million Jews
occurred. Although many thousands died there, Auschwitz was used
primarily as headquarters for the German staff for interrogation and for
torture. But the actual work of liquidation was done elsewhere. I marched
with fellow Knesset members and Jewish youngsters from Israel and other
countries along the railroad tracks leading from Auschwitz to nearby
Birkenau. The tracks led through another infamous gate, coming to an
abrupt end at a white ramp several hundred yards into the camp. On either
side was a crematorium, now partially in ruins. The trains would stop at the
ramp each day, depositing thousands of Jews who were quickly dispatched
to the gas chambers. Soon there was nothing left of them but ashes.
Until I stood there at Birkenau, I never realized how tiny and mundane
the whole thing was. The factory of death could have been put out of
operation by one pass of a bomber. Indeed the Allies had been bombing
strategic targets a few miles away. Had the order been given, it would have
taken but a slight shift of the bomber pilot’s stick to interdict the slaughter.
Yet the order was never given.
Many people visiting Birkenau assume that the Allies were unaware of
the fact that all of Europe’s Jews were being systematically annihilated. I
knew differently. For a year and a half during my tenure at the United
Nations, my colleagues and I had waged a campaign to open the secret
archives where the UN records on Nazi war criminals were kept. When we
finally obtained access to the files, we saw that the Allies War Crimes
Commission, established by Britain in 1942 and staffed by the officials of
seventeen countries, had been receiving accurate and comprehensive
information about what was going on in Birkenau, Chelmno, and Dachau in
early 1944, a year and a half before the ovens were put out of commission
by Germany’s collapse. Had the Allies acted on this information, untold
numbers of Jews could have been saved. But they knew, and did nothing.
European Jewry was doomed.
How did the Jews come to this point of utter helplessness? How did an
entire people arrive at a state where they were herded quietly to the
slaughter, unable to resist this monstrous assault on their persons and on
their collective existence? And how is it that they were able to do nothing to
elicit even an ounce of action from their would-be saviors?
The question of Jewish powerlessness is central to the traumatic
experience of the Jewish people, and it is the obverse side of the question of
Jewish power. It is between these two poles that Jewish history has
oscillated in modern times. Certainly in the last one hundred years, the
period that is the primary focus of this book, the Jewish people has
experienced the most extreme shifts of circumstance from one pole to the
other. The pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus trial, the gathering storm of anti-
Semitism and its seismic explosion in the Holocaust, along with Great
Britain’s cynical obstruction of the Jewish national movement’s efforts to
bring the Jews of Europe to a safe haven—these are the tragic steps in a
people’s descent to utter impotence. Similarly, the resurrection of Israel, the
rebirth of Jewish military power, and its spectacular successes against
adversaries far superior in numbers and matériel signify a movement in the
contrary direction.
Yet as dramatic as this oscillation has been during the last century, I
believe that the rise of Israel can only be understood in a much broader
historical perspective, a millennial one. For the Jews are one of the oldest
nations on earth, and they are distinguished by their capacity for
remembrance. In its essence, the rise of Israel has been a conscious attempt
to wrest redemption from the grip of unrelenting agony and to do so by
weaving into the future the enduring threads of collective will and purpose
originating in a heroic past.
To fully understand the interplay between power and power-lessness in
the history of the Jews, therefore, requires an examination of the Jewish
position over a much longer period than the modern era. Of necessity, such
a perspective must begin with the position of the Jews in antiquity, for it is
in that period that the decisive experiences in the life of the nation took
place, shaping many aspects of the Jewish character, Jewish attitudes, and
Jewish expectations of the future.
As opposed to the image of the Jew during most of the modern period,
Jews in ancient times were not known as docile victims. To the contrary,
they were renowned for possessing the exact opposite qualities of national
character. Biblical records attest to this, as do Hellenistic and Roman
sources. The Jews may not have been loved in antiquity, but they were
respected for their determination and capacity to resist assaults on their
rights and liberty. In fact, it is hard to find a people that resisted so
persistently, for so long, and against such overwhelming odds. Although the
Jewish land was successively conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs, the Jewish people
resisted conquest, occupation, and exile for nearly twenty centuries.
In this first long phase of their history, the Jews produced a succession
of remarkable military and political figures to lead their protracted struggle,
a list that has few if any rivals in the history of nations: Moses, Joshua,
Gideon, Samson, Debora, Saul, Jonathan, David, the Kings of Israel and
judah, Nehemia, the Maccabees, Bar Kochba, Elazar ben Yair, Judah of
Galilee, Simon bar Giora, and other lesser-known Jewish leaders of the
successive revolts against Rome and Byzantium.
Furthermore, Jewish resistance characterized the Jewish Diaspora of the
ancient world as well. From the second century B.C.E. through the end of
the Roman period, the Jews of Egypt, Syria, and Rome evinced a capacity
to resist politically and militarily the pogroms, massacres, and violations of
their rights by the non-Jews among whom they lived. “You know what a big
crowd it is, how they stick together, how influential they are,” pouted
Cicero, seeking to avoid undue confrontation with the Jews of Rome. 1
Against Rome and Byzantium, the Jews of Judea stood utterly alone in the
face of a superpower that had vanquished most of the civilized world,
waging a seemingly hopeless resistance for six centuries.
If there is one quality that emerges from Jewish history in antiquity, it is
the obstinate refusal of the Jews to defer their religious and political
independence to other peoples, as well as their readiness to wage an
unrelenting struggle against their would-be oppressors. They sometimes
succeeded, although more often they did not. But they never gave up the
struggle, which preserved in itself their identity and values and prevented
them from assimilating and disappearing like the numberless other nations
that succumbed to the power of empires.
How did this capacity to resist vanish, to be replaced by the image and
reality of the defenseless Jew? This did not happen overnight. Conquered,
subjugated, and exhausted, the Jews nevertheless continued the struggle to
assert control over their fate, sometimes requiring long decades to replenish
their collective will. Certainly the protracted and tragic struggle against
Rome drained the nation of much energy. But contrary to popular notions,
this series of defeats failed to root out the Jewish will to resist, as shown by
the later Jewish revolts against Rome and Byzantium after Bar Kochba. For
as long as the Jewish people lived on its land, it possessed a clear capacity
for military and political action, demonstrated as late as the beginning of the
seventh century with the Jewish alliances first with and then against the
Persian invaders of the land.
Yet once the Jews were driven into exile and became a collection of
dispersed communities in the medieval world, they were gradually deprived
of all the conditions necessary for self-defense. Although in the cities of the
Middle Ages the Jews lived in their own fortified quarters, they slowly lost
the power necessary to sustain such defenses. Most notably in the states of
medieval Germany, the Jews were stripped of the right that others had to
carry weapons for self-defense, despite the fact that (or perhaps because) it
was the Jews who often faced the most wanton assaults. If you cannot carry
a sword, you soon forget how to use one altogether; both the physical and
psychological preparedness to resist eventually atrophy. Step by step, the
Jews were consigned to the status of a minority dependent on the protection
of its hosts—that is, if the hosts were inclined to protect it in the first place.
In some cases it took many centuries for the Jews to be reduced to a level of
such perfect powerlessness. As late as fourteenth-century Spain, for
example, there are records of Jewish armed resistance against attacks. But
by then, such resistance had become an aberration. The Jewish people had
effectively lost control over its destiny.
A condition of inherent defenselessness necessarily invites aggression.
This was especially true in the case of the Jews, who uniquely combined
economic success and endemic weakness, making them an irresistible target
and producing an escalating cycle of pogrom and displacement. Tossed out
from one land, the Jews would find a haven in another, usually striking an
arrangement with the sovereign and the nobility only to be brutally attacked
when their allies and protectors were toppled or weakened. The Jewish
people became a people that other people killed, often with relish, generally
with impunity. A direct line leads from the massacres of Jews in the
Crusades in the eleventh century, to the mass killing in Spain in 1391, to the
great bloodletting in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, to the pogroms
in Russia in the nineteenth century, to the Holocaust in Europe in our own
time. And as the technology of destruction improved, the horrors became
even more horrible.
The first result of the atrophy of Jewish resistance was physical
destruction on an unimaginable scale. No other people has paid such a price
for being defenseless. But there was a second fateful consequence: Slowly
and surely, through the centuries of exile, the image and character of the
Jew began to change. For non-Jews, the glorious Jewish past faded into dim
memory and irrelevance. The word Jew became an object of contempt,
derision, at best pity. It became synonymous with the word coward in a
hundred different tongues. The adjective wandering was affixed to it,
signifying the rootlessness and precariousness of Jewish existence. Not a
trace could be found of the grudging admiration that the peoples of
antiquity had harbored for Jewish courage and tenacity.
Worse, a substantial segment of Jewish opinion assimilated this
disparaging image of the Jew, and many Jews came to view themselves as
others had come to view them. This took on a particularly pernicious twist
in the modern era. As the doctrines of modern pacifism emerged, many
Jews rushed to embrace them, pretending they could transform into a
universal virtue what had always been a unique vulnerability of the Jews.
That the Jews “would not” (could not) resort to arms, that they would not
“demean” themselves by “stooping to violence,” was taken to be a clear
sign of their moral superiority over other peoples who were not similarly
constrained. Once leading segments of Jewish opinion in Europe had
transformed Jewish weakness into a positive good, the Jewish people’s
chances of escaping its fate reached a new low.
Of all Zionist leaders, Jabotinsky was virtually alone in seeing where all
this was leading. Throughout the 1930s, he sounded the alarm of impending
danger. In Warsaw in 1938, on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’av (marking
the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans), he said
to Poland’s three million Jews, almost none of whom were to survive the
war:

For three years I have been imploring you, Jews of Poland, the
crown of world Jewry, appealing to you, warning you unceasingly
that the catastrophe is nigh. My hair has turned white and I have
grown old over these years, for my heart is bleeding that you, dear
brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin
to spew forth its fires of destruction. I see a horrible vision. Time is
growing short for you to be spared. I know you cannot see it, for
you are troubled and confused by everyday concerns… Listen to
my words at this, the twelfth hour. For God’s sake: let everyone
save himself, so long as there is time to do so, for time is running
short.

But Jabotinsky also saw a glimmer of light in the blackness:

And I want to say something else to you on this day, the Ninth of
Av: Those who will succeed in escaping this catastrophe will live to
experience a festive moment of great Jewish joy: the rebirth and
establishment of the Jewish State! I do not know whether I myself
will live to see it—but my son will! I am certain of this, just as I am
certain that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I believe in it with
all my heart. 2

Even a year before the outbreak of the war, few could see the
catastrophe coming, and fewer still could share in Jabotinsky’s note of
hope. For those who could see the danger clearly, the Jewish people was
approaching the end.
A scene at the close of Claude Lanzmann’s haunting documentary,
Shoah, captures this hopelessness. Shoah ends with the testimony of one of
the survivors from the Warsaw ghetto. He describes how in the last
desperate days of the fighting, when the ghetto was being pulverized by the
German forces, he was sent to seek help from the Polish Resistance.
Lowering himself into a sewer, he made his way through the German lines
to the “Aryan” section of Warsaw. The Poles refused his request, and after
doing what he could, he decided to go back. He reentered the sewer and
surfaced in the midst of darkness in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. He was
greeted by utter silence. Everyone was dead. The survivor remembers
saying to himself: “I’m the last Jew. I’ll wait for morning, and for the
Germans.” 3
His assessment about being the last Jew was not so far off the mark. In
1942, the rulers of Nazi Germany had met in a villa in the Berlin suburb of
Wannsee to design the Final Solution. As was later learned from the
Wannsee Conference documents, the Nazis planned to annihilate every Jew
in Europe, from Britain to the Soviet Union. They drew up detailed lists for
the liquidation of eleven million human beings, down to the two hundred
Jews of Albania scheduled for destruction. 4 The original German plan dealt
only with European Jewry, but when the Nazi armies reached North Africa,
they began deporting the Jews of these lands to the death camps as well.
They, like the Jews of Russia, were saved only by Hitler’s defeat.
It seemed this was to be the inevitable consequence of the long, horrible
transformation of the Jews: The sons of the Maccabees had become the
ultimate victims, destined to vanish from the earth.
Yet at this lowest of lows in Jewish history, the Jews were beginning to
experience a second great transformation: They were rediscovering the
capacity to resist, a rediscovery that had begun slowly in the previous
century. The huge citizen-armies of Europe after Napoleon had begun to
train a Jewish soldiery, and by World War I hundreds of thousands of Jews
were under arms and fighting with distinction on both sides. In World War
II such Jewish strength was committed to the Allied cause. But the most
telling sign of a transformation was occurring at the very bottom of the
abyss itself. In the Warsaw ghetto, as in Treblinka and in Sobibor, Jews
were undertaking the most heroic resistance in the annals of man. In rising
up against the Nazis in the most desperate and impossible of circumstances,
they were showing that the ancient thread that ran through the fabric of their
character had not been severed after all.
This resurrection of the Jewish capacity to resist had been fashioned as a
deliberate policy only within the Zionist movement. As early as World War
I, the Zionists had set out to reconstruct, after many centuries of neglect, the
elements of Jewish military power, starting with Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legion
during World War I, through the makeshift Hashomer units in the 1920s,
Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads in the 1930s, and the Jewish Brigade
in the British Army during World War II. From these sprang the various
underground forces, the Hagana, Irgun, and Lehi, which in turn paved the
way for the establishment of the Israel Defense Force on the eve of Israel’s
independence.
With the founding of the State of Israel, the majority of Jews quickly
came to understand the critical importance of military power—a change far
more abrupt and spectacular than the gradual loss of this understanding had
been. For if the rendering of the Jews from a militant to a docile people had
taken place over many centuries, here in the space of only a few years a
reborn Jewish sovereignty rediscovered the art of soldiering. Israel devoted
an enormous part of its economy and the finest of its youth to the task of
militarily defending the state. Much to the amazement of the world, the
Jewish state was soon producing fighters second to none and an army that
proved itself capable of routing far larger and better-equipped fighting
machines again and again. Furthermore, in the war against terrorism Israel’s
soldiers showed a demoralized and paralyzed world that civilized societies
could fight this scourge: In countless raids and special operations
culminating in the rescue mission at Entebbe, Israel proved that terrorism
could be fought and beaten.
All this not only changed the condition of the Jews of Israel, enabling
the Jewish people to successfully resist assaults aimed at its annihilation for
the first time in centuries. It also changed the image of the Jew in the eyes
of non-Jews. The respect for Israel’s military prowess against
overwhelming odds did not necessarily mean that the anti-Semitic
stereotypes of the Jews were replaced everywhere and in every way; in
some cases, the anti-Semites, encouraged by the Arabs, created a strange
amalgam of the cowardly, mercenary Jew bedecked in a storm trooper’s
uniform. But notwithstanding these grotesque distortions, most of the world
was keenly aware that the Jewish people was experiencing in Israel a great
transformation. As in antiquity, many marveled at the resolve,
resourcefulness, and audacity shown by the Jewish army, changing for
millions their conception of the Jews, or at least of some of them.
But the change in the way the Jews viewed themselves was even more
dramatic. It had begun as early as the 1890s. Visitors to Palestine at the time
noted a change in the first generation of Jewish youngsters who had been
raised on the land outside the enclosed ancient Jewish quarters of Safed and
Jerusalem. Unlike their Orthodox brethren, these young Jews, mostly sons
and daughters of recent immigrants, cultivated the land, rode horses,
learned to shoot, spoke a revived Hebrew, and were capable of befriending
or confronting the Arabs, earning their respect if not their love.
A quintessential example of this new breed was the Aaronsohn family of
Zichron Ya’akov, which gained renown both in Palestine and abroad after
the turn of the century. Well-to-do farmers, they received international
acclaim through the achievements of the family’s eldest son, the strong-
willed Aaron Aaronsohn. Aaronsohn was a multifaceted personality: a
talented agronomist whose experimental work was crucial in convincing
many that the barren land could indeed be brought back to life and
successfully cultivated, a political thinker of great sagacity, a hard-headed
organizer and leader of men. As such, he was totally committed to driving
out the Turks by helping the British liberate Palestine. He, his equally
strong-willed sister Sarah, and a band of young Palestinian Jews that
included the colorful adventurer Yosef Lishansky and the sensitive romantic
Avshalom Feinberg organized an espionage ring that transmitted signals to
British ships from the family’s estate on the cliffs overlooking the
Mediterranean. Each of these extraordinary figures of the “Nili” group, as it
was later known, was to die tragically: Sarah, by her own hand while being
tortured during interrogation by the Turks; Avshalom, murdered by
Bedouins in the sands near Rafah while he was en route to British lines in
Egypt; Lishansky, hanged by the Turks in Damascus after he was caught in
the north of the country; and Aaron, lost at the age of thirty-nine when his
plane mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel after the war.
Nonetheless, the audacity and courage shown by these young Jews, the
special spirit they exuded, combining worldliness with fierce pride and an
equally fierce determination to overthrow the Ottoman occupation of the
Jewish land, shaped the ethos of generations of young Palestinian (and later
Israeli) Jews. It also influenced the non-Jews who came into contact with
them, most notably the remarkable Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen
(described in Chapter 2), who as General Allenby’s intelligence officer
worked with Aaronsohn’s group and as a result reversed his previous
opinion of the Jews.
This essential transformation of the Jew occurred with great rapidity on
the soil of Palestine over the first half of the century. By the eve of Israel’s
independence, a distinctly different Jewish character had emerged, ready to
take up the struggle to deliver the nation. Fifty or sixty years may be like
the blink of an eye in the collective life of an ancient people, but in the lives
of individuals it can seem like an eternity: What is true in a person’s own
life and in his or her parents’ lives comes to seem as though it has been true
forever. By the time the second or third generation born and bred into the
change reached adulthood, the Jews of Israel had begun to lose their
awareness of what it meant to be a Jew in the ghettos of Europe or Yemen.
Sometimes it would take an unexpected event to awaken this understanding
anew.
This was very much my own experience. One of the young Israeli
recruits whom I met in an elite military unit for which we had both
volunteered was Haim Ben-Yonah. Haim was a good half a head taller than
the rest of us, and he stood out in other ways as well. A self-effacing smile
disguised an inner toughness, wedded to a basic integrity that made him the
first of our induction to be sent to officers’ school. If ever there were a
person exemplifying so many of the things that we valued in the Israeli
character, Haim was that person. This was obvious to all of us from our first
days in the army together. Our induction into our unit entailed a twenty-
four-hour, eighty-mile march, some of it over grueling terrain, and all of it
during one of the worst winter storms in years. Early in the march, when the
officer leading Haim’s team twisted his ankle and had to be evacuated, he
asked Haim, then a raw recruit like the rest of us, to take command—which
Haim did calmly, almost matter-of-factly. And while the position of
leadership Haim assumed naturally distanced him somewhat from the
others in the unit, his habitual reserve did not prevent him from opening up
when it was needed. I remember in particular the friendship he struck up
with a young recruit whose family had come from Allepo in Syria. The
youth found himself on perpetually unfamiliar ground in dealing with the
clannish kibbutzniks, but Haim was undeterred, spending hours speaking
Arabic with him using what little of the language he had managed to pick
up on his kibbutz and sending both of them into paroxysms of laughter over
the absurdities of his pronunciation.
One dark night in 1969, as the unit was carrying out a counter-strike
across the Suez Canal after deadly Egyptian raids on the Israeli side, Haim
was killed in a burst of gunfire. His body fell into the waters of the canal
and disappeared. We searched for him fruitlessly that night and the next,
and his body was finally returned to us days later by the Egyptians. It was at
the end of a long row of cypress trees at Kibbutz Yehiam in the western
Galilee, Haim’s home, that he was buried. It was there also that I met
Haim’s mother Shulamit and discovered that Haim had been born shortly
after she and his father had been freed from the death camps of Europe. Had
he been born two years earlier, this daring young officer would have been
tossed into the ovens, one of the million nameless Jewish babies who met
their end in this way. Haim’s mother told me that while she felt a great deal
of pain, she felt no bitterness. At least, she said, her son had died wearing
the uniform of a Jewish soldier defending his people.
I was nineteen years old then, and these words had a profound effect on
me. I found myself thinking again and again about the possibility that Haim
might not have lived even the short life that he did live. Or, eerily, that he
might have outlived the war, but in a world in which Israel had not come
into being. Would Haim have come out the same way in another land—a
Hungarian-speaking version of the same dauntless Israeli youth, sure of his
place in the world, possessed of the same inner calm? For me this was an
unsettling question, and I was not at all sure of the answer. I had been born
into the Jewish state and therefore believed that the values and attitudes
with which I and my generation had grown up were natural, long abiding,
and even shared by all, or most, Jews.
But this was not the case. A distinguishing feature of many Jews raised
in Israel is the absence of the sense of personal insecurity that accompanies
many Jews in the Diaspora, even the most successful ones. While Israel
itself may come under periodic attack, the sense of being a Jew in Israel
seldom does. There are occasional existential musings, limited to tiny fringe
groups in the society, about the purpose of it all and whether the Diaspora
was not really preferable to all this, but these are sharp aberrations from the
norm: In the deepest personal sense, the overwhelming majority of Israelis
feel completely and naturally at home in Israel, notwithstanding its many
problems. There are, of course, quite a few Jews who feel at home in
America as well, but a few sharp incidents of anti-Semitism may deprive
them of this sense of security. When non-Jews sense this vulnerability in
Jews, some wrongly ascribe it to cowardice. I could not fully understand
until much later in life the view of the Jew as a pusillanimous creature
because, although I had certainly met some noteworthy cowards in my
childhood and youth in Jerusalem, I had also seen the very opposite
qualities in the young Israelis who grew up with me. In any case, the issue
here is not individual courage or lack of it, but the inner sense of belonging
that produces in turn a personal sense of security about one’s place in the
world. This was the other great result of the Return. In addition to the
physical ingathering of the Jews, it stimulated a spiritual ingathering where
feelings and attitudes that had been lost in the dispersion were retrieved.
The speed with which a new generation raised in Israel had developed
and absorbed this old-new ethos was one of the most remarkable
transformations in the history of any culture and of any people. No doubt it
could take place so rapidly because the Jewish people maintained the
memories of its life in antiquity and preserved intact its desire not only to
restore its independence as a nation but its integrity as individuals. This is
why what was happening in Israel radiated to the farthest corners of the
Diaspora and affected the self-perception of many Jews around the world.
In particular, the victory after the Six Day War stiffened Jewish pride and
made many Jews speak out and declare their activism and commitment to
the Jewish people and the Jewish state. It was anything but coincidental that
the great awakening of Soviet Jews, buried under half a century of
Communist amnesia, took place after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in
1967, as Natan Sharansky and others have testified. The reestablishment of
the State of Israel and the rediscovery of the Jewish capacity to resist
dramatically transformed the objective and subjective condition of the
Jewish people worldwide.

***

But this was not a complete transformation. Indeed, it could not have been
complete. For the Jewish people, having lived outside politics for so long,
having not wielded power for so many centuries, could not adapt to an
independent existence all at once. If your fate has been entirely determined
by others for centuries, it is difficult to internalize the idea that not only can
others bend you to their will, but that you can shape the actions of others to
conform to your needs. A culture that is truly political assumes that the
mustering of support and the periodic exercise of political power is a
natural and inevitable part of the ongoing struggle to survive.
But for the Jews, even reimplanting an understanding of the elementary
need for military power entailed a bitter battle to overcome the entrenched
view that Jews ought to have nothing to do with armies. The calls by
Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and others to challenge this state of
helplessness by creating Jewish military and political power met with
derision even from many Jews and were dismissed as irrelevant absurdities
or fascistic fetishes. Jewish critics from all quarters warned that the
establishment of Jewish military might would throw the Jews into the arms
of militarism and extreme nationalism, as though the act of wielding arms
were in and of itself morally repugnant. If the Allies fighting the Nazis had
adopted such a view, it would have doomed humanity. Yet in rejecting the
Zionist message to organize political and military resistance, the Jews of
Europe wasted a full four decades in which they could have obtained arms,
allies, and escape routes to save themselves. The result was Auschwitz.
The persistent refusal of most of the Jews to see the need for something
as obvious as the capacity for self-defense seems incredible today. It was
indeed incredible, the result of over a thousand years of nearly complete
detachment from political and military realities. Of course, after the
catastrophe of World War II, many Jews came to understand the need for
military power quickly enough; they understood the stark fact that the
absence of a Jewish ability to physically resist the Nazis had permitted a
third of their people to be slaughtered. This understanding they translated
into the Jewish army of Israel, without which, they knew, another Holocaust
would have befallen them at the hands of the Arabs.
But even many Israeli Jews, who have come to accept the need for and
the possibility of resistance, balk when it comes to sustaining this resistance
into the indefinite future. Perhaps because of the agonized odyssey of the
Jewish people, the Jewish mind seeks a way out of coping with this
incessant political and occasional military struggle, stretching out into
foreseeable time. When will it all end? many Israeli and non-Israeli Jews
ask. Will we go on struggling forever? Will the sword forever devour its
makers?
For Israel, such questions are never fully answerable. One cannot
prophesy an endless succession of wars, nor predict the scope of battles or
their outcomes. Whether wars break out, whether they are defused by
diplomacy or stopped by deterrence, are questions no one can answer with
certainty. But what is a safe assumption is that political conflict in the
Middle East is not about to disappear under any predictable circumstance—
that is, unless one accepts the idea that history will soon come to its end and
we shall reach the millennium. Not coincidentally, this thought is of Jewish
origin as well, although the visions of Isaiah and the other Jewish prophets
were principally intended to teach us what to strive for—and not necessarily
what to expect next week. But whereas many other peoples have been able
to distinguish between the ideal vision of human existence and the way the
affairs of nations must be conducted in the present, the Jewish people has
had a harder time accepting this separation. The Jews have such an acute
sense of what mankind should be that they often act as though it is virtually
there already.
Nowhere is this penchant for seeing it all come to a speedy and
satisfactory end more sharply felt than in Israel itself. A country besieged
time and again by armies calling for its destruction, whose eighteen-year-
old sons and daughters give years of their youth to serving in the army, and
whose adult men do reserve duty for another twenty-five years, naturally
develops a powerful longing for peace. As a result, broad swaths of Israel’s
population have developed simplistic, sentimental, and even messianic
views of politics.
I recall, for instance, the attitudes of many people in Israel following the
defeat of the Arabs in the Six Day War. A widespread view was that the
Arabs would sue for an immediate end to the conflict. I remember that even
as an eighteen-year-old I found inanely childish this notion that the Arab
leaders would pick up the phone and call the whole thing off any moment
now. Yet it is remarkable how many in Israel actually believed this at the
time, making no allowance for the possibility that the Arabs would pursue
the war against Israel by other means until they were ready for the next
military round; nor did they make any allowance for the time and
experiences that would be needed for an evolution in the Arabs’ deeply held
beliefs about Israel.
This approach was partly rooted in the tendency to ascribe to the Arabs
the same sentiments that we felt in Israel, with a total disregard for the
differences in culture, history, and political values. Many Israelis believed
that the Arabs loathed war as much as they themselves did and that, given a
proper explication of Israel’s peaceful intentions, the Arabs would embrace
and welcome us. This cloyingly sentimental approach was espoused in the
1920s by the Brit Shalom (Alliance for Peace) movement led by the
American rabbi Judah Magnes, who had settled in Jerusalem and became
chancellor of the Hebrew University. Magnes believed, in decidedly
American terms, that the Arab campaign against the Jews was a product of
a failure to communicate. The Mufti, he believed, could be reasoned with,
pacified, and appeased. Under no circumstances should the Jews take up
arms and retaliate, for this would merely heighten the Arabs’ hostility. It is
difficult to believe how many of the leading intellectuals of the Jewish
community in Palestine continued to cling to this view, not only in the face
of murderous anti-Jewish passions incited by the Mufti but even in the
period when he was an active partisan of the Nazis. The successor-believers
in this view are still very much with us today, ignoring the realities of Arab
political life, dismissing the intentions of those bent on destroying Israel, or
inverting logic by suggesting that they must be appeased rather than
resisted.
Though the great majority in Israel shuns this simple-minded attitude
toward the Arab world, it is nonetheless strongly influenced by a current of
thinking that encompasses surprisingly numerous segments of the
population, left and right. This current derives from the relentless Jewish
desire to see an end to struggle. In its essence it is a nonpolitical, even
antipolitical, approach to the life of nations. Basically, it holds that history,
or more precisely Middle Eastern history, will have a finite end. We will
arrive at a state called “peace” in which history will simply stop. Wars will
end, external conflicts will subside, internal conflicts will vanish, Israel will
be accepted by the Arabs, and the Jews will be forever content. At this end
of days, Israel will become a kind of blissful castle in the clouds, a Jewish
never-never land in which the Jews will be able finally to find a respite
from struggle and strife.
It is a view that I remember well from my childhood. The illustrated
textbooks of Israel’s geography had drawings of rolling hills and cultivated
fields, in the center of which was a cluster of little white houses with red-
tiled roofs and a water tower in the background, presumably signifying
some idyllic kibbutz or mo-shav. The idea was that we each were destined
to have our own version of this idyll, with our own little house, a stretch of
grass next to it, and a leafy tree shading it—as though we did not live in the
middle of a sandstorm, as though the swirling dust of fanaticism and war
were not enveloping us, as though we were living in the Midwest and not in
the Mideast. This fantasy view of Israel’s situation, including its fairy-tale
denouement, was broadly prevalent in the education of generations of
youngsters both before and after the establishment of the state.
But after the creation of Israel, with the successive attacks and the
continuing absence of the long-hoped-for peace, the gap between the idyll
and the reality grew greater and greater, creating an ever-increasing sense of
frustration that was felt most acutely at the extremes of the Israeli political
spectrum. According to the views prevalent in these quarters, the problem
was not that the idyll was misplaced or in need of revision, but that we had
strayed from the path of righteousness and were being punished for our sins
by the Arab refusal to accept us. If we would only correct our ways, we
could reach the hoped-for pastoral state of bliss, the desire for which is
embedded so deeply in the Israeli psyche.
On the left, this messianic belief focuses today on the “sin” of Israel’s
conquest of the territories during the Six Day War. The proponents of this
view look nostalgically back to the nineteen years in which Israel lived in a
vulnerable, embryonic condition. Somehow they manage to remember not
the terrible danger to which the country was subjected but only the relative
degree of national unity that this danger produced.
In this leftist revision of history, the incorporation of the territories into
Israel during the Six Day War was the beginning of all evil. Israel became
smug and self-satisfied, insensitive and inhuman, repressing the Palestinian
Arabs and tarnishing the Israeli soul in the process. To save Israel’s soul, we
must amputate part of the body. If only the nation were to rid itself of the
territories, its economy would improve, Israelis would have to serve less
reserve duty, and there would be jobs for new immigrants and money for
building safer highways. This strain of argument occasionally spills over
into the foreign press in articles about the ill effects of the “tensions
produced by the occupation,” which are supposed to lead to such things as
increased child abuse and wife-beating. The essential thesis of this view is:
Give up the territories and be saved. The true believers are certain that we
are at salvation’s gate but have simply been too blind or too foolish to go in.
A mirror image of this messianism is found on the religious right, where
it is believed that the act of settling the land is in and of itself sufficient to
earn divine providence and an end to the country’s woes. If Israel were
merely to hang tough and erect more settlements, it could dispense with
world opinion and international pressures. A variation on the religious
right’s view is the idea advanced by a segment of the nonreligious right that
Israel could achieve lasting stability if only it could get rid of the Arabs
living in its midst. That is, the left believes that getting rid of the territories
would cure all of Israel’s ills, the right believes that keeping the territories
would achieve the same effect.
These are all quick fixes that are neither quick nor able to fix. For what
needs fixing is the underlying problem of Arab hostility—a problem that
may or may not disappear with the passing of several generations. Both of
these fantasies evidence a fundamental immaturity in Israeli political
culture, a desperate search for an escape from the difficult struggle that
Jewish national life among the Arabs has engendered throughout this
century, and that Israel will have to face in the next century as well.
True, continuing struggle does not necessarily mean perpetual war, but it
does mean an ongoing national exertion and the possibility of periodic
bouts of international. confrontation. Ending the state of war with the Arab
states and establishing formal peace with them would substantially reduce
the degree and the intensity of the conflict, but it can never fully eliminate
the possibility offuture wars and upheavals, just as the end of the Cold War
did not constitute an end to all conflicts or to history itself, as some had
inanely believed. You cannot end the struggle for survival without ending
life itself.
It is this that Jews in general and Israelis in particular find so difficult to
accept. A nation of idealists and closet idealists, still lacking the experience
of political sovereignty needed to sharpen political perspicacity, they have
found it difficult to adjust to the realities of international politics. The
escapist tendencies to Israeli politics stem from this Jewish inability to
reconcile oneself to the permanent need for Jewish power.

Of course, after many decades most Israelis have come to terms with the
idea that the military is, at least for the time being, the indispensable
foundation of Israel’s security. But the evident successes of the Israeli army
in protecting the country and its citizens have obscured a crucial truth:
Military strength is not enough to ensure the nation’s survival. Just as the
Jews had earlier failed to grasp the significance of military power, a great
many Jews, including many Israelis, now fail to understand the significance
of, and the need for, other types of power—and the totality of strength that
derives from a nation’s military, economic, and political resources.
Thus, in contrast to their new-found willingness to defend themselves
against military attacks, many Israelis show a marked and disturbing
tendency toward conceding at the first sign of serious international political
and economic pressure. Who are we, they ask, to resist the entire world? If
this is the will of the powers that be, what choice do we have but to go
along? That it is sometimes—and in the case of Israel, often—necessary to
dissent from and resist prevailing opinion seldom crosses their minds. That
dissent is possible is believed even less frequently. In the realm of political
power, the habits of passivity and submissiveness acquired in exile are still
very much with us.
Yet the twentieth century has shown better than any other age that
political power is no less important than military might in international
conflicts. This is a lesson that no one, regardless of his ends, can afford to
forget. The Czechs neglected this lesson and allowed Hitler, who
understood it well, to paint them into a political corner in Munich, forcing
them to surrender their country’s defenses without firing a shot. But it is not
only victims of aggression who pay the price for underestimating the
importance of political power. Sometimes the perpetrators of aggression
forget it as well. Saddam Hussein, for one, did not take it into account in his
bid to rule Kuwait. His army had overcome all Kuwaiti resistance within
hours, but the battle that Saddam was unprepared to fight was the political
battle, over the next six months, to persuade international opinion that his
cause was just, and that the governments of the world should not embark on
embargo and war to pry Kuwait from his grasp. He could have prepared the
ground in advance by conducting a full-scale campaign in the West to
obscure his designs under a cloud of palatable arguments: that the Kuwaiti
rulers were corrupt oppressors of their own people, that Kuwaitis were an
integral part of the Iraqi people, that they welcomed his populist rule, and
so on. But having failed to fight on this battlefield, Saddam lost
ignominiously. He was completely isolated internationally, with virtually no
one to come to his assistance or broker an elegant, face-saving compromise.
He was saved only by American timidity in the closing hours of the war.
As Saddam learned the hard way, to win militarily you must also win
politically; to win politically, you must win over public opinion; and to win
over public opinion, you must convince the public that your cause is just.
This chain of imperatives, culminating in the need to muster public
support on a vast scale, is not a luxury that nations may choose to forgo.
The advent of democratic ideals and democratic terminology, along with the
rise of the mass media, have elevated international public opinion into the
crucial arena in which political struggles are waged. It matters little if your
cause is just or unjust, moral or immoral. Anyone engaged in political or
military conflict in this century must seek to persuade international
audiences that his cause is just. Indeed, Hitler and Churchill were
quintessential examples of political leaders who understood the logic of this
new necessity. Hitler and Goebbels perfected the techniques of the
propaganda blitz, disguising their aggressive intentions in appeals to justice
and self-determination. Although these were outrageous parodies of the
truth, they were nonetheless accepted at the time as plausible explanations
of Nazi actions (and as excuses for Western inaction). Churchill recognized
that his first task as war leader was to mobilize the entire Western world by
appealing to its most cherished values of freedom and human dignity. His
main weapons, his speeches, were carefully constructed toward that end, as
were those of his ally, Franklin Roosevelt, who pioneered the systematic
use of broadcasting as a device to rally public opinion.
To see the power of public opinion in the age of mass communication,
one need only compare the electrifying effect of Churchill’s speeches,
broadcast to millions over radio, with the virtual initial noneffect of
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. That address, though at least as inspiring as
any that Churchill wrote, was heard by only a handful of people, and it
played almost no immediate role in determining the course of the Civil War.
5
The millions who were swayed by its poetry and power became familiar
with it only later, and not in the midst of the great events that had led
Lincoln to compose it. It could be argued that even if Lincoln had had
broadcasting available to him, his weak voice would not have carried the
message, as Churchill’s stentorian delivery did. All this serves simply to
underscore the new realities of the century: that the effect of a powerful
message powerfully delivered and powerfully broadcast to public opinion
has become an indispensable element in the waging of political and military
struggles.
Many of the century’s chief antagonists in international disputes have
understood this principle. Stalin applied it enthusiastically, presenting
himself as the world’s savior and changing democracies into despotisms in
the eyes of hundreds of millions of people. This legacy of the big lie hugely
told has been bequeathed by Hitler and Stalin to an endless array of lesser
dictators, from Nasser to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro, who have used their
techniques on their victims and on their victims’ allies to weaken resistance
to their aggression.
Take the North Vietnamese as an example. They pursued the propaganda
war with great success against South Vietnam, presenting themselves as a
paragon of goodness while vilifying the South, whose government was
anything but pristine but was certainly not guilty of the mass killings and
uprooting of entire populations that the North habitually practiced. The
relentless North Vietnamese propaganda campaign aimed at American
public opinion made an important contribution to sapping the American
will to pursue the war. To the understandable question of why American
boys should be fighting in a far corner of Asia was added the corollary:
especially when America’s ally is so corrupt and evil. With repetition of the
question, the answer became increasingly obvious, paving the way to North
Vietnam’s victory.
But notwithstanding the success of the North Vietnamese, I believe that
in the postwar era the preeminent masters of translating propaganda into
political pressure have been the Arabs. The Arab regimes and terror
organizations have understood the importance of this instrument as it
applied to their particular objective: the destruction of Israel. They saw that
to reverse Israel’s military victory of 1967 they would have to defeat Israel
politically, that this meant defeating it on the battleground of public
opinion, and that this in turn meant defeating it in the appeal to justice.
They consequently proceeded to weave an elaborate patchwork quilt of
falsehoods: the false Theory of Palestinian Centrality, the false Reversal of
Causality, the false image of PLO Congeniality. Above all, the Arabs sought
to rob the Jews of every aspect of the historical case that suggested the
justice of their cause, constructing an extraordinary distortion of Jewish
history and substituting in its place a fictitious Palestinian one: The Arabs
took the place of the Jews as the natives in the land, and the Jews took the
place of the Arabs as the invaders; the horrible Jewish exile into a hundred
lands was exchanged for a Palestinian Arab “exile” (into the neighboring
Arab states); the atrocities committed against the Jews were denied and
dismissed, while any hardship encountered by the Arabs was inflated into a
miniature Holocaust. All this was meant to persuade the peoples of the
world, especially those of the United States and Europe, that Israel had
committed a grave injustice, which the Arabs were merely trying to correct,
and that decent people everywhere were obligated to help them correct it.
While the Arabs were exceptional in waging the battle for public
opinion so long and so systematically, the Jews of Israel were unique in
abandoning the field for so long. For as we have noted, the Israelis have
been encumbered by the great debilitation stemming from the long Jewish
absence from international political life and the renewed emphasis on
military power. The majority felt there was no need to counteract Arab
propaganda. Had not the Israeli Defense Forces extricated Israel from
destruction in 1948 and again in 1967? Were they not capable of doing so
again? And if the Arabs kept prattling away at the UN, in the media and in
universities of the West—what of it? Surely Israel did not have to concern
itself with such trivial carpings, as long as it possessed the military power to
defend itself. As David Ben-Gurion bluntly informed a young nation in the
1950s: What matters is not what the goyim (Gentiles) say, but what the Jews
do. He was half right, of course. Without resolute Jewish actions, the
building and fortification of the Jewish state could not take place. But he
was flat wrong in dismissing the importance and power of public opinion—
he found out later, when Israeli forces responded to Egyptian-sponsored
terror attacks by entering the Sinai in 1956. At the time, Ben-Gurion
announced that Israel would not leave the Sinai for a thousand years. But
Israel’s failure to win support for its action in the American administration,
the Congress, and with the public in order to dampen Eisenhower’s
opposition resulted in a hasty Israeli retreat within months.
It took several decades for the majority of Israelis to acknowledge the
force of public opinion. And though by now there are many who lament
Israel’s ongoing lack of activity in this area, most still do not see in sharp
focus how much real damage is caused to their country by its negative
portrayal, and how much more difficult it makes the job of securing
alliances, without which no small nation can survive.
Ironically, it is precisely the common Israeli belief in the para-mountcy
of military power that has reduced Israel’s ability to secure such alliances.
A reigning assumption that military power alone suffices to guarantee the
security of a nation will inevitably breed complacency with regard to the
political side of national power. Alliances that are not cultivated are
alliances that do not come into being, and the absence of reliable allies in
turn fosters an enervating fatalism about the political world: that Israel is
irrevocably doomed to an unsplendid isolation; that the entire world is
inevitably against it; and that there is nothing that it can do other than to
muster the force, exclusively physical in nature, to withstand the pressures.
That this has sometimes been the case does not make it always the case.
For the nations of the world form their alliances and their antipathies
according to their changing interest and, in an increasingly democratic
world, according to their public opinion. Israel could therefore act on both
these fronts of interest and opinion to persuade governments and their
citizens alike about the advisability and the justice of siding with it. This
might not get everyone on Israel’s side and it might not even get most on
Israel’s side, but it would get some, and it would reduce the antagonism of
others.
This was precisely Herzl’s conception when he successfully sought to
obtain the support for Zionism among the rulers of Britain, Germany,
Russia, Turkey, and others, but it cannot be said that his followers
understood his conception or applied it very well. Perhaps it was because
Herzl, who understood political power and public opinion so intuitively and
applied them so brilliantly, died so young. It is a fact that most of the
Zionist leadership after his death accepted with only minor resistance the
great injustices that the British heaped upon them between the two world
wars, believing they were powerless in the face of a great power—even
though British public opinion, like American opinion later, could be made
sympathetic and susceptible to Zionist appeals.
The one student of Herzl who understood the importance and the
possibility of political resistance was Jabotinsky. In addition to stressing the
need for Jewish military force and a territory on which the Jews could build
their state, Jabotinsky put forward what he called the theory of public
pressure:

For there is no friendship in politics: There is pressure. What tips

the balance one way or another is not whether the ruler is good or
bad, but the degree of pressure exerted by the subjects. If pressure
is exerted solely by our opponents, with no counter-pressure
applied by us, then whatever is done in Palestine will be against us,
even if the head of the government will be called Balfour, or
Wedgwood, or even Theodor Herzl!

Politics does not suffer a void; and if one side presses another with
political and propaganda pressure while its opponent does nothing, the
passive party will ultimately have to yield to the pressure. Therefore the
only way for the Jewish people to resist this kind of coercion, Jabotinsky
thought, was to apply the counter-pressure aimed at influencing foreign
governments and their publics. And to do this, no less than on the military
battlefield, the Jews would have to be willing to fight:
For no reformation in national conditions is attained without
pressure and struggle. And whoever lacks the stamina, courage,
ability, and desire to fight, will not be able to achieve even the
smallest adjustment [of these conditions] on our behalf. 6

Like Herzl, Jabotinsky was little understood. He too died relatively

young—actually, in the course of attempting to launch such a campaign in
1940 to win over American public opinion to the cause of a Jewish state.
The majority of his followers grasped very well his military and territorial
ideas, but only a few fully appreciated the third, political element of his
conception of national power—the need for an unrelenting international
effort of persuasion and pressure to protect Jewish interests.
This is why the successive Likud governments that emblazoned
Jobotinsky’s teachings on their ideological flag in fact often proceeded to
act on the international scene in direct contravention of his principles. They
frequently took actions that were justifiable in themselves, but they made
absolutely no effort to persuade the world that this was the case. Likud
governments emphasized the pride Jews should take in acting firmly, rather
than the prudence of ensuring that the action was understood to be correct
and just. The need to win over public opinion was simply not perceived to
be a priority (or even a possibility), and as a result no capability was
developed to see it realized on the world scene.
Hence the Israeli military strike on the Iraqi reactor in 1981, to take one
obvious example, was met with near-universal opprobrium, since Israel did
next to nothing to counter Arab propaganda and Western censure, both of
which would have been relatively easy to refute in this case. And when
Israel entered Lebanon in 1982, this error was compounded: Rather than
fighting the political battle, Israel did the opposite, imposing an information
blackout for the first crucial days of the war—the chief effect of which was
to ensure that the Israeli side of the story went virtually unreported.
Completely left out of the picture was the fact that Israel’s northern cities
had been tormented by PLO rocket and terror attacks for a decade, as
children grew up in bomb shelters and urban populations dwindled from
year to year. Also left out was the preceding decade’s history of PLO
murder, rape, and looting in South Lebanon and the fact that even the
Shi’ite Moslems there greeted the Israeli soldiers as liberators. The PLO
took full advantage of this vacuum to flood the world media with fabricated
reports of Israeli atrocities. It succeeded, for example, in convincing the
media for a time that Israel’s attack had left six hundred thousand people in
South Lebanon homeless—more than the entire actual population of the
region. By the time Israel lifted the blackout, much of the PLO’s depiction
of events had been accepted as truth, and even Israel’s staunchest friends
abroad had trouble explaining why Israel should be supported. The political
battle had been lost.
But it was worse than lost. For if there is one thing for which the
Lebanon campaign is remembered internationally, it is the massacre of
several hundred Palestinian Arabs by Christian Lebanese allied with Israel
in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla outside Beirut. This horrifying
massacre was not perpetrated by Israeli forces but by Arabs seeking to
avenge the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel (who
was a Christian). It was yet another bloody chapter in a civil war in which
Palestinians and Christians had massacred each other again and again since
the early 1970s. Israeli forces did not participate in the massacre, did not
enable it, did not even know about it. In fact, Israel’s judicial commission of
inquiry, the Kahan Commission, recommended the resignation of Defense
Minister Ariel Sharon in the wake of the massacre because he knew nothing
about it, and, according to the commission, should have foreseen that the
Christians would slaughter the Palestinians and should have acted to
preempt the massacre. Yet skillful Arab propaganda, combining with the
Israeli media paralysis, left its indelible impression that Israel, having
launched a pointless war of aggression, had sunk to the level of massacring
Arab innocents.
The consequences of this were all too real. Instead of being understood
as a decisive blow against international terror, the Israeli campaign was
received in the West as unreasonable and unjust, even in the United States
and Britain, which were to bomb Libya only three years later in response to
terrorist attacks that affected them. The result was mounting Western
opposition to the Israeli operation and mounting pressure to stay Israel’s
hand and prevent the PLO, trapped in West Beirut and surrounded by the
Israeli army, from being destroyed. The West, whose airliners had been
blown out of the sky, its citizens kidnapped, and its diplomats murdered by
terrorists dispatched from the PLO’s lair in Lebanon, now fought to save the
organization that had committed these crimes from the Israeli onslaught. In
the end Western pressure prevailed, and the PLO’s ten thousand gunmen
were escorted out of Beirut, rifles in hand, and spirited away to the safety of
the PLO’s bases in Tunisia and other Arab states.
During the Lebanon campaign, nothing more dramatically underscored
the importance of the political battle than the incident of President Ronald
Reagan and the armless Palestinian girl. The Israeli Defense Force had
achieved a complete military victory, destroying the PLO presence
everywhere in southern Lebanon. Only West Beirut, the last PLO
stronghold, remained, and the Israeli army was selectively bombarding PLO
strongholds in the hope of forcing a surrender and preventing the higher
casualties that would be involved in a direct assault. At the height of the
siege, President Reagan was handed a photograph of a little Palestinian girl
who, he was told, had lost her arm in the Israeli bombardment. Moved to
anger, the president picked up the telephone and told Israeli prime minister
Menachem Begin that the bombardment had to stop. Begin complied.
At the time, I was posted to Washington as Israel’s deputy chief of
mission. When I saw the photograph, I asked if it could be enlarged. The
more the picture was enlarged, the less it looked like a fresh photo taken
after that summer’s operation. We pored over it. Finally, I managed to
establish telephone contact with the Israeli headquarters in Beirut and
suggested that the military try to find the girl. A few days later, the Israeli
army succeeded in locating her. Her arm had indeed been damaged, but
years earlier during the Lebanese civil war; she had been the victim of Arab
and not Israeli fire. But by then it was too late. The notion of Israel’s
brutality had penetrated a notch deeper into the consciousness of the
American leadership and public.
Nevertheless, the fact that policy and the explication of policy have
become inseparably intertwined has still not penetrated into the
consciousness of many in Israel, as it has in Western countries. The
President of the United States and most other world leaders do not make
decisions that are independent of the way in which these decisions will be
received by international opinion (and obviously, domestic opinion). In fact,
an integral part of making a decision is addressing the question of how it
will affect public opinion and what needs to be done to make its message
more palatable and effective to international audiences. This is a need that
very large states may sometimes forgo, though they seldom do. But a small
country, much more dependent on international climate, simply does not
have the luxury of ignoring the principle that a policy and its presentation
are inseparable.
Having rediscovered its military capabilities, Israel is now in the midst
of discovering the political capacities it needs to survive in a swiftly
changing world. These capacities require, I believe, a major overhaul in
Israel’s abilities to present its case and its policies before world audiences.
This must be understood to be a central pillar of policy and be treated
accordingly, necessarily changing both the formulation of Israel’s messages
to the world and the quality of its messengers.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the issue here is not just what kinds of
pictures will flicker across the television screen. It is the crafting of
argument and image through language, which is always the decisive first
step in political debate, and usually this takes place in print before
broadcasting. I have found over the years, again contrary to the popular
wisdom, that occasionally one word can be worth a thousand pictures,
rather than vice versa. For example, the word occupation. Or the expression
homeless people. Or Arab land. Or land for peace. In countless newspaper
pieces, journal articles, and books, the Arabs have devoted untold
intellectual resources to framing the argument in such a way that it frames
Israel. Israel will have to devote an even greater intellectual effort to
extricating itself from the trap into which it has so readily entered. Above
all, this will require clearly written words, powerfully tying together
arguments and facts that must be disseminated in journals, periodicals, and
newspapers of the West—and now those of the East as well, especially in
Russia and Japan. Israel must explain to world audiences the basis of the
Jewish right to the land, the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the goals
and tactics of its adversaries, and the prerequisites for genuine peace in the
region.
By arguing for the need for written rebuttals to the Arab defamation of
Israel, I do not wish to imply that spoken words should be neglected,
especially those spoken on television. As the Gulf War showed,
international crises are increasingly televised exchanges, and the
protagonists and antagonists do much of the exchanging before the viewers’
eyes. During the Gulf War, for leaders and public alike, the main source of
real-time information—and what is more important, real-time impressions
of the unfolding situation—was the new international news networks. What
George Bush was seeing on his screen in the White House was seen by
Saddam Hussein in his bunker in Baghdad, by Mikhail Gorbachev in the
Kremlin, and by Yitzhak Shamir in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem
—as well as by every other government in the world. What was said over
this medium immediately and directly influenced the perceptions of the
world’s leaders, in addition to influencing the respective publics to which
these leaders are ultimately accountable in democratic societies. If public
opinion was of decisive importance in shaping political outcomes during
the first half of the century, it is now, at the close of the second half of the
century, assuming an importance not even imaginable thirty or forty years
earlier. And Israel, which is at the eye of so many political storms, simply
will not be able to continue to go about its political or diplomatic business
as usual, as though none of this existed.
Astonishingly, some hold the view that Israel should actually give up the
battle for public opinion. Thus, an Israeli daily in the early nineties
explained that the Labor government then ruling Israel considered Israeli
diplomats to be “discharged from the burden of aggressive public
relations”; the government, it said, is “declaring a unilateral cease-fire in the
media war” and “promises not to be dragged into responding to the
provocations of the Arab spokesmen.” 7 How effective a strategy this is was
demonstrated in December 1992 when the new Labor government deported
over four hundred Hamas Islamic fundamentalist organizers and in-citers to
Lebanon—making no provision whatsoever to stave off the public relations
disaster that ensued when the deportees encamped themselves on a hillside
near Israel’s border and before the cameras of the world. Essentially, an
Israeli media cease-fire amounts to capitulation: doing away with the
presentation of realities and simply expressing Israel’s peaceful intentions
in the hope that this will suffice to protect the country politically. This view
fails to grasp the significance of the ceaseless campaign of vilification
aimed at Israel by the Arab regimes, regardless of which party is in power
in Jerusalem. The absence of a credible effort to explain Israel’s position to
the world over the last few decades has led to one political defeat after
another, and as long as only the Arab side is doing the explaining, the
situation can only go from bad to worse.
As for Israel’s messengers, its ministers, parliamentarians, and diplomats
will have to become adept at communicating with international audiences.
The diplomats, in fact, ought to be chosen in the first instance with these
capacities in mind. Israel will have to recruit the sharpest minds and most
eloquent pens to refute the many lies hurled at it and to present the truth. In
the technical sense, this requires an overhaul of the government ministries
involved, defining differently, for example, the job of a diplomat and
recruiting candidates accordingly. It also requires a radically different level
of staffing and funding to engage in research, publication, broadcasting, and
press relations. Such reforms of Israel’s information apparatus can take
place only with the political reforms that will make available the authority
needed to sweep clean the existing information barns.
Of course, to some Israelis and perhaps to some non-Israeli readers of
this book, all this is not necessary. Israel, they believe, will be coddled by
the world when it pursues the right policies. Presumably this means getting
rid of the hateful “territories,” since, these people believe, all of Israel’s ills
stem from the fateful days in June 1967, when it took possession of these
lands. They forget the terrible campaigns of terror and warfare launched
against the Jews and the Jewish state by the Arab world half a century
before the Six Day War. They erase from their minds the peril in which
Israel found itself on the eve of that war and the fact that it was from these
very mountains that the attack was launched. They forget, too, that the
demands placed on Israel will not end with the evacuation of the West Bank
(as they did not end with the evacuation of the Sinai). After pocketing the
territories, the Arabs could go back to demanding eastern Jerusalem, the
“right of return,” autonomy (and later independence) for the Arabs of the
Galilee and the Negev, and more—demands that would place Israel in even
greater danger, and against which Israel would still have to struggle on the
world scene to defend itself. The need for waging a worldwide public
information campaign is not going to disappear with changing political
circumstances.
In a world that has been conditioned to see Israel as the heavy, every
Israeli retreat from positions under dispute with the Arabs will naturally be
applauded. Israel will be patted on the back and congratulated as long as it
continues to make unilateral concessions. But once an Israeli government
decides, as it inevitably must, to draw a line beyond which it cannot retreat,
the international applause will cease—and pressure will begin again. Hence
the test of Israeli diplomacy is not whether it can gain short-term sympathy
by sacrificing Israel’s vital interests, but whether it can protect these
interests while securing international understanding and support. To yield to
pressure for the sake of ephemeral international praise is as tempting as it is
short-sighted. To be firm about vital matters and to earn the respect of
nations for this stance is much more difficult, but ultimately more prudent
and responsible. The school of thought that holds that Israel’s public
relations problem would end with the establishment of a Palestinian state is
wrong. In such a case Israel would be faced with an existential threat and a
public relations nightmare, as Arab irreden-tism turns its focus on the Arab
population within the remainder of Israel. Resisting an outcome so
reminiscent of 1938 Czechoslovakia, or of Lebanon and the Balkans today,
is critical for the continued existence of the Jewish state. Israel must direct
the current of public opinion rather than agree to being swept along by it
toward the political cataract downstream.
Many of those Israelis who believe that influencing public opinion is
unimportant do so because they have adopted a significant portion of the
Arabs’ revision of the truth: They have come to accept that the reason Israel
has been attacked by the Arab world since 1967 is because of its victory in
the Six Day War. This is the ultimate in siege mentality: If I am besieged, I
must have done something wrong. And if my enemy tells me to lower the
drawbridge or else he will continue the siege, I must surely do as he says
and relieve myself of the burden of his disapproval. (There are various
rationalizations for this course of action: The enemy is not an enemy, the
siege is not a siege, the protecting wall does not protect, and so on.)
Moreover, argue the rationalizers, the situation on the outside has
dramatically changed. Has not the world transformed itself, with old
enemies becoming new friends everywhere? Why should Israel be the sad
exception to this happy rule? Let us lower our defenses, embrace our
adversaries, and live in everlasting tranquillity with one another.
The fact that many parts of the world may indeed be changing for the
better does not mean that Israel’s immediate vicinity is doing the same.
Despite the good news that a regime such as Syria has been brought to the
negotiating table as a result of the collapse of its Soviet sponsor, the fact
remains that in many ways the neighborhood has been changing for the
worse. It has certainly not improved. Has Saddam really changed for the
better? Has Qaddafi? Is there an Iraqi Lech Walesa in the wings? An Iranian
Vaclav Havel? The Middle East’s numerous predator regimes remain
unreformed, Arab arms purchases from West and East continue to escalate,
and there is no longer a need to look for Soviet approval before embarking
on the next adventure. Worse, Islamic fundamentalism continues to gather
momentum. Worse still, the development of nuclear weapons by Arab states
and Iran continues at a feverish pace. Yet none of this seems to matter to
those who readily dismiss these problems as nitpicking, spoiling the picture
they so desperately want to see outside the wall.
Sometimes these same Israelis offer a variation on their recipe for
despair. What’s the use of resisting Arab demands, they ask, if the United
States and the other powers of the world are irredeemably committed to
supporting those demands? How will Israel ever secure American favor if it
does not comply with American conditions? It does not cross the minds of
these advocates of capitulation that the task of Israel’s leaders is to try to
convince the American government that it is in the interest of the United
States to follow policies that cohere with Israeli interests, not vice versa.
This, after all, is the basic purpose of foreign policy for any country—to
pursue one’s own interests, not those of others.
Curiously, the advocates of this submissive posture fail to recognize that
the United States is a vibrant democracy in which various forces affect the
shaping of policy: the administration, the Congress, and especially popular
opinion. Each of these audiences is eager to hear a variety of viewpoints
and is very much open to persuasion. American policy toward Israel is
ultimately determined by the synthesis of all these forces, and Israel has
every fair opportunity to try to convince each of them of the justice of its
case. Even those who have no case make this effort, and Israel cannot afford
not to. As in the 1930s, when the Jews were paralyzed and did not make the
case against the aspects of British policy so inimical to their interests and
had forgone the attempts to appeal to a public and a parliament still very
much favorable to them, so today there exists in Israel and in parts of the
Jewish world elsewhere a faction that abhors the idea of an activist
opposition to the policies dangerous to Israel that may come out of
Washington, in the belief that such opposition would itself endanger Israel’s
relationship with the United States.
This is preposterously circular reasoning. It is not to Israel’s advantage
to sacrifice its most vital interests for a relationship that is meant to
safeguard those interests in the first place. Furthermore, this thinking does
not take into account the appreciation in Washington, as in many other
places, of a sound argument cogently made and powerfully backed by
resolute will. The weak and timid may do well for a while, but not for very
long. In international politics, in fact in domestic politics too, strength
attracts and weakness ultimately repels.
This is true not only in the battle for public opinion (in which a powerful
presentation attracts support and a weak one does not) but also in enhancing
the possibility of obtaining the support of governments even before the
factor of public opinion is introduced. There is a tendency to forget that
substantial foreign aid to Israel was not forthcoming between 1948 and
1967, when Israel was perceived as being fragile and endangered. The
dramatic rise of American support for Israel began only after the Six Day
War, when Israel resoundingly defeated the Arabs, captured the territories
against terrific odds, and proved beyond a doubt that it was the preeminent
military power in the Middle East—an assumption that was confirmed in
September 1970, when Israeli power was used to prevent a Syrian takeover
of Jordan. Those who constantly plead for a return to the eggshell borders
of pre-1967 never seem to take these facts into account, ironically claiming
that possession of the territories will jeopardize American aid. In fact,
nothing is more likely to jeopardize American support for Israel than the
return of Israel to a condition of chronic vulnerability. No nation in the
world will choose to ally itself with Israel because it has returned to
parading the virtue of Jewish powerlessness.
The same applies to economic powerlessness. An economically weak
Israel inspires no desire for alliances, either economic or political. But an
Israel that shakes off the political and bureaucratic manacles that have
shackled its economy is being quickly transformed into a significant
economic power that others would seek to join, much as Taiwan and South
Korea were able to overcome their political isolation by demonstrating
substantial economic strength. Moreover, since American aid to Israel is in
any case going to be greatly reduced in the coming years due to domestic
forces unrelated to the Middle East, Israel’s economic focus should be on
attracting American investments rather than American philanthropy. The
result would be an increased American interest in Israel, even greater than
the one that existed during the years of American-Soviet rivalry. This is the
policy that I embarked on, for the first time actually reducing Israel’s
dependence on American financial support, while rigorously privatizing and
liberalizing Israel’s economy.
Some believe that the fact that the Soviet Union has collapsed and poses
no more threat to American and Western interests in the region has
irrevocably altered Israel’s importance to the United States and to the West.
I do not share this view. The collapse of the Soviets has merely replaced
one type of threat with another. The Soviets were very careful to control the
aggressive impulses of their clients, and they always knew when to pull
back from an engagement that might escalate into a direct confrontation
with American military power. Further, they were exceptionally careful not
to allow any Soviet nuclear technology to reach the regimes allied with
them, perhaps because they were fully acquainted with the terrible dangers
that such technology in such hands might pose. But this is precisely the
danger that the world faces today. Iraq, Iran, and Syria are now all vying to
develop nuclear weapons and the missile systems to deliver them. The
demise of the Soviet Union has enabled the unrestrained growth of the
militant regimes in the Middle East, with no one in the region to continually
check either their ambitions or their obsessive plans for armament—no one,
that is, other than Israel, which is both willing and able to act in its own
defense and thereby safeguard the broader interest of peace. The
international community is not likely to station a permanent countervailing
military force in the region anytime soon, even if the Arabs were to allow it,
and the need for such a force is not going to disappear. In many ways Israel
serves this purpose. Were it not for Israel, Jordan certainly would have been
swallowed by its neighbors in short order, and the radical regimes of Syria
and Iraq would now have little to obstruct their advance—unless the United
States is prepared to reprise its performance in the Gulf War every few
years.
A strong Israel introduces a measure of stability into an ultimately
unstable region. A weak Israel does not. Consumed at every moment by the
need to devote all its resources to protect its own fragile borders, it will not
be able to contribute its part to deterring armed attacks from radical states in
the region, or to reducing their capacity to launch international terrorism or
interdict the sea lanes. These are real dangers that have not passed from the
world with the disappearance of Soviet power; in fact, they may actually
increase in the coming years. Israel shares a common interest with many
other countries to ward off these threats, and such common ground can be
the basis of important political alliances that can be formed in the future.
But the Soviet collapse has already brought to the surface other,
previously suppressed areas of mutual interest. A host of countries that had
broken off relations with Israel after the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur
War have reestablished relations with Israel: China, Russia, India, Nigeria,
and nearly thirty others in the years between 1988 and 1992. There were
several reasons for this change (among them the democratization of Eastern
Europe), but a principal force behind the seemingly endless procession of
diplomats and heads of state to Jerusalem in recent years has been that
many of these governments believe Israel possesses special capacities to
influence American policy in what, for a while at least, promises to be a
unipolar world. It matters little whether this assessment is correct; it matters
a great deal that it is held. For those who argued that Israel was doomed to
international isolation unless it gave up the territories, this was particularly
sad news. Some exponents of this view wrote lugubrious articles in Israel’s
leading papers lamenting the narrow views of these foreign governments
driven by considerations of power and self-interest alone.
In fact, this is not exactly the case. Unlike public opinion, many
governments do tend to be concerned first with power, and only then with
virtue or the appearance of virtue. This is exactly why a campaign to
influence public opinion, which in turn influences government policy, is
often so essential. Nowhere is this more important than in the United States.
American support for Israel is not rooted exclusively, or even mainly, in the
question of interest. The United States, more than any other country, shapes
its policies in accordance with the climate of its public opinion, and the
climate that has ruled for a very long time finds in Israel a society that
treasures values shared with the United States. Nurturing these feelings, and
the values Americans share with the Jewish state, should be a top priority of
every Israeli government.
Nevertheless, I firmly believe that at the point of testing, a weak Israel
would elicit a great deal of American sympathy but not much else. This is
not mere theory. It was tested before the Six Day War in the life-threatening
siege imposed by Nasser’s coalition, when a highly sympathetic U.S.
administration stood on the sidelines. This same lesson was taught once
more by the terrible events that unfolded in the ruins of Yugoslavia in 1992.
Although the Bosnians may have been able to muster all the sympathy in
the world, a ground war intervention against the Serbs was nonetheless an
option too costly, too dangerous, and too short on clear political benefits for
any nation in the world to do more than sympathize, even as the slaughter
raged on for years. If you lack the power to protect yourself, it is unlikely
that in the absence of a compelling interest anyone else will be willing to do
it for you. Air support, yes. Ground war action with its attendant casualties
is much slower to come, if at all.
What emerges is this: Power is the cornerstone of the effort to attract
and maintain alliances. Yet without a campaign to secure international
sympathy, even the most formidable accumulation of military or economic
power is simply insufficient to assure enduring support. Equally, the
accumulation of international sympathy is no substitute for self-defense.
The Jewish people must forcefully resist the jejune notion of the Israeli left
that an Israel stripped of its physical defenses will be so morally strong as
to inspire ever-ready and everlasting protection from the mighty. Weakness
buys you nothing. It is not a prescription for securing the support of
governments, or for their acting on your behalf. On the contrary, it is the
one sure way of securing their indifference.
But Israel must resist the equally immature conception of the Israeli
right that nothing we will do or say will make a difference to an implacably
hostile world. Actions invariably speak louder than words, assert the self-
declared Spartan “realists” of the right, so let us do without the words. They
are wrong. Support among the nations, especially in the great democracies
of the West, can be bolstered, cultivated, and protected by an incessant
campaign to win over the public. If the Jewish people had understood this
principle during the couse of this century, it could have activated others to
assist it in times of peril rather than having the very opposite happen. And
had Israel understood this principle, it certainly would not have allowed
Arab propaganda, including all the gross distortions detailed in this book, to
capture the high ground of international opinion.
It may puzzle some that after all the depredations Jews suffered in the
last one hundred years, all this is not self-evident. Yet there are many people
who might glimpse pieces of a puzzle and reach totally different
conclusions about the whole. For example, there are some in Israel who,
sensing that military power is not enough, proceed to say that it is therefore
unnecessary. Others question the wisdom of Herzl’s vision by arguing that
attacks against Jews still persist in the form of attacks against the Jewish
state, just as they did when the Jews lived as a collection of dispersed
communities. They miss the point. A Jewish state was not expected to
eliminate all attacks on the Jewish people, merely to enable an effective
defense against such attacks. Herzl viewed the establishment of a Jewish
state as the prerequisite instrument by which the Jews could resurrect their
capacity to resist the ill fortunes heaped on them by a history of dispersion
and the baser instincts of mankind.
And indeed, what a difference the Jewish state has made for Jewish
fortunes. It has rescued beleaguered Jewish communities, bringing them, as
from Yemen and Ethiopia, on the wings of eagles to the soil of their ancient
homeland. It beckons as a haven and resting place for millions of Jews in
Russia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, who look over their shoulders at the
spectre of anti-Semitism. What these Jews have is what the Jews of Europe
half a century ago did not: the knowledge that they are not alone, that they
have a place to go, that there is a country that not only wants them but will
intercede for their safety and their well-being.
In another powerful scene in Shoah, a minor official of the Polish
government-in-exile, a non-Jew, describes how during the Nazi annihilation
of Polish Jewry, he was approached by a delegation of Jews from Warsaw
begging for Allied assistance—for military action, for arms for the Jewish
fighters in the ghetto, at least for public pronouncements of support. No one
was listening, and so they had to come to him, they said. “We understand
we have no country of our own, we have no government, we have no voice
in the Allied councils. So we have to [seek help from]… little people like
you… Will you approach… the Allied leaders?” But there was of course
little he could actually do. 8
No more succinct a statement could be made about the significance of
the rise of Israel. For if there had been an Israel earlier in this century, there
surely would have been no Holocaust. There would have been a country
willing to take the Jewish refugees when America, Britain, and the other
nations refused. There would have been a country to press for their
departure. And there would have been an army ready to fight for them. If
the past was lacking in this regard, the future is not: The Jews are no longer
helpless, no longer lacking the capacities to assert their case and to fight for
it. It is an uncontestable fact that the establishment of the Jewish state has
retrieved for the Jews the ability to again seize their destiny, to again
control their fate. And if that ability is still in the making, if the Jewish
people needs time to shed its apolitical habits of thought and behavior
acquired in years of exile, this process will have to be substantially
accelerated. The Jewish state is at the center of an international maelstrom,
and it needs much political ingenuity to maneuver on the international
scene. Somehow Israel will have to compress the long decades required to
produce the political statesmanship it so badly needs. It cannot wait to
become politically mature. It must skip its adolescence and become
politically adult. The Jewish people underwent this kind of rapid
transformation in the case of building military strength, and it will now
have to do the same in re-creating its political abilities.
But this is not a change that Jews alone find difficult to assimilate. Israel
encounters difficulties in explaining its position that no other nation
encounters. No other country faces both constant threats to its existence and
constant criticism for acting against such threats. I do not believe that the
international obtuseness in grasping Israel’s predicament is grounded solely
in the successes of Arab propaganda and Israel’s ineffectual response to it.
This explanation may remove the topsoil of attitudes toward the Jewish
state, but it does not get to the psychological bedrock underneath. That
rock, I believe, consists of a basic difficulty in accepting the revolutionary
change in the status of the Jews.
The entire world is witnessing the historical transformation of the
Jewish people from a condition of powerlessness to power, from a condition
of being unable to meet the contingencies of a violent world to one in which
the Jewish people is strong enough to pilot its own destiny. For a world
accustomed to seeing the Jew as the perennial victim, suffering endless
atrocities at the hands of a succession of persecutors, this is a jarring shift in
reality that has barely begun to make sense. This is certainly true for the
opponents of the Jews, who believe that Jewish power is nothing more than
a passing aberration, and that the Jewish state will fall sooner or later to a
combination of political and military forces.
But the inability to adjust to the reality of Jewish power is equally true
of those who are sympathetic to Jewish suffering and wish to see it end.
Many philo-Semites have come to appreciate the Jews as a persecuted
people and therefore as a people that cannot be morally in the wrong. For
one who has no power over anyone else, or even over himself, cannot be
blamed for the harm that befalls others. For such sympathizers, it is no easy
thing to watch the Jews become a people wielding power. Power inevitably
means moral responsibility, and sometimes it means making mistakes as
well. Once the Jews have an army and a state, it is all too easy to blame
them for their actions—and to look back wistfully upon the perfect morality
of the defenseless Jew.
This is an important part of the secret of the success of Arab
propaganda: It appeals to a world that has not yet accustomed itself to the
sight of Jewish strength, military and political. It implicitly urges philo-
Semites to yearn for a “purer” age when Jews were beyond reproach
because they were beyond succor. This is the root of the infamous, twisted
standard by which the Arabs remain completely blameless for expelling
hundreds of thousands of people—as Saudi Arabia did to its Yemenis in
1990 and Kuwait did to its Palestinians in 1991—while Israel is excoriated
for deporting a cadre of terrorists; or by which Israel is condemned for
maintaining the presence of a few hundred soldiers in a six-mile sliver of
Lebanon while Syria annexes almost the entire rest of the same country; or
by which Saudi and Jordanian apartheid laws forbidding Jewish residence
went unnoticed for many years, while Israel, whose Arab citizens are freer
than those of Arab states, is still accused of racism for quelling riots. All of
this and much worse emanates not from Israel’s opponents but from many
of its sin-cerest sympathizers—who genuinely believe in the idea of the
Jewish state but cannot bring themselves to accept the reality accompanying
that idea: that such a state, in order to actually survive in practice, may have
to resort to buffer strips, deportation of subversives, or riot control. It
appears that attitudes evolved over centuries are difficult to change for non-
Jews, too.
Yet there is, with all this, a profound desire in modern society,
influenced as it is by biblical values, to see the Jewish people’s odyssey
through. I encountered that attitude on a drizzly morning in 1986, when I
visited the Arch of Titus in Rome, which the Romans erected to mark their
victory over the Jews in 70 C.E. I stood underneath the arch peering at the
decaying Forum below. A group of Japanese tourists was vacating the space
to a group of Scandinavians. The tour guides pointed dripping umbrellas at
the engraving of the sacred Jewish candelabrum being taken into captivity
on the shoulders of the triumphant Romans, looking as freshly cut in the
stone as it had 1,900 years earlier, when the Romans had celebrated the
razing of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
A Jew’s thoughts, or those of some Jews anyway, tend to turn
introspective at moments like this. The destruction of the Temple was one
of the two greatest catastrophes of a Jewish history teeming with
catastrophes. But what struck me most that morning was the easy
comprehension that I recognized on those Japanese and Scandinavian faces.
They nodded their heads, they pointed, and said the word Israel several
times. Perhaps they sensed what many who have visited this arch sensed:
that the candelabrum etched on its wall was a potent symbol of overturning
the laws of history.
Writing in the early eighteenth century, the Italian philosopher Giovanni
Battista Vico put forth what appeared to be an iron-clad historical sequence:
Nations go through a predictable cycle of birth, adolescence, maturity, and
death. Students of history from Hegel to Arnold Toynbee adopted this idea,
pointing to the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks,
Romans, and even their later counterparts such as the Incas and the Aztecs
—civilizations that flowered, shriveled, then died. If you wait long enough,
the historians assure us, the blows of time will eventually do their work on
everyone. But the Jews were a problem: They received more blows than
any other nation, yet they refused to die. Or more accurately, as one of
Hegel’s Jewish disciples, Rabbi Nachman Krochmal, explained, they
suffered a decline as did all other nations, but each time they avoided death
with a new birth, beginning the cycle anew. They refused to give up the
dream of their salvation and the attainment of justice. Perhaps this is why
when Frederick the Great asked his physician to adduce proof of God’s
existence, he was satisfied with the reply: “The proof that God exists is that
the Jews exist.”
This is the great mystery that made the story of the Jews so captivating
to Rousseau and Byron, Balfour and Wilson, and to countless millions the
world over. Speaking for these, Mark Twain wondered:

The Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a
nebulous dim puff of Stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way.
Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has
always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other
people.… He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the
ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him…. The
Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet
with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed
away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise,
and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their
torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now,
or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now
what he always was… All things are mortal but the Jew; all other
forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? 9

This fascination has only grown since the rebirth of Israel. One could
point to the scattered fragments of other ancient peoples in other parts of the
world, the sparks of great firmaments dispersed to other lands. Only in the
case of the Jews did these embers not die out when the home fire had
ceased to burn. And only in the case of Israel did these sparks come
together to rekindle a new flame.
But now the Jews have entered a new phase in their history. Since the
rise of Israel, the essence of their aspirations has changed. If the central aim
of the Jewish people during its exile was to retrieve what had been lost, the
purpose now is to secure what has been retrieved. It is a task that has barely
begun, and its outcome is of profound import not only for the fate of the
Jews but for all mankind. In the hearts of countless people around the world
burns the hope that the Jews will indeed be able to overcome the
insurmountable obstacles that are strewn along their journey’s path, ford the
stormy river between annihilation and salvation, and build anew their home
of promise. If, echoing the words of the prophet Amos, the fallen tent of
David has indeed risen again, its resurrection is proof that there is hope for
every people and every nation under the sun. The rebirth of Israel is thus
one of humanity’s great parables. It is the story not only of the Jews, but of
a human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors.
It is the incomparable quest of a people seeking, at the end of an unending
march, to assume its rightful place among the nations.
OceanofPDF.com
CHRONOLOGY:
Zionism and the Rise of Israel

1881 Widespread pogroms in Russia reinforce Jewish national

awakening.
1882 Publication of Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation, calling for the
establishment of a Jewish state.
1882 Beginning of the first wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine.
1894 Theodor Herzl attends the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris and
witnesses outpouring of French anti-Semitism.
1896 Herzl’s The Jewish State published.
1897 Herzl convenes First Zionist Congress in Basel.
1904 Herzl dies.
1915 Joseph Trumpeldor founds Zion Mule Corps of British army in
World War I, the first Jewish fighting unit in centuries.
1917 Balfour Declaration commits Britain to supporting a Jewish
National Home in Palestine.
1917 British forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby liberate
Palestine from the Turks. Jewish Legion participates in freeing
Galilee, Samaria, and Transjordan.
1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson argues for self determination
of peoples. Jewish-Arab accord: Jews claim Jewish home in
Palestine; Arabs claim Arab state from Iraq to Yemen (excluding
Palestine).
1920 San Remo Conference grants Britain Mandate over Palestine with
the aim of encouraging immigration and settlement of Jews and
establishment of a Jewish National Home.
1920 British officials instigate Arab riots in Palestine. Rioters demand
end to Jewish immigration and incorporation of Palestine into
Syria.
1920 Vladimir Jabotinsky founds Hagana, the Jewish self-defense force,
in Palestine.
1921 British decide to install Abdullah in Transjordan(eastern
Palestine).
1921 Arab riots in Palestine.
1922 League of Nations officially ratifies British Mandate over Palestine
with aim of building Jewish National Home.
1922 British cut away Transjordan from Palestine.
1929 Arab riots in Palestine. Massacre of Jews in Hebron and Safed.
Arabs demand end to Jewish immigration.
1930 British White Paper limits Jewish immigration to Palestine.
1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany.
1936– Campaign of Arab violence in Palestine. Arab rioters murder five
39 hundred Jews and thousands of Arabs, demanding an end to
Jewish immigration.
1937 British Peel Commission asserts that Jewish National Home
cannot be built in Palestine. Recommends repartition of Palestine
into tiny Jewish state (5 percent of total area) and Arab state in
remainder. Peel plan is rejected by both Arabs and Jews.
1938 Munich Conference and betrayal of the Czechs. Hitler is given the
Sudetenland.
1939 Chamberlain White Paper announces end to Jewish National
Home and promises control of immigration into Palestine to the
Arabs within five years. British blockade Palestine against
“illegal” Jewish immigration.
1941 Mufti relocates to Berlin. Meets with Hitler, announces intention
of creating “fascist” Arab state, and agitates for the destruction of
world Jewry.
1942 Nazi conference at Wannsee decides on destruction of all Jews in
Europe.
1945 World War II ends. Liberation of the death camps where six
million Jews died. Arabs demand end to Jewish immigration to
Palestine.
1945 “Illegal” smuggling of Holocaust survivors into Palestine by Jews.
Increase of Jewish underground actions against British blockade
and British administration in Palestine.
1947 Britain announces withdrawal from Palestine. United Nations
announces partition into Jewish and Arab states. Jews accept
partition; Arabs reject it.
1948 Invasion of Arab forces aimed at preventing the establishment of
the Jewish state.
1948 Declaration of independence of the State of Israel. David Ben-
Gurion first prime minister.
1948– War of Independence. Arab armies from five countries invade
49 Israel. Jordanian forces occupy Judea, Samaria, and eastern half of
Jerusalem, including Old City and Temple Mount, destroying all
Jewish settlements. Egypt occupies Gaza. War of Independence
ends in Jewish victory.
1948– 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries. Most flee to Israel
52 and are absorbed. 650,000 Arabs flee from Israel to Arab states
and are confined to refugee camps.
1951 Yasser Arafat of the Husseini clan begins organizing Palestinian
radicals in Cairo and recruits Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, and other
future leaders of the PLO.
1952– Terrorist raids into Israel from adjoining Arab states, including
56 Egyptian-sponsored fedayeen raids from Gaza. Israeli army adopts
policy of reprisals.
1956 Sinai Campaign, Oct. 29–Nov. 5. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes
Suez Canal and blocks Israeli shipping. Israel captures Sinai from
Egypt. Terrorist bases in Gaza dismantled.
1956 U.S.-Soviet pressure forces Israeli withdrawal from Sinai without
peace treaty. Dwight Eisenhower guarantees protection of Israeli
shipping.
1964 PLO is founded in Cairo with aim of “liberating” Palestine. PLO
Charter calling for Israel’s destruction adopted. Campaign of terror
attacks across Israel’s borders escalates.
1967 Egypt floods Sinai with troops and blockades Israeli shipping in
the Red Sea. American guarantee to protect Israel fails to take
effect.
1967 Six Day War, June 5–10. Israel defeats combined forces of Egypt,
Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Captures Sinai and Gaza, Judea and
Samaria, and the Golan Heights. Jerusalem is reunited. Jewish
settlements in eastern Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria reestablished.
1969– War of attrition. Egypt and Syria launch campaign of continuous
70 attacks along Suez Canal and Golan Heights. PLO steps up terror
attacks across Jordan River. Heavy Israeli retaliation brings war to
an end.
1970 Nasser dies and is succeeded by Anwar Sadat.
1970 PLO attempts to take over Jordan. King Hussein massacres
Palestinian Arabs and expels PLO in “Black September.”
1971– PLO relocates to Lebanon and establishes de facto state on its
75 territory, which becomes base for all international terror
organizations. PLO campaign of massacres in northern Israel.
1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes earns PLO
international notoriety.
1973 Yom Kippur War, Oct. 5–24. Egypt and Syria launch surprise
attack against Israel. Despite heavy casualties, Israeli army
reverses tide and advances toward Cairo and Damascus. Israel
negotiates disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria,
setting cease-fire lines in the Sinai and the Golan.
1973 Arab oil embargo is imposed. International oil prices rise
dramatically.
1975 United Nations passes resolution defaming Zionism as racism.
1975 PLO control of Lebanon is challenged, and full-scale civil war
erupts between Moslems and Christians.
1976 Syria invades Lebanon and sets up permanent control over more
than half of that country.
1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda, July 4, frees 103
hostages held by PLO.
1977 Likud government elected in Israel. Menachem Begin is first
Likud prime minister.
1977 President Anwar Sadat of Egypt responds to Begin’s invitation and
visits Israel.
1978– First wave of Jewish emigration from Soviet Union as result of
79 Soviet-American détente reaches peak. All told, 200,000 Soviet
Jewish immigrants arrive in Israel.
1979 Egypt and Israel sign Camp David Accords. Israel agrees to return
Sinai.
1981 Sadat is assassinated.
1982 Israeli ambassador is shot in London by PLO. Israel invades
Lebanon with aim of dismantling terror bases. PLO is expelled
from Lebanon and forced to relocate in Tunis.
1984 U.S. and Israel sign strategic cooperation agreement formalizing
alliance.
1985 Israel withdraws from Lebanon and establishes security zone north
of Israeli-Lebanese border.
1986 U.S. takes lead in war against terror after PLO hijacks Achille
Lauro cruise ship. Midair interception of terrorists by U.S. fighter
planes.
1987 PLO banned in U.S. by law for terrorist activities.
1989– Collapse of Soviet Union. Second wave of Soviet immigration to
91 Israel brings 400,000 in two years.
1990 Israeli airlift brings most of Ethiopian Jewry to Israel.
1990 Saddam Hussein of Iraq invades Kuwait.
1991 Madrid Peace Conference among Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and a
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Bilateral and regional peace
negotiations launched.
1991 United Nations repeals Zionism-racism resolution.
1992 Labor returns to power in Israel. Yizhak Rabin becomes prime
minister.
1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO signed. Israel agrees to
cede most of the Gaza district and parts of the West Bank to the
control of a Palestinian Authority, headed by Yasser Arafat, in
exchange for recognition of Israel and an end to Palestinian
terrorism.
1995 Peace treaty between Israel and Jordan is signed.
1994– Wave of terrorist bombings emanating from Palestinian areas
95 ravages Israel’s cities and claims over 200 lives.
1996 Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. Shimon Peres becomes prime
minister.
1996 Benjamin Netanyahu elected in Israel’s first direct elections for
prime minister.
1997 Hebron Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority.
1998 Wye River Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority.

OceanofPDF.com
APPENDIX A
The Arab-Jewish Agreement at Versailles

AGREEMENT BETWEEN EMIR FEISAL AND DR. CHAIM

WEIZMANN, JANUARY 3, 1919
His Royal Highness the Emir Feisal, representing and acting on behalf
of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing
and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organisation, mindful of the racial
kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish
people, and realising that the surest means of working out the
consummation of their national aspirations is through the closest possible
collaboration in the development of the Arab State and Palestine, and being
desirous further of confirming the good understanding which exists between
them, have agreed upon the following Articles:

ARTICLE I
The Arab State and Palestine in all their relations and undertakings shall
be controlled by the most cordial goodwill and understanding, and to this
end Arab and Jewish duly accredited agents shall be established and
maintained in the respective territories.

ARTICLE II
Immediately following the completion of the deliberations of the Peace
Conference, the definite boundaries between the Arab State and Palestine
shall be determined by a Commission to be agreed upon by the parties
hereto.

ARTICLE III
In the establishment of the Constitution and Administration of Palestine
all such measures shall be adopted as will afford the fullest guarantees for
carrying into effect the British Government’s Declaration of the 2d of
November, 1917.

ARTICLE IV
All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate
immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as
possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer
settlement, and intensive cultivation of the soil. In taking such measures the
Arab peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights, and shall
be assisted in forwarding their economic development.

ARTICLE V
No recognition nor law shall be made prohibiting or interfering in any
way with the free exercise of religion; and further the free exercise and
enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or
preference shall forever be allowed. No religious test shall ever be required
for the exercise of civil or political rights.

ARTICLE VI
The Mohammedan Holy Places shall be under Mohammedan control.

ARTICLE VII
The Zionist Organisation proposes to send to Palestine a Commission of
experts to make a survey of the economic possibilities of the country, and to
report upon the best means for its development. The Zionist Organisation
will place the aforementioned Commission at the disposal of the Arab State
for the purpose of a survey of the economic possibilities of the Arab State
and to report upon the best means for its development. The Zionist
Organisation will use its best efforts to assist the Arab State in providing the
means for developing the natural resources and economic possibilities
thereof.

ARTICLE VIII
The parties hereto agree to act in complete accord and harmony on all
matters embraced herein before the Peace Congress.

ARTICLE IX
Any matters of dispute which may arise between the contracting parties
shall be referred to the British Government for arbitration.
Given under our hand at London, England, the third day of January, one
thousand nine hundred and nineteen.
Chaim Weizmann.
Feisal ibn-Hussein.

RESERVATION BY THE EMIR FEISAL

If the Arabs are established as I have asked in my manifesto of January
4th addressed to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, I will
carry out what is written in this agreement. If changes are made, I cannot be
answerable for failing to carry out this agreement.
Feisal ibn-Hussein.
OceanofPDF.com
APPENDIX B
Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence

DELEGATION HEDJAZIENNE,
PARIS, MARCH 3, 1919.
DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER:
I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American
Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in
Arabia and Europe.
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered
similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by
a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the
attainment of their national ideals together.
We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest
sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully
acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist
Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and
proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them
through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we
have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great
helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make
the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a
reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one
another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our
movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us
both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.
People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours,
ignoring the need for cooperation of the Arabs and Zionists have been
trying to exploit the local difficulties that must necessarily arise in Palestine
in the early stages of our movements. Some of them have, I am afraid,
misrepresented your aims to the Arab peasantry, and our aims to the Jewish
peasantry, with the result that interested parties have been able to make
capital out of what they call our differences.
I wish to give you my firm conviction that these differences are not on
questions of principle, but on matters of detail such as must inevitably occur
in every contact of neighbouring peoples, and as are easily adjusted by
mutual good will. Indeed nearly all of them will disappear with fuller
knowledge.
I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in
which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which
we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the
community of civilised peoples of the world.
Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) Feisai
5TH MARCH,
1919.
OceanofPDF.com
APPENDIX C
The League of Nations Mandate
July 24, 1922

MANDATE FOR PALESTINE

The Council of the League of Nations:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of
giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League
of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the
administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the
Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; and

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the
Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration
originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of his
Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being
clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the
civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,
or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and

Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection

of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting
their national home in that country; and
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have selected His Britannic
Majesty as the Mandatory for Palestine; and

Whereas the mandate in respect of Palestine has been formulated in the

following terms and submitted to the Council of the League for approval;
and

Whereas His Britannic Majesty has accepted the mandate in respect of

Palestine and undertaken to exercise it on behalf of the League of Nations
in conformity with the following provisions; and

Whereas by the afore-mentioned Article 22 (paragraph 8), it is provided

that the degree of authority, control or administration to be exercised by the
Mandatory, not having been previously agreed upon by the Members of the
League, shall be explicitly defined by the Council of the League of Nations;

Confirming the said mandate, defines its terms as follows:

ARTICLE 1.
The Mandatory shall have full powers of legislation and of
administration, save as they may be limited by the terms of this mandate.

ARTICLE 2.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such
political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the
establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble,
and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for
safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine,
irrespective of race and religion.

ARTICLE 3.
The Mandatory shall, so far as circumstances permit, encourage local
autonomy.

ARTICLE 4.
An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for
the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of
Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the
establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish
population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the
Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country.
The Zionist organisation, so long as its organisation and constitution are
in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such
agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s
Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist
in the establishment of the Jewish national home.

ARTICLE 5.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory
shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the
Government of any foreign Power.

ARTICLE 6.
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and
position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall
facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage,
in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close
settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not
required for public purposes.

ARTICLE 7.
The Administration of Palestine shall be responsible for enacting a
nationality law. There shall be included in this law provisions framed so as
to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up
their permanent residence in Palestine.

ARTICLE 8.
The privileges and immunities of foreigners, including the benefits of
consular jurisdiction and protection as formerly enjoyed by Capitulation or
usage in the Ottoman Empire, shall not be applicable in Palestine.
Unless the Powers whose nationals enjoyed the afore-mentioned
privileges and immunities on August 1st, 1914, shall have previously
renounced the right to their re-establishment, or shall have agreed to their
non-application for a specified period, these privileges and immunities
shall, at the expiration of the mandate, be immediately re-established in
their entirety or with such modifications as may have been agreed upon
between the Powers concerned.

ARTICLE 9.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that the judicial system
established in Palestine shall assure to foreigners, as well as to natives, a
complete guarantee of their rights.
Respect for the personal status of the various people and communities
and for their religious interests shall be fully guaranteed. In particular, the
control and administration of Wakfs shall be exercised in accordance with
religious law and the dispositions of the founders.

ARTICLE 10.
Pending the making of special extradition agreements relating to
Palestine, the extradition treaties in force between the Mandatory and other
foreign Powers shall apply to Palestine.

ARTICLE 11.
The Administration of Palestine shall take all necessary measures to
safeguard the interests of the community in connection with the
development of the country, and, subject to any international obligations
accepted by the Mandatory, shall have full power to provide for public
ownership or control of any of the natural resources of the country or of the
public works, services and utilities established or to be established therein.
It shall introduce a land system appropriate to the needs of the country,
having regard, among other things, to the desirability of promoting the close
settlement and intensive cultivation of the land.
The Administration may arrange with the Jewish agency mentioned in
Article 4 to construct or operate, upon fair and equitable terms, any public
works, services and utilities, and to develop any of the natural resources of
the country, in so far as these matters are not directly undertaken by the
Administration. Any such arrangements shall provide that no profits
distributed by such agency, directly or indirectly, shall exceed a reasonable
rate of interest on the capital, and any further profits shall be utilised by it
for the benefit of the country in a manner approved by the Administration.

ARTICLE 12.
The Mandatory shall be entrusted with the control of the foreign
relations of Palestine and the right to issue exequaturs to consuls appointed
by foreign Powers. He shall also be entitled to afford diplomatic and
consular protection to citizens of Palestine when outside its territorial limits.

ARTICLE 13.
All responsibility in connection with the Holy Places and religious
buildings or sites in Palestine, including that of preserving existing rights
and of securing free access to the Holy Places, religious buildings and sites
and the free exercise of worship, while ensuring the requirements of public
order and decorum, is assumed by the Mandatory, who shall be responsible
solely to the League of Nations in all matters connected herewith, provided
that nothing in this article shall prevent the Mandatory from entering into
such arrangements as he may deem reasonable with the Administration for
the purpose of carrying the provisions of this article into effect; and
provided also that nothing in this mandate shall be construed as conferring
upon the Mandatory authority to interfere with the fabric or the
management of purely Moslem sacred shrines, the immunities of which are
guaranteed.

ARTICLE 14.
A special Commission shall be appointed by the Mandatory to study,
define and determine the rights and claims in connection with the Holy
Places and the rights and claims relating to the different religious
communities in Palestine. The method of nomination, the composition and
the functions of this Commission shall be submitted to the Council of the
League for its approval, and the Commission shall not be appointed or enter
upon its functions without the approval of the Council.

ARTICLE 15.
The Mandatory shall see that complete freedom of conscience and the
free exercise of all forms of worship, subject only to the maintenance of
public order and morals, are ensured to all. No discrimination of any kind
shall be made between the inhabitants of Palestine on the ground of race,
religion or language. No person shall be excluded from Palestine on the sole
ground of his religious belief.
The right of each community to maintain its own schools for the
education of its own members in its own language, while conforming to
such educational requirements of a general nature as the Administration
may impose, shall not be denied or impaired.

ARTICLE 16.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for exercising such supervision over
religious or eleemosynary bodies of all faiths in Palestine as may be
required for the maintenance of public order and good government. Subject
to such supervision, no measures shall be taken in Palestine to obstruct or
interfere with the enterprise of such bodies or to discriminate against any
representative or member of them on the ground of his religion or
nationality.

ARTICLE 17.
The Administration of Palestine may organise on a voluntary basis the
forces necessary for the preservation of peace and order, and also for the
defence of the country, subject, however, to the supervision of the
Mandatory, but shall not use them for purposes other than those above
specified save with the consent of the Mandatory. Except for such purposes,
no military, naval or air forces shall be raised or maintained by the
Administration of Palestine.
Nothing in this article shall preclude the Administration of Palestine
from contributing to the cost of the maintenance of the forces of the
Mandatory in Palestine.
The Mandatory shall be entitled at all times to use the roads, railways
and ports of Palestine for the movement of armed forces and the carriage of
fuel and supplies.

ARTICLE 18.
The Mandatory shall see that there is no discrimination in Palestine
against the nationals of any State Member of the League of Nations
(including companies incorporated under its laws) as compared with those
of the Mandatory or of any foreign State in matters concerning taxation,
commerce or navigation, the exercise of industries or professions, or in the
treatment of merchant vessels or civil aircraft. Similarly, there shall be no
discrimination in Palestine against goods originating in or destined for any
of the said States, and there shall be freedom of transit under equitable
conditions across the mandated area.
Subject as aforesaid and to the other provisions of this mandate, the
Administration of Palestine may, on the advice of the Mandatory, impose
such taxes and customs duties as it may consider necessary, and take such
steps as it may think best to promote the development of the natural
resources of the country and to safeguard the interests of the population. It
may also, on the advice of the Mandatory, conclude a special customs
agreement with any State the territory of which in 1914 was wholly
included in Asiatic Turkey or Arabia.

ARTICLE 19.
The Mandatory shall adhere on behalf of the Administration of Palestine
to any general international conventions already existing, or which may be
concluded hereafter with the approval of the League of Nations, respecting
the slave traffic, the traffic in arms and ammunition, or the traffic in drugs,
or relating to commercial equality, freedom of transit and navigation, aerial
navigation and postal, telegraphic and wireless communication or literary,
artistic or industrial property.

ARTICLE 20.
The Mandatory shall co-operate on behalf of the Administration of
Palestine, so far as religious, social and other conditions may permit, in the
execution of any common policy adopted by the League of Nations for
preventing and combating disease, including diseases of plants and animals.

ARTICLE 21.
The Mandatory shall secure the enactment within twelve months from
this date, and shall ensure the execution of a Law of Antiquities based on
the following rules. This law shall ensure equality of treatment in the matter
of excavations and archaeological research to the nationals of all States
Members of the League of Nations; (1) “Antiquity” means any construction
or any product of human activity earlier than the year 1700; (2) The law for
the protection of antiquities shall proceed by encouragement rather than by
threat. Any person who, having discovered an antiquity without being
furnished with the authorisation referred to in paragraph 5, reports the same
to an official of the competent Department, shall be rewarded according to
the value of the discovery; (3) No antiquity may be disposed of except to
the competent Department, unless this Department renounces the
acquisition of any such antiquity. No antiquity may leave the country
without an export licence from the said Department; (4) Any person who
maliciously or negligently destroys or damages an antiquity shall be liable
to a penalty to be fixed; (5) No clearing of ground or digging with the
object of finding antiquities shall be permitted, under penalty of fine, except
to persons authorised by the competent Department; (6) Equitable terms
shall be fixed for expropriation, temporary or permanent, of lands which
might be of historical or archaeological interest; (7) Authorisation to
excavate shall only be granted to persons who show sufficient guarantees of
archaeological experience. The Administration of Palestine shall not, in
granting these authorisations, act in such a way as to exclude scholars of
any nation without good grounds; (8) The proceeds of excavations may be
divided between the excavator and the competent Department in a
proportion fixed by that Department. If division seems impossible for
scientific reasons, the excavator shall receive a fair indemnity in lieu of a
part of the find.

ARTICLE 22.
English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine.
Any statement or inscription in Arabic on stamps or money in Palestine
shall be repeated in Hebrew and any statement or inscription in Hebrew
shall be repeated in Arabic.

ARTICLE 23.
The Administration of Palestine shall recognise the holy days of the
respective communities in Palestine as legal days of rest for the members of
such communities.

ARTICLE 24.
The Mandatory shall make to the Council of the League of Nations an
annual report to the satisfaction of the Council as to the measures taken
during the year to carry out the provisions of the mandate. Copies of all
laws and regulations promulgated or issued during the year shall be
communicated with the report.

ARTICLE 25.
In the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of
Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the
consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold
application of such provisions of this mandate as he may consider
inapplicable to the existing local conditions, and to make such provision for
the administration of the territories as he may consider suitable to those
conditions, provided that no action shall be taken which is inconsistent with
the provisions of Articles 15, 16, and 18.

ARTICLE 26.
The Mandatory agrees that, if any dispute whatever should arise
between the Mandatory and another Member of the League of Nations
relating to the interpretation or the application of the provisions of the
mandate, such dispute, if it cannot be settled by negotiation, shall be
submitted to the Permanent Court of International Justice provided for by
Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

ARTICLE 27.
The consent of the Council of the League of Nations is required for any
modification of the terms of this mandate.

ARTICLE 28.
In the event of the termination of the mandate hereby conferred upon the
Mandatory, the Council of the League of Nations shall make such
arrangements as may be deemed necessary for safeguarding in perpetuity,
under guarantee of the League, the rights secured by Articles 13 and 14, and
shall use its influence for securing, under the guarantee of the League, that
the Government of Palestine will fully honour the financial obligations
legitimately incurred by the Administration of Palestine during the period
of the mandate, including the rights of public servants to pensions or
gratuities.
The present instrument shall be deposited in original in the archives of
the League of Nations and certified copies shall be forwarded by the
Secretary-General of the League of Nations to all Members of the League.

Done at London the twenty-fourth day of July, one thousand nine

hundred and twenty-two.

SECRETARY-GENERAL.
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APPENDIX D
Ribbentrop Promise to Mufti to
Destroy Jewish National Home

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Berlin, April 28, 1942

Your Eminence:
In response to your letter and to the accompanying communication of
His Excellency, Prime Minister Raschid Ali El Gailani, and confirming the
terms of our conversation, I have the honour to inform you:
The German Government appreciates fully the confidence of the Arab
peoples in the Axis Powers in their aims and in their determination to
conduct the fight against the common enemy until victory is achieved. The
German Government has the greatest understanding for the national
aspirations of the Arab countries as have been expressed by you both and
the greatest sympathy for the sufferings of your peoples under British
oppression.
I have therefore the honour to assure you, in complete agreement with
the Italian Government, that the independence and freedom of the suffering
Arab countries presently subjected to British oppression, is also one of the
aims of the German Government.
Germany is consequently ready to give all her support to the oppressed
Arab countries in their fight against British domination, for the fulfillment
of their national aim to independence and sovereignty and for the
destruction of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.
As previously agreed, the content of this letter should be maintained
absolutely secret until we decide otherwise.
I beg your Eminence to be assured of my highest esteem and
consideration.

(Signed) Ribbentrop
To His Eminence
the Grossmufti of Palestine
Amin El Husseini.
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APPENDIX E
The PLO Charter *

This Covenant will be called “The Palestinian National Covenant” (Al-

Mîhâq Al-Watanî Al-Filastînî).

ARTICLE 1
Palestine is the homeland of the Palestine Arab people and an integral
part of the great Arab homeland, and the people of Palestine is a part of the
Arab Nation.

ARTICLE 2
Palestine with its boundaries that existed at the time of the British
Mandate is an integral regional unit.

ARTICLE 3
The Palestinian Arab people possesses the legal right to its homeland,
and when the liberation of its homeland is completed it will exercise self-
determination solely according to its own will and choice.

ARTICLE 4
The Palestinian personality is an innate, persistent characteristic that
does not disappear, and it is transferred from fathers to sons. The Zionist
occupation, and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people as result of the
disasters which came over it, do not deprive it of its Palestinian personality
and affiliation and do not nullify them.

ARTICLE 5
The Palestinians are the Arab citizens who were living permanently in
Palestine until 1947, whether they were expelled from there or remained.
Whoever is born to a Palestinian Arab father after this date, within Palestine
or outside it, is a Palestinian.

ARTICLE 6
Jews who were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the
Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

ARTICLE 7
The Palestinian affiliation and the material, spiritual and historical tie
with Palestine are permanent realities. The upbringing of the Palestinian
individual in an Arab and revolutionary fashion, the undertaking of all
means of forging consciousness and training the Palestinian, in order to
acquaint him profoundly with his homeland, spiritually and materially, and
preparing him for the conflict and the armed struggle, as well as for the
sacrifice of his property and his life to restore his homeland, until the
liberation—all this is a national duty.

ARTICLE 8
The phase in which the people of Palestine is living is that of the
national (Watanî) struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Therefore, the
contradictions among the Palestinian national forces are of a secondary
order which must be suspended in the interest of the fundamental
contradiction between Zionism and colonialism on the one side and the
Palestinian Arab people on the other. On this basis, the Palestinian masses,
whether in the homeland or in places of exile (Mahâjir), organizations and
individuals, comprise one national front which acts to restore Palestine and
liberate it through armed struggle.

ARTICLE 9
Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a
strategy and not tactics. The Palestinian Arab people affirms its absolute
resolution and abiding determination to pursue the armed struggle and to
march forward toward the armed popular revolution, to liberate its
homeland and return to it, [to maintain] its right to a natural life in it, and to
exercise its right of self-determination in it and sovereignty over it.

ARTICLE 10
Fedayeen action forms the nucleus of the popular Palestinian war of
liberation. This demands its promotion, extension and protection, and the
mobilization of all the mass and scientific capacities of the Palestinians,
their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution, and
cohesion in the national {Watanî) struggle among the various groups of the
people of Palestine, and between them and the Arab masses, to guarantee
the continuation of the revolution, its advancement and victory.

ARTICLE 11
The Palestinians will have three mottoes: National (Wataniyya) unity,
national (Qawmiyya) mobilization and liberation.

ARTICLE 12
The Palestinian Arab people believes in Arab unity. In order to fulfill its
role in realizing this, it must preserve, in this phase of its national (Watanî)
struggle, its Palestinian personality and the constituents thereof, increase
consciousness of its existence and resist any plan that tends to disintegrate
or weaken it.

ARTICLE 13
Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine are two complementary aims.
Each one paves the way for realization of the other. Arab unity leads to the
liberation of Palestine, and the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity.
Working for both goes hand in hand.

ARTICLE 14
The destiny of the Arab nation, indeed the very Arab existence, depends
upon the destiny of the Palestine issue. The endeavor and effort of the Arab
nation to liberate Palestine follows from this connection. The people of
Palestine assumes its vanguard role in realizing this sacred national
(Qawmî) aim.
ARTICLE 15
The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national
{Qawmî) duty to repulse the Zionist, imperialist invasion from the great
Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine. Its full
responsibilities fall upon the Arab nation, peoples and governments, with
the Palestinian Arab people at their head.
For this purpose, the Arab nation must mobilize its military, human,
material and spiritual capabilities to participate actively with the people of
Palestine. They must, especially in the present stage of armed Palestinian
revolution, grant and offer the people of Palestine all possible help and
every material and human support, and afford it every sure means and
opportunity enabling it to continue to assume its vanguard role in pursuing
its armed revolution until the liberation of its homeland.

ARTICLE 16
The liberation of Palestine, from a spiritual viewpoint, will prepare an
atmosphere of tranquility and peace for the Holy Land, in the shade of
which all the holy places will be safeguarded, and freedom of worship and
visitation to all will be guaranteed, without distinction or discrimination of
race, color, language or religion. For this reason, the people of Palestine
looks to the support of all the spiritual forces in the world.

ARTICLE 17
The liberation of Palestine, from a human viewpoint, will restore to the
Palestinian man his dignity, glory and freedom. For this, the Palestinian
Arab people looks to the support of those in the world who believe in the
dignity and freedom of man.

ARTICLE 18
The liberation of Palestine, from an international viewpoint, is a
defensive act necessitated by the requirements of self-defense. For this
reason, the people of Palestine, desiring to befriend all peoples, looks to the
support of the states which love freedom, justice and peace in restoring the
legal situation to Palestine, establishing security and peace in its territory,
and enabling its people to exercise national (Wataniyya) sovereignty and
national (Qawmiyyd) freedom.
ARTICLE 19
The partitioning of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is
fundamentally null and void, whatever time has elapsed, because it was
contrary to the wish of the people of Palestine and its natural right to its
homeland, and contradicts the principles embodied in the Charter of the
United Nations, the first of which is the right of self-determination.

ARTICLE 20
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate Document, and what has been
based upon them are considered null and void. The claim of a historical or
spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical
realities nor with the constituents of statehood in their true sense. Judaism,
in its character as a religion of revelation, is not a nationality with an
independent existence. Likewise, the Jews are not one people with an
independent personality. They are rather citizens of the states to which they
belong.

ARTICLE 21
The Palestinian Arab people, in expressing itself through the armed
Palestinian revolution, rejects every solution that is a substitute for a
complete liberation of Palestine, and rejects all plans that aim at the
settlement of the Palestine issue or its internationalization.

ARTICLE 22
Zionism is a political movement organically related to world
imperialism and hostile to all movements of liberation and progress in the
world. It is a racist and fanatical movement in its formation; aggressive,
expansionist and colonialist in its aims; and Fascist and Nazi in its means.
Israel is the tool of the Zionist movement and a human and geographical
base for world imperialism. It is a concentration and jumping-off point for
imperialism in the heart of the Arab homeland, to strike at the hopes of the
Arab nation for liberation, unity and progress.
Israel is a constant threat to peace in the Middle East and the entire
world. Since the liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and
imperialist presence and bring about the stabilization of peace in the Middle
East, the people of Palestine looks to the support of all liberal men of the
world and all the forces of good progress and peace; and implores all of
them, regardless of their different leanings and orientations, to offer all help
and support to the people of Palestine in its just and legal struggle to
liberate its homeland.

ARTICLE 23
The demands of security and peace and the requirements of truth and
justice oblige all states that preserve friendly relations among peoples and
maintain the loyalty of citizens to their homelands to consider Zionism an
illegitimate movement and to prohibit its existence and activity.

ARTICLE 24
The Palestinian Arab people believes in the principles of justice,
freedom, sovereignty, self-determination, human dignity and the right of
peoples to exercise them.

ARTICLE 25
To realize the aims of this Covenant and its principles the Palestine
Liberation Organization will undertake its full role in liberating Palestine.

ARTICLE 26
The Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents the forces of
the Palestinian revolution, is responsible for the movement of the
Palestinian Arab people in its struggle to restore its homeland, liberate it,
return to it and exercise the right of self-determination in it. This
responsibility extends to all military, political and financial matters, and all
else that the Palestine issue requires in the Arab and international spheres.

ARTICLE 27
The Palestine Liberation Organization will cooperate with all Arab
states, each according to its capacities, and will maintain neutrality in their
mutual relations in the light of, and on the basis of, the requirements of the
battle of liberation, and will not interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab
state.

ARTICLE 28
The Palestinian Arab people insists upon the originality and
independence of its national (Wataniyya) revolution and rejects every
manner of interference, guardianship and subordination.

ARTICLE 29
The Palestinian Arab people possesses the prior and original right in
liberating and restoring its homeland and will define its position with
reference to all states and powers on the basis of their positions with
reference to the issue [of Palestine] and the extent of their support for [the
Palestinian Arab people] in its revolution to realize its aims.

ARTICLE 30
The fighters and bearers of arms in the battle of liberation are the
nucleus of the Popular Army, which will be the protecting arm of the
Palestinian Arab people.

ARTICLE 31
This organization shall have a flag, oath and anthem, all of which will be
determined in accordance with a special system.

ARTICLE 32
To this Covenant is attached a law known as the Fundamental Law of
the Palestine Liberation Organization, in which is determined the manner of
the organization’s formation, its committees, institutions, the special
functions of every one of them and all the requisite duties associated with
them in accordance with the Covenant.

ARTICLE 33
This Covenant cannot be amended except by a two-thirds majority of all
the members of the National Council of the Palestine Liberation
Organization in a special session called for this purpose.
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APPENDIX F
Security Council Resolution 242,
November 22, 1967

The Security Council,

Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle
East,
Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war
and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the
area can live in security,
Emphasizing further that all Member States in their acceptance of the
Charter of the United Nations have undertaken a commitment to act in
accordance with Article 2 of the Charter,
1. Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the
establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should
include the application of both the following principles:
(i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent
conflict;
(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and
acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political
independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace
within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of
force;
2. Affirms further the necessity
(a) For guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international
waterways in the area;
(b) For achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem;
(c) For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political
independence of every State in the area, through measures including
the establishment of demilitarized zones;
3. Requests the Secretary-General to designate a Special Representative
to proceed to the Middle East to establish and maintain contacts with the
states concerned in order to promote agreement and assist efforts to achieve
a peaceful and accepted settlement in accordance with the provisions and
principles in this resolution;
4. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Security Council on
the progress of the efforts of the Special Representative as soon as possible.
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APPENDIX G
The Pentagon
Plan June 29, 1967

JSCM—373–67

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE SUBJECT:

MIDDLE EAST BOUNDARIES
1. Reference is made to your memorandum dated 19 June 1967, subject as
above, which requested the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without
regard to political factors, on the minimum territory in addition to that held
on 4 June 1967, Israel might be justified in retaining in order to permit a
more effective defense against possible conventional Arab attack and
terrorist raids.

2. From a strictly military point of view Israel would require the retention
of some captured Arab territory in order to provide militarily defensible
borders. Determination of territory to be retained should be based on
accepted tactical principles such as control of commanding terrain, use of
natural obstacles, elimination of enemy-held salients, and provision of
defense in-depth for important facilities and installations. More detailed
discussions of the key border areas mentioned in the reference are contained
in the Appendix hereto. In summary, the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
regarding these areas are as follows:

A. THE JORDANIAN WEST BANK

Control of the prominent high ground running north-south through them
middle of West Jordan generally east of the main north-south highway
along the axis Jenin-Nablus-Bira-Jerusalem and then southwest to a
junction with the Dead Sea at the Wadi el Daraja would provide Israel with
a militarily defensible border. The envisioned defensive line would run just
east of Jerusalem; however, provision could be made for
internationalization of the city without significant detriment to Israel’s
defensive posture.

B. SYRIAN TERRITORY CONTIGUOUS TO ISRAEL.

Israel is particularly sensitive to the prevalence of terrorist raids and border
incidents in this area. The presently occupied territory, the high ground
running generally north-south on a line with Qnaitra about 15 miles inside
the Syrian border, would give Israel control of the terrain which Syria has
used effectively in harassing the border area.

C. THE JERUSALEM-LATRUN AREA

See subparagraph 2A above.

D. THE GAZA STRIP

By occupying the Gaza Strip, Israel would trade approximately 45 miles of
hostile border for eight. Configured as it is, the strip serves as a salient for
introduction of Arab subversion and terrorism, and its retention would be to
Israel’s military advantage.

E. THE NEGEV-SINAI BORDER

Except for retention of the demilitarized zone around Al Awja and some
territory for the protection of the port of Eilat, discussed below, continued
occupation of the Sinai would present Israel with problems outweighing
any military gains.

F. THE NEGEV-JORDAN-AQABA-STRAIT OF TIRAN AREA

Israel’s objectives here would be innocent passage through the Gulf of
Aqaba and protection of its port at Eilat. Israel could occupy Sharm ash-
Shaykh with considerable inconvenience but could rely on some form of
internationalization to secure free access to the gulf. Failing this, Israel
would require key terrain in the Sinai to protect its use of the Strait of Tiran.
Eilat, situated at the apex of Israel’s narrow southern tip, is vulnerable to
direct ground action from Egyptian territory. Israel would lessen the threat
by retention of a portion of the Sinai Peninsula south and east of the Wadi el
Gerafithen east to an intersection with the Gulf of Aqaba at approximately
29° 20’ north latitude.

3. It is emphasized that the above conclusions, in accordance with your

terms of reference are based solely on military considerations from the
Israeli point of view.
For the Joint Chiefs of Staff
signed Earle G. Wheeler
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

DISCUSSION OF KEY ISRAELI BORDER AREAS

1. THE JORDANIAN WEST BANK

a. Threat. The Jordan-Israeli border is 330 miles in length extending from
the Gulf of Aqaba northward to the Dead Sea, thence following the
armistice demarcation lines and the Jordan River northward to the Yarmuk
River, thence along the Yarmuk River to the Syrian frontier. This border
area has traditionally been lightly held by military forces and defenses
consisted mainly of small, widely separated outposts and patrols and,
therefore, afforded an area where launching of saboteurs and terrorists into
Israel was relatively easy. During the period January 1965 to February
1967, a total of 53 incidents of sabotage and mining activity took place
along this border. These activities resulted in three killed, 35 wounded, and
damage to houses, roads, bridges, railroads, and water and electric power
installations in Israel. Instances of exchange of small arms fire occurred
quite frequently. The majority of these events took place from the Mount
Hebron and Arabah areas where the Jordanian authorities did not take
sufficient measures to protect against line crosses and saboteurs. The high
ground running north-south through the middle of West Jordan overlooks
Israel’s narrow midsection and offers a route for a thrust to the sea which
would split the country in two parts.
b. Requirement. A boundary along the commanding terrain overlooking the
Jordan River from the west could provide a shorter defense line. However,
as a minimum, Israel would need a defense line generally along the axis
Bardala-Tubas-Nablus-Bira-Jerusalem and then to the northern part of the
Dead Sea. This line would widen the narrow portion of Israel and provide
additional terrain for the defense of Tel Aviv. It would provide additional
buffer for the air base at Beersheba. In addition, this line would give a
portion of the foothills to Israel and avoid interdiction by artillery in the
Israeli villages in the lowlands. This line would also provide a shorter
defense line than the border of 4 June 1967 and would reduce the Jordanian
salient into Israel. It also provides adequate lines of communication for
lateral movement.

2. SYRIAN TERRITORY CONTIGUOUS TO ISRAEL

a. Threat. The border between Syria and Israel extends approximately 43
miles. It extends from a point on the Lebanese-Syrian border east to the
vicinity of Baniyas, south to Lake Tiberias, then south along the eastern
shore of the lake to the Syrian-Jordanian border. During the period January
1965 to February 1967, a total of 28 sabotage and terrorist actsoccurred
along this border. In addition, there were numerous shellings of villages
from the high ground overlooking the area southeast of Lake Tiberias.
Casualties were seven killed and 18 wounded. Control of the dominant
terrain affords Syria a military route of approach into northern Israel;
however, the greatest threat in this sector is from terrorism and sabotage.
b. Requirement. Israel must hold the commanding terrain east of the
boundary of 4 June 1967 which overlooks the Galilee area. To provide a
defense in-depth, Israel would need a strip about 15 miles wide extending
from the border of Lebanon to the border of Jordan. This line would
provide protection for the Israeli villages on the east bank of Lake Tiberias
but would make defending forces east of the lake vulnerable to a severing
thrust from Jordan to the southern tip of the lake. The Israelis would
probably decide to accept this risk. As a side effect, this line would give the
Israelis control of approximately 25 miles of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline.

3. THE JERUSALEM-LATRUN AREA

a. Threat. These areas have been the scene of intermittent trouble over the
years as both Jordanians and Israelis have been illegally cultivating lands in
the area between the lines. Only one serious incident occurred in this area
during the period January 1965 to February 1967.
b. Requirement. To defend the Jerusalem area would require that the
boundary of Israel be positioned to the east of the city to provide for the
organization of an adequate defensive position. On the other hand, if
Jerusalem were to be internationalized under the United Nations, a
boundary established west of the city could be defended in accordance with
the concept in paragraph 1, above.

4. THE GAZA STRIP

a. Threat. During the period 1949–1956, prior to the Suez war, numerous
infiltrations and terrorist raids were mounted by Egypt from the Gaza Strip.
However, with the establishment of the United Nations Emergency Force in
1957, based in the Gaza Strip and along the Sinai border, the situation has
been quiet. Only three events of sabotage occurred in this area during the
period January 1965 to February 1967. The Strip, under Egyptian control,
provides a salient into Israel a little less than 30 miles long and from four to
eight miles wide. It has served as a training area for the Palestine Liberation
Army and, despite the few incidents arising in this area of late, it is
significant to note that one of the first actions by the Israelis in the recent
conflict was to seal off the area from the Sinai. b. Requirement. Occupation
of the Strip by Israel would reduce the hostile border by a factor of five and
eliminate a source for raids and training of the Palestine Liberation Army.

5. THE NEGEV-SINAI BORDER

a. Threat. This area has not presented any border problems since
establishment of the United Nations Emergency Force in 1957. The
demilitarized zone around Al Awja, containing the main north-south, east-
west road junction in eastern Sinai and the major water source in the area, is
the principal feature providing military advantage.
b. Requirement. Except for an adjustment of a portion of the boundarytied
to the defense of Eilat, discussed below, and retention of the demilitarized
zone around Al Awja, no need is seen for Israeli retention of occupied
territory in the Sinai

6. THE NEGEV-JORDAN-AQABA-STRAIT OF TIRAN AREA

a. Threat. There were only five incidents of sabotage in this area during the
period January 1965 to February 1967. Israel’s chief concern in this area is
free access through the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba and protection
of Eilat, Israel’s chief oil port and trade link with the West African
countries. Eilat, being at the apex of Israel’s southern tip, is vulnerable to
interdiction from Egyptian territory.
b. Requirement. To provide Israel with sufficient depth to protect theport,
the boundary should be established approximately 20 miles to the west
along the Wadi el-Girafi, south to its headwaters, then east to a point on the
Gulf of Aqaba at approximately 39° 20’ north latitude. In the event an
international guarantee for free passage of the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of
Aqaba is not provided, Israel would feel compelled to occupy key terrain in
order to control the entrance to the Strait.
OceanofPDF.com
APPENDIX H
Security Council Resolution 338,
October 22, 1973

The Security Council,

1. Calls upon all parties to present fighting to cease all firing and
terminate all military activity immediately, no later than 12 hours after the
moment of the adoption of this decision, in the positions they now occupy
2. Calls upon all parties concerned to start immediately after the cease-
fire the implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) in all of
its parts;
3. Decides that, immediately and concurrently with the cease-fire,
negotiations start between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices
aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.
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APPENDIX I
The Phased Plan

TEXT OF POLITICAL PLAN APPROVED BY

THE PLO COUNCIL, JUNE 8, 1974 *
On the basis of the National Palestinian Covenant and the PLO’s
political plan as approved at the 11th session (6–12 January 1973); and in
the belief that a just and lasting peace in the region is impossible without
restoration of the full national rights of the Palestinian nation, and first and
foremost the right of return and self-determination on the homeland’s soil
entire; and after having studied the political circumstances as they
developed during the period between its previous and its present session—
the Council resolves as follows:

1. Emphasis of the PLO’s position with relation to Security Council

Resolution 242, which overlooks the national rights of our nation and
approaches the Palestinian issue as a refugee problem.
The Council therefore rejects any action on that basis on any level
of Arab and international operation, including the Geneva Conference.
2. The PLO is fighting by every means, and primarily by the armed
struggle, to free the Palestinian land and establish a national,
independent and fighting government over every part of the soil of
Palestine to be freed. This calls for a considerable change in the
balance of forces, for the good of our nation and its struggle.
3. The PLO objects to any plan for a Palestinian entity at the price of
recognition, peace (sulb), secure boundaries, surrender of national
rights and deprivation of our nation’s prerogative of return and of self-
determination in its homeland.
4. Any step of liberation is a link in realizing the strategy of the PLO for
the establishment of a Palestinian-democratic State, as resolved by the
previous Councils.
5. It is necessary to struggle alongside the national Jordanian forces for
the establishment of a national Jordanian-Palestinian front, with the
purpose of forming a national democratic government in Jordan that
will safeguard solidarity.
6. The PLO struggles to unify the efforts of the two nations and all the
forces of the Arab liberation movements which subscribe to this plan.
7. In view of this plan, the PLO fights to strengthen national unity and
raise it to a height where it will be capable of fulfilling its national
missions.
8. After its establishment, the national Palestinian government will fight
for the unity of the countries of confrontation, to complete the
liberation of all the Palestinian land and as a step in the direction of
overall Arab unity.
9. The PLO fights to strengthen its solidarity with the Socialist countries
and the forces of liberation and progress, to frustrate all the Zionist
reactionary and imperialist plans.
10. On the basis of this plan, the leadership of the revolution will fomulate
tactics that will enable these objectives to be realized.

OceanofPDF.com
NOTES

PREFACE

1. Letters from Jill W. Rhodes (Jan. 31, 1991), Marion Hitch (Feb. 11,
1991), and Judy T. Fulp (Jan. 20, 1942).
2. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Literary Classics of
the United States, 1984), pp. 385, 398.

INTRODUCTION

1. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern

Middle East 1914–1922 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989), p. 403.
2. See J.A.S. Grenville, The Major International Treaties 1914–1945: A
History and Guide with Texts (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 48–49.
3. Bernard Lewis, “The Palestinians and the PLO, a Historical
Approach,” Commentary (Jan. 1975), p. 32.
4. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (New York: Norton, 1986),
p. 169.
5. Ibid.

1. THE RISE OF ZIONISM

1. Anna Nordau, Memoirs (Jerusalem: Mitzpah, 1930), p. 159.

2. Alkalai’s published calls for the establishment of Jewish colonies in
the Land of Israel began to appear in 1834 in Semlin, the capital of Serbia,
where he served as rabbi. One of his admirers was a fellow Semlinernamed
Simon Loeb Herzl, grandfather of the founder of Zionism. Kalischer’s
Seeking Zion (1862) was more widely read than Alkalai’s writings, and it
influenced not only the religious world but Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem
(1862), which quotes from it. Hess’s book became a classic statement of
Jewish nationalism, which is all the more astonishing because it was made
by a prominent member of Germany’s cosmopolitan intelligentsia.
Translated excerpts from all three authors can be found in Arthur
Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New
York: Atheneum, 1984), pp. 102–38.
3. Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Ilerzl (New York:
Dial, 1956), pp. 267–73, 339.
4. Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), vol. 14, pp. 352–53.
5. Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 9, p. 1312.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic,
1979), p. 304.
7. That millions of enslaved people were to be considered “free”
because their oppressors were of their own kind was the fantastic creed
foisted on a credulous Western intelligentsia during the second half of the
twentieth century by an assortment of Communist and Third World
dictators. They distorted beyond recognition Isaiah Berlin’s ideas of
positive and negative freedom (developed in his essay “Two Concepts of
Liberty”), effectively leaving their subjects with no freedom of any kind.
See Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford, 1969).
8. Byron quoted in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, p. 1549.
9. Adams quoted in Nahum Sokolow, A History of Zionism 1600–1918
(Bombay: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), vol. 1, p. 59.
10. Napoleon quoted in Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New
York: Knopf, 1983), p. 8.
11. Shaftesbury quoted in Sokolow, History of Zionism, p. 123.
12. Palmerston quoted in Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration
(London: Vallentine, Mitchell and Co., 1961), pp. 6–7.
13. A.W.C. Crawford, Lord Lindsay, Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy
Land (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1858), p. xi.
14. George Gawler, Tranquillisation of Syria and the East (London: T. and
W Boone, 1845), p. 6.
15. Descriptions of the Zionist sympathies of prominent Britons and
Americans can be found in Sokolow, History of Zionism. Also of interest
are Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 268–70; Grose, Israel in the Mind
of America; and Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine
(New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 100–106.
16. George Eliot, DanielDeronda (London: William Blackwood and Sons,
1876), vol. 3, book 6, p. 248.
17. Isaiah 11:12; Jeremiah 31:10; Ezekiel 36:24.
18. These Christian clergymen are quoted in Grose, Israel in the Mind of
America, pp. 8–10.
19. Blackstone quoted in Ibid., p. 36.
20. Bliss quoted in Moshe Pearlman, Digging Up the Bible: The Stories of
the Great Archaeological Discoveries in the Holy Land (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 47.
21. Warren quoted in Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem: A
History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for
Palestine (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), p. 12.
22. Sokolow, History of Zionism, p. 299.
23. Edwin Sherwin Wallace, Jerusalem the Holy (New York: Arno Press,
1977), pp. 310, 355.
24. Balfour quoted in Grose, Israel in the Mind of America, p. 62.
25. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 270–75.
26. Churchill White Paper of 1922.
27. Rome did not officially annex Judea to the empire until 44 C.E.
During the intervening decades it exercised control over the land through
the client regime of Herod and his family
28. Dio Cassius, Roman History, book 69, sec. 12.1, cited in M. Stern,
Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: Israel Academy
of Sciences and Humanities, 1980), vol. 2, p. 393.
29. Caracalla enacted the constitutio Antoniniana de civitate, which
accorded Roman citizenship to “free residents” of the empire. See Salo W
Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1952), vol. 11, p. 109. See also Encyclopaedia Judaica,
vol. 5, p. 157.
30. Katz, Battleground, p. 88.
31. Benzion Dinur, Israel in the Diaspora (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960; Hebrew),
vol. 1, “From the Conquest of the Land of Israel by the Arabs to the
Crusades,” pp. 27–30. Prof. Dinur provides an exhaustive compilation of
historical sources, mostly Arab and Jewish, documenting the condition of
the Jews at the beginning of the Arab conquest, and its progressive decline
as a result of Arab colonization policy.
32. According to Toynbee, “There is a thing in law, I think in all forms of
law, the statute of limitations, which for the sake of producing the minimum
amount of hardships and suffering, says that a legal claim does expire after
such and such a time.” “Selective Debates on Palestine,” Kadhim Jawad,
ed., Baghdad Magazine (1970), p. 74.
Furthermore: “[A]fter a lapse of 1800 years it could not be said that
Palestine was the land of the Jews. Otherwise the United States of America
should now belong to the Red Indians.… In my opinion, the Jews have no
right in Palestine except their right to personal property. They do not have
the right to establish a State. It is most unfortunate that a state is established
on a religious basis.” Shakil Ahmed Zia, A History of Jewish Crimes
(Karachi: Ahmed Alam Khan, 1969), p. 231.
33. Jabotinsky quoted in Joseph Schechtman, The Vladimir Jabotin-sky
Story: The Early Years (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956), p. 89.
34. Ruth 1:16; Psalms 137:5. The Shmoneh-esrei or Amidah, the central
prayer in the traditional daily service, devotes six of its eighteen blessings
to the subject of the Return to Zion.
35. The famous formula “Next year in Jerusalem” is recited at the end of
the traditional service both on Passover, the holiday of nationalliberation,
and on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.
36. In J. Davidson et al., eds., Prayerbook of Rav Saadiah Gaon
(Jerusalem, 1963), pp. 77–78. Cited in H. H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of
the Jewish People (Cambridge: Harvard, 1976), pp. 446–47.
37. Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews (New York: New American
Library, 1968), pp. 296–97.
38. Maimonides’ “Epistle to Yemen” in Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides
Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972), pp. 456–57.
39. Nahmanides’ commentary on Numbers 33:53.
40. Grayzel, History of the Jews, pp. 372–73.
41. Maharal, The Eternity of Israel (Prague, 1591), fol. 2r. Quoted in Ben-
Sasson, History of the Jewish People, p. 709.
42. Hillel of Shklov, Kol Hator (B’nei Brak, Israel: Kol Hator Committee,
1968, Hebrew), p. 83.
43. Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 13, p. 216. For a brief survey of Jewish
presence in the land during the centuries of the exile, see Katz,
Battleground, pp. 89–100.
44. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, memo to U.S. Secretary of State, dated
May 17, 1939, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), vol. 4, p. 757.
45. Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement
and the Arabs, 1878–1948 (New York: Herzl Press, 1982), p. 262.
46. Ibid., p. 261.
47. Ibid., p. 255.
48. Arafat address to the twenty-ninth session of the United Nations
General Assembly, Nov. 13, 1974. Official UN translation published under
the title “Palestine Lives” by People’s Press—Middle East Project, p. 8.
49. By 1820–21, travelers such as Richardson, Carne, and Scholtz
reported that Jews made up the largest ethnic group in Jerusalem. The first
official public census, taken by the Turks in 1844, revealed a Jewish
population of 7,120, as opposed to 5,760 Moslems. See Eliyahu Tal, Whose
Jerusalem? (Jerusalem: Tal Communications, 1933), p. 51.
50. The Journal of Henry Maundrell from Aleppo to Jerusalem, 1697
(London: Henry Bohn, 1848), pp. 428, 450, 477.
51. Thomas Shaw, Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of
Barbary and the Levant (London, 1754), pp. 336–37.
52. Count Constantine F. Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt in the
Years 1783, 1784, 1785 (London: Pater, Noster and Row, 1788), vol. 2, p.
36.
53. Alexander Keith, The Land of Israel (Edinburgh: William, Whyte,
1844), p. 465.
54. J. S. Buckingham, Travels in Palestine (London, 1821), p. 146.
55. Alphonse de Lamartine, Recollections of the East (London, 1845), pp.
268, 308. Cited in Katz, Battleground, p. 107.
56. Finn, letter to the Earl of Clarendon, Sept. 15, 1857; British Foreign
Office Documents 78/1294 (Pol. no. 36).
57. Twain, Innocents Abroad, pp. 384, 403, 414, 442, 480, 485–86.
58. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sinai and Palestine (London: John Murray,
1881), p. 118.
59. Alexander Scholch, “The Demographic Development of Palestine” in
International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 17, 1985, p. 488.
60. Avneri, Claim of Dispossession, pp. 30–31. At the time of the granting
of the Mandate, Transjordan’s population was roughly three hundred
thousand, half of whom were nomadic. Ya’akov Shimoni, Political
Dictionary of the Arab World (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 254.
61. Kaiser quoted in Lowenthal, Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 292.
62. Jabotinsky in Hertzberg, Zionist Idea, p. 562.
63. Lewis, “Palestinians,” p. 32.
64. British Royal Commission Report (1937), ch. 1, p. 6.
65. Felix Bovet, Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia: A Visit to Sacred Lands
(London, 1882), pp. 384–85. Cited in Michael Ish-Shalom, Christian
Travels in the Holy Land (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1965; Hebrew), p. 714.
66. These Arabizations and hundreds more can be found in Michael Avi-
Yonah, Qedem Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology (Jerusalem:
Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Carta,
1976).
67. Katz, Battleground, p. 114.
68. Smith quoted in Ibid.
69. Balfour quoted in Stein, Balfour Declaration, pp. 641, 643, 650.
70. Cited in Jill Becker, The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), p. 13.
71. Lord Cecil quoted in Stein, Balfour Declaration, p. 565.
72. Lloyd George quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 401.
73. Smuts quoted in Stein, Balfour Declaration, p. 627.
74. Benzion Netanyahu, ed., Max Nordau to His People (Jerusalem:
Political Library, 1937), vol. 2, p. 59.
75. Churchill quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 519, 520,
523.

2. THE BETRAYAL

1. Roosevelt quoted in Grose, Israel in the Mind of America, p. 134.

2. Horace Samuel, Unholy Memories of the Holy Land (London:
Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1930), pp. 6, 26.
3. Clayton quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 321.
4. Ibid., p. 318.
5. Ibid., p. 321.
6. Storrs quoted in Ibid., pp. 323, 325.
7. Jabotinsky quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege: The Saga of
Israel and Zionism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 135, 138–39.
8. Sanders, High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 651.
9. O’Brien, Siege, p. 139.
10. William Bernard Ziff, The Rape of Palestine (London: St. Botolph’s,
1948), p. 14.
11. Sanders, High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 653.
12. Katz, Battleground, p. 61.
13. Sanders, High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 653.
14. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 322.
15. Jabotinsky quoted in Sanders, High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 653.
16. Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917–1956 (London:
Cresset, 1959), p. 149.
17. Ibid., p. 67.
18. Ibid., p. 18.
19. Ibid., pp. 68, 132.
20. Samuel, Unholy Memories, p. 55.
21. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 56.
22. Ibid., p. 82.
23. Ibid.
24. Samuel, Unholy Memories, p. 57.
25. Ibid., p. 58.
26. Aref quoted in Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 83.
27. Patterson quoted in Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 20.
28. Samuel, Unholy Memories, p. 68.
29. Samuel quoted in Sanders, High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 656.
30. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 97.
31. Ibid, p. 105.
32. Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 19.
33. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 116.
34. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 497–99.
35. Churchill quoted in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise
of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 110.
36. Balfour quoted in Ibid, p. 127.
37. Samuel quoted in Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 23.
38. Times quoted in Katz, Battleground, p. 54–55.
39. Arnold quoted in Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 79.
40. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 127.
41. Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 82.
42. Lloyd George quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 504–
505. The precise chronology of events surrounding the detachment of
Transjordanian Palestine is provided by Becker, The PLO, p. 243: “On 24
April 1920 Britain was granted a mandate over the Palestine region by the
San Remo peace conference. On 1 July 1920 Sir Herbert Samuel took over
from the military administration and established a civil administration in
Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River (see Viscount Samuel’s
Memoirs).… In March 1921 Abdullah was installed as Governor of
Transjordan.’ This decision to treat Transjordan’ differently was not
internationally sanctioned until it was confirmed as part of a text of the
Mandate terms by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922
(Article 25 declared that in the ‘territory lying between the Jordan River
and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined’ the
Mandatory might ‘postpone or withhold’ application of certain provisions
of the Mandate). Only on 23 September 1922 did the League specifically
approve a memorandum relating to Article 25 which specifically exempted
the area of Transjordan from the original Mandate’s requirements
concerning the establishment of a Jewish national home.”
43. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, pp. 99–100.
44. Samuel, Unholy Memories, pp. 70–71.
45. Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 21.
46. Storrs quoted in Samuel, Unholy Memories, p. 73.
47. Storrs quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 215.
48. O’Brien, Siege, p. 151.
49. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 524.
50. Ibid, p. 518.
51. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, pp. 132–33.
52. Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 23.
53. Sachar, History of Israel, pp. 175–76.
54. Joseph Schechtman, The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story: The Later Years
(New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956), p. 126.
55. Sanders, High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 661.
56. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 166.
57. Wingate quoted in Israel Beer, Hagana as Britain’s Ally (Tel Aviv:
Cooperative Press “Achduth,” 1947).
58. Shuckburgh quoted in David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An
Interpretation of the Arabs (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 198.
59. Abram Sachar, The Redemption of the Unwanted: From the Liberation
of the Death Camps to the Founding of Israel (New York: St. Martin’s,
1983), p. 224.
60. David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–
1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 38–39.
61. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 171.
62. Halifax quoted in A. Sachar, Redemption of the Unwanted, p. 225.
63. Shuckburgh quoted in Ibid., p. 231.
64. Ibid.
65. Weizmann quoted in Ibid., p. 240.
66. Ibid., p. 210.
67. Ibid., p. 237.
68. Meinertzhagen commented on this incomprehensible, monomaniacal
betrayal: “It is grossly unfair that the Jews are not allowed to bring in their
own nationals, when the [Jordanian] Arab Legion, armed, equipped,
financed, and officered by Britain, together with Army units from Iraq,
Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are on the move into Palestine to attack
them.” Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, p. 223.
69. Pryce-Jones describes the rallying of the Arab leadership to the
Germans in Closed Circle, pp. 199–206.
70. Quoted in Ibid., p. 202.
71. Husseini quoted in Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 111.
72. Niles quoted in A. Sachar, Redemption of the Unwanted, p. 318.
73. Crum quoted in Ziff, Rape of Palestine, p. 110.
74. David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the
Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 159.
75. Kennan quoted in A. Sachar, Redemption of the Unwanted, p. 201.
76. Truman quoted in Ibid.
77. Saud quoted by Associated Press (Jan. 9, 1954). Cited in Henry
Atkinson, Security and the Middle East: The Problem and Its Solution
(New York: Ballantine, 1955) p. 26; proposals submitted to the President of
the United States.
78. Hints of the land-for-peace discussions even made it into public
discussion at the time. A major policy speech in 1955 by Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles stressed that the armistice lines from the War of
Independence did not have to be permanent. Referring to the Negev, he
complained that “territory which is barren has acquired a sentimental
significance” for Israelis, making concessions unnecessarily difficult.
British prime minister Anthony Eden was more forward, calling explicitly
for territorial compromise. H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 476.
79. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (New York: Herzl Press, I960), pp. 169–
70.
80. Preamble: “Disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in
barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…. Member
states have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United
Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human
rights and fundamental freedoms….”
Article 28: “Rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration cannot be
enjoyed in a country under a reign of terror, nor in a world at war or in
turmoil…. Only in a social and international order that is governed by the
rule of law and the principle of mutual respect may human rights be fully
observed.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Standard of
Achievement (New York: United Nations, 1948), pp. 1, 11.
81. By a vote of 111 to 25 with 13 abstentions, the UN General Assembly
endorsed a resolution revoking the equation. The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 16,
1991.
82. Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940–
1944 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 189; and
Marshall Lee Miller, Bulgaria During the Second World War (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 96.

3. THE THEORY OF PALESTINIAN CENTRALITY

1. Shimoni, Political Dictionary, pp. 30, 165–66, 311–13.

2. Ibid., pp. 198, 514, 518–19.
3. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 261.
4. The jerusalem Post , Nov. 1, 1990, p. 4.
5. Shimoni, Political Dictionary, p. 229.
6. Ibid, pp. 295, 299.
7. Assad quoted in Kamal Jumblatt, / Speak for Lebanon (London: Zed,
1982), p. 78.
8. Shimoni, Political Dictionary, 311–13
9. Ibid, p. 23, 491–92.
10. Ibid, p. 230.
11. Ibid, p. 479.
12. Ibid, p. 101.
13. Atkinson, Security, p. 94.
14. Two hundred thousand Kurdish refugees fled to Iran in 1975 after the
Shah of Iran stopped aid to the Pesh Perga Kurdish rebel forces. Shimoni,
Political Dictionary, p. 287.
15. Atkinson, Security, pp. 95, 101.
16. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 265.
17. The New York Times, Sept. 1, 1988.
18. Saddam poured two million barrels (84 million gallons) of crude oil
into the gulf, producing a spill six times the size of the infamous Exxon
Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989. The Jerusalem Post, March 11, 1991.
19. Al-Gumhuria, Oct. 19, 1984.
20. An excellent exposition of the Middle Eastern machinations of the
rival British and French empires during World War I can be found in
Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, passim.
21. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, pp. 26–27.
22. Amir Shakib-Arslan, Our Decline and Its Causes: A Diagnosis of the
Symptoms of the Downfall of Moslems, trans. M. A. Shakoor (Lahore,
1944). Excerpted in John Donohue and John Esposito, eds., Islam in
Transition: Muslim Perspectives (New York: Oxford, 1982), pp. 60–62.
23. Anti-Defamation League pamphlet, “The Myth of Linkage,” 1990.
24. The New York Times, Aug. 12 and 15, 1990.
25. Qutb quoted in Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology
and Modern Politics (New Haven: Yale, 1985), p. 31.
26. Faraj quoted in Al-Ahram (Egypt), July 12, 1974. Cited in Sivan,
Radical Islam, p. 20.
27. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, pp. 27–28.
28. Persecution of Jews in Arab countries began with the slaughter of the
Jews of Medina by Mohammed in the year 625. The countless pogroms and
massacres that punctuated the life of Jews under Arab Islam thereafter
included those in Cairo (1012), Fez (1032), Marrakesh (1146), Baghdad
(1333), Fez (1640), Basra (1776), Algiers (1801), Damascus (1840), Djerba
(1864), Tunis (1869), Fez (1912), Constantine (1934), Damascus (1936),
Baghdad (1941), Tripoli (1945), and cities across the Arab world in 1948
and 1967. A brief survey of Arab persecution of Jews can be found in Joan
Peters, From Time Immemorial (New York: Harper, 1984), pp. 33–71.
29. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE., this experience was
encapsulated in the famous adage of the rabbis that the Jewish
commonwealth was destroyed by gratuitous hatred among Jews. Talmud
Yoma 9b.
A dramatic exception to the absence of Jewish political murder was the
firing of Hagana troops on the ship Altalena bringing weapons and
ammunition to Irgun troops immediately before the declaration of the state,
in which eighteen members of the Irgun were killed. Another exception was
the murder of Emil Greenzweig at an antiwar rally in February 1983. The
murder was forcefully and universally condemned.
30. Shakib-Arslan, in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition, p. 61.
31. Abdalla Laroui, Contemporary Arab Ideology (Paris: Maspero, 1967),
p. 15, in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition, p. 141.
32. Shakib-Arslan, in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition, pp. 60–
62.
33. Muhammad Nuwayhi, Towards a Revolution in Religious Thought
(1970), in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition, pp. 167–68.
34. Bitar, symposium of Al-Ihya Al-Arabi, Nov. 17, 1979. Cited in Sivan,
Radical Islam, p. 157.
35. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 235.
36. Cited in Ibid., p. 238.
37. Michel Aflaq, In Remembrance of the Arab Prophet (1972), in
Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition, p. 111.
38. Muammar Qaddafi, The Third Way, in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in
Transition, pp. 104–106.
39. Ghouri quoted in Becker, PLO, p. 18.
40. Charter quoted by Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel
(Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), p. 70.
41. Nasser quoted in Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 253.
42. Quoted in Becker, PLO, p. 249.
43. Hussein quoted in Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 214.
44. Tsurani in Al-Qabas, Oct. 27, 1986.
45. Arafat quoted in Saudi News Agency, Jan. 2, 1989.
46. During Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, Assad welcomed him
beneath an oil painting of Saladin’s victory over the Crusaders. Edward
Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger: A Secret History of American
Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Readers Digest Press, 1976), p.
95.
47. By 1963, so many Israeli farmers had lost their lives to Syrian fire
from the Golan Heights that armored tractors had become standard
equipment on Galilee farms. H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 618.
48. Mubarak quoted in The New York Times, Sept. 16, 1990.
49. Sheikh Saud Nassir al-Sabah, Nov. 5, 1990. Cited in Anti-Defamation
League pamphlet, “The Myth of Linkage,” 1990.

4. THE REVERSAL OF CAUSALITY

1. Nasser quoted in H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 633.

2. Radio Baghdad, May 31, 1967.
3. Algiers Home Service (in Arabic), June 4, 1967.
4. Radio Damascus, June 5, 1967.
5. H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 633.
6. Amman Radio, June 7, 1967.
7. Actual strengths of Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq)
versus Israel: artillery 960 to 200; combat aircraft 682 to 286; tanks 2,330
to 1,000. Colonel Trevor Dupuy, U.S. Army, Ret., Elusive Victory: The
Arab- Israeli Wars, 1947–1974 (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1978), p.
337.
8. The defense of Israel’s shipping and the prevention of a blockade of
the Straits of Tiran was central to the purpose of committing United Nations
Emergency Force (UNEF) troops to the area in 1957. Dupuy, Elusive
Victory, p. 221. Eisenhower confirmed this mission: “We should not
assume… Egypt will prevent Israeli shipping from using the Suez Canal or
the Gulf of Aqaba. If, unhappily, Egypt does hereafter violate the Armistice
Agreement or other international obligations, then this should be dealt with
firmly by the family of nations” (Feb. 20, 1957).
9. Dupuy, Elusive Victory, p. 247
10. Jonathan Netanyahu, Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan
Netanyahu (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 133.
11. International Documents on Palestine (1967), p. 62.
12. Ibid, pp. 62–63.
13. Ibid, p. 61.
14. Ibid, p. 100.
15. Charter of the United Nations, Article 2, Section 4. “All Members
shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in
any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
16. Azzam Pasha quoted in Leonard David, Myths and Facts: A Concise
Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Near East Report,
1989), p. 273.
17. Filastin, Feb. 19, 1949. Cited in Katz, Battleground, p. 16.
18. Al-Hoda, June 8, 1951. Cited in Katz, Battleground, p. 17.
19. AlDifaa, Sept. 6, 1954. Cited in Katz, Battleground, p. 18.
20. Akhbar al-Yom (Cairo), Oct. 12, 1963.
21. It is estimated that World War II uprooted 48 million people from their
homes in Europe and another 31 million in Asia. Between 1945 and 1957,
refugees created by forced population transfers, exchanges, and war totaled
another 57 million. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, “Immigrations to
Israel, 1948–72,” p. 72.
The Gulf War is estimated to have displaced another five million people,
whose absorption by Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and other countries is
taking place without any delays or fanfare. The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 8,
1991, p. 6.
22. Speech by Dr. Elfan Rees, reprinted in Newsletter of the Anglo-Israel
Association 47 (Oct. 1957).
23. Atkinson, Security, p. 102.
24. Ibid., pp. 102–103.
25. Ibid., p. 102.
26. Arafat quoted in Saut Falastin, Dec. 9, 1980.
27. Mohsin quoted in Trouw (Netherlands), Mar. 31, 1977.
28. Official resolution from the Eighth Conference of the Palestine
National Council, Mar. 1971.
29. Hout on Radio Cairo, May 30, 1967.
30. Arafat’s speech before the United Nations, Nov. 13, 1974.
31. Hassan in Al-Destour, Feb. 5, 1970.
32. King Hussein on Egyptian television, Oct. 10, 1977.
33. King Hussein in Al-Nahar Al-Arabi, Dec. 26, 1981.
34. King Hussein in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Oct. 30, 1984.
35. Abu Iyad in Al-Majallah, Nov. 8, 1988.
36. Keitel quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Ballantine, 1950), p. 572.
37. Henlein quoted in Ibid., p. 448.
38. Ibid., pp. 488–89.
39. Ibid., pp. 524–26.
40. Ibid., pp. 493, 523–24.
41. Ibid., pp. 490, 519, 538.
42. Ibid., p. 489.
43. Ibid., pp. 522, 526.
44. Ibid., p. 527.
45. Ibid., p. 535.
46. Beneš quoted in Ibid , pp. 529, 564.
47. Hitler quoted in Ibid, p. 577.
48. Times editorial quoted in Ibid, p. 518.
49. Yitzhak Zaccai, fudea, Samaria and the Gaza District, 1967–1987:
Twenty Years of Givil Administration (Jerusalem: Carta, 1987), pp. 14, 17,
25, 45, 84, 87, 96.
50. Quoted in Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Intifada (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1990), p. 18.
51. PLO Radio (Baghdad), Dec. 10, 1987.
52. Arafat in Riyadh, on Jan. 1, 1989. Quoted by a spokesman of the U.S.
State Department at its daily press briefing on Jan. 19, 1989. A slightly
different version was cited by the Kuwaiti News Agency on Jan. 2, 1989,
but the sense is the same: “Any Palestinian leader who suggests ending the
intifada exposes himself to the bullets of his own people and endangers his
life. The PLO will know how to deal with them.”
53. Leaflets of the Fatah, dated Jan. 21, 1991; Hamas, dated Mar. 5, 1989;
United National Command of the intifada, dated Jan. 1, 1992.
54. Quoted on CBS, 48 Hours, Feb. 9, 1988.
55. By mid-1992, the total number killed in clashes with the IDF stood at
776, while the number of slayings of Arabs by intifada activists stood at
698. Source: IDF spokesman, Aug. 23, 1992.
56. The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 27, 1992.
57. Ibid.
58. This figure includes all soldiers disciplined for unauthorized or
excessive use of force through July 27, 1992, whether or not anyone was
harmed as a result. Source: IDF spokesman.
59. Beirut Radio, Oct. 26, 1954.
60. AlDifaa, Apr. 19, 1957.
61. Al-Nahar, Apr. 25, 1963.
62. Reuters and Al-Gumhuria, Nov. 22, 1966.
63. The New York Times, March 2, 1987; The Associated Press, May 20,
1988.
64. The Jerusalem Post, May 3, 1992, p. 6.
65. The Jerusalem Post, July 22, 1990, p. 4.
66. “We do not believe there should be new settlements in the West Bank
or East Jerusalem.” The New York Times, March 9, 1990.
U.S. administration reports on settlement activity and the arrival of new
immigrants in the territories have included East Jerusalem in their tallies,
thus concluding that the 10 percent of Russian immigrants who move into
Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem are all “settlers.” Ibid.
67. Zaccai, Judea, Samaria, p. 50; Department of Geography, Office of
the Prime Minister of Israel.
68. Only an approximate estimate is possible. Source: Plia Albeck, State
Attorney’s Office.
69. Excerpted from Naomi Shemer, “Jerusalem of Gold,” 1967.
Translation mine.
70. J. Netanyahu, SelJ-Portrait, p. 238.
71. Dayan quoted in H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 674.
72. I Maccabees 15. Simon not only claimed Judea and Samaria as Jewish
land. Replying to the demand to return the cities of Joppa (today Jaffa,
south of Tel Aviv, which Simon did not consider Jewish land) and Gazara
(Gezer), Simon makes the argument from security: “As for Joppa and
Gazara, which you demand, they were causing great damage among our
people and to our land.” Ibid.

5. THE TROJAN HORSE

1. Becker, PLO, p. 38.

2. Ibid, p. 42.
3. Official letter of the Bandung Commemoration Conference, April 24,
1985, entitled “Message from His Excellency Yasser Arafat, Chairman of
the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
Commander in Chief of the Forces of the Palestinian Revolution, to His
Excellency Mr. Soharto, President of the Republic of Indonesia, on the
Occasion of the Commemoration of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Asian-
African Conference.”
4. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 199.
5. Ibid, p. 196.
6. Ibid, pp. 196–97.
7. Becker, PLO, p. 25.
8. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, p. 199.
9. Al-Banna quoted in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition,p. 80.
10. Sami al-Jundi, Al-Ba’th, p. 27. Cited in Lewis, Semites, pp. 147–48.
11. Becker, PLO, p. 19.
12. Ibid.
13. Lewis, Semites, p. 150.
14. Ibid, p. 158.
15. Ibid, p. 151.
16. Ibid, pp. 152–53.
17. Ibid, p. 152.
18. Mufti quoted in Ibid, p. 155.
19. Ibid, p. 154.
20. Ibid, p. 156.
21. J. B. Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuhrer- The Rise and Fall of Haj
Amin el-Husseini (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965), p. 156.
22. Ibid, p. 157.
23. Ibid, p. 156.
24. Ibid, pp. 159–60.
25. Ibid, p. 160.
26. Lewis, Semites, p. 160.
27. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, pp. 206–207.
28. Hans Josef Horchem, “Terror in West Germany” in Conflict Studien,
no. 185, 1985. Horchem was head of West Germany’s Office for the
Protection of the Constitution, whose responsibilities included the
monitoring of left- and right-wing extremist groups.
29. Ibid.
30. Interviews with Abu Iyad in Der Spiegel, July 17, 1981, and Die Tat,
July 19, 1985.
31. Source: Yigal Carmon, Prime Minister’s Adviser on Terrorism,
personal communication, Dec. 22, 1992.
32. Agence France Presse, May 21, 1986 and Reuters, July 4, 1986; for
Abbas see Liberation, July 1, 1985 and France Soir, July 2, 1985.
33. The London Observer, Feb. 5, 1989.
34. Source: Yigal Carmon, personal communication, Dec. 22, 1992.
35. Ibid. Carmon has shown me photostats of captured PLO identity
documents bearing such names.
36. Pryce-Jones, Closed Circle, pp. 206–207.
37. Sheehan, Secret History, p. 217.
38. Neil Livingstone and David Halevy Inside the PLO: Cover Units,
Secret Funds, and the War Against Israel and the United States (New York:
William Morrow, 1990), p. 64.
39. O’Brien, Siege, p. 368.
40. H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 342.
41. O’Brien, Siege, p. 476.
42. Arafat quoted in Al-Destour, Dec. 26, 1983.
43. Quoted in Becker, PLO, p. 53.
44. Ibid., p. 51.
45. “Those [Israelis] who survive will remain in Palestine. I estimate that
none of them will survive.” Shukeiri quoted in H. Sachar, History of Israel,
pp. 633–34.
46. Becker, PLO, p. 66.
47. H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 685.
48. The PLO estimated the toll at thirty thousand dead. Becker, PLO,p.
75- Israel offered medical treatment to casualties at Israeli hospitals. The
Jerusalem Post, Sept. 23, 1970.
49. The jerusalem Post , May 16 and June 7, 1982.
50. Raphael Israeli, The PLO in Lebanon: Selected Documents (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).
51. Livingstone and Halevy, Inside the PLO, p. 82.
52. Al-Saeyasa (Kuwait), June 2, 1990.
53. Jimmy Carter, The Blood of Abraham (Boston: Hough ton Mifflin,
1985), pp. 112–13.
54. Arafat first approached the United States with a statement that he was
willing to accept that “Israel is here to stay” in 1973, a full fifteen years
before the supposed acceptance of Israel that prompted the U.S.-PLO
dialogue. Arafat’s original proposal to the Americans was that he would
accept Israel if the United States would support a PLO state in Jordan. The
Americans did not respond, in part because they believed that the PLO “was
certain to be irredentist” and would not be satisfied only with Jordan. Henry
Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 626.
55. The jerusalem Post , March 26, 1973.
56. Harris Schoenberg, Mandate for Terror: The United Nations and the
PLO (New York: Shapolsky, 1989), pp. 413–14.
57. The New York Times, Oct. 10, 1985. Cited in Livingstone and Halevy,
Inside the PLO, p. 317.
58. Livingstone and Halevy, Inside the PLO, p. 259.
59. At an Arab League luncheon at the UN, at which the UN secretary-
general was present; The New York Times, Dec. 4, 1985.
60. The New York Times, Nov. 13, 1988. Abbas continued: “It wasn’t us
who carried out this [Achille Lauro] operation, but the Americans. They are
the ones who made this whole thing up. The Americans are trying to play
the role of ‘cowboy’” Al-Watan Al-Arabi (Paris), Dec. 16, 1988.
61. The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 1979.
62. Nov. 8–11, 1987. The Record of Events called the conference
“extraordinary” in that it was called to deal with the Iran-Iraq War rather
than the usual agenda. “The Middle East and North Africa” (London:
Europa Publications, 1991), 37th ed., p. 244.
63. Abu Iyad interviewed on BBC, Nov. 10, 1985.
64. Kaddoumi in Quotidien de Paris, Nov. 19, 1985.
65. The denial was issued by PLO spokesman Mahmoud Labadi. The
Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1982.
66. Arafat’s official text, Geneva, Dec. 13, 1988.
67. Arafat, in Ibid.
68. The New York Times, Jan. 19, 1989. Such reactions were based on the
views of the State Department, whose spokesman announced that “things
will never be the same again in the Middle East peace process.”The
Washington Post, Dec. 16, 1988.
69. Arafat on Austrian television, Dec. 19, 1988.
70. Za’anoun quoted in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Dec. 23, 1988.
71. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Rayah (Qatar), Jan. 13, 1990.
72. Al-Hassan quoted in Al-Rayah (Qatar), Jan. 13, 1990.
73. Hawatmeh quoted by Jamahiriya News Agency (Libya), Apr. 19,
1989.
74. Abu Iyad on Radio Monte Carlo, March 4, 1989.
75. Kaddoumi quoted in Politiken (Denmark), May 18, 1989.
76. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Watan (Kuwait), Feb. 11, 1989.
77. Habash quoted in the PFLP’s Al-Hadaf, April 9, 1989.
78. Saudi Press Agency, Aug. 8, 1989.
79. Arafat and Qaddafi statement, Jana Libyan News Agency, quoted by
Agence France Presse, Jan. 7, 1990.
80. Arafat on Radio Monte Carlo, May 2, 1989.
81. Arafat quoted by Agence France Presse, May 5, 1989.
82. Balawi interviewed with Al-Sabbah (Tunisia), quoted by Kuwait
News Agency, May 6, 1989.
83. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Saeyasa (Kuwait), June 1, 1989.
84. Abu Iyad quoted in Ukaz (Saudi Arabia), Jan. 23, 1989.
85. Natshe quoted in Al-Watan (Kuwait), Jan. 8, 1989.
86. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Sept. 7, 1988.
87. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Yom Al-Sabi, Nov. 28, 1988.
88. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Sapir, Jan. 1988.
89. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Dec. 18, 1988.
90. Abu Iyad quoted in Dehira Ufales (Kuwait), Jan. 6, 1987.
91. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Sept. 7, 1988.
92. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Dec. 6, 1988.
93. Abu Iyad quoted in Al-Anba (Kuwait), Dec. 12, 1988.
94. Arafat quoted by Libyan News Agency, May 1, 1990.
95. Kaddoumi quoted over BBC Arabic Service, Apr. 5, 1989.
96. Sayah quoted in Al-Saeyasa (Kuwait), Dec. 21, 1988.
97. Sayah quoted in As-Shira (Beirut), Aug. 22, 1988.
98. PFLP statement, Voice of the Mountain Radio (Lebanon), June 9,
1989.
99. PFLP’s Al-Hadaf, Apr. 9, 1989.
100. Hawatmeh quoted by Agence France Presse, Jan. 1989.
101. Natshe quoted in Al-Qabas, Dec. 26, 1989.
102. Al-Rai (Amman), Nov. 12, 1992.
103. Dejani quoted in Ukaz (Saudi Arabia), Nov. 22, 1988.
104. Natshe quoted m Al-Watan (Kuwait), Jan. 8, 1989.
105. Danny Rothschild, Israel Government Coordinator for Judea and
Samaria, Oct. 1991.
106. Hassan quoted in Al-Watan (Kuwait), Feb. 21, 1990.
107. Through Jan. 1, 1953. Atkinson, Security, p. 164. This amounts to
more than $5 billion in 1992 terms.
108. Qaddafi on ABC, 20/20, Jan. 27, 1988. Nasser said as much three
decades earlier: “If Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to
exist.”Züricher Woche, Sept. 1, 1961; cited in Katz, Battleground, p. 31.
109. Arafat quoted in Qatar News Agency, Jan. 13, 1989.
110. Natshe quoted in Al-Watan (Kuwait), Jan. 8, 1989.
111. Arafat quoted by Middle East News Agency, Aug. 1, 1991.
112. Algiers Voice of Palestine, March 15, 1992.
113. Becker, FLO, pp. 175, 197.
114. Kaddoumi quoted in Ibid., p. 197.
115. As of Aug. 23, 1992, 698 “collaborators” had been murdered in the
territories by the intifada committees. Source: IDF spokesman.
116. Arafat quoted in People’s Daily, June 29, 1989.
117. Arafat quoted by Associated Press, Jan. 7, 1991.
118. Farouq Kaddoumi, on Radio A-Sharq (Lebanon), Aug. 20, 1991.
119. Voice of Palestine, Aug. 19, 1991. Predictably, within hours after the
coup failed, Arafat issued a contradictory message of congratulations to
Gorbachev and Yelstin. They were not pleased.
120. Mufti quoted in Schechtman, Mufti, p. 104.

6. TWO KINDS OF PEACE

1. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s

Political Writings (New York: Cambridge, 1970), pp. 100, 103.
2. Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 556–57.
3. Between 1989 and 1992, the U.S. government provided nearly $8
billion in unconditional loan guarantees to eight Arab governments,
including $500 million in guarantees for Iraq approved immediately before
its invasion of Kuwait. Near East Report, April 6, 1992.
4. Western European countries supplied Saddam with combat aircraft;
assault, antitank, and reconnaissance helicopters; air-to-air, surface-to-air,
and air-to-surface missiles and missile launchers; electronic systems for
land and sea defense; military transports of various sorts; armored cars and
antitank armored cars; mobile artillery; missile frigates and corvettes; and
ammunition and explosives. Yedidya Atlas, “Where Did Saddam Get All
Those Weapons?” The Jerusalem Post, Sept. 17, 1990. The recent
revelations and accusations in Britain and the United States seem to indicate
much more extensive Western involvement in creating the Iraqi menace
than even the above list indicates.
5. Max Nordau, Morals and the Evolution of Man, Marie Lewenz, trans.
(New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1922), pp. 1–2.

7. THE WALL

1. Charles Perkins, Arms to the Arabs: The Arab Military Buildup Since
1973 (Washington, D.C.: AIPAC, 1989), p. 5.
2. Saudi defense expenditures in 1990 totaled $31.9 billion, as compared
with Britain’s $38.5 billion. And Saudi expenditures in the coming years
may include tens of billions of dollars in additional arms requested from the
U.S. and other suppliers. International Institute for Strategic Studies,
Military Balance, 1991 (London: Brassey, 1991), p. 117.
3. The Germans had 3,350 tanks. Col. T. N. Dupuy, A Genius for War:
The German Army and General Staff 1807–1945 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 269. Compare this with Syria’s 4,350 today.
Military Balance, p. 120.
4. The Syrian standing army comprises 404,000 troops. Israel’s active
service comes to 141,000 men, and it can rely on 504,000 reserves. Military
Balance, pp. 108, 120.
5. NATO forces arrayed against a possible Soviet assault were deployed
across the entire depth of West Germany, affording 150 miles of defenses
between East Germany and France at West Germany’s narrowest point.
David Isby and Charles Kamps, Armies of NATO’s Central Front (London:
Jane’s, 1985), p. 194.
6. Twain, Innocents Abroad, p. 379.
7. The Arab states comprise 5.4 million square miles, while the United
States is 3.5 million square miles. Maryland is 9,837 square miles, as
opposed to 8,290 for pre-1967 Israel. The West Bank is 2,187 square miles.
8. A surprise attack by Syria, Jordan, and an Iraqi expeditionary force
would have a six-to-one advantage in standing ground forces over Israel
during the first forty-eight hours of the fighting. Aryeh Shalev, The West
Bank Line of Defense (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), p. 42.
9. The Washington Times, Oct. 12, 1988.
10. The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 7, 1991.
11. The Jaffee Center Study Group on War in the Gulf Implications for
Israel (Boulder: Westview, 1992), p. 388.
12. The length of the West Bank’s border with pre-1967 Israel is 361
kilometers, as opposed to 100 kilometers at present. Shalev, West Bank
Line, p. 10.
13. Ha’aretz, July 22, 1988.
14. The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 12, 1986, and Apr. 5, 1987.
15. The Associated Press, Jan. 14, 1990.
16. Livingstone and Halevy, Inside the PLO, p. 68.
17. Arthur Goldberg, “The Meaning of 242,” The Jerusalem Post, June
10, 1977.
18. Ibid.
19. Caradon on The MacNeil-Lehrer Report, Mar. 30, 1978.
20. Eugene Rostow, “The Truth About 242,” The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 5,
1990.
21. Johnson, Address before the 125th anniversary meeting of B’nai Brith,
Washington, D.C., Sept. 10, 1968. Reprinted in the Department of State
Bulletin, Oct. 7, 1968.
22. Dayan quoted in H. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 674.

8. A DURABLE PEACE

1. “We, the Palestinian people, made the imaginative leap in the

Palestine National Council of November 1988, during which the Palestine
Liberation Organization launched its peace initiative based on Security
Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and declared Palestinian independence
based on Resolution 181 of the United Nations, which gave birth to two
states in 1948, Israel and Palestine” (emphasis added). Head of Palestinian
delegation, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, in The New York Times, Nov. 1, 1991.
2. “The claims invoked by Israel for the migration of world Jewry to it at
the expense of the native Arab population are not sanctioned by anylegal or
humanitarian principle. If the entire world were to adopt such claims, it
would have to encourage Christians to emigrate to the Vatican and all the
Moslems to emigrate to holy Mecca.” Syrian foreign minister Farouq Al-
Shara, in Ibid.
3. Tlas quoted on Damascus Television Service, Mar. 7, 1990.
4. The jerusalem Post , Oct. 22 and 23, 1991.
5. The New York Times, Mar. 22, 1991.
6. The New York Times, Mar. 18, 1991.
7. Telephone discussion with Eliyahu Rosenthal, Israel Water Authority.
8. Ibid.
9. Saudi News Agency, Jan. 2, 1989.
10. The Jerusalem Post, May 19, 1992.
11. Addendum to the report of the Commissioner-General of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,
“Financial Situation of UNRWA in 1990 and 1991 and Budget Estimates
for 1992–93.”
9. THE QUESTION OF JEWISH POWER

1. Cicero quoted in Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, vol. 1, p. 19.

2. Jabotinsky quoted in Benzion Netanyahu, Jabotinsky’s Place in the
History of the Jewish People (Haifa: University of Haifa Faculty of the
Humanities Publications, 1981), p. 15.
3. Shoah, An Oral History of the Holocaust: The Complete Text of the
Film by Claude Lanzmann (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 200.
4. Protocols of the Wannsee Conference, Jan. 20, 1942, in Yitzhak Arad,
ed., Documents of the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981), p. 254.
5. In fact, many newspapers ridiculed the address. Carl Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), pp. 445–46.
6. Jabotinsky, in Do’ar Hayom, May 17, 1929. Cited in B. Netanyahu,
Jabotinsky’s Place, p. 7.
7. Ha’aretz, Aug. 27, 1992.
8. Shoah, p. 169.
9. Mark Twain, The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, Charles Neider,
ed. (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1963), p. 249.
OceanofPDF.com
Acknowledgments to
A Durable Peace

My friend Merv Adelson deserves all thanks for introducing me to Larry

Kirshbaum of Warner Books, who persistently and doggedly pursued me to
take time out from my schedule to complete the task of preparing this book
for publication. Larry was not only successful in hunting his quarry (me),
but also unusually generous with perceptive and invaluable editorial advice.
At his suggestion, we touched as little of the original historical material as
possible but updated the book to reflect the events of the last few years.
Larry also brought with him excellent technical assistance in the person of
his son Michael, who expertly manned the computer, kept up with my
dictation, and proved that we are truly living in an electronic age. To both
members of the Kirshbaum family, I extend my warmest thanks, as I do to
David Bar Ilan, who applied his critical intelligence to the manuscript, old
and new. As always, my wife, Sarah, put up with our impossible hours to
complete the book with great understanding and even greater support.
OceanofPDF.com
Acknowledgments to
A Place Among the Nations

The task of writing this book would have been daunting enough in itself,
but writing it in the midst of the turbulence of Israeli politics made it all the
more so. A number of people helped me overcome what otherwise would
have been insurmountable difficulties.
Dr. Dore Gold of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv
University and Douglas Feith read the manuscript and suggested important
revisions. My brother, Dr. Iddo Netanyahu, and my cousin, Nathan
Mileikowsky, went over every word, steering me away from obscurity and
toward what I hope is greater clarity and focus. The unwavering enthusiasm
of Linda Grey and Ann Harris of Bantam Books was a constant source of
encouragement, as were Ann’s good-natured yet incisive editorial
comments. Rami Elhanan and Jackie Levy calmly produced the maps and
illustrations in the face of ever-changing demands. Esther Loewy, Avishai
Cohen, and Ita Hanya verified facts and quotations, relentlessly weeding
out inaccuracies and hunting down reliable information. Ralph Cwernan
methodically tracked down material from some of my UN speeches, which
I incorporated into the text. Above all, Yoram Hazony acted as an amalgam
of researcher, editor, and typist, bringing a perceptive intelligence, as well
as much patience and dedication, to work that often continued literally
around the clock. To each of them I am deeply indebted, and to each I offer
my thanks.
Last and most important, I owe an inestimable debt to my wife, Sarah,
who gave me her clear insights into what was important and what was not,
combining wise judgment with a profound sensitivity, while offering me her
firm convictions and her courage.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
OceanofPDF.com
ACCLAIM FOR THE FIRST EDITION OF A DURABLE PEACE
“Powerful, lucidly argued… impressive…. Very few Israeli spokesmen
have ever understood the Arab arguments against Israel so well, or
deployed counterarguments so skillfully…. Often entertaining as well as
instructive.”
—CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

’Brilliant… mastery… shows that Netanyahu is as tough, as sharp, and

as eloquent as his political enemies fear. And then some.” —NATIONAL
REVIEW

“A good introduction to the man and his views… artful.” —

JERUSALEM POST

“Scholarly yet swift…. Seasoned watchers of Middle Eastern affairs and

interested laymen alike will enjoy Mr. Netanyahu’s clarity and
thoughtfulness… a profound effort to explain the issues thoroughly while
not being didactic… a pleasure to read.” —WASHINGTON TIMES
OceanofPDF.com
Israel at the half-century mark is one of the great success stories of our
time. Now, as the Jewish State enters the twenty-first century, comes a new,
thoroughly revised edition of Benjamin Netanyahu’s acclaimed A Place
Among the Nations, updated to reflect both recent developments and
Netanyahu’s unique vantage point.

We live in a time of intense geopolitical change. Communism, fascism, and

other “isms” are crumbling into dust. But Zionism, the national liberation
movement of the Jewish people, has triumphantly endured. What is the
secret of that endurance—and what is the prognosis for its continued
success?
From the rise of Zionism to the latest peace initiatives, Benjamin
Netanyahu traces the origins, history, and politics of Israel’s relationship
with the Arab world and the West. He exposes some of the most common—
and often shocking—misrepresentations and myths about Arab-Israeli
issues, replacing them with facts. And he explores the themes that have
shaped his vision of Israel and its position in the world:

What is the foundation of the Jewish claim to the land of Israel?

What is the real source of conflict between Arabs and Israelis?
How has the West both contributed to and jeopardized Israel’s security
throughout the decades?
How have Arab groups used warfare to achieve what might have been
otherwise unattainable ends?
Why is the status of the West Bank, as well as Gaza and the Golan
Heights, so crucial to Israel?
Why is any hope for peace in the Middle East linked to a clear
recognition of Israel’s right to exist?
Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union, why is a strong Israel
essential to the stability of the world?

Netanyahu writes as an Israeli who wishes to see a secure Israel at peace

with its neighbors. But for this to happen the battle for truth must be won.
Closely reasoned, meticulously documented, and often shattering in its
revelations, A DURABLE PEACE sheds welcome light on the Middle East
debate. It is a most fitting tribute to Israel today.
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*
The name Palestine is derived from the Philistines, a seafaring people that
invaded the coast of the land of Canaan from the sea around 1200
B.C.E.,shortly after the Jewish conquest overland from the east. The main
Philistine dominions never extended much farther than the coastal strip
between Gaza and today’s Tel Aviv, and the Philistines disappeared as a
people under the heel of the Babylonians. It was the Roman Empire, bent
on destroying every vestige of Jewish attachment to the land, that invented
the name Palestine to replace Judea, the historic name of the country.
Thus according to Professor Bernard Lewis:

The official adoption of the name Palestine in Roman usage to

designate the territories of the former Jewish principality of Judea
seems to date from after the suppression of the great Jewish revolt
of Bar Kochba in the year 135 C.E.…. it would seem that the name
Judea was abolished… and the country renamed Palestine or Syria
Palestine, with the… intention of obliterating its historic Jewish
identity. 3

While this Roman name disappeared in the land itself shortly after the
conquest by the Moslems, 4 Christian cartographers kept the name alive in
their own lands and eventually bequeathed it to the Allied negotiators at
Versailles and the inhabitants of the land, who adopted it only after the
British took control. According to Professor Lewis:

By the early twentieth century, with the predominance of European

influence… the name Palestine came to be used even in the country
[i.e., in Palestine]. This use was, however, in the main confined to
Christians and to a very small group of westernized Muslims. The
name was not used officially, and had no precise territorial
definition until it was adopted by the British to designate the area
which they acquired by conquest at the end of World War I. 5

Thus, up until the twentieth century, the name Palestine referred

exclusively to the ancient land of the Jews—as did the names Judea, Judah,
Zion, and Israel. It had never yet been argued that there existed a
“Palestinian people” other than the Jews. The Arabs who lived there were
called Arabs, just as the Armenians, Turks, Druze, and Circassians who
migrated into Palestine were then still called Armenians, Turks, Druze, and
Circassians. With the exception of the Jews, who called the land Eretz
Yisrael (the Land of Israel) and viewed it as their national home, all of these
groups considered themselves as living in the realm of Southern Syria.
*
Writing near the turn of the century, Bliss and all of his contemporaries
used the ancient names of Judea and Samaria for the central mountain ridge
in the land, and not “West Bank,” which had not yet been invented. The
term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan
conquered the territory in 1948. Jordanian king Abdullah called Judea the
“West Bank” in order to obliterate the historic and ongoing Jewish
connection to the land—much as the Romans two thousand years earlier
had sought to achieve the same goal by changing Judea to Palestine. In
using the term West Bank, he sought to associate this territory with his
kingdom, which lay on the east bank of the Jordan River.
The same routine and entirely apolitical usage of the names Judea and
Samaria to describe the West Bank can be found over and over again in
quotes from before 1948 by such travelers as Mark Twain (on pages 42–43
of this book) and the cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (page 44); and
the name Judea is used interchangeably with Palestine by statesmen such as
President John Adams (page 15) and Lord Robert Cecil (page 49).
The idea that, by using the historical terms Judea and Samaria, it is
Israel that is politicizing the geographical nomenclature rather than the
Arabs, who obliterated these names with the politically loaded name West
Bank, is one of those characteristic reversals of truth that are the mainstay
of the Arab campaign against Israel.
*
The terms B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. are the
nondenominational equivalents of the Christian designations B.C. and A.D.,
respectively.
*
The other criterion Toynbee offered to adjudicate competing claims was
that the question of who should be granted sovereignty should be
determined by comparing the suffering caused to each side by being denied
sovereignty. This definitely works in favor of the Jews. Certainly the
suffering experienced by the Jews for being stateless has far exceeded any
suffering that may have been caused to the Arabs by the Jewish national
restoration. This point is so obvious that it defies rebuttal. Nevertheless the
Arabs, aided by European anti-Semites, are trying to rebut it by making the
incredible claim that the Holocaust did not happen, or by attempting to
equate the suffering experienced by the Palestinian Arabs to the murder of
six million Jews. As if the ovens of Auschwitz could be compared to an
Israeli administration that from 1967 until the establishment of the
Palestinian Authority in 1993 built five universities for the Palestinian Arab
population, placed severe restraints on its own soldiers and court-martialed
offenders, and enabled the Arabs to appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court to
reverse the decisions of the army. (The fact that this preposterously
asymmetrical “symmetry” found currency in cartoons and editorials of
serious newspapers in the West shows that Goebbels was right in arguing
that a lie spreads in proportion to its size.)
*
The land mass of the Arab states today is 5,414,000 square miles, as
compared with 8,290 for pre-1967 Israel, and 2,130 for Judea, Samaria, and
Gaza (together 10,420 square miles). This is a ratio of 540 to one.
*
Patterson was a remarkable non-Jewish Zionist. A British officer, he
commanded the first Jewish fighting units in centuries—the Zion Mule
Corps, founded by Joseph Trumpeldor—which participated in the Gallipoli
campaign. (Trumpeldor was a Jewish former officer in the Russian army
who had lost his arm in the Russo-Japanese War and died a hero’s death in
1920 defending the Galilee community of Tel Hai against Arab marauders.
He was the kind of Jewish fighter that Patterson hoped to see emerge in this
century.) Patterson went on to command the Jewish Legion, founded by
jabotinsky. Soldier and intellectual, he collaborated with my father in
America at the outbreak of World War II, when my father came to the
United States as a member of Jabotinsky’s delegation to campaign for the
establishment of a Jewish state. Such was the friendship between them that
my parents decided to call their first-born son Jonathan, the “Jon” in honor
of Patterson and the “Nathan” in honor of my grandfather. Now and then,
on special occasions, my family brings out a silver cup with the inscription:
“To my darling godson, Jonathan, from your godfather, John Henry
Patterson.”
*
These Jewish actions against British military targets were quickly branded
by Britain as “terrorism.” The Arabs have been only too happy in more
recent times to try to taint the Jewish resistance with this same term, to
justify by means of a supposed symmetry their own ruthless violence
against Israel and others.
This effort at symmetry readily reduces the Jewish resistance to the false
cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But
terrorism can be reasonably defined. It is the deliberate and systematic
assault on civilians, on innocent noncombatants outside the sphere of
legitimate warfare. One could argue that in the case of the Jewish
underground organizations a few isolated incidents could possibly qualify
under the definition of terrorism, but there can be no question that the many
hundreds of operations carried out by these organizations were indeed
concentrated on military rather than civilian targets (including the British
military headquarters, then housed in the King David Hotel).
This is a far cry from the flood of unprovoked peacetime attacks on
civilians that has characterized Arab terrorism over the past decades. In
thousands of remorseless attacks, Arab terror organizations have
deliberately and systematically sought out civilians as targets, attacking
them in markets, airports, schools, universities, bus stops—even at the
Olympic games, which had been declared off-limits to violence since
ancient times. For a detailed discussion of the nature of terrorism, see
Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., International Terrorism: Challenge and
Response (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980) and Terrorism: How
the West Can Win(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
*
Israel does not view itself as an “occupying power” in Judea, Samaria, and
Gaza, territories that were recognized as part of the Jewish National Home
by the League of Nations in 1922. Consequently, Israel has never
recognized the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with occupation, as
applying to its administration of these areas. However, Israel has
unilaterally committed itself to observing the humanitarian provisions of
this convention in militarily governing the Arab population until a final
settlement is achieved.
Article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1950) empowers an
“occupying power” to “subject the population of the occupied territory to
provisions which are essential to enabling the Occupying Power to fulfil its
obligations under the present Convention, to maintain orderly government
of the territory, and to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the
members and property of the occupying forces and administration, and
likewise of the establishments and lines of communication used by them.”
The Convention does not require that the inhabitants of an occupied
territory be granted the right to appeal to the Supreme Court (a right that
Israel provides the residents of the West Bank and Gaza); nor does it
prohibit the application of the death penalty (which Israel has refused to
apply even in cases of terrorist massacres).
Israel was often castigated for expelling inciters and practitioners of
violence from the territories on the grounds that the Fourth Geneva
Convention forbids “deportations.” Indeed it does (in Article 49), but that
prohibition was inserted into the Convention, written just after World War
II, in order to prevent the uprooting of entire populations such as the Nazis
had practiced. It was not meant to address the removal from a territory of a
selected few who threaten the well-being of the inhabitants and the security
forces alike.
*
One of the leaders of the “Black Panthers,” the intifada gang directly under
the control of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, described the PLO’s control
over the killings in this way:
“We [the masked youths] don’t kill just anyone…. [W]e consult with the
Black Panthers’ central committee, which is in direct contact with the Fatah
military command abroad.… I only take my orders from the military
command of Fatah…,” 57
*
After the Six Day War Israelis were shocked to discover that tombstones in
the Mount of Olives cemetery, the Jewish people’s most revered burial site
overlooking King David’s city, had been torn down and used as pavement
stones for roads and slabs for latrines. Most of this state-sponsored
desecration was carried out on the bottom third of the mountain, where the
Jordanians built a highway right through the cemetery, and at the very top,
where they built the Intercontinental Hotel. Soon after the Six Day War, my
family set out with considerable trepidation to find out whether my
grandfather’s grave, which the Jordanians had not allowed us (like other
Israelis) to visit for nineteen years, had been desecrated. Fortunately we
found it intact, and my grandmother was later buried beside him.
*
The Charter was first approved in 1964 and amended slightly in 1968. All
quotes are from the 1968 version, which is the one still in force today.
*
Relations between Palestinian terror groups and the German extreme right
date back to 1968, the year Yasser Arafat took control of the PLO. By 1970,
members of the “Adolf Hitler Free Corps” under the leadership of German
neo-Nazi Udo Albrecht were in Jordan assisting in the PLO’s attempt to
overthrow the government of King Hussein. Albrecht and his group went
on to collaborate with “Black September,” the terror arm of Arafat’s Fatah,
which committed the Munich Olympic massacre. Albrecht was eventually
arrested in West Germany with PLO identity papers, but he later escaped. In
1976, four German neo-Nazis testified that they had been recruited by
Albrecht to conduct PLO terror operations, and that they had been trained
by the PLO in Lebanon. 28
Albrecht also introduced Manfred Roeder, leader of the ultra-rightist
“German Action Group,” to PLO terrorism. In the two years that Albrecht
was in prison after 1976, Roeder repeatedly traveled to Lebanon to
coordinate with Abu Jihad, Arafat’s lieutenant in the Fatah. 29
Yasser Arafat’s Fatah also trained the preeminent German neo-Nazi Karl
Heinz Hoffman, whose “War Sports Group” began training in international
terror in 1979 in Fatah’s Bir Hassan training camp near Beirut. 30 In 1986
Hoffman was arrested for planning and ordering the 1980 murders of the
German-Jewish publisher Shlomo Levin and his wife. Hoffman blamed the
murders on one of his disciples, Uwe Behrendt, and was not convicted, but
went to jail on other charges. Behrendt himself escaped to Lebanon.
Another Hoffman protégé, Michael Kuhnen, founded the now-outlawed
“National Socialist Action” organization in Germany, which also received
its training from the PLO in Lebanon. In between jail terms, Kuhnen has
been an outspoken supporter of the PLO. 31
Perhaps the most notorious of German neo-Nazi killers is Odfried Hepp,
a leader of the Nazi group “VS.B.D.,” who was also trained by the PLO in
the Fatah camp near Beirut. Hepp was arrested in Paris in 1985, along with
his partner, Mahmad Adban, a senior operative of Abul Abbas’s PLF
faction of the PLO (which carried out the Achille Lauro hijacking later that
year). The two were convicted of perpetrating terrorist attacks against
Israeli targets in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Geneva. They are also suspected
of involvement in the bombing of a Jewish restaurant in Paris in 1982,
which left six dead. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that after the arrest,
Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO executive, publicly called for Hepp’s
release and tried to secure it through diplomatic channels. 32
The PLO has also worked to cultivate ties with neo-Nazis in Britain and
France. In 1977, Fatah agreed to train members of “L’Oeuvre Française,” a
French neo-Nazi group, which in turn agreed to carry out operations for the
PLO. In 1985 the British neo-Nazi Ian Michael Davison joined with two
other gunmen of Yasser Arafat’s “Force 17” to murder three Israeli tourists
on a yacht in Larnaca, Cyprus. He is now in jail in Nicosia. 33 In recent years
the British neo-Nazi group “National Front” has also established a
relationship with the PLO, which has included the founding of a British
front group called the “Campaign for Palestine Rights.” 34
While downplayed in the Western media, the PLO has otherwise made
virtually no effort to hide its collaboration with neo-Nazism and its
admiration for Nazism generally. This affinity has been markedly expressed
in such overt gestures as the adoption of Nazi nommes de guerre such as
“Hitler” and “Rommel” by Palestinian leaders in every faction of the PLO,
including the PFLP, the Marxist DFLP, and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Perhaps
best known is Fawzi Salem al-Mahdi, a senior commander in Arafat’s
personal bodyguard “Force 17,” who was nicknamed “Abu Hitler.” 35
*
I was involved with one of the earliest of such efforts to delegitimize terror,
the establishment of the Jonathan Institute, named after my brother. The
purpose of the institute was to educate governments and public opinion in
the West about the nature of terror. The idea that terrorism had become a
form of political warfare waged by dictatorial regimes against the
democracies of the West, expressed at the institute’s first International
Conference on Terrorism in 1979, encountered stiff opposition.
Conference participants, who included the late Senator Henry Jackson
and then-presidential candidate George Bush, offered revelations of the
direct involvement of the Soviet Union and its European satellites in
international terror—revelations at which, wrote a Wall Street Journal
correspondent covering the event, “a considerable number in the press corps
covering the conference were much annoyed.” 61 After the fall of Soviet
Communism, I had several conversations with officials of the former East
bloc who expressed amazement at the naivete of Westerners on the subject.
The recommendations of the Jonathan Institute’s second conference in
1985 included the imposition of military and economic sanctions against
states that sponsor terrorism. I edited the proceedings into a book,
Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Perhaps because Time magazine
published a lengthy excerpt from the book (which President Reagan had
read) shortly after the American raid on Libya, some in the Arab world
concluded that I was to blame for the attack. The Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai
Al-Am branded me “the enemy’s most dangerous agent abroad.” Ironically,
the paper was later shut down when Saddam and the PLO took over
Kuwait.
*
Not quite everyone. In March 1999, Nabil Shaath of the Palestinian
National Authority revealed that Yossi Beilin, a senior member of the Labor
party leadership, had reached an agreement with Arafat’s deputy Abu-
Maazen, under which Israel would hand over 95 percent of Gaza and the
West Bank, thereby effectively returning Israel to the pre-1967 boundaries.
*
The West has continued to contribute generously to support the Palestinian
Arab refugees: The United States in 1990–91 had pledged $62 million,
Sweden $22 million, Japan $17 million, Italy $12 million, and Britain $11
million. The figures for the Arab states, including the fabulously wealthy
ones, are abysmal in comparison: Saudi Arabia’s $1 million, Kuwait’s $1
million, and Jordan’s $365,000 are the only contributions worth
mentioning. The contributions from the other eighteen Arab governments
are each under five digits—less than the donation made by the Swedish
Save the Children fund. 11
*
Adopted in 1964 and revised in 1968.
*
Broadcast on Saut Falastin Radio, Egypt.
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