When presented
with the facts, sensible people should instinctively grasp:
(a) Israel’s 53-year-long
quest for lasting peace and security;
(b) the real dangers
faced by Israel, a tiny country no larger than New Jersey, in a tumultuous,
arms-laden neighborhood;
(c) Israel’s unshakeable
commitment to democracy and democratic values;
(d) the common
enemies of extremism and fanaticism faced by Israel and the United States;
and
(e) Israel’s impressive
contributions to world civilization in such fields as science, medicine, technology,
agriculture, and culture – contributions that are even more remarkable given
the country’s relative youth and its heavy defense burden.
No country’s
historical record is perfect, and Israel, like other democratic nations, has
made its share of mistakes. But acknowledging fallibility is a national strength,
not a weakness. And I’ll gladly match Israel’s record with that of any other
country in the region, indeed well beyond the region, when it comes to the
values Americans hold dear.
Israel has a proud record and the
country’s friends shouldn’t hesitate to shout it from the rooftops. That
record actually begins long before the establishment of the modern state in
1948.
The Jewish
people’s link to the land of Israel is incontrovertible and unbroken.
It spans nearly four thousand years.
Exhibit A for this connection is the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Genesis, the
first of the five books of the Bible, recounts the story of Abraham, the covenantal
relationship with One God, and the move from Ur (in present-day Iraq) to Canaan,
the region corresponding roughly to Israel. Exhibit B is any Jewish prayer
book in use anywhere in the world. The references in the liturgy to Zion,
the land of Israel, are endless.
The same
is true of the connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem.
It dates back to the period of
King David, who lived approximately 3,000 years ago, and who established Jerusalem
as the capital of Israel. Ever since, Jerusalem has represented not only
the geographical epicenter of the Jewish people, but also the spiritual and
metaphysical heart of our faith and identity. Indeed, the relationship between
Jerusalem and the Jewish people is entirely unique in the annals of history.
Jerusalem was
the site of the two Temples – the first built by King Solomon during the tenth
century B.C.E. and destroyed in 586 B.C.E. during the Babylonian conquest,
and the second rebuilt less than a century later, refurbished by King Herod,
and destroyed in 70 C.E. by Roman forces.
As the psalmist
wrote, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue
stick to my palate if I cease to think of thee, if I do not keep Jerusalem
in memory even at my happiest hour.”
Though in
forced dispersion for nearly 1,900 years, Jews never stopped yearning for
Zion and Jerusalem.
In addition to expressing this
through prayer, there were always Jews who lived in the land of Israel, and
especially Jerusalem. Indeed, since the 19th century, Jews have constituted
a majority of the city’s population. For example, according to the Political
Dictionary of the State of Israel, Jews were 61.9 percent of Jerusalem’s
population in 1892.
The historical and religious link
to Jerusalem is especially important because some Arabs seek to rewrite history
and assert that Jews are nothing more than “foreign occupiers” or “colonialists”
with no actual tie to the land. Such attempts to deny Israel’s legitimacy
are demonstrably false and need to be exposed for the lies they are. They
also entirely ignore the “inconvenient” fact that when Jerusalem was under
Muslim (i.e. Ottoman and, later, Jordanian) rule, it was always treated as
a backwater.
Zionism
is the quest for national self-determination of the Jewish people.
Although the yearning for a Jewish
homeland derives from a longing that dates back thousands of years and, is
given expression in classic Jewish texts, it also stems from a more contemporary
reality.
Theodor Herzl, considered the father
of modern Zionism, was a secular Jew and a journalist living in Vienna who
became appalled at the blatant anti-Semitism fueling the infamous Dreyfus
case in France, the first European country to extend full rights to the Jews.
He came to the inescapable conclusion that Jews could never enjoy full equality
as minorities in European societies since the sad legacy of centuries of anti-Semitism
was too deeply embedded. Therefore, he called for the establishment of a
Jewish state, which he set out to describe in his landmark book Altneuland (“Old-New Land”, published in 1902.
Herzl’s vision was endorsed by
the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, who issued a statement on November
2, 1917:
“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.”
In 1922, the League
of Nations, entrusting Britain with the Mandate for Palestine, recognized
“the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.”
The rise of Hitler and the Nazi
“Final Solution,” spearheaded by Germany and its allies – and facilitated
by widespread complicity as well as indifference to the fate of the Jews –
revealed in tragic dimensions the desperate need for a Jewish state. (Apropos,
Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was among Hitler’s most enthusiastic
supporters for the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people.)
Only in such a state, the Zionist
movement believed, would Jews not have to rely on the “good will” of others
to determine their destiny. All Jews would be welcome to settle in the Jewish
state as a refuge from persecution or as a fulfillment of a “yearning for
Zion.” Indeed, this latter point fired the imagination of many Jews who resettled
in what was then a generally desolate Palestine, in the late 19th and early
20th century, out of idealistic convictions and who laid the foundation for
the modern state of Israel.
Israel’s adversaries to this day
twist the meaning of Zionism and try to present it as a demonic force, with
the goal of undermining Israel’s raison d’être and isolating the state in
the community of nations.
This happened in 1975, when the
UN, over the strenuous objections of the democratic countries, adopted a resolution
labeling Zionism as “racism.” The resolution was repealed by the UN in 1991,
but the canard resurfaced earlier this year (of all places) at the World Conference
Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The Arab bloc, however, failed in
its latest effort to condemn Zionism in the conference documents. This time
many nations fortunately understood that the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians is, and has always been, political, not racial.
In this vein, it’s well worth remembering
the comments of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on anti-Zionism:
“And what is anti-Zionist? It
is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim
for the people of Africa and all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination
against Jews, my friends, because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism
… Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism,
they mean Jews – make no mistake about it.”
It is also important to stress
that non-Jews were not excluded from Israel’s nation-building. To the contrary,
today one-fifth of Israel’s citizens are non-Jews, including over one million
Arabs, and Arabic is an official national language.
Moreover, Israel’s Jewish population
has always reflected enormous national, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity,
which became even more pronounced in the 1980’s, when Israel rescued tens
of thousands of black Jews from drought-stricken Ethiopia who were dreaming
of resettlement in Israel. The eloquent comments at the time of Julius Chambers,
the director-general of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, bear repeating:
“Were the victims of Ethiopian
famine white, countless nations might have offered them refuge. But the people
dying every day of starvation in Ethiopia and the Sudan are black, and in
a world where racism is officially deplored by virtually every organized government,
only one non-African nation has opened its doors and its arms. The quiet
humanitarian action of the state of Israel, action taken entirely without
regard to the color of those being rescued, stands as a condemnation of racism
far more telling than mere speeches and resolutions.”
The Arab-Israeli
conflict was avoidable.
Shortly after its founding in 1945,
the United Nations took an interest in the future of Mandatory Palestine,
then under British rule. A UN commission (UNSCOP, or the United Nations Special
Committee on Palestine) recommended to the General Assembly a partition of
the land between Jews and the Arabs. Neither side would get all it sought,
but a division would recognize that there were two populations in the land
– one Jewish, the other Arab – each meriting a state.
On November 29,
1947, the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 33 in favor, 13 opposed, and 10
abstaining, adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan.
Acceptance of the Partition Plan
would have meant the establishment of two states, but the Arab states and
the local Arab population vehemently rejected the proposal. They refused
to recognize a Jewish claim to any part of the land and chose war to fulfill
their objectives.
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel
was founded. As Winston Churchill said at the time:
“The coming into being of a Jewish
state…is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective not of
a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand
or even three thousand years.”
Years later, President
John F. Kennedy offered his perspective on the meaning of Israel:
“Israel
was not created in order to disappear—Israel will endure and flourish. It
is the child of hope and home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity
nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors
the sword of freedom.”
Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment
of the State included these words:
“We extend
our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace
and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation
and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.”
Tragically, that offer was ignored.
On May 15,
1948, the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria attacked the fledgling
Jewish state, seeking its destruction.
In the course of this war, launched
by the Arab side, civilian populations were affected, just as in all wars.
Controversies continue to this day about how many local Arabs fled Israel
because Arab leaders called on them to do so or threatened them if they did
not comply, how many left out of fear of the fighting, and how many were compelled
to do so by Israeli forces. Importantly, hundreds of thousands of Arabs ended
up staying in Israel and became citizens of the state.
But the central
point must not be overlooked – Arab countries began this war aiming to wipe
out the 650,000 Jews in the new state of Israel, and by doing so the Arabs
defied the UN plan for the creation of both Arab and Jewish states.
There have
been two refugee populations created by the Arab-Israeli conflict, not one.
While world attention has been
focused on the Palestinian refugees, the plight of Jews from Arab countries,
hundreds of thousands of whom became refugees as well, has been largely ignored.
Indeed, many experts believe that the size of the two groups was roughly comparable.
But there was one profound difference – Israel immediately absorbed the Jewish
refugees, while the Palestinian refugees were placed in camps and deliberately
kept there as a matter of calculated Arab policy and with the complicity of
the UN.
There is
no comparable situation in the world today where a refugee population has
been cynically exploited in this way.
Until now, only one Arab country
– Jordan – has offered citizenship to the Palestinian refugees.
The other 21 Arab countries, with
their vast territory and common language, religion, and ethnic roots with
the Palestinians, have refused to do so. Why? Sadly, they appear to have
little interest in alleviating the plight of refugees living in often squalid
camps for two and three generations. Rather, they want to breed hatred of
Israel and thus use the refugees as a key weapon in the ongoing struggle against
Israel.
Parenthetically—just to give a
sense how Palestinians are treated in the Arab world—Kuwait summarily expelled
over 300,000 Palestinians working in the country (but never given Kuwaiti
passports) when Yasir Arafat voiced support for Iraq in the Gulf War and the
Palestinians were seen as a potential fifth column. There was hardly a peep
of protest from other Arab countries about what amounted to the expulsion
of an entire Palestinian community.
Unfortunately,
the story of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries is not often discussed.
When the issue
of Jewish refugees from Arab countries is raised, Arab spokesmen often feign
ignorance about the issue, or strenuously assert that Jews lived well under
Muslim rule (unlike Jews living in Christian Europe), or disingenuously argue
that Arabs, by definition, cannot be anti-Semitic because, like Jews, they
are Semites.
It is certainly true that there
was no equivalent of the Holocaust in the Jewish experience in Muslim lands,
and it also true that there were periods of cooperation and harmony, but the
story does not end there. Jews seldom, if ever, enjoyed full and equal rights
with Muslims in Islamic countries; more often, there were clearly delineated
rules of behavior for Jews as second-class citizens. Violence against Jews
was also not unknown in the Muslim world.
To cite but one illustration of
the fate of Jews in Arab countries, Jews lived uninterruptedly in Libya since
the time of the Phoenicians, that is, many centuries before the Arabs arrived
from the Arabian Peninsula, bringing Islam to North Africa and settling –
occupying? – lands already inhabited by Berbers, among others.
The vast majority of Libya’s 40,000
Jews left between 1948 and 1951, following pogroms in 1945 and 1948. In 1951,
Libya became an independent country. Despite constitutional guarantees, the
Jews who remained in the country were denied the right to vote, hold public
office, obtain Libyan passports, supervise their own communal affairs, or
purchase new property. After a third pogrom in 1967, Libya’s remaining 4,000
Jews fled, permitted to leave with only one suitcase and the equivalent of
$50. In 1970, the Libyan government announced a series of laws to confiscate
the assets of Libya’s exiled Jews and issued bonds providing for fair compensation
payable within fifteen years. But 1985 came and went, with no compensation
paid.
At the same time,
the government destroyed the Jewish cemeteries, using the headstones to pave
new roads as part of a calculated effort to erase any vestige of the Jewish
historical presence in the country.
There were an
estimated 754,000 Jews in Arab countries in 1948, the year of Israel’s establishment;
today, by contrast, there are fewer than 8,000, the bulk of whom live in Morocco
and Tunisia.
Where was
the Arab sympathy for the Palestinian population from 1948 to 1967?
With armistice agreements ending
Israel’s War of Independence, the Gaza Strip was in the hands of Egypt. Rather
than consider sovereignty for the local Arab population and the Palestinian
refugees who settled there, Egyptian authorities imposed military rule instead.
Meanwhile, the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem were ruled by Jordan.
Again, there was no move to create an independent Palestinian state; to the
contrary, Jordan annexed the territory, a step recognized by only one country
in the world, Pakistan.
It was during this period, 1964
to be precise, that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded.
Its aim was not the creation of a state in the lands under Egyptian and Jordanian
rule, but rather the elimination of Israel and the founding of an Arab Palestinian
state in the whole of Palestine.
Article 15 of the PLO Charter clearly
revealed this goal:
“The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national
duty to repulse the Zionist, imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland
and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine.”
In the ensuing
years, PLO-sponsored terrorism took its deadly toll, focusing on Israeli,
American, European, and Jewish targets.
How did
Israel come into possession of the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, the
Sinai Peninsula, and the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Old City?
These days, some people reflexively
refer to the “occupied territories” without ever asking the question how they
fell into Israel’s hands in 1967. Once again, there are those in the Arab
world who seek to rewrite history and impute expansionist motives to Israel,
but the facts are clear. Here’s a quick summary of some of the major events
leading up to the Six-Day War:
On May 16, 1967, Cairo Radio announced:
“The existence of Israel has continued too long. The battle has come in which
we shall destroy Israel.” On the very same day, Egypt demanded the withdrawal
of UN forces which had been stationed in Gaza and Sharm el-Sheikh since 1957.
Three days later, the UN announced it would comply with the Egyptian request.
On May 19, Cairo Radio said: “This
is our chance, Arabs, to deal Israel a mortal blow of annihilation….”
On May 23, Egyptian President Nasser
declared his intention to block the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping,
thus effectively severing Israel’s vital trade links with East Africa and
Asia. Israel replied that under international law this was a casus belli,
an act of war.
On May 27, Nasser
said that “our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.”
On May 30, Jordanian King Hussein
placed Jordanian forces under Egyptian control. Egyptian, Iraqi, and Saudi
troops were sent to Jordan.
On June 1, Iraq’s leader added
his thoughts: “We are resolved, determined, and united to achieve our clear
aim of wiping Israel off the map.”
On June 3, Radio
Cairo hailed the impending Muslim holy war.
On June 5, Israel, surrounded by
Arab forces likely to attack at any moment, launched a preemptive strike.
Within six days, Israel had defeated its adversaries and, in the process,
captured land on the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian fronts.
Israel had made strenuous efforts,
via UN channels, to persuade King Hussein to stay out of the war. Unlike
the unremitting hostility of Egypt and Syria toward Israel, Jordan and Israel
had quietly cooperated, to some degree, and shared concerns about the Palestinians’
aggressive designs. Years later, King Hussein publicly acknowledged that
his decision to enter the 1967 war, in which he lost control of the West Bank
and eastern Jerusalem, was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made.
Another
lost peace opportunity.
Shortly after the Six-Day War,
Israel indicated its desire to negotiate peace with its Arab neighbors. While
Israel was unprepared to relinquish the eastern half of Jerusalem – which
contained Judaism’s holiest sites and which, despite the terms of the Israeli-Jordanian
armistice agreement, had been entirely off limits to Israel for nearly 19
years (while Jordan desecrated dozens of synagogues in the Old City) – it
was willing to exchange the seized territories for a comprehensive settlement.
But Israel’s overtures were rebuffed. An unmistakable response came from Khartoum,
Sudan’s capital, where Arab leaders issued a resolution on September 1 announcing
the three “no’s”: “no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation.”
In November
1967, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242.
This resolution, often cited in
discussions about the Arab-Israeli conflict as the basis for resolving the
conflict, is not always quoted with precision. The resolution stresses “the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work
for a just and lasting peace in which every [emphasis added] State
in the area can live in security.”
Further, it calls for “withdrawal
of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,”
but deliberately omitted use of the word “the” before the word “territories.”
The U.S. Ambassador to the UN at the time, Arthur Goldberg, noted that this
was intentional, so that any final settlement could allow for unspecified
border adjustments that would take into account Israel’s security needs.
The resolution
also includes a call for “termination of all of claims or states of belligerency
and respect for and acknowledgement 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.” [emphasis added]
And, not least, it “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 [Author’s comment: Note the absence of reference to which refugee
problem, allowing for more than one interpretation of the refugee populations
covered.]; and (c) For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political
independence of every State in the area, through measures including the establishment
of demilitarized zones.”
[On October 22, 1973, during the
Yom Kippur War, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 338, which called
for a cease-fire, implementation of Resolution 242 in its entirety, and the
onset of talks between the parties concerned. Resolutions 242 and 338 are
normally cited together in connection with any Arab-Israeli peace talks.]
The settlements
have been a contentious issue.
No question, but,
like just about everything else associated with the Arab-Israeli conflict,
there’s more here than meets the eye.
After Israel’s victory in the 1967
war, and once it became clear that the Arabs were not interested in negotiating
peace, Israel, under a Labor-led coalition, began encouraging the construction
of settlements, or new communities, in the captured lands. This practice
was accelerated under Likud-led governments after 1977.
Whatever one’s
perspective on the settlements, it’s important to understand the motives in
Israel for having moved ahead on this front: (a) Israel contended that the
land was disputed – both Arabs and Jews laid claim to it – and since there
was no sovereign authority, Israel had as much right to settle there as the
Palestinians; (b) there had been Jewish communities in the West Bank long
before 1948, for example, in Hebron and Gush Etzion, both sites of massacres
by Arabs in which large numbers of Jews were killed; (c) the West Bank, according
to the Bible, represents the cradle of Jewish civilization, and some Jews,
driven by faith and history, wanted to reassert the link; (d) the Israeli
government believed that certain settlements could serve a useful security
purpose; and (e) some Israeli officials felt that building settlements, and
thus creating facts on the ground, might hasten the day when the Palestinians,
presumably realizing that time was not necessarily on their side, would talk
peace.
Today, most Israelis agree that
any peace agreement with the Palestinians will necessarily entail dismantling
many, though not all, of the settlements. Polls repeatedly show that a majority
of Israelis accept this prospect, but only in the context of a real peace
process. However, Israelis fear that any unilateral decisions to withdraw
would be viewed by the Palestinians and their Arab supporters as a sign of
weakness, not strength, and could only encourage further violence.
In hindsight, this perception of
Israeli weakness may have actually been one of the unintended consequences
of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1999. Israeli
troops were there for one reason only – not to acquire territory, but rather
to maintain a security zone that would prevent deadly strikes from Lebanon
on the villages and towns of northern Israel.
But periodic attacks by Hezbollah
on Israeli soldiers took their toll, and Prime Minister Barak concluded that
the benefit to Israel no longer justified the price. He ordered the troops
home. Hezbollah declared victory over the seemingly invincible Israel Defense
Force (IDF), and this may have emboldened Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza to believe that they could follow suit and accomplish what no Arab army
had succeeded in doing since Israel’s founding in 1948, namely, defeat the
IDF.
The possibilities of peace.
In 1977, Menachem Begin, Israel’s
first Likud prime minister, took office. That did not stop Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat from making his historic trip to Israel the same year and addressing
the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. An extraordinary peace process ensued,
with all the ups and downs that came with a difficult set of negotiations.
In September 1978, the Camp David Accords were adopted, containing a framework
for comprehensive peace, including a proposal for limited self-government
for the Palestinians. (The proposal was rejected by the Palestinians.) Six
months later, a peace accord was signed and the 31-year state of war between
Israel and Egypt came to an end.
It was a remarkable moment in history.
Sadat, virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic for much of his life, and the
mastermind of Egypt’s surprise attack (together with Syria) on Israel that
ignited the 1973 Yom Kippur War, teamed up with Begin, the head of Israel’s
leading right-wing party, to open a new chapter in Arab-Israel relations.
It proved that with will, courage, and vision, anything was possible.
But every Arab country, save Sudan
and Oman, severed diplomatic ties with Cairo. And in 1981 the Egyptian leader
was assassinated by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who would later become
brothers-in-arms of Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network.
For its part,
Israel yielded the vast expanse of the Sinai (approximately 23,000 square
miles), which had provided a critical strategic buffer zone between itself
and Egypt; it also gave up valuable oil fields it discovered in the Sinai,
a big sacrifice for a country with no natural resources to speak of; it closed
important air bases it had constructed; and, despite Begin’s staunch commitment
to settlements, it dismantled these enclaves.
In doing so, Israel
demonstrated very clearly its desire for peace, its willingness to take substantial
risks and make sacrifices for peace, and its scrupulous commitment to fulfilling
the terms of peace.
Israel and
Jordan reached an historic peace agreement in 1994.
This was a much
easier negotiation than with Egypt, since as Israel and Jordan already enjoyed
good, if quiet, ties based on overlapping national interests vis à vis the
Palestinians, Israel once again demonstrated its deep yearning for peace and
readiness to take the steps necessary to achieve it, including border adjustments
and water-sharing arrangements that Amman called for.
Another
opportunity for peace was spurned by the Palestinians in 2000-2001.
When Ehud Barak took office as
prime minister in 1999, he announced an ambitious agenda. The Israeli leader
said he would attempt to reach an historic end to the conflict with the Palestinians
within 13 months, picking up where his predecessors had left off, and building
on the momentum of the 1991 Madrid Conference and accelerated by the 1993
Oslo Accords. As it turned out, he went beyond what anyone in Israel might
have thought possible in his willingness to compromise.
With the active support of the
Clinton administration, Barak pushed the process as far and as fast as he
could, and, in doing so, he broke new ground on such infinitely sensitive
issues as Jerusalem for the sake of an agreement. But alas, he and Clinton
failed.
Arafat was not ready to engage
the process and make it work.
Rather than press ahead with the
talks, which would have led to the establishment of the first ever Palestinian
state, with its capital in eastern Jerusalem, he walked away, after preposterously
trying to persuade President Clinton that there was no historical Jewish link
to Jerusalem and dropping the bombshell demand of a so-called “right of return”
for Palestinian refugees and their generations of descendants. Arafat surely
knew that this was an instant deal-breaker, since no Israel’s government could
ever conceivably agree to allow millions of Palestinians to settle in Israel,
and thus destroy Israel as a Jewish state.
Tragically,
Arafat revealed himself incapable or unwilling, or both, of pursuing peace
at the negotiating table. Instead, he returned to a more familiar pattern
– on occasion talking peace while consistently encouraging violence.
He knew that the media images of
heavily armed Israeli troops facing Palestinians in the streets, including
children cynically sent to the front lines, would work to his advantage.
Israel would be cast in the role of aggressor and oppressor, the Palestinians
as the downtrodden victims.
It wouldn’t be long, he calculated,
before the Arab world would angrily denounce Israel, the nonaligned countries
would dutifully follow suit, the Europeans would urge still more concessions
from Israel to placate the Palestinians, international human rights groups
would accuse Israel of excessive use of force, and the world, plagued by a
short memory, would forget that the Palestinian leader had just spurned an
unprecedented chance to strike a peace deal.
Moreover, he presumably reckoned,
Washington might eventually take a tougher line on Israel, as the result of
pressure from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two Arab countries that loom large in
the worldview of American policymakers. And finally, there was the long-term
possibility that Israel, a first-world country, would begin to tire of the
struggle and its daily toll of military and civilian casualties, the negative
impact on the nation’s mood and psyche—not to speak of its economy—and the
potentially growing international isolation.
Some in the media have too uncritically
bought the Palestinian spin and, as a consequence, have been less than fully
objective and balanced in their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So, too, a number of international human rights groups, which sometimes seem
to have a blind spot for human rights violations in the Arab world, including
especially in the Palestinian Authority. And many European Union nations,
Germany being the notable exception, haven’t always been as understanding
of Israel’s profound security dilemmas as they should be; it’s undoubtedly
easier to render judgments on the situation from the safety and comfort of
distant capitals.
What exactly is Israel expected
to do to ensure the safety of its citizens?
What would other states do in a similar situation?
We’re about to find out, as the
United States and its allies respond to Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban,
and possibly some nations that provide home and support for terrorist groups.
Judging from the military build-up to date and the global diplomatic, political,
and financial full-court press, it doesn’t look as if “restraint,” “dialogue,”
“compromise,” and “understanding” are currently part of Washington’s vocabulary
vis à vis those who attack us, nor should they be.
At the end of the day, Israel tragically
found it had no credible negotiating partner. Instead, its citizens are targeted
for murder by suicide bombers who are brainwashed to believe they are destined
for martyrdom and sexual ecstasy.
Despite repeated requests, the
Palestinian Authority has proved unwilling to arrest and imprison those responsible
for murdering Israelis.
The limits on
a Palestinian police force, agreed to in the Oslo Accords, have long since
been exceeded, and well-armed and aggressive militia forces are emerging to
do battle with Israel; several of these groups, including the Tanzim and Force
17, are under the direct control of Arafat.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two radical
groups on the American list of terrorist organizations, and which are widely
believed to have links with bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, operate with relative impunity
in the Palestinian-controlled areas.
Ceasefires negotiated with Israel
are regularly broken by the Palestinians. Ze’ev Schiff, the highly respected
defense correspondent for Ha’aretz, noted last year (October 20) that
Arafat agreed to 22 cease-fires with Jordan’s King Hussein until he was banished
from the country 30 years ago and to more than 70 cease-fires during the Lebanese
civil war.
The education
for peace that is so necessary to laying the groundwork for a new era in the
region, regrettably, is absent in the Palestinian Authority; instead, schools,
the media, and the mosques preach hatred of Jews, vilification of Judaism,
Holocaust denial, demonization of Israel, and violence.
Perhaps the tragic events of September
11 will help the world grasp the kind of threat Israel has been facing and
the rationale for Israel’s unflinching response. Unflinching yes, but also
measured. The truth is that Israel could deliver a much more devastating
blow to the Palestinians, but has chosen not to for a host of diplomatic,
political, strategic, and humanitarian reasons.
In the final analysis, even though
Israel enjoys military superiority, Jerusalem understands that this is not
a conflict that can be won exclusively on the battlefield; simply put, neither
side is going to disappear. This conflict can only be resolved at the peace
table if and when the Palestinians finally realize they have squandered more
than fifty years and numerous chances to build a state and realize their national
aspirations – alongside Israel, that is, not in its place.
Israel is
a democracy and thinks and behaves like a democracy.
That’s not always easy to do in
light of the situation it faces. But, while Israel gets its share of criticism
for allegedly heavy-handed methods, the Palestinians, despite all their shrill
rhetoric, understand better than anyone that it is precisely Israel’s democratic
values and rule of law which they regard as the nation’s Achilles heel.
The Palestinians know, even if
they don’t publicly acknowledge it, that the democratic system puts brakes
and borders on Israel’s policy options.
They know that Israel has a multiparty
political system and that these parties need to differentiate themselves from
one another to have any chance of electoral success. In fact, the parties
include every viewpoint from extreme left to extreme right, from secular to
religious, from Russian Jewish to Arab. Furthermore, Israeli Arabs currently
hold approximately ten percent of the Knesset seats (and a few of these parliamentarians
have identified with Israel’s enemies in the current conflict).
They know that public opinion in
Israel counts for something and can affect policy; witness the grassroots
movement that successfully urged the government to pull out of southern Lebanon.
They know that Israel enjoys a
free and inquisitive press.
They know that Israel has an independent
judiciary that occupies a respected place in the nation’s life.
They know that
Israel has a thriving civil society and numerous human rights groups that
stress their objectivity and impartiality.
They know that
Israel protects freedom of worship for all religious communities, indeed has
gone so far as to prevent Jews from praying on the Temple Mount, one of Judaism’s
holiest sites, specifically to avoid tension with Muslim worshippers at the
two mosques built there, and, since the 1967 Six-Day War, has ceded authority
for the area to the Waqf, the Muslim religious authority.
They know that
Israel cares about world opinion, especially American and European reactions
to its policies.
They know that
Israel, based on the core values of the Jewish tradition, attaches great importance
to ethical and moral standards of behavior, even when, at times, it falls
short of those standards.
And, as a result,
they know that there are self-imposed restraints on Israeli behavior precisely
because Israel is a democratic state and because, in the final analysis, its
government is accountable to the will of the people.
If only
the Middle East resembled the Middle West!
Wouldn’t that augur well for peaceful
conflict resolution and regional cooperation? When was the last time that
one democratic nation launched a military attack against another democracy?
Regrettably, democracy is a very rare commodity in the Middle East.
The Palestinians know how Syria’s
Assad dealt with Islamic fundamentalists, killing an estimated 10-20,000 in
Hama and leveling the city as an unmistakable message to other fundamentalists
in the country.
They know how
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein handled the Kurds, using poison gas to kill thousands
and destroying hundreds of Kurdish villages.
They know, as
noted above, how Kuwait responded to Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein
in the Gulf War by expelling 300,000 Palestinians from the country in one
fell swoop.
They know how Saudi Arabia reacted
to Yemeni support for Saddam Hussein during the same war. Overnight, the
country expelled an estimated 600,000 Yemenis.
And they know
how Egypt dealt with its own Islamic radicals in the 1990s – below the radar
of the media, without fanfare. Within a few years, thousands of these radicals
were either dead or locked up in jails.
The Palestinians count on the fact
that Israel will not follow any of these examples. That is Israel’s strength
as a democracy, but it comes with a price. The Palestinians seek to take
advantage of it. But they have made one fundamental error – they have underestimated
Israel’s will to survive.
Israelis desperately want
peace. At the same time, peace at any price is no peace.
Israelis want to
stop worrying about bombs on buses and in malls. They want to put an end
to burying their children, victims of terror or military engagements. In
short, they want to lead normal lives, and they have demonstrated their willingness
time and again to endorse far-reaching, even potentially risky, compromises
in the quest for peace.
Israelis, however, have learned
the painful lessons of history. Peace without security can be tantamount
to national suicide. And who knows better than the citizens of Israel, who
include Holocaust survivors and refugees from Communist lands and from Arab
extremism, how dangerous it can be to let one’s guard down too quickly, too
easily?
Are Israelis simply
to ignore Iran and Iraq’s calls for Israel’s annihilation, the insatiable
appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction in Tehran and Baghdad,
Syria’s hospitality to terrorist groups bent on Israel’s destruction, Hezbollah’s
accumulation of short-range missiles capable of reaching the northern third
of Israel, and the blood-curdling calls for suicide attacks against Israel
heard in Gaza and the West Bank?
Our world hasn’t been terribly
kind to the naïve, the credulous, or the self-delusional. Despite the doubters
at the time, Hitler meant exactly what he said when he wrote Mein Kampf,
Saddam Hussein meant exactly what he said when he insisted that Kuwait was
a province of Iraq, and Osama bin Laden meant exactly what he said when he
called for killing as many Americans as possible.
Israel lives in a particularly
rough neighborhood. To survive, it has had to be courageous both on the battlefield
and at the peace table, passing both tests with flying colors. As Israel
faces the unresolved challenges in its region, it deserves both understanding
and support.
New York, October 11, 2001