CHAPTER 6
REDEFINING POLICY:
THE CASE OF ISRAEL
The United States faces no more complex international relationship than the one it maintains with Israel, nor one more poorly understood, most of all by the Americans and the Israelis. U.S.-Israeli relations would appear to poison U.S.-Islamic relations and complicate the termination of warfare in the Middle East. In addition, there are some who believe that Israel exercises control over U.S. foreign policy, a view not confined to Islamic fundamentalists. The complex reality, as well as the even more complex perception of the tie that binds the United States and Israel, will continue to be a fundamental issue for the United States’ global strategy over the next decade.
U.S.-Israeli relations are also a case study for the debate between realists and idealists in foreign policy. America’s close relations with Israel are based both on national interest and on the moral belief that the United States must support regimes similar to itself. This latter idea has, of course, become an intense philosophical battleground. On the idealist side are those who focus on the kind of regime Israel has: an island of democracy in a sea of autocrats. But there are also those who argue that because of its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has forfeited any moral claims. On the realist side are those who argue that Israel gets in the way of better relations with the Arabs, and those who argue that they are allies in the war against terrorism.
If there is any place where finding a coherent path that incorporates both strategic and moral interests is more difficult, I can’t think of one. But to truly understand this complex state of affairs, we must go back in history.
Given the antiquity of the Middle East, it is fortunate that understanding its contemporary political geography requires going back only as far as the thirteenth century. This was the time when the Byzantine Empire was fading and control of the areas bordering the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean shifted to the Ottoman Turks. By 1453 the Turks had conquered Constantinople, and by the sixteenth century they were in command of most of the territory that had once fallen to Alexander the Great. Most of North Africa, Greece, and the Balkans, as well as the area along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, was under Ottoman control from the time of Columbus to the twentieth century.
All this came to an end when the Ottomans, who had allied with Germany, were defeated in World War I. To the victors went the spoils, which included the extensive Ottoman province known as Syria. A secret wartime deal between the British and the French, the Sykes-Picot agreement, had divided this territory between the two allies on a line running roughly from Mount Hermon due west to the sea. The area to the north was to be placed under French control; the area to the south was to be placed under the control of the British. Further divisions gave rise not only to the modern country of Syria but to Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel as well.
The French had sought to be an influence in this region since the days of Napoleon. They had also made a commitment to defend the Arab Christians in the area against the majority Muslim population. During a civil war that raged in the region in the 1860s, the French had allied with factions that had forged ties with France. Paris wanted to maintain that alliance, so in the 1920s, when the French were at last in control, they turned the predominantly Maronite (Christian) region of Syria into a separate country, naming it after the dominant topographical characteristic, Mount Lebanon. As a state, then, Lebanon had no prior reality. Its main unifying feature was that its people felt an affinity with France.
The British area to the south was divided along similarly arbitrary lines. During World War I, the Muslim clan that ruled the western Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, the Hashemites, had supported the British. In return, the British promised to install this group as rulers of Arabia after the war. But London made commitments to other tribes as well. Based in Kuwait, a rival clan, the Saud, had launched a war against the Turks in 1900, trying to take control of the eastern and central parts of the Arabian Peninsula. In a struggle that broke out shortly after World War I, the Sauds defeated the Hashemites, so the British gave Arabia to them—hence today’s Saudi Arabia. The Hashemites received the consolation prize of Iraq, where they ruled until 1958, when they were overthrown in a military coup.
The Hashemites left in Arabia were moved to an area to the north along the eastern bank of the Jordan River. Centered on the town of Amman and lacking any other obvious identity, this new protectorate became known as Trans-Jordan, as in “the other side of the Jordan River.” After the British withdrew in 1948, Trans-Jordan became contemporary Jordan, a country that, like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, had never existed before.
West of the Jordan River and south of Mount Hermon was yet another region that had once been an administrative district of Ottoman Syria. Most of it had been called Filistin, undoubtedly after the Philistines, whose hero Goliath had fought David thousands of years before. The British took the term Filistin, ran it through some ancient Greek, and came up with Palestine as the name for this new region. Its capital was Jerusalem, and its residents were thereafter called Palestinians.
None of these remnants was a nation in the sense of having a common history or identity except for Syria itself, which could claim a lineage going back to biblical times. Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine were French and British inventions, created for their political convenience. Their national history went back only as far as Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot and some British double-dealing in Arabia.
Which is not to say that the inhabitants did not have a historical connection to the land they lived on. If not their homeland, the territory was certainly a home, but even here there was complexity. Under Ottoman rule, the ownership of the land, particularly in Palestine, had been semifeudal, with absentee landlords collecting rent from the felaheen, or peasants, who actually tilled the soil.
Enter the Jews. Members of the European Diaspora had been moving into this region since the 1880s, joining relatively small Jewish communities that had existed there (and in most other Arab regions) for centuries. This immigration was part of the Zionist movement, which—motivated by the European idea of the nation-state—sought to create a Jewish homeland in the region the Jews had last controlled in biblical times.
The Jews came in small numbers, settling on land purchased with funds raised by Jews in Europe. Frequently this land was bought from the absentee landlords, who sold it out from under their Arab tenants. From the Jewish point of view, this was a legitimate acquisition of land. From the tenants’ point of view, it was a direct assault on their livelihood, as well as an eviction from land their families had farmed for generations. As more Jews arrived, the acquisition of land, the title to which was frequently dubious anyway, became less scrupulous and even more intrusive.
While the Arabs generally (but not universally) saw the Jews as alien invaders, they did not agree on something perhaps more important: to whom did the residents of Palestine owe national allegiance?
The Syrians regarded Palestine the way they regarded Lebanon and Jordan—as an integral part of Syria. They opposed an independent Palestine, just as they opposed the existence of an independent Jewish state, for the same reason they opposed Lebanese and Jordanian independence: for them, the Sykes-Picot agreement was a violation of Syria’s long-standing territorial integrity.
The Hashemites, formerly from the Arabian Peninsula, had even greater problems with the Palestinians. The Hashemites were, after all, an Arabian tribe transplanted on the east bank of the Jordan. After the British left in 1948, they became rulers by default of what is today the West Bank. While sharing Arab ethnicity and the Muslim faith with the Palestinians who were native to the area, these transplants were profoundly different in culture and history. In fact, the two groups were quite hostile to each other. The Hashemite (now Jordanian) view was that Palestine was legally theirs, at least the part left after Israel gained independence. Indeed, from the time that the Jews became more numerous and powerful in Palestine, the Hashemite
rulers of Jordan saw these new emigrants from eastern Europe and elsewhere as allies against the native Palestinians.
To the southwest of Israel were the Egyptians, who at various points had also been dominated by the French and the British, as well as by the Ottomans. In 1956 they experienced a military coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Nasser opposed the existence of Israel, but he had a very different vision of the Palestinians. Nasser’s dream was the creation of a single Arab nation, a United Arab Republic, which he succeeded in establishing very briefly with the Syrians. For him, all of the countries of the Arab world were illegitimate products of imperialism and all should join together as one, under the leadership of the largest and most powerful Arab country, Egypt. Viewed in that context, there was no such thing as Palestine, and the Palestinians were simply Arabs occupying a certain ill-defined piece of land.
All the Arab states within the region, then, save the Jordanians, wanted the destruction of Israel, but none supported, or even discussed, an independent Palestine. The Gaza strip, occupied by Egypt during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, was administered as part of Egypt for the next twenty years. The West Bank remained a part of Jordan. The Syrians wanted all of Jordan and Palestine returned to them, along with Lebanon. This was complicated enough, but then the Six Day War of 1967 shuffled the deck once more.
In 1967, Egypt expelled UN peacekeeping forces from the Sinai Peninsula and remilitarized it. They also blockaded the Straits of Tiran and the Bab el Mandeb, cutting off the port of Eilat from the Red Sea. In response, the Israelis attacked not only the Egyptians but also the Jordanian West Bank, which had shelled Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria, which had shelled Israeli settlements.
Israel’s success, including the occupation of Jordan west of the river, transformed the entire region. Suddenly a large population of unwilling Palestinian Arabs was under the rule of an Israeli state. Israel’s initial intent seems to have been to trade the conquered areas for a permanent peace agreement with its neighbors. However, at a meeting held in Khartoum after the 1967 war, the Arab states replied with the famous “three no’s”: no negotiation, no recognition, no peace. At this point the Israeli occupation of these formerly Palestinian areas became permanent.
It was also at this point that the Palestinians first came to be viewed as a separate nation. The Egyptians had sponsored a group known as the Palestine Liberation Organization and installed a young man named Yasir Arafat to lead it. Nasser still clung to the idea of an Arab federation, but no other nations chose to accept his leadership. Nasser wasn’t prepared to submit to anyone else, which left the PLO and its constituent organizations, such as al-Fatah, by default the sole advocates for a Palestinian state.
The Jordanians were happy to have the Palestinians living in Israeli territory, as an Israeli problem. They were also happy to recognize the PLO as representing the Palestinian people, and just as happy that the Israelis didn’t allow the Palestinians to be independent. The Syrians supported their own organizations, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which advocated that Israel should be destroyed and that the Palestinians should be incorporated into Syria. So the recognition of Palestinian nationalism by the Arabs was neither universal nor friendly. Indeed, Arab support for the Palestinians seemed to increase in proportion to the distance the Arabs were from Palestine.
It should be obvious from this summary that the moral argument that rages about the rights of Israel, which any American president must deal with, is enormously complex. Beyond the substantial displacement of populations that occurred with the creation of modern Israel, the immigration of European Jews did not constitute the destruction of a Palestinian nation, because no such nation had ever existed. The Palestinian national identity in fact emerged only out of resistance to Israeli occupation after 1967. And the hostility toward Palestinian national claims was as intense from Arabs as it was from Jews. Israeli foreign policy was shaped by these realities and took advantage of them in order to impose the current political order on the region. But whatever was the case in the past, there is certainly today a self-aware Palestinian nation, and that is part of what must inform U.S. policy going forward.
Apart from dealing with this incredibly convoluted history, which weighs on any moral judgment, U.S. policy in this region must accommodate two other basic facts. First, whatever the Israelis’ historical claim, from a twentieth-century perspective, the Jews were settlers from another continent who displaced the natives. Then again, it is difficult for Americans, who displaced their own native population even more thoroughly, to make a moral case against Israel for usurping Palestinian land and mistreating the indigenous people.
A more powerful moral argument is the one that Roosevelt made in support of France and England against Nazi Germany: Israel (excluding the West Bank and Gaza) is a democratic country, and the United States is the “arsenal of democracy.” This means that the United States has a special relationship with democratic states, as well as obligations that transcend geopolitics. Therefore, the United States must support democratic Israel exclusive of other moral or even geopolitical considerations.
Realists would disagree. They would argue that the moral claims of any side can have no hold on the United States, and that the United States must shape its policies to its national interest. However, as I have argued, pursuing a national interest without reference to a moral purpose leaves the national interest shallow and incomplete. More important, defining the national interest in the region on its own terms is extraordinarily difficult. The moral compass must be there, but it points in many directions. The pursuit of the national interest is less obvious than it might appear.
Morality rooted in historical claims can be shaped to suit, and is by all sides. A simple moral judgment doesn’t deal with the realities on the ground, and simply arriving at a coherent moral position is breathtakingly difficult. As for the realist position, it is extraordinarily difficult to extract what that might be. So the question is, how do we frame a realistic foreign policy that will serve the moral purpose and national interest in the decade to come? To find the answer, we need to consider the history of the relationship between Israel and the United States.
THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL
The United States recognized Israeli independence in 1948, but the two countries were hardly allies in any sense of the term. While the United States always recognized Israel’s right to exist, that fact never really drove U.S. policy. The primary American interest in 1948, when Israel came into being, was the containment of the Soviet Union, and the American focus was primarily on Turkey and Greece. Greece had an internal Communist insurgency. Both Greece and Turkey had an external Soviet threat as well. For the United States, Turkey was the key to the region. It was only a narrow strait in Turkey, the Bosporus, that blocked the Soviet fleet in the Black Sea from entering the Mediterranean Sea in force. If that strait fell into Soviet hands, the Soviets would be able to challenge American power and threaten southern Europe.
The major impediment to the U.S. strategy of containment in the Middle East was that the British and French were trying to reestablish the influence in the region that they had held before World War II. Seeking to develop closer ties in the Arab world, the Soviets could and did exploit hostility to the Europeans’ machinations. Things came to a head in 1956, after Nasser took power and nationalized the Suez Canal.
Neither the British nor the French (who were fighting to suppress an anticolonial revolt in Algeria and who were striving to reclaim their influence in Lebanon and Syria) wanted Egypt to control the canal. Neither did Israel. In 1956, the three nations hatched a plot for an Israeli invasion of Egypt, but with a twist. After Israel reached the canal, British and French forces would intervene, seizing the canal to secure it from the Israeli invasion and potential conflict with Egypt. It was one of those ideas that must have made sense when sketched on a cocktail napkin after a few drinks.
In the American view, the adv
enture was not only doomed to failure but would drive Egypt into the Soviet camp, giving them a strong and strategic ally. Since anything that might increase Soviet power was unacceptable to the United States, the Eisenhower administration intervened against the Suez scheme, forcing British and French withdrawal and Israel back to the 1948 lines. In the late 1950s, there was no love lost between Israel and the United States.
The strategic problem for Israel was that its national security requirements always outstripped its industrial and military base. In other words, given the challenges it faced from Egypt and Syria, and potentially from Jordan, not to mention the Soviet Union, it could not produce the weapons it needed in order to protect itself. To ensure a steady source of weapons, it needed a major foreign patron.
Israel’s first patron was the Soviet Union, which saw Israel as an anti-British power that might become an ally. The USSR supplied weapons to Israel through Czechoslovakia, but this relationship crumbled quickly. Then France, still fighting in Algeria, replaced the Soviets as Israel’s benefactor. The Arab countries supported the Algerian rebels, and thus it was in France’s interest to have a strong Israel standing alongside France in opposition. So the French supplied the Israelis with aircraft, tanks, and the basic technology for their nuclear weapons.
At this time the United States still saw Israel as of marginal importance to its broader strategic goals in the area. After the Suez crisis, however, the United States began to reconsider its strategic relationships. The Americans had intervened on behalf of Egypt in Suez, but the Egyptians migrated into the Soviet camp regardless. The French and British had left behind a series of regimes, in Syria and Iraq in particular, that were inherently unstable and highly susceptible to the Nasserite doctrine of militarily driven Arab nationalism. Syria had begun moving into the Soviet camp as early as 1956, but in 1963 a left-wing military coup sealed that position. A similar coup occurred that same year in Iraq.
The Next Decade Page 10
