By the 1960s, American support for the Arabs had begun to look like an increasingly questionable enterprise. Despite the fact that the only assistance the United States was providing Israel was food, the Arab world had turned resolutely anti-American. The Soviets were prepared to fund projects the United States wouldn’t fund, and the Soviet model was more attractive to Arab socialists. The United States remained fairly aloof for a while, content to let France maintain the relationship with Tel Aviv. But when the United States began supplying antiaircraft systems to anti-Soviet regimes in the region, Israel was included on the gift list.
In 1967, Charles de Gaulle ended the Algerian war and sought to resume France’s prior relationship with the Arab world, and he did not want Israel attacking its neighbors. When the Israelis disregarded his demands and launched the Six Day War, they lost access to French weapons. Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbors in the 1967 conflict generated pro-Israeli support in the United States, which was bogged down in Vietnam; the Israelis seemed to provide a model of swift and decisive warfare that revitalized the American spirit. The Israelis capitalized on that feeling to aggressively woo the United States.
Struggling with the Vietnam War and public opinion, Lyndon Johnson saw American public infatuation with Israeli military successes as useful in two ways. First, the generation for support of any war might strengthen support for the Vietnam War. Second, the Israeli victory had strengthened an already powerful Soviet hand in Egypt and Syria, making Israel a useful ally. A strategic basis for the U.S.-Israeli relationship emerged. The Soviets had penetrated Syria and Iraq in the mid-1960s and were already building up the military of both countries. The Soviets’ strategy for dealing with their encirclement by U.S. allies was to try to leapfrog them, recruiting their own allies to their rear and then trying to increase the political and military pressure on them. Turkey, which had always been at the center of U.S. strategic thinking, was the key for the Soviets, as it was for the Americans. The coups in Syria and Iraq—well before 1967—had intensified the strategic problem for the United States. Turkey was now sandwiched between a powerful Soviet Union to the north and two Soviet clients to the south. If the Soviets placed their own forces in Iraq and Syria, Turkey could find itself in trouble, and with it would go the entire American strategy of Soviet containment.
The Israelis now represented a strategic asset, allowing the United States to play leapfrog in return. In order to tie down Iraqi forces, the United States armed Iran, important in its own right because it shared a border with the Soviets. Israel did not share a border with the Soviets, but it did border Syria, and a pro-American Israel served to tie down the Syrians while making a Soviet deployment into Syria more complex and risky. In addition, Israel stood in opposition to Egypt. The Soviets were not only arming the Egyptians, they were using the port of Alexandria as a naval base, which could develop into a threat to the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.
Contrary to widespread belief, the Egyptians and Syrians did not become pro-Soviet because of U.S. support for Israel. In fact, it was the other way around. The Egyptian shift and the Syrian coup happened before America replaced France as Israel’s source of weapons, a development that in fact happened in response to Egyptian and Syrian policies. Once Egypt and Syria aligned with the Soviets, arming the Israelis became a low-cost solution for restricting Egyptian and Syrian forces while forcing the Soviets on the defensive in those countries. This helped secure the Mediterranean for the United States and relieved pressure on Turkey. It was at this point, and for strategic—not moral—reasons, that the United States began supplying a great deal of aid to Israel.
The U.S. strategy worked. The Egyptians expelled the Soviets in 1973. They signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1978. While the Syrians remained pro-Soviet, the expulsion of Soviet forces from Egypt blunted the Soviet threat in the Mediterranean. However, another threat had emerged in the meantime: Palestinian terrorism.
The PLO had been crafted by Nasser as part of his extended struggle with the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, an effort to topple the royal houses and integrate them into his United Arab Republic. Soviet intelligence, wanting to weaken the United States by contributing to instability in Arabia, trained and deployed PLO operatives. The situation became critical in September 1970, when Yasir Arafat engineered an uprising against the Hashemite rulers of Jordan, key allies of the United States and covert allies of Israel. At the same time, Syria moved armor south into Jordan, clearly intending to use the chaos to reassert Syrian authority. The Israeli air force intervened to block the Syrians, while the United States flew in Pakistani troops to support Jordanian forces to put down the uprising. About ten thousand Palestinians were killed in the fighting, and Arafat fled to Lebanon.
This conflict was the origin of the group known as Black September, which, among other things, carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Black September was the covert arm of Arafat’s Fatah movement, but what made it particularly important was that it also served Soviet interests in Europe. During the 1970s, the Soviets had organized a destabilization campaign, mobilizing terrorist groups in France, Italy, and Germany, among others, and supporting organizations such as the Irish Republican Army.
The Palestinians became a major force in this “terrorist international,” a development that served to further bind the United States and Israel together. To prevent the destabilization of NATO, the United States wanted to shut down the Soviet-sponsored terrorist organizations, whose members were being trained in Libya and North Korea. For their part, the Israelis wanted to destroy the Palestinians’ covert capability. The CIA and Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, cooperated intensely for the next twenty years to suppress the terrorist movement, which did not weaken until the mid-1980s, when the Soviets shifted to a more conciliatory policy toward the West. During this time, the CIA and Mossad also cooperated in securing the Arabian Peninsula against covert Soviet and PLO operations.
The collapse of the Soviet Union—and indeed, the shift in policy that took place after Leonid Brezhnev’s death—changed this dynamic dramatically. Turkey was no longer at risk. Egypt was a decaying, weak nation of no threat to Israel. It was also quite hostile to Hamas. Formed in 1987, Hamas was a derivative of the Muslim Brotherhood that had threatened the regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Syria was isolated and focused on Lebanon. Jordan was in many ways now a protectorate of Israel. The threat from the secular, socialist Palestinian movement that had made up the PLO and that had supported the terrorist movements in Europe had diminished greatly. U.S. aid to Israel stayed steady while Israel’s economy surged. In 1974, when the aid began to flow in substantial amounts, it represented about 21 percent of the Israeli gross domestic product. Today it represents about 1.4 percent, according to the Congressional Research Office.
Once again, it is vital to understand that U.S.-Israeli cooperation did not generate anti-Americanism in the Arab world but resulted from it. The interests that tied Israel and the United States together from 1967 to 1991 were clear and substantial. Equally important to understand is the fact that since 1991, the basis of the relationship has been much less clear. The current state of play makes it necessary to ask precisely what the United States needs from Israel and what, for that matter, Israel needs from the United States. As we consider American foreign policy over the next ten years, it is also vital to ask exactly how a close tie with Israel serves U.S. national interests.
As for the moral issue of rights between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the historical record is chaotic. To argue that the Jews have no right in Palestine is a defensible position only if you are prepared to assert that Europeans have no right to be in America or Australia. At the same time, there is an obvious gulf between the right of Israel to exist and the right of Israel to occupy the home territory of large numbers of Palestinians who don’t want to be occupied. On the other hand, how can you demand that Israel surrender control when larg
e numbers of Palestinians won’t acknowledge Israel’s right to exist? The moral argument becomes dizzying and cannot be a foundation for a foreign policy on either side. Supporting Israel because we support democracies is a far more persuasive argument, but even that must be embedded in the question of national interest. And it must be remembered that the United States has been inconsistent in applying this principle, to say the least.
CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL
The Israel of today is strategically secure. It has become the dominant power among the bordering states by creating a regional balance of power among its neighbors that is based on mutual hostility as well as dependence by some of them on Israel.
By far the most important element of this system is Egypt, which once represented the greatest strategic threat to Israel. The Egyptians’ decision in the 1970s that continued hostility toward Israel and alignment with the Soviet Union were not in their interests led to a peace treaty in which the Sinai became a demilitarized zone. This kept Egyptian and Israeli forces from impinging on each other. Without a threat from Egypt’s military, Israel was secure, because Syria by itself did not represent an unmanageable threat.
The peace between Egypt and Israel always appears to be tenuous, but it is actually built on profoundly powerful geopolitical forces. Egypt cannot defeat Israel, for reasons that are geographical as well as technological. To defeat Israel, Egypt would have to create a logistical system through the Sinai that could support hundreds of thousands of troops, a system that would be hard to build and difficult to defend.
The Israelis cannot defeat Egypt, nor could they stand a prolonged war of attrition. To win they would have to win swiftly, because Israel has a small standing army and must draw manpower from its civilian reserves, which is unsustainable over an extended period. Even in 1967, when victory came within days, the manpower requirements for the battle paralyzed the Israeli economy. Even if Israel could defeat the Egyptian army, it could not occupy Egypt’s heartland, the Nile River basin. This region is home to more than 70 million people, and the Israeli army simply does not have the resources even to begin to control it.
Because of this stalemate, Egypt and Israel would risk much and gain little by fighting each other. In addition, both governments are now battling the same Islamic forces. The Egyptian regime today still derives from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular, socialist, and militarist revolution. It was never Islamic and was always challenged by devout Muslims, particularly those organized around the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni organization that is the strongest force in opposition to established regimes throughout the Arab world. The Egyptians repressed this group. They fear that a success by Hamas might threaten the stability of their regime. Therefore, whatever grumbling they might do about Israeli Palestinian policy, they share Israel’s hostility to Hamas and work actively to contain Hamas in Gaza.
Israel’s accord with Egypt is actually the most important relationship it has. So long as Egypt remains aligned with Israel, Israel’s national security is assured, because no other combination of neighbors can threaten it. Even if the secular Nasserite regime fell, it would be a generation before Egypt could be a threat, and then only if it gained the patronage of a major power.
Nor does Israel face a threat from Jordan, even though the Jordan River line is the most vulnerable area that Israel faces. It is several hundred miles long, and the distance between that line and the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem corridor is less than fifty miles. However, the Jordanian military and intelligence forces guard this frontier for Israel, a peculiar circumstance that exists for two reasons.
First, the Jordanian-Palestinian hostility is a threat to the Hashemite regime, and the Israelis serve essential Jordanian national security interests by suppressing the Palestinians. Second, the Jordanians are much too few and much too easily defeated by the Israelis to pose a threat. The only time that the Jordan River line could become a threat would be if some foreign country (Iraq or Iran, most likely) were to send its military to deploy along that line. Since desert separates the Jordan River from these countries, deploying and supplying forces would be difficult. But more than that, such a deployment would mean the end of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, which would do everything it could to prevent a significant deployment and would be backed by the Israelis. Israel and Jordan are in this way joined at the hip.
That leaves Syria, which by itself poses no threat to Israel. Its forces are smaller than Israel’s fully mobilized ones, and the areas in which it could attack are too narrow to exploit effectively. But far more important, Syria is a country that is oriented toward the west, and therefore toward Lebanon, which it not only regards as its own but is where its ruling elite, the Alawites, have close historic ties.
Lebanon is the interface between the northern Arab world and the Mediterranean. Beirut’s banks and real estate, as well as the Bekaa Valley’s smuggling and drug trade, are of far more practical interest to the Syrians than any belief that all of Ottoman Syria belongs to them. Their practical interests are in dominating and integrating Lebanon informally into their national economy.
Following the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, and faced with hostility from Iraq, the Syrians found themselves isolated in the region. They were also hostile to Arafat’s Fatah movement, going so far as to invade Lebanon in 1975 to fight the Palestinians. Nevertheless, they saw themselves at risk. The Iranian revolution in 1979 created a new relationship, however distant, and one that allowed the Syrians to increase their strength in Lebanon, using Iran’s ideological and financial resources. In the 1980s, following Israel’s own invasion of Lebanon, an anti-Israeli Shiite militia was formed, called Hezbollah. In part, Hezbollah is simply a part of the Lebanese political constellation. In part, it is a force designed to fight Israel. But in return for receiving a free hand in Lebanon from Israel, Syria guaranteed to restrain Hezbollah actions against Israel. This agreement broke down in 2006, when the United States forced Syrian uniformed forces out of Lebanon, as punishment for supporting jihadists in Iraq. As a result Syria renounced any promise it had made to Israel.
The deeper the detail, the more dizzyingly complex and ambiguous this region becomes, so a summary of the strategic relationships is in order. Israel is at peace with Egypt and Jordan, a far from fragile peace based on substantial mutual interests. With Egypt and Jordan aligned with Israel, Syria is weak and isolated and poses no threat. Hezbollah is a threat, but not one with the weight of fundamentally threatening Israel.
The primary threat to Israel comes from inside its boundaries, from the occupied and hostile Palestinians. But while their primary weapon, terrorism, can be painful, terrorism cannot ultimately destroy the Israelis. Even when Hezbollah and other external forces are added, the State of Israel is not at risk, partly because the resources those forces can bring to bear are inadequate, and partly because Syria, fearing Israeli retaliation, limits what these groups can do.
Indeed, Israel’s problems have been lessened by the split among the Palestinians. Fatah, Arafat’s organization, was until the 1990s the main force within the Palestinian community. Like the Nasserite movement it came from, it was secular and socialist, not Islamist. During the 1990s, Hamas, an Islamic Palestinian movement, arose, which has split the Palestinians, essentially creating a civil war. Fatah controls the West Bank; Hamas controls Gaza. The Israelis, playing the balance-of-power game within the Palestinian community as well as in the region, are now friendly and supportive of Fatah and hostile to Hamas. The two groups are as likely to fight each other as they are to fight Israel.
The danger of terrorism for the Israelis, beyond the personal tragedies it engenders, is that it can shift Israeli policy away from strategic issues and toward simple management of the threat. The killing of Israelis by suicide bombers is never going to be acceptable, and no Israeli government can survive if it dismisses the concern. But the balance of power makes Israel secure from threats by nation-states, and the threat of terrorism within the occupied territori
es is secondary.
The problem for Israel remains the same as it was in biblical times. Israel has always been able to control Egypt and whatever powers were to the east and north. It was only the distant great powers, such as Babylon, Persia, Alexandrian Greece, and Rome, that were able to overwhelm the ancient kingdom of the Jews. These empires were the competitors that Israel didn’t have the weight to manage and sometimes engaged with catastrophically by overestimating its strength or underestimating the need for diplomatic subtlety.
Terrorism puts Israel in the same position today. The threat of this violence is not that it will undermine the regime but that it will cause the regime to act in ways that will cause a major power to focus on Israel. Nothing good can come from Israel’s showing up too brightly on the global radar screen.
From the Israeli point of view, Palestinian unhappiness or unrest or even terrorism can be lived with. What Israel cannot accommodate is the intervention of a major power spurred on by Israeli actions against the Palestinians. Great powers—imperial powers—can afford to spend a small fraction of their vast resources on issues that satisfy marginal interests or that merely assuage public opinion. That small fraction can dwarf the resources of a country like Israel, which is why Israel must maintain its regional arrangements and prudently manage the Palestinians and their terrorism.
The Next Decade Page 11
