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. Neve
rtheless, 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
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.
A Durable Peace Page 2
