A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Israel to the Arab world is like a cancer to the human body, and the only way of remedy is to uproot it just like a cancer.… Israel is a serious wound in the Arab world body, and we cannot endure the pain of this wound forever. We don’t have the patience to see Israel occupying part of Palestine for long.

  We Arabs total about fifty million. Why don’t we sacrifice 10 million of our number and live in pride and self respect? 77

  In this way, the Arab regimes were able to satisfy the need they felt to fire the passions of their own people and troops. Quite apart from their animus, Israel was a useful scapegoat on which they could pin all their failings and shortcomings. Still, these early efforts did little to rejuvenate the flagging forces of international anti-Zionism, since few people in the West could accept such stark language and the purposes evident behind it.

  Thus, the respite in international public opinion that Israel enjoyed between 1948 and 1967 resulted from the combined effect of a basic Western sympathy for the Jewish state and Arab apathy toward Western audiences. The Arabists were still calling the tune in Washington, urging Eisenhower, for example, that Israel should trade the Negev (the southern half of the country) in exchange for peace. 78 But during those years there was little public sympathy for officials who had treated the Holocaust as “Zionist sobs tuff.”

  This grace period came to an end after the Six Day War in 1967. As opposed to Western governments, Western public opinion has tended to support whomever it perceives as the under dog. For some Westerners, the Israeli victory in the Six Day War instantly transformed Israel from underdog to superdog in the space of the few days it took to win the war—a perception reinforced by the cockiness of some Israelis, who believed that single brilliant victory would end Israel’s ongoing struggle to survive against a hostile Arab world of immense size and wealth. The Arabs soon exploited this reversal in public opinion, portraying Israel as a frightening power that preyed on its weaker Arab neighbors. Further, the fact that in the ensuing years Israel was militarily administering territories from which it had been attacked was soon stripped of that wartime context, and the unprovoked nature of the Arab attack was forgotten. The only thing that remained clearly fixed in public opinion was the fact that Israel was governing territories on which a substantial Arab population lived—or, as the parlance would soon have it, it was “occupying Arab land”—thereby removing the mantle of culpability from the shoulders of the Arabs and placing it on the Jewish state.

  The Arabs exploited these propaganda benefits, but the results of the Six Day War nonetheless presented them with a difficult military obstacle to their designs on Israel. The Israeli victory pushed the border from the outskirts of Tel Aviv to the Jordan River, a few dozen miles to the east over a range of mountains, cliffs, and wadis. It became clear to the Arabs that Israel could no longer be crushed with one swift blow. If they were to excise Israel from their midst, they now realized, Israel would first have to be territorially reduced—to the starting conditions of the Six Day War.

  The Arabs came to perceive that they could not achieve this goal militarily—that they could attain it only if the West, especially the United States, applied overwhelming political pressure on Israel. But in the wake of Israel’s astounding victory in the Six Day War, a powerful sentiment was developing in the United States to form a political and military alliance with Israel as the new preeminent regional power. This sentiment was translated into a liberal infusion of military aid to Israel’s army, making the Arabs’ job of overcoming Israel still more difficult. The shrewder political minds among the Arabs, however, slowly parted from the view of America as irreversibly committed to supporting Israel and came to see the usefulness of cultivating the old Arabist lines of argumentation, albeit suitably adapted to a more contemporary Western audience. Moreover, they grew to appreciate the decisive role that Western public opinion played in making and maintaining policy—a public opinion that had been none too keen on the Arab cause up until then. Hence the principal effort of the ongoing Arab war against Israel since 1967 has been to defeat Israel on the battlefields of public opinion: in the media, in university lecture halls, and in the citadels of government.

  In order to capture the sympathy of the Western public, its beliefs concerning the history, causes, and nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict had to be revised. No Westerner was interested in hearing that the Jewish state was a “cancer” that had to be “uprooted.” A new history had to posit plausible explanations for the relentless Arab campaign against Israel, along with reasons for the West to abandon its support for the Jewish state. The core of the new history had to be the critique of the birth of Israel itself in moral terms comprehensible to Westerners. For if the very creation of the Jewish state could be presented as a moral error, a vehicle not of justice but injustice, as the British Arabists had claimed it was, then the West could become sympathetic to efforts to redress the “injustice” that had been committed.

  In this, the Arabs found that all the foundations had already been laid. The British Arabists had already spent decades injecting the West with the idea that Jewish immigration to Palestine was based upon a moral mistake; that such immigration had “caused” Arab violence against the Jews (rather than the Arabs causing it themselves); and that the presence of the Jewish home in the Middle East would compel the Arabs to unite against the West, gravely harming Western interests. After 1967, the Arabs gave new life to all these arguments, parading them before the West to explain international Arab terrorism, Arab fulminations at the UN, and the Arab oil embargo of 1973. By the early 1970s, all eyes (and cameras) were turned to the Arab governments, as they rehearsed for a world audience the themes that the British colonialists had invented in the 1920s.

  In the court of public opinion, as in any court, the question of who attacked whom—who initiated an assault and who acted in self-defense—is central to the verdict. The Arab states embarked on an unprecedented campaign to persuade the West that it was not they, the Arabs, who had attacked Israel, but Israel that had attacked them. Thus, the results of their own aggression against Israel—the bloodshed, the refugees, the capture of Arab-controlled land—were instead presented as its causes. These were now deemed unprovoked evils that had been perpetrated by the Jews, grievances that the Arabs were now merely and innocently trying to redress. It was not the Arabs who were the guilty party, but Israel that had fended off their attacks. (See Chapter 4, “Reversal of Causality.”)

  Still, the task of the Arabs was far more difficult than that of their Arabist predecessors had been. The British Arabists had had only to convert the Colonial and Foreign offices to their views in order to bring the absolute authority of the Mandatory government and the British Army to bear against Zionism. But to create American opposition to an independent State of Israel that had many friends and admirers in Washington would require a much more sweeping, much more comprehensive campaign of disinformation than had ever been conceived by the British anti-Zionists. It would entail the fabrication of ancient historical rights to nullify those of the Jews; the obliteration from memory of Versailles, the League of Nations, and the Balfour Declaration; and a complete revision and rewriting of the Arab wars against the Jews following the establishment of Israel.

  Before a lie of such incredible proportions could hope to make any headway against the common sense of the common man in the west or of his government, the ground would have to be prepared by means of a direct assault on Zionism itself as a moral movement, as a movement seeking justice. The Arabs aimed to render the rest of their arguments plausible by building their house of canards on the bedrock of Israel’s inherent immorality: The post-Holocaust-era view of the Zionist as the good guy had to be forcibly brought to an end.

  For this ambitious undertaking, the Arabs attacked Israel through every channel, at every gathering, from every platform. But none of these forums proved to be as effective as the most powerful of instruments available to the Arabs, an instrument of universal reach and app
eal that at the time enjoyed not only respectability but reverence, and that therefore was trusted by many around the world—the United Nations.

  And at the UN, as elsewhere, the Arabs also found a new ally. The British Empire had capsized, but a new empire had arisen that quickly replaced the British as the patron of Pan-Arab aspirations. Cultivating Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and a string of other despotisms, the Soviet Union, much like the British Arabists before it, came to see Israel as a challenge to its imperialist ambitions in the Middle East and in the eastern Mediterranean. The Soviets were accomplished masters of propaganda, who had taught expressions such as “peace-loving” and “self-determination” to every anti-Western terror organization in the world. And it was the Soviets who hit upon the precise formulation that the Arabs needed to stab at the heart of Israel’s moral standing in the West.

  In Mexico City in 1975, the Soviet and Arab blocs took over a United Nations Conference on Women and forced it to adopt one of the great slanders of all time. They then brought this resolution to an obedient UN General Assembly, which confirmed it. They achieved this aim by means of political and economic intimidation. At the time, the Arab oil blackmail was at its height, and it seemed that nothing could stand in its way. Many countries that should have known better, that did know better, nevertheless succumbed.

  Thus in November 1975, a mere eight years after their great defeat in the Six Day War, the Arabs achieved their greatest victory on the field of propaganda: The General Assembly of the United Nations, by a vote of 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, resolved that Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, constituted “racism.”

  Such an achievement had eluded even the great anti-Semitic propagandists of our millennium like Torquemada and Joseph Goebbels. For what they and their disciples had failed to do in the Inquisition and in the Holocaust had at long last been achieved by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Never before had anti-Semitism acquired a tool of such universal dissemination as the UN. Never before had any of the slander of the Jewish people, of which there had been so many, been promulgated and applauded by an organization that purported to represent humankind.

  The Arabs knew that Israel’s strength was not rooted in its numbers, its size, or its resources. In all these areas the Arabs were far stronger. Israel’s greatest shield, they understood, was its moral stature. They therefore sought to tarnish that shield, to crack it, and ultimately to crush it. Their weapon was an extraordinary vilification of a movement that had inspired millions. For Zionism is a unique moral phenomenon that has won the support of many people of goodwill around the world. The Jewish people had suffered degradation, humiliation, oppression, and mutilation like no other. But the Jewish legacy is one of the principal founts of Western civilization, contributing above all to advancing the concepts of freedom and justice. The Zionist movement had come into being to seek for its own people freedom and justice. After two millennia of bondage, the Jewish people was entitled to its own liberation as an independent nation.

  This is the true and only meaning of Zionism. At the close of World War I, and again after World War II, it had been so understood not only by the Jewish people but by virtually the entire world. Many nations and peoples had admired the tenacity, courage, and moral strength of the Zionist movement. They had marveled at Israel’s achievement in rebuilding a modern state on the ruins of an ancient homeland. They had applauded the ingathering of the exiles from a hundred lands and the seemingly miraculous revival of an ancient tongue. And they had thrilled at Israel’s ability to maintain its democratic and human ethic in the face of one of the most remorseless campaigns of hatred in history. All this had been appreciated by people not only in Europe and America but in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, where Israel and Zionism had served as a shining example of the independence and progress that so many other nations, coming out from under the heel of empire, hoped to achieve.

  These realities were not lost on the Arab regimes or on the Soviets. Indeed, their attack on Israel was not driven by political interest alone. Deep down, they experienced an unforgiving resentment. For nothing so effectively unmasks dictators and despots who hide behind the rhetoric of “liberation” and “self-determination” as a genuine movement of national liberation. Israel and Zionism, by their very existence, exposed the claims of the tyrants and totalitarians for the sham that they are.

  But the sham was particularly preposterous in labeling so completely color-blind a movement racist. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had himself declared the plight of blacks to be a cause of fundamental concern to him, like that of the Jews:

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

  Almost a century later, Israel’s rescue of Ethiopia’s Jews showed Zionism to be the only movement in history to transport blacks out of Africa not to enslave them but to liberate them.

  In 1985, on the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the resolution defaming Zionism, I organized a symposium on the United Nations premises to attack this infamy. The Arab states and the PLO were especially irked by this affront (how dared we convene a conference on “their” ground?), and they tried unsuccessfully to block it. But what irritated them even more was that one of the speakers, Rahamin Elazar, was an Ethiopian Jew. He described in moving terms his own personal salvation in coming to Israel. Since then, tens of thousands of members of his community have followed in their great exodus from Ethiopia. An accusation of racism against the Zionists by the Arab world—whose contemporary customs include the keeping of indentured black servants in the Gulf states and a prolific history of trading along the slave coast of Africa, as well as the repeated massacres of blacks by the Sudanese Arabs—should have been received like a witless joke.

  It wasn’t. The combined power of the Arab and Soviet blocs gave them complete control of the UN, its microphones, and its printing presses. To be sure, even without the campaign against Israel, one would have been hard pressed to consider the UN General Assembly a pure arbiter of moral truth. Indeed, what can be said of an institution that failed to curb in even the slightest way the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, a war that claimed a million lives and turned five million people into refugees; that for seven years did not lift a finger to stop the sickening carnage of the Iran-Iraq War, in which another million perished; that did not even address, much less remedy, such outrages as the genocide in Cambodia, the horrific slaughter of the Ibo in Biafra, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Uganda under Idi Amin, all in flagrant violation of the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights? 80

  Yet despite all these and other enormous affronts to conscience, nothing injected such calumny into the arteries of international opinion as the Zionism-racism resolution did against Israel. It may be tempting to dismiss this resolution as a meaningless absurdity, especially after its belated renunciation in December 1991. 81 But that would be a mistake. We must remember that the Arabs had a full sixteen years to drive home their racism message, and that even after its formal renunciation, this defamation lives on in the minds of many nations and their leaders. I stress again that, for the first time in history, a world body had given its stamp of approval to the libeling of an entire people. In the very century of the Holocaust, one must not forget the insidious power of uninhibited libel. Without the torrents of slander poured on the Jews by the Nazis, the Holocaust would never have been possible. Had the Nazis not succeeded in brainwashing Germans and non-Germans alike into believing that the Jews were reprehensible, subhuman, and in fact a different species, they would not have secured the collaboration of thousands upon thousands of ordinary people
in moving the machinery of genocide.

  We know that in the two or three European countries where such collaboration did not take place the majority of Jews were saved. Well known is the example of Denmark, in which the king himself declared that if any of his subjects wore the yellow badge, then he too would wear it; Denmark’s Jews were successfully smuggled to safety in Sweden. Less well known but equally dramatic is the case of Bulgaria, where the entire educated elite of the country opposed the implementation of official anti-Semitism. Thus, the Union of Bulgarian Lawyers and the Union of Writers respectively denounced the German-imposed anti-Jewish legislation as “socially damaging” and “very harmful.” The head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church described the directives as “thunder from a clear sky.” A German report attributed Bulgarian disobedience of these laws to the “inactivity of the police and the complete indifference of the majority of the Bulgarian people.” Particularly telling is the explanation that the German ambassador in Sofia offered to his superiors in Berlin: He told them that the “Bulgarian public lacks the understanding of the Jewish question in historical terms.” This failure of understanding was in fact directly due to the stubborn refusal of the country’s leadership—writers, clergy, teachers, politicians—to spread the Nazi slander, as a consequence of which Bulgarian Jewry was saved. 82

  In other words, libel is the prelude to murder. It is a license to kill. The libeling of an entire people separates that people from the rest of humanity, making the lives of its members dispensable, its oppressors and murderers immune to blame.

  Appearances notwithstanding, the libel of “Zionism equals racism” is the very same libel that was preached by the Nazis. It is the same anti-Semitism dressed up in trendy terminology. For the bitter truth is that the horrors of the Holocaust did not make anti-Semitism unfashionable; they only made some of the old terminology embarrassing. Zionism and Zionist now serve as euphemisms for Judaism and Jew. And since there is no worse epithet in today’s lexicon than racist, it is the term that is used to replace the whole range of old-fashioned invective. It is the contemporary equivalent of Christ-killer, traitor, usurer, international conspirator All this has stolen into vogue under the sham disclaimer of “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m just anti-Zionist”—the equivalent of “I’m not anti-American, I just think the United States shouldn’t exist.”