A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Building on the Zionism-racism resolution, the Arab propaganda machine has now been at work for a quarter of a century, ever since the Six Day War, spinning a web of falsehoods that have permeated every issue and colored every opinion on the subject of Israel. Even now, with the resolution overturned, the spires of untruth that it erected and buttressed remain standing, having taken on a terrible life of their own. So successful has been the demonization of the Jewish state that many people are willing to overlook the most heinous crimes, to pardon virtually any excess on the part of the Arabs, since, after all, one has to take into account their “plight” and “all they have suffered.” Just as they had planned, the Arabs have succeeded in foisting their historical fabrications into the media and from there onto the world public and its representatives everywhere. With this, the Arabs have achieved an astonishing transformation, making themselves over into the aggrieved party demanding justice, and Israel into an “entity”—unnatural, alien, immoral—capable of virtually no right because its very existence is itself an irredeemable wrong.

  Thus it is that Zionism, once considered a noble and legitimate national movement worthy of broad international support during the establishment of the new world order at the opening of the twentieth century, is itself the odd man out at the initiation of the new world order at the close of the century. Israel is the only nation on the face of the globe that important sections of opinion consider to be guilty for being a nation—wrong for claiming its homeland as its own, culpable for building its homes, schools, and factories on this land, and unjust for trying to defend itself against enemies who wish its destruction. This is the view that the British colonialists fashioned for their own purposes, but today it has been accepted as truth by many who have no conception of where these ideas came from—or where they might lead.

  Of course, there are many people who argue that they have not given up on the basic promise that was made at Versailles to the Jews. After all, they say, we have no desire to see Israel destroyed—we are only looking for balance between Israel and the Arabs. But this position obscures what is in fact an astonishing disregard for the most basic demands of Israel’s survival. Hence many in the United States, which measures its strategic depth in terms of thousands of miles, chastise Israel for its insistence on having a few tens of miles of strategic depth. Hence while Western leaders constantly blare warnings that Israel must seek peace, they allow their arms dealers to sell the Arab states almost twenty times the weaponry they sell Israel, including the pick of the most advanced systems in their arsenals. Hence some European countries provide the means to produce even nuclear weapons clearly aimed at Israel’s destruction to the most fanatical of its enemies, then condemn Israel for acting against the menace. Hence important political figures, knowing full well that without immigration Israel’s position is precarious at best, are cynically willing to impede or endanger the movement of Jewish refugees to Israel, for the dubious end of ingratiating themselves with the Arabs.

  True, the betrayal of Zionism by the West cannot today be found in explicit calls for an end to the Jewish state. Rather, the betrayal is found in the nonchalance with which virtually the entire Western world demands that Israeli governments accept risks that no elected official in any Western state would ever willingly accept for his own country. It is found in the insistence, backed up by increasingly militant political and economic coercion, that Israel is an aggressor when it behaves like any other nation, and is righteous only when it passively sits by and waits for the next blow to land. This creeping annulment of Israel’s right to self-defense constitutes a continual erosion of the promise of Versailles. For once a nation no longer has the means to freely defend its existence, its very right to exist is put into question. A right that cannot be defended is eventually rendered meaningless.

  As we have seen, the extraordinary constriction of the support for Zionism’s geographic and demographic needs has largely been the result of a systematic campaign, originating with Western anti-Zionists in the first half of the century and led by the Arab world in the second half, aimed at undermining belief in the justice of Israel’s cause. This campaign could not have achieved such dramatic results without synchronizing its message with an appeal to Western self-interest. The argument that wringing concessions from Israel is in the West’s interests, and particularly America’s, is identical to that which was presented to the British during the 1920s and 1930s—and that led them to try to prevent the development of the Jewish state by force of arms. It took a mere twenty years for Britain to be transformed from the sincere protector of the Jews and the guarantor of their national restoration to one of the principal opponents of the restoration, abandoning the Jewish nation at the brink of annihilation. The engine for this transformation was the idea that it was in the interest of Britain to concede to the demands of the Arabs in their hatred of the Jewish nation. Like the British, who were told that they would earn the gratitude of the Arabs if only they would prevent the immigration of the Jews to Palestine, America is now told that it will earn that same gratitude if only it will force Israel to give up the West Bank and curb immigration—steps that would purportedly cure all the problems of the Middle East, thereby stabilizing world peace and assuring the flow of oil. In the next chapter I will examine how this exceptionally implausible claim has been rendered plausible.

  3

  THE THEORY OF

  PALESTINIAN CENTRALITY

  The first casualties of the 1991 Persian Gulf War were not people but cows. For years, opponents of Israel had tended and nurtured a herd of sacred cows, unchallengeable axioms that had come to constitute the basis for a false and misleading—but very widely held—conception of the nature of the Middle East and Israel’s role in it. Only the harsh reality of Iraqi armor grinding over a defenseless Arab state was finally able to drive some of these creatures from the field of rational discourse.

  First among the sacred cows to be crippled in the Iraqi onslaught was the belief that all the turbulence in the Middle East was somehow the consequence of what had come to be known as the “Palestinian Problem.” Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, this untouchable assumption had been the linchpin of nearly all analyses of the region’s problems, as well as of proposals for resolving them. For years, not a day had passed without a spokesman for some Arab nation or organization declaring that the “core” or “root” or “heart” or “underlying cause” of the Middle East conflict was the Palestinian Problem. Those who made such pronouncements were always careful to refer to “the conflict”—in the singular—as though life in the Middle East would have been idyllic were it not for this solitary, frustrating sticking point. Consequently, the impression relentlessly presented to the media and the world was that all one had to do was to solve that Palestinian Problem, and there would be peace in the Middle East.

  The proponents of this account of the endless turmoil in the region were by no means only the representatives of the Arab regimes. The choir chanting the monotonous tones of the Theory of Palestinian Centrality included numerous Third World governments, in addition to the leadership of the then-still-vibrant Soviet bloc. With the help of the United Nations, this theory was ceaselessly proclaimed and endlessly elaborated.

  Nor did it take long for Westerners to join the chorus. At nearly all the diplomatic functions I can remember, from the day I first came to Washington as deputy chief of the Israeli mission in 1982 right up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait, Western diplomats of all ranks and extractions would solemnly point out that peace would not be achieved in the Middle East as long as the Palestinian Problem was not resolved. And each one of them was utterly convinced that this was so “because, after all, it is the core of the conflict in the region.” Thus, what had started out two decades earlier as a transparent slogan of Arab propaganda had assumed, through constant embellishment, a patina of self-evident truth—and had been accepted as such by many of the men and women responsible for the safety and governance of our world.
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  Then, in August 1990, came Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It is difficult to appreciate the astonishment with which the international community received this unexpected event. For here was one Arab country (Iraq) invading a second Arab country (Kuwait) and threatening still other Arab countries (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states)—all with no discernible connection to the Palestinian Problem, nor to anything else that was directly or indirectly attributable to Israel. Worse, a few months later, Saddam Hussein began to launch daily Scud missile attacks on Israel, even though he knew full well that some of the Scuds might undershoot Israel’s cities and instead hit the Palestinian areas in the territories (which some of them actually did). When Saddam was asked how he could possibly justify such callous disregard for the very people whose champion he was supposed to be, he replied that he did not concern himself “with sorting beans.”

  The true nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime came as a genuine shock to countless well-meaning officials the world over, including many who count themselves friends of Israel. After all, during the preceding decade, Saddam had been regarded not merely as unthreatening but as a friend of the West and the Gulf states, and he had been wined, dined, and fed extraordinary quantities of assistance and armaments based on this premise. During the Iran-Iraq War, numerous op-ed pieces in the American press by so-called experts on the Middle East advocated a “tilt toward Iraq” as serving the best interests of the United States. So when Western leaders finally realized that Saddam hadn’t been named the Butcher of Baghdad by his own people for nothing, it came not as an insight but as a revelation.

  Still, one cannot help but feel amazed at the amazement that then prevailed in political circles in the West. After all, one did not have to wait for the destruction of Kuwait to realize that the Middle East is rife with wars that are utterly unconnected to the Palestinian Arabs. Barely a year before the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq itself had emerged from a nine-year crusade against neighboring Iran, a devastating conflict that had claimed well over a million lives and demolished vast sections of both countries. And even the most cursory survey of the region would have readily revealed that such bellicosity had never been confined solely to Iraq. Ever since independent Arab states emerged in the first half of this century, virtually every one of them had been involved in wars, attempts at subversion and assassination, and unending intrigue against one or more of its Arab neighbors—and against its non-Arab neighbors, too.

  In North Africa, for example, Libya has clashed with Tunisia and bombed the Sudan, and in 1977 it narrowly avoided a war over the penetration of Libyan tanks into Egyptian territory. (These are all countries that Qaddafi has wished to persuade to “merge” with his.) Declaring its support for various “liberation movements” as part of Muammar Qaddafi’s “Third Universal Theory,” Libya has financed numerous efforts to topple other Arab regimes or assassinate their leaders, including those of Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Somalia. It has also announced a campaign to liquidate Libyan exiles in the West. Similarly, Egypt under Nasser tried to assassinate the leaders of Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. In 1958 Egypt attempted to impose its regime on Syria, and in 1962 it began a brutal occupation of the nation of Yemen that sputtered on in various forms for half a decade. In the meantime, for years Algeria coveted the Colomb-Bechar and Tindouf regions claimed by Morocco. It clashed with Moroccan troops along the border and finally went to war with that country in 1963. Since 1975, Algeria has channeled its antagonism toward Morocco into a relentless war in the Western Sahara, which it pursued through its Polisario proxies. 1

  No more pacific has been life on the Arabian Peninsula, where until recently South Yemen regularly launched subversive forces into the Dhofar in an attempt to tear this region away from Oman. North Yemen and South Yemen have each viewed the other as an integral part of its own territory, actively promoting subversion and intrigue against each other. Hostilities erupted into border incursions and armed conflict in 1972 and again in 1979, after the President of North Yemen was killed by an envoy from South Yemen carrying a booby-trapped briefcase. 2 In 1991, a union of the two was once again attempted, and it remains an uneasy one. When they had not been fighting with each other, both Yemens lived in constant fear of Saudi Arabia, which under its founder Ibn Saud raided not only the territory of Yemen but those of Oman, Kuwait, and the other Gulf emirates, as well as Iraq and Jordan. 3 More recently, Yemen had to contend with absorbing the hundreds of thousands of former Yemenis who had been forcibly expelled by the Saudi regime, which in turn feared Yemeni subversion during the Gulf War. 4

  The fact that Kuwait had fretted for years over Saudi encroachment on its territory, even though it was Iraq that had actually invaded the country in 1973, is especially worth contemplating. Only the second Iraqi invasion of 1990 seems to have stilled Kuwait’s fear of Saudi Arabia, at least for the moment. But Iraq itself had racked up an impressive record of aggression long before it attacked Kuwait. For years, it had carried out an energetic campaign of subversion and terrorism against a number of Arab states, including its traditional enemy, Syria, and its western neighbor, Jordan. Hostilities with Syria reached a peak in 1976, when Iraq closed an oil pipeline through Syria, leading Syria to completely seal its border with Iraq for two years. Iraqi efforts to depose the Syrian government continued throughout the Iran-Iraq War because of Syrian support for the Ayatollah Khomeini. 5

  Syria, too, qualifies as a predator of considerable standing. It has repeatedly threatened Jordan, murdered its diplomats, set off bombs in Amman, and even invaded Jordanian territory. It has vilified its fellow Ba’thists in Iraq and openly and tirelessly worked to overthrow the regime in Baghdad, its main rival for control of the Euphrates River basin and therefore of crucial parts of “Greater Syria.” Similarly, the reason for Syria’s ongoing and brutal occupation of almost all of Lebanon is neither to topple a regime that has already been vassalized, nor to change a border that it treats as meaningless, but to swallow the country whole. These designs go at least as far back as 1946, when both countries gained independence; even at the time, Syria refused to accept the existence of a separate state in Lebanon or extend it diplomatic recognition, a policy that has endured to this day. Since the early 1970s, Syria has declared Lebanon to be part of its “strategic defense sphere,” and it has flooded the country with its troops. In pursuit of a thorough Syrianization of Lebanon, the Assad regime, with impeccable impartiality, has slaughtered any Lebanese who thought to oppose it—whether Christians, Moslems, or Druze. To justify this conquest, Syria has always maintained that its forces in Lebanon are a “peace-keeping” force mandated by the Arab league (and “invited” into the country in 1976 by a desperate Lebanese government), and that only an all-Arab directive could terminate its mission. 6 Finally, in 1991, with all eyes on the crisis in the Persian Gulf, Syria did to Lebanon what Iraq had failed to do to Kuwait. It devoured its neighbor outright, then asserted legitimacy for its action with a fake Syrian-Lebanese amicability treaty.

  Just as Syrian regimes have always claimed Lebanon to be an integral part of Syria, so too have they always asserted that Palestine is part of Syria. Anyone who has any doubts as to what kind of relationship would exist between Syria and a Palestinian Arab state, should one ever come into existence, ought to consider what Syrian president Hafez Assad once told PLO leader Yasser Arafat:

  You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people. 7

  Indeed, Syria savaged Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon in 1976, and in 1983 it backed a successful military effort by pro-Syrian Palestinians to expel the PLO from Tripoli in northern Lebanon.

  With such a record of chronic aggression against their brothers, it can hardly come as a surprise that Arab reg
imes have also created problems for their non-Arab neighbors. Libya, for example, conquered a large part of the country of Chad, sent a suitcase full of explosives to its cabinet, and even succeeded in installing a puppet regime in the capital, until it was pushed out of Chad following the American raid on Tripoli in 1986. Qaddafi has trained special units to bring down black African governments and has been implicated in plots as far afield as Senegal. 8 As the Egyptian government has testified, he has been engaged in conspiracy on a global scale, commissioning the assassination not only of fellow Arab rulers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates but also of such non-Arab leaders as Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, and Zia al-Haq of Pakistan.

  Like that of Libya, Syria’s appetite does not limit itself to Arab prey. Syria claims for its own, for example, the region and city of Alexandretta in Turkey. The dispute was supposedly settled in 1939, but official Syrian maps continue to include Alexandretta within Syrian territory, and the government has on occasion assured the press that it fully intends to regain this land. 9 The Syrians have supported both Kurdish and Armenian rebel groups in Turkey, providing them with training and money and helping them infiltrate the country.