A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  The Gulf War made Iraq the Arab regime best known for its aggressiveness. Yet a full decade before the Gulf War, Saddam had sought to move on Kuwait. He amassed troops on its borders, rekindled Iraq’s alleged historical claims to the country, and proceeded to fabricate border provocations in preparation for an invasion. But then Saddam’s attention was suddenly drawn to what he thought were better pickings: postrevolutionary Iran, which he perceived as weak and ripe for plunder after the collapse of the Shah. Saddam swiftly renounced the border agreement he had signed five years earlier with the Shah and seized the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which abuts Iran’s oil-rich provinces. The result was the Iran-Iraq War, which raged nearly a decade during which chemical weapons and poison gas were used and civilian populations were targeted, exacting a toll in lives horrific even by the standards of this century’s bloody wars. 10

  Nor is the violence in the Middle East limited to aggression across borders. Many Arab regimes are also ready practitioners of violence against the citizens of their own countries, relying on force and the threat of even greater brutality in order to stay in power. This habitual willingness to resort to violence against their own citizens is a feature of most governments throughout the Arab world. Not surprisingly, many of them are military dictatorships. Thus, Libya is ruled by a colonel and a small clique of officers, as Algeria was for many years. In Saudi Arabia, not one but two armies (they watch each other) protect the princes from their own subjects. In Syria, an officer corps dominated by the minority Alawite sect suppresses dissent with the assistance of no fewer than five independent intelligence organizations (which also watch one another). To such a regime, not even the slaughter of a significant part of the population of an entire Syrian city is too great a price to pay for staying in power—as Assad demonstrated in 1982, when his tanks ringed the city of Hama, thought to be sympathetic to the Moslem Brotherhood, and leveled the city center, killing an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 civilians. 11

  It is little consolation that most of the movements for “democracy” in the Arab world, such as in Algeria and Jordan, are dominated by Moslem fundamentalists seeking not to break down and distribute the government’s absolute monopoly of power but to transfer that power—to themselves. With opponents such as these, it is difficult to judge which is more oppressive, the people’s current rulers or their would-be liberators. The difficulty is greatest in Lebanon, where a kaleidoscope of armed gangs of various persuasions have for two decades competed for the right to brutalize the country. This nightmare out of Hobbes has finally been ended only through the imposition of an even more ruthless Pax Syriana—a “peace” extorted through the application of limitless fear. Remove the Syrian boot, and the internecine violence will be unleashed again.

  Like Arab aggression across borders, domestic violence within the Arab states is also applied to non-Arabs. A powerful Arab nationalism regards the area from Morocco to the Persian Gulf as belonging exclusively to Arabs, despite the presence of numerous other peoples and religious minorities throughout the area—Berbers, Kurds, Copts and other Christian denominations, Druze, Jews, Circassians, Assyrians, blacks, and others—constituting a substantial proportion of the overall population. And while the presence of these non-Arab or non-Moslem peoples is usually tolerated by Arab governments, they are accepted only in a state of subjugation, never as equals. Those who have refused to agree to this arrangement have been suppressed, often mercilessly.

  In 1933, the Iraqi authorities massacred the ancient Assyrian Christian community and incited the Arab population to murder and plunder the survivors. Thousands fled the country. 12 On December 15, 1945, the Kurds of Iraq declared an independent republic that was immediately aborted by the Iraqi army. 13 The Kurdish quest for independence began anew in 1961 and was savagely suppressed. Tens of thousands of Kurds were killed and 200,000 were left homeless, but this was not the end of Kurdish suffering. In the 1970s, Saddam drove another 200,000 Kurdish refugees into Iran. 14 Hundreds of thousands more have been forcibly resettled in barren regions outside their homeland, a method perfected by Saddam’s precursor and hero Nebuchadnezzar as a means of destroying peoples. (Saddam likes to have his bust juxtaposed with that of the famous Babylonian conqueror.) The Kurds were promised at Versailles that they would at least be granted autonomy, but Kurdistan was subsequently incorporated into Arab Iraq because of Britain’s desire to maintain control over the oil of the Kurdish region of Mosul. The continued absence of any international interest in keeping the Versailles promise has given Saddam free rein in his efforts to “Arabize” the Kurdish areas. Still, Kurdish attempts to achieve independence continue to this day. One recent attempt was crushed by Iraq after it lost the Gulf War.

  Other minorities have not fared much better. Syria massacred its Christian community in the 1920s and drove tens of thousands of Armenians out of Syria after World War II. Under the Syro-French agreement of 1936 the Druze were promised autonomy in the Jebel Druze (Mount Druze) region of Syria, where they constitute a majority, but their efforts to assert this autonomy have likewise been ruthlessly crushed. 15 Nasser’s Egypt expelled its Greek Christian community in the 1950s and continued to encourage public violence against the Coptic Christian community for years thereafter. Even more tragic has been the fate of the Christian blacks in the southern part of the Sudan. Sudan’s Arab government has waged a series of campaigns of forced conversion, starvation, and chattel enslavement against them since 1956. Conservative estimates put the number killed during the height of this campaign in the 1970s at 500,000, but other sources say the toll is actually in the millions. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring countries, despite efforts by the Arabs to trap them in the Sudan.

  Thus, the penchant for violence of many Arab rulers has led to the continual prosecution of wars against Arabs and non-Arabs abroad, and the continual persecution of Arabs and non-Arabs at home. With such a record, it is hardly a surprise that these rulers have been paid back with a fusillade of assassination efforts, a considerable number of them successful. Listed chronologically, this gallery of victims is a who’s who of leaders in the Arab world, as one can see from the table below.

  Partial Chronology of Arab Violence Against Arab Rulers

  1949 President Zaim of Syria is executed by a military court after being overthrown by a pro-Hashemite coup.

  1951 King Abdullah of Jordan is assassinated by agents of the Mufti for holding secret talks with Israel.

  1958 King Feisal of Iraq is murdered, along with the regent, Nuri Said, during the revolution that ends the monarchy in Iraq.

  1960 Prime Minister Majali of Jordan is killed by Egyptian agents in an attempt on the life of King Hussein.

  1963 President Qassem of Iraq is murdered by the cabal of Ba’th activists and nationalist officers that topples his regime.

  1964 President Shishakli of Syria is assassinated by a Druze in revenge for the bombing of Jebel Druze during his rule.

  1967 President Boumedienne of Algeria barely survives an attempt by military officers to overthrow his regime.

  1971 Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tal of Jordan is assassinated in Cairo in November 1971 by the PLO in revenge for the massacre of Palestinian Arabs in Jordan a year earlier.

  1972 King Hassan of Morocco escapes the aerial bombing of his royal palace by renegade fighter planes of the Moroccan Air Force.

  1975 King Feisal of Saudi Arabia is assassinated by his nephew, who is then executed for the murder.

  1977 President Hamdi of North Yemen is assassinated, probably by a pro-Saudi group.

  1978 President Ghashmi of North Yemen is killed by an envoy from South Yemen carrying a booby-trapped briefcase.

  1981 President Sadat of Egypt is murdered by Islamic fundamentalists during a parade marking the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.

  1982 President Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon is killed in the bombing of the Christian Phalanges headquarters in Beirut.

  1984 Colonel Qaddafi of Libya is attacked in his r
esidence in Tripoli by the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.

  1985 President Numeiri of the Sudan manages to escape with his life from the coup that ousts him from power.

  1987 Prime Minister Rashid Karameh of Lebanon dies when his helicopter is blown up in mid-air.

  1989 President Renee Mouwad of Lebanon is killed by a car bomb just a few days after taking office.

  1992 President Boudiaf of Algeria is assassinated by an Islamic extremist, four months after his imposition of martial law to prevent an Islamic takeover of the country.

  1995 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s motorcade is attacked shortly after his arrival in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Mubarak escapes unharmed.

  1995 Crown Prince Hamad bin Khlifa Al Thani of Qatar ousts his father, Emir Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, in a bloodless coup and assumes power.

  1996 Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s son Uday is wounded in a drive-by shooting by unknown assailants.

  1998 Colonel Qaddafi of Libya is reportedly injured in an assassination attempt near Benghasi.

  For the sake of brevity, I have omitted the countless assassinations and attempted assassinations of lesser ministers, opposition leaders, intellectuals, journalists, diplomats, and minor officials. Nor have I focused in detail on the smaller Arab countries, which unhappily have not escaped this phenomenon. One scholar examined political life in the string of tiny despotisms that make up the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf and published his findings in 1977:

  Sheikh Zayid of Abu Dhabi had overthrown his brother Shakhbut in 1966; Rashid of Dubai had deposed his uncles in 1932; Ahmed of Umm-al-Qaywayn had shot an uncle who had just murdered his father; Saqr of Ras-al-Khayma had expelled his uncle in 1948; and, in a more recent coup, 1972, Sheikh Sultan of Sharja assumed power after his brother Khalid had been shot by his cousin and the former ruler, Saqr ibn Sultan. In Abu Dhabi, the core state of the federation, 8 of the 15 emirs of the Al bu Falah dynasty of the Bani Yas tribe, which had ruled uninterruptedly since the 1760s, have been assassinated. 16

  While it may be true that the frequency of such assassinations in the Arab world has declined in the last decade, this is primarily because the regimes have consolidated their domination over their populations (as in Syria and Iraq) and have drastically improved their capacity to wipe away all traces of internal opposition.

  A disturbing aspect of the continual bloodletting in Arab political conflicts is that many of its practitioners accept no limits to their violence, either in the means they choose to pursue it or in the victims they select as its targets. At least three of the exceedingly rare uses of gas warfare since World War I have been by Arab states. Nasser used gas in Yemen in the early 1960s; more recently, Saddam repeatedly gassed both the Iranian army in Baghdad’s war against Teheran and the Kurdish civilians in his own country. (In the only gas attack against the Kurds for which figures are available, two thousand people died.) 17 During the Iran-Iraq War, both sides incessantly bombed the neutral shipping of many countries. And in the Gulf War, Saddam’s flooding of the seas with crude oil and his positioning of military matériel at archaeological sites served notice that not even nature and history were out of bounds. 18

  But against the West, the use of such brazen violence has been the exception, not the rule. The radical Arab regimes have understood that the West is simply too powerful, and that frontal assaults on Western interests or nationals may therefore be too dangerous. As a result, these regimes have resorted to the much safer technique of terrorism. Terrorist warfare has allowed Arab regimes to attack Western targets while denying any responsibility for these attacks. Sovereign Arab states such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya have provided arms, embassies, intelligence services, and money to various terror organizations operating against the West and other objects of their animosity, thereby transforming terrorism that had been a local peculiarity of Middle Eastern politics into an international malignancy. For international terrorism is the quintessential Middle Eastern export, and its techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that invented it. The hijacking and bombing of aircraft, the bombing of embassies, the murder of diplomats, and the taking of hostages by Arab terrorists have since been adopted by non-Arab terror organizations the world over. Indeed, before a determined policy under the leadership of the United States curtailed its operations, Arab terrorism’s sphere of operations had grown to include the entire world outside the Communist bloc. Its victims, both Arab and non-Arab, were as likely to be attacked on the streets of London and Paris, of Bangkok and Karachi.

  Its attacks on the West notwithstanding, Arab terrorism has also exacted a terrible toll on the Arabs themselves. It has probably killed more people in Lebanon alone than in the entire non-Arab world combined. In 1984, Muhsen Muhammad, editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Gumhuria, lamented the penchant of Arab terrorists for choosing Arab targets:

  The number of terrorist organizations in the Arab and Moslem world has grown. These are organizations which kill Arabs and Moslems everywhere…. some of these were created by governments [specifically for the purpose of] killing [Arab] opponents, adversaries, emigres, and refugees in all countries of the world. 19

  True, not every Arab state is Syria or Libya. Although some Arab regimes are truly predatory, others are more often prey. Still, this does not alter the picture before us, a picture that is unpleasant to contemplate, but that must be understood if one is to form any reasonable opinion about the politics of the Middle East. Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of nearly all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab.

  So far, I have not mentioned the Arab-Israeli dispute. There is a simple reason for this: Virtually none of the above conflicts and none of the violence they have produced has anything to do with Israel. Yet it is undeniable that almost every discussion on the subject of “achieving peace in the Middle East” begins and ends with Israel and the Palestinians, as a consequence of a deliberate campaign to divert attention from the true sources of perennial turmoil in the Middle East. As we have seen, this is achieved by implanting belief in a false center of this maelstrom: the Palestinian Problem.

  Nowhere have the efforts to bury the true character of the Middle East been more intense than in the United States. When I first came there as Israel’s ambassador in late 1984, I discovered that every year the UN devotes not one but two full sessions of the General Assembly, each lasting close to a week, to promoting the Theory of Palestinian Centrality. In the first session, called “The Question of Palestine,” country after country, Arab and non-Arab, lines up to excoriate Israel for its various alleged crimes against the Palestinians and demands that Israel comply with its ideas of a just solution to the Palestinian Problem. These ideas often range from Israel’s gradual dismemberment to its immediate dissolution.

  The second session is entitled “The Situation in the Middle East.” To my chagrin, I discovered that this consisted of the same harangues against Israel, almost word for word, that were delivered during the first session. When I rose to speak during such a session in 1985, I asked about the purpose of having two separate debates; after all, if the same claims and arguments are to be made twice, the UN could save everyone the time, the trouble, and the money and have just one discussion. The only possible justification for this second debate, I suggested, could be to discuss the subject of the session’s name, the situation in the Middle East. I proceeded to distribute to the delegates a compendium of Middle Eastern violence for 1985, compiled by the impartial American Foreign Broadcasting Information Service, which regularly monitors news reports from the Middle East. I had excluded reports of incidents relating to Israel. “Those,” I said, “were discussed in the ‘Question of Palestine’ debate, in the UN’s Second Committee, in a host of Special Committees, reports, letters and other documents.” (After four years at the UN, I had to wonder if there was a forum in which this subject was not disc
ussed.)

  Given that 1985 was widely considered an “uneventful” year in the Middle East, this was a remarkable compilation. It was a catalogue of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, executions, coups, hijackings, and border incursions, alongside the outright war raging at the time between Iran and Iraq. The targets were diplomats, journalists, embassies, and airline offices. The victims were Iraqis, Moroccans, Sudanese, and Libyans, bearing almost every passport in the Arab world, as well as Americans, British, French, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Soviets, Japanese, and many others.

  Calendar of Middle East Violence, April 1985

  1 April Egypt uncovers Libyan plot

  1 April Amal hijacks Lebanese plane

  1 April Dutch priest killed in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon

  2 April Saharan People’s Liberation Army claims it killed 120 Moroccans

  3 April Sidon, Lebanon, fighting kills 54

  3 April Iraq bombs Teheran

  4 April Jordanian plane attacked in Athens by group calling itself “Black September”

  4 April Iraq downs Iranian plane

  4 April Jordanian embassy in Rome attacked by Syria 6 April Coup in Sudan

  12 April Islamic Jihad group bombs restaurant in Madrid, killing 20

  13 April Assassination attempt on Lebanese imam

  16 April United Arab Emirates oil minister escapes assassination attempt

  16 April Iraq downs Iranian plane

  17 April Amal surrounds refugee camps in Lebanon

  18 April Murabitoun headquarters destroyed in Tripoli

  23 April Iraq shoots down three Iranian planes

  30 April Iraqi terrorist plots against Libyan and Syrian embassies uncovered

  SOURCE: U.S. Foreign Broadcasting Information Service

  Such a list—a single month of which is reproduced in the table above—could hardly have been obtained from any other region in the world, because the Middle East has for decades consistently been the most violent area on the globe. Yet virtually none of the conflicts enumerated has anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Needless to say, none of the violence listed was found suitable for discussion in the General Assembly. The Arab delegates were quite peeved to be handed this compendium. By what right, they wanted to know, does the Israeli representative meddle in the “internal affairs” of the Arab world? These are all disputes within “the Arab family” and do not belong under the UN’s purview of international matters. (I was hearing this last rejoinder at a time when both Iran and Iraq were declaring that the road to liberate Jerusalem went through each other’s capital. On this, the Iranians at least had geography on their side.)