A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  The promise of victory was especially beckoning, since all the Arabs had to do was slice Israel into two at its narrowest point, between the Jordanian border and the Mediterranean, where it was only ten miles wide. In a combined attack, with Egypt in the south and Syria in the north, even a mediocre Jordanian tank commander could hope to cross that minuscule distance swiftly and reach the sea. In fact, since the Jordanians probably had the best of the Arab commanders, the temptation for Hussein to join the attack turned out to be irresistible. Moreover, Jordan had the full strategic backing of Iraq. As in 1948, approximately one third of the Iraqi army crossed Jordan and by June 5 was approaching the Israeli border. Furthermore, after Egypt flooded the Sinai with 100,000 troops in May (in flagrant violation of the armistice agreements of 1956, following the Sinai campaign, which stipulated that the Sinai would be demilitarized), Nasser felt that from the old Egyptian-Israeli border he was in easy striking distance of the densely populated Israeli coastal plain. Tel Aviv, after all, is only about forty miles from the Gaza district, which was then under Egyptian control, and the Israeli city of Ashkelon is less than five miles away. Finally, Syria, poised on top of the Golan Heights, from which it had tormented the Israeli settlements in the valley below for nineteen years, could launch a quick assault from its superior high ground, penetrate the Israeli Galilee, and reach the vital coastal plain from the north.

  In hindsight, it is easy, as some do now, to dismiss the Arab military’s belief that with such promising starting conditions they could overrun Israel. Indeed, the Arabs were encouraged in this belief by political developments. Israel’s pleas to the United States, Western Europe, and the United Nations to help break the siege that the Arab states had thrown up fell on deaf ears. Three weeks before the war, when Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s vital sea outlet to the south, Israel turned to the United States and asked that it live up to its commitment to keep that channel of water open (a promise that the United States and the European countries had given to Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai in 1956). In Washington, no friendlier American administration could have been imagined. The president was the sympathetic Lyndon Johnson, the undersecretary of state was the supportive Eugene Rostow, the UN ambassador was the lifelong Zionist Arthur Goldberg. Yet when Israel asked that the written commitment that the Americans had given be honored, this friendliest of all possible administrations hemmed and hawed and said it could not find a copy of the commitment. 8

  The noose was tightening, and although public opinion was squarely behind Israel, the world’s governments did nothing. Israel stood alone.

  The mood of the country was somber. War was not new, and the threat of war still less so. But the last time Israel had experienced a full-scale military conflict was eleven years earlier, during the battle over Sinai. Although I had been born and raised in Israel, my own experience with that war was sharp but not traumatic. I remember as a seven-year-old taping the windows and pulling the blinds in case the Arabs attacked Jerusalem. My clearest recollection from that war is of the father of the boy next door, wearing dusty fatigues, sweeping into the neighborhood, splotches of sand still covering the floor of his army jeep. “Here,” he said with an outstretched hand, “this is for you.” He gave the children of the neighborhood Egyptian chocolate that he had brought from El Arish, a town in the northern Sinai that had just fallen to Israel. “I bought them,” he added with extra emphasis, to make it clear to us that he hadn’t just taken them.

  The Arabs didn’t attack our cities—that time. But now, eleven years later, as war rushed toward us, the windows were taped again. This time it proved necessary. On the morning of June 5, I was awakened by a deafening noise outside the apartment. I ran to the roof and watched in fascination as Jordanian shells exploded yards away from my building in the heart of Jerusalem. Most of the shells fell in open spaces, but a number slammed into residences, killing twenty civilians and wounding hundreds. The parliament building of the Knesset and the Israel Museum, housing the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, were also targeted but were not hit.

  This was a new sight for me. I was eighteen years old, and I had spent the last three years in an American high school in Philadelphia, where my father was doing historical research. In the latter part of May, as the Arab intention to go to war became clearer, I had taken my exams early and set off for Israel. My parents did not try to stop me. They merely asked, ’Are you sure there will be a war?”

  “Positive,” I answered. “The Arabs will go through with it. Besides, I want to see Yoni before the war starts.” Yoni was the Hebrew nickname by which we called my older brother, Jonathan. This sealed the argument.

  When I landed in Lod Airport near Tel Aviv on the evening of June 1, the airfield was enveloped in utter darkness, including the runways. After staying overnight in an equally darkened Jerusalem, I set out to find my brother. At twenty-one, he had been released a few months earlier from service as an officer in the paratroops. In the last week of May he had been mobilized again (Israel’s army in wartime consists of virtually all of the able-bodied men in the country called up for reserve duty). The problem was where to find him. “Look in the orchards around Ramleh,” I was told through the unofficial grapevine that instantly and mysteriously spreads classified information to people who need to know in Israel, and to them alone. “That’s where you’ll find Brigade Eighty.” The trouble was, there are an awful lot of orchards around Ramleh. The reserve paratroop brigade was bivouacked under its leafy shade, the better to hide it from possible aerial reconnaissance. I walked into one of the groves along the road leading from Ramleh to Gedera. Several reservists were preparing coffee on a makeshift stove. They were in their early thirties at most, but to me they looked far too old for this. They should have been home with their families, I thought.

  “Yoni?” One of them scratched his head. “Oh yeah, the young guy. Look in the next grove.”

  I wandered through the next cluster of citrus trees, but I didn’t find him. Then, at the other end of a long row of trees, I saw him staring at me in utter disbelief. “What are you doing here?” he asked, and broke into his broad grin as we ran toward each other.

  Over a cup of “military coffee” (a sickeningly sweet blend of coffee and residues of tea with which I was to become intimately familiar over the next five years of my own army service), I asked him what he thought was going to happen. “We’ll win,” he said simply. “We have no other choice.”

  The next time I saw him was ten days later, in a hospital bed in Safed. His unit had landed in helicopters at Um Katef, behind the lines of the Egyptian forces poised to choke the Negev, smashing their fortification and paving the way for the sweep of Israeli armor into the Sinai. From there they were taken up to the foothills of the Golan, where they fought their way up the steep incline nine hundred feet to the plateau above, on which the Syrian guns were still trained downward on the Israeli villages that lay spread like a map beneath them.

  Three hours before the end of the war, Yoni led a three-man advance squad to reconnoiter the storming of Jelabina, a Syrian outpost. A sudden burst of machine-gun fire tore open the neck of the soldier next to him. As Yoni leaned forward to grab the stricken man, his own elbow was shattered by a Syrian bullet, leaving the nerve exposed and causing horrific pain. He later said that as he crawled back to safety on that scorched field, bullets whizzing past him, he felt for the first and only time in his life that he was going to die. When he reached Israeli lines, he stood up on his feet.

  “Can you make it on foot to the field hospital?” he was asked. “No problem,” he answered, and promptly collapsed.

  Now in Safed, with the war ended just a day earlier, I entered the long orthopedic ward. His was the last bed on the left. His arm was in a heavy cast. He was the only patient in the ward who was not an amputee.

  “You see,” he said with quiet sadness, “I told you we’d win.”

  Seven hundred and seventy-seven Israeli soldiers
died in the Six Day War. In less than a week they and their comrades had purchased a brilliant military victory against those who sought to snuff out Israel’s life. King Hussein lost control of all the territories his grandfather’s troops had forcibly seized in 1948—Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. Syria lost the Golan Heights; Egypt lost the Sinai and Gaza. Israel, which before the war had been a tiny country, now became a small country (see Map 7). The border, which had previously been ten miles from the sea, was pushed back to the Jordan River forty miles away. The Sinai provided a large buffer against Egypt, as well as supplying most of Israel’s oil needs. And on the Golan Heights the tables were turned, with the Israelis gazing down at the Syrians for the first time.

  Whatever it was that had made the Arabs drop all caution in word and deed on the eve of the Six Day War, this was the last time they would unreservedly expose before the entire world their undisguised goal of annihilating Israel. They did not anticipate Israel’s preemptive air strike during the first three hours of the war, which destroyed the entirety of Egypt’s air force, the backbone of Arab air power. Later in the day, after Syria and Jordan attacked, Israel destroyed their air forces as well. (This gave Israel’s armored divisions complete freedom to maneuver on the ground with total Israeli air supremacy in the skies above, a devastating combination in desert warfare that was to disappear by the time the next war came around.)

  Israel did not fire a shot on the Syrian and Jordanian fronts until it was attacked from these lines. On June 5, hours before the Israeli operation began, the Syrians bombed the Israeli air force base at Megiddo, as well as targets in Haifa and Tiberias, and spewed fire at Israeli positions from the Golan. The war on the Jordanian front began when Jordan opened up a full-scale bombardment on Israeli targets. 9

  Thus my Arabist colleague may have been right in saying Israel fired the first shot in 1967—but only against Egypt, which in any case had already committed an act of war by closing the Straits of Tiran. Faced with the choice of either eliminating the escalating threats to its life or being driven into the sea, Israel chose to live. It took decisive and unforeseen action to avoid the fate that the Arabs had planned for it. This mood is captured in a story told among the Israeli troops during the tense days before the outbreak of the war, which Yoni related in a letter he wrote from the orchards of Ramleh on May 27, 1967, a week before the war:

  We sit and wait. What are we waiting for? Well, it’s like this: An Englishman, an American and an Israeli were caught by a tribe of cannibals. When they were already in the pot, each of them was allowed a last wish. The Englishman asked for a whiskey and a pipe, and got them. The American asked for a steak, and got it. The Israeli asked the chief of the tribe to give him a good kick in the backside. At first the chief refused, but after a lot of arguments, he finally did it. At once the Israeli pulled out a gun and shot all the cannibals. The American and the Englishman asked him: “If you had a gun the whole time, why didn’t you kill them sooner?” ’Are you crazy?” answered the Israeli. “And have the U.N. brand me an aggressor?” 10

  But that is exactly what the UN (and most of the world) proceeded to do. It would soon condemn Israel for refusing to be stewed in the pot that Nasser and the Arabs had prepared for it. This did not happen right away. The resolutions adopted by the Security Council, written under threat of veto by the United States, were initially “evenhanded,” calling for restraint and negotiations toward peace on all sides. But not the resolutions of the General Assembly. There, all the shame the Arabs felt over their defeat exploded into tantrums of impotent rage, which the Soviets and their servants joined for reasons of their own. Having “invaded Africa” (according to a prevalent Third World interpretation) by capturing the Sinai, Israel was not only the aggressor but a neocolonialist regime—not merely the tool of imperialism but an oppressor empire in its own right. All over the East bloc and the Third World, states severed diplomatic relations and condemned their newly discovered aggressor foe. China declared of Israel’s act of self-defense: “This is another towering crime against the Arab people committed by U.S. imperialism and its tool Israel, as well as a grave provocation against the people of Asia, Africa and the rest of the world.” 11 Pakistan asserted that it was “[n]efarious and naked aggression… against the territorial integrity of the United Arab Republic and the adjoining Arab States…. Israel is an illegitimate child born of fraud and force.” 12 In Bulgaria, it was felt that “[t]he adventures and aggressive actions of Israel arouse disgust and anxiety among world public opinion.” 13 And Moscow, which had helped to trigger the war by feeding the Arabs false intelligence, piously informed the world that “in view of the continued Israeli aggression against Arab States and its gross violation of the Security Council resolutions, the Soviet government has decided to sever diplomatic relations with Israel.” 14

  That all this could occur because Israel had succeeded in defending itself was no ordinary propaganda victory. Still, the Arabs understood that such condemnations, coming from the Soviet bloc, China, and the Third World, would not suffice. The shock of their defeat in the Six Day War led them to a fundamental reevaluation of their tactics. Having lost areas strategically vital to waging war against Israel, especially the commanding heights of Judea and Samaria, the Arabs realized that no easy military solution would be forthcoming until they first forced Israel to retreat to the vulnerable pre-1967 lines. This would require the exertion of enormous political pressure, and such pressure could be effective only if it came from one place: the West. Israel, after all, was a Western country dependent on Western, and especially American, support. The Arab states would therefore have to win over public opinion in the West by means of a lengthy, sophisticated, and comprehensive campaign. They would have to change the terms of the conflict so as to obscure its real nature and present it in a manner that would be plausible, even persuasive, to audiences outside the Middle East.

  For one thing, the kind of open declaration of intent that they had made so freely up to the eve of the Six Day War would have to be muted or even dispensed with. Obviously, it would not do to speak again of driving the Jews into the sea. To much of the world, this was simply unacceptable.

  New arguments would have to be marshaled to justify continued hostility against Israel. And what better proof of Israel’s innate aggressiveness could there be than the incontestable fact that it had come out of the war a bigger country than when it entered it? All the territories that the Arabs had lost in 1967, territories that had been used by Arab leaders as staging areas for a war that they themselves had brought on, were now held up as examples of unbridled Israeli expansionism. The consequences of Arab aggression were thereby presented as its causes.

  The Arab leaders now demanded that these same territories be handed over to them. That they have managed to persuade many people of the justice of their demand is, to say the least, curious. They present, after all, an entirely new theory in international relations. Never before have states that lost territory in wars of aggression assumed so easily the mantle of the aggrieved party. Germany after World War II certainly did not. Neither did the other aggressor states from that same war. In fact, there is hardly a case in history in which a repelled aggressor was permitted to demand anything, much less the territory from which his aggression was initiated.

  The wide acceptance of the idea of Israel’s relinquishing Judea and Samaria has much to do with the notion, promulgated in the UN Charter, that the acquisition of land by force should be considered illegitimate. 15 The advocates of this position like to remind us—frequently—that taking land by force is like stealing the property of an individual. But there is no small amount of hypocrisy in the fact that this principle is today so piously preached by states that only a few years ago were themselves ardently pursuing international empires spanning the globe—with force the preferred method of acquisition. When it comes to their own interests, these states, including Western ones, have no real regrets over past uses of force, and they continue to
use it to keep what they have captured whenever they see fit.

  Yet Israeli “acquisitions” of territories by force stand in marked contrast to most examples that one could adduce, including American actions against the Indians and against Mexico, by means of which the continental United States came into being. For Israel has at no point set out to conquer anything. It has been repeatedly forced into wars of self-defense against Arab regimes ideologically committed to its destruction.

  Of paramount importance is the fact that the lands in question—the mountain ranges of Golan, Samaria, and Judea—were all used as springboards by the Arab armies to attack Israel during the Six Day War and as staging areas for terrorism during the years before the war. Syria, as we have seen, used the Golan to threaten Israel’s water supply as well. In such a case, the argument over the use of force to acquire territory is like the argument over whether you may use force to take a gun away from someone who has already fired two shots at you and is about to fire a third time. Countries that have been the object of aggression have a legitimate interest in protecting themselves against potential attacks, a principle that has been recognized repeatedly in international relations, even in cases in which the threats were considerably less than those facing Israel.

  Thus, for three decades after World War II, the United States kept Okinawa (eight thousand miles from California) as a hedge against the possible resurgence of Japanese aggression, while East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were kept under Soviet control (with American acquiescence) as a hedge against renewed German aggression. The actual possibility that a “next war” would be launched from either of these utterly ruined, disarmed, and subjugated opponents was almost nonexistent, but neither the Americans nor the Soviets were willing to take even the slightest risk where their national security was concerned. Compare this to Israel’s case: The West Bank—the Judean heartland of the Jewish people—is only a few miles from the outer perimeter of Tel Aviv, and the Arab regimes surrounding Israel continue to arm themselves feverishly, rarely bothering to disguise their plans to use the territory against Israel once more should Israel vacate it.