A Durable Peace
Page 19
If the Palestinians’ wish is merely to control and better their lives, that wish could have been accommodated many times during the twentieth century. It certainly can be fulfilled in a final peace agreement with Israel. But if the Palestinians continue to harbor a desire not to run their own affairs but to free themselves of Israel’s very existence, that wish will bury any chances for a true and lasting peace. It is my fervent hope that the mainstream elements of Palestinian society will rid themselves of this poisonous ambition, so that a genuine and enduring peace may finally be established between our peoples.
The Arab-Israeli conflict, therefore, is not rooted in the territories that changed hands in 1967, nor in the refugees that resulted from the Arab attack on Israel in 1948, nor in any claimed lack of self determination for the Arabs of Palestine. The real root of the conflict is the persistent Arab refusal to recognize Israel within any boundaries.
These devices of Arab propaganda, especially the most recent one of self-determination, have been directed solely against Israel and therefore have received the credulous support of many governments. These governments will soon have to reexamine just how tenaciously they wish to support this claim. For the Arab campaign against Israel has developed what I call the Palestinian Principle, which dictates that any minority that does not want to be a minority does not have to be one. The Arabs, I should emphasize, were not demanding civil rights for the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. If that were the demand, Israel could have satisfied it by annexing the territories and making all the Arabs citizens of Israel or offering them full individual rights under Israeli law as resident foreign nationals who would retain their present Jordanian citizenship.
The Arab governments and the PLO summarily rejected such options. They refused to consider the Arabs of the territories living under an Israeli state in any condition, even as equal citizens. They were not interested in civil rights. Instead, they demand national rights over the territories—which means the creation of still another Arab state, another Arab regime, another Arab army. It is not enough that the Palestinians enjoy full integration in Jordan, a country with a solid Palestinian majority encompassing the majority of the territory of Palestine. It is not enough that members of the same people living across the border from Jordan in the West Bank and Gaza should enjoy equal civil rights and self-governance in any political settlement. On the contrary, we are told that the Palestinian Arabs of Judea-Samaria, a tiny area sixty miles long by thirty miles wide, should be given a state of their own, as demanded by the Palestinian Principle. That is, the Palestinians demand unlimited self-determination, with no limitation of potentially destructive sovereign powers.
What will this Palestinian Principle do to the post-Communist world? I described in the opening of this book how the international community is going back to Versailles to seek organizing principles for according sovereignties to various national groups. While Wilson at Versailles strove for a world in which each distinct nation has its own distinct state (a demand that the subsequent conferences could not universally fulfill), neither he nor his disciples ever said that each minority should have its own state—that is, in addition to a homeland in which the co-nationals of that minority constitute a majority. The issue here is not whether the Lithuanians are entitled to have a state of their own, independent from Russia. The issue, rather, is whether the Russian minority in Lithuania is entitled to have its independence from Lithuania despite the existence of an independent Russia. Similarly, the issue is not whether the Czechs and the Slovaks should have retained their union or formed independent states, but rather whether the Hungarian minority within Slovakia can legitimately agitate for independence despite the existence of an independent Hungary. Eastern Europe is replete with examples of minorities of one national population overlapping into the national territory of another people. So is Western Europe, for that matter. So are all the republics of the former Soviet Union. So is Africa. So are vast parts of Asia. Will each and every one of these minorities have its own state?
The United States is not exempt from this potential nightmare. In a decade or two the southwestern region of America is likely to be predominantly Hispanic, mainly as a result of continuous emigration from Mexico. It is not inconceivable that in this community champions of the Palestinian Principle could emerge. These would demand not merely equality before the law, or naturalization, or even Spanish as a first language. Instead, they would say that since they form a local majority in the territory (which was forcibly taken from Mexico in the war of 1848), they deserve a state of their own. “But you already have a state—it’s called Mexico,” would come the response. “You have every right to demand civil rights in the United States, but you have no right to demand a second Mexico.” This hypothetical exchange may sound farfetched today. But it will not necessarily appear that way tomorrow, especially if the Palestinian Principle is allowed to continue to spread, which it surely will if a new Palestinian state comes into being.
Ironically, the inevitable effect of the Palestinian Principle is to diminish respect for minority rights internationally. For if every minority can be considered a serious threat to the long-term integrity and viability of any state, then governments will find themselves seeking ways to suppress and ultimately eliminate all recognizable minority groupings within their borders. What this means could be seen recently in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serbian nationals were engaged in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against a Moslem minority that constituted a local majority. The mentality behind the horrifying efforts to drive the Moslems from their homes is not unrelated to the Palestinian Principle. For if every minority has the right of secession, it is not surprising that some wrongly conclude that they had better expel the minority and avoid the trouble altogether.
What I am arguing is that the Palestinian Principle has potentially divisive and destabilizing consequences in the search for a new world order. It is a political fragmentation bomb that will explode the civil and national peace of many lands, not only because the Arabs have promoted the incendiary idea that no minority must remain a minority, but also because the PLO until very recently demonstrated grisly methods to pursue its realization: terror, blackmail, extortion, and the co-option of the entire world stage without moral inhibitions or limits. Up until the collapse of Communism, it was possible for many governments to subscribe to the Palestinian Principle without thinking too carefully about its consequences for themselves. The Cold War not only froze the national conflicts within the vast territories controlled by the Soviet empire; it put a cap on the amount of leeway that contending sides in national disputes had outside the direct Soviet dominion. The United States and the Soviet Union may have supported competing sides in Latin America or Asia or Africa, but they made sure that things would not get out of hand. Now that the superpower rivalry has abated, the paradoxical result is less order and less security in national conflicts, not more. New champions of unlimited self-determination proclaiming their “national rights” can crop up in the most surprising of places, and if the feverish attempts of the arming of Iraq, Iran, and other countries with weapons of mass destruction is any indication, their capacity to acquire formidable weapons to exercise their perverted versions of “self-determination” is expanding, not shrinking.
This, then, is the new threat posed by a new Palestinian state in the Middle East. It is not merely the obvious physical threat to Israel, which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 7. It is not even the danger to peace and stability in the Middle East as a whole, which will surely be threatened by the emergence of such an independent state capable of purveying terror and other dangers. Even more than these, it is the impact that the creation of such a state will have on the problem of limiting the demands of minorities for sovereignty the world over.
At present, the chief contribution of the Palestinian Principle has been to obstruct the achievement of a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli dispute. For it is important to make one point
clear: No matter how the borders are drawn, any durable settlement would leave a significant number of Arabs living side by side with their Jewish neighbors under Israeli sovereignty. (Twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs.) It has long been recognized that being a minority is not necessarily a tragedy. All nations have their minorities. The tragedy is to be everywhere a minority This was precisely the situation of the Jews before the creation of the State of Israel. But the Arab rejectionists employ the reverse logic: For them, it is a tragedy that Arabs should be a minority. anywhere in the Middle East. They find it intolerable that some Arabs should live as a minority in Israel, even as non-Arab peoples live as minorities in their midst—and this despite the fact that the Arab citizens of Israel enjoy the civil liberties and rule of law that are denied to many non-Arab peoples living under Arab regimes.
The Palestinian Principle is not a standard that the Jewish state can apply to its Arab minority, and it is not a standard the Jewish people has ever applied to itself. The Jews who constituted significant minorities in many lands for centuries before the Holocaust (for example, 10 percent of Poland’s population) never demanded a state of their own in the areas in which they formed a local majority. Nor did the Jews, once they had attained statehood, possess twenty-one states and ask for more, as the Arabs today demand for themselves.
The Palestinian Principle has been, of course, enthusiastically accepted by Moslems all over the world, who see it as the logical extension of the idea of a Realm of Islam. The American writer Charles Krauthammer was able to point out that the intifada (the mass violence of Palestinian Arabs against Israel) is not restricted to the Arab-Israeli dispute—it is a worldwide enterprise directed at many non-Moslem governments by radical Moslem minorities demanding secession: in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan from the Soviet Union before their independence; in Kashmir from India; in Kosovo from Yugoslavia; in Xin Jian from China; and so on. The Palestinian Principle seems to mean that if there is ever a significant Moslem majority in any section of Britain or France, there will eventually be a demand for secession there as well.
If the Palestinian Principle is transparently false and obviously dangerous, how is it that it has been accepted by so many people around the world? The first reason is that the Arabs took pains to invent a new Palestinian identity in the West Bank, in effect creating a “West Bankian” people presenting the demands of an entirely new “nation.” If the issue had been presented in irredentist terms—that is, that the Arabs in Samaria and Judea wished to be reunited with Jordan—the conflict would have been reduced to a squabble over where the border should be drawn and the whole issue would have lost its hold on Western imaginations so captivated by the idea of self-determination.
The second reason for the virtually unchallenged spread of the Palestinian Principle is Arab oil. One cannot overlook the power and influence of the Arab League and OPEC, which in the 1970s transformed themselves into mighty propaganda machines for the cause of self-determination of the Arabs of Palestine. The Palestinian cause was critical for the oil sheikhs of the Persian Gulf, who were able to get away with subsidizing the PLO and anti-Zionist propaganda instead of actually shelling out the funds necessary to build homes for the refugees. Thus the participation of the oil states became a decisive factor in focusing attention on the Palestinian Arabs. It is quite likely that if there were 150 million Basques in twenty-one Basque countries controlling 60 percent of the world’s oil supply, incessantly agitating and fulminating for a quarter of a century about the need for self-determination for the Basques of Spain (all the while threatening oil cutoffs and aircraft hijackings if this self-determination were not granted), many would believe today that the main obstacle to peace in Europe, possibly in the world, is the “Basque Problem.”
In this regard the Arab world’s campaign against Israel is not the first time that totalitarian regimes have used a perversion of the concept of self-determination in concert with threats of force as a weapon against a small democracy. The most striking precedent for this strategy in this century is Nazi Germany’s campaign against Czechoslovakia. This campaign deserves a reexamination because so many of its particulars are being eerily reenacted today against Israel.
Czechoslovakia was strategically placed in the heart of Europe, and its conquest was central to Hitler’s plans for overrunning Europe. Though small, Czechoslovakia could field over 800,000 men (one of the strongest armies in Europe), and it had a highly efficient arms industry. To complicate matters from Hitler’s point of view, it possessed a formidable physical barrier to his designs in the shape of the Sudeten mountains, which bordered Germany and guarded the access to the Czech heartland and the capital city of Prague only miles away. A system of fortifications and fortresses had been built in the mountains over many years, making passage by force a very costly proposition, perhaps even impossible. We now know from the Nuremberg trials and other sources that Hitler’s generals were utterly opposed to an assault on the Czech fortifications. After the war, numerous German generals stressed the point, including Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German high command:
We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military operation because… we had always been of the opinion that our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient. From a purely military point of view we lacked the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the frontier fortifications. 36
Worse, from Hitler’s point of view, the Western powers had promised at Versailles to guarantee the Czech border against any aggressive attack. France, which in 1938 could field one hundred divisions (an army 50 percent larger than Germany’s), had agreed in writing to come to the Czechs’ defense, and Britain and Russia were committed to joining in if France did so.
Since an outright military victory seemed impossible, Hitler embarked on an unprecedented campaign to politically force the Czechs to give up the land, and with it any hope of being able to defend their capital or their country. The inhabitants of the Sudetenland, he said, were predominantly German, and these three million Sudeten Germans deserved—what else?—the right of self-determination and a destiny separate from the other seven million inhabitants of Czechoslovakia; this despite the fact that the country was a democracy and that the Sudeten Germans enjoyed economic prosperity and full civil rights. To buttress his claim, Hitler organized and funded the creation of a new Sudeten political leadership that would do his bidding, which was, in the words of the Sudeten leader Konrad Henlein, to “demand so much that we can never be satisfied.” 37 Henlein was instructed to deny that he was receiving instructions from Germany. As William Shirer, who was a reporter in Europe at the time, succinctly summarizes it:
Thus the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was merely a pretext… for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted, undermining it, confusing and misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose… to destroy the Czechoslovak state and grab its territories…. The leaders of France and Great Britain did not grasp this. All through the spring and summer, indeed almost to the end, Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier apparently sincerely believed, along with most of the rest of the world, that all Hitler wanted was justice for his kinsfolk in Czechoslovakia. 38
In addition, Hitler backed the establishment of a Sudeten liberation movement called the Sudeten Free Corps, and he instigated a series of well-planned and violent uprisings that the Czechs were compelled to quell by force. 39 Further, he secretly summoned Henlein to Berlin and briefed him, instructing him in great detail precisely how he should agitate for the so-called Sudeten independence. (Occasionally, Hitler would replace his principal demand for Sudeten independence with his second demand for reunification with Germany, literally mixing self-determination with German irredentism.)
Most important of all, Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels orchestrated a fearful propaganda campaign of fabricated “Czech terror” and oppression of the Sudeten Germans. The Czech refusal to
allow the Sudeten territories to return to their rightful German owners, Hitler prattled, was proof that the Czechs were the intransigent obstacle to peace. For what choice would Germany have but to come to the assistance of its oppressed brethren living under intolerable Czech occupation? Rejecting plans for Sudeten autonomy, he insisted on nothing less than “self-determination.” 40 Moreover, the Germans reversed causality, claiming that the Czechs were trying to precipitate a European crisis in order to prevent the breakup of their state, that the choice between war and peace in Europe was in Czech hands, and even that “this petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race.” 41 But there was a simple way to simultaneously avoid war and achieve justice, Hitler said. The Western powers—meaning Britain and France—could force the Czechs to do what was necessary for the sake of peace: Czechoslovakia had to relinquish the occupied territories.
And it worked. With astonishing speed, the governments and opinion-makers of the West adopted Hitler’s point of view. Throughout 1937 and 1938, mounting pressure was exerted on Czechoslovakia by the leading Western powers “to go to the utmost limit” to meet Sudeten demands. 42 Czech leader Edvard Beneš was reviled as intransigent. The Western press published articles lamenting Czech shortsightedness and its total disregard for the cause of peace in Europe, as well as the injustice of not allowing the Sudetenland to be “returned” to Germany (despite the fact that it had never been part of Germany). The British envoy who was dispatched to investigate the situation even went so far as to demand that Czechoslovakia “so remodel her foreign relations as to give assurance to her neighbors that she will in no circumstances attack them or enter into any aggressive action against them.” 43