A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  On September 18, 1938, under the gun of Hitler’s September 28 deadline, a meeting was held between the British Cabinet and the French prime minister and foreign minister, in which it was determined that democratic Czechoslovakia must accede to Hitler’s demands. Despite the fact that the West had promised in writing at Versailles to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia’s borders, it agreed that the Czechs must give up the Sudetenland for “the maintenance of peace and the safety of Czechoslovakia’s vital interests.” In return, the Czechs would receive from Britain and France “an international guarantee of the new boundaries… against unprovoked aggression.” 44 If the Czechs did not accept the plan and thereby save the peace of Europe, they were informed by the leaders of the free world, they would be left to fight Hitler alone. In Neville Chamberlain’s immortal words: “It is up to the Czechs now.” 45

  But in fact it was not even left to the Czechs. Chamberlain realized that if the Czechs were to fight, France and Britain might be forced to fight too. As the Czechs and the Germans mobilized, Chamberlain became increasingly hysterical about averting war by buying off Hitler with the Czech defensive wall. He shuttled repeatedly to Germany to try to arrange the payoff. Finally, minutes before his September 28 deadline, Hitler “agreed” to Chamberlain’s proposal for an international peace conference to bring peace to Central Europe. At Munich, Britain and France pleaded with Hitler for eleven and a half hours to “compromise” and take the Sudetenland peacefully. In the end Hitler agreed.

  Having grasped the fact that his supposed democratic allies had allowed themselves to become tools in Hitler’s hand, Prime Minister Beneš announced Czechoslovakia’s capitulation to the demands of the totalitarians. “We have been basely betrayed,” he said. 46

  The Western leaders returned in triumph to London and Paris. In government, in parliament, in the press, Chamberlain and Daladier were praised, cheered, thanked for having traded land for peace. “My friends,” said Chamberlain, “I believe it is peace in our time.”

  On September 30, the Czech army began its withdrawal from the Sudetenland, from the strategic passes, the mountain fortresses, the major industrial facilities that would have been the backbone of Czechoslovakia’s effort to defend itself. But this was only phase one of Hitler’s plan. The German annexation of the Sudetenland was followed by a renewed list of demands on the Czechs. The Nazis continued to invent incidents of violence and oppression against the ethnic German minority in what was left of the Czech state. Less than six months later, on March 15, 1939, the Nazi war machine rolled through the rest of Czechoslovakia. Shorn of their defenses in the Sudeten mountains, the Czechs were now powerless to resist. Phase two had been implemented. “It was clear to me from the first moment,” said Hitler, “that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution.” 47

  The Western powers again did nothing. Once more, all their assurances proved worthless.

  Unfortunately, the parallels to today’s effort to gouge the remainder of Judea and Samaria out of Israel are all too easy to see. Like Czechoslovakia, Israel is a small democracy with a powerful army much aided by defensive terrain. Like the Sudeten district, the West Bank is mountainous territory, a formidable military barrier that guards the slender and densely populated Israeli shoreline and Israel’s capital city. Like the Germans, the Arabs understand that as long as Israel controls these mountains, it will not be overrun. They understand too that a military campaign to seize these mountains is at present unthinkable, and that Israel’s removal from them can be achieved only by the application of irresistible political pressure by the West on Israel to withdraw.

  The Arab regimes have therefore embarked on a campaign to persuade the West that the Arab inhabitants of these mountains (like the Sudeten Germans, comprising roughly a third of the total population) are a separate people that deserves the right of self-determination—and that unless such self-determination is granted, the Arab states will have no choice but to resort to war to secure it. As in the case of Czechoslovakia, Israel’s insistence on not parting with territories strategically vital for its defenses is presented as the obstacle to peace. Echoing Munich, the Arabs repeatedly advocate “active” American (and European) involvement, in the hope that an American Chamberlain can be found to force “the intransigent party” to capitulate where it is otherwise unwilling to compromise its own security.

  That the Arabs have borrowed directly from the Nazis in this, as in so many of their other devices against Israel, is not surprising. What is surprising, or at least disappointing, is the speed and readiness with which this transparent ruse has been received, digested, and internalized by the elite of the Western world. Not a day passes without some somber editorial or political comment from august quarters in America or Europe asking Israel to voluntarily accept the same decree that Czechoslovakia was asked to accept. Israel is told that it should divest itself of its large Arab minority, making itself ethnically more homogenous for the sake of securing internal security and demographic bliss. The London Times, the leading newspaper of the world in 1938, published a celebrated editorial that summed it all up:

  It might be worthwhile for the Czechoslovak government to consider whether they should exclude altogether… making Czechoslovakia a more homogenous state by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race…. The advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogenous state might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district. 48

  Substitute Israel for Czechoslovakia, and Palestinian Arab for Sudeten German, and you could insert this same editorial into the leading newspapers of the West today without so much as raising an eyebrow. Israel, still the object of genocidal designs by some of the Arab world, has become in the view of many Western opinion-leaders the intransigent party, the obstacle to peace; Arabs who seek Israel’s destruction and say so openly within the Arab world are often presented as reasoned and moderate.

  We now know that the propaganda weapon of “self-determination” is aimed at the Achilles’ heel of the West. Westerners, and in particular Americans with their tradition of inalienable rights and sympathies for national freedom, find it easy to identify with the exaggerated national aspirations of the Palestinians today, just as others found themselves moved by the plight of the German ethnic nationals in Czechoslovakia in the time of Hitler. Thus the argument of self-determination has been able to succeed where earlier Arab efforts to portray the conflict as one over refugees or Israeli territorial aggression had largely failed. As soon as the Arabs recognized the susceptibility of the West to the image of an “oppressed people struggling to be free,” the entire Arab propaganda machine was retooled to churn out arguments on this basis. The Arabs were suddenly capable of persuading Western opinion-makers of what they had been saying since 1967: that Israel’s presence in the territories was based on an inherently immoral act, and that any effort to strengthen the Jewish state was therefore fundamentally wrong as long as it hung on to these territories.

  Two things greatly assisted in driving home these ideas to the West: the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, and the ongoing controversy over the Jewish settlements in the territories. In recent years these issues have served as lightning rods in the campaign against Israel, focusing all the anti-Israeli energy in the international scene and directing it to reverse the great injustices that Israel has allegedly committed against the Palestinian Arabs.

  The intifada came as a godsend to a PLO that had been losing ground in the Arab world and internationally ever since 1982, when the Israeli army had entered Lebanon, destroying the PLO bases that had been built up there for over a decade, and depriving the PLO of the staging area it needed to launch attacks against Israel. An indication of how low the PLO’s fortunes had sunk came in 1987, when an Israeli bus was bombed by PLO terrorists in Jerusalem, prompting (again, for the first time in anyone’s memory) Palestinian Arab l
eaders in the territories to condemn this act of terror and those responsible for it. Such a brazen act of repudiation against their own “sole legitimate representative” was what the PLO had most feared for years, and with good reason.

  Meanwhile, although it was far from paradise, life in the territories had been steadily improving for years. The West Bank that Israel had found in 1967 had been only lightly touched by the twentieth century. There was scarcely any industry, medical treatment was primitive, and higher education did not exist. The vast majority of the residents lived in homes without electricity or running water, and most of the women were illiterate.

  Soon after the Six Day War, Israel adopted a liberal policy aimed at radically improving the lives of the Arabs. Universal education was instituted, universities were opened, hospitals were built, and modern roads were cut into the hills. By 1985, the number of telephone subscribers had grown by 400 percent, ownership of automobiles had risen by 500 percent, and the annual rate of construction in Judea and Samaria had risen by 1,000 percent. By 1986, 91 percent of Arab homes in Judea and Samaria had electricity (as opposed to 23 percent under Jordan), 74 percent of homes had refrigerators (as opposed to 5 percent), and 83 percent of homes were equipped with stoves (as opposed to 5 percent). By 1987, these Palestinian Arabs had become the most educated segment in the Arab world, infant mortality had dropped drastically, and the economy had grown by an amazing 40 percent. 49 The improvement in Gaza was even more dramatic. Ironically, the Palestinian Arabs were also enjoying rights denied to other Arabs in the Middle East, with a press consisting of newspapers representing various factions (some openly sympathetic to the PLO), and the right to appeal all government decisions directly to the democratic Israeli court system. Furthermore, Israel kept the Allenby Bridge to Jordan open, affording every Palestinian Arab the right to visit other Arab countries and see whether living conditions were better elsewhere. Most of them decided they were better off in the West Bank.

  This is not to say that the Arabs in the territories had suddenly become Zionists or acquiesced in Israeli control. That is never the case with a population living under military government, especially if that government must contend with the constant threat of terrorism. Palestinian Arabs have thus had to go through such trying experiences as roadblocks, identity checks, curfews, closings of workplaces and schools, and searches of their homes. And there has been no option for speedily bringing this state of affairs to an end. During the twenty years after the Six Day War the territories’ political future was kept in limbo, first by the unwillingness of Israeli governments immediately after 1967 to annex or bargain away the territories, and then after the Camp David Accords of 1978, when the Arab side refused to follow through on the agreed-upon negotiations for determining the future of the territories. As a result, the Palestinian Arabs inhabiting these territories lived for over two decades under military administration, without knowing what the future disposition of the territories would be. Such uncertainty produces inevitable political tensions that a final political settlement would otherwise reduce. For example, the Arabs of the Galilee lived uneasily under an Israeli military administration during the 1950s and became full-fledged citizens of Israel once that administration was removed. The decades that have passed since then may not have been idyllic, but the fact that Israel’s Arab citizens can take part in Israeli society, and that they have a mechanism for political expression (including representation in the Knesset), has produced a relatively quiet coexistence for Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens that has defied the earlier prognostications of many.

  But no such definitive political settlement or mechanism for political expression was to be found in the territories. Virtually the entire Arab world rejected the Camp David Accords, refusing to rescind its totalist and immediate demand for a Palestinian state in the territories, thereby making it impossible to make progress along the path of negotiations with Israel. Thus, by 1987, two decades after the Six Day War, a new generation of Arabs had grown up in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that was at once uncertain about the future of these areas and continuously subjected to virulent PLO agitation that filled the political void. Inevitably, this generation adopted ever more extreme and implacable positions.

  But here too the PLO could not deliver on its own incitements, and increasingly the rage of the younger Palestinian Arabs was directed not only against Israel but against the leadership of the PLO itself, which was seen as living the good life in villas along the Côte d’Azur or on the languorous beaches of Tunisia, on the other side of the Mediterranean. Like their troubled counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world who are seduced by the facile promises of religious fanaticism, more and more of these youngsters were turning to the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement as a vehicle to vent their rage. Fundamentalism spreads most rapidly in poverty-stricken areas and is therefore at least in part a by-product of the Arab world’s investment in weapons as a substitute for refugee rehabilitation.

  This was the background for the outbreak of the “intifada,” which unleashed these frustrations into widespread violence. The intifada began on December 8, 1987, when an Israeli truck accidentally ran down four Palestinian Arabs in Jebalya, near Gaza. Within hours the rumor spread that this was a deliberate act of murder, touching off weeks of mass rioting. Sensing a chance to regain its standing, the PLO joined in fanning the flames. On the day after the accident, Al-Fajr, a pro-PLO newspaper in Jerusalem, described it as “maliciously perpetrated.” 50 In Baghdad, Arafat used the frenzy of the rioting as an excuse to promise that Israel was about to be annihilated:

  O heroic sons of the Gaza Strip, O proud sons of the [West] Bank, O heroic sons of the Galilee, O steadfast sons of the Negev: the fires of revolution against the Zionist invaders will not fade out… until our land—all our land—has been liberated from these usurping invaders. 51

  Arafat sometimes has let his guard down. Here he was summoning Arabs to rise up and liberate “all our land,” in which he specifically includes not only the West Bank but the Galilee and the Negev—that is, Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries. And when Bethlehem’s moderate Christian mayor Elias Freij suggested a temporary halt to the violence, Arafat responded: “Whoever thinks of stopping the intifada before it achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest.” 52

  Within a few weeks this violence was being organized and funded by the PLO, gathering Arab youths into “intifada committees” that really believed what Arafat told them: that victory was at hand. They attacked Israeli civilian traffic with rocks and gasoline grenades and enforced repeated strikes by setting up roadblocks to prevent Arabs from going to work, firebombing Arab stores, and threatening Arab merchants who tried to keep their shops open. Raiding the schools during class time and forcing the children into the street, the activists made their riots look more popular and simultaneously increased the tragic toll of children among the intifada’s casualties. Afraid of being outdone, the fundamentalist Hamas movement organized rival committees, and for the next four years the two networks of violence competed in trying to push the Palestinian population to bloodshed.

  In all this the Israeli army did precisely what is required of it by the Fourth Geneva Convention: It tried to defend the Arab and Jewish civilian populations by patrolling the highways, dismantling the roadblocks, and arresting the instigators of the violence. * The intifada “committees” responded by attacking the soldiers with axes, bricks, and gasoline grenades—gaining glory for themselves and media coverage for the PLO. The PLO sent out an order not to use guns, lest they spoil the underdog image of the uprising and provoke the army to take serious action.

  The West may have imagined that the young Arab hotheads in Nablus wished for nothing more than the liberation of their backyard, but the “committees” saw it otherwise. Their goals were just as Arafat and the Hamas had dictated them: to drive the Jews from every inch of Israel. They published widely circulated Arabic-language communiqués explaining this goal to those they expecte
d to follow them. A leaflet circulated by Arafat’s Fatah faction, dated January 21, 1991, said that Jews were “descendants of monkeys and pigs,” the inference being to treat them accordingly. The Hamas, in a typical counterleaflet, declared, “There will be no negotiations with the enemy. There will be no concession on even one centimeter of the land of Palestine. The way to liberation is through jihad.” As for their Jewish neighbors in Judea and Samaria, the leaders of the intifada called upon their followers to “burn the ground out from under their feet.” 53

  On rare occasions, the Western press actually bothered to send a translator along and interview some of the intifada leaders about what they wanted. When Bob Simon of CBS News tried this novel approach, he received a straightforward answer from the leader of a group of seven masked intifada activists he interviewed: “I want all of Palestine, all of it entirely…. Palestine is indivisible. Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Galilee, Nazareth—all of these are parts of Palestine.” 54 None of these “parts of Palestine” is on the West Bank. These are pre-1967 areas of Israel, the regions of densest Jewish population, which the intifada’s leaders believed would eventually fall into their hands.

  But after a few months, all but the most extreme grew tired of pursuing this chimera, and the intifada began to lose its glitter. The interminable strike destroyed the booming economy that had been painstakingly built up since 1967, ruining businesses and impoverishing many. Law enforcement was transferred into the hands of competing gangs of local toughs funded and directed by competing PLO factions, * who used their power to abuse anyone they considered to be “collaborators“: the well-to-do, the educated, political rivals, and so on. Indeed, the great majority of intifada violence ended up turning inward: against rival factions and anyone else considered undesirable. In 1990, the third year of the intifada, the total number of people killed in this grisly inter-Arab strife in the territories was one hundred, as compared to a total of fifty killed in confrontations with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a ratio of two to one. 55 The bodies of scores of Arabs were discovered covered with burns, swollen from beatings, disemboweled, dismembered, decapitated. Wives of “collaborators” were raped, and their children molested and beaten as warnings. The intifada was literally devouring its children.