A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  The result was an unprecedented explosion of terrorism in Israel’s cities, coming on the heels of the agreement to end all terrorism. In the two and a half years after the Labor government signed the Oslo Accords to end all terror, two hundred and fifty Israelis died in these savage attacks, equivalent to ten thousand American dead. The people of Israel reached one conclusion: This is not peace. While many agreed to continue with the Oslo agreement, with all its flaws (Yitzhak Rabin described it as “being perforated with more holes than Swiss cheese” because its central framework had not been cleared in advance with Israeli’s military and security chiefs), they nevertheless demanded two things: that Arafat keep his commitments under Oslo and that Israel maintain the necessary security defenses.

  This is precisely the platform on which I was elected as Prime Minister in 1996 and which my government proceeded to implement thereafter. We have insisted that the Palestinians carry out their part in the agreement, most notably to fight terrorism and to annul the PLO Charter. At our demand, the Palestinian Authority annuled the passages in the PLO Charter calling for Israel’s destruction. This was done in the presence of President Clinton to make backtracking difficult. Our insistence of this symbolic act was the first step on the long road of Palestinian acceptance of Israel, but many steps remain. Equally, we have been prepared to withdraw from additional territories, but not at the expense of Israel’s security. These demands are consistent not only with the agreements we signed but also with common sense. They are the minimal safeguards to assure us that the PLO has abandoned the strategy of the Trojan horse, and they provide Israel with secure and defensible boundaries in case it hasn’t.

  6

  TWO KINDS OF

  PEACE

  By now, readers must be asking themselves if the attainment of peace is at all possible in this Middle Eastern morass of depravity and duplicity. If Arab politics is so predisposed to violence and strife, if non-Arabs and non-Moslems are hardly tolerated, if much of Arab society manifests an incorrigible anti-Westernism that finds its focus in anti-Zionism, is it even possible to conceive of, let alone achieve, a durable peace between Arab and Arab, and between Arab and Jew?

  I answer this question with a clear affirmative. This may sound surprising in view of what I have presented thus far, but there is no need for either surprise or despair. It is possible to reach peace in the Middle East, provided that we know what kind of peace it is we are setting out to achieve.

  The most important step is to recognize that there are two kinds of peace. The first is the kind we mean when we use the word peace in the West: open borders, commerce, tourism, mutual exchange and cooperation in areas such as science, education, culture, the environment, the curtailment of hostile propaganda, the absence of fortifications and standing armies, the elimination of military preparations and preparedness, and above all, the absolute certainty of the absence of any aspiration for armed conflict. This is the kind of peace that prevails in North America between the United States and Canada, the United States and Mexico, and for that matter between Canada and Mexico. It is the kind of peace prevailing among the countries of Western Europe, where you can literally cross the border from one state to another without noticing it until you actually have to buy something. (With the introduction of a common European currency, that too may be changing.)

  This is not to say that there are no conflicts, even acute ones, among these states. Canada regularly accuses the United States of polluting its forests with acid rain that American industry produces across the border. The United States has serious problems with drug smuggling along the Mexican border, not to speak of the entry of millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico into American territory. In fact, if you scratch the surface, you will find a multitude of grievances over trade imbalances, environmental problems, border controls, and the like harbored by each of these states against each of its neighbors. In addition, there are often national jealousies and bigotries, as well as historical rivalries whose psychological dust has not yet settled and that whirl up again at any time.

  Yet clearly these nations are irrevocably at peace with one another, because just as clearly they will not resort to war to settle any of these disputes. This is not because of a balance of power and the fear of the response that armed action might elicit from their neighbors. Certainly the more powerful among them would have no military difficulty in squashing their neighbors. But the reason they will not resort to force is that it is simply unthinkable—because they are immersed in a physical, psychological, and political state of peace.

  There is one attribute common to all countries that are in such a state of peace: They are democracies. They share a system of values that is inherently antagonistic to the initiation of the use of force. In this century, modern democracies have shown a marked reluctance to initiate wars. This is not to say that they have not responded to attacks, impending or actual. But even these responses, whenever they required a full-scale war (as opposed to a limited operation of a few days’ duration), have generally been undertaken only with exceeding caution. Witness, for example, the hesitation of the United States to enter World War I (joining only in the last year of the war, 1917), World War II (its fleet in Pearl Harbor had to be bombed first by the Japanese, despite the obvious threat posed by Hitler), and the Gulf War (in which the United States undertook a campaign to reverse naked aggression only after months of agonizing domestic debate). Even the Vietnam War, which many believe the United States entered too hastily, was characterized throughout by a marked ambivalence as to whether the war should be prosecuted, and ended with an American withdrawal as a consequence of growing domestic opposition. Similar examples can be drawn from the democracies of Western Europe. Indeed, in the postcolonial world it is difficult to provide examples in which democratic nations have pursued unprovoked aggression against other nations and have done so in full-scale war.

  One reason for this is that democracies require the consent of the governed to go to war, and that is not easy to secure. Parents will not readily vote for a government that endangers their sons in unnecessary military adventures. But there is a second reason connected to the first that is less obvious and that relates to the inherent predisposition of democratic societies against violence. After all, within a democracy, the use of force is strictly limited and applied only against violators of the law. Within the law there is more than enough room for conflict, competition, and contest. The sharper a dispute, the more encompassing the scope of the disagreement, the more likely it is to become an issue on the agenda of national elections. In other words, such confrontations are settled by ballots, not bullets. Other, lesser conflicts are resolved in parliamentary compromises or are adjudicated in the courts. In fact, the whole idea of politics in democratic states is the nonviolent resolution of conflict—not harmonious agreement, not even tolerable disagreement, but the dynamic reconciliation of opposing views and conflicting interests. The point is that this dynamic reconciliation is always peaceful; otherwise, the democracy is endangered internally.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that this built-in psychological inclination toward “conflict resolution” (a social science jargonism that happens to be useful in this case) is so ingrained in the minds of the citizens of democracies and their governments that they are inclined to apply it to all disputes. That is, democracies tend to resolve their external disputes the way they resolve their internal ones: by argument, even by heated argument, by cajoling, by applying various pressures, and very often by compromise—but not by resorting to force in the first instance, or even in the second or third. The peaceful tendencies of democratic governments are therefore a product of the practical limits that their electorates impose and of the moral constraints that the system of values shared by the entire citizenry sets upon them.

  The desire for this kind of peace—the peace of democracies—may be common in the West, but it suffers from one main drawback: It is not necessarily common elsewhere. In fact, since modern
democracies have evolved only in the last two centuries, this “internally enforced” peace, deriving from built-in reluctance of the citizenry to go to war, is rather new in the history of nations and in the history of conflict. (The warlike disposition of some of the “democractic” city-states of ancient Greece does not alter this fact, since neither their value systems nor the regimes in question were comparable to those of modern democracies.) Until very recently, we should remember, most of the world was composed not of democracies but of despotisms of one shade or another, and despots are under none of the inhibitions and constraints described above. They certainly have no upcoming elections they have to consider carefully.

  Worse, they exhibit innate tendencies opposed to those found in the democracies. For dictatorships, too, tend to resolve their external disputes the way they resolve their internal ones, except that here this tendency leads them toward, and not away from, the use of force. The very definition of dictatorship is the maintenance of internal power not by popular consent but by the use of force or threats of violence, a principle that despots are naturally inclined to extend to their foreign disputes as well. This is why in the last century virtually all the major wars and most of the minor ones have been launched by dictatorships.

  This issue used to be hotly contested before the fall of Communism in Russia. Many people in the West explained away the Soviet Union’s aggressive politics as “defensive” in nature, as they did the aggression that the Soviet Union encouraged among its clients around the world. This is no longer a plausible argument, since even before the final collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders occasionally admitted the unprovoked nature of their military escapades, embarrassing their former apologists in the West. Similarly, the attacks of international terrorism against the democracies were initiated by a coalition of Middle Eastern and East European dictatorships, and the full scope of their involvement in terrorism is only now being revealed.

  We can see the relationship between forms of government and the proclivity for war by looking at the cases of countries that changed from democracy to dictatorship and back to democracy. It is not happenstance that when such countries had military governments, they tended to initiate military action to achieve their national aspirations. The Falkland Islands, however tenaciously most Argentineans claimed them to be Argentinean territory, were physically seized when a military dictatorship ruled Argentina. Its democratic successor later agreed to enter political negotiations with Britain to resolve the dispute. Similarly, it was the regime of the colonels in Greece that sparked the Greek-Turkish war over Cyprus in 1975. The subsequent democratization of both Greece and Turkey has not ended the dispute but has diminished the prospects for a military confrontation. The armed conflict in and around Nicaragua, which seemed malignant and interminable, disappeared virtually overnight with the establishment of a democratic government in Managua.

  This formulation may not be foolproof, and here and there an exception may be adduced. But few would question the powerful pattern that emerges: Democracies tend toward peace, while despotisms tend toward war. Does this mean that a world inhabited by despotisms cannot have peace? Immanuel Kant may have been the first to grapple with this question in his essay “Perpetual Peace,” written in 1795, an age that saw very few democracies. Kant stressed the predominance of the first factor I described—the restraining influence of a concerned electorate—as the decisive factor for keeping the international peace:

  If, as is inevitably the case under [a democratic] constitution, the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise. For this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supplying the costs of the war from their own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and, as the crowning evil, having to take upon themselves a burden of debt which will embitter peace itself and which can never be paid off on account of the constant threat of new wars.

  Without democratic government, argued Kant, it is child’s play to slide into war over and over again:

  But under a [despotic] constitution… it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but the owner of the state, and war will not force him to make the slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces and court festivals are concerned. He can thus decide on war, without any significant reason, as a kind of amusement, and unconcernedly leave it to the diplomatic corps (who are always ready for such purposes) to justify the war for the sake of propriety… [The] glory of its ruler consists in his power to order thousands of people to immolate themselves for a cause which does not truly concern them, while he need not himself incur any danger whatsoever. 1

  Since the examples of Stalin and Hitler and their less successful would-be imitators were not available to Kant (Napoleon was just starting out), it must be admitted that his assessment of the problem was prophetically precise. His solution was to advocate a world federation of free countries strong enough to compel the arbitration of disputes instead of war. As the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, show, such federations fall apart or are of limited use when they include dictators who have the capacity to manipulate the organization in pursuit of their next conquest.

  The issue for democracies is therefore this: how to keep the peace when they are engaged in conflicts with dictatorships. (For obvious reasons there is far less need to ask how to keep the peace when they are in conflict with another democracy.) The experience of the last two centuries tells us that it is indeed possible to maintain peace under such conditions.

  In the absence of the internal restraints that prevent democracies from going to war, the inclinations of dictatorship in this direction can nevertheless be controlled by the application of external constraints. Even the most predatory of tyrants can be deterred from using his state to wage war if it is clear to him that he will lose power, land, honor, control of his country, and perhaps his own life if he persists in warmongering. Historically, this idea has been given the name of “balance of power,” and most recently, in the catchy slogan of the Reagan era, “peace through strength.” But the underlying idea is the same, and it is sound. As long as you are faced with a dictatorial adversary, you must maintain sufficient strength to deter him from going to war. By doing so, you can at least obtain the peace of deterrence. But if you let down your defenses, or if it is even thought that you are letting them down, you invite war, not peace.

  This was the tragic lesson of the first half of the twentieth century, and it has been carefully applied to Western policy in the second half. The basic difficulty for the democracies early in the century was in distinguishing the peace of democracies from the peace of deterrence, and the greatest tragedies of the century occurred when this distinction was not made. In 1925, the West pushed to have all military powers sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war forever. The democracies seriously believed that they could refrain from maintaining their armed forces and that dictators would do the same. While Japan and Italy, and later Germany, ignored the treaty they had signed and pursued a military buildup that enabled them to invade other countries, the West continued to abide by its pledge until the eve of World War II.

  In the face of Nazism, the democracies thus weakened themselves and strengthened their nemesis through a policy of appeasement that gave Hitler one military and political victory after another: rearmament, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. Not only did each triumph persuade Hitler even more firmly that the West would allow him the next victory, he gained immense physical resources with which to build his war machine: ten million more German citizens, a dramatically improved strategic position, vast new natural resources, and excellent industries, including weapons industries, all intact and ready to serve the Reich.

  But most important were the psychological
resources that Hitler amassed: His string of bloodless victories over the most powerful countries of the world allowed him to cast himself in the role of hero, as the champion and hope for the future of the oppressed Germans (and of other peoples, such as the Arabs). It was this image of genius and invincibility that made opposition to Hitler impossible, that robbed his opponents of their spirit to resist. At Nuremberg, German generals testified that in the early years of Nazi rule they had planned to depose Hitler for fear that he would ruin the country—but that his unbroken string of victories made it impossible to make this case to the German populace, and they were forced to leave him in power. 2

  With the fall of Hitler’s Germany and the rise of Stalin’s Russia, the West vowed not to make the same mistake again. The democracies promptly formed NATO, a powerful defensive alliance against the Communist menace, which had just conquered Eastern Europe and taken over China. Ringing the Communist empire with a chain of defense organizations, the American policy of “containment” was reviled as being warlike, intransigent, and an obstacle to peace through successive administrations from Truman to Johnson to Reagan. But it was nothing of the kind. The unflinching American stand of the 1950s stopped the Communist juggernaut in its tracks and reduced it to a seesaw battle of ultimately fruitless skirmishes for toeholds in the Third World. It was the staunch American stand of the 1980s that ultimately convinced the Soviet leadership to give up all hope of a triumph over the West and to forge peace with it instead. In dealing with tyrants, capitulating to their whims often accelerates the descent into war. Standing firm in the face of dictatorial demands is not an obstacle to peace, only to aggression.