A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  If over the next generation the Arab world internalizes the fact that Israel is here to stay, this might produce a psychological shift in its attitude toward Israel’s right to exist. The Arabs, like other people, will not bang their heads against a stone wall forever. But if the wall itself is dismantled, if Israel’s most vital defenses are suddenly stripped away, the great progress that has been made toward peace over recent decades could be reversed at once.

  In one of his books, Max Nordau described a well-known experiment that the German zoologist Karl August Möbius designed to study the relationship between predator and prey. The experiment was conducted with two fish:

  An aquarium was divided into two compartments by means of a pane of glass; in one of these a pike was put and in the other a tench. Hardly had the former caught sight of his prey, when he rushed to the attack without noticing the transparent partition. He crashed with extreme violence against the obstacle and was hurled back stunned, with a badly battered nose… He repeated his efforts a few times more, but succeeded only in badly hurting his head and mouth.

  Slowly, wrote Nordau, the pike began to realize

  that some unknown and invisible power was protecting the tench, and that any attempt to devour it would be in vain; consequently from that moment he ceased from all further endeavors to molest his prey. Thereupon the pane of glass was removed from the tank, and pike and tench swam around together… All [the pike] knew was this: he must not attack this tench, otherwise he would fare badly. The pane of glass, though no longer actually there, surrounded the tench as with a coat of mail which effectually warded off the murderous attacks of the pike. 5

  No matter how compelling the reasons, there is no point in attacking where there is no hope of success. This elementary understanding is no less applicable to human behavior. It is precisely such an understanding that has been slowly evolving in the attitudes of the radical Arab regimes toward Israel. But it cannot be said that they have reached the stage of having fully assimilated the reality of Israel’s existence. Deprived of its equivalent of the glass partition, Israel might become the target once again of pouncing predators. This partition, Israel’s defenses, is made up of several important elements: the physical and human resources available to protect the country, and the material and psychological assets deployed for the common defense. But without a doubt, central among them is the physical partition that separates Israel’s cities from the vast eastern-front armies of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The separation consists of a wall: the dominating heights of the Golan and the mountains of Samaria and Judea, commonly known to the world as the West Bank, whose military value I now turn to discuss.

  7

  THE WALL

  On October 6, 1973, I was in my second year as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although this was Yom Kippur, the news traveled fast, reaching Cambridge by early afternoon.

  “Haven’t you heard? War’s broken out. Egypt and Syria have attacked.”

  Several of us, Israeli students studying at MIT and Harvard who were reserve officers in the Israeli army, said good-bye to our friends and quickly drove to Kennedy airport in New York to catch the first plane back. But that did not prove to be simple. Israeli reservists were streaming to Kennedy from all corners of the United States and Canada. The first Boeing Jumbo had already left, every seat taken. There was fierce competition to go on the second plane. I used all the pull and connections at my disposal (what we in Israel call protektsia), calling Motta Gur, Israel’s military attaché in Washington, and everybody else I could think of. Since I had served for five years as a soldier and officer in the special forces, I was finally able to get on board. The plane was bursting at the seams with doctoral students, computer specialists, physicians, and physicists, some of whom I knew but had not seen for years. For too many of them, this would be their final trip.

  On the plane, there was a serene confidence that within a few days, a week at most, the war would be over with an Israeli victory. But things did not turn out that way. The Egyptians and Syrians achieved impressive initial gains with their surprise attack. Syria sliced through the entire width of the Golan Heights, and the forward Syrian tanks almost reached the bridges across the Jordan and into the Galilee. The Egyptian army in the south crossed the Suez Canal, overran the fortified Bar Lev Line, and reached as far as the foothills of the Mitla and Gidi passes, some twenty miles east of the canal. Worse, both armies were equipped with new and unfamiliar antiaircraft and antitank missiles, which took a punishing toll from Israel’s air force and a less severe but nonetheless frightening toll of Israel’s armor.

  In Israel everything was in confusion. Two days into the war, the reservists had not yet been fully mobilized—and some of the troops were still arriving from abroad. By the time I reached my unit, it had already scrambled to the two fronts. We formed a makeshift force of “returnees,” equipping ourselves with armed vehicles and jeeps, and made our way to the front facing the Egyptian army When we reached the front the hemorrhage had been stanched and the lines stabilized, in preparation for the counterattack across the Suez Canal that was to come days later under General Ariel Sharon.

  Our job was to protect the armored formations at night from Egyptian heliborne commandos. We alternated between reconnoitering for marauding helicopters and guarding the perimeter of the tank encampments. Inside the perimeter the tank crews, exhausted from the fighting and from the endless job of tending to the tanks, would get a few hours of fitful, grimy sleep. On one occasion, in the pitch darkness that was enforced in the camp, I literally bumped into a buddy I hadn’t seen in years, and wild rejoicing ensued. But more often I learned, usually from news delivered in hushed tones, of friends who had been killed in the first spasm of fighting. I remembered many of them as children, and I wondered if their families had received the news. Many more were to die in the counterattack, including soldiers from my own unit whose framed photographs would later fill up the memorial wall in the unit’s modest library. But these were early days, and there was soon a tense lull across the front, the kind that comes after the first violent exchanges in any firefight.

  In the Golan Heights, where we were next taken, we found much the same thing. In fierce fighting, the Israeli units, outnumbered ten to one by the advancing Syrians, had managed to hold the line until the reserves arrived. The Israeli command of the Golan at Nafah had to vacate the sea to open terrain when Syrian tanks reached the fenced perimeter. Crews were having their tanks shot out from under them, and the surviving soldiers jumped into new tanks to continue the fighting. Entire brigades were wiped out. The officers were the first to be mowed down as they exposed themselves above the turrets in order to direct the battle. In several brigades the command reverted to sergeants and corporals, who joined the remnants of other units to fight with incredible, desperate tenacity, trying to ward off what Moshe Dayan warned could be “the fall of the Third Temple.” Later, the ashen-faced survivors—the regulars just out of their boyhood and the reservists who were clerks, teachers, and farmers in private life—would describe the feeling that at once overwhelmed and sustained them, that they held the weight of Jewish history and the very fate of the Jewish people in their hands. If they were to lose here, all would be lost. The line held.

  Once the other reserves had arrived in full, the Israeli armor went onto the offensive and quickly rolled into Syria. On the southern front, the Israeli columns that had counterattacked and crossed the canal encircled and trapped the Egyptian Third Army. Here the Arabs pleaded with the Soviets and the Americans to stop the war, which they did with a Security Council ultimatum. At war’s end, the Israeli army was twenty-five miles from Damascus and eighty miles from Cairo.

  Israel had achieved a stunning reversal. But the cost was staggering: In the pulverizing battle to keep the front from collapsing entirely in the face of overwhelming numbers, the army had sustained 2,552 dead—the worst losses since the War of Independence. This was proportiona
tely as though the United States had taken three times the losses of the eight-year Vietnam War in a period of three weeks.

  There was an important lesson here for both Israelis and Arabs. On both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts, the Arabs had managed to penetrate as much as twenty miles before Israeli forces finally checked them. If the war had begun not on the post-1967 lines but on the pre-1967 lines, and if the Arab armies had advanced the same distances, Israel would have ceased to exist. The Egyptians would have reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv from the south; the Jordanians (who no doubt would once more have caved in to the temptation to join in the attack) would have reached the sea, splitting the country in two; and the Syrians would have cut deep into the Galilee.

  Israel’s army was able, albeit by a hair’s breadth, to prevent defeat in the face of a surprise attack under the most auspicious conditions the Arabs could muster, including their throttling of the Western economies with an Arab oil embargo. By hiking up oil prices and denying the world economy the fuel it needed to run, the Arabs had mounted extraordinary international pressure on Israel, and Israel’s relations with dozens of nations were severed for two decades. When the United States sought to airlift emergency assistance to Israel during the three weeks of the war, it could not find a single country in Europe that would let the American supply planes land and refuel there. (In the end, Portugal agreed to allow the planes to refuel in the Azores Islands.)

  But despite such enormous advantages, the Arabs were routed within the month. That they had so little to show for an onslaught stacked so decisively in their favor was a crucial factor in inducing Anwar Sadat finally to come to terms with Israel. And indeed, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Israel and Egypt ultimately negotiated the Camp David Accords of 1979, the first peace agreement between an Arab state and Israel. While Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, it was agreed that the Sinai would remain for the most part demilitarized, with the bulk of Egyptian forces staying on the western side of the Suez Canal. Three zones were established in the Sinai delineating permissible Egyptian troop levels. An elaborate monitoring system was established, including a multinational observer force, to ensure that the demilitarization was observed.

  The fact that the Sinai is so large (more than twice the size of Israel and the West Bank combined) meant that any violation of the demilitarization agreement on the part of Egypt would leave Israel with sufficient time and depth to intercept an incoming Egyptian force before it reached the border. Since the only kind of peace that can endure in the Middle East is a peace that can be defended (the peace of deterrence), the only kind of peace treaty that can be sustained is one that allows adequate defense against its possible violation. Because of the availability of the Sinai as a buffer, it was relatively easy to achieve such conditions along the Egyptian border, Israel’s southern front. On other fronts, however, the situation was much more complicated.

  To understand the prerequisites for keeping peace on Israel’s eastern front, facing Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, one must first understand the building blocks of Israel’s military defense. Israel’s ability to deter aggression depends on three central factors: its military strength relative to that of the Arabs; the warning time it has to mobilize its forces; and the minimum space that its army requires to deploy in the face of potential threats.

  With regard to Israeli military strength, the Arab advantage in armaments has been mounting steadily against Israel for years. Since the Yom Kippur War the Arabs have spent more than $150 billion on arms and military facilities. 1 Saudi Arabia alone annually spends as much on its military as a major industrialized nation such as Great Britain. 2 Syria now has more tanks than the German army used when it invaded Russia. 3 To this arsenal are added the F-15S, AWACs planes, and Sidewinder missiles of Saudi Arabia, and the Hawk missiles and advanced artillery of Jordan—all supplied by the United States. To be sure, Israel has morale, training, and other qualitative edges over the Arabs, but with the vast purchases of weapons by the Arab regimes, the Middle East is fast reaching a point beyond which Arab quantity translates into quality.

  Military strength is also a function of manpower. In 1999, Israel’s population is roughly six million, as opposed to thirty-five million for the eastern front states of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. This advantage in population allows the Arab regimes to field larger armies, and it means that they can afford to keep most of their forces on active duty—unlike Israel, most of whose army consists of reservists who must be called up to fight. On the eve of hostilities in 1973, Israel’s usual contingent of sixty tanks on the Golan was bolstered by the arrival of the Seventh Armored Brigade, bringing the total to 177 tanks. The Israeli force was nonetheless vastly outnumbered by the Syrian active-duty force of 900 tanks. Israel’s defense therefore requires a capability of deterring or defending against an attack in which its troops are initially outnumbered by a margin of five or seven to one. This enormous Arab advantage in arms and manpower, which Israel cannot possibly match, makes the two remaining factors in Israel’s security equation even more critical.

  For Israel, warning time is a precondition of survival. Israel needs sufficient time to mobilize the civilian reserves that make up the bulk of its army. This consists of calling them up from their homes all over the country, assembling them in units, issuing them weapons and ordnance, briefing them, and then transporting them to the lines. To mobilize several hundred thousand soldiers simultaneously in this way is a herculean task, and it cannot be performed in less than forty-eight to seventy-two hours. (The Syrians have no analogous problem because their standing army is almost as large as Israel’s entire reserve force, 4 and they therefore need only a few hours’ notice to go to war.) Until mobilization is completed, the survival of the entire country is literally in the hands of the few thousand soldiers on active duty on the front at any given time. If they were to fail to hold the front until the arrival of reinforcements, the battle would sweep into the streets of Israel’s towns and cities.

  The situation in the air is even worse. For a jet fighter, the flight time between Jordanian air bases and Israeli population centers is five minutes, and it is only ten minutes from Syrian bases—while the absolute minimum time required to scramble an interceptor is three minutes, assuming that it is waiting in a condition of highest alert. This means that without advance warning of an attack, Israel’s coast and airfields could be bombed without a fight. Such a scenario is so fearsome and so plausible that during the Gulf War, Israel was forced to keep a large portion of its fighter force in the air. In many parts of Israel during the Gulf War, you could step out of your house and see combat aircraft circling overhead during prolonged periods—for an entire month and a half. Moreover, this was only possible because the Americans had announced in advance the starting date of the war. Such readiness is impossible against a surprise attack, so the air force relies heavily on surveillance installations that hope to shave seconds off the period before Israel becomes aware of an impending blow.

  Among the most important surveillance positions in the entire Israeli defense system are the “early-warning stations” in the mountain peaks of Samaria. These bases are high enough to be able to monitor troop movements and air base activity over the mountains in Amman and the other major cities in Jordan. At the same time, the high ground interferes with surveillance efforts aimed at Israel. If a hostile country were ever to gain control of these mountains, the situation would be reversed: The Arabs would be afforded unlimited surveillance of the Israeli coastal plain, while Israel would lose much of what it has in the way of an early-warning system. In facing a potential threat from Saddam Hussein, for example, these stations are critical and irreplaceable. Today, Israel’s surveillance positions on the crest of the Samarian mountain ridge can tip off Israel to an attack; if they were in Arab hands, the same positions would be reporting to Saddam about the activity of Israel’s forces instead. (Jordan, for example, has regularly shared surveillance intelligence with Iraq.)

  While ai
rborne and satellite reconnaissance is improving, these sources of intelligence are notoriously vulnerable to bad weather and maintenance problems. They are still prohibitively expensive, and in the case of early-warning aircraft, they can be lost to enemy missile fire. No nation relies exclusively on airborne or space-based early-warning and this is true for Israel as well. For Israel, there is still no substitute for a good mountaintop.

  During the critical first seventy-two hours of war, one of the most precious commodities the handful of defenders on the line can have is space. The Israeli army must have minimal physical room to deploy men and hardware at the outbreak of war. Already squeezed in the country’s present boundaries, it could not do so effectively if Judea and Samaria were lopped off, leaving the army to deploy in the streets of Jerusalem and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Worse, almost the entire zone of mobilization and deployment would be subject to artillery bombardment, which can be effectively directed at most of Israel’s major cities from the hills of the West Bank. Once astride this mountain range, an enemy could easily take aim at airfields, mobilization centers, crucial highways, power plants, and key industries. Such intervention at the outbreak of a war would spell substantial disruption of the entire mobilization network. By physically shielding the coast from attack, the wall of the West Bank is able not only to save the lives of the Israelis living below but to afford the Israeli army the time it badly needs to get the troops to the front (see Map 9).

  This is the crucial point to understand about a military buffer space: Space buys time. The distance the enemy has to cover before it can enter Israel’s populated areas, inflict enormous civilian casualties, and conquer its cities translates into the time that Israel has to mobilize. The farther the advancing column has to travel, the more likely it is that air harassment and resistance on the ground will be able to stem the advance and thereby purchase time for the mobilization and deployment of the reserves. The space available for such delaying tactics is called “strategic depth,” and NATO’s forces in Germany counted on a depth of 150 miles for tank battles involving roughly the same number of tanks that Israel has to face along its eastern front. 5