A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  In addition, the topography of the Judean and Samarian mountains is particularly well suited for the delaying actions necessary for Israel’s defense. To an invader from the east, this range is an extraordinary obstacle that must be overcome to reach the Israeli coastline. Such an invader enters the West Bank in the Jordan River Valley, which is the lowest point on earth, more than a thousand feet below sea level. He then has to fight his way up a cliff face that rises a daunting three to four thousand feet within a space of seven to nine miles. This is terrain that, with the exception of a few tortuous routes, is virtually impassable to tanks and other heavy equipment. No amount of electronic gadgetry can replace a stone wall thousands of feet high as an obstacle to war. The West Bank thus provides Israel not only with strategic depth but with strategic height.

  In withdrawing from the Sinai, Israel took upon itself considerable risks, but not ones that immediately jeopardized its existence. For if the Egyptians were to violate the peace treaty by moving substantial forces into the Sinai, it would take these forces several days to cover the 120 miles from the Suez Canal to the border of Israel. This would give Israel sufficient time to mobilize its ground forces and intercept the Egyptian expedition in the desert before it reached the Israeli border. By contrast, the distance from the West Bank to the Mediterranean is only ten miles. Were Israel to vacate the West Bank, hostile forces could cover these distances in a matter of hours.

  It is often difficult for non-Israelis to grasp just how tiny Israel is and what kind of military odds it faces. I suppose this difficulty arises from the string of Israeli victories, extracted from the teeth of extinction. These tend to obscure the fact that one defeat for Israel means the last defeat. Further, because of their lack of familiarity with Israel’s geographical and topographical realities, people in the West have a great difficulty understanding that Israel’s position vis-à-vis the Arabs could change from one of relative strength to one of extreme vulnerability by shifting the border “just a few miles.”

  How is it possible that the physical circumstances of the country that the press and television crews of the entire world cover perhaps more than any other are so little understood by millions? After all, the map of Israel appears routinely on the television nightly news. But there’s the rub: The map, with no reference to scale, is usually designed to emphasize Israel and its “occupation” of the West Bank, which the viewer naturally believes to be, not thirty miles wide, but a substantial piece of real estate—like, say, the west bank of the Mississippi, which stretches a thousand miles to the Rockies.

  American visitors to Israel are often astonished at its tininess. In this they echo Mark Twain, who observed that “the State of Missouri could be split into three Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for part of another—possibly a whole one.” 6

  It was only during the Gulf War, when the focus on Iraq required a larger map of the region that showed Israel to be the minuscule thumbprint that it is, that many Western viewers gasped in amazement. But not even that conveyed Israel’s microscopic size compared with the Arab world. The territory of the Arab countries is far larger than the land mass of the United States. Israel in the pre-1967 boundaries is smaller than the state of Maryland, and the West Bank is a quarter that size. 7 To put it another way, if the Arab world were imagined as a football field, Israel could easily fit between the goalposts on one end of the field. Its population is six million, less than the population of greater Los Angeles, as compared with over 150 million Arabs. Further, the Arabs’ fantastic petrodollar wealth has allowed them to invest unlimited funds in buying the latest weapons and building formidable arsenals. Consequently, Israel’s army is one-sixth the size of the combined armies directly facing it and one-seventh the size of those of the entire Arab world. 8 If ever in the history of nations there was a clear-cut case of David facing Goliath, this is it.

  Israel has had to face enemies on its eastern front who in short order could field thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, and rockets, and millions of men, reminiscent of the eastern front faced by NATO. But whereas the distance between the Warsaw Pact lines and the English Channel was a thousand miles, Israel’s current width from its eastern front to the sea is forty miles. This is bad enough, but Israel is now being seriously asked to reduce that distance to ten miles. Against such odds, it could not survive.

  I have a special kind of familiarity with these distances. It is an Israeli dictum that you get to know the country through your feet, a cliché immortalized by endless blisters that Israelis acquire during military service. When I was in the army, we used to hike the distance “from sea to sea” in a day’s march. We’d fill up a canteen with sea water from the Mediterranean at five in the morning and empty it into the Sea of Galilee at five in the evening—twelve hours to cross the country on foot from west to east. This one-day trek crosses Israel in its present width. Its previous width lent itself to a brisk run, which is what we used to do when I entered the army a few weeks after the Six Day War. The paratroop base where I did basic training was situated right opposite Tuklarem, on the just-erased Jordanian border. We used to run from the base to the sea in a little over an hour.

  How can someone living in America or Britain or France comprehend the vulnerability of a country of such minuscule dimensions? A plane trip from Montreal to Miami along the narrower north-south dimension of the United States takes three hours. I recently flew into Israel with the same kind of jetliner, which was flying east and circled back for the landing at Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. From the time it crossed the Mediterranean shoreline to the moment it passed over the old border, two minutes had elapsed. By the time it reached the turn (coming up over Jerusalem), another minute had elapsed. If it had continued eastward it would have crossed into Jordanian air space two minutes later. In other words, compared to the three hours it takes to fly across America’s narrower dimension, it takes five minutes to do so in Israel. A jet fighter can cover the distance in three.

  How to defend such a speck of territory against forces that approach the size of NATO’s is a tactician’s nightmare. It is a question that was once asked of me in the heart of Africa. The head of an African state with which Israel had no relations had invited me on a private and unofficial visit. After graciously receiving me, the African leader explained that he was no enemy of Israel, but as he was a friend of the Palestinians, he wanted to know why we could not just give them the West Bank and be done with it. I took one of the paper napkins that were served with the coffee and proceeded to draw the country’s dimensions, the West Bank, and the forces arrayed against Israel in the east. “Mr. President,” I said, “you’re a military man. Here, why don’t you draw the minimal borders necessary for our defense?” He said he saw my point.

  In fact somebody did draw a map. That somebody was none other than the American Joint Chiefs of Staff. On June 29, 1967, eighteen days after the Six Day War, the then U.S. secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, asked the joint chiefs to submit a position paper outlining the minimal territory Israel would need to protect itself, “without regard to political forces.” The Pentagon proceeded to draw a map based on purely military considerations, well before political ones were introduced under Arab pressure to muddy up the simple military facts. The map is reproduced as Map 11, and the report accompanying it is in Appendix G. It recommends that Israel retain four-fifths of the territories (not counting the Sinai). This includes most of the West Bank and all of the Golan Heights. The only area that the Pentagon thought Israel could afford not to annex was the eastern slope of Samaria facing the Jordan River. This was the opinion of the objective, apolitical military planners of the U.S. Department of Defense.

  Twenty-one years later, in 1988, one hundred retired U.S. generals and admirals petitioned the American administration, arguing that the Pentagon’s conclusion from 1967 “is even more valid today“:

  3. 1920 The Jewish National Home Under British Administration

  4. 1922 The
Jewish National Home After Creation of Transjordan

  5. 1947 UN Partition Plan

  6. 1949 Armistice Lines After War of Independence

  7. 1967 Armistice Lines After Six Day War

  8. 1992 Israel Before the Oslo Accords

  9. Israel’s Strategic Vulnerability 1949–1967

  10. Israel’s Exposed Shoreline 1949–1967

  11. The Pentagon Plan for Israel’s Security Needs June 18, 1967

  12.1999 Israel After the Oslo Accords

  [Without the territories, a] dwarfed Israel would then be an irresistible target for Arab adventurism and terrorism, and ultimately for an all-out military assault which could end Israel’s existence….

  If Israel were to relinquish the West Bank… it would have virtually no warning of attack…. Virtually all the population would be subject to artillery bombardment. The Sharon Plain north of Tel Aviv could be riven by an armored salient within hours. The quick mobilization of its civilian army… would be disrupted easily and perhaps irreversibly. 9

  The view of the generals was forcefully elaborated upon in November 1991 by Lieutenant-General Thomas Kelly, who had served as the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War and who visited Israel later that year:

  It is impossible to defend Jerusalem unless you hold that high ground…. [I] look onto the West Bank and say to myself, “If I’m chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, I cannot defend this land without that terrain.”… I don’t know about politics, but if you want me to defend this country, and you want me to defend Jerusalem, I’ve got to hold that ground. 10

  Of course, the position of successive administrations in Washington has not been based on such cold strategic calculations. The U.S. government cannot escape the intense politicization of the issue that has taken place since 1967, and the version of Israel’s defense needs to which the United States is officially committed is skewed accordingly. This is why a great many American officials insist on ignoring their generals and asserting that an Israel ten miles wide can count portions of the Mediterranean in its tally of the strategic depth available for its defense, evidently believing that the Israeli army can walk on water. But there is a limit to the number of miracles an army can perform, and Israel’s soldiers have performed more than most. No country should ask its army to continue to do the impossible, especially since it would be hard pressed to perform even the ordinary military tasks that security dictated while standing on the head of a pin.

  This is obvious enough even to nonmilitary observers who have become acquainted with Israel’s geography. Their common sense tells them what every military planner knows: Never prepare for the previous war. But here Israel is being asked to prepare to fight the Six Day War again, a conflict that preceded the previous war by several wars—except that the conditions that prevailed before June 5, 1967, and that allowed Israel to escape death then are gone forever. For one thing, a repetition of the surprise Israeli air strike that demolished all the Arab air forces in 1967 is impossible, because since 1968 Arab military aircraft no longer sit on open runways but are sheltered underground in fortified bunkers. For another, after 1969 the Arabs acquired highly effective antiaircraft missiles, which took a deadly toll of Israel’s air force in 1973. And with the improvement of Arab battle strategy, the long hesitation that allowed Israel the time to mobilize its troops, which was the fatal error of the Arab coalition on the eve of the Six Day War, will certainly not occur again. Further, the Arab armies have increased three- and four-fold in size. Their slow-moving infantry divisions of the past have become rapidly moving armored and mechanized formations. Arab artillery is no longer towed but is self-propelled.

  But whereas the Arabs have plenty of space to deploy their massive armies around Israel’s borders, a truncated Israel would find it extremely difficult to field its army, which has also been enlarged since 1967, in the small stretch of space between the edges of Tel Aviv’s suburbs and the border. It is therefore absurd to assume that since Israel survived a previous attack from the boundaries of the Six Day War, it could necessarily do so again.

  One way I have tried to get this point across to foreign visitors is by flying with them from Sdeh Dov, the small airport on the Tel Aviv beach, to the pre-1967 border a few miles to the east. The helicopter traverses the suburbs of Tel Aviv and reaches the last house of the last suburb, Kfar Saba, in minutes. From there it flies over a small field, then reaches the Arab town of Kalkilya across the old border. Before the 1967 war, the distance between Kfar Saba and Kalkilya used to be a number of miles. But Kfar Saba has grown, and so has Kalkilya. “That,” I say, pointing to the few hundred yards that currently separate the last house in Kfar Saba from the first house in Kalkilya, “is what most of the world intends to be Israel’s strategic depth.”

  Beyond Kalkilya, we can see the wall rise up: the mountains of Samaria, which from the air look like a castle fortress looming up over the coast. Then I ask the pilot to fly due west to the coast, heading directly for embassy row on Tel Aviv’s beachfront Hayarkon Street. If the visitor is American, the pilot flies us over the American embassy; if British, over the British embassy, and so on. The round trip takes all often minutes. When the visitor is a diplomat from a country that is particularly dogmatic about having Israel “return the West Bank,” he can easily imagine himself working in an embassy all of five minutes’ helicopter flight from the new border that his government insists Israel should have.

  On one occasion I was explaining the significance of this tiny distance to an American senator. The pilot became very excited and joined in on my side of the discussion. It turned out that he was the brother of a prominent civil servant who was identified with Israel’s dovish Labor party.

  “Tell him who you vote for,” I said to the pilot, guessing.

  “Labor,” he answered. “But what’s the difference? We all want to live.”

  While this determination never to return to the pre-1967 borders is shared by most Israelis, a small minority has emerged that does not have the same qualms about withdrawing to these lines. Since this minority exercises considerable influence in Israel’s media and politics (it is very potent in the left), its argument should be paid due attention. To counter the menacing geographic reality, the members of this school of thought argue that in the age of missiles the amount of territory Israel holds does not matter. For if the Arabs possess projectiles that can fly over a territorial defense and hit Israel’s cities and military bases, what use is territory? This simple formulation has great appeal and is receiving much currency. After all, wasn’t Israel attacked by Iraqi Scud missiles fired from a thousand miles way? What difference does it make whether it controls or does not control the West Bank?

  However appealing, this argument is based on a fallacy Missiles do not win wars. They can do damage, even terrible damage, but they do not conquer territory. The intense bombing of North Vietnam by the United States caused considerable destruction, but since the American army did not invade North Vietnam and take possession of its territory, the United States could not win the war. Similarly, the devastating American air strikes against Saddam’s troops in Kuwait and Iraq, with everything from smart bombs to cruise missiles, could not by themselves win the war. Ground action remained indispensable to physically drive Iraq’s army from Kuwait. Israel might be attacked from the air, but it cannot be overrun and conquered without being physically overrun and physically conquered. And this can be done only by armies possessing tanks, mobile artillery, and mechanized infantry that can move into a territory and take possession of it. The distance they have to cover and the terrain they must negotiate at the start of the fighting are vital factors in determining the outcome of battles. Distance may not make much difference to missiles, but to an armored division it makes a world of difference whether it must cover 12 miles or 120 miles to reach its target, and whether the ground it must cross is flat or mountainous. (In point of fact, larger distances do diminish the effectiv
eness of missiles as well, though in a different way The same Scud missiles that were fired at Israel from distant Iraq are now in the possession of nearby Syria, which would be able to pack twice the explosive payload into each warhead because of the shorter distance the missile must travel to reach its target.)

  The physical barrier that the West Bank places before incoming divisions is of particular value in the age of missiles. Israel must mobilize the bulk of its army to ward off a threat, but in the age of missiles we must assume that the time needed for such mobilization will increase. For missiles, even unsophisticated ones like the Iraqi Scuds, can hit population centers with ease, thereby disrupting the flow of Israeli civilians to their mobilization centers. As one Israeli reserve officer told me, “If missiles rain down on my city, I’ll rush to my daughter’s school to see if she’s alive before I head for my unit.” And as the missiles get more deadly and more accurate, they can be pinpointed on the mobilization bases themselves and on the road intersections that lead to them, thus further delaying the deployment of Israeli troops toward the front. If, during such an aerial bombardment, enemy ground troops were to advance toward Israel’s borders, Israel would be hard pressed to bring the reserves to the front to oppose them. Initial terrain conditions would therefore be even more vital for Israel’s small standing army as it seeks to hold off the assault of the far larger Arab forces until the arrival of reinforcements. Israel would need more rather than less space to absorb an attack and buy for itself the precious time it needed to regroup. Thus, the protective wall of the West Bank provides invaluable time and space.