A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  In Israel’s case, fully 40 percent of the available fresh-water resources consists of ground water drawn from aquifiers wholly or partially under Judea and Samaria. This is a supply without which Israel would be brought to the brink of catastrophe, and no “solution” to the dispute over the territories can be resolved without this possibility being forestalled. The question is how? The problems that would be caused by having the most vital of all resources under the control of an enemy do not stop at water blackmail, a frightening enough scenario in itself. The underground water supply could be contaminated in ways that could spread epidemics and even destroy the aquifier permanently, either on purpose or by accident. Given that one of the weapons of the intifada was the burning of forests all over Israel, and that Saddam was willing to fight America by pouring millions of barrels of crude oil into the gulf and setting oil wells afire, Israel cannot rule out the possibility of deliberate diversion and pollution of its water supply. (Significantly, the first attacks that Yasser Arafat’s Fatah ever launched in the 1960s were attempts to destroy the National Water Carrier, the Israeli pipeline that provides water from the Golan and Galilee to parched communities and farms all over Israel.) 16

  But accidental poisoning is no less a concern. The improper treatment of sewage and other industrial and urban waste-disposal problems have an immediate impact on the fresh-water reserves under the ground. Poorly sealed sewers are capable of leaking toxic wastes into the aquifier for years without detection, as are factory disposal sites. Preventing such deadly seepage requires both a high level of governmental and public awareness, and the dedication of substantial funds to inspection, monitoring, and repairs. If it is difficult to muster the necessary concern over environmental poisoning in the most advanced countries in the West, it is clear that handing such fearsome responsibility to an impoverished and hostile Arab regime on the West Bank would be an act of unalloyed foolishness, and no Israeli government could seriously be expected to do it.

  When one considers the crucial factor of strategic depth and height, the topographical and geographical obstacles to invasion, and the control of the precious water resources offered by this vital mountain ridge known as the West Bank, one thing becomes apparent. It is the same stark conclusion that one reaches on a clear day standing on the ridge of the Samarian mountain of Ba’al Hazor, seeing at once the entire breadth of the country, with the Jordan River Valley to the right and the Mediterranean to the left: that western Palestine, the present territory under Israel, is one integral territorial unit, dominated by one mountain range that overlooks one coastal plain. For any nation this would constitute a tiny physical platform on which to build and protect its physical life. To subdivide this land into two unstable, insecure nations, to try to defend what is indefensible, is to invite disaster. Carving Judea and Samaria out of Israel means carving up Israel.

  The considerations of strategic depth, geography, and water are also crucial in considering the future of the Golan Heights, and they render concessions on that front extremely dangerous as well. The Golan, which dominates the headwaters of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, controls another 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. Like the West Bank, it too constitutes a natural barrier shielding Israel, rising nearly four thousand feet above the farmland in the Hula Valley of northern Israel. The Golan is also similar to the West Bank in that it is tiny—no more than sixteen miles at its widest point—as opposed to the Sinai, whose 120-mile expanse offered relatively flat approaches to Israel and not a drop of water. Thus, while Israel could afford to be extremely generous in ceding the Sinai in its peace with Egypt on the western front, there is no margin for similar concessions in the Golan and the West Bank on its eastern front.

  This becomes readily apparent when one considers that the conventional military threat to Israel’s existence can come from three potential sources: the large and powerful armies of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The well-armed Egyptian army is separated from Israel by the Sinai desert, which affords Israel sufficient strategic depth should Egypt ever choose to violate the peace treaty with Israel. The Iraqi army, although reduced in strength after the Gulf War, remains a substantial threat and is in the process of being rebuilt. It is separated from Israel by a buffer area roughly the same size as the Sinai—the Jordanian desert. Although the Jordanian army that patrols this empty waste is a good one, it is too small to constitute a serious threat to Israel on its own. Israel has always said publicly that it considers the entire territory of Jordan to be a buffer area, and that it would under no circumstances allow “foreign forces” to enter Jordan—a warning with which King Hussein was never too unhappy, since it shielded him from his Arab neighbors, just as it protected Israel itself. Thus during the Gulf War, Israel issued repeated warnings that if the Iraqi army entered Jordan for any reason, this would be considered an act of war. (A similar Israeli warning to Syria in 1970 caused the invading Syrian army to withdraw from Jordan.)

  Most Israelis oppose the insertion of a PLO state on the West Bank because they do not want a state allied with Iraq and the most radical forces in the Arab world on their doorstep. Such a state would nullify the whole value of the buffer area on Israel’s eastern front.

  But whereas Israel presently possesses sufficient strategic depth against potential threats from the south (Egypt) and east (Iraq), it has no such strategic depth in the case of the Syrian threat in the north. It must be remembered that the Syrian army is one of the largest and best equipped in the world. It is permanently deployed on the broad plateau between Damascus and the Golan Heights, a mere sixteen miles from the Israeli breadbasket of Galilee, and another thirty miles from Haifa and the Israeli coastal plain. While the Egyptian and Iraqi armies face a journey of days to reach Israel from their current emplacements, the Syrians could reach the first Israeli population centers in a matter of hours. The only military obstacle in their way is the necessarily far smaller Israeli force that is entrenched on the superior terrain of the Golan Heights. For ever since the Six Day War in 1967, Israel has looked down at the Syrians, rather than the other way around. From the precipices of Mount Hermon and Mount Avital, Israeli soldiers can observe the Syrian installations spread out beneath them. It is these commanding positions that make up for the lack of strategic depth. This is the reason that the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin fought bitterly to retain this terrain in the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria—much to the consternation of the U.S. administration, which found it difficult to understand what difference “a few miles” made.

  Yet Israel is often told that, its security and water requirements notwithstanding, it is bound by international agreement to cede the territories to the Arabs. The Arabs invoke UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted in the wake of the Six Day War and to which Israel has always been a full subscriber. This resolution, it is often claimed, expresses the will of the international community that Israel withdraw from Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Gaza. By now the actual wording of the text and the intentions of its authors have for the most part been forgotten. As in so many other things, the version of the resolution frequently discussed by “experts” on television has more to do with the intent of Israel’s adversaries than with fact.

  As written, Resolution 242 was originally about peace. It called for an immediate “termination of all claims or states of belligerency”; for the “acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area”; and for the recognition of the right of those states “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” (The full text can be found in Appendix F.) Thus the bulk of the resolution is a demand by the international community that the Arab states make peace: by ending the state of war against Israel, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and assuring that Israel’s borders will be secure ones. That this was the central concern of the resolution was confirmed by Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, who was one of the
authors of the resolution:

  It calls for respect and acknowledgement of the sovereignty of every state in the area. Since Israel never denied the sovereignty of its neighboring countries, this language obviously requires those countries to acknowledge Israel’s sovereignty. 17

  It took twelve years for Egypt to comply with the Security Council resolution. In explicitly refusing to make peace with Israel, other Arab states flout the dictates of Resolution 242 to this day Yet with unsurpassed hypocrisy, they reverse causality yet again and claim that it is Israel that is in violation of a resolution with which they themselves have yet to make the slightest gesture of compliance. Their accusations are based on an additional clause in Resolution 242, which calls for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Israel, claim the Arabs, has never obeyed the directive to withdraw from “the territories.” Why should they make peace, when Israel is still in possession of the West Bank, the Golan and Gaza? They conveniently choose to forget that any Israeli withdrawal was supposed to follow the signing of peace agreements, which the Arab states adamantly refuse to sign.

  Viewed through the distorting prism of Arab propaganda, it is indeed possible to believe that the intention of the UN was unmistakably to oust Israel from “the territories,” and that the resolution says only “territories” (leaving out the word the) due to a printer’s error. In fact, as the very people who drafted the resolution attest, evacuating Israeli forces from the territories was not the central issue, and the the was left out on purpose so that Israel could negotiate to keep a portion of the land for security reasons. Hence Arthur Goldberg: “The notable omissions in regard to [Israeli] withdrawal are the word ‘the’ or ‘all’… the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories, without defining the extent of the withdrawal.” 18 This is also the view of Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the UN, who co-authored the resolution with Goldberg:

  We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the [pre-] 1967 line. We did not put the “the” in. We did not say all the territories, deliberately…. We all knew that the boundaries of [pre-] 1967 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a ceasefire line of a couple of decades earlier…. We did not say that the [pre-] 1967 boundaries must be forever. 19

  Eugene Rostow, who was U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs when the American administration took the initiative to draft the resolution, confirms the position of the authors:

  Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338… rest on two principles. [First,] Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors make peace. And [second,] when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to “secure and recognized borders,” which need not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949. 20

  But has Israel withdrawn from “territories occupied in the conflict”? It certainly has. The Sinai Peninsula, returned in the context of Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, is on the Israeli scale a very substantial piece of property: twenty-five thousand square miles on which Israel had built major airfields, developed luxury hotels, and discovered oil. In all, the Sinai—ten times bigger than Judea and Samaria—constituted no less than 91 percent of the territories captured by Israel in 1967. Nor does the resolution say in any of its clauses that Israel should have to withdraw on every front (Sinai and Gaza, the Golan, and the West Bank). This was left, precisely as intended by the framers of the resolution, for negotiation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

  Yet all of this misses what is surely the major moral principle embedded in the diplomatic wording of Resolution 242: that the Arabs should make concessions for peace. That is, if the resolution recognized an Israeli right to secure borders and furthermore did not necessarily expect Israel to return to the borders from which the war had started, this means that the framers of the resolution thought it was reasonable for the Arabs to sacrifice some of their territorial ambitions for the sake of a secure peace.

  And why not? What kind of a “compromise” is it for one side to renounce one hundred percent of its claims and the other side to renounce zero percent? What kind of a moral position is it to say that the failed aggressor should be given back all the territory from which he launched his attack? And what kind of deterrence could Israel be expected to maintain if the negative consequences of Arab aggression against it were found to be nil for the Arab countries? Indeed, the position underlying Resolution 242 is as refreshing as it is just. Untouched by the propaganda of the decades that followed it, it states what any rational person would have said from the start: that peace benefits both sides, and so both sides have to share the costs. Secure boundaries for Israel are a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. The Arabs have demonstrated again and again that the ten-mile strip on which Israel lived before 1967 could not constitute a secure boundary. This means the Arabs have to give something up for peace. There has to be an Arab leader courageous enough to be willing to forgo some or all of the Arab claims to the remaining land. So far none has been found. With the support of most of the world, the Arabs continue to demand every inch of the territories from which they attacked Israel.

  Arab military strategy is simple: Squeeze Israel into the pre-1967 armistice lines, subjecting it once more to a state of intolerable vulnerability. Arab political strategy is to harness a forgetful West to this cause. But as President Lyndon Johnson said shortly after the Six Day War: “We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of June 4, 1967, will not bring peace.” 21

  Whatever their differences, nearly everyone in Israel—whether Labor or Likud, government or opposition—agrees that Israel must not go back to these boundaries, and that it must not relinquish strategic control of Judea and Samaria. * This point was made forcefully by Labor’s Moshe Dayan in August 1967 (two months after the capture of Judea and Samaria) at a ceremony commemorating those who fell in the desperate defense of Jerusalem in 1948—when the Arab armies occupied the strategic wall surrounding the city and starved and bombarded the city of Peace without mercy: “Our brothers, we bear your lesson with us.… We know that to give life to Jerusalem, we must station the soldiers and armor of [the Israeli army] in the Sh’chem mountains [Samaria] and on the bridges over the Jordan.” 22 Thus, whatever views Israelis may have as to how to establish a modus vivendi between Arab and Jew in the territories, few question the necessity for continued Israeli military control of this vital space.

  In those parts of the world where peace is the norm, borders, territories, and strategic depth may appear unimportant. In the Middle East they are of decisive importance. Given the specifics of the West Bank, the slogan “land for peace” is singularly inappropriate: To achieve a sustainable peace, Israel must maintain a credible deterrent long enough to effect a lasting change in Arab attitudes. It is precisely Israel’s control of this strategic territory that has deterred all-out war and has made eventual peace more likely.

  8

  A DURABLE PEACE

  Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has now been compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies, the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have settled themselves.

  While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will remain threatened by the desta
bilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic missiles and atomic weapons.

  Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the Arab world and the Jewish state.

  Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world have still not had an irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that Israel has become vulnerable enough to attack.