A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  A second obstacle facing the realists is that no Arab leader or representative wants to end up like Abdullah of Jordan, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, or Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon—or for that matter like the many thousands of moderate Palestinian Arabs whom the Mufti and the PLO have butchered over this century for “betraying” the Arab cause by trying to make peace with the Jews. For seventy years, ever since the heyday of the Mufti, every move and every gesture toward peace has been stifled by fear of the radical Pan-Arab nationalists and Moslem fundamentalists.

  Those who are interested in something more than a pyrrhic peace in the Middle East must recognize the harsh reality that there is always a powerful Muftist faction among the Arabs ready to veto peace. The Mufti’s politics of terror is no less with us today. So long as this branch of Arab politics is powerful enough to terrorize other Arabs into playing by its rules, making peace will be an extraordinarily difficult business. When the radicals feel confident and powerful, the intimidated moderates run to snuggle within the tiger claws of the dictators, much as King Hussein of Jordan snuggled in Saddam’s paws on the very eve of the Gulf War. Without suppressing the power of intimidation of the radicals, there can be no hope that moderates will emerge.

  This principle was much in evidence in the case of Morocco. When Qaddafi was at the height of his power, having conquered most of Chad and terrorized much of the West with his threats, King Hassan of Morocco—as antithetical a figure to Qaddafi as one could conjure up in the Arab world—entered into a bizarre “marriage” between Libya and Morocco. Yet within months of the American bombing of Tripoli and the collapse of Qaddafi’s forces in Chad, Hassan dissolved the union and invited Israel’s foreign minister to an open meeting in Morocco. Similarly, when Syria came to realize in the wake of the Gulf War that the eclipse of its Soviet benefactor spelled a decline in its ability to resist American pressure, it suddenly permitted King Hussein and other Arabs to enter negotiations and even went so far as to sit at the same table with Israel itself. Pressing the radicals, curtailing their options to intimidate, and limiting their political and military clout are continual prerequisites for engaging in any realistic efforts for peace.

  Any Israeli diplomat who has ever dealt with the Arabs can recount endless variations on this theme. My own experience with Arab diplomats has taught me how readily some of them would make peace if they were freed from the yoke of terror. When I was deputy chief of the Israeli mission in Washington, I used to meet regularly with one such diplomat, an ambassador from an Arab country with which Israel has no relations. On one occasion we had set a meeting in a small restaurant. I arrived five minutes late and asked the waiter whether a gentleman answering the description of my Arab colleague had been there.

  “Yes,” said the waiter. “He showed up, ordered something to drink, and left suddenly.”

  I called him up. “Ali, what happened?” I asked.

  “I came to the restaurant at the time we’d agreed on. I sat down. Who do you think I saw at the next table? The Syrian ambassador. I walked out.”

  It is a sad commentary on the pace of political evolution in the Arab world that many years after this conversation took place, I am still unable to reveal the diplomat’s real name and have had to substitute a false one to protect his identity.

  This little vignette, set in a quiet corner of Washington, D.C., contains in microcosm the story of countless foiled peace attempts throughout the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The nonradicals might entertain the possibility of negotiating peace with Israel, but they fear the violent response of the radicals. This was painfully evident in the Madrid Peace Conference and in the subsequent talks in Washington. Once again, my Israeli colleagues and I found that even the most reasonable among the Jordanians and Lebanese were constantly forced to weigh every word for fear of the PLO and the Syrians, whose threatening gaze they felt even in the most private of conversations.

  The West often aggravates this situation by strengthening the hands of the worst radicals. It is often so grateful for any reasonable gesture coming from these quarters that it proceeds to enter into economic and military agreements with them. It operates on the belief that such carrots will lure a radical regime to become a less radical one—a view whose full wisdom was revealed in the Western arming of Saddam in the 1980s. The fact is that the radicals should not be armed. There should be a curb on weapons sales to the moderates as well, for the simple reason that in the Middle East today’s “moderate” could be tomorrow’s radical, courtesy of a coup, an invasion, or mere intimidation.

  So long as freedom of expression, the rule of law, and real representative government are absent from the Arab world, it will continue to be next to impossible for realist Arabs to have an enduring influence on Arab policies toward Israel. For this reason, there is a direct relationship between what the West does to press the Arab world to democratize and the chances of attaining a durable Middle East peace. In the cases of Germany and Japan, of Russia and the Ukraine, of Latin America and several African dictatorships, the powerful relationship between democratic values and the desire for peace has been obvious to American policymakers, who for years have tied American trade and other forms of assistance to domestic policy reforms and democratization. For example, the United States imposed sanctions on China after the massacre in Tienanmen Square that suppressed the movement for democratization in that country. Similarly, when the president of Peru suspended democratic institutions in 1992, the United States undertook a full-court press, including economic sanctions, in order to prevent backsliding to authoritarian rule in a Latin America it had tirelessly worked for decades to push into democracy.

  Only the Arab states have been entirely exempt from such pressure—much to the dismay of a handful of reformist Arabs in exile in London who have seen their fellow Arabs abandoned to the unrelenting totalitarians of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and to the unreconstructed dictatorships that form much of the rest of the Arab world; and much to the dismay of Israel, which must consider the possibility that these regimes will at any moment return to savaging the Jewish state alongside the treatment they mete out to their own people.

  It might be argued that the West has been slowly inching toward broaching the subject of democracy with the Arab leaders. But in the wake of the Gulf War, which the United States waged to save a helpless Saudi Arabia from Saddam and to resurrect a Kuwait that he had conquered, it is clear that this is not the case. Never has a ruler been as helpless as was the exiled Emir Al-Sabah of Kuwait, sitting in Riyadh waiting to have the West extricate his country from Iraq’s gullet. If ever there had been a moment to extract a commitment to basic human rights, or a constitution, or a free press, this was it. None was asked for.

  Other than the fact that the Arab world possesses a good part of the world’s oil supply, the West seems to have granted the democratic exemption to the Arab world for reasons virtually indistinguishable from those the British Colonial Office held at the end of World War I: a kind of smug condescension that the Arabs are “not ready” for democracy, that democracy is somehow incompatible with their Islamic heritage, that “their own traditional forms of government” should be considered “right for them,” and so on—as though, for example, torture, amputation, slavery, a manacled press, and absolute rule by a family of a few hundred cousins is anything but a tyranny by any standard. Most bizarre are the attempts by Westerners to convince themselves that the Arabs should have their democratic exemption because what they already have is as good as democracy, as in the periodic journalistic accounts of Saudi Arabia as a quiet, gentle kingdom—a kind of Tibet in the sands.

  Arab culture and Islamic civilization are no better excuses for an exemption from democracy than were Japanese culture in 1945 and Russian civilization in 1989—although neither of these had been democratic societies before. For an enduring peace to be built in the Middle East, America must stop coddling the various Arab dictators and autocrats and begin pushing them to adopt the most rudimentary guara
ntees that will allow those willing to live peacefully with Israel to come out of the closet, publish their opinions, organize political parties, and ultimately be elected to positions to make good on their beliefs. Some argue that democracy cannot be introduced into the Arab states because it will bring the Islamic fundamentalists to power. But of course the idea cannot simply be to establish majority rule, and thereby hand power to the tyranny of the mob. To advance democracy in the Arab world, the West must promote the concepts of individual rights and constitutional limits on governmental power, without which the existence of any genuine democracy is impossible. Without real and concerted steps in this direction, the perennial search for Arabs willing to make a permanent (as opposed to a tactical) peace with Israel will be ultimately futile.

  I wrote the above before I was elected Prime Minister, and my views have substantially remained unaltered. But I have come to recognize that neither the United States nor the Western countries are likely to act toward the goal of democratization in the Arab world. Nor is it possible for Israel to do so, for any action on our part would be falsely interpreted as an attempt to destabilize neighboring regimes, changing one ruler with another—something we have absolutely no desire to do. Consequently, we must assume that for our generation and perhaps the next, the task of peacemaking is with the Arab world as it is, unreformed and undemocratic. The prevalence of radicalism in the Middle East—and the danger that, in the absence of any democratic traditions, a nonradical regime can turn radical overnight—means that peace in the Middle East must have security arrangements built into it. I have already noted that for the foreseeable future the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between Arab and Arab and between Arab and Jew is the peace of deterrence. Security is an indispensable pillar of peace for any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the possibility of a future war. An Israel lacking security would eventually invite an act of aggression that would destroy the peace. The question we must therefore ask is, what are Israel’s minimal security requirements that can sustain its defenses and thereby sustain the peace?

  This question need not be answered in territorial terms alone. The adoption of security arrangements between Israel and the Arab states, such as a hotline between Damascus and Jerusalem, or procedures to alert the other side to planned military maneuvers, can reduce the possibility of war. Buffer zones might be created to prevent the stockpiling of weapons next to particularly sensitive borders. Such zones would be free of heavy military equipment such as tanks and artillery and could be accessible to the officers of the other side. Of necessity, the configuration of these zones would have to take into account the tremendous disparity in the dimensions of Israel as compared with those of its Arab neighbors.

  But however useful such devices may be, they cannot meet a contingency in which Israel’s enemies decide to violate the rules and invade. In the case of Israel, as we have seen, military distances are so tiny and warning times so short that without minimal strategic depth to absorb an attack and mobilize its reserves, Israel’s existence would be placed in jeopardy. Nor can its need for strategic depth be filled by international guarantees. Even if the guaranteeing powers summon the will to act—which, despite a formal promise, the friendly American administration did not do on the eve of the Six Day War—there looms the question of whether they could physically dispatch the forces in time. Kuwait, a country almost exactly the size of Israel (minus the West Bank), was overrun in a matter of six hours, but liberated only after a six-month buildup of huge forces shipped from West to East. Israel cannot be asked to play the role of Lazarus. It will not rise from the dead, to whose ranks its defeat would surely consign it. For unlike Arab Kuwait, no one doubts that if the Jewish state were ever conquered by Arab armies, it would be effectively, irredeemably destroyed. The problem with international guarantees for Israel is therefore exactly what Golda Meir said it was: “By the time they come to save Israel, there won’t be an Israel.”

  Israel’s defenses therefore must be entrusted to its own forces, which are willing and able to act in real time against an imminent invasion or attack. When seeking, as we must, a peace based on security, we must necessarily ask what secure boundaries for Israel would be. Clearly, the Six Day War boundaries are the boundaries not of peace but of war. But how much broader does Israel need to be? As we have seen, the crucial question is not only additional increments of strategic depth but the incorporation of the Judea-Samaria mountain ridge, which forms a protective wall against invasion from the east. It is not feasible for Israel to relinquish military control of this wall. A similar situation prevails for the Golan Heights, which dominate the north. When these territories were in Arab hands, the result was war, not peace. One simply cannot talk about peace and security for Israel and in the same breath expect Israel to significantly alter its existing defense boundaries.

  Arab leaders’ promises that the Palestinian Arabs would have the whole of Palestine in 1947, the whole of Israel in 1967, and the whole of Jordan in 1970 all proved to be impediments to resolving the problem of the Palestinian Arabs, each one leading to the rejection of rational compromises and to further calamity.

  Jerusalem, too, has been the subject of renewed Arab demands. Arafat has long and often said that there will be no peace so long as the PLO flag does not fly over the city. The West has often taken this statement at face value, and every peace plan to date that Westerners have offered has been in some fashion gerrymandered to allow an Arab flag to fly over some section of Jerusalem—usually over what the media like to refer to as “Arab East Jerusalem.” Of course, there is nothing exclusively or even mainly “Arab” about eastern Jerusalem. This part of the city consists of those portions of Jerusalem that the Jordanian Legion was able to tear away by force in 1948. Many Jews lived there at the time, but the Jordanians expelled them. Today these sections of the city have 150,000 Jewish residents and a similar number of Arab residents. (Unlike the Jordanians, who expelled the Jews when they conquered this portion of the city in 1948, Israel left the Arab population intact and offered it Israeli citizenship.)

  Eastern Jerusalem includes the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the City of David. It was the capital of ancient Israel for twelve centuries, the very heart and soul of all Jewish aspiration to return and rebuild the Land of Israel. Israel could not under any circumstances negotiate over any aspect of Jerusalem, any more than Americans would negotiate over Washington, Englishmen over London, or Frenchmen over Paris. Israel is prepared to offer the Arabs full and equal rights in Jerusalem—but no rights over Jerusalem.

  The tremendous significance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people—as well as the indelible physical facts of Jewish neighborhoods such as Gilo, Ramot, Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Neve Ya’akov built in eastern Jerusalem since 1967—make the notion that somehow Jerusalem will be redivided sheer fantasy. Yet it is not only Arabs who cling to this fantasy. In practically every foreign ministry in the West, including the U.S. State Department, there are maps that do not include East Jerusalem as part of a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Indeed, most governments refuse to recognize even West Jerusalem as part of Israel, on the grounds that “the final status of Jerusalem remains to be negotiated,” in the hope that it will be internationalized—this in recognition of its “special status,” reflecting its unique importance not only to Judaism but to Islam and Christianity as well. But it is only under Jewish rule that Jerusalem has become a city open to all faiths, with the holy sites of all religions protected equally for the first time in history. The Jewish belief in the universal meaning of Jerusalem has made it today a truly universal city. To pry the city away from the one people that has ensured unimpeded access to it for all, to put it under a UN-type administration, would not merely violate the historic right of the Jewish people to its one and only capital. It would assure a descent into factionalism, where shrill partisans of Islam like the followers of Khomei
ni and Qaddafi would return the city to the divisions and sectarian strife that characterized it before 1967—something for which no rational person could possibly wish. This is why Israel, within the context of a peace agreement with the Arabs, is prepared to guarantee free access to Moslems wishing to make pilgrimages to their holy places in Jerusalem, but will in no way alter Israel’s ability to maintain Jerusalem as a peaceful and open city under Israeli sovereignty.

  It will be objected that in keeping sovereignty over Jerusalem and the remaining territories, Israel is expecting the Arabs to renounce their claim to what they consider part of their domain. This is precisely the case. An entire century of Arab wars has been waged against the Jews because the Arabs have refused to in any way temper their doctrine of never giving up what they claim to be Arab lands. In fact, in its entire recorded history, the Arab nation has never given up a single inch of land willingly, for the sake of peace or for the sake of anything else. This fact was confirmed to the point of absurdity after the cession of the entire Sinai (more than twice the size of all of Israel), when Egypt refused to reciprocate by ceding Israel a few hundred yards on which the Israelis had partially built a luxury hotel—leading to a crisis of several years that finally ended when Israel gave up the land in 1989.

  But the time has finally come to recognize that peace will be possible only when both sides are willing to strike a compromise that gives each the minimum it needs to live. The Zionist movement and the State of Israel are by now well acquainted with compromising on ideology for the sake of coexistence and peace, having done so at least four times in this century. In 1919 the Zionists bitterly gave up on their claim to the Litani River (now in southern Lebanon), which was to have been the main water source for the new Jewish state. In 1922 four-fifths of the Jewish National Home was made off-limits to Jews so that there could be a territory, Jordan, reserved for the Arabs of Palestine. This was much more painful, for it meant giving up on a large portion of biblical Israel and agreeing that the Jewish state would be only forty miles wide. But for the sake of peace, the Jews have given up on this claim as well, and they asked the Palestinian-Jordanian state four times the size of Israel to give them nothing in return. In the 1979 treaty with Egypt, Israel compromised many of its most cherished principles for the sake of peace. In giving up the Sinai, it conceded vast lands, transferred thousands of Jews from their homes, razed houses, schools, and farms that had been built from the desert over fifteen years, and utterly renounced every one of the Jewish historical, strategic, and economic claims to land where the Jewish people had received the Law of Moses and become a nation. In 1989, Israel gave Taba, near Eilat, to Egypt for the sake of peace and once again, in the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel ceded land to the Palestinians.