A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  But it is not only Israelis and Arabs who have roles to play in bringing a lasting peace to a region so important to the entire world. As the Camp David Accords demonstrated, the moral, strategic, and financial assistance of the West can play a decisive role in making peace possible. An important step was taken with the commencement of multilateral talks under the auspices of the peace talks begun in 1991. This international support was later reaffirmed and expanded under the Oslo Accords. Foreign involvement in areas such as the development of water resources and protection of the environment would be of major significance to the region, and it would alleviate some of the sources of tensions that could easily contribute to renewed hostility and war.

  In particular, there are two areas demanding substantial commitments from Western governments, without which the possibility of achieving peace would be seriously, and I believe irrevocably, impaired. The first is the resettlement of the remaining Arab refugees. As we have seen time and again, the various refugee districts scattered throughout the Middle East are the breeding ground for misery and hatred. Without them the PLO would have a hard time even existing, and a major source of instability would have been removed from the region. In this effort, the continuation of the problem is not a matter of disinterested morality to the states of the West. They too have a stake in dismantling the camps as a step toward ending the long campaign of terror that the rulers of the camps have waged against Israel and the West. Western assistance will be necessary to undertake the large-scale construction of housing projects and infrastructure necessary to transform the camps into towns, as well as educational projects and investments in businesses intended to raise the standard of living. The Western countries should also offer to absorb those refugees who prefer a new home in North America or Europe to continuing to live in Israel or the Arab states. Among them, the Western countries could handily absorb even the entire refugee population if necessary, settling the matter once and for all.

  It is true that the Arab states possess sufficient funds to easily pay for this effort themselves, but given their past record of refugee relief (the entire Arab world contributes less than one percent of UNRWAs budget * ), it will be a triumph if they can be prodded into assisting at all. Such Arab involvement in the resettling of refugees should be demanded, both because the Arab states are responsible for originating and sustaining the refugee problem and because their participating in resolving it would signify a real commitment to ending the conflict with Israel.

  But the West, including the United States, has so far refused to put its foot down even on a matter as straightforward as ending the Arab fantasy of one day implementing the “right of return.” When asked if the United States still supported UN Resolution 194 from December 1948 (in the middle of the War of Independence), which called for the return of the refugees, the United States couldn’t muster the simple word no. It stammered for three days and finally came up with a circumlocution (“The Resolution is irrelevant to the peace process”) 10 that leaves the Arabs still with the hope of one day thrusting upon Israel the burden of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of people whom the Arab regimes have cruelly maintained as lifelong refugees. On the refugee issue, as with other outdated or unjust UN resolutions (like the 1947 UN Partition Plan allotting the Jews only half of the present-day Israel, and the resolution calling for the internationalization of Jerusalem), the United States and European nations must alter their formal positions and flatly declare the resolutions to be null and void.

  An essential area for international development is in the field of nonconventional arms development in the Arab countries. Nearly a decade after the victorious assault against Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons facilities are still being found in Iraq, and there are probably plenty more where these came from. As the request to clean out Iraq has proved, it is exceedingly difficult to strip a country of the know-how and technology to build weapons of mass destruction once it has them. The only possible way of forestalling the day when Arab states will have the capacity to wipe out Israeli cities (and those of other countries) at the touch of a button is to secure a real, enforced moratorium on the transfer of such weapons and expertise to Iran and the Arab world—and this means the imposition of sanctions on countries that are found to be in violation of the ban. Without such concerted international action and in the absence of the democratization of Middle Eastern regimes, it will only be a matter of time before one of the dictatorships in the region acquires nuclear weapons, imperiling not only Israel and the Middle East but the peace of everyone else on the planet.

  It is possible to present all of these steps as a peace plan comprised of three tracks: bilateral measures between Israel and Arab states; international measures taken by the nations of the world (including assistance to joint projects involving Israel and the Arab states); and measures taken to improve the conditions under which Jews and Arabs live side by side in peace with each other. Each of these elements obviously requires careful articulation and much elaboration, which only painstaking negotiations can produce. Such negotiations understandably might alter certain components and possibly add others. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the approach described in this chapter ought to serve as a blueprint for the achievement of a realistic and enduring peace between Arabs and Israelis.

  In addition to the proposals for a resolution of the question of the disputed areas, a comprehensive approach to an Arab-Israeli peace must include formal peace treaties between the Arab states and Israel; security arrangements with the Arab states to protect Israel from future attacks and to enable all sides to monitor compliance with the agreements; normalization of relations (including an end to the Arab economic boycott of Israel); cessation of official anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in Arab schools and government media; an international regime to ban the sale of nonconventional weapons or matériel to the radical regimes of the Middle East; internationally assisted refugee housing and resettlement projects; and regional cooperation for water development and environmental protection.

  This is the path to an Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East as it really is—turbulent, undemocratized, and as yet unreformed of its underlying antagonisms. Those antagonisms will be extremely slow to disappear. This is why a genuine reconciliation, in addition to having buttresses of stability, security, and cooperation built into it, must contain a strong element of gradualism. Such a graduated approach would allow both sides to alter their conceptions about achieving peace, should the basic political and military conditions of the region undergo a substantial transformation—for the better, one would hope.

  While endless ink has been spilled in calling for various futile resolutions to the ongoing strife between the Jewish and Arab peoples over the disposition of Palestine, the proposal made here takes full account of Israel’s security needs, while granting control over their own needs to the Arabs living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Though it is certain to arouse furious opposition from irredentists in the Arab camp, as well as from purists on the Israeli left and right, I believe that it offers a real hope of a lasting peace—and one in which any realist in any camp can wholeheartedly believe.

  9

  THE QUESTION OF

  JEWISH POWER

  In 1987 I visited Poland, then still under Communist rule. I landed at a military airport near Krakow and was then taken by car to the drab countryside. We soon came across a dilapidated village whose only mark of distinction was a sign that startled me: “Auswiescen.” Auschwitz. There were actually people who lived there.

  A few minutes beyond the village, we reached the gates of the camp, inscribed with the infamous promise: Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”). As I soon learned, the barracks of Auschwitz were not the actual place where the great part of the destruction of some two million Jews occurred. Although many thousands died there, Auschwitz was used primarily as headquarters for the German staff for interrogation and for torture. But the actual work of liquidation was done elsewhere. I marched
with fellow Knesset members and Jewish youngsters from Israel and other countries along the railroad tracks leading from Auschwitz to nearby Birkenau. The tracks led through another infamous gate, coming to an abrupt end at a white ramp several hundred yards into the camp. On either side was a crematorium, now partially in ruins. The trains would stop at the ramp each day, depositing thousands of Jews who were quickly dispatched to the gas chambers. Soon there was nothing left of them but ashes.

  Until I stood there at Birkenau, I never realized how tiny and mundane the whole thing was. The factory of death could have been put out of operation by one pass of a bomber. Indeed the Allies had been bombing strategic targets a few miles away. Had the order been given, it would have taken but a slight shift of the bomber pilot’s stick to interdict the slaughter. Yet the order was never given.

  Many people visiting Birkenau assume that the Allies were unaware of the fact that all of Europe’s Jews were being systematically annihilated. I knew differently. For a year and a half during my tenure at the United Nations, my colleagues and I had waged a campaign to open the secret archives where the UN records on Nazi war criminals were kept. When we finally obtained access to the files, we saw that the Allies War Crimes Commission, established by Britain in 1942 and staffed by the officials of seventeen countries, had been receiving accurate and comprehensive information about what was going on in Birkenau, Chelmno, and Dachau in early 1944, a year and a half before the ovens were put out of commission by Germany’s collapse. Had the Allies acted on this information, untold numbers of Jews could have been saved. But they knew, and did nothing. European Jewry was doomed.

  How did the Jews come to this point of utter helplessness? How did an entire people arrive at a state where they were herded quietly to the slaughter, unable to resist this monstrous assault on their persons and on their collective existence? And how is it that they were able to do nothing to elicit even an ounce of action from their would-be saviors?

  The question of Jewish powerlessness is central to the traumatic experience of the Jewish people, and it is the obverse side of the question of Jewish power. It is between these two poles that Jewish history has oscillated in modern times. Certainly in the last one hundred years, the period that is the primary focus of this book, the Jewish people has experienced the most extreme shifts of circumstance from one pole to the other. The pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus trial, the gathering storm of anti-Semitism and its seismic explosion in the Holocaust, along with Great Britain’s cynical obstruction of the Jewish national movement’s efforts to bring the Jews of Europe to a safe haven—these are the tragic steps in a people’s descent to utter impotence. Similarly, the resurrection of Israel, the rebirth of Jewish military power, and its spectacular successes against adversaries far superior in numbers and matériel signify a movement in the contrary direction.

  Yet as dramatic as this oscillation has been during the last century, I believe that the rise of Israel can only be understood in a much broader historical perspective, a millennial one. For the Jews are one of the oldest nations on earth, and they are distinguished by their capacity for remembrance. In its essence, the rise of Israel has been a conscious attempt to wrest redemption from the grip of unrelenting agony and to do so by weaving into the future the enduring threads of collective will and purpose originating in a heroic past.

  To fully understand the interplay between power and power-lessness in the history of the Jews, therefore, requires an examination of the Jewish position over a much longer period than the modern era. Of necessity, such a perspective must begin with the position of the Jews in antiquity, for it is in that period that the decisive experiences in the life of the nation took place, shaping many aspects of the Jewish character, Jewish attitudes, and Jewish expectations of the future.

  As opposed to the image of the Jew during most of the modern period, Jews in ancient times were not known as docile victims. To the contrary, they were renowned for possessing the exact opposite qualities of national character. Biblical records attest to this, as do Hellenistic and Roman sources. The Jews may not have been loved in antiquity, but they were respected for their determination and capacity to resist assaults on their rights and liberty. In fact, it is hard to find a people that resisted so persistently, for so long, and against such overwhelming odds. Although the Jewish land was successively conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs, the Jewish people resisted conquest, occupation, and exile for nearly twenty centuries.

  In this first long phase of their history, the Jews produced a succession of remarkable military and political figures to lead their protracted struggle, a list that has few if any rivals in the history of nations: Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Debora, Saul, Jonathan, David, the Kings of Israel and judah, Nehemia, the Maccabees, Bar Kochba, Elazar ben Yair, Judah of Galilee, Simon bar Giora, and other lesser-known Jewish leaders of the successive revolts against Rome and Byzantium.

  Furthermore, Jewish resistance characterized the Jewish Diaspora of the ancient world as well. From the second century B.C.E. through the end of the Roman period, the Jews of Egypt, Syria, and Rome evinced a capacity to resist politically and militarily the pogroms, massacres, and violations of their rights by the non-Jews among whom they lived. “You know what a big crowd it is, how they stick together, how influential they are,” pouted Cicero, seeking to avoid undue confrontation with the Jews of Rome. 1 Against Rome and Byzantium, the Jews of Judea stood utterly alone in the face of a superpower that had vanquished most of the civilized world, waging a seemingly hopeless resistance for six centuries.

  If there is one quality that emerges from Jewish history in antiquity, it is the obstinate refusal of the Jews to defer their religious and political independence to other peoples, as well as their readiness to wage an unrelenting struggle against their would-be oppressors. They sometimes succeeded, although more often they did not. But they never gave up the struggle, which preserved in itself their identity and values and prevented them from assimilating and disappearing like the numberless other nations that succumbed to the power of empires.

  How did this capacity to resist vanish, to be replaced by the image and reality of the defenseless Jew? This did not happen overnight. Conquered, subjugated, and exhausted, the Jews nevertheless continued the struggle to assert control over their fate, sometimes requiring long decades to replenish their collective will. Certainly the protracted and tragic struggle against Rome drained the nation of much energy. But contrary to popular notions, this series of defeats failed to root out the Jewish will to resist, as shown by the later Jewish revolts against Rome and Byzantium after Bar Kochba. For as long as the Jewish people lived on its land, it possessed a clear capacity for military and political action, demonstrated as late as the beginning of the seventh century with the Jewish alliances first with and then against the Persian invaders of the land.

  Yet once the Jews were driven into exile and became a collection of dispersed communities in the medieval world, they were gradually deprived of all the conditions necessary for self-defense. Although in the cities of the Middle Ages the Jews lived in their own fortified quarters, they slowly lost the power necessary to sustain such defenses. Most notably in the states of medieval Germany, the Jews were stripped of the right that others had to carry weapons for self-defense, despite the fact that (or perhaps because) it was the Jews who often faced the most wanton assaults. If you cannot carry a sword, you soon forget how to use one altogether; both the physical and psychological preparedness to resist eventually atrophy. Step by step, the Jews were consigned to the status of a minority dependent on the protection of its hosts—that is, if the hosts were inclined to protect it in the first place. In some cases it took many centuries for the Jews to be reduced to a level of such perfect powerlessness. As late as fourteenth-century Spain, for example, there are records of Jewish armed resistance against attacks. But by then, such resistance had become an aberration. The Jewish people had
effectively lost control over its destiny.

  A condition of inherent defenselessness necessarily invites aggression. This was especially true in the case of the Jews, who uniquely combined economic success and endemic weakness, making them an irresistible target and producing an escalating cycle of pogrom and displacement. Tossed out from one land, the Jews would find a haven in another, usually striking an arrangement with the sovereign and the nobility only to be brutally attacked when their allies and protectors were toppled or weakened. The Jewish people became a people that other people killed, often with relish, generally with impunity. A direct line leads from the massacres of Jews in the Crusades in the eleventh century, to the mass killing in Spain in 1391, to the great bloodletting in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, to the pogroms in Russia in the nineteenth century, to the Holocaust in Europe in our own time. And as the technology of destruction improved, the horrors became even more horrible.