A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  The persistent refusal of most of the Jews to see the need for something as obvious as the capacity for self-defense seems incredible today. It was indeed incredible, the result of over a thousand years of nearly complete detachment from political and military realities. Of course, after the catastrophe of World War II, many Jews came to understand the need for military power quickly enough; they understood the stark fact that the absence of a Jewish ability to physically resist the Nazis had permitted a third of their people to be slaughtered. This understanding they translated into the Jewish army of Israel, without which, they knew, another Holocaust would have befallen them at the hands of the Arabs.

  But even many Israeli Jews, who have come to accept the need for and the possibility of resistance, balk when it comes to sustaining this resistance into the indefinite future. Perhaps because of the agonized odyssey of the Jewish people, the Jewish mind seeks a way out of coping with this incessant political and occasional military struggle, stretching out into foreseeable time. When will it all end? many Israeli and non-Israeli Jews ask. Will we go on struggling forever? Will the sword forever devour its makers?

  For Israel, such questions are never fully answerable. One cannot prophesy an endless succession of wars, nor predict the scope of battles or their outcomes. Whether wars break out, whether they are defused by diplomacy or stopped by deterrence, are questions no one can answer with certainty. But what is a safe assumption is that political conflict in the Middle East is not about to disappear under any predictable circumstance—that is, unless one accepts the idea that history will soon come to its end and we shall reach the millennium. Not coincidentally, this thought is of Jewish origin as well, although the visions of Isaiah and the other Jewish prophets were principally intended to teach us what to strive for—and not necessarily what to expect next week. But whereas many other peoples have been able to distinguish between the ideal vision of human existence and the way the affairs of nations must be conducted in the present, the Jewish people has had a harder time accepting this separation. The Jews have such an acute sense of what mankind should be that they often act as though it is virtually there already.

  Nowhere is this penchant for seeing it all come to a speedy and satisfactory end more sharply felt than in Israel itself. A country besieged time and again by armies calling for its destruction, whose eighteen-year-old sons and daughters give years of their youth to serving in the army, and whose adult men do reserve duty for another twenty-five years, naturally develops a powerful longing for peace. As a result, broad swaths of Israel’s population have developed simplistic, sentimental, and even messianic views of politics.

  I recall, for instance, the attitudes of many people in Israel following the defeat of the Arabs in the Six Day War. A widespread view was that the Arabs would sue for an immediate end to the conflict. I remember that even as an eighteen-year-old I found inanely childish this notion that the Arab leaders would pick up the phone and call the whole thing off any moment now. Yet it is remarkable how many in Israel actually believed this at the time, making no allowance for the possibility that the Arabs would pursue the war against Israel by other means until they were ready for the next military round; nor did they make any allowance for the time and experiences that would be needed for an evolution in the Arabs’ deeply held beliefs about Israel.

  This approach was partly rooted in the tendency to ascribe to the Arabs the same sentiments that we felt in Israel, with a total disregard for the differences in culture, history, and political values. Many Israelis believed that the Arabs loathed war as much as they themselves did and that, given a proper explication of Israel’s peaceful intentions, the Arabs would embrace and welcome us. This cloyingly sentimental approach was espoused in the 1920s by the Brit Shalom (Alliance for Peace) movement led by the American rabbi Judah Magnes, who had settled in Jerusalem and became chancellor of the Hebrew University. Magnes believed, in decidedly American terms, that the Arab campaign against the Jews was a product of a failure to communicate. The Mufti, he believed, could be reasoned with, pacified, and appeased. Under no circumstances should the Jews take up arms and retaliate, for this would merely heighten the Arabs’ hostility. It is difficult to believe how many of the leading intellectuals of the Jewish community in Palestine continued to cling to this view, not only in the face of murderous anti-Jewish passions incited by the Mufti but even in the period when he was an active partisan of the Nazis. The successor-believers in this view are still very much with us today, ignoring the realities of Arab political life, dismissing the intentions of those bent on destroying Israel, or inverting logic by suggesting that they must be appeased rather than resisted.

  Though the great majority in Israel shuns this simple-minded attitude toward the Arab world, it is nonetheless strongly influenced by a current of thinking that encompasses surprisingly numerous segments of the population, left and right. This current derives from the relentless Jewish desire to see an end to struggle. In its essence it is a nonpolitical, even antipolitical, approach to the life of nations. Basically, it holds that history, or more precisely Middle Eastern history, will have a finite end. We will arrive at a state called “peace” in which history will simply stop. Wars will end, external conflicts will subside, internal conflicts will vanish, Israel will be accepted by the Arabs, and the Jews will be forever content. At this end of days, Israel will become a kind of blissful castle in the clouds, a Jewish never-never land in which the Jews will be able finally to find a respite from struggle and strife.

  It is a view that I remember well from my childhood. The illustrated textbooks of Israel’s geography had drawings of rolling hills and cultivated fields, in the center of which was a cluster of little white houses with red-tiled roofs and a water tower in the background, presumably signifying some idyllic kibbutz or mo-shav. The idea was that we each were destined to have our own version of this idyll, with our own little house, a stretch of grass next to it, and a leafy tree shading it—as though we did not live in the middle of a sandstorm, as though the swirling dust of fanaticism and war were not enveloping us, as though we were living in the Midwest and not in the Mideast. This fantasy view of Israel’s situation, including its fairy-tale denouement, was broadly prevalent in the education of generations of youngsters both before and after the establishment of the state.

  But after the creation of Israel, with the successive attacks and the continuing absence of the long-hoped-for peace, the gap between the idyll and the reality grew greater and greater, creating an ever-increasing sense of frustration that was felt most acutely at the extremes of the Israeli political spectrum. According to the views prevalent in these quarters, the problem was not that the idyll was misplaced or in need of revision, but that we had strayed from the path of righteousness and were being punished for our sins by the Arab refusal to accept us. If we would only correct our ways, we could reach the hoped-for pastoral state of bliss, the desire for which is embedded so deeply in the Israeli psyche.

  On the left, this messianic belief focuses today on the “sin” of Israel’s conquest of the territories during the Six Day War. The proponents of this view look nostalgically back to the nineteen years in which Israel lived in a vulnerable, embryonic condition. Somehow they manage to remember not the terrible danger to which the country was subjected but only the relative degree of national unity that this danger produced.

  In this leftist revision of history, the incorporation of the territories into Israel during the Six Day War was the beginning of all evil. Israel became smug and self-satisfied, insensitive and inhuman, repressing the Palestinian Arabs and tarnishing the Israeli soul in the process. To save Israel’s soul, we must amputate part of the body. If only the nation were to rid itself of the territories, its economy would improve, Israelis would have to serve less reserve duty, and there would be jobs for new immigrants and money for building safer highways. This strain of argument occasionally spills over into the foreign press in articles about the ill effects
of the “tensions produced by the occupation,” which are supposed to lead to such things as increased child abuse and wife-beating. The essential thesis of this view is: Give up the territories and be saved. The true believers are certain that we are at salvation’s gate but have simply been too blind or too foolish to go in.

  A mirror image of this messianism is found on the religious right, where it is believed that the act of settling the land is in and of itself sufficient to earn divine providence and an end to the country’s woes. If Israel were merely to hang tough and erect more settlements, it could dispense with world opinion and international pressures. A variation on the religious right’s view is the idea advanced by a segment of the nonreligious right that Israel could achieve lasting stability if only it could get rid of the Arabs living in its midst. That is, the left believes that getting rid of the territories would cure all of Israel’s ills, the right believes that keeping the territories would achieve the same effect.

  These are all quick fixes that are neither quick nor able to fix. For what needs fixing is the underlying problem of Arab hostility—a problem that may or may not disappear with the passing of several generations. Both of these fantasies evidence a fundamental immaturity in Israeli political culture, a desperate search for an escape from the difficult struggle that Jewish national life among the Arabs has engendered throughout this century, and that Israel will have to face in the next century as well.

  True, continuing struggle does not necessarily mean perpetual war, but it does mean an ongoing national exertion and the possibility of periodic bouts of international. confrontation. Ending the state of war with the Arab states and establishing formal peace with them would substantially reduce the degree and the intensity of the conflict, but it can never fully eliminate the possibility offuture wars and upheavals, just as the end of the Cold War did not constitute an end to all conflicts or to history itself, as some had inanely believed. You cannot end the struggle for survival without ending life itself.

  It is this that Jews in general and Israelis in particular find so difficult to accept. A nation of idealists and closet idealists, still lacking the experience of political sovereignty needed to sharpen political perspicacity, they have found it difficult to adjust to the realities of international politics. The escapist tendencies to Israeli politics stem from this Jewish inability to reconcile oneself to the permanent need for Jewish power.

  Of course, after many decades most Israelis have come to terms with the idea that the military is, at least for the time being, the indispensable foundation of Israel’s security. But the evident successes of the Israeli army in protecting the country and its citizens have obscured a crucial truth: Military strength is not enough to ensure the nation’s survival. Just as the Jews had earlier failed to grasp the significance of military power, a great many Jews, including many Israelis, now fail to understand the significance of, and the need for, other types of power—and the totality of strength that derives from a nation’s military, economic, and political resources.

  Thus, in contrast to their new-found willingness to defend themselves against military attacks, many Israelis show a marked and disturbing tendency toward conceding at the first sign of serious international political and economic pressure. Who are we, they ask, to resist the entire world? If this is the will of the powers that be, what choice do we have but to go along? That it is sometimes—and in the case of Israel, often—necessary to dissent from and resist prevailing opinion seldom crosses their minds. That dissent is possible is believed even less frequently. In the realm of political power, the habits of passivity and submissiveness acquired in exile are still very much with us.

  Yet the twentieth century has shown better than any other age that political power is no less important than military might in international conflicts. This is a lesson that no one, regardless of his ends, can afford to forget. The Czechs neglected this lesson and allowed Hitler, who understood it well, to paint them into a political corner in Munich, forcing them to surrender their country’s defenses without firing a shot. But it is not only victims of aggression who pay the price for underestimating the importance of political power. Sometimes the perpetrators of aggression forget it as well. Saddam Hussein, for one, did not take it into account in his bid to rule Kuwait. His army had overcome all Kuwaiti resistance within hours, but the battle that Saddam was unprepared to fight was the political battle, over the next six months, to persuade international opinion that his cause was just, and that the governments of the world should not embark on embargo and war to pry Kuwait from his grasp. He could have prepared the ground in advance by conducting a full-scale campaign in the West to obscure his designs under a cloud of palatable arguments: that the Kuwaiti rulers were corrupt oppressors of their own people, that Kuwaitis were an integral part of the Iraqi people, that they welcomed his populist rule, and so on. But having failed to fight on this battlefield, Saddam lost ignominiously. He was completely isolated internationally, with virtually no one to come to his assistance or broker an elegant, face-saving compromise. He was saved only by American timidity in the closing hours of the war.

  As Saddam learned the hard way, to win militarily you must also win politically; to win politically, you must win over public opinion; and to win over public opinion, you must convince the public that your cause is just.

  This chain of imperatives, culminating in the need to muster public support on a vast scale, is not a luxury that nations may choose to forgo. The advent of democratic ideals and democratic terminology, along with the rise of the mass media, have elevated international public opinion into the crucial arena in which political struggles are waged. It matters little if your cause is just or unjust, moral or immoral. Anyone engaged in political or military conflict in this century must seek to persuade international audiences that his cause is just. Indeed, Hitler and Churchill were quintessential examples of political leaders who understood the logic of this new necessity. Hitler and Goebbels perfected the techniques of the propaganda blitz, disguising their aggressive intentions in appeals to justice and self-determination. Although these were outrageous parodies of the truth, they were nonetheless accepted at the time as plausible explanations of Nazi actions (and as excuses for Western inaction). Churchill recognized that his first task as war leader was to mobilize the entire Western world by appealing to its most cherished values of freedom and human dignity. His main weapons, his speeches, were carefully constructed toward that end, as were those of his ally, Franklin Roosevelt, who pioneered the systematic use of broadcasting as a device to rally public opinion.

  To see the power of public opinion in the age of mass communication, one need only compare the electrifying effect of Churchill’s speeches, broadcast to millions over radio, with the virtual initial noneffect of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. That address, though at least as inspiring as any that Churchill wrote, was heard by only a handful of people, and it played almost no immediate role in determining the course of the Civil War. 5 The millions who were swayed by its poetry and power became familiar with it only later, and not in the midst of the great events that had led Lincoln to compose it. It could be argued that even if Lincoln had had broadcasting available to him, his weak voice would not have carried the message, as Churchill’s stentorian delivery did. All this serves simply to underscore the new realities of the century: that the effect of a powerful message powerfully delivered and powerfully broadcast to public opinion has become an indispensable element in the waging of political and military struggles.

  Many of the century’s chief antagonists in international disputes have understood this principle. Stalin applied it enthusiastically, presenting himself as the world’s savior and changing democracies into despotisms in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people. This legacy of the big lie hugely told has been bequeathed by Hitler and Stalin to an endless array of lesser dictators, from Nasser to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro, who have used their techniques on their victims and on their victims
’ allies to weaken resistance to their aggression.

  Take the North Vietnamese as an example. They pursued the propaganda war with great success against South Vietnam, presenting themselves as a paragon of goodness while vilifying the South, whose government was anything but pristine but was certainly not guilty of the mass killings and uprooting of entire populations that the North habitually practiced. The relentless North Vietnamese propaganda campaign aimed at American public opinion made an important contribution to sapping the American will to pursue the war. To the understandable question of why American boys should be fighting in a far corner of Asia was added the corollary: especially when America’s ally is so corrupt and evil. With repetition of the question, the answer became increasingly obvious, paving the way to North Vietnam’s victory.

  But notwithstanding the success of the North Vietnamese, I believe that in the postwar era the preeminent masters of translating propaganda into political pressure have been the Arabs. The Arab regimes and terror organizations have understood the importance of this instrument as it applied to their particular objective: the destruction of Israel. They saw that to reverse Israel’s military victory of 1967 they would have to defeat Israel politically, that this meant defeating it on the battleground of public opinion, and that this in turn meant defeating it in the appeal to justice. They consequently proceeded to weave an elaborate patchwork quilt of falsehoods: the false Theory of Palestinian Centrality, the false Reversal of Causality, the false image of PLO Congeniality. Above all, the Arabs sought to rob the Jews of every aspect of the historical case that suggested the justice of their cause, constructing an extraordinary distortion of Jewish history and substituting in its place a fictitious Palestinian one: The Arabs took the place of the Jews as the natives in the land, and the Jews took the place of the Arabs as the invaders; the horrible Jewish exile into a hundred lands was exchanged for a Palestinian Arab “exile” (into the neighboring Arab states); the atrocities committed against the Jews were denied and dismissed, while any hardship encountered by the Arabs was inflated into a miniature Holocaust. All this was meant to persuade the peoples of the world, especially those of the United States and Europe, that Israel had committed a grave injustice, which the Arabs were merely trying to correct, and that decent people everywhere were obligated to help them correct it.