A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  While the Arabs were exceptional in waging the battle for public opinion so long and so systematically, the Jews of Israel were unique in abandoning the field for so long. For as we have noted, the Israelis have been encumbered by the great debilitation stemming from the long Jewish absence from international political life and the renewed emphasis on military power. The majority felt there was no need to counteract Arab propaganda. Had not the Israeli Defense Forces extricated Israel from destruction in 1948 and again in 1967? Were they not capable of doing so again? And if the Arabs kept prattling away at the UN, in the media and in universities of the West—what of it? Surely Israel did not have to concern itself with such trivial carpings, as long as it possessed the military power to defend itself. As David Ben-Gurion bluntly informed a young nation in the 1950s: What matters is not what the goyim (Gentiles) say, but what the Jews do. He was half right, of course. Without resolute Jewish actions, the building and fortification of the Jewish state could not take place. But he was flat wrong in dismissing the importance and power of public opinion—he found out later, when Israeli forces responded to Egyptian-sponsored terror attacks by entering the Sinai in 1956. At the time, Ben-Gurion announced that Israel would not leave the Sinai for a thousand years. But Israel’s failure to win support for its action in the American administration, the Congress, and with the public in order to dampen Eisenhower’s opposition resulted in a hasty Israeli retreat within months.

  It took several decades for the majority of Israelis to acknowledge the force of public opinion. And though by now there are many who lament Israel’s ongoing lack of activity in this area, most still do not see in sharp focus how much real damage is caused to their country by its negative portrayal, and how much more difficult it makes the job of securing alliances, without which no small nation can survive.

  Ironically, it is precisely the common Israeli belief in the para-mountcy of military power that has reduced Israel’s ability to secure such alliances. A reigning assumption that military power alone suffices to guarantee the security of a nation will inevitably breed complacency with regard to the political side of national power. Alliances that are not cultivated are alliances that do not come into being, and the absence of reliable allies in turn fosters an enervating fatalism about the political world: that Israel is irrevocably doomed to an unsplendid isolation; that the entire world is inevitably against it; and that there is nothing that it can do other than to muster the force, exclusively physical in nature, to withstand the pressures.

  That this has sometimes been the case does not make it always the case. For the nations of the world form their alliances and their antipathies according to their changing interest and, in an increasingly democratic world, according to their public opinion. Israel could therefore act on both these fronts of interest and opinion to persuade governments and their citizens alike about the advisability and the justice of siding with it. This might not get everyone on Israel’s side and it might not even get most on Israel’s side, but it would get some, and it would reduce the antagonism of others.

  This was precisely Herzl’s conception when he successfully sought to obtain the support for Zionism among the rulers of Britain, Germany, Russia, Turkey, and others, but it cannot be said that his followers understood his conception or applied it very well. Perhaps it was because Herzl, who understood political power and public opinion so intuitively and applied them so brilliantly, died so young. It is a fact that most of the Zionist leadership after his death accepted with only minor resistance the great injustices that the British heaped upon them between the two world wars, believing they were powerless in the face of a great power—even though British public opinion, like American opinion later, could be made sympathetic and susceptible to Zionist appeals.

  The one student of Herzl who understood the importance and the possibility of political resistance was Jabotinsky. In addition to stressing the need for Jewish military force and a territory on which the Jews could build their state, Jabotinsky put forward what he called the theory of public pressure:

  For there is no friendship in politics: There is pressure. What tips the balance one way or another is not whether the ruler is good or bad, but the degree of pressure exerted by the subjects. If pressure is exerted solely by our opponents, with no counter-pressure applied by us, then whatever is done in Palestine will be against us, even if the head of the government will be called Balfour, or Wedgwood, or even Theodor Herzl!

  Politics does not suffer a void; and if one side presses another with political and propaganda pressure while its opponent does nothing, the passive party will ultimately have to yield to the pressure. Therefore the only way for the Jewish people to resist this kind of coercion, Jabotinsky thought, was to apply the counter-pressure aimed at influencing foreign governments and their publics. And to do this, no less than on the military battlefield, the Jews would have to be willing to fight:

  For no reformation in national conditions is attained without pressure and struggle. And whoever lacks the stamina, courage, ability, and desire to fight, will not be able to achieve even the smallest adjustment [of these conditions] on our behalf. 6

  Like Herzl, Jabotinsky was little understood. He too died relatively young—actually, in the course of attempting to launch such a campaign in 1940 to win over American public opinion to the cause of a Jewish state. The majority of his followers grasped very well his military and territorial ideas, but only a few fully appreciated the third, political element of his conception of national power—the need for an unrelenting international effort of persuasion and pressure to protect Jewish interests.

  This is why the successive Likud governments that emblazoned Jobotinsky’s teachings on their ideological flag in fact often proceeded to act on the international scene in direct contravention of his principles. They frequently took actions that were justifiable in themselves, but they made absolutely no effort to persuade the world that this was the case. Likud governments emphasized the pride Jews should take in acting firmly, rather than the prudence of ensuring that the action was understood to be correct and just. The need to win over public opinion was simply not perceived to be a priority (or even a possibility), and as a result no capability was developed to see it realized on the world scene.

  Hence the Israeli military strike on the Iraqi reactor in 1981, to take one obvious example, was met with near-universal opprobrium, since Israel did next to nothing to counter Arab propaganda and Western censure, both of which would have been relatively easy to refute in this case. And when Israel entered Lebanon in 1982, this error was compounded: Rather than fighting the political battle, Israel did the opposite, imposing an information blackout for the first crucial days of the war—the chief effect of which was to ensure that the Israeli side of the story went virtually unreported. Completely left out of the picture was the fact that Israel’s northern cities had been tormented by PLO rocket and terror attacks for a decade, as children grew up in bomb shelters and urban populations dwindled from year to year. Also left out was the preceding decade’s history of PLO murder, rape, and looting in South Lebanon and the fact that even the Shi’ite Moslems there greeted the Israeli soldiers as liberators. The PLO took full advantage of this vacuum to flood the world media with fabricated reports of Israeli atrocities. It succeeded, for example, in convincing the media for a time that Israel’s attack had left six hundred thousand people in South Lebanon homeless—more than the entire actual population of the region. By the time Israel lifted the blackout, much of the PLO’s depiction of events had been accepted as truth, and even Israel’s staunchest friends abroad had trouble explaining why Israel should be supported. The political battle had been lost.

  But it was worse than lost. For if there is one thing for which the Lebanon campaign is remembered internationally, it is the massacre of several hundred Palestinian Arabs by Christian Lebanese allied with Israel in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla outside Beirut. This horrifying massacre was not perpetrated
by Israeli forces but by Arabs seeking to avenge the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel (who was a Christian). It was yet another bloody chapter in a civil war in which Palestinians and Christians had massacred each other again and again since the early 1970s. Israeli forces did not participate in the massacre, did not enable it, did not even know about it. In fact, Israel’s judicial commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, recommended the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon in the wake of the massacre because he knew nothing about it, and, according to the commission, should have foreseen that the Christians would slaughter the Palestinians and should have acted to preempt the massacre. Yet skillful Arab propaganda, combining with the Israeli media paralysis, left its indelible impression that Israel, having launched a pointless war of aggression, had sunk to the level of massacring Arab innocents.

  The consequences of this were all too real. Instead of being understood as a decisive blow against international terror, the Israeli campaign was received in the West as unreasonable and unjust, even in the United States and Britain, which were to bomb Libya only three years later in response to terrorist attacks that affected them. The result was mounting Western opposition to the Israeli operation and mounting pressure to stay Israel’s hand and prevent the PLO, trapped in West Beirut and surrounded by the Israeli army, from being destroyed. The West, whose airliners had been blown out of the sky, its citizens kidnapped, and its diplomats murdered by terrorists dispatched from the PLO’s lair in Lebanon, now fought to save the organization that had committed these crimes from the Israeli onslaught. In the end Western pressure prevailed, and the PLO’s ten thousand gunmen were escorted out of Beirut, rifles in hand, and spirited away to the safety of the PLO’s bases in Tunisia and other Arab states.

  During the Lebanon campaign, nothing more dramatically underscored the importance of the political battle than the incident of President Ronald Reagan and the armless Palestinian girl. The Israeli Defense Force had achieved a complete military victory, destroying the PLO presence everywhere in southern Lebanon. Only West Beirut, the last PLO stronghold, remained, and the Israeli army was selectively bombarding PLO strongholds in the hope of forcing a surrender and preventing the higher casualties that would be involved in a direct assault. At the height of the siege, President Reagan was handed a photograph of a little Palestinian girl who, he was told, had lost her arm in the Israeli bombardment. Moved to anger, the president picked up the telephone and told Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin that the bombardment had to stop. Begin complied.

  At the time, I was posted to Washington as Israel’s deputy chief of mission. When I saw the photograph, I asked if it could be enlarged. The more the picture was enlarged, the less it looked like a fresh photo taken after that summer’s operation. We pored over it. Finally, I managed to establish telephone contact with the Israeli headquarters in Beirut and suggested that the military try to find the girl. A few days later, the Israeli army succeeded in locating her. Her arm had indeed been damaged, but years earlier during the Lebanese civil war; she had been the victim of Arab and not Israeli fire. But by then it was too late. The notion of Israel’s brutality had penetrated a notch deeper into the consciousness of the American leadership and public.

  Nevertheless, the fact that policy and the explication of policy have become inseparably intertwined has still not penetrated into the consciousness of many in Israel, as it has in Western countries. The President of the United States and most other world leaders do not make decisions that are independent of the way in which these decisions will be received by international opinion (and obviously, domestic opinion). In fact, an integral part of making a decision is addressing the question of how it will affect public opinion and what needs to be done to make its message more palatable and effective to international audiences. This is a need that very large states may sometimes forgo, though they seldom do. But a small country, much more dependent on international climate, simply does not have the luxury of ignoring the principle that a policy and its presentation are inseparable.

  Having rediscovered its military capabilities, Israel is now in the midst of discovering the political capacities it needs to survive in a swiftly changing world. These capacities require, I believe, a major overhaul in Israel’s abilities to present its case and its policies before world audiences. This must be understood to be a central pillar of policy and be treated accordingly, necessarily changing both the formulation of Israel’s messages to the world and the quality of its messengers.

  Contrary to conventional wisdom, the issue here is not just what kinds of pictures will flicker across the television screen. It is the crafting of argument and image through language, which is always the decisive first step in political debate, and usually this takes place in print before broadcasting. I have found over the years, again contrary to the popular wisdom, that occasionally one word can be worth a thousand pictures, rather than vice versa. For example, the word occupation. Or the expression homeless people. Or Arab land. Or land for peace. In countless newspaper pieces, journal articles, and books, the Arabs have devoted untold intellectual resources to framing the argument in such a way that it frames Israel. Israel will have to devote an even greater intellectual effort to extricating itself from the trap into which it has so readily entered. Above all, this will require clearly written words, powerfully tying together arguments and facts that must be disseminated in journals, periodicals, and newspapers of the West—and now those of the East as well, especially in Russia and Japan. Israel must explain to world audiences the basis of the Jewish right to the land, the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the goals and tactics of its adversaries, and the prerequisites for genuine peace in the region.

  By arguing for the need for written rebuttals to the Arab defamation of Israel, I do not wish to imply that spoken words should be neglected, especially those spoken on television. As the Gulf War showed, international crises are increasingly televised exchanges, and the protagonists and antagonists do much of the exchanging before the viewers’ eyes. During the Gulf War, for leaders and public alike, the main source of real-time information—and what is more important, real-time impressions of the unfolding situation—was the new international news networks. What George Bush was seeing on his screen in the White House was seen by Saddam Hussein in his bunker in Baghdad, by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, and by Yitzhak Shamir in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem—as well as by every other government in the world. What was said over this medium immediately and directly influenced the perceptions of the world’s leaders, in addition to influencing the respective publics to which these leaders are ultimately accountable in democratic societies. If public opinion was of decisive importance in shaping political outcomes during the first half of the century, it is now, at the close of the second half of the century, assuming an importance not even imaginable thirty or forty years earlier. And Israel, which is at the eye of so many political storms, simply will not be able to continue to go about its political or diplomatic business as usual, as though none of this existed.

  Astonishingly, some hold the view that Israel should actually give up the battle for public opinion. Thus, an Israeli daily in the early nineties explained that the Labor government then ruling Israel considered Israeli diplomats to be “discharged from the burden of aggressive public relations”; the government, it said, is “declaring a unilateral cease-fire in the media war” and “promises not to be dragged into responding to the provocations of the Arab spokesmen.” 7 How effective a strategy this is was demonstrated in December 1992 when the new Labor government deported over four hundred Hamas Islamic fundamentalist organizers and in-citers to Lebanon—making no provision whatsoever to stave off the public relations disaster that ensued when the deportees encamped themselves on a hillside near Israel’s border and before the cameras of the world. Essentially, an Israeli media cease-fire amounts to capitulation: doing away with the presentation of realities and simply expressing Isra
el’s peaceful intentions in the hope that this will suffice to protect the country politically. This view fails to grasp the significance of the ceaseless campaign of vilification aimed at Israel by the Arab regimes, regardless of which party is in power in Jerusalem. The absence of a credible effort to explain Israel’s position to the world over the last few decades has led to one political defeat after another, and as long as only the Arab side is doing the explaining, the situation can only go from bad to worse.

  As for Israel’s messengers, its ministers, parliamentarians, and diplomats will have to become adept at communicating with international audiences. The diplomats, in fact, ought to be chosen in the first instance with these capacities in mind. Israel will have to recruit the sharpest minds and most eloquent pens to refute the many lies hurled at it and to present the truth. In the technical sense, this requires an overhaul of the government ministries involved, defining differently, for example, the job of a diplomat and recruiting candidates accordingly. It also requires a radically different level of staffing and funding to engage in research, publication, broadcasting, and press relations. Such reforms of Israel’s information apparatus can take place only with the political reforms that will make available the authority needed to sweep clean the existing information barns.