A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Of course, to some Israelis and perhaps to some non-Israeli readers of this book, all this is not necessary. Israel, they believe, will be coddled by the world when it pursues the right policies. Presumably this means getting rid of the hateful “territories,” since, these people believe, all of Israel’s ills stem from the fateful days in June 1967, when it took possession of these lands. They forget the terrible campaigns of terror and warfare launched against the Jews and the Jewish state by the Arab world half a century before the Six Day War. They erase from their minds the peril in which Israel found itself on the eve of that war and the fact that it was from these very mountains that the attack was launched. They forget, too, that the demands placed on Israel will not end with the evacuation of the West Bank (as they did not end with the evacuation of the Sinai). After pocketing the territories, the Arabs could go back to demanding eastern Jerusalem, the “right of return,” autonomy (and later independence) for the Arabs of the Galilee and the Negev, and more—demands that would place Israel in even greater danger, and against which Israel would still have to struggle on the world scene to defend itself. The need for waging a worldwide public information campaign is not going to disappear with changing political circumstances.

  In a world that has been conditioned to see Israel as the heavy, every Israeli retreat from positions under dispute with the Arabs will naturally be applauded. Israel will be patted on the back and congratulated as long as it continues to make unilateral concessions. But once an Israeli government decides, as it inevitably must, to draw a line beyond which it cannot retreat, the international applause will cease—and pressure will begin again. Hence the test of Israeli diplomacy is not whether it can gain short-term sympathy by sacrificing Israel’s vital interests, but whether it can protect these interests while securing international understanding and support. To yield to pressure for the sake of ephemeral international praise is as tempting as it is short-sighted. To be firm about vital matters and to earn the respect of nations for this stance is much more difficult, but ultimately more prudent and responsible. The school of thought that holds that Israel’s public relations problem would end with the establishment of a Palestinian state is wrong. In such a case Israel would be faced with an existential threat and a public relations nightmare, as Arab irreden-tism turns its focus on the Arab population within the remainder of Israel. Resisting an outcome so reminiscent of 1938 Czechoslovakia, or of Lebanon and the Balkans today, is critical for the continued existence of the Jewish state. Israel must direct the current of public opinion rather than agree to being swept along by it toward the political cataract downstream.

  Many of those Israelis who believe that influencing public opinion is unimportant do so because they have adopted a significant portion of the Arabs’ revision of the truth: They have come to accept that the reason Israel has been attacked by the Arab world since 1967 is because of its victory in the Six Day War. This is the ultimate in siege mentality: If I am besieged, I must have done something wrong. And if my enemy tells me to lower the drawbridge or else he will continue the siege, I must surely do as he says and relieve myself of the burden of his disapproval. (There are various rationalizations for this course of action: The enemy is not an enemy, the siege is not a siege, the protecting wall does not protect, and so on.) Moreover, argue the rationalizers, the situation on the outside has dramatically changed. Has not the world transformed itself, with old enemies becoming new friends everywhere? Why should Israel be the sad exception to this happy rule? Let us lower our defenses, embrace our adversaries, and live in everlasting tranquillity with one another.

  The fact that many parts of the world may indeed be changing for the better does not mean that Israel’s immediate vicinity is doing the same. Despite the good news that a regime such as Syria has been brought to the negotiating table as a result of the collapse of its Soviet sponsor, the fact remains that in many ways the neighborhood has been changing for the worse. It has certainly not improved. Has Saddam really changed for the better? Has Qaddafi? Is there an Iraqi Lech Walesa in the wings? An Iranian Vaclav Havel? The Middle East’s numerous predator regimes remain unreformed, Arab arms purchases from West and East continue to escalate, and there is no longer a need to look for Soviet approval before embarking on the next adventure. Worse, Islamic fundamentalism continues to gather momentum. Worse still, the development of nuclear weapons by Arab states and Iran continues at a feverish pace. Yet none of this seems to matter to those who readily dismiss these problems as nitpicking, spoiling the picture they so desperately want to see outside the wall.

  Sometimes these same Israelis offer a variation on their recipe for despair. What’s the use of resisting Arab demands, they ask, if the United States and the other powers of the world are irredeemably committed to supporting those demands? How will Israel ever secure American favor if it does not comply with American conditions? It does not cross the minds of these advocates of capitulation that the task of Israel’s leaders is to try to convince the American government that it is in the interest of the United States to follow policies that cohere with Israeli interests, not vice versa. This, after all, is the basic purpose of foreign policy for any country—to pursue one’s own interests, not those of others.

  Curiously, the advocates of this submissive posture fail to recognize that the United States is a vibrant democracy in which various forces affect the shaping of policy: the administration, the Congress, and especially popular opinion. Each of these audiences is eager to hear a variety of viewpoints and is very much open to persuasion. American policy toward Israel is ultimately determined by the synthesis of all these forces, and Israel has every fair opportunity to try to convince each of them of the justice of its case. Even those who have no case make this effort, and Israel cannot afford not to. As in the 1930s, when the Jews were paralyzed and did not make the case against the aspects of British policy so inimical to their interests and had forgone the attempts to appeal to a public and a parliament still very much favorable to them, so today there exists in Israel and in parts of the Jewish world elsewhere a faction that abhors the idea of an activist opposition to the policies dangerous to Israel that may come out of Washington, in the belief that such opposition would itself endanger Israel’s relationship with the United States.

  This is preposterously circular reasoning. It is not to Israel’s advantage to sacrifice its most vital interests for a relationship that is meant to safeguard those interests in the first place. Furthermore, this thinking does not take into account the appreciation in Washington, as in many other places, of a sound argument cogently made and powerfully backed by resolute will. The weak and timid may do well for a while, but not for very long. In international politics, in fact in domestic politics too, strength attracts and weakness ultimately repels.

  This is true not only in the battle for public opinion (in which a powerful presentation attracts support and a weak one does not) but also in enhancing the possibility of obtaining the support of governments even before the factor of public opinion is introduced. There is a tendency to forget that substantial foreign aid to Israel was not forthcoming between 1948 and 1967, when Israel was perceived as being fragile and endangered. The dramatic rise of American support for Israel began only after the Six Day War, when Israel resoundingly defeated the Arabs, captured the territories against terrific odds, and proved beyond a doubt that it was the preeminent military power in the Middle East—an assumption that was confirmed in September 1970, when Israeli power was used to prevent a Syrian takeover of Jordan. Those who constantly plead for a return to the eggshell borders of pre-1967 never seem to take these facts into account, ironically claiming that possession of the territories will jeopardize American aid. In fact, nothing is more likely to jeopardize American support for Israel than the return of Israel to a condition of chronic vulnerability. No nation in the world will choose to ally itself with Israel because it has returned to parading the virtue of Jewish powerlessness.

  Th
e same applies to economic powerlessness. An economically weak Israel inspires no desire for alliances, either economic or political. But an Israel that shakes off the political and bureaucratic manacles that have shackled its economy is being quickly transformed into a significant economic power that others would seek to join, much as Taiwan and South Korea were able to overcome their political isolation by demonstrating substantial economic strength. Moreover, since American aid to Israel is in any case going to be greatly reduced in the coming years due to domestic forces unrelated to the Middle East, Israel’s economic focus should be on attracting American investments rather than American philanthropy. The result would be an increased American interest in Israel, even greater than the one that existed during the years of American-Soviet rivalry. This is the policy that I embarked on, for the first time actually reducing Israel’s dependence on American financial support, while rigorously privatizing and liberalizing Israel’s economy.

  Some believe that the fact that the Soviet Union has collapsed and poses no more threat to American and Western interests in the region has irrevocably altered Israel’s importance to the United States and to the West. I do not share this view. The collapse of the Soviets has merely replaced one type of threat with another. The Soviets were very careful to control the aggressive impulses of their clients, and they always knew when to pull back from an engagement that might escalate into a direct confrontation with American military power. Further, they were exceptionally careful not to allow any Soviet nuclear technology to reach the regimes allied with them, perhaps because they were fully acquainted with the terrible dangers that such technology in such hands might pose. But this is precisely the danger that the world faces today. Iraq, Iran, and Syria are now all vying to develop nuclear weapons and the missile systems to deliver them. The demise of the Soviet Union has enabled the unrestrained growth of the militant regimes in the Middle East, with no one in the region to continually check either their ambitions or their obsessive plans for armament—no one, that is, other than Israel, which is both willing and able to act in its own defense and thereby safeguard the broader interest of peace. The international community is not likely to station a permanent countervailing military force in the region anytime soon, even if the Arabs were to allow it, and the need for such a force is not going to disappear. In many ways Israel serves this purpose. Were it not for Israel, Jordan certainly would have been swallowed by its neighbors in short order, and the radical regimes of Syria and Iraq would now have little to obstruct their advance—unless the United States is prepared to reprise its performance in the Gulf War every few years.

  A strong Israel introduces a measure of stability into an ultimately unstable region. A weak Israel does not. Consumed at every moment by the need to devote all its resources to protect its own fragile borders, it will not be able to contribute its part to deterring armed attacks from radical states in the region, or to reducing their capacity to launch international terrorism or interdict the sea lanes. These are real dangers that have not passed from the world with the disappearance of Soviet power; in fact, they may actually increase in the coming years. Israel shares a common interest with many other countries to ward off these threats, and such common ground can be the basis of important political alliances that can be formed in the future.

  But the Soviet collapse has already brought to the surface other, previously suppressed areas of mutual interest. A host of countries that had broken off relations with Israel after the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War have reestablished relations with Israel: China, Russia, India, Nigeria, and nearly thirty others in the years between 1988 and 1992. There were several reasons for this change (among them the democratization of Eastern Europe), but a principal force behind the seemingly endless procession of diplomats and heads of state to Jerusalem in recent years has been that many of these governments believe Israel possesses special capacities to influence American policy in what, for a while at least, promises to be a unipolar world. It matters little whether this assessment is correct; it matters a great deal that it is held. For those who argued that Israel was doomed to international isolation unless it gave up the territories, this was particularly sad news. Some exponents of this view wrote lugubrious articles in Israel’s leading papers lamenting the narrow views of these foreign governments driven by considerations of power and self-interest alone.

  In fact, this is not exactly the case. Unlike public opinion, many governments do tend to be concerned first with power, and only then with virtue or the appearance of virtue. This is exactly why a campaign to influence public opinion, which in turn influences government policy, is often so essential. Nowhere is this more important than in the United States. American support for Israel is not rooted exclusively, or even mainly, in the question of interest. The United States, more than any other country, shapes its policies in accordance with the climate of its public opinion, and the climate that has ruled for a very long time finds in Israel a society that treasures values shared with the United States. Nurturing these feelings, and the values Americans share with the Jewish state, should be a top priority of every Israeli government.

  Nevertheless, I firmly believe that at the point of testing, a weak Israel would elicit a great deal of American sympathy but not much else. This is not mere theory. It was tested before the Six Day War in the life-threatening siege imposed by Nasser’s coalition, when a highly sympathetic U.S. administration stood on the sidelines. This same lesson was taught once more by the terrible events that unfolded in the ruins of Yugoslavia in 1992. Although the Bosnians may have been able to muster all the sympathy in the world, a ground war intervention against the Serbs was nonetheless an option too costly, too dangerous, and too short on clear political benefits for any nation in the world to do more than sympathize, even as the slaughter raged on for years. If you lack the power to protect yourself, it is unlikely that in the absence of a compelling interest anyone else will be willing to do it for you. Air support, yes. Ground war action with its attendant casualties is much slower to come, if at all.

  What emerges is this: Power is the cornerstone of the effort to attract and maintain alliances. Yet without a campaign to secure international sympathy, even the most formidable accumulation of military or economic power is simply insufficient to assure enduring support. Equally, the accumulation of international sympathy is no substitute for self-defense. The Jewish people must forcefully resist the jejune notion of the Israeli left that an Israel stripped of its physical defenses will be so morally strong as to inspire ever-ready and everlasting protection from the mighty. Weakness buys you nothing. It is not a prescription for securing the support of governments, or for their acting on your behalf. On the contrary, it is the one sure way of securing their indifference.

  But Israel must resist the equally immature conception of the Israeli right that nothing we will do or say will make a difference to an implacably hostile world. Actions invariably speak louder than words, assert the self-declared Spartan “realists” of the right, so let us do without the words. They are wrong. Support among the nations, especially in the great democracies of the West, can be bolstered, cultivated, and protected by an incessant campaign to win over the public. If the Jewish people had understood this principle during the couse of this century, it could have activated others to assist it in times of peril rather than having the very opposite happen. And had Israel understood this principle, it certainly would not have allowed Arab propaganda, including all the gross distortions detailed in this book, to capture the high ground of international opinion.

  It may puzzle some that after all the depredations Jews suffered in the last one hundred years, all this is not self-evident. Yet there are many people who might glimpse pieces of a puzzle and reach totally different conclusions about the whole. For example, there are some in Israel who, sensing that military power is not enough, proceed to say that it is therefore unnecessary. Others question the wisdom of Herzl’s vision by arguing that attacks ag
ainst Jews still persist in the form of attacks against the Jewish state, just as they did when the Jews lived as a collection of dispersed communities. They miss the point. A Jewish state was not expected to eliminate all attacks on the Jewish people, merely to enable an effective defense against such attacks. Herzl viewed the establishment of a Jewish state as the prerequisite instrument by which the Jews could resurrect their capacity to resist the ill fortunes heaped on them by a history of dispersion and the baser instincts of mankind.

  And indeed, what a difference the Jewish state has made for Jewish fortunes. It has rescued beleaguered Jewish communities, bringing them, as from Yemen and Ethiopia, on the wings of eagles to the soil of their ancient homeland. It beckons as a haven and resting place for millions of Jews in Russia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, who look over their shoulders at the spectre of anti-Semitism. What these Jews have is what the Jews of Europe half a century ago did not: the knowledge that they are not alone, that they have a place to go, that there is a country that not only wants them but will intercede for their safety and their well-being.

  In another powerful scene in Shoah, a minor official of the Polish government-in-exile, a non-Jew, describes how during the Nazi annihilation of Polish Jewry, he was approached by a delegation of Jews from Warsaw begging for Allied assistance—for military action, for arms for the Jewish fighters in the ghetto, at least for public pronouncements of support. No one was listening, and so they had to come to him, they said. “We understand we have no country of our own, we have no government, we have no voice in the Allied councils. So we have to [seek help from]… little people like you… Will you approach… the Allied leaders?” But there was of course little he could actually do. 8