A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  No more succinct a statement could be made about the significance of the rise of Israel. For if there had been an Israel earlier in this century, there surely would have been no Holocaust. There would have been a country willing to take the Jewish refugees when America, Britain, and the other nations refused. There would have been a country to press for their departure. And there would have been an army ready to fight for them. If the past was lacking in this regard, the future is not: The Jews are no longer helpless, no longer lacking the capacities to assert their case and to fight for it. It is an uncontestable fact that the establishment of the Jewish state has retrieved for the Jews the ability to again seize their destiny, to again control their fate. And if that ability is still in the making, if the Jewish people needs time to shed its apolitical habits of thought and behavior acquired in years of exile, this process will have to be substantially accelerated. The Jewish state is at the center of an international maelstrom, and it needs much political ingenuity to maneuver on the international scene. Somehow Israel will have to compress the long decades required to produce the political statesmanship it so badly needs. It cannot wait to become politically mature. It must skip its adolescence and become politically adult. The Jewish people underwent this kind of rapid transformation in the case of building military strength, and it will now have to do the same in re-creating its political abilities.

  But this is not a change that Jews alone find difficult to assimilate. Israel encounters difficulties in explaining its position that no other nation encounters. No other country faces both constant threats to its existence and constant criticism for acting against such threats. I do not believe that the international obtuseness in grasping Israel’s predicament is grounded solely in the successes of Arab propaganda and Israel’s ineffectual response to it. This explanation may remove the topsoil of attitudes toward the Jewish state, but it does not get to the psychological bedrock underneath. That rock, I believe, consists of a basic difficulty in accepting the revolutionary change in the status of the Jews.

  The entire world is witnessing the historical transformation of the Jewish people from a condition of powerlessness to power, from a condition of being unable to meet the contingencies of a violent world to one in which the Jewish people is strong enough to pilot its own destiny. For a world accustomed to seeing the Jew as the perennial victim, suffering endless atrocities at the hands of a succession of persecutors, this is a jarring shift in reality that has barely begun to make sense. This is certainly true for the opponents of the Jews, who believe that Jewish power is nothing more than a passing aberration, and that the Jewish state will fall sooner or later to a combination of political and military forces.

  But the inability to adjust to the reality of Jewish power is equally true of those who are sympathetic to Jewish suffering and wish to see it end. Many philo-Semites have come to appreciate the Jews as a persecuted people and therefore as a people that cannot be morally in the wrong. For one who has no power over anyone else, or even over himself, cannot be blamed for the harm that befalls others. For such sympathizers, it is no easy thing to watch the Jews become a people wielding power. Power inevitably means moral responsibility, and sometimes it means making mistakes as well. Once the Jews have an army and a state, it is all too easy to blame them for their actions—and to look back wistfully upon the perfect morality of the defenseless Jew.

  This is an important part of the secret of the success of Arab propaganda: It appeals to a world that has not yet accustomed itself to the sight of Jewish strength, military and political. It implicitly urges philo-Semites to yearn for a “purer” age when Jews were beyond reproach because they were beyond succor. This is the root of the infamous, twisted standard by which the Arabs remain completely blameless for expelling hundreds of thousands of people—as Saudi Arabia did to its Yemenis in 1990 and Kuwait did to its Palestinians in 1991—while Israel is excoriated for deporting a cadre of terrorists; or by which Israel is condemned for maintaining the presence of a few hundred soldiers in a six-mile sliver of Lebanon while Syria annexes almost the entire rest of the same country; or by which Saudi and Jordanian apartheid laws forbidding Jewish residence went unnoticed for many years, while Israel, whose Arab citizens are freer than those of Arab states, is still accused of racism for quelling riots. All of this and much worse emanates not from Israel’s opponents but from many of its sin-cerest sympathizers—who genuinely believe in the idea of the Jewish state but cannot bring themselves to accept the reality accompanying that idea: that such a state, in order to actually survive in practice, may have to resort to buffer strips, deportation of subversives, or riot control. It appears that attitudes evolved over centuries are difficult to change for non-Jews, too.

  Yet there is, with all this, a profound desire in modern society, influenced as it is by biblical values, to see the Jewish people’s odyssey through. I encountered that attitude on a drizzly morning in 1986, when I visited the Arch of Titus in Rome, which the Romans erected to mark their victory over the Jews in 70 C.E. I stood underneath the arch peering at the decaying Forum below. A group of Japanese tourists was vacating the space to a group of Scandinavians. The tour guides pointed dripping umbrellas at the engraving of the sacred Jewish candelabrum being taken into captivity on the shoulders of the triumphant Romans, looking as freshly cut in the stone as it had 1,900 years earlier, when the Romans had celebrated the razing of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

  A Jew’s thoughts, or those of some Jews anyway, tend to turn introspective at moments like this. The destruction of the Temple was one of the two greatest catastrophes of a Jewish history teeming with catastrophes. But what struck me most that morning was the easy comprehension that I recognized on those Japanese and Scandinavian faces. They nodded their heads, they pointed, and said the word Israel several times. Perhaps they sensed what many who have visited this arch sensed: that the candelabrum etched on its wall was a potent symbol of overturning the laws of history.

  Writing in the early eighteenth century, the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico put forth what appeared to be an iron-clad historical sequence: Nations go through a predictable cycle of birth, adolescence, maturity, and death. Students of history from Hegel to Arnold Toynbee adopted this idea, pointing to the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even their later counterparts such as the Incas and the Aztecs—civilizations that flowered, shriveled, then died. If you wait long enough, the historians assure us, the blows of time will eventually do their work on everyone. But the Jews were a problem: They received more blows than any other nation, yet they refused to die. Or more accurately, as one of Hegel’s Jewish disciples, Rabbi Nachman Krochmal, explained, they suffered a decline as did all other nations, but each time they avoided death with a new birth, beginning the cycle anew. They refused to give up the dream of their salvation and the attainment of justice. Perhaps this is why when Frederick the Great asked his physician to adduce proof of God’s existence, he was satisfied with the reply: “The proof that God exists is that the Jews exist.”

  This is the great mystery that made the story of the Jews so captivating to Rousseau and Byron, Balfour and Wilson, and to countless millions the world over. Speaking for these, Mark Twain wondered:

  The Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of Stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people.… He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him…. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always wa
s… All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? 9

  This fascination has only grown since the rebirth of Israel. One could point to the scattered fragments of other ancient peoples in other parts of the world, the sparks of great firmaments dispersed to other lands. Only in the case of the Jews did these embers not die out when the home fire had ceased to burn. And only in the case of Israel did these sparks come together to rekindle a new flame.

  But now the Jews have entered a new phase in their history. Since the rise of Israel, the essence of their aspirations has changed. If the central aim of the Jewish people during its exile was to retrieve what had been lost, the purpose now is to secure what has been retrieved. It is a task that has barely begun, and its outcome is of profound import not only for the fate of the Jews but for all mankind. In the hearts of countless people around the world burns the hope that the Jews will indeed be able to overcome the insurmountable obstacles that are strewn along their journey’s path, ford the stormy river between annihilation and salvation, and build anew their home of promise. If, echoing the words of the prophet Amos, the fallen tent of David has indeed risen again, its resurrection is proof that there is hope for every people and every nation under the sun. The rebirth of Israel is thus one of humanity’s great parables. It is the story not only of the Jews, but of a human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors. It is the incomparable quest of a people seeking, at the end of an unending march, to assume its rightful place among the nations.

  CHRONOLOGY:

  Zionism and the Rise of Israel

  1881 Widespread pogroms in Russia reinforce Jewish national awakening.

  1882 Publication of Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation, calling for the establishment of a Jewish state.

  1882 Beginning of the first wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine.

  1894 Theodor Herzl attends the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris and witnesses outpouring of French anti-Semitism.

  1896 Herzl’s The Jewish State published.

  1897 Herzl convenes First Zionist Congress in Basel.

  1904 Herzl dies.

  1915 Joseph Trumpeldor founds Zion Mule Corps of British army in World War I, the first Jewish fighting unit in centuries.

  1917 Balfour Declaration commits Britain to supporting a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

  1917 British forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby liberate Palestine from the Turks. Jewish Legion participates in freeing Galilee, Samaria, and Transjordan.

  1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson argues for self determination of peoples. Jewish-Arab accord: Jews claim Jewish home in Palestine; Arabs claim Arab state from Iraq to Yemen (excluding Palestine).

  1920 San Remo Conference grants Britain Mandate over Palestine with the aim of encouraging immigration and settlement of Jews and establishment of a Jewish National Home.

  1920 British officials instigate Arab riots in Palestine. Rioters demand end to Jewish immigration and incorporation of Palestine into Syria.

  1920 Vladimir Jabotinsky founds Hagana, the Jewish self-defense force, in Palestine.

  1921 British decide to install Abdullah in Transjordan(eastern Palestine).

  1921 Arab riots in Palestine.

  1922 League of Nations officially ratifies British Mandate over Palestine with aim of building Jewish National Home.

  1922 British cut away Transjordan from Palestine.

  1929 Arab riots in Palestine. Massacre of Jews in Hebron and Safed. Arabs demand end to Jewish immigration.

  1930 British White Paper limits Jewish immigration to Palestine.

  1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany.

  1936–39 Campaign of Arab violence in Palestine. Arab rioters murder five hundred Jews and thousands of Arabs, demanding an end to Jewish immigration.

  1937 British Peel Commission asserts that Jewish National Home cannot be built in Palestine. Recommends repartition of Palestine into tiny Jewish state (5 percent of total area) and Arab state in remainder. Peel plan is rejected by both Arabs and Jews.

  1938 Munich Conference and betrayal of the Czechs. Hitler is given the Sudetenland.

  1939 Chamberlain White Paper announces end to Jewish National Home and promises control of immigration into Palestine to the Arabs within five years. British blockade Palestine against “illegal” Jewish immigration.

  1941 Mufti relocates to Berlin. Meets with Hitler, announces intention of creating “fascist” Arab state, and agitates for the destruction of world Jewry.

  1942 Nazi conference at Wannsee decides on destruction of all Jews in Europe.

  1945 World War II ends. Liberation of the death camps where six million Jews died. Arabs demand end to Jewish immigration to Palestine.

  1945 “Illegal” smuggling of Holocaust survivors into Palestine by Jews. Increase of Jewish underground actions against British blockade and British administration in Palestine.

  1947 Britain announces withdrawal from Palestine. United Nations announces partition into Jewish and Arab states. Jews accept partition; Arabs reject it.

  1948 Invasion of Arab forces aimed at preventing the establishment of the Jewish state.

  1948 Declaration of independence of the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion first prime minister.

  1948–49 War of Independence. Arab armies from five countries invade Israel. Jordanian forces occupy Judea, Samaria, and eastern half of Jerusalem, including Old City and Temple Mount, destroying all Jewish settlements. Egypt occupies Gaza. War of Independence ends in Jewish victory.

  1948–52 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries. Most flee to Israel and are absorbed. 650,000 Arabs flee from Israel to Arab states and are confined to refugee camps.

  1951 Yasser Arafat of the Husseini clan begins organizing Palestinian radicals in Cairo and recruits Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, and other future leaders of the PLO.

  1952–56 Terrorist raids into Israel from adjoining Arab states, including Egyptian-sponsored fedayeen raids from Gaza. Israeli army adopts policy of reprisals.

  1956 Sinai Campaign, Oct. 29–Nov. 5. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes Suez Canal and blocks Israeli shipping. Israel captures Sinai from Egypt. Terrorist bases in Gaza dismantled.

  1956 U.S.-Soviet pressure forces Israeli withdrawal from Sinai without peace treaty. Dwight Eisenhower guarantees protection of Israeli shipping.

  1964 PLO is founded in Cairo with aim of “liberating” Palestine. PLO Charter calling for Israel’s destruction adopted. Campaign of terror attacks across Israel’s borders escalates.

  1967 Egypt floods Sinai with troops and blockades Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. American guarantee to protect Israel fails to take effect.

  1967 Six Day War, June 5–10. Israel defeats combined forces of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Captures Sinai and Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights. Jerusalem is reunited. Jewish settlements in eastern Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria reestablished.

  1969–70 War of attrition. Egypt and Syria launch campaign of continuous attacks along Suez Canal and Golan Heights. PLO steps up terror attacks across Jordan River. Heavy Israeli retaliation brings war to an end.

  1970 Nasser dies and is succeeded by Anwar Sadat.

  1970 PLO attempts to take over Jordan. King Hussein massacres Palestinian Arabs and expels PLO in “Black September.”

  1971–75 PLO relocates to Lebanon and establishes de facto state on its territory, which becomes base for all international terror organizations. PLO campaign of massacres in northern Israel.

  1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes earns PLO international notoriety.

  1973 Yom Kippur War, Oct. 5–24. Egypt and Syria launch surprise attack against Israel. Despite heavy casualties, Israeli army reverses tide and advances toward Cairo and Damascus. Israel negotiates disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria, setting cease-fire lines in the Sinai and the Golan.

  1973 Arab oil embargo is imposed. International oil pric
es rise dramatically.

  1975 United Nations passes resolution defaming Zionism as racism.

  1975 PLO control of Lebanon is challenged, and full-scale civil war erupts between Moslems and Christians.

  1976 Syria invades Lebanon and sets up permanent control over more than half of that country.

  1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda, July 4, frees 103 hostages held by PLO.

  1977 Likud government elected in Israel. Menachem Begin is first Likud prime minister.

  1977 President Anwar Sadat of Egypt responds to Begin’s invitation and visits Israel.

  1978–79 First wave of Jewish emigration from Soviet Union as result of Soviet-American détente reaches peak. All told, 200,000 Soviet Jewish immigrants arrive in Israel.

  1979 Egypt and Israel sign Camp David Accords. Israel agrees to return Sinai.

  1981 Sadat is assassinated.

  1982 Israeli ambassador is shot in London by PLO. Israel invades Lebanon with aim of dismantling terror bases. PLO is expelled from Lebanon and forced to relocate in Tunis.

  1984 U.S. and Israel sign strategic cooperation agreement formalizing alliance.

  1985 Israel withdraws from Lebanon and establishes security zone north of Israeli-Lebanese border.

  1986 U.S. takes lead in war against terror after PLO hijacks Achille Lauro cruise ship. Midair interception of terrorists by U.S. fighter planes.

  1987 PLO banned in U.S. by law for terrorist activities.

  1989–91 Collapse of Soviet Union. Second wave of Soviet immigration to Israel brings 400,000 in two years.