A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  We live in a time of intense geopolitical change. Communism, fascism, and other “isms” are crumbling into dust. But Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, has triumphantly endured. What is the secret of that endurance—and what is the prognosis for its continued success?

  From the rise of Zionism to the latest peace initiatives, Benjamin Netanyahu traces the origins, history, and politics of Israel’s relationship with the Arab world and the West. He exposes some of the most common—and often shocking—misrepresentations and myths about Arab-Israeli issues, replacing them with facts. And he explores the themes that have shaped his vision of Israel and its position in the world:

  What is the foundation of the Jewish claim to the land of Israel?

  What is the real source of conflict between Arabs and Israelis?

  How has the West both contributed to and jeopardized Israel’s security throughout the decades?

  How have Arab groups used warfare to achieve what might have been otherwise unattainable ends?

  Why is the status of the West Bank, as well as Gaza and the Golan Heights, so crucial to Israel?

  Why is any hope for peace in the Middle East linked to a clear recognition of Israel’s right to exist?

  Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union, why is a strong Israel essential to the stability of the world?

  Netanyahu writes as an Israeli who wishes to see a secure Israel at peace with its neighbors. But for this to happen the battle for truth must be won. Closely reasoned, meticulously documented, and often shattering in its revelations, A DURABLE PEACE sheds welcome light on the Middle East debate. It is a most fitting tribute to Israel today.

  * The name Palestine is derived from the Philistines, a seafaring people that invaded the coast of the land of Canaan from the sea around 1200 B.C.E.,shortly after the Jewish conquest overland from the east. The main Philistine dominions never extended much farther than the coastal strip between Gaza and today’s Tel Aviv, and the Philistines disappeared as a people under the heel of the Babylonians. It was the Roman Empire, bent on destroying every vestige of Jewish attachment to the land, that invented the name Palestine to replace Judea, the historic name of the country.

  Thus according to Professor Bernard Lewis:

  The official adoption of the name Palestine in Roman usage to designate the territories of the former Jewish principality of Judea seems to date from after the suppression of the great Jewish revolt of Bar Kochba in the year 135 C.E.…. it would seem that the name Judea was abolished… and the country renamed Palestine or Syria Palestine, with the… intention of obliterating its historic Jewish identity. 3

  While this Roman name disappeared in the land itself shortly after the conquest by the Moslems, 4 Christian cartographers kept the name alive in their own lands and eventually bequeathed it to the Allied negotiators at Versailles and the inhabitants of the land, who adopted it only after the British took control. According to Professor Lewis:

  By the early twentieth century, with the predominance of European influence… the name Palestine came to be used even in the country [i.e., in Palestine]. This use was, however, in the main confined to Christians and to a very small group of westernized Muslims. The name was not used officially, and had no precise territorial definition until it was adopted by the British to designate the area which they acquired by conquest at the end of World War I. 5

  Thus, up until the twentieth century, the name Palestine referred exclusively to the ancient land of the Jews—as did the names Judea, Judah, Zion, and Israel. It had never yet been argued that there existed a “Palestinian people” other than the Jews. The Arabs who lived there were called Arabs, just as the Armenians, Turks, Druze, and Circassians who migrated into Palestine were then still called Armenians, Turks, Druze, and Circassians. With the exception of the Jews, who called the land Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) and viewed it as their national home, all of these groups considered themselves as living in the realm of Southern Syria.

  * Writing near the turn of the century, Bliss and all of his contemporaries used the ancient names of Judea and Samaria for the central mountain ridge in the land, and not “West Bank,” which had not yet been invented. The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948. Jordanian king Abdullah called Judea the “West Bank” in order to obliterate the historic and ongoing Jewish connection to the land—much as the Romans two thousand years earlier had sought to achieve the same goal by changing Judea to Palestine. In using the term West Bank, he sought to associate this territory with his kingdom, which lay on the east bank of the Jordan River.

  The same routine and entirely apolitical usage of the names Judea and Samaria to describe the West Bank can be found over and over again in quotes from before 1948 by such travelers as Mark Twain (on pages 42–43 of this book) and the cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (page 44); and the name Judea is used interchangeably with Palestine by statesmen such as President John Adams (page 15) and Lord Robert Cecil (page 49).

  The idea that, by using the historical terms Judea and Samaria, it is Israel that is politicizing the geographical nomenclature rather than the Arabs, who obliterated these names with the politically loaded name West Bank, is one of those characteristic reversals of truth that are the mainstay of the Arab campaign against Israel.

  * The terms B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. are the nondenominational equivalents of the Christian designations B.C. and A.D., respectively.

  * The other criterion Toynbee offered to adjudicate competing claims was that the question of who should be granted sovereignty should be determined by comparing the suffering caused to each side by being denied sovereignty. This definitely works in favor of the Jews. Certainly the suffering experienced by the Jews for being stateless has far exceeded any suffering that may have been caused to the Arabs by the Jewish national restoration. This point is so obvious that it defies rebuttal. Nevertheless the Arabs, aided by European anti-Semites, are trying to rebut it by making the incredible claim that the Holocaust did not happen, or by attempting to equate the suffering experienced by the Palestinian Arabs to the murder of six million Jews. As if the ovens of Auschwitz could be compared to an Israeli administration that from 1967 until the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1993 built five universities for the Palestinian Arab population, placed severe restraints on its own soldiers and court-martialed offenders, and enabled the Arabs to appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court to reverse the decisions of the army. (The fact that this preposterously asymmetrical “symmetry” found currency in cartoons and editorials of serious newspapers in the West shows that Goebbels was right in arguing that a lie spreads in proportion to its size.)

  * The land mass of the Arab states today is 5,414,000 square miles, as compared with 8,290 for pre-1967 Israel, and 2,130 for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (together 10,420 square miles). This is a ratio of 540 to one.

  * Patterson was a remarkable non-Jewish Zionist. A British officer, he commanded the first Jewish fighting units in centuries—the Zion Mule Corps, founded by Joseph Trumpeldor—which participated in the Gallipoli campaign. (Trumpeldor was a Jewish former officer in the Russian army who had lost his arm in the Russo-Japanese War and died a hero’s death in 1920 defending the Galilee community of Tel Hai against Arab marauders. He was the kind of Jewish fighter that Patterson hoped to see emerge in this century.) Patterson went on to command the Jewish Legion, founded by jabotinsky. Soldier and intellectual, he collaborated with my father in America at the outbreak of World War II, when my father came to the United States as a member of Jabotinsky’s delegation to campaign for the establishment of a Jewish state. Such was the friendship between them that my parents decided to call their first-born son Jonathan, the “Jon” in honor of Patterson and the “Nathan” in honor of my grandfather. Now and then, on special occasions, my family brings out a silver cup with the inscription: “To my darling godson, Jonathan, from your godfather, Jo
hn Henry Patterson.”

  * These Jewish actions against British military targets were quickly branded by Britain as “terrorism.” The Arabs have been only too happy in more recent times to try to taint the Jewish resistance with this same term, to justify by means of a supposed symmetry their own ruthless violence against Israel and others.

  This effort at symmetry readily reduces the Jewish resistance to the false cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But terrorism can be reasonably defined. It is the deliberate and systematic assault on civilians, on innocent noncombatants outside the sphere of legitimate warfare. One could argue that in the case of the Jewish underground organizations a few isolated incidents could possibly qualify under the definition of terrorism, but there can be no question that the many hundreds of operations carried out by these organizations were indeed concentrated on military rather than civilian targets (including the British military headquarters, then housed in the King David Hotel).

  This is a far cry from the flood of unprovoked peacetime attacks on civilians that has characterized Arab terrorism over the past decades. In thousands of remorseless attacks, Arab terror organizations have deliberately and systematically sought out civilians as targets, attacking them in markets, airports, schools, universities, bus stops—even at the Olympic games, which had been declared off-limits to violence since ancient times. For a detailed discussion of the nature of terrorism, see Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., International Terrorism: Challenge and Response (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980) and Terrorism: How the West Can Win(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

  * Israel does not view itself as an “occupying power” in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, territories that were recognized as part of the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations in 1922. Consequently, Israel has never recognized the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with occupation, as applying to its administration of these areas. However, Israel has unilaterally committed itself to observing the humanitarian provisions of this convention in militarily governing the Arab population until a final settlement is achieved.

  Article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1950) empowers an “occupying power” to “subject the population of the occupied territory to provisions which are essential to enabling the Occupying Power to fulfil its obligations under the present Convention, to maintain orderly government of the territory, and to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the members and property of the occupying forces and administration, and likewise of the establishments and lines of communication used by them.”

  The Convention does not require that the inhabitants of an occupied territory be granted the right to appeal to the Supreme Court (a right that Israel provides the residents of the West Bank and Gaza); nor does it prohibit the application of the death penalty (which Israel has refused to apply even in cases of terrorist massacres).

  Israel was often castigated for expelling inciters and practitioners of violence from the territories on the grounds that the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids “deportations.” Indeed it does (in Article 49), but that prohibition was inserted into the Convention, written just after World War II, in order to prevent the uprooting of entire populations such as the Nazis had practiced. It was not meant to address the removal from a territory of a selected few who threaten the well-being of the inhabitants and the security forces alike.

  * One of the leaders of the “Black Panthers,” the intifada gang directly under the control of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, described the PLO’s control over the killings in this way:

  “We [the masked youths] don’t kill just anyone…. [W]e consult with the Black Panthers’ central committee, which is in direct contact with the Fatah military command abroad.… I only take my orders from the military command of Fatah…,” 57

  * After the Six Day War Israelis were shocked to discover that tombstones in the Mount of Olives cemetery, the Jewish people’s most revered burial site overlooking King David’s city, had been torn down and used as pavement stones for roads and slabs for latrines. Most of this state-sponsored desecration was carried out on the bottom third of the mountain, where the Jordanians built a highway right through the cemetery, and at the very top, where they built the Intercontinental Hotel. Soon after the Six Day War, my family set out with considerable trepidation to find out whether my grandfather’s grave, which the Jordanians had not allowed us (like other Israelis) to visit for nineteen years, had been desecrated. Fortunately we found it intact, and my grandmother was later buried beside him.

  * The Charter was first approved in 1964 and amended slightly in 1968. All quotes are from the 1968 version, which is the one still in force today.

  * Relations between Palestinian terror groups and the German extreme right date back to 1968, the year Yasser Arafat took control of the PLO. By 1970, members of the “Adolf Hitler Free Corps” under the leadership of German neo-Nazi Udo Albrecht were in Jordan assisting in the PLO’s attempt to overthrow the government of King Hussein. Albrecht and his group went on to collaborate with “Black September,” the terror arm of Arafat’s Fatah, which committed the Munich Olympic massacre. Albrecht was eventually arrested in West Germany with PLO identity papers, but he later escaped. In 1976, four German neo-Nazis testified that they had been recruited by Albrecht to conduct PLO terror operations, and that they had been trained by the PLO in Lebanon. 28

  Albrecht also introduced Manfred Roeder, leader of the ultra-rightist “German Action Group,” to PLO terrorism. In the two years that Albrecht was in prison after 1976, Roeder repeatedly traveled to Lebanon to coordinate with Abu Jihad, Arafat’s lieutenant in the Fatah. 29

  Yasser Arafat’s Fatah also trained the preeminent German neo-Nazi Karl Heinz Hoffman, whose “War Sports Group” began training in international terror in 1979 in Fatah’s Bir Hassan training camp near Beirut. 30 In 1986 Hoffman was arrested for planning and ordering the 1980 murders of the German-Jewish publisher Shlomo Levin and his wife. Hoffman blamed the murders on one of his disciples, Uwe Behrendt, and was not convicted, but went to jail on other charges. Behrendt himself escaped to Lebanon. Another Hoffman protégé, Michael Kuhnen, founded the now-outlawed “National Socialist Action” organization in Germany, which also received its training from the PLO in Lebanon. In between jail terms, Kuhnen has been an outspoken supporter of the PLO. 31

  Perhaps the most notorious of German neo-Nazi killers is Odfried Hepp, a leader of the Nazi group “VS.B.D.,” who was also trained by the PLO in the Fatah camp near Beirut. Hepp was arrested in Paris in 1985, along with his partner, Mahmad Adban, a senior operative of Abul Abbas’s PLF faction of the PLO (which carried out the Achille Lauro hijacking later that year). The two were convicted of perpetrating terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Geneva. They are also suspected of involvement in the bombing of a Jewish restaurant in Paris in 1982, which left six dead. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that after the arrest, Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO executive, publicly called for Hepp’s release and tried to secure it through diplomatic channels. 32

  The PLO has also worked to cultivate ties with neo-Nazis in Britain and France. In 1977, Fatah agreed to train members of “L’Oeuvre Française,” a French neo-Nazi group, which in turn agreed to carry out operations for the PLO. In 1985 the British neo-Nazi Ian Michael Davison joined with two other gunmen of Yasser Arafat’s “Force 17” to murder three Israeli tourists on a yacht in Larnaca, Cyprus. He is now in jail in Nicosia. 33 In recent years the British neo-Nazi group “National Front” has also established a relationship with the PLO, which has included the founding of a British front group called the “Campaign for Palestine Rights.” 34

  While downplayed in the Western media, the PLO has otherwise made virtually no effort to hide its collaboration with neo-Nazism and its admiration for Nazism generally. This affinity has been markedly expressed in such overt gestures as the adoption of Nazi nommes de guerre such as “Hitler” and “Rommel” by
Palestinian leaders in every faction of the PLO, including the PFLP, the Marxist DFLP, and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Perhaps best known is Fawzi Salem al-Mahdi, a senior commander in Arafat’s personal bodyguard “Force 17,” who was nicknamed “Abu Hitler.” 35

  * I was involved with one of the earliest of such efforts to delegitimize terror, the establishment of the Jonathan Institute, named after my brother. The purpose of the institute was to educate governments and public opinion in the West about the nature of terror. The idea that terrorism had become a form of political warfare waged by dictatorial regimes against the democracies of the West, expressed at the institute’s first International Conference on Terrorism in 1979, encountered stiff opposition.

  Conference participants, who included the late Senator Henry Jackson and then-presidential candidate George Bush, offered revelations of the direct involvement of the Soviet Union and its European satellites in international terror—revelations at which, wrote a Wall Street Journal correspondent covering the event, “a considerable number in the press corps covering the conference were much annoyed.” 61 After the fall of Soviet Communism, I had several conversations with officials of the former East bloc who expressed amazement at the naivete of Westerners on the subject.

  The recommendations of the Jonathan Institute’s second conference in 1985 included the imposition of military and economic sanctions against states that sponsor terrorism. I edited the proceedings into a book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Perhaps because Time magazine published a lengthy excerpt from the book (which President Reagan had read) shortly after the American raid on Libya, some in the Arab world concluded that I was to blame for the attack. The Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai Al-Am branded me “the enemy’s most dangerous agent abroad.” Ironically, the paper was later shut down when Saddam and the PLO took over Kuwait.