A Durable Peace (15 page)

Yet, Arab bellicosity aside, the young state enjoyed a relatively hospitable international clime during its early years. In
the first two decades of its life, the influence of professional Arabist hostility was tempered by the worldwide moral identification
with Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the wake of the courage and tenacity shown by the Jews in their War of
Independence. During this time, before Arab propaganda organized its later campaign and before the Arabists themselves could
regroup, this innate sympathy produced enthusiastic support for the fledgling nation across Western Europe and North America.
In Holland, France, Denmark, Italy, Britain, and above all in the United States, acclaim for Israel was acclaim for the good
guy. As at Versailles, there was on this point not confusion but perfect clarity. But as the Holocaust and the miracle of
Israel’s birth receded from memory, so did the influence of this sympathy. (It resurged most forcefully in the days of siege
before the Six Day War, then steadily declined in the aftermath of Israel’s stunning victory, only to be rekindled during
the Iraqi Scud attacks during the Gulf War, which briefly reminded the world who was the victim and who the aggressor.)

In the first half of this century, political anti-Zionism had been led by British imperial interest and aided by the Arabs.
The second half of the century saw these roles reversed: The initiative now passed on to the Arabs themselves, who were aided
by Western Arabists. The newly independent Arab states found themselves in control of modern presses, radio, and later television,
as well as embassies and diplomatic services—and the enormous wealth to make use of all this. At first they showed little
recognition of the power of these resources as international political weapons. Early
Arab propaganda against Israel was largely directed
inward,
with the aim of convincing the Arab populations themselves, rather than outward, toward Westerners. The newly installed Arab
regimes had not yet mastered the art of propaganda; only later were they to begin couching their antagonism in more moderate
and palatable phraseology. Thus, the bulk of Arab pronouncements came out sounding like King Saud of Saudi Arabia in this
statement from 1954:

Israel to the Arab world is like a cancer to the human body, and the only way of remedy is to uproot it just like a cancer.…
Israel is a serious wound in the Arab world body, and we cannot endure the pain of this wound forever. We don’t have the patience
to see Israel occupying part of Palestine for long.

We Arabs total about fifty million. Why don’t we sacrifice 10 million of our number and live in pride and self respect?
⁷⁷

In this way, the Arab regimes were able to satisfy the need they felt to fire the passions of their own people and troops.
Quite apart from their animus, Israel was a useful scapegoat on which they could pin all their failings and shortcomings.
Still, these early efforts did little to rejuvenate the flagging forces of international anti-Zionism, since few people in
the West could accept such stark language and the purposes evident behind it.

Thus, the respite in international public opinion that Israel enjoyed between 1948 and 1967 resulted from the combined effect
of a basic Western sympathy for the Jewish state and Arab apathy toward Western audiences. The Arabists were still calling
the tune in Washington, urging Eisenhower, for example, that Israel should trade the Negev (the southern half of the country)
in exchange for peace.
⁷⁸
But during those years there was little public sympathy for officials who had treated the Holocaust as “Zionist sobs tuff.”

This grace period came to an end after the Six Day War in 1967. As opposed to Western governments, Western public opinion
has tended to support whomever it perceives as the under
dog. For some Westerners, the Israeli victory in the Six Day War instantly transformed Israel from underdog to superdog in
the space of the few days it took to win the war—a perception reinforced by the cockiness of some Israelis, who believed that
single brilliant victory would end Israel’s ongoing struggle to survive against a hostile Arab world of immense size and wealth.
The Arabs soon exploited this reversal in public opinion, portraying Israel as a frightening power that preyed on its weaker
Arab neighbors. Further, the fact that in the ensuing years Israel was militarily administering territories from which it
had been attacked was soon stripped of that wartime context, and the unprovoked nature of the Arab attack was forgotten. The
only thing that remained clearly fixed in public opinion was the fact that Israel was governing territories on which a substantial
Arab population lived—or, as the parlance would soon have it, it was “occupying Arab land”—thereby removing the mantle of
culpability from the shoulders of the Arabs and placing it on the Jewish state.

The Arabs exploited these propaganda benefits, but the results of the Six Day War nonetheless presented them with a difficult
military obstacle to their designs on Israel. The Israeli victory pushed the border from the outskirts of Tel Aviv to the
Jordan River, a few dozen miles to the east over a range of mountains, cliffs, and wadis. It became clear to the Arabs that
Israel could no longer be crushed with one swift blow. If they were to excise Israel from their midst, they now realized,
Israel would first have to be territorially reduced—to the starting conditions of the Six Day War.

The Arabs came to perceive that they could not achieve this goal militarily—that they could attain it only if the West, especially
the United States, applied overwhelming political pressure on Israel. But in the wake of Israel’s astounding victory in the
Six Day War, a powerful sentiment was developing in the United States to form a political and military alliance with Israel
as the new preeminent regional power. This sentiment was translated into a liberal infusion of military aid to Israel’s army,
making the Arabs’ job of
overcoming Israel still more difficult. The shrewder political minds among the Arabs, however, slowly parted from the view
of America as irreversibly committed to supporting Israel and came to see the usefulness of cultivating the old Arabist lines
of argumentation, albeit suitably adapted to a more contemporary Western audience. Moreover, they grew to appreciate the decisive
role that Western public opinion played in making and maintaining policy—a public opinion that had been none too keen on the
Arab cause up until then. Hence the principal effort of the ongoing Arab war against Israel since 1967 has been to defeat
Israel on the battlefields of public opinion: in the media, in university lecture halls, and in the citadels of government.

In order to capture the sympathy of the Western public, its beliefs concerning the history, causes, and nature of the Arab-Israeli
conflict had to be revised. No Westerner was interested in hearing that the Jewish state was a “cancer” that had to be “uprooted.”
A new history had to posit plausible explanations for the relentless Arab campaign against Israel, along with reasons for
the West to abandon its support for the Jewish state. The core of the new history had to be the critique of the birth of Israel
itself in moral terms comprehensible to Westerners. For if the very creation of the Jewish state could be presented as a moral
error, a vehicle not of justice but injustice, as the British Arabists had claimed it was, then the West could become sympathetic
to efforts to redress the “injustice” that had been committed.

In this, the Arabs found that all the foundations had already been laid. The British Arabists had already spent decades injecting
the West with the idea that Jewish immigration to Palestine was based upon a moral mistake; that such immigration had “caused”
Arab violence against the Jews (rather than the Arabs causing it themselves); and that the presence of the Jewish home in
the Middle East would compel the Arabs to unite against the West, gravely harming Western interests. After 1967, the Arabs
gave new life to all these arguments, parading them before the West to explain international Arab terrorism, Arab fulminations
at the UN, and the
Arab oil embargo of 1973. By the early 1970s, all eyes (and cameras) were turned to the Arab governments, as they rehearsed
for a world audience the themes that the British colonialists had invented in the 1920s.

In the court of public opinion, as in any court, the question of who attacked whom—who initiated an assault and who acted
in self-defense—is central to the verdict. The Arab states embarked on an unprecedented campaign to persuade the West that
it was not they, the Arabs, who had attacked Israel, but Israel that had attacked them. Thus, the
results
of their own aggression against Israel—the bloodshed, the refugees, the capture of Arab-controlled land—were instead presented
as its
causes.
These were now deemed unprovoked evils that had been perpetrated by the Jews, grievances that the Arabs were now merely and
innocently trying to redress. It was not the Arabs who were the guilty party, but Israel that had fended off their attacks.
(See
Chapter 4
, “Reversal of Causality.”)

Still, the task of the Arabs was far more difficult than that of their Arabist predecessors had been. The British Arabists
had had only to convert the Colonial and Foreign offices to their views in order to bring the absolute authority of the Mandatory
government and the British Army to bear against Zionism. But to create American opposition to an independent State of Israel
that had many friends and admirers in Washington would require a much more sweeping, much more comprehensive campaign of disinformation
than had ever been conceived by the British anti-Zionists. It would entail the fabrication of ancient historical rights to
nullify those of the Jews; the obliteration from memory of Versailles, the League of Nations, and the Balfour Declaration;
and a complete revision and rewriting of the Arab wars against the Jews following the establishment of Israel.

Before a lie of such incredible proportions could hope to make any headway against the common sense of the common man in the
west or of his government, the ground would have to be prepared by means of a direct assault on Zionism itself as a
moral movement, as a movement seeking justice. The Arabs aimed to render the rest of their arguments plausible by building
their house of canards on the bedrock of Israel’s
inherent
immorality: The post-Holocaust-era view of the Zionist as the good guy had to be forcibly brought to an end.

For this ambitious undertaking, the Arabs attacked Israel through every channel, at every gathering, from every platform.
But none of these forums proved to be as effective as the most powerful of instruments available to the Arabs, an instrument
of universal reach and appeal that at the time enjoyed not only respectability but reverence, and that therefore was trusted
by many around the world—the United Nations.

And at the UN, as elsewhere, the Arabs also found a new ally. The British Empire had capsized, but a new empire had arisen
that quickly replaced the British as the patron of Pan-Arab aspirations. Cultivating Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and a string
of other despotisms, the Soviet Union, much like the British Arabists before it, came to see Israel as a challenge to its
imperialist ambitions in the Middle East and in the eastern Mediterranean. The Soviets were accomplished masters of propaganda,
who had taught expressions such as “peace-loving” and “self-determination” to every anti-Western terror organization in the
world. And it was the Soviets who hit upon the precise formulation that the Arabs needed to stab at the heart of Israel’s
moral standing in the West.

In Mexico City in 1975, the Soviet and Arab blocs took over a United Nations Conference on Women and forced it to adopt one
of the great slanders of all time. They then brought this resolution to an obedient UN General Assembly, which confirmed it.
They achieved this aim by means of political and economic intimidation. At the time, the Arab oil blackmail was at its height,
and it seemed that nothing could stand in its way. Many countries that should have known better, that did know better, nevertheless
succumbed.

Thus in November 1975, a mere eight years after their great defeat in the Six Day War, the Arabs achieved their greatest victory
on the field of propaganda: The General Assembly of the United Nations, by a vote of 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, resolved
that Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, constituted “racism.”

Such an achievement had eluded even the great anti-Semitic propagandists of our millennium like Torquemada and Joseph Goebbels.
For what they and their disciples had failed to do in the Inquisition and in the Holocaust had at long last been achieved
by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Never before had anti-Semitism acquired a tool of such
universal
dissemination as the UN. Never before had any of the slander of the Jewish people, of which there had been so many, been
promulgated and applauded by an organization that purported to represent humankind.

The Arabs knew that Israel’s strength was not rooted in its numbers, its size, or its resources. In all these areas the Arabs
were far stronger. Israel’s greatest shield, they understood, was its moral stature. They therefore sought to tarnish that
shield, to crack it, and ultimately to crush it. Their weapon was an extraordinary vilification of a movement that had inspired
millions. For Zionism is a unique moral phenomenon that has won the support of many people of goodwill around the world. The
Jewish people had suffered degradation, humiliation, oppression, and mutilation like no other. But the Jewish legacy is one
of the principal founts of Western civilization, contributing above all to advancing the concepts of freedom and justice.
The Zionist movement had come into being to seek for its own people freedom and justice. After two millennia of bondage, the
Jewish people was entitled to its own liberation as an independent nation.