A Durable Peace (2 page)

This has not happened. The pivotal change in Jewish destiny occurred with the founding of the Jewish state. This seminal event
of reestablishing Jewish sovereignty in the ancient Jewish homeland was preceded by nearly a hundred years of renewed Jewish
settlement activity in the Holy Land and by over fifty years of Zionist agitation, heralded by the prophetic and inspired
genius of Theodor Herzl. Indeed, the Jewish state changed everything for the Jewish people. From a fledgling beachhead on
the Mediterranean coast, struggling to survive the Arab onslaughts aimed at exterminating the Jewish presence in the land,
the Jews were able to repel the attack; build a state; create one of the world’s finest armies; defeat the much larger Arab
forces in successive wars forced on Israel; unite their ancient capital, Jerusalem; bring in millions of immigrants and refugees,
including a million beleaguered Jews from the former Soviet Union and the imperiled Jewish community of Ethiopia; revive an
ancient language; build an astonishing scientific and technological capability; develop the most thriving economy in the Middle
East, and one of the most
advanced in the world; create a vibrant cultural life, which includes some of the leading artists and musicians of the world;
and maintain a staunchly democratic ethos amidst a sea of despotic regimes.

By any criteria, these achievements are nothing short of miraculous. But they are all subsumed under the one greater accomplishment:
The Jewish people, after long centuries of exile, has once again seized control over its destiny. And within the next decade
or two it will realize the dream of ages, the Ingathering of the Exiles. For the first time since the era of the Second Temple
two thousand years ago, the majority of the Jewish people will live in the Jewish homeland. This is a momentous development,
the one guarantor of the Jewish future. For it is also true that in the last fifty years, a significant threat to Jewish survival
has been the accelerating rate of intermarriage, assimilation, and loss of identity among Jews of the Diaspora, especially
the Jews of the West. While the Jewish population of Israel grew from 600,000 in 1948 to five million in 2000, the population
of American Jewry stayed flat and is beginning to show alarming signs of steady decline. In Israel itself the threat of assimilation
is nonexistent. And to the extent that Jewish identity has been maintained and strengthened in important parts of American
Jewry, this is due to the strong identification that these Jews have with the State of Israel. In simple terms, the future
of the Jewish people depends on the future of the Jewish state.

For the Jewish people, therefore, the history of the twentieth century may be summed up thus: If there had been a Jewish state
in the first half of the century, there would have been no Holocaust. And if there had not been a Jewish state after the
Holocaust, there would have been no Jewish future. The State of Israel is not only the repository of the millennial Jewish
hopes for redemption; it is also the one practical instrument for assuring Jewish survival.

Assuring that survival is not free of problems. Israel has yet to complete the circle of peace around its borders, a peace
that must be based on security if it is to last. I view this as the first task facing
the country, and any prime minister must dedicate himself to its completion. This of course does not depend on Israel alone,
but on the willingness of its Arab neighbors to forge a true compromise with Israel and genuinely accept its right to exist.
Perhaps the most difficult agreements to be completed are the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians. This will require the Palestinians
to keep their commitments, especially to fight terror, and Israel to maintain adequate security defenses. Much of this book
was written before the Oslo Accords, and I have amended and added a few segments to indicate how I believe the Oslo process
could be completed so as to provide Israel with peace and security.

During my three years as Prime Minister (1996–1999), I firmly pursued these principles for a realistic peace, despite a torrent
of criticism and abuse from those who cavalierly refuse to understand that in the volatile Middle East, peace without security
is a sham. Such shortsightedness ought not to deflect Israel from pursuing a lasting peace that will endure not a flicker
of time but for generations to come.

Assuring its security will also require Israel to address new threats on the horizon, presented by radical regimes developing
fearsome weapons and the means to deliver them. Even if Israel completes the circle of peace with its immediate neighbors,
and it should strive to do so, this threat will loom large in the coming decades. What if Iraq or Iran detonates nuclear devices?
This will send infinitely greater Shockwaves around the world than the addition of India and Pakistan to the league of nuclear
nations. The possession of atomic bombs by Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollas of Teheran is not merely a mortal threat to Israel’s
existence. It is a threat to the peace of the world. The community of responsible nations will have to make every effort to
contain or eliminate this threat. But surely for Israelis, once again they recognize that the one guarantor of their survival
against these dangers is their own strength and capacity to deter and punish aggression directed against the state.

The transformation of the Jewish condition from one of utter
powerlessness to one of effective self-defense marks the great change that the founding of Israel introduced into Jewish life,
in fact making that life possible. As Herzl and the founding fathers of Zionism foresaw, the founding of the Jewish state
would not necessarily stop the attacks on the Jewish people, but would assuredly give the Jews the means to resist and repel
those attacks.

Naturally, such a momentous change in the life of a nation does not occur without internal turbulence and turmoil. Israel
is undergoing the adjustment pains as it moves from adolescence to maturity. If initially its governing socialist class wanted
to strait-jacket all Israelis into one European socialist prototype, they have had a hard time accepting the fact that this
will not happen, that the currents of life and the natural desire for unrestricted diversity and pluralism are more powerful
than any rigid ideological construct. Israel after half a century is a rich tapestry of Jews from a hundred lands, each bringing
to the national fabric its own unique strands of culture, folklore, and memory. Modern Hebrew is laced with Russian, Arabic,
and English slang, and with expressions liberally borrowed from the Jews of Poland and Morocco alike. Each community affects
the other, creating a dynamic synthesis that enhances the national culture. There are of course some lingering sharp divides,
as between Israel’s Jewish majority and its non-Jewish minority and, in the Jewish population, between the secular majority
and an ultra-orthodox minority. It takes a crisis in the Persian Gulf to remind Israelis that inflying Iraqi missiles do not
distinguish between religious and non-religious Jews, and, in fact, between any of the groups that make up Israel’s population.
Yet I believe that despite the inevitable frictions that accompany this extraordinary maturation of an immigrant nation, the
forces that unite the people of Israel are infinitely greater than those that divide them: a common past in a sacred ancestral
homeland, and a millennial desire to return to this land and forge in it a common future.

This of course is not the picture of Israel presented by many observers, as Israel celebrated its jubilee. The foreign press
amplified
the Israeli press, which regularly amplifies the grievances of the old elites that complain of giving way to the new realities.
This chorus of gloom is an episodic and irrelevant footnote in the larger tale of Jewish revival in the last fifty years.
After all that we have struggled against, and all that we have achieved, I have no doubt that Israel can meet with equal success
the remaining challenges of external and internal peace.

Israel at the start of the twenty-first century is undoubtedly one of the greatest success stories of the twentieth century.
Communism, fascism, socialism, and so many other “isms” have crumbled into dust. But Zionism, the national liberation movement
of the Jewish people, the one true liberation movement amidst so many false ones, has far from crumbled. It has fended off
powerful foes, and is on the verge of creating the second most successful technological society on earth, the “Silicon Wadi,”
as it is becoming known. In a profound sense, Zionism has achieved its central purpose of securing Jewish independence in
the Jewish land, and it can look to the future and its challenges with confidence.

It can do so with the remarkable kinship and support of the American people. The friendship of the United States of America
has been a cornerstone of Israel’s modern history. It is a partnership based on common values and common ideals, and it remains
constant.
The New York Times,
which affords ample space for the discontent of the Israeli left, expressed in noteworthy honesty its surprise at a Jubilee
year poll commissioned by the newspaper, which showed that instead of waning, American support for Israel had reached a twenty-year
high. Non-Jewish Americans from every part of that great land identified with Israel and not with its adversaries. They deeply
valued the special relationship between Israel and the United States. Many thought of Israel as the biblical promised land
upon which America was modeled. They saw Jerusalem as the original city on the hill and strongly believed that it must never
be divided again. They viewed Israel’s struggle as one of a solitary democracy surrounded by dictatorships, resolutely
fighting terrorism. Beyond the swirl of daily events and the often tendentious coverage of Israeli affairs, this is what emerges
in the American mind when the name of Israel is evoked. It need not surprise anyone for a simple reason: It is true.

Yet the truth has often eluded discussions about modern Israel. Israel has been portrayed as an aggressive obstacle to peace,
a force bent on physically and economically colonizing its neighbors, a twister and bender of the Jewish soul. I believe that
all of these slanders, like so many others that afflicted the Jewish people down the ages, will also pass in due time. I wrote
this book not only to help accelerate their demise, but to express my boundless faith in the Jewish future, my unreserved
confidence that the last fifty years have shown that the Jewish people will survive, and that against all obstacles the Jewish
state will prevail.

During the Gulf War, Israel sustained thirty-nine Scud missile attacks that rained down on its cities. Deafening sirens warned
Israelis to don their gas masks in the tense minutes as the missiles headed for their targets. In the course of one such alert
I was being interviewed, with a gas mask on, at the CNN television headquarters in Jerusalem. After the alert subsided, the
CNN bureau chief, evidently moved by the experience, asked me to show the network’s viewers Israel’s position on the map of
the Middle East.

“Show them what you showed me in your office the other day,” he said, producing a map of the Middle East in front of the camera.

“Here’s the Arab world,” I said, “walking” across the map with my hands open wide. It took me a number of handbreadths to
span the twenty-one Arab countries.

“And here is Israel,” I added, easily covering it with my thumb.

The results of this simple demonstration were astonishing. For months after the war, I received hundreds of letters from around
the world expressing sympathy and support for Israel. But the one thing that repeatedly appeared in many of those letters
was the shock experienced by viewers from as far afield as Minnesota and Australia concerning the walk I took across the
map. One viewer wrote: “Most
Americans, myself included, have little real knowledge of the kind of danger and turmoil that confronts your part of the world.”
But when presented with the simple geographic facts, she said, “suddenly the picture came into focus for me—and I think for
many Americans.” In other interviews I used the opportunity to spell out the basic facts of Israel’s predicament, prompting
a viewer from Britain to confess that this “changed my way of thinking…. I went to the library to find out more about the Arab-Israeli
problem and realized I knew very little about it.” A third said these facts represented “the first real view I’ve had of the
Jewish side to all this…. I began to feel with you.”
¹
This was the refrain I heard again and again as the letters filled one binder, then a second, then a third.

I had been aware of the general lack of familiarity with the facts of Israel’s physical circumstances, but this torrent of
mail brought home to me, as nothing else had, the gaping void in the world’s knowledge of my country and its struggle. Here
were people who clearly wished Israel well, yet who did not know something so elementary as the fact that the Arab world is
more than five hundred times the size of the Jewish state. (See Maps 1 and 2.) They did not realize that the Israel they were
incessantly hearing about and seeing every day on their television screens is all of forty miles wide (
including
the West Bank), and that if it were to give up the entire West Bank, it would be ten miles wide.