A Durable Peace (24 page)

Whatever it was that had made the Arabs drop all caution in word and deed on the eve of the Six Day War, this was the last
time they would unreservedly expose before the entire world their undisguised goal of annihilating Israel. They did not anticipate
Israel’s preemptive air strike during the first three hours of the war, which destroyed the entirety of Egypt’s air force,
the backbone of Arab air power. Later in the day, after Syria and Jordan attacked, Israel destroyed their air forces as well.
(This gave Israel’s armored divisions complete freedom to maneuver on the ground with total Israeli air supremacy in the skies
above, a devastating combination in desert warfare that was to disappear by the time the next war came around.)

Israel did not fire a shot on the Syrian and Jordanian fronts
until it was attacked from these lines. On June 5, hours before the Israeli operation began, the Syrians bombed the Israeli
air force base at Megiddo, as well as targets in Haifa and Tiberias, and spewed fire at Israeli positions from the Golan.
The war on the Jordanian front began when Jordan opened up a full-scale bombardment on Israeli targets.
⁹

Thus my Arabist colleague may have been right in saying Israel fired the first shot in 1967—but only against Egypt, which
in any case had already committed an act of war by closing the Straits of Tiran. Faced with the choice of either eliminating
the escalating threats to its life or being driven into the sea, Israel chose to live. It took decisive and unforeseen action
to avoid the fate that the Arabs had planned for it. This mood is captured in a story told among the Israeli troops during
the tense days before the outbreak of the war, which Yoni related in a letter he wrote from the orchards of Ramleh on May
27, 1967, a week before the war:

We sit and wait. What are we waiting for? Well, it’s like this: An Englishman, an American and an Israeli were caught by a
tribe of cannibals. When they were already in the pot, each of them was allowed a last wish. The Englishman asked for a whiskey
and a pipe, and got them. The American asked for a steak, and got it. The Israeli asked the chief of the tribe to give him
a good kick in the backside. At first the chief refused, but after a lot of arguments, he finally did it. At once the Israeli
pulled out a gun and shot all the cannibals. The American and the Englishman asked him: “If you had a gun the whole time,
why didn’t you kill them sooner?” ’Are you crazy?” answered the Israeli. “And have the U.N. brand me an aggressor?”
¹⁰

But that is exactly what the UN (and most of the world) proceeded to do. It would soon condemn Israel for refusing to be stewed
in the pot that Nasser and the Arabs had prepared for it. This did not happen right away. The resolutions adopted by the Security
Council, written under threat of veto by the United
States, were initially “evenhanded,” calling for restraint and negotiations toward peace on all sides. But not the resolutions
of the General Assembly. There, all the shame the Arabs felt over their defeat exploded into tantrums of impotent rage, which
the Soviets and their servants joined for reasons of their own. Having “invaded Africa” (according to a prevalent Third World
interpretation) by capturing the Sinai, Israel was not only the aggressor but a neocolonialist regime—not merely the tool
of imperialism but an oppressor empire in its own right. All over the East bloc and the Third World, states severed diplomatic
relations and condemned their newly discovered aggressor foe. China declared of Israel’s act of self-defense: “This is another
towering crime against the Arab people committed by U.S. imperialism and its tool Israel, as well as a grave provocation against
the people of Asia, Africa and the rest of the world.”
¹¹
Pakistan asserted that it was “[n]efarious and naked aggression… against the territorial integrity of the United Arab Republic
and the adjoining Arab States…. Israel is an illegitimate child born of fraud and force.”
¹²
In Bulgaria, it was felt that “[t]he adventures and aggressive actions of Israel arouse disgust and anxiety among world public
opinion.”
¹³
And Moscow, which had helped to trigger the war by feeding the Arabs false intelligence, piously informed the world that
“in view of the continued Israeli aggression against Arab States and its gross violation of the Security Council resolutions,
the Soviet government has decided to sever diplomatic relations with Israel.”
¹⁴

That all this could occur because Israel had succeeded in defending itself was no ordinary propaganda victory. Still, the
Arabs understood that such condemnations, coming from the Soviet bloc, China, and the Third World, would not suffice. The
shock of their defeat in the Six Day War led them to a fundamental reevaluation of their tactics. Having lost areas strategically
vital to waging war against Israel, especially the commanding heights of Judea and Samaria, the Arabs realized that no easy
military solution would be forthcoming until they first forced Israel to retreat to the vulnerable pre-1967 lines. This would
require the exertion of
enormous political pressure, and such pressure could be effective only if it came from one place: the West. Israel, after
all, was a Western country dependent on Western, and especially American, support. The Arab states would therefore have to
win over public opinion in the West by means of a lengthy, sophisticated, and comprehensive campaign. They would have to change
the terms of the conflict so as to obscure its real nature and present it in a manner that would be plausible, even persuasive,
to audiences outside the Middle East.

For one thing, the kind of open declaration of intent that they had made so freely up to the eve of the Six Day War would
have to be muted or even dispensed with. Obviously, it would not do to speak again of driving the Jews into the sea. To much
of the world, this was simply unacceptable.

New arguments would have to be marshaled to justify continued hostility against Israel. And what better proof of Israel’s
innate aggressiveness could there be than the incontestable fact that it had come out of the war a bigger country than when
it entered it? All the territories that the Arabs had lost in 1967, territories that had been used by Arab leaders as staging
areas for a war that they themselves had brought on, were now held up as examples of unbridled Israeli expansionism. The consequences
of Arab aggression were thereby presented as its causes.

The Arab leaders now demanded that these same territories be handed over to them. That they have managed to persuade many
people of the justice of their demand is, to say the least, curious. They present, after all, an entirely new theory in international
relations. Never before have states that lost territory in wars of aggression assumed so easily the mantle of the aggrieved
party. Germany after World War II certainly did not. Neither did the other aggressor states from that same war. In fact, there
is hardly a case in history in which a repelled aggressor was permitted to demand anything, much less the territory from which
his aggression was initiated.

The wide acceptance of the idea of Israel’s relinquishing Judea
and Samaria has much to do with the notion, promulgated in the UN Charter, that the acquisition of land by force should be
considered illegitimate.
¹⁵
The advocates of this position like to remind us—frequently—that taking land by force is like stealing the property of an
individual. But there is no small amount of hypocrisy in the fact that this principle is today so piously preached by states
that only a few years ago were themselves ardently pursuing international empires spanning the globe—with force the preferred
method of acquisition. When it comes to their own interests, these states, including Western ones, have no real regrets over
past uses of force, and they continue to use it to keep what they have captured whenever they see fit.

Yet Israeli “acquisitions” of territories by force stand in marked contrast to most examples that one could adduce, including
American actions against the Indians and against Mexico, by means of which the continental United States came into being.
For Israel has at no point set out to conquer anything. It has been repeatedly forced into wars of self-defense against Arab
regimes ideologically committed to its destruction.

Of paramount importance is the fact that the lands in question—the mountain ranges of Golan, Samaria, and Judea—were all used
as springboards by the Arab armies to attack Israel during the Six Day War and as staging areas for terrorism during the years
before the war. Syria, as we have seen, used the Golan to threaten Israel’s water supply as well. In such a case, the argument
over the use of force to acquire territory is like the argument over whether you may use force to take a gun away from someone
who has already fired two shots at you and is about to fire a third time. Countries that have been the object of aggression
have a legitimate interest in protecting themselves against potential attacks, a principle that has been recognized repeatedly
in international relations, even in cases in which the threats were considerably less than those facing Israel.

Thus, for three decades after World War II, the United States kept Okinawa (eight thousand miles from California) as a hedge
against the possible resurgence of Japanese aggression, while East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania
were kept under Soviet control (with American acquiescence) as a hedge against renewed German aggression. The actual possibility
that a “next war” would be launched from either of these utterly ruined, disarmed, and subjugated opponents was almost nonexistent,
but neither the Americans nor the Soviets were willing to take even the slightest risk where their national security was concerned.
Compare this to Israel’s case: The West Bank—the Judean heartland of the Jewish people—is only a few miles from the outer
perimeter of Tel Aviv, and the Arab regimes surrounding Israel continue to arm themselves feverishly, rarely bothering to
disguise their plans to use the territory against Israel once more should Israel vacate it.

But what is even more amazing is the fact that the Arab-inspired myth of “Israeli expansionism” persists, even though in 1979
Israel, in pursuit of peace at Camp David, willingly agreed to give up
91 percent
of the territory it had won in a war of self-defense, land containing billions of dollars of investments and the oil fields
that it had developed and that met most of its energy needs. Further, Israel ceded additional territories to Palestinian control
under the Oslo Accords. No victor in recorded history has behaved similarly. What other nation would give up its oil supply
and become dependent on imported oil for the sake of peace?

Clearly, however indignant some Arab leaders may be over the loss of territory in 1967, this loss cannot have been the cause
of a conflict that began much earlier. If not the loss of territory, are the Palestinian Arab refugees the cause of the conflict?
Prior to 1967, in fact, it was “the refugee problem” that was the constant refrain of the Arab chorus in explaining the Arab
enmity toward Israel. But there was no such thing as the refugee problem when the Arabs embarked upon their first full-scale
war against the fledgling Israel in 1948. On the day five Arab armies invaded the new State of Israel, Azzam Pasha, secretary
general of the Arab League, declared:
“This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the
Crusades.”
¹⁶

In several cases—as in Haifa, Tiberias, and in other well-known examples documented by the British authorities and Western
correspondents on the scene at the time—the Jews pleaded with their Palestinian Arab neighbors to stay. This was in sharp
contrast to the directives the Palestinian Arabs were receiving from Arab governments, exhorting them to leave in order to
clear the way for the invading armies. No matter: The idea that Israel expelled the refugees, repeated ad nauseam, has caught
hold over the decades since. But in the years immediately after the conflict, there were many moments of candor. For example,
the Jordanian newspaper
Filastin
wrote in February 1949, “The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out
of the way of the Arab invasion armies.”
¹⁷
And in the New York Lebanese daily
Al-Hoda
in June 1951:

The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel
Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade…. Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land,
homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow
them down.
¹⁸

In 1954 the Jordanian daily
Al-Difaa
quoted this telling comment from one of the refugees: “The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we
got out, but they did not get in.”
¹⁹
As late as 1963, the Cairo
Akhbar al-Yom
was still able to write: “May 15th arrived.… [O]n that very day the Mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine
to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead.”
²⁰

Not only have the Arab leaders chosen to forget this history,
they have created a new one, at once absolving themselves of any responsibility for the refugees and pinning the blame on
Israel. Again, as with the territories lost in 1967, the consequence of the 1948 war—Arab refugees—was presented as its cause.

But to make this scheme work, the refugees had to be maintained as refugees, permanently wretched, perpetually unsettled.
Most people unfamiliar with the Middle East are shocked to learn that the PLO actually has acted to prevent Palestinians from
leaving the refugee camps, as have various Arab states. For the PLO, these camps served as a propaganda bonanza and fertile
soil for the recruitment of new “fighters,” and it was willing to resort to violence to keep them intact. For some reason,
the Western press seems to have had little interest in reporting on this sordid bit of manipulation.