A Durable Peace (48 page)

Eugene Rostow, who was U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs when the American administration took the initiative
to draft the resolution, confirms the position of the authors:

Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338… rest on two principles. [First,] Israel may administer the territory until its Arab
neighbors make peace. And [second,] when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to “secure and recognized borders,” which need
not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949.
²⁰

But
has
Israel withdrawn from “territories occupied in the conflict”? It certainly has. The Sinai Peninsula, returned in the context
of Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, is on the Israeli scale a very substantial piece of property: twenty-five thousand
square miles on which Israel had built major airfields, developed luxury hotels, and discovered oil. In all, the Sinai—ten
times bigger than Judea and Samaria—constituted no less than 91 percent of the territories captured by Israel in 1967. Nor
does the resolution say in any of its clauses that Israel should have to withdraw on every front (Sinai and Gaza, the Golan,
and the West Bank). This was left, precisely as intended by the framers of the resolution, for negotiation between Israel
and its Arab neighbors.

Yet all of this misses what is surely the major moral principle embedded in the diplomatic wording of Resolution 242: that
the
Arabs
should make concessions for peace. That is, if the resolution recognized an Israeli right to secure borders and furthermore
did not necessarily expect Israel to return to the borders from which the war had started, this means that the framers of
the resolution thought it was reasonable for the Arabs to sacrifice some of
their
territorial ambitions for the sake of a secure peace.

And why not? What kind of a “compromise” is it for one side to renounce one hundred percent of its claims and the other side
to renounce zero percent? What kind of a moral position is it to say that the failed aggressor should be given back all the
territory from which he launched his attack? And what kind of deterrence could Israel be expected to maintain if the negative
consequences of Arab aggression against it were found to be nil for the Arab countries? Indeed, the position underlying Resolution
242 is as refreshing
as it is just. Untouched by the propaganda of the decades that followed it, it states what any rational person would have
said from the start: that peace benefits both sides, and so both sides have to share the costs. Secure boundaries for Israel
are a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. The Arabs have demonstrated again and again that the ten-mile strip on which
Israel lived before 1967 could not constitute a secure boundary. This means the Arabs have to give something up for peace.
There has to be an Arab leader courageous enough to be willing to forgo some or all of the Arab claims to the remaining land.
So far none has been found. With the support of most of the world, the Arabs continue to demand every inch of the territories
from which they attacked Israel.

Arab military strategy is simple: Squeeze Israel into the pre-1967 armistice lines, subjecting it once more to a state of
intolerable vulnerability. Arab political strategy is to harness a forgetful West to this cause. But as President Lyndon Johnson
said shortly after the Six Day War: “We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will
assure each the greatest security It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of June 4, 1967, will not bring peace.”
²¹

Whatever their differences, nearly everyone in Israel—whether Labor or Likud, government or opposition—agrees that Israel
must not go back to these boundaries, and that it must not relinquish strategic control of Judea and Samaria.
^*
This point was made forcefully by Labor’s Moshe Dayan in August 1967 (two months after the capture of Judea and Samaria)
at a ceremony commemorating those who fell in the desperate defense of Jerusalem in 1948—when the Arab armies occupied the
strategic wall surrounding the city and starved and bombarded the city of Peace without mercy: “Our brothers, we bear your
lesson with
us.… We know that to give life to Jerusalem, we must station the soldiers and armor of [the Israeli army] in the Sh’chem mountains
[Samaria] and on the bridges over the Jordan.”
²²
Thus, whatever views Israelis may have as to how to establish a modus vivendi between Arab and Jew in the territories, few
question the necessity for continued Israeli military control of this vital space.

In those parts of the world where peace is the norm, borders, territories, and strategic depth may appear unimportant. In
the Middle East they are of decisive importance. Given the specifics of the West Bank, the slogan “land for peace” is singularly
inappropriate: To achieve a sustainable peace, Israel must maintain a credible deterrent long enough to effect a lasting change
in Arab attitudes. It is precisely Israel’s control of this strategic territory that has deterred all-out war and has made
eventual peace more likely.

8

O
f late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the future of the Middle East. There are those who
said that the responsibility for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has now been
compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies,
the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have settled themselves.

While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo
the compliment. This is not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors
is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after
the attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will remain threatened
by the destabilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic
missiles and atomic weapons.

Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors.
But if this peace is to endure, it
must be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first casualty of the Arab campaign
against Israel, and a peace built upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled away
by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace must take into account the true nature of this region,
with its endemic antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the Arab world and the Jewish
state.

Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact
and right of Israel’s existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct with the
Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories
are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world
have still not had an irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently
weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the
Arabs might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that Israel
has
become vulnerable enough to attack.

That Israel’s existence was a bigger issue than the location of its borders was brought home to me in the first peace negotiations
that I attended as a delegate to the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. In Madrid, the head of the Palestinian delegation
delivered a flowery speech calling for the cession of major Israeli population centers to a new Palestinian state and the
swamping of the rest of Israel with Arab refugees,
¹
while the Syrian foreign minister questioned whether the Jews, not being a nation, had a right to a state of their own in
the first place.
²
(And this at a peace conference!) Grievances over disputed lands and disputed waters, on which the conference sponsors hoped
the participants would eventually focus their attention, receded into insignificance in the face of such a primal hostility
toward Israel’s existence. This part of the conference served to underscore the words of Syria’s defense
minister, Mustafa Tlas, who with customary bluntness had summed up the issue one year earlier: “The conflict between the Arab
nation and Zionism is over existence, not borders.”
³

This remains the essential problem nearly a decade later. The fact that the Syrians place such immense obstacles before the
resumption of peace talks with us, and the fact that the Palestinians resisted for more than a year my call to enter fast-track
negotiations for a final settlement, underscores their reluctance to make a genuine and lasting peace with us. To receive
territory is not to make peace. Peace requires that you also give something in return, namely arrangements not to use the
land that is handed over to you as a future staging area for attacks against Israel. Equally, peace requires that our Arab
partners educate their people to an era of mutual acceptance, something we have failed to see in many parts of the Arab world.

To begin resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, one must begin here. The Arabs must be asked forthrightly and unconditionally
to make their peace with Israel’s existence. The Arab regimes must move not only to a state of nonbelligerency but to a complete
renunciation of the desire to destroy the Jewish state—a renunciation that will gain credibility only when they establish
a formal peace with Israel. This means ending the economic boycott and the explosive arms buildup, and signing peace treaties
with Israel. The Arab states must resign themselves to something they have opposed for so long: not merely the fact but the
right of Israel’s permanent presence among them. This necessarily means that they will have to accept mutual coexistence as
the operating principle in their relations with the Jewish state.

A policy of coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union was of course promulgated in the heyday of the Cold
War, and we have become so used to hearing the phrase that we are inured to its profound importance. For even at a time when
the Communists were possessed by doctrines of global domination, they were saying that they understood that there was a
higher interest, higher even than the Marxist cause: the survival of their own society and of the planet as a whole.

This is a rational attitude since it allows warring societies to live, evolve, and eventually resolve the antagonisms between
them. The crucial idea of mutual coexistence is setting limits to conflict. Yet for close to a century Arab society and Arab
politics have been commandeered by an anti-Jewish obsession that has known no limits: It harnessed the Nazis, promoted the
Final Solution, launched five wars against Israel, embarked on a campaign of global terrorism, strangled the world’s economy
with oil blackmail, and now, in Iraq and elsewhere, is attempting to build nuclear bombs for the great Armageddon. This obsession
must be stopped not only for Israel’s sake but for the sake of the Arabs themselves and for the sake of the world.

It will not do to obscure the primacy of this existential opposition to Israel as the driving force of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Such obfuscation is fashionable in current commentaries on Israel and Arabs, in the form of a neat symmetry imposed on their
respective needs and desires. These commentaries hold that Israel’s demand for Arab recognition of its right to exist should
be met in exchange for various Arab demands, especially for land. Yet to treat these demands as symmetrical, as the two sides
of an equation, is to ignore both history and causality. Worse, it sets a price tag on the lives of millions of Jews and their
nation.