Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine
After The Yom Kippur War
This article is the ninth chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the eighth chapter:
Israel’s Function In The Modern World. Tomorrow, we will publish the last chapter. These articles are part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click
Here.
About the book: “A fully documented, dramatic history of the events which shaped the Middle East. Every key problem in the Arab-Israel conflict, every decision is carefully analyzed, from the questionable policies of Britain in 1948 to how the Palestinian refugee problem began. The territory won in the war of 1967, and the terrorist war of attrition is discussed.” (From the intro at ShmuelKatz website). To view the entire book online, go to
Shmuelkatz.com. To buy the book, go to
Afsi.org.
The writing of the original English edition of this book was concluded early in 1972. Thus it was that only in a footnote inserted in the page proofs was there mention of what turned out to be an historic turning point in the Arab war against the Jewish state. In July 1972, the Egyptian President announced that he had asked the Soviet government to withdraw its “advisers” (said to number more than thirty thousand) from Egypt. The reason, he said, was that the Soviets had refused his requests for more sophisticated weapons with which to attack Israel. The Soviet government consequently recalled most of its military personnel from Egypt.
The expulsion was followed by a lengthy period of mutual recrimination. The breach in relations between Egypt and the Soviet Union was warmly welcomed in the West. The euphoria was all the deeper for the fact that the expulsion had followed closely on the heels of an impressive agreement to regulate the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. One paragraph in this agreement (signed in Moscow on May 29, 1972, by President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR) laid down that the two governments had a “special responsibility to do everything in their power so that conflicts or situations will not arise which can serve to increase international tensions.”
To the framers of Middle East policy in Washington, ft thus seemed clear in mid-1972 that, partly through the action of Sadat and partly through the Soviet leaders’ readiness for self-restraint, a considerable relaxation of tension was in the offing.
In fact, the expulsion of the Soviet advisers from Egypt, and the noisy cooling of relations between the two countries, was a cleverly conceived, well-coordinated, impeccably executed hoax; and the Soviet government undertaking to honor the relevant clause in the agreement for d6tente was a calculated deception. Both, as it transpired, served as preliminary moves toward the orchestrated, many-pronged Arab aggression against Israel in October 1973.
The motives and ramifications of the Egyptian plan, and the complex tactics of its execution, were subsequently described by Abd al-Satar al-Tawila, then the military correspondent of the Egyptian weekly Rose-al-Yusuf, in a book entitled The Six-Hour War According to a Military Correspondent’s Diary. There he described Sadat’s actions as a “brilliant plan of political camouflage” carried out in a “spectacular manner to mislead the enemy.” He describes how:
The various government agencies spread rumors and stories that were exaggerated, to say the least, about deficiencies, both quantitative and qualitative, regarding the weapons required to begin the battle against Israel, at the very time that the two parties – Egypt and the USSR – had reached agreement concerning the supply of quantities of arms during the second half of 1973 – weapons which, in fact, were beginning to arrive. And there came a time when we saw how the majority of habitues of Egyptian and Arab coffee houses, particularly in Beirut, turned into arms experts and babbled about shortages in this or that type of hardware. And speaking in the jargon of the scientist and the expert, they would say that the Soviets were refusing to supply Egypt with missiles of a certain type and were even cutting off the supply of spare parts in such a manner that our planes, for example, had turned into useless scrap and were unable to fly, not to speak of combating the Phantom and the Mirage. These self-styled arms experts went deeply into the question of offensive and defensive weapons, inventing arbitrary differences between them while – as we shall see in the chapters dealing with the battle – defensive antiaircraft missiles actually played an offensive role during the War of October 6. Moreover, the Egyptian press frequently gave prominence to an inclination [in Cairo] to seek arms in the West. And while it is coned that it Is possible to buy some categories of hardware in the West, to equip a whole army with weapons from the West would mean, simply, that the date of the expected battle remains far off, i.e., until such time as the Egyptian army could be trained in the use of such now hardware….All this talk about armaments and their shortage was intended to create the impression in the ranks of the enemy that one of the reasons why Egypt was incapable of starting war was the absence of high quality weapons….And the whole world was taken by surprise when zero hour arrived. A Pentagon spokesman expressed this surprise when he said:
“They – i.e, the Israelis—did not suspect the presence of such quantities and such categories of Soviet weapons in Egyptian and Syrian hands, in view of the incessantly repeated Arab complaint that the Soviets were refusing to supply these two countries with advanced offensive weapons in sufficient quantities.”
The Egyptian camouflage to deceive the enemy was expanded to include Egyptian-Soviet relations. This was done to such an extent that many among the Arabs themselves cast doubt upon Egyptian-Soviet friendship and its sincerity and allegations were spread concerning Soviet non-support for the Arabs in their struggle. The episode of July 1972, when Egypt decided to make do without Soviet experts, was exploited and many intentionally or unintentionally failed to beer the words of President Sadat and his repeated emphasis that this episode was no more than ‘an interlude with our friend,’ as always happens among friends. Now we already know that one of the reasons for the willingness to make do without the Soviet experts was so that preparations could be made for the beginning of a battle that would bear the character of a 100% Egyptian decision, using 100% Egyptian forces. However, these experts had fulfilled an important task in connection with the network of missiles and other delicate weapons.
The Egyptian deception campaign, moreover, was able to reap considerable benefit from this episode – the willingness to make do without the Soviet experts–because it raised questions about the genuineness of the regimes threats to resort to war since, after all, how would the Egyptian army be able to fight without the presence of thousands of Russian experts, distributed among all the most important weapons sectors of the army so as to train [the army] in their use and even to operate some of this hardware themselves? In addition, the [deception] campaign benefited also from the allegations and suspicions that were spread in the Arab world, as if this [willingness to do without Soviet experts] had been the result of a secret agreement with the U.S. and its friends in the region, whereby a peace arrangement would be prepared in return for the removal of the Soviet military presence. If that was the case why, then, no war was to be expected, nor anything like a war – yet all the time preparations were continuing feverishly to open the battle; and when the war started in fact, there was the additional surprise that unlimited Soviet support was extended both in the international arena and in the area of military equipment. The same Pentagon spokesman, on the morrow of the battle, expressed his opinion about this surprise:
‘We never imagined that the Soviet union would do what it has done after the tough verbal campaigns waged against it in the Arab world, and after the cooling of relations with Cairo following the exodus of the Soviets.’
During a visit to the battlefront on the 7th of October, I heard an ordinary Egyptian soldier give expression to Arab-Soviet friendship in the following simple words:
“Some of you may have believed all this talk – yet our friendship is flourishing – after all, I was being trained to use Soviet-produced anti-tank R.P.G.”
Excerpts from Al-Tawila’s book were published on the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur War in Rose-al-Yusuf – the official organ of the only political party allowed to exist in Egypt. The Journal (of which Al-Tawila was later appointed editor) thus authoritatively told its readers that Al-Tawila. had been encouraged in his work by President Sadat. In fact, Sadat had personally helped him revise the text of the book. Al-Tawila had, moreover, been given access to secret documents. [Rose-d-Yusuf, October 7, 1974]
A year later, President Sadat himself, in an interview on Cairo Radio (October 24, 1975), confirmed Al-Tawila’s version, describing his expulsion of the Soviet advisers as “a strategic cover … a splendid strategic distraction for our going to war.”
The year following July 1972 was employed by the Egyptians in preparing for the surprise attack across the Suez Canal and for its coordination with the parallel attack, by the Syrian forces, on the Golan Heights. The Syrians, incidentally, became direct beneficiaries of the Egyptian-Soviet maneuver: The experts expelled from Egypt were transferred to Syria. Moscow did not do this without the ready consent of the Egyptian government, for Cairo held that “the national interest required the continued presence of Soviet experts in the region.”
In that same period, the Arab states planned the grand strategy – which they had often threatened without being taken seriously – of using their vast oil resources as a political weapon.
Previously, no doubt, it had been difficult to achieve united action even among the oilproducing states, and certainly not with the non-Arab oil producers. In 1970 however, the oil-producing states, having united in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), had already begun a process, albeit comparatively moderate, of raising prices. Now, at some point in 1973, they had come to a radical decision to execute a sudden and steep increase. The Organization of Arab Oil Producers (OAPEC) decided at the same time to proclaim an embargo, to coincide with the war they were preparing against Israel. This embargo would deny oil to the whole of the Western world in order to extort from them support, in bringing Israel to her knees. Overnight the countries of Europe and Japan, heavily dependent on Middle East off, would be reduced to the status of suppliants.
The timing of the OPEC announcement – on October 16, 1973, the eleventh day of the Yom Kippur War – of a drastic rise in oil prices to coincide with the of the embargo was for the Arabs a happy means of making it appear, even if briefly, that Israel was at the root of the difficulties of the West. The next day, the Arab oil exporters published their threat
“to reduce oil production by not less than 5 percent of the September level of output in each Arab oil exporting counties, with a similar reduction to be applied each successive month until such time as total evacuation of Israeli forces from all Arab territory occupied during the June 1967 war is completed and the legal rights of the Palestinian people are restored.”
This remained an unfulfilled threat. The embargo was lifted in March 1974, and indeed its precise scope, while it lasted, has remained a matter of controversy. The atmosphere of emergency and indeed near-panic it induced was exaggerated, as were the intensely gloomy prophecies about its effect on the Western economies. Its impact on the Arab-Israeli war itself also was minor, but it could have been serious because of the supine accommodation of most of the governments of Europe to the threats of the Arabs.
The war could have been over in a few days. A relaxation of alertness throughout the Israeli Army, lowered standards of discipline and arms maintenance compounded by political misjudgment of Arab and Soviet intentions, found Israel at the opening of the war in a position of tactical inferiority, unable to prevent or even effectively counter the successful exploitation by Egyptians and Syrians of the element of surprise. Caught off balance, some of the Israeli commanders in the field blundered in the early stages. The result was a substantial number of Israeli casualties and spectacular Arab successes. The Egyptians captured a strip of territory on the East Bank of the Suez Canal and the Syrians a generous portion of the Golan Heights. Only a display of outstanding bravery in the Israeli ranks on both fronts prevented a military disaster.
Yet the Israeli Army not only succeeded in extricating itself from the critical situation thus created, but tamed the tables completely. By the tenth day of the war, all of the Golan Heights had been regained, and Israeli forces had in addition occupied a substantial area in Syria, where they posed a direct threat to Damascus. In the south, although the Egyptian forces – the Second and Third Armies – held their positions east of the Canal, a brilliant break through their center and across the Canal had been followed by the occupation of a much larger salient inside Egypt proper. There, indeed, the road to Cairo was open. The Third Army trapped and encircled west of the Canal, was doomed. It was precisely at this point that political pressure from the Nixon administration, which the Israeli government found irresistible, forced them to agree to a ceasefire.
As the war progressed, the moral weakness of Weston Europe was pitiably exposed. One reason for the precarious state in which the Israeli forces found themselves after the initial Arab onslaught was the decision Israeli government, even when they had realized that the attack was imminent, not to deprive the Arabs of any of the benefits of surprise. They had refrained purposely from taking preemptive action. Moreover, they purposely delayed even the full call-up Reserves – the main body of the Israeli Army.
Purpose of this restraint was to prevent any misconception, or pretended misconception, about the identity of the aggressors. The Israeli government wished to prevent a repetition of the ludicrous charges of aggression laid at Israel’s door in 1967, when she took preemptive action in the face of the belligerent closing of the Straits of Tiran and the massing of the Egyptian and Syrian forces for the declared purpose of Israel’s annihilation. Now, the government’s restraint turned out to be irrelevant, ineffective, and costly beyond measure or repair. They did not reckon with the realities of international motivations. When the United States government applied to the governments of Europe to allow her planes, bringing supplies to the battered victim of aggression, to land on their airfields for refuelling, they refused for fear of offending the Arabs. Fortunately, the United States had rights, secured by treaty, to land her planes in the Portuguese colony in the Azores. The Portuguese agreed to respect these rights, and the desired weight and speed of supply to Israel in the latter phase of the war were thus ensured. The stark realities of European moral flabbiness were compounded by the applied power of Arab oil. The embargo reduced presumably proud governments in Europe to whimpering impotence. “Nous pesons peu” (we count for little), cried Michel Jobert, the French Foreign Minister, in the National Assembly; and the West German Foreign Minister subsequently explained that his government was “aware of the limits of her influence.”
The central effect of the oil boycott, as gradually transpired after the event, was psychological. It diverted the attention of frightened populations away from the concomitant steep rise in price (fourfold in less than three months). Its long-range effect was as a threat, a demonstration of the seemingly irresistible power that resides potentially in the hands of the Arab oil states. With the passage of time, however, the organization of oil reserves, the provisions made for mutual aid and cooperation among the consumer states, the discovery of new oil sources, and the development of alternative fuels, suggest that a future embargo will be far more difficult to apply effectively.
The real change – palpable, swift, and far-reaching in the very fabric of international relations – that developed after mid-October 1973 derives from the rise in the price of oil. Its implications and consequences transformed the potential of the Arab states into unprecedented economic power. They have transmuted this power into political terms and have applied it in every possible direction with a ruthlessness sometimes sophisticated, sometimes openly brutal. Its weight has been directed to the consummation of the central short term purposes of the Arabs: the annihilation of Israel. But in counterpoint to that purpose, there wells up, unmistakably, the theme of Arabdom as a world power, avenging itself, moreover, on the hitherto supercilious and allegedly exploitative West. Not only fabulous wealth, but the idea of the peoples of the Christian West – Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, and even Americans – hungry for oil and deals and dollars, abasing themselves before Moslem overlords, has fired Arab imagination with the vision of a new golden age of domination in the world.
By a combination of circumstances, the Arabs have derived considerable aid and comfort from the sorrows of the United States – the trauma of Vietnam and the agony of Watergate – as well as from the policy ofWashington toward the Soviet Union.
Early in 1976, with the debacle for the West following the successful intervention in the Angolan Civil War by Cuban troops sponsored and armed by the Soviet Union, it was very widely agreed in the United States that the declared policy of detente, pursued for several years, had been a grotesque failure derived, as its critics had long maintained, from a disregard of, or an inability to understand the purpose of, the priorities, the thought process, and the mode of operation of the Soviet leaders. Far from weaning them away from dreams of world domination and deepening their interest in noncompetitive ideological coexistence, the policy of detente had proved to be a powerful vehicle for furthering their plans for expansion and their dream of Communist predominance throughout the world.
The failure was measurable, for detente was not a vague generalization. It was codified in the formal Nixon-Brezhnev agreement in Moscow in May 1972. In addition to the undertaking to do everything in their power so that conflicts or situations would not rise which would serve to increase international tensions they also promised – among the twelve principles agreed upon to prevent the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations and to do their, utmost to avoid military confrontations.
This agreement, as far as it affected the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, effectively helped to lull Jerusalem (and Washington) into a false sense of security. The Soviet government refrained from carrying out those of its provisions which might conceivably have prevented war. The secret delivery, behind the heavy smoke screen of “a quarrel” with Egypt, of large quantities of arms into Egypt as well as Syria was not precisely a means of preventing “conflicts or, situations … which would serve to increase international tensions.” Nor did they warn the United States, as they were pledged to do, when they knew the Arab offensive was imminent. They did indeed send planes to evacuate Soviet families from both Egypt and Syria two days before the war broke out, but American Intelligence believed this was part of the “quarrel.” Having extended the aid designed to give both countries the maximum advantage in opening the war, the Soviets executed throughout its progress what they themselves described as an “uninterrupted flow by sea and air of Soviet arms and ammunition to Egypt and Syria.”
They went further: They called on the other Arab states to join in the war. In a message to President Boumedienne of Algeria on October 9, and to the heads of other Arab states the next day, Brezhnev wrote:
Today more than ever Arab brotherly solidarity must play its decisive role. Syria and Egypt must not remain alone in their fight against a perfidious enemy.
Sponsoring aggression in the Middle East was only one facet of the dynamic policy of the Soviet leaders. The USSR continued to build up her military power in every field with single-minded intensity and with a high efficiency detectable in no other sphere of her economic endeavor. Her military manpower grew (by 1975) to 4.4 million, more than twice the size of the United States establishment. In every category of military production except helicopters, she drew ahead of the United States. In ground-forces equipment, the ratio rose to about six to one. In the air, still qualitatively inferior, her production rates in fighter aircraft in 1975 exceeded those of the United States Air Force by a factor of four.
Nor did the detente agreement inhibit or slow down the uninterrupted expansion of the Soviet Navy – the most significant and the most spectacular phenomenon in the changing balance of international relationships. The progress was summed up succinctly by James R. Schlesinger, former United States Secretary of Defense:
“It has become a formidable blue-water navy challenging that of the United States.”
Moreover, taking advantage of some clauses in the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT 1) of 1972, and by ignoring other clauses, the Soviet Union attained superiority in the field of nuclear missiles. Not least significant, in contravention of that agreement, she built up an anti-nuclear CM defense system, thus creating for herself the essential prerequisite of a nuclear war-winning capability – which the agreement was specifically designed to deny to both sides.
All the while, the United States was not only decreasing her military expenditures (by about 3 percent per annum), but, by means of huge supplies of wheat and consumer commodities, helping the Soviet Union to overcome her continuing food shortage without having to reduce her military build-up, and, together with other Western nations, especially France and Germany, helping her develop an otherwise unattainable technological capacity.
What is no less important, the chief architect of American foreign policy, Dr. Henry Kissinger, consistently brushed aside all criticism of this policy as well as the pertinent questions and doubts and fears aroused by Soviet behavior under detente. He rushed to the defense of the Soviet Union even on its behavior in the Yom Kippur War. He announced at its – height that the Russians were “less provocative, less incendiary, and less geared to military threats, than they were in the Six Day War in 1967.” Soviet behavior so far could not, he said, be judged irresponsible.
But the breakthrough with the most far-reaching immediate impact achieved by the Soviet Union was in the reopening of the Suez Canal. In prospect of that reopening, and parallel to the growth of her navy, the Soviet Union expanded its network of bases and base facilities in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf Zone. By the time the Canal was reopened – in June 1975 – Russia had established no fewer than four bases covering its immediate approaches. In addition to the three in the People’s Republic of South Yemen, she had built the largest of her bases outside the Soviet Union itself, at Berbera in Somalia.
The opening of the Canal released the coiled spring of Soviet power. Moscow was now not only physically equipped, but was freed from her logistic shackles for the pursuit of a policy of intervention and expansion. She was now complete mistress of her own strength, free to deploy her resources as she wished. The Canal, hitherto an obstacle, was now transformed into an instrument of Soviet strategy. The Soviet leaders quickly sensed the overwhelming central phenomenon in the process by which the reopening of the Canal had been achieved: the strange complaisance of the United States. For whether through extreme political myopia, on a deep fatalism, or a failure of will, or all of these, the fact remained that the great prize – the opening of the door to supremacy in the Indian Ocean, in the Persian Gulf thus to the oil sources of the Middle East and into the African continent; the renewal of full exploitation both of the Soviet Union’s naval strength and of her geographical proximity to the area of prospective intervention; the ending of the frustrations of bottled-up Soviet power and repressed Soviet ambitions – this great many – colored prize had been presented to her by her main geopolitical and ideological rival. The reopening of the Canal was achieved by the energetic initiative and effort of the American Secretary of State. Still more incredibly, it was presented to the Soviet Union incidentally, as though absentmindedly, in an apparently unrelated context, and thus did not require any payment, or concession, or undertaking, or even vote of thanks. Moreover, it was displayed to the world, and accepted in the West, as part of a diplomatic victory for America.
How had this situation, yet another compound of Kafka and Orwell, come about?
Immediately after his assumption of office as Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger called in the ambassadors to the UN of thirteen Arab states and told them that he understood the Arab states could not resign themselves to a perpetuation of the status quo in the Middle East. He promised them that the United States would work for a solution to the problem.
Eleven days later, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. Not all the resources of United States and Israeli Intelligence had been adequate to foresee the attack. When the Israeli Army, after its initial were and nearly fatal setback, began turning the tables, and while the Soviet Union was operating its new, massive supply train, airborne and seaborne, of supplies to Egypt and Syria, the losses the Israeli Army bad suffered threatened a shortage of essential materiel. There occurred then a never officially explained delay, lasting eight days, in the shipping to Israel of promised supplies by the United States. In reply to the daily agitated appeals by the Israeli Ambassador, the American Secretary of State claimed that it was the Defense Department that was holding up the supplies. In fact, the Defense Department was acting according to the directions of the State Department. What the Secretary of State omitted to explain to the Israeli Ambassador was that (as he had explained to his colleague, the Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.) it was his intention to see Israel “bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning.”
After two weeks of war Israel, according to all responsible military analysts, could without difficulty have broken Egypt’s power of aggression and inflicted a no less crushing defeat on the Syrians, thus ensuring for herself a long period of peace and for the Western nations a freezing of Soviet advances and ambitions south and east of Suez. At precisely this point, the American Secretary of State, having reached agreement with the Soviet government, conveyed to the Israeli government from Moscow the preemptory “advice” that they accept an immediate ceasefire.
The hopes the Israeli government had had of exploiting the overwhelming military advantage it had gained at terrible cost crumpled under the pressure and threats of the Secretary of State. Yet the Egyptian Third Army, about one half the force that had crossed the Canal, was still encircled and its supplies completely cut off. Israel had only to maintain the standstill in order to ensure its surrender and the return of her own army to the southern stretch of the East Bank of the Suez Canal. The Americans now cajoled the Israeli government into lifting the siege.
In two other decisive stages, the Secretary of State dictated the conversion of Israeli victory into defeat. These were the so-called “disengagement agreements.” In an entangled situation, with elements of each side behind the enemy lines, the obvious and logical way to effect disengagement was, of course, to disengage: The Israeli forces would withdraw eastward across the Canal from the deep salient they had occupied in Egypt proper, while the Egyptian forces would withdraw westward across the Canal from the strip they had occupied on the Sinai bank of the Canal, and the Canal would be the separating line. This was in fact proposed by the Israeli Prime Minister, but it did not accord with the vision of the American Secretary of State. Under his intense pressure, only the Israelis withdrew. By the first disengagement agreement (January 1974), the new Israeli line was established on the Mitla and Gidi Passes, some fifteen kilometers into the Sinai Desert.
In the second disengagement agreement (September 1975), the Israeli government surrendered these strategically important passes as well as her hold on the Red Sea coast and the Abu-Rodeis complex of oilfields–her only independent source of oil, providing her with some 60 percent of her total requirements.
Egypt’s overall substantive contribution to the agreements was to accept the gifts, to promise not to attack Israel for a period of three years, and to reopen the Canal. The reopening was solemnly paraded (though not by the Egyptians) as “a step towards peace,” as a great boon confirmed on the countries of Europe (who could, after all, also use the Canal), and as a concession to Israel.
The fanfare accompanying Dr. Kissinger’s diplomacy drowned the many voices in Israel and elsewhere that cried out against handing over to the Arabs and to the Soviets (hovering, modest and relaxed, in the background) such massive strategic advantages, to the peril both of Israel and of the West.
A parallel if less spectacular development was brought about by American pressure on the Syrian front. There a disengagement agreement provided for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal not only from the deep salient threatening Damascus in Syria proper, but also from a strip of the Golan Heights captured in the Six Day War. Syria gave the same quid pro quo as Egypt. She accepted the gifts. She also agreed to accept a loan from the United States.
The actions of, the American Secretary of State made a sharp, clear pattern. The withholding of arms from Israel during the war, the imposition of the ceasefire saving both Egypt and Syria from crushing defeat and then the step-by-step transformation of Israeli victory into defeat, were naked demonstrations of the fulfillment of his promise to the Arab ambassadors on the eve of the war. Nor in fact did he conceal his purpose. Immediately after the war, he hastened to condone Arab aggression. “the conditions that produced this war,” he said, “were clearly intolerable to the Arab nations.” Two weeks later, during a visit to Peking, he made the ominous forecast that if what he described as the forthcoming “peace” negotiations were successful, Israel would face grave problems. She would have to withdraw from territories and would then need “guarantees” — American or international for her “security.” The boundaries he had in mind for Israel obviously would be inadequate for that security, even from his point of view. Subsequent declarations in the same vein left no doubt that he intended to bring about an Israeli surrender of approximately all the territory she had gained in repelling the Arab aggression of 1967: that is, the first stage of the Arab goal.
These declarations were underlined by President Sadat’s repeated assurances, from February 1974 onward, that he recognized a “significant change” in American policy, and of his personal trust in the man he called his “brother Henry,” and by his relaxed assertions, both to his people and to foreign interlocutors, of confidence that the Arab purpose would be achieved. This confidence was echoed by leaders in other Arab, countries.
It was evident, however, that the Secretary of State had imposed a condition of his own: that the Arab leaders must reconcile themselves to the fact that total Israeli withdrawal could not be achieved all at once. It would be essential to apply a “salami” policy–to be graced, however, by the more elegant nomenclature of “step-by-step diplomacy towards peace.”
The American State Department proclaimed the disengagement agreements as great diplomatic victories. Egypt gave no substantive quid pro quo to Israel, but the United States itself was to derive benefit of the utmost importance: Soviet influence in Egypt was to be replaced by American influence. Again there developed a campaign of criticism and recrimination by Egypt against the Soviet Union. The grounds were, again, the non-supply, or the inadequate supply, of sophisticated weapons. The similarity of this campaign to that which preceded the Yom Kippur War strongly suggests a repetition of the hoax of 1972-73.
It would be a very rational hoax. The reopening of the Suez Canal greatly diminished the importance of Egypt in the Soviet Union’s further penetration of Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and Red Sea zones. As for the naval facilities located on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, these are feasibly replaceable certainly by Syria at Latakia, perhaps also by Libya. If Soviet imperial expansion can be pursued behind a waterfall of American self-congratulation on having “driven” the Russians out of Egypt, and if Washington can thereby flourish a story of success to brighten an otherwise gloomy record in foreign policy, thus bolstering up the detente policy that has brought such tremendous benefits to the Soviet Union, then another publicized quarrel with Egypt is a low price to pay. In fact, the noisier and more realistic, the better. During such a quarrel, Egypt should indeed not have to suffer a shortage of the proper types of arms, which the United States might not be able to supply. This remained a Soviet interest – a hedge against a possible future return of Israeli forces to the Canal. The problem of clandestine supply had, however, been solved once before and could be solved again.
Accommodation in the West to the desires of the oil-rich and population-rich Arab states was strongly in evidence before the Yom Kippur War. In the war’s aftermath, it became a dominant feature of policy in nearly all the Western nations. Perhaps they had recovered from the trauma of the oil embargo, but they were now enmeshed in the revolutionary, even cataclysmic, consequences of the four-fold, and later fivefold, rise in off prices. The unprecedented drain on their financial resources threatened, in one degree or another, to disrupt their economies. Indeed, present chaos, or near-chaos, and a lurid apocalyptic vision of the future, dominated the thinking of a generally nerve wracked and bewildered leadership in the Western nations.
The precise impact of the transfer of gigantic financial resources from the West into the grasp of a handful of oil-producing states will not soon be measured. At first, fear predominated that the oil states, especially the Arabs with their political motivations, and because of their small populations and large surpluses unproductive in their own countries — such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kuwait – would buy up large segments of the economy of the West and thereby exert an unwelcome influence on public affairs. In the United States, in Western Europe, in Japan, there was in fact a considerable buying up of real estate and “buying into” banking, industrial, and commercial concerns, including American oil companies. The cultural field was not neglected: Publishing, firms were bought into, and Arab and Islamic-oriented faculties were established at American universities.
Whether justifiably or not, the fears were soon submerged in a flood of Western initiative. Large doses of antidote were available, calculated to bring back at least some of the dollars that had flowed out. Thus, while potential buyers and investors from the Arab oil countries were to be seen in large numbers in the cities of the West, equally ubiquitous have become the salesmen of Western commerce and industry, real estate, and banking, looking for business in the capitals of the Arab states. “Recycling the petrodollars” has become a national sport in the Western nations. Whatever the ultimate size and weight of the financial and sociological implications and consequences of the two-way process, its immediate political impact on the conflict over Palestine has been very great indeed.
Needless to say, the Arabs have exploited the West’s pursuit of petrodollars in the immediate sphere of finance and business. They have intensified and extended the “secondary” boycott against Israel: the blacklisting of non-Israeli firms doing business with her. More spectacularly, they have become more openly insistent in trying to compel Western firms to collaborate in the boycott of Jews by cutting out Jewish suppliers, Jewish associates, and Jewish employers in any transaction with an Arab country. Much of this pressure is not publicized. From time to time, however, an especially prickly case comes to public notice. Considerable publicity thus attended the pressure to exclude two famous Jewish-owned banks in Britain – N. M. Rothschild & Sons and S. G. Warburg – from an international loan issue launched by a London bank for a Japanese company. There was a public outcry, but it did not affect the outcome, The two banks remained excluded.
Many firms refused to become parties to such Nazitype racism, but many others succumbed. A survey carried out in the United States by the New York Anti-Defamation League led to the conclusion that there was in fact a “widespread willingness” on the part of American businessmen and institutions to conform to the boycott.
It is the political attitudes of most Western governments to the conflict over Palestine that have been most influenced by the changed international economic relationships. The possession of oil and of great purchasing power has now become the prime if not the only operative criterion of right and justice–certainly the criterion for legitimacy. Thus, with one notable exception, there has hardly been an anti-Israel resolution among the mass of such resolutions sponsored by the Arabs at the United Nations, however outrageous morally, however baseless factually, however, infantile intellectually, that has been opposed outright by the civilized Western states. On the whole they abstain. They do not allow what they know of the facts of the dispute to cloud their judgment. They pretend to be unaware of the Arabs’ imperialist appetite; of their annihilative purpose toward Israel; of the historic, political, and moral relationship to the land which over many centuries their whole culture has known as the land of Israel. It has thus, broadly speaking, become the comfortable common cause among these civilized Western states that Israel should surrender territory down to the old Armistice lines of 1949 – from which the Arabs prepared in 1967 to launch the “final attack” on her.
The Arabs’ most spectacular success after 1973, however, has been to turn the international community into accomplices – albeit, passive – in legitimizing the instrument designed to destroy what would remain of Israel after that withdrawal.
For the achievement of such complicity by Western nations, accepted values, of culture and civilization had to be thrown overboard. The international institutions within the United Nations that were established to promote, to disseminate, and to perpetuate those values had to be subverted and prostituted, and even the formal regulations and norms protecting them in the Charter of the United Nations had to be abused and undermined. The Arab states, however, encountered little resistance.
Thus, in November 1974, a year after the Yom Kippur War, the world was treated to the spectacle of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Arab terrorists, a revolver showing at his hip, addressing amid noisy acclaim the Assembly of the United Nations. Fourteen months later a representative of his organization was seated as a participant – lacking only the right to vote – in a meeting of the Security Council.
On the Arab side, these developments were neither sudden nor the fruit of spasmodic opportunism. They were well and long thought out. They were the result of a clear change in tactics by the Arab states after the oil and petrodollar weapon had proved its potency. Before the war, the pattern of their propaganda, their pressures, and their strategy had been governed by the logic of geography: first the “erasure of the consequences of the 1967 War” – that is, Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistic lines – and then the concentrated physical attack on the attenuated Israel by a sea of Arabs, all wearing “Palestinian” uniforms and fighting for the “restoration of their legitimate rights”: that is, the elimination of Israel.
When the American pressure began to bear fruits, when Israel had physically given up part of the gains of 1967, and the further consummation of the Arabs’ objective seemed to them no longer in doubt, they changed the order of priorities. It became possible at owe – without waiting for the gradual process of Israeli withdrawal – to establish the diplomatic basis for the most radical part of their dream: the creation, in the public consciousness, of the “Palestine State” on the ruins of Israel. To this end, considerable diplomatic activity was required – for coordination among the Arab states themselves, for coordination with the Soviet bloc and with the submissive African states–to test the reactions of the Western states, the degree of passivity with which they would swallow the project.
The terrorist organizations had certainly come – or been brought – a long way since their crushing defeat in Jordan. The Arab states had then acted swiftly to ensure the speedy rehabilitation of their protégés. Some latitude, to be sure, had to be given them in executing at least some symbolic revenge on Jordan. But the promise and the arrangements for their continued existence, for quartering them (mainly in Lebanon), for financing their arms, their training and their propaganda, were necessarily accompanied by the condition that they concentrate their main effort against the Israeli enemy.
Symbolic revenge found expression in the appearance of a new organization that called itself Black September, in memory of the events in Jordan in 1970. The first operation claimed by the organization was appropriately a blow against Jordan. On November 28, 1971, King Hussein’s Prime Minister, Wasfi el Tal, was shot down in a Cairo street. The four assailants did not resist arrest. They were not put on trial but were subsequently simply released by Egyptian authorities.
In fact, Black September was not a new organization at all. The nature of its operations, the new dimension of brutality which became its hallmark, made it convenient for Fatah and its leader to avoid identification with it.
Most of its activities in the next two years were carried out at a distance from Israel. They consisted mainly of efforts to attack civilian airplanes on the ground at Rome or Athens airports or by means of stratagems. For example, a gift, chivalrously given to an unsuspecting girlfriend flying on an El Al plane to Israel, contained a time-bomb. Most dramatic of their exploits were the attacks on unsuspecting groups of people, related or unrelated to Israel, in airplanes or elsewhere, and holding them as hostages against the satisfaction of various demands. Usually these included the release of prisoners, jailed in Israel or other countries as well as money and safe conduct to one of the Arab states. Arab terrorism now became also part of an international phenomenon. Liason and mutual cooperation was widely reported with terrorist groups in Italy, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere.
Thus, the one major act of terror carried out on Israel itself was the 1972 attack by three Japanese terrorists at Lod Airport. Landing from a plane on March 25, they took up positions in the airport’s arrivals hall and machine-gunned their fellow passengers. They killed twenty seven people, including twenty pilgrims from Puerto Rico who had come to celebrate Easter in the Holy Land. Eighty others were wounded.
Black September’s own tour de force that year was performed in Munich, Germany. There, in September, they murdered eleven Israeli athletes who had come to participate in the 1972 Olympic Games. They had first trapped them, unguarded and unarmed as they were, in their sleeping quarters.
As though to flaunt its special tactics of warfare, Black September carried out an act of equal wantonness six months later. This time, for reasons unexplained, the chosen field of battle was inside Arab territory: the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartomn, capital of Sudan, where the ambassador was giving a party. The attackers had no difficulty getting in, nor in subduing five unarmed diplomats and taking them captive into another part of the building. They soon released the two Arabs among them: the host, and a Jordanian. Many hours of negotiations then followed with Sudanese authorities. To this end, the terrorists reported and received orders by radio communication with Beirut. Then the three remaining captives – a Belgian and two Americans – were shot dead in the chain to which they had been tied. The killers were arrested.
There were perhaps some valid inter-Arab reasons for the operation, but the Sudanese authorities, in their anger, now publicly dispelled whatever doubt may have existed about the authenticity of Black September. They announced and published documents proving that Black September was indeed none other than Fatah, and that the organizer of the killing in Khartoum was in fact the local official representative of Fatah. Sudan’s Vice President later announced that the order to kill had come by code, on the radio from Fatah headquarters in Beirut. Later, unofficial reports added that the order had been given personally by Yasser Arafat. Arafat now admitted that “there are some Fatah members in Black September.” A member of Fatah, captured in Jordan, revealed that the operative leader of Black September was Arafat’s deputy, Salah Halef, known as Abu Ayad.
The massacre at Munich had evoked expressions of horror throughout the Western world. The terrorists knew no bounds after the gruesome event in Khartoum. The American government demanded that Sudan deal with the murderers with due severity, and newspapers throughout the world called for countermeasures against this new barbarity. The New York Times expressed the view that it was “inconceivable” that Black September should be allowed to exist. Then sentiments failed, or pretended to fail, to understand the realities.
But by the time the Yom Kippur War broke out, nobody could continue to feign ignorance of the fact that Black September was Fatah, just as Fatah and its sister organizations were a completely integrated arm of the Arab states. There, each new operation was greeted with public approval and enthusiasm. The only Arab government that officially announced its active role in the worldwide operation of Black September was Libya. In fact, all the requirements of the terrorists were placed at their disposal by one or another of the Arab states as required, and the embassies of the Arab states, in carefree disregard of all international agreements and procedures, became bases for terrorist activities.
All Arab perpetrators of terrorist acts found sanctuary, when they needed it, in the Arab states (except Jordan). In some cases, they were given public receptions as heroes; in others, they were quickly removed from the public eye and returned to their base. Sudan had reacted to the murder of the diplomats and had responded to the terror-stricken reactions in the United States by emphatic, unequivocal, and repeated undertakings to punish the murderers. But in fact, after a while, the Sudanese government packed the murderers off to Egypt where Sadat freed them without fuss.
The Yom Kippur War presented Yasser Arafat and his organization with a great opportunity. Suddenly the Israeli Army was engaged heavily on two fronts and was plunged into dire difficulties. Large numbers of Israeli Reserve soldiers were being moved to the fronts, and civilian life in Israel was suddenly in a state of upheaval. Here was a favorable, even ideal, set of circumstances for major action – to set up a third front: to divert Israeli forces to the “Fatah front” on the Lebanese border, to attack Israeli Army installations and forces behind the lines in Judea and Samaria and indeed on the roads and in the cities of Israel. This is what might have been expected by those throughout the world who, on radio and television and in the newspapers, absorbed the daily ration of information on the size and prowess of the Palestinians. Nothing of the sort happened, however. Neither Fatah nor any of its sister organizations played any noticeable part in do Yom Kippur War.
It was only after the war, in the gloom and atmosphere of defeat that had been induced in Israel by the revelation of the unwarranted shortcomings and blunders at its opening, by its heavy toll of casualties, and by the crashing cruelty of American pressure at its conclusion, that the Arab terrorist organizations mounted a new series of operations. Now they no longer used the camouflage of Black September, but explicitly that of their collective identity – ”Palestine Liberation Organization”–or of one of its constituent bodies. Now, indeed, they operated, mostly from their bases in Lebanon, against and inside Israel itself.
The onslaught began in the spring of 1974. During that year, in addition to a number of smaller operations – such as the flinging (by two non-Arab allies from abroad) of hand grenades from the balcony of a Tel Aviv theater into the crowd below – they launched a dozen major attacks. Some were nipped in the bud; a number succeeded. Several places in northern Israel were thus added to their annals of Arab achievement, gaining a somber fame throughout the world: Nahariyah, Beit She’an, Shamir. The pattern of these attacks was exemplified by the events at Kiryat Sh’moneh and Ma’alot.
Kiryat Sh’moneh is a village in the mountains of Galilee close to the Lebanese border. It was there that the PLO opened its offensive. Shortly before dawn on April 11, 1974, three of its members, two Syrians and one Iraqi, went into an empty schoolhouse on the outskirts and, as dawn broke, fired into the street. Upon the arrival of Israeli soldiers who returned their fire, they found a way out of the building, crossed a street, and went, into an apartment building. They entered an apartment and, using Kalashnikov automatic rifles, shot Mrs. Esther Cohen, age forty, her seventeen-year-old son David, and her daughter, Shula, age fourteen. They then went quickly to other apartments in the building. Some they entered, firing at the occupants, most of whom were eating breakfast; into others they simply threw hand grenades. In the noise and confusion of the next ten minutes, they made their way into the adjacent building to continue their attack. By the time the Israeli soldiers caught up with them and shot them, they had killed six more Israelis between the ages of two-and-a half and eleven as well as eight civilian adults. Sixteen men, women and children were wounded but survived, and Israeli soldiers were killed.
Even more spectacular was the operation a month later at Ma’alot, a village somewhat farther from, the Lebanese border. Here the attackers arrived earlier in the day, at 3:00 am., when everybody was asleep. They knocked at the door of one apartment and one of them called out in Hebrew: “Police! There are terrorists around!” When the door was opened, the terrorists entered and shot Yosef Cohen, his wife Fortuna, and their four-year-old son Eli. They also shot the daughter, five-year-old Beah, but she survived. From the Cohen apartment, the terrorists went across the road, again to a school. But this school was not empty. Housed in it were more than one hundred high-school pupils on a hiking tour from Safed, resting for the night. The attackers woke the sleeping children and, wielding their Kalashnikovs, herded them, together with their teachers, into the hallway. Some of the children and one of the teachers succeeded in slipping away and escaped by jumping out of a window. The rest were held for fourteen hours. When Israeli soldiers rushed the building, the Arabs fired into the crowd of children, hitting eightyfour of them. Twenty were either killed instantly or later died of their injuries.
These operations were hailed with enthusiasm by the communications media in all the Arab states. They were described later that year by Farouk El Kadoumi leader of the Fatah delegation to the Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Arab States at Rabat, as “great operation of military heroism.”
The cries of horror that resounded throughout the West did not inhibit the great diplomatic offensive maintained by the Arab states throughout that year. Its first stage was brought to a successful conclusion by the end of 1974. Arafat himself was active in the offensive, moving from one Arab capital to another, and twice visiting Moscow in April and July. He had also had an earlier meeting in March with the Soviet Foreign Minister in Cairo, after which Mr. Gromyko sounded the keynote of the diplomatic offensive: He announced that the Soviet Union regarded the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.
It was on October 14, 1974, that the concentrated effect of Arab power was dramatically demonstrated. On that day, 105 member states of the United Nations voted to invite Yasser Arafat to address the Assembly on the Palestine problem. The moral significance of the vote was minor. Over the years, the automatic majority of the totalitarian, the antidemocratic, and the captive blocs had long turned the United Nations into a forum, pathetic yet potentially dangerous, whose deliberations bore little or no relation any longer to its high purpose. Now it was not only condoning murder and barbarity and legitimizing the threat of politicide and genocide, it was destroying its own formal legitimacy as an organization of recognized states with recognized minimal criteria. Among the 105 states, France and Italy also raised supporting hands, and of the other Western states, only three (apart from Israel)–Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and the United States – were bold enough to vote in opposition. The rest abstained.
Now, too, the French government hastened to seek a further advantage over its fellow Western Europeans in subservience to the power-wielding Arabs. Foreign Minister Jean Sauvagnargues, paying an official visit to the Middle East, made his way first to Beirut and there (October 21) became the first Western Foreign Minister to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat. He greeted him effusively as “Mr. President” and, at a press conference, publicly pronounced his considered judgment of Arafat as “a moderate leader” possessed of the stature of a statesman who was “following a constructive path.” He did not elaborate. These events took place eighteen months after the slaughter of Western diplomats in Khartoum and five months after the massacre of children at Ma’alot.
The stage was now set for the Arab states to legitimize formally their intention to replace Israel with a “democratic secular State.” On October 29, 1974, the heads of the Arab states met in conference in Rabat, Morocco, and passed resolutions:
a. Reaffirming “the right of the Palestinian people to return to its Homeland”;
b. Reaffirming “the right of the Palestinian people to set up an independent national authority, under the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, in every part of Palestine liberated. The Arab States are obligated to support this authority, from the moment of its establishment, in all spheres and at all levels”;
c. Expressing “support for the Palestine Liberation Organization in exercising its national and international responsibility within the framework of Arab undertakings.”
The decisions at Rabat were unanimous. Hussein of Jordan, who was deprived by the Rabat resolutions of any backing for his own claim to western Palestine, had long resigned himself to the reality that the terrorist movement was the more effective instrument for eliminating Israel. He could only hope that his acquiescence might evoke from the PLO a similar forbearance about having Transjordan in his hands, which, after all, they (correctly) regarded as eastern Palestine, and where in fact most of the Palestinian Arabs lived. He had long since been readmitted into the Arab fold. Egypt and Syria had reestablished relations with him on the eve of the October war, and he had then released the remaining terrorists – 756 in number – from his jails.
The resolutions were passed unanimously. President Sadat of Egypt, widely advertised by Western apologists as a “moderate,” did not pretend to try to introduce even a semantic modification of their plain language, moreover, whoever wished to could find many pronouncements by him or by other Egyptian authorities on their identity of purpose with the “Palestinian.” What Sadat intended for the Jews of Israel he had made plain in his widely publicized oath a year before the Yom Kippur War. He had sworn in the Cairo mosque to restore the Jews to the condition described in the Koran: “to be persecuted, oppressed and wretched.” It was Egypt’s leading weekly journal, AI-Musswar, that had spelt out in political terms precisely what was intended when the “legitimate rights” had been restored.
“The English word peace,” wrote the editor of the journal on December 7, 1973, “can be translated into Arabic as both sulh and salaam, whereas in Arabic there, is a difference between the two.”
Israel, he explained, could indeed expect salaam in exchange for a surrender to present Arab territorial demands (that is, to withdraw to the Armistice lines of 1949).
But sulh is another thing altogether. Sulh means that the Jews of Palestine–and I repeat and emphasize the expression, Jews of Palestine–will return to their senses and dwell under one roof and under one flag with the Arabs of Palestine, in a secular state devoid of any bigotry or racialism, proportional to their respective numerical ratio in 1948. By this I mean that the original Palestinian Jews and their children and grandchildren shall remain on the Palestinian soil and will live there with the original Palestinian Arabs. The Jews who came from abroad will return to their countries of origin, where they lived as did their forefathers before 1949 – for these countries bear them no ill will.
This article was a faithful paraphrase of the text of the constitution of the PLO—the socalled Palestine Covenant.
A fortnight after the Rabat Conference, clothed now with the unambiguous authority of the whole Arab world, Yasser Arafat delivered his address to the United Nations Assembly. His appearance was timed to coincide with the presidency for that month of an Arab, President Boumedienne of Algeria, who duly accorded to Arafat at the podium the treatment previously accorded only to heads of state. Nobody objected, nobody commented. Arafat did not disappoint his sponsors. Mounting a Soviet-style attack on imperialism and colonialism of which Zionism was the handmaiden, and repeating a fine selection of the calumnies gathered together by Arab calumniators of Zionism and the Jewish People, he called for world support for the elimination of the State of Israel and its replacement by a democratic secular State of Palestine. He did, however, make a concession to Western susceptibilities. Not all the Jews who bad arrived after 1948 would be deported. The Jews living in Israel could stay there, provided they agreed to accept whatever fate awaited them in the “democratic, secular State.”
The favoring wind that blew up for Arab ambitions after the October war had by now reached gale force. The campaign continued to accustom the world to the Nazistic idea that it would not be bad for the world if the Jewish state disappeared. Meantime, however, circumstances had made it possible for the Arabs to eliminate two other obstacles disturbing the homogeneity of Arab Moslem domination throughout the area between the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.
One of these was the Kurds in Iraq, a Moslem but non-Arabic nation; the other the Christians of Lebanon. The Kurds, who had no state of their own, had been fighting for a generation in their contiguous territory in northern Iraq, not indeed for independence, but for autonomy within the Iraqi Arab state. Except for the occasions when they made promises (which were never kept) to grant such autonomy, successive Iraqi governments had tried without success to crash the Kurds by force.
Fierce and bloody resistance to Iraqi power was supported by Iranian arms, with United States backing. Iran’s support was a function of her ongoing dispute with Iraq about the sovereignty over the waterway dividing them. With the growingly profitable common oil interest and, presumably, prodded by the Arab League, the Iraqis, meeting the Iranians at an OPEC meeting in Morocco in Match 1975, made concessions in return for an Iranian abandonment of the Kurds. The Kurds were accorded one gesture. Those who wished to escape the mercies of the Arabs would, within a brief time limit, be allowed to cross the border into Iran and would be given sanctuary as refugees.
Inside the Kurdish region, the Iraqi government speedily applied plans for a final solution of the “problem.” It would be done by degrees.
Nearly 80 percent of the agricultural produce of the region was “bought” by the Iraqi government at a very low price, thus reducing the means of livelihood for the population. Moreover, nearly all doctors and medical personnel were transferred from the Kurdish region.
A plan to settle large numbers of Egyptians in the Kurdish region, and the building of three new towns for the purpose, was publicly described in an advertisement in At-Ahram of Cairo. Should nothing happen to disturb the process, the Kurdish entity was well launched for extinction.
The assault in Lebanon began a month later. It was not a walkover. Here was the only Arab state in which the Moslems had to share power and even to accept a minor share in it. Indeed, the original raison d’etre and the whole modern history of Lebanon was primarily of a Christian enclave, of a haven for Christians in an unfriendly Moslem environment. In recent years in particular, with the increasing discomforts and unease suffered by Christians in some of the Arab states, Christian immigrants from those countries were being absorbed by Lebanon. By the agreed Lebanese Constitution of 1943, the President and the Commander in Chief of the Army were always Christians, while a Moslem was Prime Minister. A Moslem was also Speaker in the Parliament, but the Christians held a majority of its seats.
The intolerance, of Moslems to a status less than domination had twice in the recent past led to violent efforts to put an end to this Christian predominance. On the last occasion, in 1958, order had been restored only after the United States had intervened by sending in Marines.
The Christians, well organized, forewarned by the new spirit of exhilaration and militancy that gripped the Arab Moslem world after the Yom Kippur War and by the ominous direction and thrust of American diplomacy, prepared for trouble. But they were faced by a coalition of forces. Their own Moslem neighbors, armed with weapons from Syria, were reinforced by the Arab terrorist organizations now filling without inhibition the role of executors of the pan-Arab will.
Incredibly, the fighting went on for months, mainly in Beirut, the capital. Large sections of the once flourishing westernized city, banking and business metropolis of all the Arab states, were reduced to rubble, and day after day tens, and later hundreds, of people, mostly civilians, were killed. After a year of civil war, at least twenty thousand people had perished.
By then the political objective of the Moslem onslaught had been accomplished. Whatever the precise organization of the country turned out to be, Christian predominance had been brought to an end. The army had been broken up into its religious components and had I ,fact disintegrated as a viable force. The Christian President, whose resignation was demanded by the Moslem insurgents, was finally replaced by a cowed majority vote in a besieged Parliament; his successor was a Christian nominated by the Syrians.
The continued shelling and shooting reflected the sense of desperation of the Christians, who could not reconcile themselves to defeat. But more incisive was the fact that the Moslems, having achieved the essential political victory, quarreled over the spoils.
The Syrian government now found the moment ripe to achieve her own special objective to take the affairs of Lebanon under her control as a first step toward the creation of the long-dreamed-of Greater Syria. Yet the Lebanese Moslems had believed that the struggle and indeed the sacrifice had been for their benefit. The terrorist organizations, who, had played their part in reducing the Christians, regarded it as their natural right to play a dominant role in deciding the fate of Lebanon.
The grotesquerie of the events was now made complete. The Christian nations, who with more or less embarrassment had throughout the months kept silent and turned their faces from the slaughter that Syria, had generated and sustained, now welcomed her, and the troops she sent into Lebanon, as a ” Peacemaker.”
The precise roles and relationship of the Syrians, the Lebanese Moslems, and the Palestinian terrorist organizations would soon crystallize. The reduction of the penultimate vestige of non-Moslem sovereignty in the Arab world would now also bring about, along the southern Lebanese border. A fourth front manned by a variety of Arabs, all in “Palestinian” uniforms, for the final reduction of Israel – the last obstacle to the “unity of the Arab world.”
Pending the realization of their ideal of Israel’s physical elimination, the Arab states pursued with undiminished vigor the preparatory gnawing and nibbling at Israel’s Status as a member of the community of nations. Their tactics were strikingly similar to those of the Nazis: to disseminate an image of Israel – and of the Jewish people – as black, as negative and as hateful as could be conjured up by their own fertile imaginations and by the anti-Semitic outpourings of the ages so that when the time and the opportunity came to destroy Israel physically, the normal reactions, even of civilized people, would be blunted and minimal. At the same time, they accustomed the world to spectacles symbolizing the supplanting of Israel by the “Palestinians.”
They had as yet no hope of achieving Israel’s expulsion from the United Nations or even of the application of sanctions against her – both decisions subject to veto in the Security Council – but in the meantime they secured majority decisions denouncing Israel and indeed the concept of Jewish nationalism in a number of international bodies unconcerned with politics. They succeeded even in having Israel expelled from the regional section of UNESCO to which she belonged (and to whose work she contributed far beyond her logical share). The protests and resignations of intellectuals, artists, and scientists throughout the world were to no avail. Thus, also, Israel was excluded from Asian sporting bodies. And, thus, the United Nations Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism.
This last obscenity was indeed too much for the Western nations to stomach. Not only did they not hide their disgust, but thirty-four of them voted against the resolution.
Yet this isolated act of protest revealed all the more sharply the supine resignation of the Western nations toward nearly all the other Arab-Soviet orchestrated efforts to turn Israel into a pariah state, and which had already made a grotesque caricature of the United Nations organization. Mr. Abba Eban, the former foreign Minister of Israel, once remarked–before the Yom Kippur War—that if the Arabs were to introduce a resolution at the UN declaring the earth to be flat, they would get forty supporting votes. in the now enlarged United Nations, and in today’s circumstances, they would probably muster 110. And the Western nations would abstain. This is the essence of their record on the Arabs’ hate campaign against Israel. Afraid to offend the Arabs, yet unable to support them in conscience, or where no plausible excuse was available, they would seek discreet refuge in abstention, however absurd, irrelevant, or outrageous the Arab resolution might be.
On the other hand, the Western nations equally supinely showed no resistance to the seating of the PLO on various international bodies engaged in practical day-to-day activities, treating that organization as though it were a national authority relating to the territory of Palestine.
It is weird and depressing to see the rapists of Czechoslovakia and those who savaged Yemen, the destroyers of the Kurds and those who murdered the South Sudanese, the vicious racists from Uganda and the begetters of the bloodbath in Lebanon, conferring in the corridors of the United Nations in amity and parliamentary decorum with the spokesmen for Western civilization, wrestling over a formula for their diverse, selfish (or imagined) interest that would somehow break the resistance and the spirit of Israel, while all aver that their only objects are peace and justice. As long as this collaboration continues, there can be neither peace nor justice in Palestine, but at best a ceasefire with recurring Arab efforts at attrition.
Posted on Sat, November 20, 2010 at 20:37 pm CET
Arab leaders assembled in Syria during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. From left to right: King Abdullah of Jordan, President Bshara al-Khury of Lebanon, President Shukri al-Quwatli of Syria, and Prince Abd al-Illah of Iraq.
Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine
Guarantees Of Peace
This article is the tenth (and last) chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the ninth chapter:
After The Yom Kippur War. These articles are part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click
Here.
About the book: “A fully documented, dramatic history of the events which shaped the Middle East. Every key problem in the Arab-Israel conflict, every decision is carefully analyzed, from the questionable policies of Britain in 1948 to how the Palestinian refugee problem began. The territory won in the war of 1967, and the terrorist war of attrition is discussed.” (From the intro at ShmuelKatz website). To view the entire book online, go to
Shmuelkatz.com. To buy the book, go to
Afsi.org.
Peace will not come as long as the powers abet Arab visions of a paradise on earth, encourage them in their hopes of destroying and inheriting Israel, and equip them with the instruments for the undertaking. The prospect of peace will appear on the horizon when the Arab leaders realize that they cannot change the present geopolitical reality by force and that no one else will change it for them.
Then the Arabs will begin to look inward. They will discover that what they lack is not more territory – certainly not the territory of the single Jewish homeland, set geographically in the vast mosaic of their eighteen states. They will discover that their urgent need is to break with the backwardness and the stagnation of their society, to free themselves from the deadening hold of their military rulers, to launch a great reform for the education of their peoples so that they may master the scientific and technological realities of the twentieth century, and to exploit those realities for their social and economic betterment. This road to peace between Israel and the Arabs seems to be long and difficult. It is the only road.
Every student of Arab society, every honest Arabist, knows that this is the truth. All who are not merely looking selfishly to exploit the Arab’s weakness for their own ends, or to use them as a whip with which to beat the Jews, should not be afraid to publish the truth abroad and sow its seed among the Arab peoples themselves.
Israel will thus be able for the first time face freely and directly the question of the relations between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority only when her borders are established in rational security – on the Golan Heights, on the Jordan River, and in Sinai.
Coexistence between ethnic groups in one political unit is not the happiest state in creation. Mankind has not, however, yet discovered the formula that will make selfgovernment possible for every group of people. Destiny has so far seen to it that 10 percent of the world’s people live as minorities. For a group to live as a minority does not in itself involve special hardship. Life for a minority becomes hard, and even tragic, only when it is discriminated against, when it is ill-treated, and when it lives only as a minority, with nowhere a national territory of its own. Such an example, in varying degrees of severity, is the state of the Basques in Spain, of the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, of the Ibo in Nigeria. such was the case, before 1948, of the Jews throughout the world.
On the other hand, there is hardly a large people of which a part does not live in some other people’s state. Even for a minority concentrated just across a border, the joy of life may be only comparative. Its members, however, have the alternative of leaving, of going to their own state.
The Arabs are in this respect an extraordinarily favored people. No other people in the world harbor so many clear-cut ethnic and religious minorities, making up probably more than one quarter of the population of all the Arab states together. Among them are the Kurds, the Nilotic Negroes, the Berbers of the Maghreb, (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) each speaking a non-Arabic language; the non-Moslem Arabic-speaking Druze in Syria, the Christian Copts in Egypt, and the Maronites in Lebanon, who claim descent from the ancient Phoenicians. Indeed, nearly all these populations – just like the Jews of Iraq, North Africa, and Yemen – lived in their countries before the Arabs came.
The Arabs in their states have accommodated themselves enthusiastically to this universally sanctified phenomenon. Some seventy million Arabs live as majorities and rule over their minorities, sometimes discriminating against them moderately, sometimes exercising brutal repression, everywhere without embarrassment. It would be absurd, even grotesque, to suggest that there is something wrong, unjust, or immoral in the remaining million living as a minority.
The inevitability of this ultimate and normal relationship was clear from the outset of the modem Zionist enterprise. It was given noteworthy formulation in measured terms by Herbert (later Lord) Samuel in a speech in the London Opera House on November 2, 1919:
No responsible Zionist leader has suggested the immediate establishment of a complete and purely Jewish state in Palestine….The policy propounded before the Peace Conference, to which the Zionist leaders unshakably adhere is the promotion of Jewish immigration and of Jewish land settlement….in order that the country might become in time a fully self-governing Commonwealth under the auspices of an established Jewish majority.
Nevertheless the Arab leaders’ antagonism inspired, organized, and financed by the British authority, drove, the harassed Zionist leaders (though they knew how contrived was the character and how unrealistic the pretensions of the Arab national movement) to make concessions in the hope of appeasing them. This Policy caused the great dispute between the Zionist schools of, Weizmann and Jabotinsky. Weizmann’s ideas prevailed.
One concession after another was proposed to the Arabs. In the early 1930s the Zionists finally offered them a measure of political recognition which, had it been accepted, would have jeopardized the very foundations of Jewish independence. The offer consisted of parity – constitutional equality regardless of majority and minority. In case of disagreement, the decisive vote was to be cast by the British government, which the Zionist leaders continued to trust. No reasoned reply was ever made to this offer; it died in the flames of the pan-Arab attack of 1936.
Later, in 1937, the Zionst leaders agreed, again for the sake of peace, to share out the country, dividing what remained of the original Mandated territory of Palestine after Eastern Palestine had been given to the Arabs by the British. They accepted as a basis the partition scheme proposed by the British Royal Commission. The proposed Jewish miniature state would have been highly indefensible. The Arab leaders rejected the plan out of hand, and the British government buried it.
A third major effort at accommodation was made in 1947. The Jewish underground having compelled the British to relinquish their hold on Palestine, the Zionist leaders once again announced their willingness to accept a scheme of partition as a means of putting an end to the conflict. The Zionist leaders accepted the United Nations’ partition proposal, which included a ludicrously vulnerable Jewish state. They persuaded themselves once more that a heavy sacrifice would win the heart of the Arabs.
That continuing illusion was drowned, and Jewish acceptance of the Compromise was nullified, in the bloodshed and destruction let loose in reply by the Arabs of Palestine and then by the Arab League invaders. The Zionist leaders now governing the infant state, still refrained from driving home the, military advantage gained during the latter phase of the fighting. Though they might have restored the whole of western Palestine, they again accepted a compromise that left Palestine partitioned and Israel with improved but still strategically weak frontiers. Israel signed the Armistice Agreements with the Arab governments, who over the years breached their clauses one by one.
Never throughout those years did any movement arise among the Arabs of Judea and Samaria for making peace with Israel in the cramped lines of the 1949 Armistice. They identified themselves with the idea of eliminating Israel; and in May 1967, there were among them outbursts of joyful participation in the general pan-Arab festival of belligerent exhilaration.
At that time, too, as throughout their short modern history, the Arabs of western Palestine were following a lead given them by others. The concept of these Arabs as a national entity capable of independence, of independent thought and action, has remained baseless. It is no accident nor the result of any overwhelming pressure, that they did not establish a state of their own even when it was offered them on a platter by the United Nations. They passed over the opportunity a second time in 1949, when the war against Israel was over, the Armistice was signed, and the Arab army of Transjordan was occupying Judea and Samaria.
Nor did they express any desire for independence or take any action to achieve it in the nineteen years that followed, They made no move when Abdallah formally announced the annexation of Judea and Samaria to his kingdom, which he now renamed Jordan. They became “Jordanians” or even “West Bankers” without a murmur, even when they learned that the annexation had angered the other Arab states and that it had been given recognition, in the whole world, only by Great Britain and, Pakistan. The same spirit, or absence of spirit, moved them in refusing to serve as a base and to provide aid and comfort for what was proclaimed as “their” movement of “liberation from the Israeli occupation.” The swift success of the Israeli authorities in thwarting the Fatah’s attempt in 1967'to establish a base in Samaria and then in Judea was not due only to Israeli brainwork and efficiency. Indeed, if relations between the Jews and the “conquered” Arab population were reasonably relaxed for nine years, this was due in no small measure to the absence of any militant or indeed any warm local “Palestine” nationalist fervor. They do not love Israel. But it was only when Yasser Arafat was lifted to the crest of the international wave and Israel was assigned the image of a defeated people that a section, even then a small minority, of the Arab population noisily and violently proclaimed its adherence to the cause of the PLO.
But that cause is still nothing but pan-Arabism, of the Arab nations fighting to annex Israel to the Arab world (just as the PLO was equipped and directed to assist in the Islamization of Lebanon). The Arabs of Palestine did not and do not thereby become a nation. They were and have remained a fragment of the large Arab people. They lack the inner desire, the spiritual cement, and the concentrated passion of a nation. Though their number has grown in the past half-century, they have not developed a specific national character. Their personal attachment moreover, is still not to the country, but rather to a family, to a clan, to a village, or a city. In this they do not differ from 1918, when T. E. Lawrence, discovered the situation for himself.
There is truth in the repeated observation that the modern history of the Arabs of Palestine is a tragedy. They have consistently been used as pawns in the power game. Originally the British sponsored and created the pan-Arab movement, which battened on the Palestine question as its only source of life. Latterly pan-Arabs, Russians, French, British, all have incited the Palestine Arabs to reach out for the unreasonable and unattainable. If, by some mischance, the objective of the Arab states and the Soviet Union were achieved and Israel were forced back to the Armistice lines of 1949, the tragedy of the Arabs in Judea and Samaria would be perpetuated and, under the new circumstances, multiplied.
The one certain outcome of an Israeli withdrawal and surrender of territory is that the Arabs of Judea and Samaria would not become an independent political unit. Judea and Samaria would become the main base and the central battlefield for the final attack on Israel – an Israel forced to fight for her very life against the massed forces of the Arab states (though now no doubt all dressed in a uniform marked “Palestinian”. For the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria, there would then be no escape from death and destruction – what ever the military outcome.
Should the ‘final’ blow at Israel be postponed, the Palestinian Arabs would be subjected at once to a power struggle just as in Lebanon, only more complex and more violent. Not only the various groups now collectively called PLO – Fatah, Es Saiqa, and the others – but their hitherto sponsoring governments of the states bordering on Palestine–Egypt and Syria and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Jordan – would now bring on a bloodbath more gruesome than in Lebanon.
On the other hand, even those Israelis who, pliant to international pressures or chary of a large Arab minority, speak of a physical Israeli withdrawal will not agree to an Arab military presence on the west side of Jordan. Even the most forgiving, the most forgetful, and the most short-sighted among them, insist that the security of Israel can be ensured only by an Israeli military presence on the Jordan.
Only when they grasp these realities will the Arabs of Palestine be able to see an end to their anomalous condition. They will then realize that the restoration of the unity of Palestine under Israeli auspices, at once a development of historic justice and a vital necessity for Israel’s security – indeed, for her existence – holds out for them also the only hope of achieving political as well as cultural self-expression. Their political status will be that of a national minority, but they will be able to live in civic equality and in free communication with the major centers of Arabic life and culture. And in peace.
That this is a sober assessment will be evident from the history and character of Zionism. It is, after all, the values of Zionism that have been poured into the bloodstream of Israel. Three quarters of a century after its foundation, it is possible to see in perspective the weight and depth of purpose of the modem Zionist Movement for the Jewish people and its effect on the Arabs now living in Palestine.
The twentieth century has seen no movement more revolutionary than Zionism, none more progressive or more humane. Its mistakes in performance have often been grave, and the Jewish people has itself paid the fall price. The success of Zionism has been partial and late. The six million Jews of Europe whom Zionism did not save from annihilation are the everlasting witnesses to failure. Yet the tragedy of the Holocaust itself emphasizes the magnitude of the upheaval that Zionism has wrought in the Jewish people and of its impact on the world.
Zionism was one of the impossible movements. At every stage of its progress, struggling for Jewish independence, it faced what seemed impossible odds, and it was regularly written off by a chorus of respectable realists and established intellectuals. After he published A Jewish State in 1895, Theodor Herzl is said to have called on Dr. Max Nordau to determine whether in fact, as Herzl’s whole personal milieu insisted, he was clinically insane. Twenty years earlier, at the height of the tension over the Eastern Question, when political thinkers in Britain and in Europe were receptive to the idea of Jewish restoration in Palestine and all were sharply conscious of the desolation and the emptiness of the country, neither Disraeli nor Bismarck would have thought Herzl insane. Indeed, an energetic Zionist political initiative at that time might have brought the idea to germination in the deliberations of the Congress of Berlin.
No Herzl materialized in 1878, however. When he did, the international political circumstances as well as the cultural climate were radically different. In the
circumstances of the tail end of the century, Herzl’s idea was rationally and fashionably disposed of as utopia.
With the means at its disposal and in the settled order of the world, the revolution the Zionist Organization sought to achieve must indeed have seemed incredible. It aimed, after all, at more than a change in the status of an almost derelict piece of territory in the Ottoman Empire. It even envisaged the solution of a problem that had plagued and become embedded in world society for many hundreds of years – the transformation of a people dispersed throughout the nations, everywhere treated with contempt, everywhere subjected to a hatred which, imbibed by children with their very mothers milk, could not be eradicated The vast majority of Jews lived in poverty and in a misery lightened only by their own spiritual resources, their intense belief in God, and in the ultimate return to Zion. The victims of sharp economic discrimination,, they were at best protected like serfs by their overlords. Driven off the land by the ban of centuries, barred from particular professions in various countries, some of them at best found a place in the nebulous middle-world between producer and consumer.
Generation after generation in Europe had its own experience of violence against Jews, of organized sudden slaughter and rape and destruction. The Jews in many countries became history’s most famous scapegoat for the failings of governments, an outlet and a target for the anger and frustrations of their peoples. “Beat the Jews and save Russia!” was a wondrously effective formula for relieving public grievance, and it was paraphrased and adapted in many other countries. One Russian two-syllabled word-pogrom illustrated the status and the condition of the Jews in exile. Pogrom means a mass attack on Jews sponsored or permitted by the authorities. Throughout the nations, Jewish life became a cheap commodity – not only for those who killed, but also in the eyes of those who merely watched; even, sometimes, in twisted reflex, in the souls of the victims themselves.
From pity as the highest emotion through bare tolerance through unadorned intolerance and discrimination to pogrom – that was the natural range of the climate in which most of our grandfathers lived, as did many of our parents and some of our own generation. From that almost universal order, there was neither relief nor appeal. Herzl was a Western Jew. It was not in barbaric feudalistic Russia, with its Pale of Settlement which determined where a Jew might live and where he might not, that he became sharply conscious of the Jewish plight. It was in democratic, revolutionary France, when Jews could reside wherever they pleased, yet where each of them, because he was a Jew, could be treated like Dreyfus.
The Zionist Organization thus set out to reverse what had been for centuries a fixed feature of the human scene – the existence of a helpless, vulnerable minority – and to restore the human right of the Jews, not only to live, but even to live as equal citizens of the world. The only way this rescue could, be achieved was by restoring the Jews’ national independence.
That was only Zionism’s first task. It set out to revive the mutual flow of vitality between the people and its native soil, to restructure completely its abnormal, lopsided social pyramid; and it envisaged the Jew achieving self-expression as himself, not as an emaciated, or exaggerated imitation of the people among whom he lived, and not merely in twisted reaction to their contempt.
The Zionist solution would in the result free the peoples of the world of a source, of the degeneration and self-abasement – which discrimination brings about in those that discriminate and which persecution breeds in those that persecute. Anti-Semitism. could be and was often lethal for its intended victim; it was certainly dangerous to the peoples that practiced it.
The world did not rush to help the Zionist reformers. Most anti-Semites were not exhilarated by the prospect of their own unemployment. The Zionist revolution was achieved by the Jewish people alone. With minor exceptions, it was not until after the “utopia” had become a fact, and the Jews had a state, that the Zionist undertaking, as a “developing” country, qualified for material aid from other than Jewish sources.
By the time the Jewish state was established, and when the political revolution signaled fifty-three years earlier by Herzl had been thus consummated, the Zionist Movement had essentially effected its social revolution as well. In spite of a variety of social and political backgrounds (and were internal political differences), and in spite of foreign rule, the Jews of Palestine lived a full national life, as ordered, comprehensive, and effervescent as any democratic people in the world. Its economic structure, built up on a progressive agriculture and a developing industry, belonged entirely to the twentieth century, even to its difficulties, its anomalies, and its imperfections.
Now Zionism took on a new social dimension. In the circumstances of the birth of the Jewish state, its immediate function was that of a refuge. Into it flowed primarily the remnant of the Jews of Europe – the survivors of the Nazi extermination camps–and the majority of the Jews fleeing from the Arab states.
The country of Palestine is very poor in natural resources. By the end of 1951, the 650,000 Jews who had made up the population of Israel at its birth in 1948 had absorbed 690,000 Jewish immigrants. Little housing was available; there was not enough food or clothing; the existing services, for years retarded by a hostile British administration, were inadequate even to the earlier population. The overwhelming majority of the newcomers, whether from the Nazi camps or the Arab countries, were penniless; many of them were ill. Most of them were unskilled, large numbers were untaught in any modem sense and therefore for years could add very little to the productive capacity of the economy. The Jews of the world provided generous financial help and lightened the burden. Yet given the gigantic pressure of numbers in so short a time, every two Jews in Israel certainly had to carry one newcomer. These statistics have come to be mentioned as a commonplace, or drowned in the noise of Arab fantasies of the Arab “refugee problem.” Their significance may be made clear by imagining that the United States, wealthy and abundant, with its population of over 200 million, were to absorb seventy million penniless newcomers a year for three or four years.
That was only the beginning. For hundreds of thousands of newcomers from the Arab states – some medieval, an backward – the State of Israel has been a school, very often the first school. It provided these newcomers with the rudiments of a formal education which the country of their birth denied them. It. provided many of them with their first awareness of public hygiene, of sanitation, of civic pride and responsibility, of democracy. A vast investment of money and energy and love has been and continues to be made in a backbreaking effort to overcome the yawning cultural gap between them and their fellow citizens, average products of Western education.
The undertaking is far from consummated. The ills of centuries will be eradicated only slowly. The final closing of the gap may not come about for a whole generation or even two. Errors in judgment and planning, blunders in execution, are not lacking. The unsolved areas of social inequality and sheer economic deprivation are painfully visible. The human stresses and strains and frictions, are in connstant evidence in Israel. Yet even today, in its state of becoming, Israel compares reasonably well in the world’s social and economic scale, with the most progressive of the nations.
Some revolutions of our time have achieved political status for peoples, others have improved the economic lot of the individual. Which of them can compare with the profound and varied achievements of Zionism? It brought independence to a uniquely dispersed, downtrodden, decimated people; it rebuilt its social structure from the foundations; it changed the life and the lot of the individual, freeing him from discrimination and contempt, often from hunger and the threat of death, endemic or immediate. In the process of building its society, and in spite of a constant state of either war or siege, it has protected the democratic freedoms. A lively parliamentary democracy (with an abundance of political parties) and a free and critical press preside over the process.
What revolution of our time can compare with Zionism? The Soviet revolt, whose price of revolution was the murder of millions and the exile of millions more to suffer neardeath in “correctional” labor camps in the freezing Arctic north? Russia, where after fifty years and more of the revolution to establish egalitarianism – material inequalities, especially between rulers and ruled, between professionals and workers, between preachers and the preached-at, are accepted as facts of life? Where favorites of the regime may buy even imported luxuries in declared exclusive shops, while the mass of, the people spend hours every day in long queues for the bare necessities of food? Where totalitarian regimentation, protected by a ubiquitous secret police, has remained the self understood and unchanging character of society? Where every newspaper is a government product and every line in it, like every radio or television broadcast, tells the people only what the government has decided is good for them to know? Where dissenters are jailed as felons or locked up as lunatics?
Where then? In the countries of Eastern Europe, which were forced to follow willy-nilly in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, chaining their economies and their social order to Moscow’s chariot? Or perhaps the Arab states, where every bloody military putsch is labeled “revolution” to justify the unchanging totalitarianism of the “revolutionaries” and to obscure the unalleviated poverty and the political powerlessness of the mass of their people?
Zionism, existing to solve the uniquely complex problem of one people, could not by definition, and did not, aim at a universal revolution. Yet its ultimate success can bring many benefits to the whole vast area and the many peoples surrounding the Jewish homeland. It has been a truly humanist revolution, unequaled in our time. Though its humanist principle may sometimes be too sentimental, it has been a large factor in the Zionist attitude and in the policies it has tried to pursue toward the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.
The physical reacquisition of land from the handful, of existing inhabitants presented no moral problem of choice for the Zionists. It was one of the great myths of Arab propaganda elements in the period of the Mandate, that the Arab farmers of Palestine had been dispossessed or rendered landless. In fact, every square inch of land acquired from the Arabs was paid for. The British government, largely ignoring its obligation under the Mandate to place state lands at the disposal of the Zionists, enabled the Arabs to establish a virtual sales monopoly. Britain actually gave away large tracts of land to the Arabs, including absentee landlords in Egypt and Syria. These Arabs then sold to the Zionists. Of all the lands acquired by the Zionists, only 9 percent were by concession from the government. The sellers exploited to the full the heaven-sent conjunction of an eager buyer and a closed market. The prices rose consistently and finally reached exorbitant dimensions. In 1944, Jews were paying Arab sellers $1,100 an acre for arid or semiarid land that had lain fallow for centuries. At the same time, rich black soil in the State of Iowa in the United States was selling for one-tenth that price.
Altogether, 27 percent of the land purchased by the Jews came from fellahin owners themselves. The remainder, usually unworked land, was bought, from absentee landlords in Syria or Lebanon or in Palestine itself, whose families had bought it from the Turkish Sultan for a song. When, in response to Arab propaganda – disseminated or financed in most cases by the very landlords who had made fortunes selling the land – the British called for individual claims of dispossession, they discovered that even the handful whose claims they validated (as having been “sold” by the Arab landlord) were given and accepted other land or, at their own preference, financial compensation. When the State of Israel was established, 70 percent of all her land was not in private ownership but was a part of precisely the land which the British were to have made available to the Zionists. The Mandate government had, of course, inherited it from the Ottoman regime.
Jewish immigration and development brought no harm to the individual Arab resident. Further, the new settlers rapidly became famous for their tremendous beneficial impact on the social and economic life of the Arab community. Moreover, they reversed the trend of Arab migration. Instead of the traditional exodus of Arabs, Zionism brought about a large Arab immigration. Arabs within the country also moved in to the areas which, previously swamp or desert, the Zionists had transformed into blooming farms, or which, out of nondescript villages, the Zionists had made into the flourishing cities. As a result of modern health and sanitation methods introduced by the Jews, the Arab death rate dropped steeply; Jewish methods in agriculture adopted by the Arabs increased their yield out of all recognition. The standard of living of the Arabs soared beyond anything known in the Middle East.
The Zionist revolution thus had the effect of improving considerably the lot also of the non-Jewish population of Palestine as well as large numbers of incoming Arabs who had no connection with Palestine at all.
With Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, the Arab population of Judea and Samaria came under her control. The Arabs’ notions about the Zionist had been fed for nearly twenty years by their own educational system and propaganda, embellished by a famously vivid imagination. Their views on the natural behavior of a conqueror were shaped by their knowledge of Arab practice in such cases – even against fellow Arabs –and by the fate they themselves had had in mind for the Jews of a defeated Israel.
There were some with a particularly guilty conscience. The Arabs of Hebron had in 1929 carried out a house-to-house slaughter of the Jewish community of completely defenseless and unsuspecting Talmud students and their families. Altogether, they knew perfectly well the reckoning of blood and tears that had accumulated from their repeated aggressions before and since 1948. Moreover, half of Israel’s population, half her armed forces, originated in the Arab countries – in families, therefore, who had been persecuted, hounded, and finally robbed of their possessions before being driven out to find refuge in Israel. They had a special reckoning of their own, which they might be expected to settle.
Viewed thus, the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, by their own standards, had reason to fear the arrival of the Israeli Army in their towns and villages. This was no doubt the reason for the apparently inexplicable flight, of some 200,000 Arabs in the first days and weeks, after the end of the Six Day War.
These notions also explain and provide the raw material for the fantastic tales of oppression, murder, rape, and destruction which Arab propaganda has disseminated lavishly and indiscriminately against Israel since the Six Day War. They represent a reasonable picture of what the Arabs would have done had they won. In fact, nothing happened. The Israeli soldiers, when they arrived, apart from insuring security arrangements, left the population alone.
There has probably been no more benevolent occupation than the Israeli government of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria and Gaza. There have inevitably been punitive measures to put a stop to disturbances of the peace and to acts of violence.
In May 1976, in the wake of the Arab states’ triumphant induction of the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’ into the halls of international intercourse, and with Israel visibly hard-pressed, from without by a United States seeking Arab favor and from within by economic and social problems, young Arabs, long subject to persistent and exhilarant incitement did indeed riot in the towns of Judea and Samaria. Stone throwing crowds threatened heavily outnumbered Israeli security forces. In these clashes, one Arab was killed on each of a number of successive days. The event of an Arab being killed by Israeli security forces was so unusual that each single death evoked headlines, for example, in The New York Times. Thus, on a day when that newspaper buried the killing in one day alone in Lebanon, of 150 people and the wounding of 600 in two casual lines in the depths of a story from Beirut, it published a headline on its front page, and repeated it over four columns on an inside page, announcing: “Israeli Soldiers Kill Arab Youth on West Bank.”
But in the nine years of Israeli rule, there has not been one execution. A handful of Arabs have been kept in administrative detention. In some cases, where an Arab has preached violence against Israel, he has been banished across the Jordan, where he is of course free to continue to preach and even to practice violence. The most serious punishment meted out to those who have given shelter to terrorists has been the destruction of their houses after due warning.
That sums up the measures taken by the Israeli government to preserve law and order in the areas she governs. Where in the history of our times has there been such another occupation over a frankly hostile conquered population?
That is not all. The Israeli government has also gone to great lengths, probably unprecedented in the history of military occupations, both to create an easy and relaxed relationship with the people and to improve their lot. From the beginning, it established the principle of not interfering with the tenor and manner of fife of the Arab population, with only two exceptions. First it insisted on the correction or replacement of school texts containing political propaganda–that is, the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonology and crude justifications of genocide with which the textbooks abounded. The second exception consisted in a considerable expenditure of money and effort and expertise to improve the economic condition of the population. Special teams were sent to instruct Arabic farmers in modem methods and the use of modem equipment in agriculture. Loans were granted for the erection of new industrial plants and the extension and improvement of existing plants.
Israel has opened vocational training centers to raise as many young Arabs as possible out of the rut of unskilled work. Moreover, she opened the gates to Arab workers from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. By 1972, forty thousand workers from their towns and villages traveled to work every morning to Israeli building sites and factories. In addition to buying a part of their agricultural crop herself, Israel, in spite of the hostile activities against her beyond the Jordan, allows the Arabs in western Palestine to send their products for sale across the river.
The result has been the elimination of unemployment, both among the “regular” population and among the refugees still living in camps – most of the latter in the Gaza area, where they had been kept deliberately in squalor and idleness by the Egyptians. A sharp in the standard of living has followed and a widening of the economic horizons of the whole Arabic community in western Palestine.
The Israeli government has been at special pains to ensure the maintenance of the cultural and even the social links of the Arabs of Palestine with other parts of the Arab nation. In spite of the Arabs’ failure to honor the cease fire of terrorist infiltration and attempts at infiltration, of the campaign of incitement, Israel kept open the bridges across the Jordan. She permits Arabs to cross those bridges and visit their relatives and friends across the Jordan. She allows Arabic students to go abroad to study at Cairo and other Arab universities. Every year, at the summer holiday season, thousands of people from the Arab states cross the Jordan to visit relatives in Judea and Samaria.
Gradually, too, the Israeli government extended the travel facilities of these visitors. In the summers of 1971 and 1972, large numbers of Arabs from various Arab states at war with Israel, as well as from Samaria and Judea, could be found enjoying themselves on the holiday beaches of Israel. An Arab writer, Atallah Mansour, has drily described this summer influx as “taking a vacation in the Zionist hell.”
The Arabs of Judea and Samaria and the Gaza district have been able, in the years since the Six Day War, to discover also how life has been for the Arabs who were citizens of Israel in the years between 1949 and the Six Day War.
The people of Israel in 1949 owed the Arab community nothing. Except for a minority, they had identified themselves with the forces aiming at Israel’s destruction. They had withdrawn from Israel in order to clear the field for the convenience of the invaders from the Arab states. Nevertheless, a comparatively large number were allowed to return in the years after 1949, to reunite families or for other compassionate reasons. They were, of course, treated with some suspicion. The dangers of a fifth column were ever present groups or nuclei of groups of active enemies of Israel were indeed uncovered from time to time. The areas with concentrated Arab populations in the northern part of the Country continued to be governed by a military administration, and Arab citizens had to obtain permits to travel out of those areas.
Though the Arab states continued to prepare for Israel’s destruction and her Arab citizens were subjected to the daily incitement of a dozen radio stations, these security restrictions were gradually relaxed. It was discovered that the dangers had become minimal. An increasingly alert Jewish public opinion persuaded the government in 1964 to abolish the military regime.
The relations between the Jewish state and its minority of Arabs reached a turning point in May and June 1967. One of the most striking phenomena of the days before and during the Six Day War was the behavior of those. Arabs. Exposed to the confident exhilaration of leaders in Cairo, in Baghdad, in Amman, in Beirut, and in Damascus, conveyed to them day, after day for three weeks on radio and on television, promising early and swift fulfillment of the dream of the destruction of Israel, they did not lift a finger to help in its consummation. There was not one subversive move, not one act of sabotage. Some undoubtedly hoped that Nasser’s bellicosity would be vindicated. The majority was clearly not at all sure it wanted to see Israel defeated. Certainly hostility to Israel was not strong enough to move any Arab to bold action.
For the truth is, that though slow, their integration into Israel’s society was and is proceeding. Problems remain that cannot be solved in the span of half a generation and while the Arab states as such persist in their war against Israel. Absolute equality is still ruled out. The young Arab of seventeen, unlike his Jewish and Druze fellow citizens, is not called upon to serve in the Israeli Army – though in this, too, there have been some exceptions. The Arabs’ share in the public services is growing. As the beneficent effects of Israel’s education system spread, the Arab share in higher education grows. They enjoy, moreover, an unexampled economic prosperity. Their birthrate, aided by the state’s health and welfare services, is among the highest in the world, 50 percent higher than that in Judea and Samaria (in 1970, 4.6 per 1000, as compared to 3.1).
There is, however, a much more significant truth that the Arabs in Israel have been able to learn from close contact with the Jews. Notwithstanding bitter, or sour, Jewish memories going back to 1948 and 1936 and 1929 and 1920, in spite even of Jewish attitudes of present caution toward them, as part of the Arab people still at war with Israel, there is no semblance of a climate of hatred toward them. There never has been. Zionism, with its intense fervor and programmatic intent, has preached a positive Jewish patriotism; it has fostered love of the Jewish people, love of the country – it has never preached hatred. The student of the vast Zionist literature of the past fifty years will be hard put to find any such teaching, even In the days of greatest crisis. Zionism has consistently inculcated a striving for relaxed relations with the Arabs.
How to achieve such relations has indeed been the subject of historic disagreement and continuing debate. Conflicting political attitudes toward the Arabs ever since 1920 have not affected an almost universal liberalism, on the proper status of the individual Arab citizen. Zeev Jabotinsky, who opposed the efforts of the official Zionist leaders to appease the Arabs by making far-reaching concessions of rights or territory, and who insisted that the first essential step to understanding with the Arabs was to make absolutely clear the Zionist purpose of full independence in the whole of the homeland, urged at every opportunity the fullness of civic rights for the Arab citizens. He foretold a happy and prosperous coexistence of Jews and Christians and Moslems in the Jewish state he dreamed of. It was he who proposed that in the future Jewish state the Deputy Prime Minister should be an Arab.
He saw this outcome as feasible in a Jewish state living in peace. In the Jewish state as it emerged, plagued by war or by the threat of war throughout its existence, the Arab minority has yet from the outset easily exercised its full civic rights, there have been Arab members in every Knesset, and now, since 1971, an Arab Deputy Minister sits in the government.
All this the Arab of Judea and Samaria, even of Gaza, has by now been able to hear and see. His own briefer experience of the application of Zionist values does not contradict the experience of his fellow Arabs in Israel. While the air of the world resounded with the uncontrolled fabrications of Arab, Soviet, and other simply anti-Semitic propagandists, describing in detail the alleged ills of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, those Arabs themselves have been shedding many of the prejudices induced by their anti-Israel education.
As each of them goes to his familiar work in the morning – now often to a Jewish place of employment across the old Armistice lines – and as he goes back to his home in the evening, and ponders the changes actually wrought in his life since rule from Amman was replaced with rule from Jerusalem (or more directly by the local military governor), he can find only tangible material improvement and a broadening of horizons for himself and for his children. At first, no doubt unbelieving, he has gradually began to grasp that such improvement and broadening, and indeed his welfare, have in fact become a function of the Zionist state.
Zionism was not born to further the welfare of anybody but the Jewish people, still largely dispersed. It carries a burden unequaled in this troubled world from absorbing, year after year, large numbers of penniless newcomers from the various comers of the exile, to completing the social and economic transformation within the homeland. It cannot, and will not, give up its historic heritage, nor can it surrender the territorial conditions of its security. But, whatever the Arab sins and ills of the past, the existence of a large Arab community in the country is a reality, no less than the right and reality of the Jewish peoples control of its only homeland. The innate humanism of Zionism, and its still powerful revolutionary drive, can take this reality in its stride.
We would like to thank ShmuelKatz.com for providing us with the material for this article. This article is republished with the permission of David Isaac, e-Editor of ShmuelKatz.com. For republishing rights please contact David Isaac directly at David_Isaac@ShmuelKatz.com.
About the author,
Shmuel “Mooki” Katz, born Samuel Katz (9 December 1914 – 9 May 2008) was an Israeli writer, member of the first Knesset, publisher, historian and journalist. He was a member of the first Knesset and is also known for his research on Jewish leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Katz was born in 1914 in South Africa, and in 1930 he joined the Betar movement. In 1936 he immigrated to Mandate Palestine and joined the Irgun. In 1939 he was sent to London by Ze’ev Jabotinsky to speak on issues concerning Palestine. While there he founded the revisionist publication “The Jewish Standard” and was its editor, 1939–1941, and in 1945. In 1946 Katz returned to Mandate Palestine and joined the HQ of the Irgun where he was active in the aspect of foreign relations. He was one of the seven members of the high command of the Irgun, as well as a spokesman of the organization.
In 1948 Katz assisted in the bringing of the ship, Altalena to the shores of Israel. Shmuel Katz was one of the founders of the Herut political party and served as one of its members in the First Knesset. In 1951 he left politics and managed the Karni book publishing firm. He was co-founder of The Land of Israel Movement in 1967, and in 1971 he helped to create Americans for a Safe Israel.
In 1977 Katz became “Adviser to the Prime Minister of Information Abroad” to Menachem Begin. He accompanied Begin on two trips to Washington and was asked to explain some points to President Jimmy Carter. He quit this task on January 5, 1978 because of differences with the Cabinet over peace proposals with Egypt. He refused the high prestige post of UN ambassador. Katz was then active with the Tehiya party for some years and later with Herut – The National Movement after it split away from the ruling Likud. He also has written for the Daily Express and The Jerusalem Post. (source: wikipedia and
shmuelkatz.com)
HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
A Chronological Collection of Historical Documents Relating to the Arab-Israeli Conflict...
Feb 13, 2013 - They continue to live in a fantasy world, hiding from their citizens the simple fact that, in spite of their oil reserves, Israel, warts and all, is by far ...
Nov 13, 2010 - This article is the third chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the ...
Nov 12, 2010 - This article is the second chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published ...
In fact, under the surface, a completely different spiritual transformation was ...... online version of Shmuel Katz's, "Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine.
Dec 29, 2013 - 194-7, 207-8, Berlin, 1957), the 1948 Palestinian leadership, headed ... I – cited by Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, Samuel Katz, ...
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