Israel's Fateful Hour:
Hoyt, Robert G.
BOOKS A hawk with an olive branch At long last there is movement toward the start of a begin-ning of preliminary negotiations that may have a chance of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Recent...
...The positions the author reports are simi...
...it is bad to let it cloud our understanding of the present conflict...
...In May 1970, for example, he argued for an Israeli declaration of its readiness to withdraw from the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai as part of a peace settlement...
...In 1974 he found it not realistic to believe that Israel could continue to hold the occupied territories, and "misguided" to refuse any and all negotiations with the PLO...
...Harkabi would agree, I'm sure, that George Shultz did Israel an enormous favor by opening the door to dialogue...
...Every step in that chain of reasoning can be challenged...
...Two decades ago he was convinced that the destruction of Israel was not only the Arabs' "grand design"-their ideal goal, their dream- but also the goal of their policy, a purpose they believed could be accomplished, therefore a guideline for action, affecting "the way in which the Arabs built up their military forces, organized their societies, developed their economies, and modernized their countries...
...Recent doings in Algiers, Stockholm, Geneva, Washington, and Tunis demonstrate again, if more proof were needed, that policies of the United States government will greatly affect the pace and direction of movement...
...If published articles in mainstream Catholic publications are any indication, there has been a reluctance to accept testimony like that of Yehoshafat Harkabi, though there are many Israelis with like credentials holding similar views...
...Currently professor of Middle East studies at Hebrew University, he has been chief of Israel's military intelligence, served as intelligence adviser to then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and is the author of earlier studies of the conflict that are cited with respect by other scholars...
...Those are the questions that properly hold priority now...
...Not only tribes but creeds and ideologies are intricately at war...
...It is good to acknowledge the shame of this part of our history, and to keep it always in mind...
...By his own account, confirmed for me by a knowledgeable source, his earlier studies of Arab and Palestinian attitudes and agendas put him on the side of the Israeli hawks, though not in their camp...
...if they are "transferred" (expelled), Israel will lose legitimacy with many of its own people along with the support of other nations that it absolutely must have to survive, while insuring ascendancy among Arabs and Palestinians of the radical states and leaders that still cling to the original Arab "grand design" calling for elimination of the Jewish state...
...For some in Israel and elsewhere, Arab intransigence has been transformed from a conclusion based on observable current fact into an unshakable dogma-and an excuse for adhering permanently to the Israelis' own "grand design," the dream of establishing dominance over Eretz Yisrael: all or most of Palestine, incorporating Gaza and stretching east at least as far as the Jordan River, perhaps northward into Lebanon...
...It was published last year in England, two years ago in Israel, where it has gone ISRAEL'S FATEFUL HOUR Yehoshafat Harkabi Harper & Row, $22.50...
...If this is hawkishness, it is pragmatic not ideological...
...and, therefore, who in the Diaspora can claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return...
...lar to views I expressed at roughly the same times, though not for identical reasons...
...A continued Israeli effort to demonize the PLO or to choose, by whatever means, the Arabs they will negotiate with will be recognized more and more widely not as a reasonable precondition but as a devious means of saying No to the possibility of peace...
...Harkabi acknowledges that these views are held only by a minority within a minority, but notes that it is not only the followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the zealots of Gush Emunim who voice them, and he argues that the response of religious leaders and scholars has been indefensibly feeble...
...I owe the reader a similar disclosure...
...Three years before Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem, for example, Harkabi saw a likelihood that the Egyptian president would act to lift the burden of the conflict from his country's back and budget...
...But even if enacted, such legislation would affect very few people...
...Talking peace with such an opponent made no sense for Israel, Harkabi argues...
...or, Which side has the stronger claim...
...ROBERT G. HOYT has written frequently about the Middle East for the National Catholic Reporter and Christianity and Crisis...
...Israel does not now have a choice between good and bad options but only between bad and worse...
...A grandiose, militaristic, expansionist, ultranationalist ideology that was already in place but never in power gained immensely from Israel's astounding feats of arms in 1967...
...The tactical strength of religious fundamentalism in Israel surfaced for Americans with the presentation of demands by certain religious parties for laws redefining by conservative Orthodox standards the question "Who is a Jew...
...Even while putting the evidence of Arab harshness and adamancy before the Israeli public, he urged understanding of Arab grievances and warned against taking inflexible positions...
...But hanging onto the West Bank and Gaza, either as conquered territories or as integral parts of Israel, will be worse...
...Israel will be smaller and perhaps less defensible...
...Harkabi is harsh (I think justifiably) in his indictment of the "Jabotinsky-Begin ethos" (Ze'ev Jabotinsky was the father of Revisionism and Begin's mentor) for its lack of realism and prudence...
...That demand, and the willingness of both Labor and Likud to consider it, roused the anger of...
...Given these circumstances, we are fortunate to have this updated edition of Israel's Fateful Hour on hand now...
...For American readers, including many American Jews, I think the most significant passages in the book may be those dealing with the transformation of Israeli attitudes and policies following the Six-Day War, from a relatively modest, pragmatic, and conciliatory vision of Israel's place in the Middle East to the "grand design" of Revisionist Zionism under Menachem Begin and his successors...
...The best and only means of confirming this trend is Israeli rejection of Israeli rejectionism...
...The reason Yehoshafat Harkabi's treatment of this bitter-tasting mishmash achieves clarity is certainly not political naivete...
...Now, a non-Jewish, non-Israeli outsider who is not at immediate risk may be justified in criticizing Israeli policy out of abstract considerations of justice and/or out of sympathy with victims on both sides, but it's never comfortable...
...so did I, as a part-time, distant, dilettantish observer...
...There is, finally, a surplus of pain-filled history, of centuries-old grievances kept ever fresh by new offenses...
...and, if the superpowers act in concert to promote a regional settlement, it will be hard for their client states to resist...
...The reason for that, I believe, is the existence of a mountainous residue of Catholic guilt for the Holocaust and all that went before it...
...The witness of this coolheaded "Machiavellian dove" badly needs to be heard...
...Robert G. Hoyt through four printings...
...Primarily, it is the book's steady focus that lends it persuasive coherence...
...The conflict would then become "existential," it would be "war to the death...
...Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State, Basil Black well, 1987...
...I agreed then, as now...
...The reader should know, then, that I'm inclined to give a warm welcome to arguments favoring a new Israeli policy that are voiced by a "Machiavellian dove" (Harkabi's tag for himself) and that are based on considerations of realpolitik...
...If negotiations are to happen, the Palestinians will be the Israelis' chief interlocutors, and Yasir Arafat's PLO will represent them...
...In a way, however, that chapter is a distraction and its content (as the author admits and fears) could be misused...
...one could, after all, be wrong, whether out of soft-headedness or some undetected strain of anti-Semitism-and in this conflict there is no room for error...
...His near-scornful critique of Peace Now and its adherents for their excessive reliance on moralisms and their failure to produce a comprehensive political program might better have been directed against leaders of the main factions within the Alignment...
...There are too many players for easy clarity: on both sides, factions Within factions, on the scene and worldwide...
...In this chess game there are no unassailable positions...
...He gave particular attention to internal Arab and Palestinian disputes over ends and means, tactics and strategy, in their conflict with Israel...
...I could not voice that wish: in my view, the occupation is not only dangerous to Israel, it is legally untenable and ethically wrong, antidemocratic and out of harmony with those forms of Zionism I can admire...
...Still more interesting, if certainly of lesser importance, is the chapter given to "Nationalistic Judaism...
...The book is unabashedly pro-Israel, and yet it is attentive to the Arab side and includes strongly worded criticism of the "ethos" informing Israel's Herut party and Likud coalition...
...As for bias, Harkabi's commitment to Israel is, no hindrance but a help, given the decidedly unsentimental realism of his approach...
...Sharing the land between an Israeli and a Palestinian state will be bad...
...That is understandable...
...It is my hope that the main thrust of Israel's Fateful Hour will be widely understood and honestly debated in this country, particularly among American Catholics...
...Diaspora Jews as has no other development in Israel...
...When signs of change appeared, verified by the depth and sometimes savagery of these quarrels (Arabs have been murdered for urging a negotiated peace with Israel), he announced them...
...Negotiation is now possible (and has been for some time, but won't be for the indefinite future) because Arab "moderates" are precariously in control, or near that point...
...This defense of his approach appears in a "personal note" in Harkabi's preface...
...even as he describes the intricate four-sided interplay among moderates and extremists on both sides, Harkabi acknowledges that he is oversimplifying out of sheer necessity...
...256 pp...
...Harkabi believes that a solution of the con- . flict can be achieved, but that no solution will be perfectly safe or perfectly just...
...Anyone who writes coherently about the Arab-Israeli conflict must immediately incur suspicion of political innocence or partisan bias...
...for them, and for the stone-throwing youths of the territories who have done so much to win world opinion and shake the Israeli consensus, the PLO is the embodiment of the Palestinians' cause...
...Which way does the...
...balance of power tilt now, and how is that likely to change...
...and Christianity and Crisis...
...The U.S...
...But Harkabi added: "Would that 1 be proved wrong...
...When he resigned his post as intelligence adviser, his letter to Prime Minister Begin said, "For us to rule Judea and Samaria for an extended period of time is, I believe, impossible...
...edition takes account of the intifadah and of King Hussein's decision to end Jordan's administrative involvement with the West Bank, but not, of course, of the November declaration of Palestinian statehood or of our government's mid-December decision to open talks with the PLO...
...Harkabi anticipates the challenges, describes them fairly, and provides answers that are reasonably satisfying...
...arguments for excluding "idolators" (including Christians and especially Catholics) from residing in Jerusalem, and other notions as repellent...
...but rather: What will work for Israel...
...Harkabi documents (as Amnon Rubenstein had done earlier) the existence within the Israeli religious right of ideas and proposals that are no less than shocking and that if adopted would altogether change the nature of Israel in the eyes of the world: justifications not only for annexing Judea and Samaria but for expelling and even annihilating the Arab residents...
...Whatever priority one has-peace or justice, the security of Israel or the rights of Palestinians, or all of the above-it is more than ever necessary to understand the realities of the hour, which may indeed be fateful for Israel and all concerned...
...one does not set up housekeeping with another who is bent on murder...
...Irrederitism will survive among the Palestinians and it will be easier for them to build the strength of a sovereign state than to hold together a revolutionary movement...
...Weak and stateless as they are, the Palestinians constitute the' Arab entity that has the most to negotiate about, the clearest claim for redress of grievances, the greatest support among the Arab masses elsewhere...
...Unaccountably, however, he gives almost no attention to the loss of elan and orientation on the part of the Labor Alignment which created the vacuum that made possible the victory of Herat and the Likud coalition in 1977 (see Amnon Rubenstein, The Zionist Dream Revisited, Schocken, 1984...
...If the Arabs are allowed to remain they will constitute an ungovernable near majority by the year 2000...
...For Harkabi the urgent issues are not: Who started this fight...
...they are distractingly high for the rest of us because of superpower involvement, the oil factor, the availability of weapons of annihilating power...
...What, then, is to be done...
...Now that Hussein has given up all title to speak for them, there is no Arab ruler or state that claims or can claim that right...
...Moderates" are those who will never accept Israeli domination of the territories or the region but who have come to regard the grand design as in-feasible, even in the distant future, and meantime too costly-not only in blood and money but in lost opportunities for Arab development and modernization...
...Israel's peace with Egypt would collapse, thereby much quickening the gradual growth of Arab military power vis-a-vis Israel...
...There comes a time in any bloody and longstanding ethnic-religio-nationalist dispute when continued partisan debate over justice and morality becomes unjust and immoral...
...Lucid...
...But Harkabi persisted in his Arab-watching...
...Overall, it is sufficiently complex to do justice to a tangled situation, yet lucid and readable...
...It is not only Arab moderates but the Israeli people who will pay the price for continued inflexibility...
...For the protagonists the stakes are numbingly high: personal and national survival, justice, freedom, land, water, and, for some, revenge...
...Still, the arguments are well made and carefully defended, to the point where adequate summary is not possible...
Vol. 116 • January 1989 • No. 1
