The Impotence of Victory
Talmon, J. L.
The Psychology of Arab-Israeli Conflict THE FANTASTIC VICTORY that came so unexpectedly in June 1967 propelled Israel into a euphoric mood. All at once Zionism became immensely...
...Was not the essence of Zionism the deep longing to be a nation unto the nations in the family of nations...
...Some console themselves with the hope that there is a Hegelian List der Vernunft hidden in all that, and that like the Holland we have mentioned before, the nation would come out greater and better from this ordeal...
...Sovereignty over the Holy Land was reserved for the Jews alone...
...There is likely to be much discussion in the future among historians on whether Israel was to blame for not coming forward on the morrow of its triumph with a bold, imaginative, and magnanimous offer, instead of waiting for the famous telephone call from Cairo (and Amman), or whether the Arabs This article is an excerpt from Mr...
...The dovish argument about world opinion the hawks would dismiss as pusillanimous and dishonorable...
...But the sands are running out fast...
...And even if they could, what would be the point of it...
...Is there any certainty that a fourth Jewish victory will at last drive home "the lesson" to the Arabs...
...Security Council's resolution...
...The Italians seem to have at last learned their lesson and cured themselves...
...Although the official Israeli policy is still direct negotiations with all options open, increasingly more frequent and louder are ministerial statements about this or that point—usually territorial—not being negotiable, until one even hears that it is better to hold Sharm-el-Sheikh, the God-forsaken desert around the exit to the Red Sea, without peace, than to get peace without SharmelSheikh...
...These steps were accompanied by the growing pressure of his Russian and Egyptian collaborators who proclaimed Israel's reaction to Syrian provocations to be preparation for a U.S.–Israeli collusion a la 1956, and then, when the crisis mounted, interpreted Israel's initial hesitations as a paralysis of will, and a corroboration of the exaggerated Soviet reports about the demoralization in Israeli society...
...Talmon's book Israel Among the Nations, copyright © 1970 by J. L. Talmon and to be published by Macmillan in 1971...
...Any arrangement with the Arab governments at this hour, even one short of a treaty negotiated face-to-face and signed amidst handshakes in the blaze of television lights, would implicitly be based upon the one common interest of all sides concerned, Israel, the Arab governments, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S...
...Or by having conquered all of the promised territory and imposed its presence with superior force upon an unreconciled foe...
...We will make it easy for them to convert to Judaism, and those who will not wish to convert can live here as a sympathetic minority of Christians and atheists, tied to us in heart and soul, as citizens...
...It is," writes R. H. Tawney in one of his purple passages, the tragedy of a world where man must walk by sight that the discovery of the reconciling formula is always left to the future generations, in which passion has cooled into curiosity, and the agonies of peoples have become the exercise in the schools...
...what we will have annexed and integrated into Israel will remain ours—is the hope of the hawks...
...And yet, there is a glimmer of hope that the specter of China and the inexorable compulsion of modern technology and warfare may still work to bring about a Russo– American agreement to resolve the Arab– Israeli conflict, once the Vietnam imbroglio is out of the way...
...If the latter were paramount, then there would be only one categorical imperative, "kill him before he kills you...
...It would also find that the image of oppressor would be attached to its name in the minds of countless millions in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere...
...Marshal Foch failed to obtain the "natural frontier" of the river Rhine, and the allies got no reparations in the end...
...It is written in the Book of History that Israel will be restored to the fullness of its inheritance...
...This vehement rejection of the Four Powers' intervention by Israel may at least partly be motivated by the understandable wish of the victor to be left alone with the vanquished...
...Much the same is being said by Hussein and to some extent even by Nasser...
...This makes for obsessive overanxiety and overreaction, and for neurotic determination to make the worst fears come true...
...In brief, with so many good reasons, justifications, and pretexts on both sides for doing nothing to bring peace closer, the idea that force is the sole arbiter is growing into an axiom, partial rights and wrongs having become almost irrelevant...
...Jews have been able to exist and prosper only where reciprocity was obtained...
...The Russians think in quantities, and thus conclude that even if Israel could be weaned away from America, the strategic value of the large Arab territories, not to mention the oil they contain, makes the Arab world a much more worthwhile ally...
...it also imparted the mad obsession with a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to the Islamic world, which, however contemptuous of and unfriendly to Jews, had in the past not known that essentially Christian neurotic preoccupation with Jewish deicide and the Protocols of Zion, from the dire results of which the Jews sought refuge in Palestine...
...Although it was greeted with jubilation by Zionist left-wingers, to whom consistent Soviet hostility had been a source of deep chagrin, the motive of the Russians, as soon became unmistakably clear, had been no change of heart in regard to Zionism...
...That inheritance belongs to all generations past, present, and future...
...In the end, the proud Spaniards were compelled to sign in 1648 a treaty with a Holland that in the meantime had grown from a handful of desperate rebels and fugitives into a world empire, the first financial power in the world, and the culturally most advanced country in Europe...
...A poet of the romantically nationalist persuasion, but doubtful of the possibility of enticing many Jews to immigrate, launched a delirious "appeal to the Gentiles"—Norwegians, Dutchmen, Danes, Mexicans, Frenchmen, and Italians: Let us tell them: come and partake of the wonderful adventure of building Eretz Israel...
...The chance may be lost for that detente and deescalation, which a common interest not so much in positive peace as in avoidance of further dangerous complications may bring about, in an unacknowledged way, so as to lead to factual cooperation, notwithstanding the continued incantations about the unforgotten wrongs suffered and eternal rights possessed by the Arab people...
...And what kind of security could there be for a country with such a large and determinedly hostile minority within its frontiers, in those wide ditches and high mountains—in an age of bitter national strife all over the world and in the age of jets and missiles...
...To the Israeli ministers, most of them persons of sound common sense and warm humanity, although in some cases afflicted by a good deal of self-righteous incomprehension of the Arab cause, such an outcome seems logical and natural...
...a rational people swept by morbid passions and neurotic obsessions...
...They invite, as it were, the Arabs to demonstrate through the intensification of terror and warming up of the frontiers, that they will never negotiate, and that the situation is so explosive that the Powers must curb Israel...
...This conjures up the vision of a Gotterdammerunga nightmare abhorrent to Jewish tradition...
...We have traveled a long way from the revolutionary universalism of Marx, which recognized neither Jew nor Greek nor Gentile, but only workers and capitalists...
...But there is more to it...
...The devil who builds bridges does not span such chasms till much that is precious has vanished down forever...
...When he has nothing to lose, he can risk everything, because he risks nothing...
...For decades the Arabs had been obsessed by memories of past glories and prophecies of future greatness, mocked at by the injury and the shame of having had an alien and despised race injected into the nerve center of their promised pan-Arab empire, between its Asian and African halves, just at a time when the imperialist powers had started the great retreat from their colonial possessions in Asia and Africa...
...It seemed like the case of the impotent who has tried and tried so many times in vain and is obsessed with the dream of that breakthrough, after which he will be able to look men and women straight in the eye...
...Particularly horrifying is the Soviet–Arab sponsorship of an updated version of the Protocols of Zion: the Zionist-AmericanImperialist world plot, operating not only against Arabs, Asians, and Africans, but also against all the socialist regimes, causing economic difficulties, student unrest, Catholic intransigeance...
...By refusing to have anything less than that, and thus perpetuating and perhaps intensifying the present tensions to a boiling point, may we not—to say it once more—be helping the guerrilla organizations which, however insignificant their military achievements may be, have J. L. TALMON nevertheless raised a flag, created a myth, have become a focal point for the hopes and the activities of the young and done incalculable harm to the image of Israel in the world...
...A Great Power finds it easier to change allies or abandon clients than a small, isolated state to win new protectors,—we need only mention the volte face in the attitude of France...
...And so, by the end of May 1967, the great day of reckoning seemed to have arrived...
...The state of uncertainty about their future prevented moderate Arabs from collaborating with the Israeli authorities, while it encouraged the extremists to assist in or condone the acts of the saboteurs and terrorists...
...He may have just glided into it, egged on by the recklessness of the newly established pro-Soviet regime in Syria and the success of each consecutive step in undoing the results of the 1956 Suez war...
...a barrel of powder—which all the Powers are most anxious to prevent from exploding—catching fire through some "untoward" Sarajewo accident...
...Accomplished facts create laws, theories of international law do not establish facts...
...There is indeed much justified doubt whether such a statelet would be viable at all...
...Well, had it not taken the Jews 2,000 years to come back to the Holy Land...
...We will share everything with them...
...No one can blame a people who had experienced Auschwitz, for not treating threats of annihilation as rhetoric or metaphor...
...Fortified outposts must be established, and they have to be flanked by settlements and supplied with safe and easy lines of communication— the Golan Heights, strategic areas in Sinai, in the mountains on the West Bank, and in the Jordan Valley...
...The only hope of a peaceful settlement in the Middle East lies in an American–Soviet agreement, and not in the preponderance of Israeli armies backed by the Sixth Fleet...
...This is well-known to the Russians, and from ft they draw extreme conclusions...
...Thus, while not motivated by conventionally anti-Semitic convictions and aims, the Soviet Union is almost objectively, to use its own language, led to adopt policies which, given the murderous hostility of the Arabs and the role of Israel in the postholocaust period of Jewish history, amount to a definite threat to the survival of the Jewish people...
...One must not be scared by threats and abuse coming from Moscow, for the Russians will not send an expeditionary force against us...
...From this there is little distance to the conclusion that annexation would redound to the good of the Arabs themselves and even help in resettling the refugees...
...More immediately, it means shelving any plan of an Israeli initiative in setting up a Palestinian Arab entity as at least a way of taking a ten tative step...
...One is constantly told by Israeli ministers that the government has passed on innumerable messages to the other side, with sufficiently clear hints for its imagination to grasp that a favorable bargain could be got...
...There is then the argument that it would in fact be either an Israeli protectorate or a springboard for militant Arab irredentism...
...T T HIS DIVIDED MooD--between the yearning for peace and profound distrust of the Arabs, consequent disbelief in peace, and the hankering sense of obligation toward the "potential" citizens of Israel in the diaspora —becomes the source of much that is equivocal, inconsistent, and likely to appear hypocritical or even cynical in the eyes of outsiders...
...Similarly, the demand to permit emigration from Russia to Israel must appear as an anti-Soviet device, implying as it does a vote of no confidence in the achievements and nature of the regime...
...Were even a directly negotiated and formally signed Peace Treaty attainable —the Israelis themselves say—the Arab leaders who would put their signature to it would be assassinated the next day, and the Arab ministers would in any case, like the Germans in 1919, sign it only under duress and with mental reservations and hostile resolve in their heart...
...The spirit of generous euphoria began at once to give way to fear and distrust and to a hardening of arteries in Israel...
...Nasser may not have actually planned the June war...
...In other words, in diminish REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST ing his grievance and urge for revenge...
...If the former were there and convincingly demonstrated, questions of borders, refugee settlement, guarantees against the guerrilla activities, would be secondary and likely to fall easily into place...
...the right to hold on to strongpoints such as Sharm-el-Sheikh, if not forever at least for some years as guarantees, till the need for them has become superfluous in the eyes of all...
...Understandable as their anxieties are, the Israelis would do well to pause and reflect whether it is in the long-term interest of Israel to be irreversibly tied to America in the way South Vietnam, South Korea, or Western Germany are...
...The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate had recognized the rights of the Palestinian Arabs as individuals, but not as a sovereign national entity...
...They do not expect the powers to become angels, foregoing their own interests, or eunuchs impotent to defend them, but set their hopes on the mutually contradictory interests of the Powers cancelling each other out into some reasonable compromise...
...T T HERE ARE LIBERALS IN ISRAEL who, though aware of the pitfalls of an imposed settlement, endeavor not to lose their sense of proportion...
...It is today highly unpopular in Israel to recall that such a situation had existed between Israel and Egypt for some ten years after Suez, when the Israel-Egypt border was indeed quiet...
...All that can be hoped for at present is the stemming of the tide in the hope of its gradual ebbing away...
...the Suez crisis was resolved in 1956-57 because the two superpowers wanted it to be...
...Soviet support for partition in 1947-48 was an isolated episode...
...The usual argument, which the Israeli hawk would bring out to "demolish" the pleadings of the doves, would be, "Trust the Arabs to help us out in the end...
...Admittedly, it did not prevent the 1967 explosion...
...Sterile as such theorizing may be, the wounds it leaves are deep...
...J. L. TALMON N N OTHING HIGHLIGHTS so much the intractable character of the conflict as the fact that what to the Jews appears a condition sine qua non as well as the crowning achievement is to the Arabs something utterly unthinkable—the ultimate humiliation: to sit down and negotiate a peace in a direct give and take...
...The man to whom these words were addressed, usually highly articulate and eloquent, sat quite speechless and his countenance showed signs of deep distress...
...There are other considerations behind Russian policy as well...
...T T HERE IS GROUND TO FEAR that a not dissimilar type of impotence is in the process of paralyzing Israel...
...The anti-Israel obsession gave rise to a kind of systematic Manichean metaphysic, the focus of a whole philosophy of history...
...But they helped to conjure up Hitler...
...Our pilots shot down Migs like pigeons and our armored units forayed deep into Egyptian territory...
...Since any sign of weakness only confirmed them in their intransigeance, Israel was bound not to yield an inch...
...And so even moderate spokesmen are compelled to eschew the word "withdrawal," but to speak of "new disposition of forces," and to avoid as much as possible any reference to the U.N...
...And as to the obligation toward the potential Jewish settlers in Israel, could one really justify the certainty of continued actual warfare, with all the present suffering and unknown disasters in store, for the sake of a hypothetical need for refuge, which might arise if God forbid the world is again plunged into the barbarism of the thirties and forties, a state of affairs that would in all probability spell universal destruction...
...We will give them our pretty daughters for their wives and their dark- or lightskinned women will find men here worthy of the name...
...One is reminded of the frantic efforts of French statesmen and generals after 1918 to obtain guarantees against German militarism, as well as of the insensate and very soon regretted perorations of British statesmen on squeezing the German lemon till the pips burst...
...This objection the new militants would counter by saying that the Arabs would agree to peace or rather give up war only if they became absolutely convinced that they had no hope of breaking the resolve of Israel...
...The Jew is seen as devil incarnate from the days of the Patriarch Abraham himself till his assumption of the role of the linchpin of an American-Imperialist-Zionist world plot against the Arab world, the Socialist Commonwealth, and all colonial peoples...
...The sufferings endured by earlier generations obtain no redress...
...But since the need for a real decision is made to look very distant by Arab intransigeance, the protagonists are only too glad to postpone the hour of deci J. L. TALMON sion so as not to wreck the National Coalition...
...After every victory we would face more difficult, more complicated problems...
...The Jews owed nothing to the world (as if Zionism could ever have taken off the ground without public sympathy...
...Did not Heikal triumphantly proclaim that the Arabs already had Israel in their net...
...Furthermore, should Arab hostility never relent, but continue to mount, and with it its military ability, what frontiers will ultimately be of any avail...
...You cannot stand still: you either go forward or move backward...
...The axiom of the eternity of Arab hatred and active hostility is suicidal: if these cannot be stilled, then every new defeat at the hands of Israel will exacerbate them still further, and little reliance should be placed on sophisticated weaponry outbalancing superior numbers of an eternally inferior enemy...
...This ghastly realization is breeding a quite fatalistic mood: we are doomed to live forever in a state of siege...
...I do not want any Arab territory," I was told in a private conversation two or three days after the victory by the late Prime Minister Levi Eshkol...
...But meaningful in what sense...
...Where an exclusive claim based on superior power or supposedly higher right has prevailed, Jews have always been the first victims...
...He who pays has the say...
...And when one speaks of revolution in such a context, one feels absolved J. L. TALMON in advance from blame for resorting to "revolutionary methods...
...The grave psychological impediments that continue to pile up may prove, however, strong enough to stultify this urge, or at least to prevent the Israelis from detecting that longed-for "opening," if it should appear, and certainly prevent them from going out in search of it, or taking any initiative in attempting to find such an opening...
...In a socialist regime everyone must feel happy or he is a reactionary and counterrevolutionary...
...It is, however, the Munich trauma that is at the bottom of Israeli intransigeance, or at least the not unjustified fear that the Great Powers may just patch up some hasty and precarious cease-fire, in order to be able to show that they have achieved something, but will in fact leave all the embers burning and, through inattention or weariness, secure REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST Soviet Russia a legal standing for perpetrating trouble for both Israel and the U.S...
...In its paranoiac self-centeredness neither side gives any thought to the fact that if you seriously mean to start negotiations you have first to think what would be acceptable and what would not be acceptable to the other side...
...The former was the prevailing mood in the early days after the war...
...T T HE ISRAELI ATTITUDE to the Four Powers Conference is rooted in this complex of fear, distrust, and sense of power...
...But where is the proof that this must happen again...
...The Psychology of Arab-Israeli Conflict THE FANTASTIC VICTORY that came so unexpectedly in June 1967 propelled Israel into a euphoric mood...
...Why despair of the genius of the Israeli army in the future...
...Strong reasons for and against such a policy have been adduced on practical grounds...
...So, any measure of real security is in the disposition of the protagonist...
...The 20th-century experiences are bound to have an inhibiting effect on such expectations...
...we may be destroyed within half an hour if the Arab tanks break through the narrow neck of pre-June 1967 Israel north of Tel-Aviv...
...T T HE ISRAELI ARMY HAS SHOWN itself SO many times more than a match for all the combined Arab forces that one is taken aback by the fears that if this or that is given up or not made secure, Israel is signing its death warrant...
...That process started as soon as the Arabs closed themselves into a cage with their Khartum resolutions...
...It is said that in the early days of Israel Ben-Gurion would instruct a diplomat going abroad to "do everything possible to please the Americans and nothing to displease the Russians...
...force under the auspices of the Security Council, and, of course, total freedom of passage through the straits...
...a U.N...
...People did not think of "reaping the fruits of victory...
...He and his like refuse to recognize any fundamental difference between the closely knit and self-sufficient Jewish communities of former Poland and Rumania and those of Western counttries, foremost of which is American Jewry...
...If not from North America, then the millions of recruits will come from the Soviet Union seething with anti-Semitism or from South America, menaced by Castroism and Che Guevarism...
...soldiers to fight for us...
...But what next...
...They wanted to believe that "this time the Arabs have learned their lesson"—that they cannot destroy Israel...
...Some see in such a plan a way of frightening Hussein into entering into negotiations, others an end in itself and a first unilateral step toward an overall settlement with the Arab world...
...strategic borders become then all-important, readmission of refugees is tantamount to the introduction of a Trojan horse, and even the signing of some sort of document on nonbelligerency by the Arab governments only a ruse for gaining a breathing spell for another round, in preparation for which the guerrillas would be encouraged to conduct softening-up operations deep into the neighborhood of Tel-Aviv, indeed, if possible, into its very heart...
...They are oblivious to both how ill-befitting such theorizing sounds in the mouth of a people that has fought so hard to be recognized as a nation, and to the fact that to deny a group the dignity of a nation is the surest way of establishing it as a militant one...
...a nation whose deepest desire has been to escape the fate of being not an end in itself, doomed to be a function of the existence of others, a problem, a liability, an impediment, an undesirable presence, compelled to treat a neighboring people in that very manner...
...The Israelis would be well advised not to bank too much on the "special relationship" between Israel and the U.S...
...Insofar as it has been stirring up Jewish sentiment among the Russian Jews, making this "indigestible" group still more difficult to digest, Israel is resented by the Soviet government as a nuisance and an irritant...
...And have we not shown a supreme ability to meet such a contingency...
...a people of refugees confronted by hundreds of thousands of human beings overtaken by that very fate...
...Russia is surrounded by American bases, and it is very important for her to have allies and friends and bases behind the American bases—in other words, in Syria, Egypt, Iraq...
...Did the world do anything about Auschwitz or about the situation prevailing in the days preceding the Six Day War...
...The steep and rapid fall from blinding splendor to bottomless misery has been such a constant feature in Jewish history...
...They recall that hardly ever has such an intractable conflict as the Israeli–Arab imbroglio been resolved without the Great Powers in concert, laying down the law...
...If the Arabs were absolutely resolved on a war of annihilation, surely—it was said —it would be criminal negligence not to maintain the utmost precautions, not to stick to the present frontiers, which allow us to strike at Cairo or Damascus within seconds almost, while the Egyptian planes cannot reach Tel-Aviv in less than a quarter of an hour...
...There are no more pressing, and in the long run more decisive imperatives, than these two—the checking of the growth of the guerrillas, and the resettlement of the refugees through concerted action, internationally supported and financed...
...The Jewish complex grows from a mixture of fear and distrust, on the one hand, and a feeling of power on the other...
...in all probability it would have been a world without Mussolini and Hitler and without Stalin...
...There came to my mind a recent article by Heikal, in which in a pathetic cri de coeur he exclaimed that once the Arabs had succeeded in inflicting a single defeat upon Israel and in killing 10-15-20,000 Jews, their self-respect would be regained and—he hinted—it might then become possible for them to meet the Jews face-to-face...
...By an unspeakably tragic irony, the Zionism of Jewish exiles marching to the tune of "Oh, if I forget thee, Jerusalem," not only created an Arab Zionism, propelled by a similar sense of exile and dream of a return to that very Jerusalem...
...It would follow that nothing should be done that might provoke or hurt these susceptibilities, and that nothing should be left undone that might enable the buried better self to assert itself gently...
...The divisions in the Cabinet are deep and openly voiced...
...As a very great power, Russia finds it extremely difficult to do nothing for the Arabs beyond replacing the arms they have lost, and to take Israeli defiance lying down...
...He was happy that "at last we have something we can bargain with," meaning conquered territory, for peace...
...A group of prominent Arab and Jewish intellectuals, who had been meeting together at fairly frequent intervals, were discussing for the n'th time "the problem" in an atmosphere of accentuated mutual courtesy and in the common conviction that History had decreed that we have to live together or we shall perish together, meaning—I hasten to add—by living "together" not a binational state but separate Jewish and Arab states, so as to enable each people to express itself freely as God has created it—a distinct entity—without any wish for, or opportunity of, patronizing the other, and with no reason to fear being swamped by the numbers or the superior competence of the other side...
...People began to recall the lessons of history, how every Arab "no" resulted in greater gains than had been hoped for from an Arab "yes...
...Time was on our side, no matter what pressures the U.S...
...To make a virtue out of a vice, the Arabs developed the vision of an extreme misfortune turned into the lever of an ultimate fulfillment: in the course of preparing for the joint total confrontation with Israel, the Arabs would create the sinews of their future empire, and the victory over Israel would almost automatically—as in the case of Italy in 1859-61 and of Germany in 1870-71—ensue in a pan-Arab empire, an Arab nation, one and indivisible, which had also incidentally achieved its social revolution by wresting the rich oil fields from the feudal sheiks and turned them into the rightful inheritance of the nation...
...Nothing could therefore be more galling and frustrating than the fact that Israel was the only state in the world to which its neighbors refused the right to exist...
...Both sides leave out the mitigating "ifs" and "buts" of the official spokesmen, or treat the more moderate statements of the other side as a cunning ruse, or just pitfalls and traps...
...Catholic-monarchic Spain could not bring itself to recognize or to treat, except for cease-fire arrangements, with heretics and rebels and usurpers of parts of its empire, assigned to it, after all, by the Pope himself in 1496...
...The quest for therapeutic means to replace force hangs upon the anguished hope that there is on both sides a fundamental disposition in favor of peace, though terribly inhibited and handicapped by neurotic impediments and overstrained susceptibilities...
...Success on these two issues would take the sting out of the terrible imbroglio, and enable both sides to slide slowly into peace, should the hope of first establishing the formal peace as a prelude to these remedies prove vain...
...If the Arab press seizes upon every hawkish declaration as conclusive proof that Israel does not want peace but desires expansion, the Israeli papers, for their part, select the most blood-curdling proclamations of Arab guerrilla leaders to show that nothing can be done with the Arabs...
...Everything had, as it were, to be suspended until that wrong could be redressed...
...The effect had been to make them almost incapable of putting their minds to anything else, or of seeing anything on its own merits and unrelated to the central grievance...
...Since totalitarian regimes would never allow, in fact could not even conceive, that a group of their own citizens might advocate a foreign policy that differs from or is not dictated by the government, they are bound to conclude that through the intermediary of American Jewry, Israel is of course an American puppet and agent...
...There are so many lessons in the history of victorious nations, just out of mortal peril, anxiously and desperately determined to obtain foolproof guarantees against aggression which they feared would be renewed in 10, or 20, or 50 years...
...Even those who, while insisting on strongpoints, disclaim the wish to annex Arab populations in substantial numbers go on arguing that one cannot leave two economies go their separate and very different ways...
...In the 16th and 17th century, Spain was bled white, went bankrupt, and sank into torpor and impotence at the end of 80 years of war against Holland...
...Some extremists have gone even further than this, asserting that peace might not be desirable for Israel at all, and pointing in support of their view to the bracing effect wars have had on the nation, its pride, and its sense of unity...
...As this is not done by either side, both are able to repeat with good conscience that there was no one to talk to on the other side and no one to whom you may give up anything...
...He had been plainly touched on the raw...
...For as Nietzsche has put it, there are victories which are more difficult to bear than defeat...
...But the preoccupation with security, however natural and justifiable, often becomes a self-defeating obsession...
...Somewhat exaggerating the significance of the wave of anxious solidarity which swept world Jewry in May and June 1967, when Israel seemed to face its supreme, and what then appeared as an Auschwitz-like ordeal, they would attribute to an ethnic group in a pluralistic society yearnings for an untrammeled national existence that an older generation of East European Jews went to Palestine to seek...
...The Israelis insist on the bitter experience of Arab hostility, the Arabs decry Israeli effective and victorious expansionism...
...in preventing the contingency of a total triumph of the extremists in the Arab world and the incursion of China into the area...
...Had we not clamored for immigrants from Soviet Russia and immigrants from the West before anyone dreamed of wider frontiers...
...To ease their feelings of humiliation, the Arabs would attribute all the Zionist successes—Jewish settlement, the victories of 1948 and 1956—to the machinations of Western imperialism...
...He murmured something REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST about honor, glory, history...
...Many people, who hurled abuse upon Lord Landsdowne for his famous letter to the Daily Telegraph pleading for a negotiated give-and-take peace with Germany in 1917, came afterwards to muse ruefully how much better a place the world, and their own country, would have been, had the advice of the former Foreign Secretary been heeded...
...THE ARABS cannot get a "just" peace, and the Jews are unable to obtain a "total" and "true" peace...
...that they have become aware of the fact that if the present state of war is continued, the dream of restored Arab glory, with the common cause of Palestine as the cement and lever of panArab nationalism, will reach a sad consummation with the appearance of Soviet advisers in every government office and Soviet technicians in every Arab factory, and in every Army unit—difficult though it be to imagine two races and civilizations less congenial to each other than Communist Russia and the Moslem Arabs...
...Nothing would be more dangerous for them than to act on the assumption that they have America in their pocket...
...It is easy to imagine the shock of the 1967 defeat, which not only destroyed all these calculations and schemes, but also underscored the humiliation by the fact that Israel's victory was this time manifestly singlehanded and, unlike the 1956 Suez (or Sinai) campaign, could hardly be attributed to imperialist aid...
...may exercise—they cannot be too strong, since we are, after all, the only safe ally of America in this area, its bastion against Soviet encroachment into the Indian Ocean, and we have never asked U.S...
...The unrest in the occupied territories was easily manageable and the shellings on the Canal, or the forays of guerrillas, were incapable of even making a dent in Israeli armor...
...Admittedly, it took 200 years for the Arabs to finish off the Crusaders' kingdom...
...They would inevitably be reduced to watching fatalistically and impotently the great cruel ironies working themselves out in a seemingly inexorable manner: heroic exertions and astonishing talents of a hard-pressed nation, with a deep yearning for peace and justice, beating in vain against an unattainable goal, and suffering horrible bloodshed in the process...
...Those Palestinian Arabs who, in spite of the Israeli resolve to guarantee them their human and civil rights and to grant them equality, preferred to live in an Arab state, were welcome to emigrate, and should perhaps have been encouraged to do so...
...These would then be more of an emotional release, a safety valve, than a token of unshakable resolve for direct action here and now...
...demilitarization of Sinai and the West Bank...
...It would be amusing if it were not so painful to hear Jews expatiating on the special and different mentality of "our" Arabs in the way anti-Semites have not so long ago been philosophizing about the innate and unalterable, usually mean, characteristics of Jews...
...One should perhaps try to remind the Arab intellectuals of historical parallels...
...Through the search for the best they lost the chance of obtaining the good, and brought upon themselves much sooner than feared calamities much greater than those they wanted to ward off from future generations...
...Unfortunately, what one side considers as the absolute minimum for its security and honor is seen by the other as a pistol held at its head...
...As time went by, more and more people became receptive to the romantic pseudoreligious mysticism of the various fire-eating and Bible-quoting prophets of manifest destiny, who compare the Zionist endeavor to a revolution that must unfold to its last consequence...
...One clutches at the hope that sufficient and sufficiently influential people in Egypt and in other Arab countries realize the utter futility and dangerous consequences of a renewed war...
...And the present generation, which had been singled out by the Almighty as trustee and executive, had no right to give away what belonged to all the generations...
...a society that started off with so much socialist idealism and constructive resolve becoming reduced to the position of a beleaguered city, wasting its substance on arms and the best years of the flower of its youth on destruction...
...A Hebrew University professor put a direct question to our Arab interlocutors: did any one of them know of a single example in history of victors withdrawing before the vanquished had even begun to sue for peace, let alone vow day in day out that they would never make peace, never recognize the victor's very right to exist, never meet him in order to negotiate face-to-face but would continue to labor with no respite for his destruction and annihilation...
...There is thus only one alternative to the J. L. TALMON nightmare of reciprocal destruction, and it is that of reciprocal recognition...
...What misfortunes has the burning but constantly frustrated desire of the Italians to exercise and to demonstrate martial qualities and win resounding victories brought upon that so wonderfully gifted, sophisticated, and generous nation...
...Deep down in the Jewish soul there is, consciously or unconsciously, a tremendous anxiety to do away with what has plagued the Jews' existence for 2,000 years in the diaspora—the lack of simple, unreserved recognition of their right to exist as a right, and not on sufferance...
...The Suez war has shown that they did not even have American Jewry in their pocket...
...On a less exalted and more mundane plane, the more sober politicians argue quite plausibly that if peace is very distant, then Israel cannot impotently leave things in suspense...
...Worse, they would be decried as fainthearted defeatists, capitulationists, traitors...
...This ambivalence may be taken to epitomize the general human condition since the introduction of atomic weapons, but it brings into still sharper relief the baffling ambiguity of the Jewish situation through the ages...
...a conclusion that comes perilously close to a denial of the most cherished dream and deepest raison d'être of Zionism—a safe home—and to an admission that we have exchanged a ghetto of pariahs for "a ghetto of victors...
...REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST The arguments about the danger of a Rhodesian situation developing in an Israel divided into two so utterly different societies were brushed aside by the hawks: their opponents were men of small faith in their doubts about the ability of Israel to cope with any problem: and moreover were propagating slanders by insinuating that Israel will not know how to treat fairly and justly the strangers within its gates...
...REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST THE STATE OF ISRAEL came into being in 1948 through Soviet–American agreements...
...If anything has been proved by the 50 years' conflict, it is precisely that it is just not true that the adversary "understands only the language of force...
...Israel may be able to win and win, and go on winning till its last breath, thereby demonstrating the truth of Hegel's aphorism about the "impotence of victory...
...Thus the specter of China, the difficulties with its J. L. TALMON East European satellites, the grave economic strains at home, and the unpopularity of the Middle Eastern involvement in Russia may after long travail induce her to agree to a face-saving formula for a Middle Eastern settlement...
...THE OTHER DAY I fathomed something of the depths of Arab neurosis...
...FOR THE ISRAELI LIBERAL to be able to come out against the rising tide of anxious and militant intransigeance and press his case with any effectiveness, the condition, sine qua non, is that there be Arab leaders who wish in their hearts to be more gently or more forcefully cajoled...
...Should full-scale hostilities be resumed, there is little doubt that the Israeli troops could seize Damascus, enter Cairo, and con quer Amman in no time...
...All that was needed was strong nerves...
...The Arabs owned 14 states, while Israel was to the Jews the poor man's "ewe lamb...
...This has been shown again and again by both Jews and Arabs, not to speak of Vietnam, Algeria, and in so many other cases...
...All at once Zionism became immensely meaningful again...
...Without voicing such sentiments openly, some hawkish mystics are almost on the lookout for anti-Semitism such as the Negro anti-Jewish sentiment...
...At the same time, there can be no doubt that the Soviet Union will never risk a nuclear war over the Middle East, any more than the United States will...
...If stemming the tide be the aim, should we not take another look at the Four or Two Powers Conference on the Middle East, and instead of savagely looking at it as a conspiracy, perhaps try to utilize it to make it easier for the other side to come forward with a minimum loss of face...
...The Crusaders are the Arabs' proof that the breakthrough is sure to come...
...Much as one may inveigh against the Arabs begruding the Jews that little notch, while having themselves so much, the argument sounds specious in a world in which no country, no more than any individual, has divested itself of a part of its territory, its coal or oil, to make good the wants of its close or distant neighbors...
...Security Council, which is surely dominated by our enemies and is at the same time impotent...
...Apocalyptically minded superhawks are to be found on both sides...
...Could they stay there...
...Turning to the soldier among the Arabs who were present—a former high officer in the British and at a later date in two Arab armies, and altogether an attractive and warm person—the Israeli scholar exclaimed, "and you for one after all know that the Arabs are in no position to defeat Israel for a very long time...
...But, as Namier said "the dead festering past cannot be eliminated by violent action any more than an obsession can be cured by beating the patient...
...In the event, every impediment that had stood in the way of any form of reconciliation before 1967 expanded into an immovable blockage and both sides, each in its REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST own way, succumbed to what appears to be an incurable neurosis...
...Of course, any discussion of reciprocity must take into account the fact that while the aim of the Israelis, even the extreme annexationist minority, is security, the Arabs have indicated all too frequently their determination to wipe Israel off the map...
...Would not such a policy constitute an insurmountable obstacle to peace with the Arab countries...
...deserved condemnation for closing all the avenues of a give and take through the Khartum Conference resolution, which reiterated with additional vigor all the vows of never, never...
...If egged on by fear of persecution, diaspora Jews will emigrate to Israel...
...The Arab predicament stems from resentment and rage, steeped in a sense of failure...
...The mixture of hubris and fear is allpervading in Israel...
...And should by some miracle the Arabs agree to negotiate at some future date, nothing would prevent us from pulling back from the outposts in exchange for a real peace—say the moderates...
...Those on the Arab side are determined to provoke Israel to expand till it bursts, till it is choked with Arab population, saddled with such insoluble problems and so harassed by guerrillas and sabotage that it is goaded into resorting to savage repression and irrational squandering of strength to the horror of the whole world...
...By Israel having obtained the longed for goal of peace on the basis of a genuine recognition by its neighbors as a natural and integrated component of the area...
...But Israel is strong and determined enough to defy all the Powers—the official policy claims...
...There are some Jewish superhawks on the lunatic fringe who also pray for an apocalypse, which will somehow make the Arabs vanish into thin air through mass flight and leave Israel safe and happy for ever after, behind the Jordan river or, who knows, the Syrian desert, turned into a Chinese wall...
...Israel as the agent or spearhead of the Great Powers thus became the peg upon which to hang all the frustrations encountered by the Arab peoples in their anxious and jealous effort to skip centuries of social, economic, and cultural development, and catch up with the well-established and self-assured Western old-timers...
...With El-Fatah staking the claim to speak for the undivided Palestinian nation, opposing any kind of arrangement with Israel, and vowing total destruction of the Jewish State, some Israeli leaders have lately caught fright at the idea of acknowledging even in theory the existence of such a national entity as the West Bank Arabs, lest this offer the enemy an opportunity to proclaim that the whole and undivided Palestine was the patrimony of the indivisible Palestine Arab nation—as if the fanatical terrorist groups were really in need of additional arguments...
...They are survived, outlived, bypassed, slowly shaken off out of weariness, driven out by more urgent and more pressing ones...
...Thus one of the oldest of the new militants exclaims in prophetic ecstasy: "Two million new immigrants in two years...
...Without some clear and convincing proof that Egypt is prepared to be coaxed, the Israeli liberals would be powerless Don Quixotes...
...The desperate anxiety not to allow Jordanian rule to return to Kalkilya for fear of guerrillas in the neighborhood of Tel-Aviv may—by preventing any settlement help the most uncompromising extremists in their effort to sweep away all the moderate particularistic forces in the Arab world and to unite it, with the blessing and active help of Maoist China...
...Who knows...
...Nor should we be unduly upset by unpleasantness from the U.N...
...Who can in such circumstances give up the Jordan ditch and allow the Jordanian border to be reestablished at 12-15 kms from Tel-Aviv...
...Ultimately, all turns upon this point: the presence or absence of a readiness to recognize the state of Israel, which amounts to saying —the will for peace or the will for war...
...It is not only a question of the image of Israel in the eyes of the world, especially the Afro–Asian nations, with whom Israel must live and trade in amity...
...Any concession on Israel's right of sovereignty over the whole of Palestine was tantamount to an admission that Zionism had always been wrong...
...Surely you also know very well that had your leaders shown the slightest inclination to sit down with us and talk, the Jews would have been falling over each other in a stampede to meet you, and you would have got out of them gains that you could never obtain on the battlefield...
...Where from...
...Instead of bringing him to his knees, despair goads him on to more desperate acts of resistance or aggression...
...Few people in Israel nourish any illusion by now that in a year or two an utterly exhausted or defeated Arab world will under new "peace-loving" regimes come out for peace...
...The social achievements of the Israeli labor movement, far from impressing the Bolsheviks, evoke contemptuous hostility: how dare a tiny country like Israel presume to build socialism better than Russia itself...
...It appears here with the kind permission of the publisher...
...Of course, if Israel is prepared publicly to proclaim its readiness to forego territorial expansion and to go to such lengths to save the susceptibilities and irrational obsessions of the Arabs, it is surely entitled to expect the Arabs to offer similar alleviations to the Israelis' deep-seated fears and passions, like the unity of Jerusalem (with some autonomous status for the Arab community in it) ; modifications of frontiers—the Golan Heights...
...There is something pathetic, at once touching and repellent, in the desperate quest of the mystical maximalists for ways to meet the awful, supremely ironical, contingency of the Jews of Greater Israel being swamped in no time by the higher birth rate of the Arab minority, in other words in their effort to make good the irreparable catastrophe of Auschwitz...
...It is impossible under any circumstances for Israel to adopt an anti-American attitude or even to defy American wishes for any length of time in a vital matter...
...There is a deep-seated longing for peace in Israel, and there can be no doubt that were the Jews to discern some opening, a narrow chink in the Arab wall of obduracy, the great majority of them would leap forward to meet the Arabs more than halfway...
...The very claim to the totality of Israel's inheritance does much to justify the claim to the entirety of Palestine...
...Both nations, the Arabs and the Israelis, would do well to take to heart these resigned words of wisdom: "Past injustice cannot be made good...
...The hope that the Arabs will come cap-in-hand to sue Israel for peace is no longer cherished even by those who had till not long ago believed —or still believe—that time was working in our favor...
...Their intellectual integrity is rather offended—when they think of the treatment of Palestinian Arabs in the past— by the incantations of some Israeli ministers about the right of the parties directly concerned to determine their own affairs, without the tutelage of outside powers—"the Middle East is no one's protectorate...
...Yet one does not dare not to reflect from time to time that most problems are in fact never solved...
...Some set their hopes upon a change of heart among the Jewish hippies and members of the New Left...
...That balance could not be maintained for long...
...The Soviets ask themselves also the simple question: who pays for it...
...Which state in the world has ever enjoyed absolute security, and particularly now in the age of nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare...
...The Israeli government stubbornly maintains its position that by constituting themselves into a kind of Areopagus the Big Powers are lending implicit approval to the Arab refusal to treat with Israel...
...There is then also the obsessive conviction that diplomacy consists of bazaar haggling, and what is a far-reaching concession from our point of view becomes to the adversary at once a point of departure for asking for more...
...Some Israeli leaders have become entangled in pernicious and self-defeating theoretical disquisitions intended to show that the Palestine Arabs were not a nation...
...Nor could Israel bring a suicidally determined Arab world to its knees, without incurring in the process mortal damage both material and moral, and without having completely eroded all the values which had in the past won it the sympathies of the best of mankind...
...Should this state of war between Jews and Arabs, which has already lasted 50 years, continue for another 50 years, and whoknowswhat-type of weapons will be introduced into the area in the midst of a world changing with kaleidoscopic speed—there will be no victors and no vanquished, only mutual general destruction...
...Their surplus of idealism, when frustrated, could still be channeled into Chalutzic resolve...
...One hears people say in the same breath, "we can reach Cairo within hours...
...The latter imperceptibly turns from a means into an end, and indeed a pretext to take no initiative in the pursuit of peace...
...a freedom-loving society doomed to engage in the squalid business of spying, policing, suppressing, putting schoolgirls behind bars, blowing up houses for failure to inform...
...One of the most discussed issues in Israel has been, for instance, the question of recognizing the West Bank Arabs as a Palestinian Arab entity, with a view of establishing an autonomous Arab state there...
...Those Arabs capable of thinking lucidly realize fully that Israel cannot be destroyed, and even if that were possible, the Arab countries themselves would be shattered beyond repair before they could succeed in striking a death blow at Israel...
...The reasons are too obvious to need elaboration...
Vol. 17 • November 1970 • No. 6
