Forward to Peace
Eban, Abba
ABBA EBAN FORWARD TO PEACE Israel lives in a new context. It is nothing less than that. We have yet fully to explore the nature of the transformation, and it is such an exploration which is my...
...And the skeptics in the Arab world, in Europe, and among the self-appointed omni-scients here like George Ball base their complaint on the fact that this is not a comprehensive settlement...
...the replacement of the Israeli military and civil administration by an elected Arab self-governing authority...
...I approach the matter under three headings: first, the significance of the Israeli-Egyptian treaty...
...And how can and why should we, a Social Democratic movement, tell the million Palestinian Arabs who have been separated from that monarchy for 11 years that they've now got to go back and live under that monarchy...
...There'll be an intense effort by the United States and Egypt, and by some of their own Palestinian intellectuals, to warn against the all-or-nothing syndrome, telling them, "Take this institution, ignore the rhetoric...
...you must not talk of aid...
...It means that we can go to Hebron, and that the Arabs of the West Bank can come to Jerusalem...
...After all, they rejected the Chamberlain White Paper, they rejected Bevin's enactments, they rejected the 1947 partition, they rejected the Peale report, they rejected the 1947 boundaries, they rejected the 1967 lines which they now hold up as their highest ideal—they have always rejected today that which they would long to have tomorrow, and they come out of every situation with a new nostalgia, but not necessarily with a new wisdom...
...We have given 80,000 lives for the Palestinians—and they are ungrateful...
...a "separate peace" became a dirty word...
...Toynbee wrote that nations act creatively in response to challenge...
...At the same time, Sadat knows that if the Arabs want a collective existence, they cannot have it without Cairo...
...Now these are the motives which brought Sadat to Jerusalem...
...The PLO and Syria are quite wrong if they think that Sadat intends not to look after Egypt's particular interests, but Israelis would be quite wrong if they thought that he was prepared to resign from the Egyptian and Moslem world...
...The illusion of comprehensiveness dominated American and Western diplomacy right up to Sadat's visit in November of 1977...
...But a military option which has credibility, namely which has the possibility of achieving even a tactical result, is completely destroyed if you eliminate the vast proportion which Egypt occupies of the total Arab strength...
...third, the impact on Israeli society of the various solutions that have been already developed and that are likely to be developed in the future...
...How anybody can imagine an Israeli solution emerging out of this framework, I know not...
...Germany as part of a community, yes...
...But they do mean to carry out the treaty...
...Can our present government maintain abstentionism on settlements...
...Having taken into account the objections of the other Arab states, the execution of the treaty must now proceed...
...The further conclusion is that those elements in our policy over the past 10 years which caused us the greatest embarrassment and disapproval in the media are precisely those elements of our policy which brought Egypt to the negotiating table...
...And, there are many things to be corrected...
...We have yet fully to explore the nature of the transformation, and it is such an exploration which is my intention here...
...The journey took us from Jerusalem to Cairo—from the Ben Gurion Airport to Cairo Airport—in 46 minutes...
...The international system lacks two attributes that are so essential to law that I doubt whether the word is applicable to it at all—it lacks a power of adjudication, and it has no power of enforcement...
...There they sat cross-legged on the floor (which was the most arduous physical exercise anyone of them had undertaken for many years) and they went on for some hours about the moral beauty and equity of a Jewish homeland, and after a long silence, there emerged from the white sheet one question...
...a determination of the final status of the area, after a transitional period, to be made by a group of four—Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians and Israel...
...If you are going to demand 33 percent, you might as well demand 100 percent...
...Then some time in the next few months we will announce a date for elections...
...Such a concept permits accessibility...
...One of his friends then told him, "Abe, congratulations...
...And I wonder whether the community idea is not the answer—a Benelux relation between Israel, the West Bank and Jordan, in which the community duties defuse the national mili-tance of the West Bank, just as the EEC Doctrine was meant to defuse the national intensity of Germany, and successfully did so...
...I am not going to enter into a discussion of whether they are right or not about this...
...If they want an Arab league, where can they have it—Abu Dhabi...
...One had to be very hardbitten indeed to arrive in Cairo as I did and to see the Israeli flag on the El Khuba palace, in which the war against Israel was First enacted, or to hear a recognizable attempt to render "Hatikvah" by the Egyptian military orchestra, without feeling a sense of something bizarre being enacted, especially when, after the presidential edict had gone forth that he wanted more coverage for this, the press erupted on the second day into front page coverage...
...Let us assume that the self-governing authority is established, and it enters into jurisdictional conflict with the Israeli occupying force...
...Yet while the Palestinians for Egyptians are a rather remote people, they are a symbol of Arab legitimacy...
...If there were 35 percent of non-Arabs in the territory, then you might define autonomy in personal terms, as in the Millet system of the Ottoman Empire...
...Arab hostility is responsible for a certain versatility in our economic development and relationships...
...The reference to the pathos of Egyptian poverty, suffering and sacrifice is of course reflected in the spectacle of a Cairo that has become a monstrosity of urban proliferation, from a population of three million to nine million in the last 20 years, with the prospect of being 20 million by the end of this century—a mini-India, as Sadat calls it...
...75 percent of the officials of all the intra-Arab bodies are Egyptians...
...Eighty thousand Egyptians killed in five wars against Israel, for interests that are not Egyptian interests...
...Egypt has reached the conclusion that you cannot have a Middle East without Israel—not that it wouldn't prefer it, but that it's impossible...
...It definitely says here "autonomy," it does not say independence...
...Within a month of signing and ratifying the treaty, we are committed to announce the date of an election in the West Bank and Gaza...
...The third element they referred to is the need for Egypt to transfer its preoccupation to the problems of Egypt itself...
...He's not going to resign from it...
...I've summarized the answers which I've received from Egyptians themselves during this past year during which the doors of dialogue have been opened about why they reached this conclusion...
...It's effectively going to stay under Israeli control, with autonomy construed in rather modest municipal terms...
...The lunatic asylum in Libya...
...I'm unable to understand why Israel should want it, except from the viewpoint of preventative security...
...Not one of these things could be peacefully achieved...
...And I'm not certain that they will not be cooperative...
...Germany alone, no...
...I had thought that the Jews were the only people who woke up every morning and asked themselves who we are...
...As difficult as the challenge will be—and I would not for a moment minimize how profound a change we must contemplate—I can think of none more rewarding in its prospective benefits...
...We have to learn to live without depending on external hostility as our great rallying cry...
...And our own delegation brought this document back and brandished it and said, here is evidence that Israel retains the option for sovereignty, that Israel can stay in the West Bank and Gaza forever...
...Although its general effects have been tragic, not all its specific consequences have been negative...
...And the story of Egyptian politics is the search for identity between Egyp-tianism and Arabism...
...But if you accept the concept that certain crucial changes of a modest nature would satisfy our needs, then an agreement may be possible...
...It's almost a law...
...Hussein's rejection of a West Bank claim is authentic, and it makes sense...
...Egypt is the only large solid nucleus...
...Dayan, a little less attached to semantic exactitude, said that it could very well happen, but then we would simply send in the Israeli Army and stop them—in other words, stop them in the act of proclaiming their independence...
...And I'm afraid it's also the most well-founded...
...Not one of them said, "Because of your rectitude...
...What made Western Europe prepared for German independence was the community idea...
...Begin as well as Sadat and it uses phrases such as "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people," and their "just needs"—not the needs and rights of individual Palestinians, but of a people...
...Begin produced a document and said that the honorable member has not noticed—it's not possible...
...Actually, I believe the origin of Mr...
...The subject that I want to deal with is one which I discussed recently in the New York Times, the fact that there are people who cannot take yes for an answer...
...Eighty percent of the teachers in the Arab world are Egyptians...
...They believe that the Egyptian treaty will give them access to American and European rather than to Israeli technology...
...cial contract which spoke about a million pounds and one party thought it meant the Israel pound, and the other thought it meant the pound Sterling...
...And since our lives were at stake, we had to develop a minimal cohesion, which might otherwise not have triumped over the elements of dispersion and fragmentation in Jewish character, in Jewish history...
...He didn't come to make things easier for us...
...And that first payment on this document will become due either when Jewish settlements are put into the area, or when elections have to be held for the self-governing authority...
...The conclusion is that it was the obdurate element in Israel's policy over the past 10 years that brought them to the table...
...office, Anwar Sadat restored the word Egypt: Egypt became the Egyptian Arab Republic, and Egyptian delegates in international conferences moved out of the Union of South Africa and the United States and the United Kingdom, and back to the "E's...
...He's very interested in the West Bank being demilitarized, because it would be a threat to him, but that's all he wants...
...Not one of them said, "Because we've been converted to a Zionist view of Middle Eastern history...
...And behind the four of them there stands the sponsor of the treaty—the United States...
...Let us be frank: Arab hostility has been the sustaining myth of Israeli society...
...And it was at this stage that it became obvious that if you have to begin the process somewhere, Egypt is the place with which to begin...
...There are some pragmatic as well as ideological forces at work here...
...this is clear...
...We were 46 munutes away from each other, and yet we might as well have been on different planets...
...They are therefore really giving a certificate of approval to Israeli policy since 1967...
...Further, some such proposal is required if we are to deal realistically with the obvious dilemma we confront: We do not want to exercise jurisdiction over a million Arabs...
...Egypt has a vast heritage completely antecedent to and independent of Islam...
...That is the state policy of the Labor Party, and it is as important for our benefit as it is for the benefit of the West Bank Arab population...
...There is something so non-central, so marginal, in all the other Arab countries that it's not an accident that the centers of decision— the good decisions, the bad decisions, the decision to make war, the decision to stop the war, the decision to have an armistice, the decision to attack in '73, the decision to have a disengagement—have all been independent Egyptian decisions, which in general were followed after much strife and protest by the other Arab states...
...We cannot continue to foster the illusion of the Allon Plan, which would result in the annexation of 33 percent of the West Bank...
...Abba Eban, Israel's former Foreign Minister, is a member of Parliament representing the Labor Alignment Party...
...And let us not say, "the peace is only with Egypt...
...If not, then the difference of interpretation will come to a head within a matter of days...
...It's all very well for these oil-soaked monarchies to sit in their air conditioned palaces and Cadillacs, but when is the Egyptian peasant going to get his share of his human rights and inheritance...
...Moreover, we are dealing with an exceedingly ambiguous document, a document which was brandished by Anwar Sadat in Cairo as evidence that Israel has agreed in principle to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza—and there's quite a lot of material that sustains this interpretation...
...Monet conceived of the boundary as a bridge rather than as a barrier...
...It became the United Arab Republic, and the great word, "Egypt"— "Misr"—one of the oldest words in political history, was simply wiped out...
...But if that is the case, then the area available for territorial change is very small...
...The election will be for a self-governing Arab authority which will replace the Israeli Administration...
...The idea that they will send us raw materials and then we will produce manufactured goods is, in their view, a colonial metaphor...
...Cairo is the literary center from which Arabic literature spreads out elsewhere...
...I speak to a Minister of Housing whose problem is the housing of 7'/2 million people...
...Each side takes the same musical score and plays it to the tune of its own national anthem...
...I do not mean that no one is capable of a suicidal military operation...
...The Arabs of Gaza and of the West Bank will vote, and there will be established a national Palestinian Arab authority...
...I raised this problem once in the Knesset...
...the pendulum swings between them...
...This is not ambiguity—this is equivocation...
...If the Arabs had traded with us, we would simply have imported their raw materials and agricultural products, and we would be manufacturing cheap and shoddy industrial goods which would satisfy the rather indulgent Arab market...
...We had to be tough enough to dissuade or rebuff aggression, but flexible enough to make negotiation viable...
...Finally, we must be concerned with the radical shift in Israel's psychological ground which now impends...
...In this, it is unique among the Arab countries, so that Arabism does not exhaust the meaning of Egypt—of Mitzrayim—but as soon as they are thinking of their own Egyptian personality, they suddenly say, "Oh my, but we are also not only a member, but the leading member of the Arab and Moslem world...
...In other words, they are gambling on Palestinian extremism, and I must say in all frankness that it's a pretty good thing to gamble upon...
...in other words, the official Israeli position is that we're not going to give it up to either of them...
...This is a legitimate diplomatic exercise if you want to postpone confrontation in order to consolidate what can be agreed upon, but it's legitmate only provided that you know what you're doing and you do not seek to fool yourself by the belief that a common signature means a common policy...
...The answers are uniform...
...In my opinion, his voyage has much greater weight and stature because it proceeds not from some altruistic impulse or gesture, but from a very lucid examination of Egyptian priorities...
...He has removed the center of gravity from the Arab to the Egyptian idea, while maintaining Arab solidarity as far as possible...
...Oman...
...This inaccessibility has now been overcome, and the proximity indicates how quickly a new texture of relationships can be developed...
...With that in mind, one could come to accept the prospect that the bulk of the populated territory of the West Bank would come under Arab jurisdiction...
...He is in exactly the same position...
...You can talk of cooperation...
...And the Palestinians themselves, recognizing that they have been abandoned by Egypt, fearing that they might come to be abandoned by Syria and Jordan, recognizing as well that the self-government promised them in the Camp David agreement is a penultimate stage to genuine independence, might be inclined to change their present view of the matter...
...Now, somebody's got it wrong...
...All of them said, "Our national pride and consciousness required us to want a Middle East without Israel...
...The Camp David Agreements in September produced two documents—one was the scaffolding on which the Egyptian treaty was constructed, the other the framework settlement for the West Bank and Gaza...
...Arab hostility has created our military power, with all the elements of responsibility, solidarity and resourcefulness that are exemplified by the Israel Defense Force, with social and psychological results that go far beyond the functional utility of a military machine...
...On the West Bank and Gaza, we have a common signature with America and Egypt—but we do not have a common policy: neither with America, nor with Egypt, nor with Jordan, nor with the Palestinians, nor even with ourselves...
...And this is one of the things that will have to be corrected if we want to translate the treaty relationship into a human reality...
...It reminds me of a story told in Great Britain of a Jew from Eastern Europe who applied for naturalization...
...But that can't exist when you have a national movement which happens to occupy all the territory concerned...
...But what do we say if Jordan refuses to take it over...
...The fact of a Cairo given over to a peace with Israel is an extremely moving event...
...He is rolling in wealth...
...It is half the Arab world...
...But there it is...
...Let us look at the mechanism of the agreement...
...I claim to have a part in persuading Prime Minister Begin to give up the Pyramids without asking for anything in return...
...This is not an entirely frivolous matter, for one of the complaints about Israel and its leaders is our alienation from the Middle Eastern environment...
...Above everything else, Egypt alone retains the Arab military option...
...Egyptian nationalism is moved by two contradictory forces—Egyptian particularism and Arab solidarity...
...I would imagine that on the Likud side, the assumption is that the Palestine Arabs can always be trusted to do that which is against their own best interests...
...In order to believe in a comprehensive settlement, you have to believe in the following hypothesis: that Egypt and Syria and Jordan and Libya and Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel and the United States and the Soviet Union and the United Nations and Saudia Arabia will all simultaneously find themselves under precisely the same pressures and incentives to give their approval to exactly the same text...
...You've acknowledged the rights of a people, and you've established the machinery for self-government, and you've specified a foursome of Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians and Israel...
...Language is quite capable of creating such an agreement, but the agreement can last only until the first payment becomes due...
...In short, the dynamic leads to a Palestine state in the area of the autonomous jurisdiction which is the area of the pre-1967 boundary...
...Why should he go back to his burden...
...You have to believe in a gargantuan international conference in Geneva with the participation of all the Arab states and Israel and the United States and the Soviet Union and the United Nations which would simultaneously reach a solution of the problems of Sinai and Gaza and the West Bank and Golan and boundaries and security arrangements and refuge settlements and interstate settlements...
...If they want a collective Arab personality, it can only be in Egypt—it cannot be in Mecca...
...In one mood, Egyptians think of Egypt, the Nile, the Delta, the Egyptian peasant, Alexandria with its memories of Hellenic culture— the glories of the Pharoahs—in other words, a whole list of associations and memories that have nothing to do with Islam or the Arabs...
...There is a special resentment against Jordan, which in Sadat's view created the problem of the West Bank in '67, with Hussein now disclaiming responsibility for a problem which he created and from which he now seeks to abdicate...
...And the Arabs will, therefore, be back...
...there is an anti-Arab mood in Cairo...
...I think most of us understand that international law has only one serious defect—namely, that it doesn't exist...
...In my view, the ambiguity can be maintained for a very crucial year, during which we could consolidate the Egyptian treaty up the point of full relations—but only if we are capable of abstentionism on new settlements...
...In short, there are a whole series of reactions and psychological motivations that have now to be rearranged, as a result of the idea of cooperating with the rest of the Arab world...
...And if you think that I have a loaded gun in my pocket, which I do not, the position is exactly as though I do have it...
...But they want to get the Arabs back in Cairo, and once the Egyptian-Israeli relationship is consolidated, Egypt will be at the head of the campaign to bring about a solution of the Palestine problem, which is the symbol of legitimacy in terms of Arab solidarity and Arab nationalism...
...You don't study us, you don't learn us, you're not interested in our languages and our cultures, you don't hear what we say, you don't read what we write, you think you're in the middle of Scan-danavia, there is no Middle Eastern smell or context amongst you...
...Is this not the existential liberal dilemma, that progressive aims that should be achieved by human grace and understanding are achieved, if at all, by methods which liberals and progressives would prefer to renounce...
...even the word Egypt was removed from their name...
...The question really is whether we can accommodate ourselves to the idea of the 1967 boundaries, with minor changes essential to our security, subject to demilitarization and to peace, and involving, as I have proposed, a concept of community...
...The three great events in recent Jewish history—the overthrow of Nazism, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the erosion of the Egyptian hope to remove us— can only be described in terms of power, not in terms of conviction...
...he came to make things possible for himself...
...My own view is that we ought to reenact our ideology and say that we will give up the West Bank to any regime which will not be hostile to Israeli security...
...Such a challenge is in itself an ample occasion for celebration and thanksgiving...
...On the first day of his taking Sadat didn't come to Jerusalem to make things easier for us...
...Ambiguity exists when you have an agreement and there is a genuine plurality of interpretations inherent it it...
...Why did you decide to reconcile yourselves to Israel's existence...
...The point of the community concept is that boundaries no longer mean what they meant in the 19th century...
...Now let us assume that this happens—an assumption to which I will return later...
...When an Egyptian speaks of this torment about identity, he's referring to the conflict between Egyptian particularism and Arab solidarity...
...The limitations are real enough, but it seems to me that the event is momentous enough that it is morally and'intel-lectually indecent to pass to a discussion of limitations without pausing for a moment of celebration...
...Comprehensive settlements are things that do not happen...
...If a man writes 12 volumes with S million words, he's bound to be inadvertantly right on at least one occasion...
...There was no peaceful way of overthrowing Hitler, there was no peaceful way of establishing Israel's independence, and it was only by giving a very strong example and spectacle of strength that the Egyptian mind turned from a Middle East without Israel to a Middle East with Israel...
...Mahatma Ghandi wanted to know, "Are you strong enough...
...The Arab world has one center, a solid mass of 45 million people which is equal to all the other Arabs put together...
...No, these caricatures are simply that...
...The most important headline that I saw while in Cairo was one which said the Minister of Public Instruction is now looking at the textbooks with a view to their revision in the light of the treaty...
...But that paradox is that the only people who want the Jordanian solution are the Israeli Labor Party...
...they went to the ballot box and elected new mayors, electing PLO enthusiasts in each case...
...This will be the first institutional expression of Palestine Arab nationhood...
...That is characteristic of the emphasis that Sadat has given to the policy of de-Nasserization...
...But be that as it may, peace itself has seized hold of the Egyptian people, and the expression of it came from all with whom I spoke, from Anwar Sadat through the academic and the military elite, who are even more strongly in support of the treaty than he was, to such an extent that in the latter stages, he was under pressure to stop quibbling about some of these legal matters which had engaged our own Prime Minister with such preoccupation and to get on with the signature as an essential prerequisite of the new Egyptian era...
...Now in my view, such an institution has its own dynamic which is completely independent of the intentions of those who establish it...
...He was always ambivalent about the Palestinians...
...I ask myself, where in the world do such things happen...
...the principle of self-government...
...And one day the authority meets in a museum in Ramallah, and all they have to do is read out the American Declaration of Independence, unilaterally, saying, "It's been very nice to know you but we've now decided to separate, and we set forth the reasons wherefore we separate from the union wherein we were held, and out of a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, we set forth the reason for which such separation is hereby enacted"—and 130 countries will recognize them the next morning...
...The image of the arrogant, omniscient, super-Israeli—this is what they do not want to hear about...
...Not only the difficulty, but also the nobility of Israeli life has largely been fashioned by our response to the conflict...
...Nasser decided in favor of Arab solidarity to such an extent that Egypt was wiped out...
...I believe that a Jordanian-Palestinian solution is preferable, because in general one should be against fragmentation...
...It is much more important than if we had succeeded in reaching an agreement with Bourguiba or with Hussein, for they are marginal elements in the power structure of the Arab world, and that's why the treaty is very well worth having, and why some of us were so exasperated by the prospect that it might fail at the last minute through legal preoccupations...
...Its population is four times the populations of all Israel's other Arab neighbors put together...
...What's the matter with his present situation, in which his legitimacy is universally recognized, in which he has the loyalty of his population, in which he is embraced by Arafat and Assad, in which he is nationalistically respectable...
...I cannot build a model of incentives that would explain why he, if he is in his right mind—and he is a lucid man indeed—should want the West Bank...
...One might then ask: If Arab hostility has created military strength and economic vitality and social cohesion, how are we going to live without it...
...But we reached the conclusion after the Yom Kippur War that that kind of Middle East is wildly unrealistic...
...Now those of us who have a view that the partition principle is inexorable, and that no country can possibly ignore the principle by which it came to birth—those of us who believe in partition, who believe that liberation means that Israel should be liberated from the million Arabs and from jurisdiction, controls and responsibility for them—are caught up in the paradox of demanding a Jordanian solution...
...Western Europe was not prepared for unconditional German independence...
...And so we flew to Cairo...
...Everything on the Palestine issue is utterly unsolved by the Camp David agreements and by the Egyptian treaty...
...It was quite obvious after the first meeting of the Geneva conference in December 1973 that after the ritual of comprehensive simultaneous discussion the settlement would have to be constructed as most buildings are constructed, in such fashion that some parts are ready before the other parts are ready...
...If the Arabs want an individual existence, they can have it without Egypt...
...This is about as close to a Rhodesian kind of situation as you could imagine...
...You've finally got your citizenship...
...Bertrand Russell once said wars begin in classrooms...
...nd we, therefore, will be in the position of having offered them a solution that could well be a prelude to Arab independence which they, in their all-or-nothing mentality, will have rejected...
...Now that second document is signed by Mr...
...He will attempt a synthesis...
...If that turns out to be the case, then we shall confront the paradox that an Israeli government, by this time rejecting partition, by insisting on a unitary solution, has put itself in a position of preferring an Arab unitary solution to a partition in which we would get at least our marginal but crucial adjustments...
...Not one of those banners gave any hint with whom the peace treaty had been signed, or between whom and Egypt the peace had been made...
...They may exaggerate the effect of peace upon Egypt's economic progress, but on the negative side, they know that unless Egypt liberates itself from the obsessive concern with recurrent Israeli wars, not only can the problem not be solved, it cannot even be approached...
...This sort of reaction seems to be common concerning the new treaty...
...They had rather expected to hear more about rectitude and spirituality than about strength...
...Begin's recourse to autonomy is in the demands of the Jewish delegation to the Peace Conference of 1918, when the Jews of Poland demanded individual autonomy, just as in the Middle East, Jews, Moslems and Christians had autonomy according to their personal status...
...This shouldn't have been difficult because the latest date for the construction of the Giza Pyramids is approximately 2000 years before the earliest date at which anybody puts the birth of Moses...
...Let us therefore understand that the alternatives were either an Egyptian treaty or none at all...
...15 times our problem in Israel...
...The need for psychological adjustment by Israelis to the fact that the conflict isn't there any more is not an easy problem, and it's one that political leaders and educators have got to face...
...what do we say if Jordan refuses to take it...
...In candid moments, not from the Knesset rostrum, I think the Israeli advocates of the autonomy would say, "Look, it's not going to happen at all...
...The pendulum is now heavily on the side of Egyptian particularism...
...And there is therefore an assumption that because their approach to problems is revolutionary and not evolutionary, because they deny the concept of gradualism, because they insist that it has to be all or nothing, that they will save us by their intransigence, just as they have in the past...
...For some reason, it took him about fourteen years, after which he was successful...
...Your chance of getting Arab agreement to the one is no greater than your chance of getting it to the other...
...Here, since we're going to live with Egypt in a contractual relationship, our first duty is to understand the motives and impulses at work in their policy...
...All history tells us that an institutionalized expression of nationalism in that form moves towards a secessionist situation...
...But because they closed their markets to us, we were forced to develop a technology and an industry geared to the cruelly exigent markets of the European community, of America, of the Atlantic world...
...It is the only recognized center of Arab policy and culture...
...From the Egyptian point of view, the advantage of the treaty is that it neutralized preoccupation with war...
...So now we no longer claim to have built the Pyramids...
...Perhaps we must now look for other examples...
...Equivocation is when you know full well you do not have an agreement, and you mobilize language to conceal your disagreement...
...second, the anticipated sequel and crisis that I foresee in relation to the West Bank and Gaza...
...I think our Prime Minister is the only leading statesman who believes that international relations are organized in accordance with the Oppenheimer/Lautermilk textbook on International Law...
...So this is our predicament: in Labor we have said that we will give up most of the West Bank territory provided it's taken over by Jordan...
...It's as though two people had signed a commerWe have said that we will give up most of the West Bank territory provided it is taken over by Jordan...
...Now to understand why Egypt has come around to its signature of the treaty requires some understanding of the psychological upheaval that has occurred in Egypt -since, and as a result of, the Yom Kippur War...
...a Calcutta in miniature—and about this they say, in the words of their Defense Minister, Gamasi, "How can we deal with this problem and have a war with Israel every seven years...
...Now, this really makes one feel the total absurdity of these 30 years...
...Our world is full of paradox—there's a book called The Stale and Nation by a Professor Akzin of the Hebrew University, one of the leading ideologists of the Likud movement, and he objectively analyzes conditions in which autonomy leads to secession, and he works out an equation: autonomy, when it is united with a distinctive ethnic group plus concentration in a visible piece of territory, plus a separatist psychological tendency, equals secession...
...he came to Jerusalem to make things possible for himself...
...You cannot have a collective Arab existence unless it is based on Cairo...
...Begin's intention might be Israeli control, but the consequence has no necessary relationship to the intention...
...The only way that peace evolves out of war is by gradualism and evolution...
...The return of Anwar Sadat from Washington was met in the street by masses of banners and flags, all of them paying tribute to the Hero of Peace, and he was congratulated by everybody as the Hero of Peace...
...And now the spectacle of Iran must make him think, why does he need a million people who can start marching through streets and bring about the downfall of a monarchy...
...What is happening in Egyptian nationalism is easily diagnosible, first because they tell you about their motivation themselves...
...Now if we accept this view of the centrality of Egypt and the pattern of Arab nationalism, then we must understand that a peace between Israel and Egypt is a very important thing indeed...
...The rest of the Arab world is fragmented...
...I accept Henry Kissinger's definition of deterrence: Power is what your adversary thinks it is...
...The West Bank would be under certain limitations arising from such a community, and would perhaps therefore not be a danger to Israel...
...There is a whole race of Western-educated economists, technicians and managers who think that their task is to rescue Egyptian society from what seems to be an impossible predicament...
...I would say that of all the calculations in the Israeli government's mind, that is probably the mos't prominent...
...But the Gush Emunim is not the only problem...
...We will now have to learn to live without depending on external hostility as our great rallying cry...
...What, then, is the current Israeli predicament...
...The querulous kind of hardbitten skepticism with which some people address the achievement is either humorous or enraging...
...And what we must recognize is that it is quite vain to ask Egyptian nationalism to make a drastic choice...
...Therefore, the Arab boycott is responsible for our economic vitality...
...In the deterrent equation it's what they think that matters...
...Buenos Aires had for thirty years been much more accessible than Cairo, 45 minutes away...
...Now putting these things together, their belief in our strength and in our deterrent power, we reach a rather uncomfortable conclusion from a liberal point of view...
...at any rate, there is nothing now on the horizon that refutes that scenario...
...It's rather like the explosions of houses that you get in Walt Disney cartoons, in which after the explosion, all the bricks fall neatly into place at one and the same time...
...Jordan doesn't want it...
...It is necessary to discuss the importance and the weight of the treaty because it cannot be taken for granted...
...Do they happen in Southeast Asia...
...Amidst the eccentric Ba'athist revolutionaries of Damascus...
...And Abe's reply was, "Ah, but without India...
...In that jurisdictional conflict, sympathy is invariably with the indigenous self-government and not with the occupying force...
...Now and again, the portrait of Sadat was faced by a portrait of Carter, so that the Egyptian citizen must have had the impression that there had been a war between the United States and Egypt...
...Did they happen in Europe...
...When I look at Israeli textbooks, it is extraordinary how much the concept of Israeli nationhood is defined in terms of response to hostility and challenge...
...It was not respectable to believe in anything other than a comprehensive settlement...
...Although the Israel government can rely upon the text to point out that autonomy will apply to people and not to territory, if the territory is almost totally occupied by that people, this becomes a distinction and not a difference...
...It does not mean that the Egyptians have developed a sudden enthusiasm for economic cooperation with us, especially when it is mentioned in a patronizing spirit— "Israeli genius will come and rescue Egypt from its economic plight...
...All this is expressed in the standard Egyptian complaint: What does the Arab world want of us...
...President Carter's presence in Israel did enable us to transcend these legal details and to achieve the signature...
...there is tremendous political and economic development in Jordan these days...
...In other words, all the conditions for secession exist...
...Therefore, let us remove all concepts of a comprehensive solution, even from our nostalgic memory...
...A second reason is that the Egyptians believe that Israel has a power of military deterrence which completely transcends Israel's population and size, and that therefore the military option is not viable...
...Note, for example, the title of Anwar Sadat's book, In Search of Identity...
...But once the treaty is in force, it seems to me dangerous to gamble upon the Palestinian-Arab intransigence...
...Egypt is not only one of 22 Arab states...
...And if you believe, as I do, that Camp David has for these reasons made an Arab destiny inevitable in the West Bank and Gaza, then we ought to be considering how Israel should rescue its basic interests, which are modest but crucial territorial change, demilitarization, military balance, mutual accessibility—those things which would make an Arab West Bank feasible for Israel...
...Yet we must want to live without it...
...We should be interested in what happens there, but not in having it...
...In the 1930's, some of the Socialist Zionist leaders—Shazar and Ben-Zvi and Remez—were in New Delhi and met with Gandhi...
...After several decades in which an Egyptian-Israeli treaty has seemed to be a Utopian dream, beyond any rational attainment, now that it has come to pass, the world is full of commentators and experts telling us about its limitations...
...We are not, after all, committed to the Jordanian monarchy...
...If you are committed to the retention of so significant a portion of the West Bank, you might as well learn to live without any agreement...
...This concept of a simultaneous and comprehensive settlement of all problems was an illusion from beginning to end...
...It has to be enacted across time and across space...
...On the question of the West Bank, those who deny any kind of surrender of territory don't care whether you surrender it to Hussein or Arafat...
...How can anybody occupied with that problem care very much about Arafat or about the West Bank...
...Each of them says, "Because of your strength...
...But it will not be easy to make the adjustment...
...And the reason that President Sadat can emphasize the Egyptian rather than the Arab theme is not only his stature as a populist but also the total popular resentment towards the other Arab countries who find it so easy to sit by and to tell Egypt to have wars with Israel every five years—"fighting to the last Egyptian," as they call it...
...When I asked in the Knesset why this wouldn't happen, there were two replies: Mr...
...And therefore it is the natural place to begin, at which to unfreeze the iceberg...
...Subtract from the totality of Arab armament and manpower the manpower and armament of Egypt, and the Arab world ceases to have a viable military option at all...
...Obviously, if the law has now gone forth that Israel and Egypt are at peace, then the textbooks in the schools cannot say that the aim of Egyptian policy is the elimination of Israel...
...Once you've established an Arab self governing authority, you're halfway home...
...This, at least, is one way of thinking our way through a dilemma that might be insoluble if we were to stick to the Jordanian alternative...
...That was our preference...
...That surprised me...
...If the most successful of our wars brings you nearer to Cairo and Damascus and does not bring us nearer to Tel Aviv, and that is our successful war, then our estimate is that there is no prospect of a Middle East without Israel, and to build our policy on a fantasy is to build it on shifting sands...
...By the time that President Carter reached us in Jerusalem, the subjects that were keeping us from a treaty were whether to say that the autonomy would be put into effect "as expeditiously as possible" or to say that it would be put into effect "with all due promptitude," and the legal advisors, bless their hearts, were arguing furiously on every side...
...First of all, let us understand that the term "psychological revolution" is not exaggerated...
...And now I come to the transition from celebration to crisis...
...And insofar as anything is solved, the language is in favor of the Arab idea that there must be an Arab destiny to the area, and this difference in interpretation is so explosive that it can't sustain tranquility for very long...
Vol. 4 • May 1979 • No. 5
