Why the West Must Aid Israel

...By moving away from the strict impartiality of the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, he indicated to the Arabs that Russia had increased their bargaining power with the West...

...So far, the West has tried to meet this new situation by reinforcing its policy of impartial exhortation, which had failed even when the balance of power between Israel and the Arabs was steady...

...The timing of the move has thrown the West into total confusion...

...I believe that there is a strong case for inviting the Russians to join the 1950 Tripartite Declaration by which America, France and Britain promised to maintain the military balance between Israel and the Arabs and guarantee Israel's actual frontiers against any change by force...

...Both the content and the timing of her latest move were masterly...

...Russia might well reject a Western offer of consultation on the Middle East...

...in the Middle East, the prospect of ending a strategic stalemate has destroyed any tendency among the Arabs to relax tension in their cold war with Israel...

...A million Arab refugees live in bitter squalor close to Israel's more sensitive borders, and the Arab governments refuse to alleviate their lot on the ground that this would prejudice their claim to return to Israel...

...All moral considerations apart, this would be a catastrophe for the West...

...All the trouble was caused by a normal commercial deal in arms between Egypt and Czechoslovakia...

...Revolutionary ideas know no frontiers-they travel without visas and without finger-prints...

...For this reason, the West's first aim must be to restore the balance between Egypt and Israel which the Russians have upset...

...it might also persuade the Arabs that their present flirtation with the Russians will not pay...

...And any act of aggression by Israel would give her many enemies the opportunity they have long been looking for to obtain world support for liquidating her altogether...

...And as if all this was not enough, Britain is fighting a local war with Saudi Arabia over the Buraimi oasis...

...The new technique of aggression through third parties offers Russia possibilities of expansion at less cost and risk than any of her earlier policies...

...But Russia will still be able to keep her own hands clean, juridically at any rate...

...All these stakes are now threatened because a Communist satellite has made a commercial deal with a non-Communist government, in full conformity with international law and normal commercial practice...

...Yet, it is obvious that the humiliation of a further defeat would make the Arab peoples less ready than ever to accept the existence of the State of Israel...

...Though the Middle Eastern countries bordering the Soviet Union put the menace of Russian aggression before their other worries, the Arab countries to the south still consider Israel their main enemy...

...Small wonder that some Israelis are more than ever tempted to use their military superiority while it still exists to obtain a more defensible frontier...

...The Arab states harbor British and American air bases which are an essential element as an atomic deterrent...

...North Africa, too, provides the U.S...

...Everything Russia has said and done since Stalin's death confirms this interpretation of his testament...

...It is very unlikely that the Arab states will be more ready to compromise with Israel now that Russia has promised to swing the balance in their favor...

...At least until Russia's growing atomic power has neutralized the deterrent force of America's Strategic Air Command, it is unlikely that we shall see further indirect aggression on the Korean model...

...The offer of arms to Egypt foreshadows a new strategy for which the West is so far entirely unprepared...

...Why the West Must Aid Israel By Denis Healey To balk Communist designs in the Middle East London By arranging for Czechoslovakia to supply Egypt with arms, Russia has not only brought off the most brilliant coup in postwar diplomacy...

...The Korean gamble must have seemed justified to Russia by America's prior announcement that she did not consider the defense of Korea a vital American interest...

...They burn to wipe out the humiliation of their defeat in 1948-49...

...her present intervention proves it...

...This would not only reduce the danger of war...

...It is significant that on November 6 Lazar M. Kaganovitch, delivering the keynote speech on the anniversary of the October Revolution, emphasized that working-class revolutions would triumph abroad even without direct intervention by the Soviet Union...

...But if she took this line over the Middle East as well, her real aims would emerge more clearly before the whole world...

...America's freedom of maneuver is paralyzed by the coming Presidential election...

...Instead of trying to exert direct pressure on Middle Eastern governments -a policy which only assisted the West in building the "northern tier" treaty wall from Turkey to Pakistan -Russia is trying to set the Middle Eastern governments against one another without involving herself directly in any way...

...Russia is not formally committed in any way, and even Czechoslovakia has done only what the Western governments have been doing ever since 1948...

...There is no doubt that President Truman's historic decision to treat the Korean aggression as demanding collective action through the United Nations saved the world from further indirect aggression of this type-notably by the Soviet satellites in Europe against Yugoslavia...

...And while respect for Israel's formidable army has so far restrained them from general war, they maintain a total economic blockade of Israel and connive at frontier infiltration in the hope of discouraging further settlement of Israel's underdeveloped areas...

...The appalling sacrifices made mainly by the Korean and American peoples have thereby been rewarded...

...If this leads to war, the opportunities for Communist revolution will increase enormously in the Arab states...

...This would soon have a direct impact on the Arab populations of North Africa, already in revolt against French rule...

...By bringing Russia formally into negotiations on the Middle East, the West would restrict her present ability to fish in troubled waters...

...She has also provided the West with an exhibition of her latest cold-war tactics-the technique of fire-raising through third parties...

...But Russia is just that...

...Meanwhile, so long as Russia refuses to join in preventing a Middle Eastern war, the West must restore the balance between Israel and the Arabs by increasing its military and diplomatic support for Israel...

...In this context, Russian policy in the Middle East has taken a new turn...

...Meanwhile, Israel and the Arab states suffer alike from failure to cooperate in using the Jordan River for irrigation...

...Moreover, the present confusion complicates a situation which was already pregnant with danger...

...The Czech arms deal offers the Arabs for the first time a prospect of evading the Western attempt to keep a balance of military power in the area, and of turning their cold war against Israel into a hot war...

...Whatever the course of the fighting, it would probably bring the shaky structure of the Arab societies down in ruins and open the way to Communist revolution...

...No one can break the close ties linking the Soviet peoples with the broad masses of the working class in all countries,'' he said...

...But, in the present state of tension, reason is losing its power...

...The Middle Eastern situation is now the opposite of that in Europe: In Europe, a strategic stalemate has reduced the temperature of the cold war between Russia and the West...

...full-scale war in the Middle East is a real possibility...

...Finally, the Arab countries are split by Iraq's adherence to the "northern tier," which only aggravates a long-standing dynastic rivalry...

...with indispensable bomber bases...

...By relating her Middle Eastern adventures to the Spirit of Geneva, the West could make it difficult for Russia to play the double game which now suits her so well...

...There is a natural reluctance in the West to recognize Russia as a power in the Middle East...

...her behavior at Geneva has confirmed the view that the last thing she wants is to negotiate general settlements with the West as a whole...

...Yet, the doctrinal basis of the new strategy was announced by Stalin himself in the pamphlet which established coexistence as the new orthodoxy in 1952...

...There is no evidence that the Soviet Union has ever been prepared to deliberately risk her own involvement in a world war, though she has sometimes run such risks through miscalculating the West's reaction to local adventures like Berlin and Korea...

...The Middle East contains 60 per cent of the world's proved oil reserves...

...Indeed, there are signs that she may take the same line farther east, by inciting Afghanistan against Pakistan...

...The last British troops are just leaving Suez, so there is no prospect of exerting direct pressure on the Egyptian Government or of providing a physical barrier to war between Egypt and Israel...

...Unfortunately, the line taken by Prime Minister Eden in his Guildhall speech on November 9 led in the opposite direction...

...this can only encourage them to seek further aid from Russia...

...And in any case Russia limited the risk to herself by organizing the aggression through a government whose actions she could disavow in a crisis...

...In Communist jargon, this means turning the cold war into an inter-imperialist war, as the first step toward the Leninist policy of turning the inter-imperialist war into a civil war...

...Turkey is the only local power of significance, but Turkey's relations with her allies are complicated by the quarrel about Cyprus, and she is suffering from grave economic difficulties...

...In The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Stalin said in effect that Russia should not involve the Communist camp in direct conflict with the non-Communist world, but should concentrate on aggravating the internal conflicts inside the non-Communist world to break up its current solidarity...