Facing Mideast Realities
MORGENTHAU, HANS J.
THE NEW U.S. POLICY Facing Mideast Realities BY HANS J. MORGENTHAU Writing in The New Leader of December 19, 1977, I started my assessment of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem...
...What could be fairer and more self-evident than to allow the Palestinian Arabs the exercise of the same "right" that all nations on the face of the globe allegedly exercise, the right of national self-determination...
...Accomodating and resolute statesmen could ameliorate, but not essentially alter, the situation...
...Rarely, if ever, has modern history offered a more striking example of the importance of ideologies in international politics, and of the confounding effect of an ambiguous ideology aptly employed...
...policy, they are not likely to prevent them...
...Not only while Sadat was in Jerusalem but throughout the subsequent negotiations, he propounded the Arab demands without the slightest modification...
...This right, after all, is supposed to be universally valid, to be available to any national group that chooses to claim it...
...Consequently, the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs reveals itself as the ideological disguise of the unchanged aspiration of large masses of Arabs: the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment in its place of an Arab state...
...POLICY Facing Mideast Realities BY HANS J. MORGENTHAU Writing in The New Leader of December 19, 1977, I started my assessment of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem last November with these words: "The Arab-Israeli conflict has defied solution for almost 30 years...
...The British, the French and the Czechs were flexible in 1938 with consequences fatal to Czechoslovakia...
...The intellectual and moral instrument that has been chosen to put Israel in the wrong and finally break down its resistance is the principle of national self-determination...
...After the settlement of Munich granted the German demands with regard to Czechoslovakia, the London Times, making the German ideology its own, declared: "Self-determination, the professed principle of the Treaty of Versailles, has been invoked by Herr Hitler against its written text, and his appeal has been allowed...
...In concrete terms, the American agitation against Begin is ill-advised, for it misses the crucial point: that the stalemate results from the very nature of the controversies, which do not lend themselves to reconciliation and flexible treatment...
...Thus Woodrow Wilson justified the liberation of the Central and Eastern European nationalities from foreign domination by the principle of national self-determination...
...These do not readily lend themselves to the give and take of bargaining ending in compromise...
...The irreconcilability of these positions transcends the choice of negotiators and the tactics of negotiations...
...This policy was at odds with the policies of France and its Eastern allies and was aimed, first surreptitiously and later openly, at the termination of their preponderance on the continent of Europe...
...What has changed are the policies of the United States and, in consequence, the international position of Israel...
...Those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia are as outstanding as they were inevitable...
...As soon as they had installed themselves in power, they invoked the very same principle of national self-determination in defense of the new status quo...
...The issue of Palestinian self-determination, raised in the aftermath of the 1967 War and supported by the deliberate confinement of a sector of the Arab population of Palestine in refugee camps, must be seen in the context of the continuous opposition of large masses of Arabs to the existence of both the State of Israel and of Jewish settlements in the land of Palestine...
...The oil-producing nations hold the power of life and death over highly industrialized nations devoid of substantial oil deposits, such as Japan, West Germany, and also Israel...
...Israel, naturally, wants to survive as a sovereign state...
...So Austria and Czechoslovakia were surrendered, and Poland was exposed to mortal danger...
...Yet the destruction of the old imperial order immediately called forth, still in the from the end of World War I to the end of the World War II...
...In truth, the impasse is not the result of stupidity or ill will, to be remedied by the efforts of more enlightened and better-intentioned statesmen, although stupidity and ill will may have heightened tensions...
...the Israelis have consistently opposed the creation of such a state...
...The failure until now to settle the Middle East dispute rationally and peacefully is not primarily a result of the irrationality or inadequacy of statesmen, but of the nature of the main issues involved...
...The German minorities of Czechoslovakia and Poland, under the banner of national self-determination, were now to play the exact role in undermining the national existence of Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Czech, Slovak and Polish nationalities, under the same banner, had played in undermining the national existence of the Austria-Hungarian Empire...
...In short, the drastic shift in U.S...
...To the contrary, he saw his visit to Jerusalem as an occasion to reassert the basic Arab demands that Israel has always rejected...
...But this only means Sadat's actions have not exerted an automatic influence for a rational and peaceful settlement The developments that have taken place during the four months since those lines were written bear out their accuracy...
...Flexibility in negotiations is possible, and may even be a virtue, with regard to issues whose settlement one way or other is bearable to the side that is supposed to be flexible...
...Israeli statesmanship must try to create competing new interests, such as an American naval base in Israeli waters, that will strengthen the ties between the United States and Israel and counter the forces pulling the United States toward the Arab side...
...What the Arabs want—every inch" of conquered territory—Israel cannot be expected to concede...
...When Germany joined the League of Nations in 1925, it pursued a policy of whittling away at Versailles, mainly using national self-determination as the dynamite to crack the foundations of the territorial status quo...
...When Francis I of France was asked why he always made war against Charles V of Haps-burg, he replied: "Because both of us want the same thing, Italy...
...The changed balance has deprived the United Stales of the luxury of supporting Israel at the risk of Arab, and more specifically Saudi, displeasure...
...It is an illusion to assume that the traditional U.S...
...And to the extent that this world balance of power continues to move in favor of the Arab nations, American policy will follow suit...
...For Israel to rely upon the continuing strength of traditional emotions would be an act not of policy but of desperation...
...They will be able at best to soften the blows administered to Israel by U.S...
...In addition to the principle of national self-determination, Germany used the dual fear of Bolshevist revolution and Russian imperialism, which obsessed the Western powers, as a weapon to strengthen its own position...
...While alternately offering itself as a bulwark against Bolshevism and threatening to ally itself with the Soviet Union, Germany was able to wring concessions from the Western powers, to isolate Poland from France, and to paralyze the League...
...policy was preceded by, and is in good measure the reflection of, a drastic shift in the world balance of power...
...Israel, both with respect to the Sinai and the West Bank, has made substantial concessions...
...In assessing his initiatives it is important not to lose sight of the so far unchanged nature of each side's essential positions...
...The principle of national self-determination, however, can only be understood and rationally applied within name of self-determination, new imperialism...
...friendship for Israel, and what Begin calls "American fairness," can overcome this situation...
...The Arabs demand the return of every inch of Arab territory conquered by Israel in the '67 war...
...This is another way of saying that four wars have left it pretty much as they found it...
...They can be provoked by an American Middle Eastern policy too much at odds with their own...
...Traditional "friendship" and "fairness" will have a hard time prevailing against these new concrete interests...
...For that claim is territorially based not only upon the so-called West Bank of the Jordan but, as innumerable pronouncements of the Palestine Liberation Organization insist, includes the territory of the State of Israel...
...The incompatibility of the respective positions of the parties concerned, then, is the crux of the frustration that has beset all quests for a Middle East peace, and that incompatibility has not been altered by Sadat's gestures...
...Hans J. Morgenthau, a frequent NL contributor, is University Professor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research...
...Similarly, to do justice to the Arab claim of national self-determination, one has to put it in the political context from which it has risen and within which it is supposed to operate...
...The outstanding issues of the Middle East appear as intractable today as they were before Sadat's made his historic appearance before the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem...
...After having moved over the last three decades from a by and large pro-Israel position to an "evenhanded" posture, the United States assumed an essentially pro-Arab stance following Sadat's trip...
...Flexibility is impossible, and tantamount to the vice of appeasement, where the issue is life and death...
...This was their most potent ideological weapon a particular political context...
...In other words, the recognition of the legitimacy of the State of Israel is incompatible with the Palestinian Arabs' claim to national self-determination...
...Yet the United States has exclusively blamed Israel for the current stalemate and has charged, to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's dismay, that it is "obstructionist" and "inflexible...
...This is particularly true of Saudi Arabia because it is the leading oil-producing country in the world, and because of the ever increasing financial control it exerts over large segments of the Western economies...
...for the power vacuum left by the breakdown of the old imperialism had to be filled and the newly liberated nations were there to fill it...
...For what is responsible for the drastic changes that have occurred in American policy is not what Sadat or Begin have beein doing or have refrained from doing, but what the oil-producing nations, especially Saudi Arabia, have been doing and are able to do again...
...For instance, the Arabs have called for a sovereign Palestinian state comprising initially the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip...
...Otherwise, it is a principle of disintegration and anarchy that reduces political entities to ever smaller and less viable fragments...
...That displeasure can now be translated into oil embargos, oil price rises and dramatic financial manipulation...
...When one stands at the rim of the abyss, it may be better to stand one's ground than to be flexible and break one's neck in the process...
...With their own ideological weapon turned against them, the benefactors of (he status quo of Versailles had no ideology, except the one of law and order, with which to defend themselves...
...It was by a stroke of propagandists genius that Hitler hit upon the principle to disguise and justify his policies of territorial expansion...
...Theoretically it was opposed not only to the status quo of empire but also to imperialism of any kind, either on the part of the old imperial powers Germany, Austria and Russia or on the part of the liberated small nations...
...American policy will try to forestall these reactions...
...The same reply, substituting Palestine for Italy, could be given by Begin and Yasir Arafat...
...the Israelis insist upon retaining occupied areas they deem necessary to their security...
...An apparent majority of the Arabs want a settlement promising the disappearance of Israel from their midst...
...What Israel demands—secure borders at the expense of Arab territory and Palestinian sovereignty—the Arabs cannot be expected to give...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
