Negotiating Israel Off the Map
ALROY, GIL CARL
THE REAL ARAB PEACE PLAN Negotiating Israel Off the Map BY GIL CARL ALROY IN THE WAKE of Israel's complete withdrawal last month from the Sinai, Western analysts are predicting that the rejection...
...THE GRADUALISTS find Comfort in other recent developments: Consider, for example, the rise of Arab petropower and the growing support in the world's capitals for Palestinian statehood...
...Later, Sadat proved that the mere promise of peace, if made convincingly, could turn more Israeli hawks into doves than anyone would have thought possible...
...At the negotiating table, Henry Kissinger then gave the Arabs back more land than their generals managed to lose...
...The containment of Israel within whatever boundaries we can get international pressure to agree to and to stabilize...
...The new strategy was articulated by Cecil Hourani, one of Lebanon's preeminent intellectuals, in the November 1967 issue of Encounter...
...In the Arab world, a surge of Moslem fundamentalism could make the gradualist tack founder...
...If met with openness and good will, say the negotiators, Jews will surely follow their liberal instincts and happily live under Arab rule...
...One journey to Jerusalem, in effect, achieved the return of achunk of crucial land lost over a dozen years ago: Negotiating has restored to Egypt the Sinai's invaluable oil, strategic passes and critical airfields...
...After some attempts at rationalizing the '67 debacle, much of the Arab world painfully faced the reality of the foe's power...
...Thus ever since the Six Day War, the Arabs have sought to mobilize global pressure against Israel and press it back into its previous "dwarf shape (as it is known in Arab parlance...
...Consequently, forcing it to return every last inch of captured territory would break the country's basic will to exist by showing Jews that their greatest military achievements are futile...
...The various scenarios agree that the de-Zionization of Israel must proceed in stages, the first concluding with the withdrawal to pre-'67 lines and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank...
...Gamal Abdel Nasser tried to act on this principle by combining active warfare with international diplomacy in the hope of bringing about Israel's withdrawal without formally recognizing it...
...And more than 10 per cent of the Jewish population has emigrated to North America, while the number of newcomers is falling, in large part because the overwhelming majority of "Israel-bound" Russian Jews are electing to go to the U.S...
...it becomes a question of expediency...
...The gradual transformation of Israel from a European-dominated 'exclusive' Jewish State into a predominantly Oriental Arab-Jewish State [so that] the problem of whether or not to make a formal 'peace' becomes a secondary one...
...For this to be true, the Arabs would now have to be either entirely Westernized in their thinking, or so irrational as to be contemptible...
...GIL CARL ALROY is professor of political science at Hunter College...
...That Jews now rule over Moslems in the heart of the Arab world is an unconscionable humiliation...
...Islam, which has shaped the Arabs, has for 14 centuries relegated Jews to the status of demeaned subjects...
...But whatever may happen, one thing is already clear: Israeli hopes for gaining security through a negotiated change of borders have been vain all along...
...As they remind their critics, the uses and limits of military power were again tested in the Yom Kippur War...
...The next phase envisions an Arabized Palestine, as masses of refugees return to the new state from the Arab countries and the West...
...It should come as no surprise that Egypt is more advanced than most Arab states in discussing what the eventual substitute for Jewish statehood will be...
...A partial influx of Arabs would augment the fast-growing Arab minority in Israel...
...Zionism is considered "exclusive," reactionary, and as historically doomed as apartheid in South Africa...
...Statehood, it is contended, debases and distorts Judaism...
...Its goals are: "1...
...It will no longer be a question of principle on which no Arab leader can compromise...
...Similarly, an Arab perception that Egypt has abandoned proper Islamic goals could disgrace the policy altogether...
...Though the Sinai may have been conceded, Israelis do not seem prepared to let worldwide pressure force them into allowing a Palestinian state...
...His latest book is The Middle East Uncovered...
...The destiny of the " peace" strategy is still unclear, and obviously hostage to unforeseen events...
...Until the disastrous Arab defeat in the Six Day War of June 1967, neither the 1948 nor the 1956 military setbacks altered the widespread conviction in the Middle East that Israel was an ephemeral fluke, to be disposed of in one fell swoop...
...The Arabs believe that Israel's true nature is militaristic...
...At that point wide international support is anticipated for the return to Israel itself of Arabs who fled in 1948, in conformity with several UN resolutions...
...Or, in the Arab idiom: Expansionism is Zionism's inner dynamic, retreat its demise...
...In private, and eventually in public, the term " Israel" could occasionally be heard in place of the previously used "occupied territory...
...In the final phase, the remaining Jews would choose full participation as a religious community in a prospering Arab world, rather than persist as a hopeless political entity...
...On the battlefields, Israel ultimately ended up at the gates of both Cairo and Damascus...
...The most significant shift in Arab attitudes toward Israel, it should be remembered, occurred when the Jewish State conquered land, not surrendered it...
...Indeed, the depth of Arab outrage at the presence of a Jewish State in their midst has never really been grasped in the West...
...or the West's desertionof Israel could lead it to trust only in its own arms...
...Even their total withdrawal will not change the Arabs' desire to remove them from the map...
...Perhaps the Western analysts who today speak of the Sinai return initiating a new era in the Middle East have been confused by the Arabs who favor the negotiation route criticizing their fundamentalist brothers for unwittingly perpetuating Jewish statehood...
...THE REAL ARAB PEACE PLAN Negotiating Israel Off the Map BY GIL CARL ALROY IN THE WAKE of Israel's complete withdrawal last month from the Sinai, Western analysts are predicting that the rejection of the Jewish State by its neighbors is about to come to an end...
...When even the partially successful Yom Kippur War of October 1973 failed in this respect, Anwar Sadat had the courage to take a new tack, but he never retreated from the imperative of total withdrawal...
...Moreover, in molding a new national identity to meet the challenges of modernity, many Arabs now hold their ability to punish the Jews' provocation as a crucial test of success...
...But the most important aspect of the Arabs' confidence in the diplomatic approach is that it must work because nothing short of the end of Israel is acceptable...
...The conventional assumption that one can trade the captured territory for permanent peace falls before the inescapable fact that the moderate Arabs, despite appearances, want to swap all the land for only temporary peace...
...The facts of Middle East life appear to validate a good many of these sanguine expectations on the part of some of the brightest and most powerful Arab figures...
...This is to be followed by the demand that Israel be confined to the area originally assigned to it by the United Nations (the Soviet Union is already formally committed to those 1947 lines as the Jewish State's sole legitimate boundaries...
...Meanwhile, non-Oriental Jews would emigrate as Israeli morale and glamor dwindle...
...Nor does the recent plan put forward by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Fahd...
...The weight of their history and their hopes for the future lead them to press for utter rejection...
...A change of tactics has been confused with a change of heart...
...Of course, armed might hardly granted Israel legitimacy...
...And with the battlefield clearly a counterproductive therapy, except as an adjunct to diplomacy, a more radical approach is necessary...
...Because the hitherto quiescent Israeli Arabs have become restive with the PLO's rise to global stature, they are expected to turn militantly irredentist once a Palestinian state emerges just miles away from Tel Aviv, and to demand autonomy for the Galilee...
...They are neither...
...Small wonder that many Arabs are convinced history has turned in their direction at last...
...While intellectuals and leaders from around the Arab world debate the matter, the give and take is more open in Egypt, where participants include such members of the regime as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Boutros Ghali...
...Instead "the Zionist entity" has been treated as if it were a cancer: Its presence must be recognized, but one cannot capitulate to it...
...Further, the economic malaise in Israel is deepening, making it increasingly dependent on American assistance...
...Underlying these sentiments is the conviction that the Jews themselves would be best served if they were returned to their "normal" condition of being merely a religious community...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 9
