WAR AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free*' War and Peace in the Middle East TTostilities in the Middle East had come to an end as this was written. Israeli arms...
...Goldberg then went on to praise U Thant's pursuit of a peaceful solution...
...We tend to agree with Tom Wicker of the strongly pro-Israeli New York Times that while history may never be able to make an exact determination, "the presumptive evidence is that the Israelis launched the actual fighting...
...Two—Israel, obliged by hostile encirclement to play a lonely game, has overplayed her hand on occasion...
...There have been occasions over the past decade, too, as the United Nations has determined, when Israel violently over-reacted to border incidents...
...But when the time comes that Egypt can hope to reap the gains of this increase, the population will have increased to the point where per capita food production will actually drop below the level of January, 1960, when construction of the dam began...
...It would hardly be logical," the Secretary-General continued, "to take the position that, because UNEF has maintained relative quiet along the line for more than ten years, due in large measure to the cooperation of the United Arab Republic authorities, the UAR government should now be told that it cannot unilaterally seek the removal of the force...
...The Soviet Union had poured hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons into the trigger-happy hands of the Egyptians and the Syrians...
...This would place an intolerable strain on this tiny country's precarious economy, and it would, moreover, create a critical security problem for Israel—with a million or so dissident, revenge-minded Arabs on her soil...
...peacekeeping forces on her soil is somehow a reflection on the nation's virility and an affront to its sovereignty...
...That proposal should be urgently revived now...
...What is also needed are positive reaffirmations by the United Nations and the Great Powers of the territorial integrity of Israel and her Arab neighbors...
...forces from Egypt, demanded and obtained by Nasser, would still have left a United Nations buffer force on the Israeli side of the border and possibly might have barred the way to hostilities...
...In April this year Israeli aircraft shot down six Soviet-built Syrian MIGs over Jordanian and Syrian territory...
...Four—The Great Powers must agree, for their own self-interest if for no loftier purpose, to end the arms race in the Middle East by refusing to sell or give arms to any country in the region...
...Despair and devastation dominate the Arab countryside...
...For example, the Israelis overreacted to Arab provocations late last fall and this past spring shortly before the current explosion—and, in the judgment of some competent observers, may have set fire to the tinderbox the Arabs had provided...
...Three— The Arab World, led by Nasser's Egypt, rates the decisive share of the blame for the current crisis...
...It is reassuring that some of those who first lashed out at U Thant, including some Israeli spokesmen, have now greatly moderated their position and understand the undeviat-ing commitment of the Secretary-General to world peace and the integrity of the United Nations...
...Without Arab recognition of Israel's national personality, there can be no basis for a peace settlement to replace the rickety, long battered, and now smashed armistice of 1949...
...For it was they who had raced each other to provide the arms, without which a military confrontation would have been impossible...
...In a demilitarized zone of Jordan, Israel retaliated to an unusually severe terrorist attack on her border by burning forty Jordanian homes—although, to be sure, not until the inhabitants had been warned...
...Our considerable confidence in him is unshaken...
...He consulted for hours with his advisers in the Secretariat, including Ralph Bunche, who advised the Secretary-General that he had no alternative but to comply with Egypt's demand...
...The obliteration of Israel would solve none of the social, economic, and political problems that torment the Arabs today...
...Two—The government of Israel, perhaps with the economic assistance of the Great Powers, must take prompt, decisive, and generous steps to indemnify the Arabs who lost their homes and their lands when Israel was created...
...France had sold a sizable arsenal to the understandably anxiety-ridden Israelis...
...Bitterness and hate are everywhere...
...It may be pointed out in passing," Mr...
...We will never accept co-existence with Israel," he cried to the hysterical mobs...
...And the United States, obsessed as always with deepening escalation in Vietnam, ignored the danger signals flashing in the Middle East...
...This, too, made U Thant's position extremely difficult and delicate, if not untenable, when Nasser demanded immediate withdrawal of the UNEF...
...One American newsman who saw him in action at close range during the past year or two called him an irresponsible adventurer who has acquired a Messianic complex...
...It is true that Thant might have stalled for a day or two, but with results that would doubtless have been much the same, except that there might have been bloodshed if runaway mobs of emotionally-charged Egyptians had attacked the lightly-armed UNEF forces...
...Instead, working through the United Nations, the wealthier and more powerful countries should join forces to provide significant economic assistance to all nations in the Middle East...
...When he finally filled the position by giving the job to his ambassador to the UAR, he left Cairo without an American ambassador for eleven weeks just at the time Nasser was brewing his new crisis...
...But time, tradition, and international agreement have sealed the settlement of 1947-1948, and the implacable, vengeance-motivated insistence of the Arab leadership that Israel must be destroyed, if persisted in, could only result in chaos and disaster for all the peoples of the Middle East...
...Thant said afterwards, "that over the years UNEF dealt with numerous infiltrators coming from the Israeli as well as from the United Arab Republic side of the line...
...In November, 1962, Mrs...
...If she did fire the first shot, it was only after intense and deliberate provocation by Arab leaders—and several weeks of fruitless haggling by the Great Powers and frustrating paralysis in the United Nations...
...Golda Meir, then Israel's foreign minister, suggested that her country would be willing to negotiate a compensation settlement for the Arab refugees—but only as part of a package deal for a general .peace agreement to replace the shattered armistice of 1949...
...Some hot-headed Israelis, however, may continue to demand the spoils of victory, but the only meaningful fruit of military success for Israel is a peace settlement that makes possible the patient pursuit of reconciliation with the Arab world...
...The jittery, unstable government of Syria—there have been a dozen changes in Syria's government in eleven years— immediately appealed to Egypt to honor her military alliance in the face of this grave threat from Israel...
...The speed and scope of the Israeli triumph stunned the whole world...
...The great Aswan Dam, for example, which is rising on the Nile with massive Soviet assistance, will add two million acres of arable land to the present total of six million...
...President Nasser, who had often proclaimed his implacable hostility to Israel and had long waited in the wings to reassert his claim to leadership of the Arab world, bounced onto the stage, ordered the United Nations peace-keeping forces out of his country, mobilized his own forces on the border, declared the Gulf of Aqaba closed to Israeli shipping, and, doubtless much to his own surprise at the swift pace of events, found himself acclaimed, in the Arab world, as the hero and savior who had parlayed a couple of Israeli mistakes into a brief political triumph over Israel—a triumph that was soon, however, to be reversed by the spectacular military success of the Israelis...
...It can only be achieved by understanding...
...Consider the roles each has played: One—The Great Powers, expressing shock and dismay at first over the war hysteria and then over the war itself that swept through the Middle East, were guilty of massive hypocrisy...
...Now comes the hard and heavy task of building a peace—a peace that may be more difficult to achieve as a result of the very magnitude of Israel's victory...
...Arab children are born with psychological scars," an articulate, well-informed Egyptian told us recently...
...Indeed, for nearly six months President Johnson left vacant the key post of Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East...
...In longer-range terms, none of the three actors in the current crisis—the Great Powers, Israel, and the Arab world—came into the court of world opinion with spotless hands...
...presence in 1956, the withdrawal of U.N...
...Shortly thereafter the new nation was recognized by and accepted as a member of the United Nations...
...No peaceful settlement can hope to endure, it seems to us, that does not include at least these principal ingredients: One—The Arab world must accept the fact of Israel as a free, independent, sovereign nation...
...Given this fact of domestic despair, given the further fact that Nasser's enemies in the Arab world were taunting him—although he was long a leader in hostility to Israel—with cries of "coward" and "paper tiger" in the face of his relatively moderate response to Israel's over-reaction to border incidents, given the additional fact that his ill-conceived campaign against the royalists has been bogged down for months in Yemen, and given the final fact that the Soviets stood at his side with guns, planes, money, and a desire to improve their bargaining position with the United States in the war in Vietnam—given all these considerations, Nasser's recent moves assume a sort of twisted logic of their own: the desperate design by a leader in urgent need of a major diversion...
...Altogether, a recent London Times study showed, the nations of Europe and North America have poured almost $3 billion in armaments into this highly inflammable region since World War II...
...Another correspondent emphasized that Nasser is basically a shrewd, sophisticated leader who has sought to forge a more progressive program at home than the royalist reactionaries in some of the other areas of the Middle East...
...This strikes us as a criminal incitement to permanent warfare...
...As the late Albert Einstein once said: "Peace cannot be kept by force...
...His insistence that the end of Israel was his real goal brought—for the moment—an end to domestic conflict in Egypt and his enthronement—again for only the moment—as the unchallenged leader of the Arab world...
...indeed, the contrived concentration of Arab concern on the presence of tiny Israel provides Arab leaders with a device to shift public attention away from their own inability to solve their social and economic problems...
...Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg spoke for many thoughtful observers when he urged that "we should at all costs avoid wasteful recrimination" on this subject...
...Israel is a child of international agreement and United Nations decision...
...Even the Soviet Union, which armed the Arabs for their recent adventures against Israel, does not dispute her legitimacy...
...Hearing the clangorous call for a holy war against Israel, Nasser must have realized at this point, just before the guns went off, that he had mounted a tiger he could not ride...
...Those who stand by Israel are our enemies and those who stand with us are our friends...
...It is understandable that the Arabs passionately resent the transfer of the land that is now Israel to the Jews—a transfer made without Arab consent and over their bitter and violent objections...
...Little or nothing has been achieved in all these years in working out a decent settlement of the claims of Palestinian Arabs who lost their lands and homes to Israel...
...The conflict over the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf 'of Aqaba was an important factor but not the governing consideration...
...They are indoctrinated from the first moment of understanding," he noted with approval, "with the conviction that their great mission in life is to redeem the portion of Palestine arbitrarily handed to the Zionists by the Great Powers—and to reopen that land to the Arab refugees now living in hunger and despair...
...Had Israel consented to a U.N...
...The heart of the matter was and is the refusal of the Arab world to accept the very existence of Israel, which was created through the partition of Palestine in 1947-1948, with the blessing of both the Soviet Union and the United States...
...The results, however, have not been impressive—in significant measure because the increase in population is outrunning the gains in technology...
...This recognition, understandably, will be a bitter pill for the Arabs to swallow, but history reminds us that countless "irreconcilable conflicts" have yielded to the healing powers of time and tolerance and reason—and a willingness to live and let live...
...Moreover, two of the nations with the largest contingents in the UNEF, India and Yugoslavia, whose troops constituted nearly half the force, were unwilling to maintain them against Egypt's wishes and demanded the immediate withdrawal of their men, which they had every right to do...
...Israel, on the map, represents an almost invisible island in the vast Arab world...
...Great Britain had deposited nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of military hardware in the oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia...
...The Soviets played an especially dangerous game in encouraging Nasser and other Arab adventurers...
...U Thant did not "shoot from the hip" as some of his critics have contended...
...A day or two later, before war broke out, Nasser described Egyptians as "hotter than burning coals in awaiting the battle with Israel...
...Given the harsh facts of life in the Middle East, Israel must discard the false notion that the presence of U.N...
...There is doubtless much more that needs doing, including the internationalization of Jerusalem, so holy to three great religions...
...This is the moment when the leaders and people of Israel must exercise extraordinary restraint, as some are...
...Israel, moreover, has unwisely walked out of—or failed to attend— meetings of the Mixed Armistice Commissions established by the United Nations to resolve specific disputes...
...But these four proposals, we are convinced, lie at the heart of the problem of taking the first patient steps toward transforming this region of constant conflict and wretched poverty into one of peace and hope...
...A final grievance against Israel held by many western students of the region who deeply believe in her right to live as a free and independent nation is her long-standing failure to deal humanely and comprehensively with the vexing problem of the estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 Arab refugees who were uprooted or who uprooted themselves when the Israelis took over their portion of Palestine two decades ago...
...It has only lately been revealed, by a source James A. Wechsler described in The New York Post as one "whose integrity is beyond challenge," that in the tense hours preceding his decision to pull the UNEF out of Egypt, Thant addressed an urgent secret plea to Israel to allow the transfer of the UNEF contingent to the Israeli side of the border...
...The strident competition among Arab leaders to spew the most hateful epithets on Israel—and their shrill call for a holy war—did much to inflame Arab public opinion to the boiling point...
...Israel rejected Thant's plea...
...The wave of criticism that beat down on U. N. Secretary-General U Thant for withdrawing the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) from the Egyptian side of the 117-mile frontier with Israel strikes us as largely unjustified...
...This is not to brand Israel as the aggressor on the basis of the evidence available to us up to now...
...Israel had refused at the time to permit a similar force on her side of the frontier...
...The UNEF, it must be remembered, was placed on Egyptian soil in 1956 solely with Egypt's consent...
...Encircled by a bitterly hostile Arab world vowing her destruction, confronted with hastily rigged military alliances between previously feuding Arab nations, faced with total Arab mobilization after the expulsion of the United Nations Emergency Force from Egypt, denied innocent passage to and from her vital port of Elath, convinced that her very survival was at stake, and left largely alone in her agony by the rest of the world—Israel showed great and commendable restraint until the guns went off...
...Three—This time, unlike 1956, both sides should be obliged to accept a substantial and effective United Nations' presence on their borders or in neutral, demilitarized zones—at least until tempers cool and passions subside...
...And the United States, true to its traditions of free enterprise, had supplied mountains of arms to both sides...
...The Progressive does not suggest that Israel take back all, or nearly all, of the refugees who fled or were expelled two decades ago...
...She refused, for example, for reasons that seem to us false pride, to permit a United Nations presence on her side of the border after the war of 1956, although Egypt, too weak and defeated to resist, consented to such a presence until the current crisis exploded...
...Reasonable compensation to the refugees would enable them to resettle permanently on the friendly soil of their Arab cousins...
...Far more significant, perhaps, was the May declaration by the highest Israeli officials, including the usually mild-mannered and peace-committed Prime Minister Eshkol, that further border raids from Syria would result in the invasion of that country, the seizure of Damascus, and the overthrow of the Syrian government...
...And recognition clearly must encompass Israel's untrammeled right to free and innocent passage of both the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal...
...When hostilities broke out June 5, each side accused the other of firing the first shot...
...Each contributed some of the matches and the tinder that ignited the fire which threatened for a time to run out of control...
...None of the basic causes of conflict has been resolved by the success of Israel's arms...
...Israeli arms were brilliantly triumphant on every front...
...President Nasser has been described to us in somewhat contradictory terms by correspondents whose judgment we usually respect...
...Greatly outnumbered and forced to fight simultaneously on three or four fronts, the Israelis destroyed much of the shiny new military hardware given the Arabs by the Soviets and, in the process, shattered the morale of the Arabs who, only a few days before, had been whipped into a frenzied mob clamoring for a holy war to exterminate Israel...
...All the Great Powers, moreover, were guilty of failing, despite repeated warnings, to come to grips, either in the United Nations or through Four Power talks, with the basic issues which almost everyone knew must one day explode in violent confrontation...
...This pursuit of peace in the Middle East will be extraordinarily difficult...
...We suspect that when all the facts are known, U Thant will be acclaimed for his even-handed statesmanship in pursuing peace, which is what his job is all about...
...This problem has been neglected far too long, despite repeated pleas to Israel by the United Nations for just compensation...
Vol. 31 • July 1967 • No. 7
