If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that the whole Arab world would recognize Israeland establish normal relations with it, in return for Israel’s recognition of the Green Lineborder, we would have believed that the days of the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people wouldhave run into the street, singing and dancing, as they did on November 29, 1947, when the UnitedNations called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.
But then disaster struck: we conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Labor and Likudgovernments filled them up with settlements, and today this offer sounds to many like amalicious anti-Semitic plot.
The leaders of Israel tell us: Don’t worry. Just as we survived Pharaoh, so we shall surviveEmir Abdallah.*
- This is an allusion to a famous Israeli song.
So what will happen?
In Israel, every international initiative designed to put an end to the conflict passesthrough three stages: (a) denial, (b) misrepresentation, (c) liquidation. That’s how theSharon-Peres government will deal with this one, too. It can draw on 53 years of experience,during which both Labor and Likud governments have succeeded in scuttling every peace planput forward.
(We must nor suspect, God forbid, that the successive Israeli governments were opposed topeace. Not at all. Every one of them wanted peace. They all longed for peace. “Provided peacegives us the whole country, at least up to the Jordan river, and lets us cover all of it withJewish settlements.” Until now, all peace plans have fallen short of that.)
PHASE A is designed to belittle the offer. “There is nothing new there,” the Political Sourceswould assert. “It is offered solely for tactical purposes. It is a political gimmick”. If theoffer comes from an Arab: “He says it to the international community, but not to his ownpeople”. I short, “It’s not serious.”
One proven method is to concentrate on one word and argue that it shows the dishonesty of thewhole offer. For example, before the October 1973 war, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made afar-reaching peace offer. Golda Meir rejected it out of hand. Her Arabists (there are alwaysintellectual whores around to do the dirty job) discovered that Sadat spoke of “salaam” butnot of “sulh, which “proves” that he does not mean real peace. More than 2000 Israel soldiersand tens of thousand Egyptians paid with their lives for this word. After that, a salaam treatywas signed.
Such methods are already being applied now to the Saudi offer. First it was said that CrownPrince Abdullah had spoken about his initiative only with an American journalist, but notaddressed his own people. When it transpired that it was widely published in all Saudi papers,both at home and in London, another argument was put forward: the prince has made his offer onlybecause Saudis had become unpopular in the United States after the Twin Towers outrage. (As ifthis matters.) In short, Abdullah has not become a real Zionist.
This point was widely discussed in the Israeli media. Commentators commentated , scholarsshowed their scholarly prowess. But not one (not one!) of them discussed the actual content ofthe offer.
PHASE B is designed to outsmart the offer. We do not reject the offer. Of course not! We a longingfor peace! So we welcome the “positive trend” of the offer and kick the ball out of the field.
The best method is to ask for a meeting with the Arab leader who proposed the offer, “to clarifythe issues”. That sounds logical. Americans think that, if two people have a quarrel, theyshould meet and discuss the matter, in order to end it. What can be more reasonable than that?
But a conflict between nations does not resemble a quarrel between two people. Every Arabpeace offer rests on a two-part premise: You give back the occupied territories, and you getrecognition and “normalization”. Normalization includes, of course, meetings of theleaders. When the Israeli government demands a meeting with Arab leaders “to clarifydetails”, it actually tries to get the reward (normalization) without delivering the goods(withdrawal from the occupied territories). A beautiful trick, indeed. If the Arab leadersrefuse to meet, well, it only shows that their peace offer is a sham, doesn’t it?
Many peace offers have fallen into this trap. Ben-Gurion offered to meet with MuhammadNaguib, the Egyptian ruler after the 1952 revolution. Several Prime Ministers asked to meetHafez al-Assad. Only Sadat outsmarted the smart ones and turned the tables on them. He came toJerusalem on his own initiative.
When the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted resolution 242, the Israeligovernment did not accept it. Only much later, when there was no way out, it accepted it”according to the Israeli interpretation”. This concentrated on the article “the” that ismissing in the English version (which demands withdrawal from “occupied territories”instead of from “the occupied territories”), contrary to the French version, in which thearticle duly appears. (The Soviets were caught napping, because there is no article in theRussian language.)
The preferred method is to kill the spirit of the offer slowly, to talk about it endlessly, tointerpret it this way and that way, to drag negotiations on and on, to put forward conditionwhich the other side cannot accept, until the initiative yields in silence. That’s whathappened to the Conciliation Committee in Lausanne, that is what happened to most of theEuropean and American peace plans.
PHASE C: If phases A and B have not worked, the liquidation stage arrives. Nowadays it is called”targeted prevention” or, simply, “ascertained killing” by the army.
Against the original UN mediator, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, “targetedprevention” was applied literally: he was shot and killed. The killers were “dissidents”,but Ben-Gurion did not shed any tears.
Usually, Israeli governments use two deadly torpedoes in their arsenal: the US Congress andthe American media. William Rogers, President Nixon’s secretary of state, for example,proposed a peace plan that included the withdrawal of Israel to the pre-1967 border, with”insubstantial changes”. Israel released its torpedoes and sunk Rogers together with hisplan. His job was taken over by the Jewish megalomaniac, Henry Kissinger, and that was the endof peace plans.
Can the Saudi initiative be scuttled in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it willnot be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small frigate, not even a destroyer,but a mighty aircraft carrier. A great effort will be needed to torpedo it.
But Shimon Peres and his foreign office are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it fordecades. Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor party, under the leadership of asmall-time copy of Sharon, will join the chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having toend the occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government.
Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In Israel, real public discourse has died long ago. Thenational instinct of survival has become blunted. Thirty five years of occupation andsettlement have eroded the nation’s abilty to reason, leaving instead a mixture of arroganceand folly.
A great, perhaps unique opportunity may be missed. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousandsmay pay for it with their lives. They will not dance in the streets any more.