The Israel-Arab Reader

by Walter Laqueur

  U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz: Congressional Testimony (July 12, 1982)26

  In late 1974 I visited Beirut, at the time a beautiful and thriving city, even then marked by the presence of Palestinian refugees. But since then Lebanon has been racked by destruction, enduring the presence of armed and assertive PLO and other forces.

  Coherent life and government are impossible under those conditions and inevitably Lebanon became a state in disrepair. The Lebanese deserve a chance to govern themselves, free from the presence of the armed forces of any other country or group. The authority of the Government of Lebanon must extend to all its territory.

  The agony of Lebanon is on the minds and in the hearts of us all. But in a larger sense Lebanon is but the latest chapter in a history of accumulated grief stretching back through decades of conflict. We are talking here about a part of the globe that has had little genuine peace for generations. A region with thousands of victims—Arab, Israeli and other families torn apart as a consequence of war and terror. What is going on now in Lebanon must mark the end of this cycle of terror rather than simply the latest in a continuing series of senseless and violent acts.

  We cannot accept the loss of life brought home to us every day even at this great distance on our television screens; but at the same time we can, as Americans, be proud that once again it is the United States, working most prominently through President Reagan’s emissary, Ambassador Philip Habib, that is attempting to still the guns, achieve an equitable outcome and alleviate the suffering.

  Mr. Chairman, the crisis in Lebanon makes painfully and totally clear a central reality of the Middle East: The legitimate needs and problems of the Palestinian people must be addressed and resolved—urgently and in all their dimensions. Beyond the suffering of the Palestinian people lies a complex of political problems which must be addressed if the Middle East is to know peace. The Camp David framework calls as a first step for temporary arrangements which will provide full autonomy for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. That same framework then speaks eloquently and significantly of a solution that “must also recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

  The challenge of the negotiations in which the United States is, and during my tenure will remain, a full partner, is to transform that hope into reality. For these talks to succeed, representatives of the Palestinians themselves must participate in the negotiating process. The basis must also be found for other countries in the region, in addition to Israel and Egypt, to join in the peace process.

  Our determined effort to stop the killing in Lebanon, resolve the conflict, and make the Government of Lebanon once again sovereign throughout its territory underscores the degree to which our nation has vital interests throughout the Arab world. Our friendly relations with the great majority of Arab states have served those interests and, I believe, assisted our efforts to deal with the current Lebanon crisis.

  But beyond the issues of the moment, the importance to our own security of wide and ever-strengthening ties with the Arabs is manifest. It is from them that the West gets much of its oil; it is with them that we share an interest and must cooperate in resisting Soviet imperialism; it is with them, as well as Israel, that we will be able to bring peace to the Middle East.

  Finally, and most important, Mr. Chairman, the Lebanese situation is intimately linked to the vital question of Israel’s security. Israel, our closest friend in the Middle East, still harbors a deep feeling of insecurity. In a region where hostility is endemic, and where so much of it is directed against Israel, the rightness of her preoccupation with matters of security cannot be disputed. Nor should anyone dispute the depth and durability of America’s commitment to the security of Israel or our readiness to assure that Israel has the necessary means to defend herself. I share in this deep and enduring commitment. And more, I recognize that democratic Israel shares with us a deep commitment to the security of the West.

  Beyond that, however, we owe it to Israel, in the context of our special relationship, to work with her to bring about a comprehensive peace—acceptable to all the parties involved—which is the only sure guarantee of true and durable security.

  Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin: The Wars of No Alternative and Operation Peace for the Galilee (August 8, 1982)27

  Let us turn from the international example to ourselves. Operation Peace for Galilee is not a military operation resulting from the lack of an alternative. The terrorists did not threaten the existence of the State of Israel; they “only” threatened the lives of Israel’s citizens and members of the Jewish people. There are those who find fault with the second part of that sentence. If there was no danger to the existence of the state, why did you go to war?

  I will explain why. We had three wars which we fought without an alternative. The first was the War of Independence, which began on November 30, 1947, and lasted until January 1949. . . . We carried on our lives then by a miracle, with a clear recognition of life’s imperative: to win, to establish a state, a government, a parliament, a democracy, an army—a force to defend Israel and the entire Jewish people.

  The second war of no alternative was the Yom Kippur War and the War of Attrition that preceded it. What was the situation on that Yom Kippur day [October 6, 1973]? We had 177 tanks deployed on the Golan Heights against 1,400 Soviet-Syrian tanks; and fewer than 500 of our soldiers manned positions along the Suez Canal against five divisions sent to the front by the Egyptians.

  It is any wonder that the first days of that war were hard to bear? I remember Gen. Avraham Yaffe came to us, to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, and said: “Oy, it’s so hard! Our boys, 18- and 19-year-olds, are falling like flies and are defending our nation with their very bodies.”

  In the Golan Heights there was a moment when the O/C Northern Command—today our chief of staff—heard his deputy say, “This is it.” What that meant was: “We’ve lost: we have to come down off the Golan Heights.” And the then O/C said, “Give me another five minutes.”

  Sometimes five minutes can decide a nation’s fate. During those five minutes, several dozen tanks arrived, which changed the entire situation on the Golan Heights.

  If this had not happened, if the Syrian enemy had come down from the heights to the valley, he would have reached Haifa—for there was not a single tank to obstruct his armoured column’s route to Haifa. Yes, we would even have fought with knives—as one of our esteemed wives has said—with knives against tanks. Many more would have fallen, and in every settlement there would have been the kind of slaughter at which the Syrians are experts.

  In the south, our boys in the outposts were taken prisoner, and we know what happened to them afterwards. Dozens of tanks were destroyed, because tanks were sent in piecemeal, since we could not organize them in a large formation. And dozens of planes were shot down by missiles which were not destroyed in time, so that we had to submit to their advances.

  Woe to the ears that still ring with the words of one of the nation’s heroes, the then defence minister, in whose veins flowed the blood of the Maccabees: “We are losing the Third Commonwealth.”

  Our total casualties in that war of no alternative were 2,297 killed, 6,067 wounded. Together with the War of Attrition—which was also a war of no alternative—2,659 killed, 7,251 wounded. The terrible total: almost 10,000 casualties.

  Our other wars were not without an alternative. In November 1956 we had a choice. The reason for going to war then was the need to destroy the fedayeen,who did not represent a danger to the existence of the state.

  However, the political leadership of the time thought it was necessary to do this. As one who served in the parliamentary opposition, I was summoned to David Ben-Gurion before the cabinet received information of the plan, and he found it necessary to give my colleagues and myself these details: We are going to meet the enemy before it absorbs the Soviet weapons which began to flow to it from Czechoslovakia in 1955.

  In June 1967 we
again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.

  This was a war of self-defence in the noblest sense of the term. The government of national unity then established decided unanimously: We will take the initiative and attack the enemy, drive him back, and thus assure the security of Israel and the future of the nation.

  As for Operation Peace for Galilee, it does not really belong to the category of wars of no alternative. We could have gone on seeing our civilians injured in Metulla or Kiryat Shmona or Nahariya. We could have gone on counting those killed by explosive charges left in a Jerusalem supermarket, or a Petah Tikva bus stop.

  All the orders to carry out these acts of murder and sabotage came from Beirut. Should we have reconciled ourselves to the ceaseless killing of civilians, even after the agreement ending hostilities reached last summer, which the terrorists interpreted as an agreement permitting them to strike at us from every side, besides Southern Lebanon? They tried to infiltrate gangs of murderers via Syria and Jordan, and by a miracle we captured them. We might also not have captured them. There was a gang of four terrorists which infiltrated from Jordan, whose members admitted they had been about to commandeer a bus (and we remember the bus on the coastal road).

  And in the Diaspora? Even Philip Habib interpreted the agreement ending acts of hostility as giving them freedom to attack targets beyond Israel’s borders. We have never accepted this interpretation. Shall we permit Jewish blood to be spilled in the Diaspora? Shall we permit bombs to be planted against Jews in Paris, Rome, Athens or London? Shall we permit our ambassadors to be attacked?

  There are slanderers who say that a full year of quiet has passed between us and the terrorists. Nonsense. There was not even one month of quiet. The newspapers and communications media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, did not publish even one line about our capturing the gang of murderers that crossed the Jordan in order to commandeer a bus and murder its passengers.

  True, such actions were not a threat to the existence of the state. But they did threaten the lives of civilians whose number we cannot estimate, day after day, week after week, month after month.

  During the past nine weeks, we have, in effect, destroyed the combat potential of 20,000 terrorists. We hold 9,000 in a prison camp. Between 2,000 and 3,000 were killed and between 7,000 and 9,000 have been captured and cut off in Beirut. They have decided to leave there only because they have no possibility of remaining there. The problem will be solved.

  We have destroyed the best tanks and planes the Syrians had. We have destroyed 24 of their ground-to-air missile batteries. After everything that happened, Syria did not go to war against us, not in Lebanon and not in the Golan Heights.

  For our part, we will not initiate any attack against any Arab country. We have proved that we do not want wars. We made many painful sacrifices for a peace treaty with Egypt. That treaty stood the test of the fighting in Lebanon; in other words, it stood the test.

  The demilitarized zone of 150 kilometers in Sinai exists, and no Egyptian soldier has been placed there. From the experience of the 1930s, I have to say that if ever the other side violated the agreement about the demilitarized zone, Israel would be obliged to introduce, without delay, a force stronger than that violating the international commitment: not in order to wage war, but to achieve one of two results: restoration of the previous situation, i.e., resumed demilitarization, and the removal of both armies from the demilitarized zone; or attainment of strategic depth, in case the other side has taken the first step towards a war of aggression, as happened in Europe only three years after the abrogation of the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland.

  Because the other Arab countries are completely incapable of attacking the State of Israel, there is reason to expect that we are facing a historic period of peace. It is obviously impossible to set a date.

  It may well be that “The land shall be still for 40 years.” Perhaps less: perhaps more. But from the facts before us, it is clear that, with the end of the fighting in Lebanon, we have ahead of us many years of establishing peace treaties and peaceful relations with the various Arab countries.

  The conclusion—both on the basis of the relations between states and on the basis of our national experience—is that there is no divine mandate to go to war only if there is no alternative. There is no moral imperative that a nation must, or is entitled to, fight only when its back is to the sea, or to the abyss. Such a war may avert tragedy, if not a Holocaust, for any nation; but it causes it terrible loss of life.

  Quite the opposite. A free, sovereign nation, which hates war and loves peace, and which is concerned about its security, must create the conditions under which war, if there is a need for it, will not be for lack of alternative. The conditions must be such—and their creation depends upon man’s reason and his actions—that the price of victory will be few casualties, not many.

  U.S. President Ronald Reagan: The Reagan Plan (September 1, 1982)

  My fellow Americans, today has been a day that should make us proud. It marked the end of the successful evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Beirut, Lebanon. This peaceful step could never have been taken without the good offices of the United States and, especially, the truly heroic work of a great American diplomat, Ambassador Philip Habib [President’s special emissary to the Middle East]. Thanks to his efforts, I am happy to announce that the U.S. Marine contingent helping to supervise the evacuation has accomplished its mission. Our young men should be out of Lebanon within two weeks. They, too, have served the cause of peace with distinction, and we can all be very proud of them.

  But the situation in Lebanon is only part of the overall problem of conflict in the Middle East. So, over the past two weeks, while events in Beirut dominated the front page, America was engaged in a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to lay the groundwork for a broader peace in the region. For once, there were no premature leaks as U.S. diplomatic missions traveled to Mid-East capitals, and I met here at home with a wide range of experts to map out an American peace initiative for the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East, Arab and Israeli alike.

  It seemed to me that, with the agreement in Lebanon, we had an opportunity for a more far-reaching peace effort in the region, and I was determined to seize that moment. In the words of the scripture, the time had come to “follow after the things which make for peace.”

  Tonight, I want to report to you on the steps we have taken and the prospects they can open up for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. America has long been committed to bringing peace to this troubled region. For more than a generation, successive U.S. administrations have endeavored to develop a fair and workable process that could lead to a true and lasting Arab-Israeli peace. Our involvement in the search for Mid-East peace is not a matter of preference, it is a moral imperative. The strategic importance of the region to the United States is well known.

  But our policy is motivated by more than strategic interests. We also have an irreversible commitment to the survival and territorial integrity of friendly states. Nor can we ignore the fact that the well-being of much of the world’s economy is tied to stability in the strife-torn Middle East. Finally, our traditional humanitarian concerns dictate a continuing effort to peacefully resolve conflicts.

  When our Administration assumed office in January 1981, I decided that the general framework for our Middle East policy should follow the broad guidelines laid down by my predecessors. There were two basic issues we had to address. First, there was the strategic threat to the region posed by the Soviet Union and its surrogates, best demonstrated by the brutal war in Afghanistan; and, second, the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors. With regard to the Soviet threat, we have strengthened our efforts to develop with our friends and allies a joint policy to deter the Soviets and their surrogates from further expansio
n in the region and, if necessary, to defend against it. With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have embraced the Camp David framework as the only way to proceed. We have also recognized, however, that solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, in and of itself, cannot assure peace throughout a region as vast and troubled as the Middle East.

  Our first objective under the Camp David process was to insure the successful fulfillment of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. This was achieved with the peaceful return of the Sinai to Egypt in April 1982. To accomplish this, we worked hard with our Egyptian and Israeli friends, and eventually with other friendly countries, to create the multinational force which now operates in the Sinai.

  Throughout this period of difficult and time-consuming negotiations, we never lost sight of the next step of Camp David: autonomy talks to pave the way for permitting the Palestinian people to exercise their legitimate rights. However, owing to the tragic assassination of President Sadat and other crises in the area, it was not until January 1982 that we were able to make a major effort to renew these talks. Secretary of State Haig and Ambassador Fairbanks [Richard Fairbanks, Special Negotiator for the Middle East Peace Process] made three visits to Israel and Egypt this year to pursue the autonomy talks. Considerable progress was made in developing the basic outline of an American approach which was to be presented to Egypt and Israel after April.