Until the fall of the shah in 1979, the United States could protect its interests through Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two pillars of our Gulf policy for more than a decade. With a hostile regime in Teheran after 1979, we lacked a major regional player who could act as a surrogate and therefore had to take steps to ensure our ability to protect vital Western interests. President Carter concluded initial agreements to allow prepositioning of U.S. equipment and supplies in regional states and created the Rapid Deployment Force, which later became the U.S. Central Command. President Reagan followed up with extensive, low-profile cooperation in the Gulf to establish the infrastructure needed to support a major U.S. intervention to defend Saudi Arabia and the southern Gulf. Without these facilities, Operation Desert Shield/Storm would have become a modern-day Gallipoli.
The key to Gulf security is sturdy U.S. bilateral military ties in support of cooperative defense efforts among the moderate Arab states. While many have called for institutionalizing U.S. security relations and even for the establishment of a new Central Command headquarters in a Persian Gulf country, the same results can be achieved without a high-profile U.S. presence. We should use our influence behind the scenes to ensure that Egypt and other Muslim countries work out multilateral arrangements to bolster the defense of the weaker Gulf states. We should also negotiate informal agreements for the prepositioning of equipment and supplies for any potential future U.S. intervention. Maintaining too high a profile would undercut our objectives. We would fatally undermine our friends and our interests if we appear to treat the Persian Gulf as our own protectorate. Our presence, rather than the threat posed by our adversaries, would become the central issue for our friends.
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Our two immediate interests in the Middle East—oil and Israel—are not always fully compatible. On the one hand, our commitment to Israel has sometimes carried a high price in terms of our access to Persian Gulf oil at free-market prices, as the 1973 Arab oil embargo demonstrated. On the other hand, our commitment to the security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states has at times complicated relations with Israel. While the decision to sell Awacs early-warning aircraft to the Saudis in 1982 prompted a bitter fight with supporters of Israel in Congress, those arms sales—and other informal security cooperation—proved indispensable during Operation Desert Shield/Storm.
Our interests require a difficult geopolitical calculus: we must both ensure the survival of Israel and work with moderate Arab states to enhance the security of the Persian Gulf. The Arab-Israeli conflict represents a central obstacle. For forty-five years, both sides have poured endless resources into arms to destroy each other rather than investing in their economies to improve the welfare of their citizens. They have waged five wars—in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982—and engaged in countless military skirmishes. This conflict, exacerbated but not created by the cold war, has repeatedly pitted our key interests against each other. The only way we can square the circle is to press forward actively with the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Time has never been on the side of peace in the Middle East. An Arab-Israeli war has broken out in every decade of the postwar period because a political stalemate was permitted to develop during peacetime. The peace process is not a panacea. But it is critical to the U.S. position in the Muslim world. Although many exaggerated the degree to which the U.S. led victory in the Persian Gulf would enhance our diplomatic influence in the region, President Bush’s skillful leadership has opened an opportunity for progress. While still not hopeful, the situation at least is no longer hopeless.
Our commitment to the survival and security of Israel runs deep. We are not formal allies, but we are bound together by something much stronger than a piece of paper: a moral commitment. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Israel is not a strategic interest of the United States. Our cooperation in intelligence sharing and military prepositioning and exercises is helpful but not vital. While Israel’s armed forces have brilliantly proven themselves on the battlefield, the Persian Gulf War—where they contributed not by participating in but by staying out of the conflict—proved their limited utility in the most important regional contingencies. Our commitment to Israel stems from the legacy of World War II and from our moral and ideological interest in ensuring the survival of embattled democracies. No American President or Congress will ever allow the destruction of the state of Israel.
Many supporters of Israel argue that the United States should back to the hilt the hard-line positions of the current Likud government. They insist that Israel cannot return to the Arabs any of the occupied territories—the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights—without endangering its security. Others even endorse the Likud leaders’ biblically based claim that the West Bank—which they call Judea and Samaria—belongs historically to Israel. All advocate support for Israel’s adamant refusal to talk with Palestinians linked with the PLO, to enter negotiations about the final status of the occupied lands, and even to contemplate any settlement that would reverse the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
While we are right to support Israel’s survival and security, we would be wrong to back the current Israeli government’s extreme demands. Without engaging in “moral equivalency” between offensive and defensive states, we should understand how the occupied territories came into Israel’s possession through the 1967 war. Aggressive military moves by Arab states created the crisis—perhaps even made the war inevitable—but Israel launched the first attacks. Former prime minister Menachem Begin said in August 1982, “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Because the war resulted from actions by both sides, the subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions—242 and 338—demanded not unilateral concessions, but bilateral trade-offs of land for peace.
There are three reasons why we must press forward with the peace process based on the land-for-peace formula. First, the Arab-Israeli conflict totally distorts our foreign aid budget. In 1991, the 60 million people of Israel and Egypt received more than 40 percent of the almost $15 billion the United States allocated to foreign aid, while the over 4 billion people in the rest of the underdeveloped world competed for the leftovers. Since the mid-1970s, the United States has given Israel $49 billion in direct and indirect foreign aid. In addition, Israel received $16.4 billion in loans between 1974 and 1989 that were subsequently converted into grants. To balance the Middle East equation, the United States has provided Egypt with $28 billion in foreign aid between 1980 and 1991. Besides having underwritten large portions of the Israeli and Egyptian defense budgets, we also canceled $6.8 billion of debt that Cairo could never hope to repay. By channeling such a disproportionate amount of assistance into coping with the Arab-Israeli conflict, we lack sufficient money to help the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, the struggling economies in Latin America, and the destitute peoples of Africa and South Asia.
Second, the Arab-Israeli conflict poisons our relations with the Muslim world and undercuts our ability to cooperate with countries with modernist, pro-Western leaders. Israel’s occupation of Arab lands—and particularly its increasingly harsh treatment of the Palestinians—polarizes and radicalizes the Muslim world. It undermines the moderates, such as President Mubarak of Egypt. All Muslim leaders support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and view the harassment of Israeli occupation forces in the so-called intifada as legitimate armed resistance, not terrorism. While many may criticize the leadership of the PLO, especially after its shameless support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, they have not backed away from the Palestinian cause and will never drop it from the agenda. President Sadat could not have signed the Camp David accords without Israel’s commitment to establish “transitional arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza for a period not to exceed five years.” Under the agreement, Palestinians were to receive lo
cal autonomy as soon as arrangements could be worked out, with negotiations over the final status of the territories to start within three years. With that timetable, the entire process should have been concluded in 1984. Nothing has happened. To put it bluntly, Israel stonewalled the United States and Egypt.
Third, more than any other flash point, the Arab-Israeli conflict poses the danger of dragging the United States into a war involving the use of nuclear weapons. While any future conflict between India and Pakistan could cross the nuclear threshold, the likelihood of direct U.S. involvement remains low. But we would almost certainly become engaged in a future Middle East conflict. I vividly recall a meeting with legislative leaders during the 1973 Middle East war. In the opening rounds of the conflict, the tide of battle had run against Israel. Meanwhile, the Soviets had initiated a massive airlift to Egypt and Syria. When a congressman asked whether the United States would take measures to counter Moscow’s actions, I flatly answered, “No American President will ever let Israel go down the tube.” I subsequently ordered a massive airlift to prevent Israel’s defeat and later put U.S. nuclear forces on alert to forestall a threatened unilateral Soviet intervention in the region. If war comes, the U.S. commitment to Israel will inevitably mean our direct or indirect involvement. Particularly since Israel has built nuclear weapons and its Arab adversaries possess chemical and biological arms, the United States cannot afford to let the peace process languish.
Both American and Israeli interests would be best served by a settlement based on land for peace. If Israel retains the occupied territories, it will corrupt its moral cause. One of Israel’s founders and a leader whom John Foster Dulles once described as an “Old Testament prophet,” David Ben-Gurion, rightly observed that the “extremists” who advocated the absorption of Arab lands would deprive Israel of its mission: “If they succeed, Israel will be neither Jewish nor democratic. The Arabs will outnumber us, and undemocratic, repressive measures will be needed to keep them under control.” While the more than 4 million Israelis and the more than 1 million estimated Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union will exceed the 2 million Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories, it is destabilizing and dangerous to keep the Arabs captive. If Israel annexes these lands, its security problem will become a national problem, as intractable as those in multinational states such as Iraq and Yugoslavia. Israel would inevitably become a binational garrison state, thereby not only corrupting the spirit of the Jewish nation but also undermining the moral purpose that undergirds the U.S. commitment to its survival.
Ironically, Israel’s current leaders appear reluctant to pursue peace at a time when the circumstances for striking the best deal are the best they have been in the forty-four years of Israel’s existence as a nation.
—Iraq, crushed in war, isolated in the Arab world, and burdened by debt and reparations, can no longer pose a conventional offensive military threat to Israel.
—The PLO, discredited by its alliance with Saddam Hussein and cut off from former creditors such as Saudi Arabia, has lost its appeal for many Palestinians, as well as its supporters abroad.
—Syria, economically feeble and financially broke, can entertain no illusions after the Persian Gulf War that its Soviet-made weaponry could prevail against Israel.
—Jordan, squeezed between the twin threats of political radicalism and economic collapse, cannot pose a real threat to Israel and wants a deal that would restore its ties with the West after its support for Iraq in the Gulf War.
—Egypt, the only Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel and the principal moderate Arab power, has regained its position as the leader of the Arab world.
—Given the massive influx of Soviet émigrés into Israel—now arriving at a rate of 30,000 per month—Arab leaders know that this will be their last chance to prevent Israel’s annexation of the territories through new settlements.
—Moscow, too preoccupied at home to play its traditional role as spoiler of the peace process, will have no choice but to follow whatever course the United States chooses.
Israel’s strong hand will inevitably weaken over time. Exploiting Israeli obstinance, the PLO may rehabilitate its image. Syria will tap new sources of support among the Gulf states. Some leaders in the former Soviet Union could resuscitate the Kremlin’s historical policy of seeking a foothold in the Middle East. As the death toll in the suppression of the Palestinian uprising surges past eight hundred, the erosion of Israel’s political standing abroad will accelerate. The Israeli people—40 percent of whom now support talks with the PLO and would accept a Palestinian ministate in the occupied territories—appear to recognize that the status quo has become intolerable. Israel should negotiate now when it is stronger than any of its potential enemies rather than waiting until the increased strength of its enemies forces it to do so. The essence of successful statecraft is to strike a deal at the most favorable moment. For Israel, that time is now.
U.S. mediation is the sine qua non of success in the peace process. The idea that the issue should be turned over to the United Nations is a nonstarter. Israel will not—and should not—submit its fate to a stacked jury. Though U.N. forces have played a useful buffer role in other hot spots, their track record in the Arab-Israeli conflict has been abysmal. Four times U.N. troops have come to bat in the Middle East. In all four trips to the plate, they have struck out.
Many Israeli moderates, as well as the hard-liners, hesitate about accepting a land-for-peace deal. They suspect that the return of land will be permanent but the peace will be temporary. They view skeptically the idea of international guarantees, especially since those offered after the 1948 and 1956 wars evaporated when the chips were down. They strongly believe that a prospective settlement must not depend on trust between the two sides. They are only partly right. No such trust exists or can be generated through a treaty. But a peace between adversaries is possible. This peace must be grounded in concrete security arrangements reinforced with a balance of power. A peace based on power is a sturdy one. If peace depends on trust, the peace disappears when the trust evaporates. If peace depends on power, the peace endures even in the absence of trust.
Any U.S.-mediated peace settlement must have four objectives: (1) full diplomatic recognition of Israel by its neighbors, (2) secure borders for Israel, (3) return to Arab states of territories captured in 1967, and (4) self-government for the Palestinians.
In the past, interim agreements—some of which have lasted more than fifteen years—have avoided the issue of Arab acceptance of Israel’s existence. That is no longer acceptable. If Arab leaders will not accept the reality of Israel after forty-four years, they are interested not in a peace settlement, but in a temporary armistice.
Israel faces two potential threats that security arrangements must address—full-scale invasion by conventional forces and small-scale strikes by guerrilla and terrorist units. To cope with the conventional threat, the United States should work at two levels. First, if Israel agrees to return the occupied territories, we should enter a mutual security treaty with Israel stipulating that a conventional attack on Israel will be treated like an attack on the United States. After the Persian Gulf War, there can be no lingering doubts about our willingness to fulfill such a pledge. We had no alliance with, no commitment to, and no deep sympathy for Kuwait. Yet we moved manpower equivalent to the population of two cities the size of Madison, Wisconsin, halfway around the world to free the country. Although President Bush had to lobby for votes on the Persian Gulf War resolutions in Congress, senators and congressmen would line up to support Israel.
Second, the United States needs to craft additional measures to ensure that the loss of land would not mean a loss of security for Israel. In all the returned territories, for example, conventional forces with offensive capabilities should be prohibited. The Golan Heights and the West Bank would in effect become buffer zones. While Syria might administer the Golan Heights and Jordan the West Bank, neither state could station milit
ary forces on these territories, thereby neutralizing their utility as a launching pad for invasion or harassing artillery strikes. We should also insist on a thinning out of Arab forces stationed along current cease-fire lines and on international or joint U.S.–Israeli–Arab League reconnaissance and early-warning stations in the territories to frustrate any plans to seize the buffer zone through a surprise attack. An international force—equipped not to observe, but to enforce the agreement by arms if necessary—could be deployed as well. With the right security measures, a land-for-peace deal can enhance rather than diminish Israel’s physical security.
Confronting the guerrilla and terrorist threat will be more difficult. Israeli hard-liners argue that the return of the West Bank would allow irregular Palestinian forces to fire mortars—some of which are small enough to fit in a knapsack—on Israeli cities from positions a couple of miles across the border. That concern is genuine, but could be addressed with security measures. Today, Israeli checkpoints along the cease-fire line with Jordan prevent the smuggling of small arms and munitions into the West Bank. There is no reason that a similar control regime—staffed partly by Israelis—could not remain in place on the ground, as well as at airports. Moreover, a peace settlement should explicitly recognize an Israeli right of retaliation in the event of unconventional attacks coming from the current occupied territories, thereby creating an incentive for Jordanian and Palestinian leaders to keep their own people in check.
To achieve Palestinian self-government, the United States should seek to resuscitate the Camp David formula—local Palestinian autonomy in association with Jordan phased in over a multiyear transition period. Although this means convincing King Hussein to retract his 1988 renunciation of the Jordanian claim to the West Bank, such flexibility is not unknown in Middle East diplomacy. In the meantime, elections should be held in the occupied territories to select Palestinian representatives for the peace talks. Israeli leaders have insisted on advance approval of those who might serve in that role and on blackballing anyone with any association—no matter how distant—with the PLO. That is unreasonable. We did not like negotiating with Stalin or his successors, but since they held power, we had to deal with them. Unless Israel comes to terms with its enemies, no peace agreement will enhance its security.
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