by Noam Chomsky
pressured towards a political settlement it might respond by military actions that would severely harm U.S. interests. A case in point was the reaction to the Saudi (Fahd) peace plan of August 1981 (see chapter 3, notes 105-7 and text). Daniel Bloch wrote in the Labor Party journal Davar that “all the handstands attempted by our propagandists will fail to dispel [the] impression” that the Fahd plan is “a sign of openmindedness and moderation” on the part of the Saudis, a shift towards commitment to a political settlement (in fact, the shift had taken place well before, but let us put that aside). Bloch interprets Israel’s reaction-provocative military flights over Saudi Arabia which “spell out our position” to “international forces” after the failure of “our propaganda campaign against the Fahd plan” to persuade them—as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”: “Jerusalem seems to believe that if rational arguments fail, we must threaten irrational behavior in order to discourage the world, and especially the United States, from putting any pressure on us.” What is the “irrational behavior” that is threatened?
Last week both Begin and [Foreign Minister] Shamir gave strong hints that the adoption of the Fahd plan by the world might cause Israel to reconsider various policies, among them the planned evacuation of the rest of Sinai. This [and crucially, the military flights over Saudi Arabia] must have caused many foreign intelligence agencies to reach for old files containing statements by Israeli generals about Israel’s capacity to bomb the Saudi oil fields. After the bombing of the Iraqi reactor [June 7, 1981], Israel is thought capable of such acts.31
This analysis recalls the observation of the moshav farmer interviewed by Amos Oz (see section 2.1) that Israel should act as a “wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal,” quite capable of “burning the oil fields” or even starting a nuclear war. This is a form of “self-defense” of a novel sort, one that cannot be easily dismissed. The threat is in this case directed primarily against the United States, but indirectly against the rest of the world as well. With this new style of “self-defense,” the special relationship takes on a more complex form, under the conditions that have been created by American “support.”
In early 1983, the executive director of the officially-registered Israeli lobbying organization AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Tom Dine, returned from a visit to Jerusalem where he met with senior Israeli government officials and policy-makers, with some further threats to deliver. Wolf Blitzer outlines them in the Jerusalem Post. Dine explained that sanctions against Israel might force it “to consider sweeping measures to eliminate the [Arab] threat while the IDF is still comparatively strong”:
The upshot of Dine’s ominous message was clear: a possible preemptive strike by Israel against its Arab adversaries designed to cripple their military capabilities for a long time to come. Don’t get Jerusalem too nervous, Dine implied.
This is the real import of Kissinger’s absurd comments, cited earlier (chapter 6, section 2.3), on the danger of “harassing” Israel “into emotional and psychic collapse” unless it “feels compassion on our side, maybe even affection, rather than unremitting pressure.”
“If [Dine’s] intention in outlining these views” of top Israeli policymakers “was to scare senior White House officials,” Blitzer adds, then “he succeeded.”32 The fear has little to do with concern for the Arab victims of another Israeli attack; rather, with two factors of considerably greater significance to White House officials: U.S. relations with the oil producers, and the threat of global war, not an unlikely prospect if Israel moves on to attack its major current military adversary, Syria. See section 2.2.
Blitzer suggests that “Dine’s warning” may have been the reason why the Reagan administration, in “proposing another large scale economic and military aid package for Israel” for the coming fiscal year, refused to attach any “political conditions”—meaning, any condition that Israel slow down its rapid absorption of the West Bank or that it withdraw from Lebanon. Testifying before Congress, Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Veliotes was specifically asked about tying U.S. aid to a retreat from the policy of expanding West Bank settlement in defiance of Reagan’s plea for a settlement freeze, but he “steadfastly refused to accept the notion of attaching political conditions for the assistance”—or to be more precise, the notion that the U.S. should not pay Israel to establish these settlements. Blitzer’s speculation is not implausible.* The “secret weapon” that the U.S. has supplied to Israel is a powerful and ominous one.
Nuclear threats are also not to be dismissed. I referred earlier to a recent study of Israel’s nuclear strategies and capacities by a group of Israeli and American specialists: Amos Perlmutter (Professor of Political Science at American University in Washington, military historian and strategic analyst, formerly a member of the Israeli delegation to the UN and the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission), Michael Handel (military historian at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, formerly of the Hebrew University), and Uri Bar-Joseph (formerly in the Israeli air force, involved with training and tactical planning).33 As noted earlier, they
*There are, however, other reasons as well for U.S. support (rhetoric aside) for Israel’s settlement policies, as discussed earlier. allege that Israel threatened to use nuclear weapons, and in fact prepared to do so, in the early stages of the October 1973 war, in order to compel the U.S. to provide “a massive shipment of conventional weapons” to Israel. Again, the threat was directed at the United States: “The Israeli signals would make it clear to the decision-makers in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department that any more delays might bring catastrophe to the Middle East.”
The authors then proceed to review the nuclear capabilities that Israel has developed in cooperation with South Africa and Taiwan. They cite reports, which they present as presumably accurate, that Israel has about 200 “operational nuclear warheads” (attributed to the CIA), including a tactical and strategic arsenal, and is working on a neutron bomb. The September 1979 incident in which American and Soviet spy satellites detected a suspected nuclear explosion over the Indian Ocean was in actuality the explosion of a nuclear shell launched from a cannon in a joint experiment of South Africa and Israel that involved “one of the most advanced tactical nuclear systems to be used anywhere in the world.” Cruise missiles are under development, jointly with South Africa and Taiwan, with a 1500 mile range, sufficient to hit “many targets in southern USSR.” Israel has “a variety of launching systems,” including American and Israeli-made planes, surface-to-surface missiles, and soon to come, a nuclear gun and cruise missiles.
Whether these reports are true or not it is impossible to know.34 But it is reasonable to suppose that they reflect what Israel would like others to believe. It may also be surmised that nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach southern Russia are not really intended to deter the USSR, but rather to put U.S. planners on notice, once again, that pressures on Israel to accede to a political settlement may lead to a violent reaction that will bring the USSR into the Middle East, setting it in inevitable confrontation with the United States, with a high probability of global nuclear war. One might even speculate as to whether Israel had something similar in mind in its provocative actions against the USSR in Lebanon in 1982, discussed earlier: a hint to the U.S. about what it could do, if pressed. Israel’s “secret weapon,” which may compensate for its extraordinary economic, military and diplomatic dependence on the United States, is the threat that it may act as a “wild country,” if pressed.
While these tendencies are now becoming too visible to be disregarded, they are not without precedent. In his personal diaries, the dovish Prime Minister Moshe Sharett recorded in October 1955 his fears concerning Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon of the Labor Party. Lavon, he wrote, “has constantly preached in favor of acts of madness and taught the army leadership the diabolic lesson of how to set the Middle East on fire, how to cause friction, cause bloody confrontations, sabotage targets and proper
ty of the Powers [and perform] acts of despair and suicide.”35 The occasion was the terrorist operation mounted by Israel in Egypt against U.S. and British installations and public buildings, with the aim “to break the West’s confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime” and thus “to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt,” in the words of the instructions given by the head of Israeli military intelligence at a time when Israel was concerned over the apparently close relations between the U.S. and Nasser.36
The growing threat has been recognized within Israel. Yaakov Sharett writes that the greatest danger facing Israel now is the “collective version” of Samson’s revenge against the Philistines—“Let me perish with the Philistines”—as he brought down the Temple in ruins, killing more Philistines than he had during his lifetime.37 He cites the Sharett diaries, the entry just cited and another one, where Defense Minister Lavon is quoted as stating: “we will go crazy” (“nishtagea”) if crossed. Again from the diaries, he cites Labor Party official David Hacohen after the attack on Egypt in 1956, who tells Moshe Sharett that “we have nothing to lose so it is better that we go crazy; the world will know to what a level we have reached,” and presumably will be afraid to interfere, a position that Moshe Sharett found appalling.38 This “Samson complex” is not something to be taken lightly. Aryeh (Lova) Eliav, one of Israel’s best-known and most influential doves, writes that the attitude of “those who brought the ‘Samson complex’ here, according to which we shall kill and bury all the Gentiles around us while we ourselves shall die with them,” is a sign of the same sort of “insanity” that was manifested in the violent counter-demonstration in which Emil Grunzweig was killed—see section 2.1—and is a phenomenon of some significance in contemporary Israel.39 It is reinforced by the feeling that “the whole world is against us” because of its ineradicable anti-Semitism, a paranoid vision that owes not a little to the contribution of supporters here, as we have seen.
In short, Israel’s “secret weapon,” which renders rational calculations somewhat questionable, is that it may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called “crazy states” in the international affairs literature. The concept was developed by the Israeli scholar Yehezkel Dror of the Hebrew University. He writes that “I am more sensitive to the possibilities and implications of seemingly irrational political behavior than either American strategists or the American public in general,” referring to “the dangers facing my own country.”40 He regards “possible crazy states” as “a main danger—to the world, to the United States, and to each country,” noting particularly the Samson complex and the special danger of nuclear crazy states. The text is so abstract that one can only guess as to what exactly he may have had in mind, but the usual reference is to such states as Libya or Iraq, an equally obvious example being pointedly omitted. This kind of “secret weapon” is one to which a state that sees itself as threatened and dependent may resort, and it becomes an extraordinarily dangerous one in the hands of the world’s fourth greatest military power, equipped with an extremely efficient and powerful air force capable of bombing the oil fields and nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the USSR, and undergoing internal social and political developments of the kinds that have taken place in Israel since the 1967 conquest—thanks to U.S. “support.”
Would Israel actually resort to its increasingly visible “secret weapon” if faced with American pressure to accept a political settlement in which it would lose the conquered territories? Whether it would hazard this under duress might depend on its assessment of the state of American opinion. If it feels that it can count on its supporters to stand firm, it might very well go beyond its reaction to the Saudi peace threat in 1981 and the threat posed by the PLO’s reliance on political means in 1982, perhaps employing its ultimate secret weapon. Sooner or later, the time will come when even a switch in U.S. policy away from the rejectionism of the past years will be too late, either because the worst will have happened, or because Israel will be able to rely on its secret weapon to resist pressures to join the international consensus, or because the consensus itself will have eroded under the impact of U.S. power and the Palestinians will have gone the way of the American Indians.
Meanwhile, at least this much seems clear. As long as the United States remains committed to an Israeli Sparta as a strategic asset, blocking the international consensus on a political settlement, the prospects are for further tragedy: repression, terrorism, war, and possibly even a conflict that will engage the superpowers, eventuating in a final solution from which few will escape.
Notes—Chapter 7
The Road to Armageddon 1. Al Hamishmar, Jan. 10, 1983 (Israeli Mirror, Middle East International, Feb. 4, 1983).
2. Shulamit Har-Even, Yediot Ahronot, Feb. 14; Baruch Meiri, Ma’ariv, Feb. 13; Dan Ben Amotz, Koteret Rashit, Feb. 23; Eliahu Salpeter, Ha’aretz, Feb. 14; Amnon Dankner, Ha’aretz, Feb. 11, 18, 1983.
3. Mordechai Nisan, “Judaism and Politics,” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 18, 1983.
4. Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden, Berlin, 1934, pp. 150-57.
5. Amos Os, Davar, Dec. 3, 17, 1982.
6. Menachem Horowitz, Ha’aretz, Feb. 6, 1983; Ha’aretz, Dec. 7, 1982 (Israeli Mirror, Middle East International, Feb. 4, 1983). See chapter 6, note 200.
7. AP, Boston Globe, Feb. 6, 1983; Jack Nelson, Los Angeles Times— Boston Globe, Feb. 23, 1983; New York Times, Feb. 24. 1983; Economist, Jan. 8, 1983; Ned Temko, John Yemma, Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 1983; also William Beecher, Boston Globe, Jan. 28, 29. 1983, on concerns in Washington over these developments.
8. Ze’ev Schiff, Ha’aretz, Dec. 31, 1982; Jan. 7, 1983 (Israeli Press Briefs). See also Thomas L. Friedman, “Syrian Army Said to Be Stronger Than Ever, Thanks to Soviets,” New York Times, March 19, 1983.
9. For further discussion of this topic, see my essay “What Directions for the Disarmament Movement?.” in Albert and Dellinger. eds., Beyond Survival, and the briefer version in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall, 1982. Also my “Priorities for averting the holocaust,” Guardian (London), July 12, 1982; “The United States and Israel: A Case Study for the Disarmament Movement” END Papers Special, Spokesman Pamphlet no. 81 (Nottingham), 1982, and a briefer version in MERIP Reports, September-October 1982; and articles by Eqbal Ahmed and Joseph Gerson in New England Briefs for Middle East Peacework, Winter 1983. On the role of the Middle East in current U.S. nuclear strategy, see Christopher Paine, “Rapid Deployment and Nuclear War,” MERIP Reports, January 1983. Similar ideas have been presented by Daniel Ellsberg. See his “Call to Mutiny.” in E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, Protest and Survive (Monthly Review, New York, 1981).
10. Cited by William Quandt, in a review of the 1958 Lebanon crisis in Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, et al., Force without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Brookings Institution, Washington 1978).
11. Yoram Peri, Between Battles and Ballots, p. 244; James E. Ennes, Assault on the Liberty, p. 78; Richard K. Smith, “The Violation of the ‘Liberty’” (see chapter 2, pp. 31-2 and note 39); Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, “The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons,” International Security, vol. 7, no. 1, 1982.
12. Ned Temko, Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 1982; Claudia Wright, New Statesman, June 18, 1982.
13. AP, “Soviet Embassy Heavily Damaged by Israeli Shells,” New York Times, July 8, 1982.
14. New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 2, 1982. It is not clear from the news reports whether the incident that Perle describes was during or prior to the Lebanon war.
15. J. Michael Kennedy, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 23, 1982.
16. Worldview, February 1983.
17. Judith Miller, New York Times, Jan. 16, 1983.
18. Sammy Smooha and Don Peretz, “The Arabs in Israel,” J. of Conflict Resolution, September 1982. The figures presented below are rounded, so they may not add up to 100% precisely.
19. Oded Yinon, “Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” K
ivunim, February 1982; published by the World Zionist Organization’s Department of Information. A partial English translation appears in the J. of Palestine Studies, Summer/Fall 1982, and a full translation in Israel Shahak, The Zionist Plan for the Middle East (AAUG, Belmont, Mass., 1982). For earlier comment on this analysis, see my articles in the Guardian, MERIP Reports and END Papers, cited in note 9; and in Middle East International, July 16, 1982 and Inquiry, August 1982; also Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, Village Voice, July 27, 1982, and Georges Corm, “La Balkanisation du Proche-Orient.” Le Monde diplomatique, January 1983. For perceptive comment on the general topic, see Edward Said, Covering Islam (Pantheon, New York, 1981, pp. 137ff.).
20. Amos Elon, Ha’aretz, May 14, 1982.
21. In this connection, we might note the observation by Zionist historian Ben Halpern that the 1942 decision of the Zionist organization to adopt the goal of a Jewish state “was in many ways the kind of definition of the aim of sovereignty long demanded by the Revisionists,” the right-wing political group that is the predecessor to Begin’s Herut party (The Idea of the Jewish State, Harvard, Cambridge, 1969, p. 39).
22. Ze’ev Schiff, “The Israeli interest in the Iraq-Iran war,” Ha’aretz, June 2, 1982: David Nyhan, Boston Globe, Oct. 21. 23; Robert Levey, Boston Globe, Oct. 22, 1982.
23. Panorama, BBC-l at 2010, February 1, 1982. I quote from the transcript.
24. See TNCW, pp. 455-6. For more on the alliance and its background, see TNCW, chapter 11, and sources cited there.
25. On these matters, see David Hirst and Irene Beeson, Sadat (Faber and Faber, London, 1981).
26. Boaz Evron, “Castle of Sand,” Yediot Ahronot, Aug. 9, 1982; Israeli Mirror.
27. Daniel J. Elazar. ed., Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.