DAVID ISAAC:POLITICAL GIMMICKRY AND PERCEIVED DEPENDENCE SYNDROME
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By David Isaac
Two famous confidence tricksters
According to Agence Free-Presse, Israel’s army radio reported Monday that “Israel is mulling a US proposal for addressing key security concerns that would entail leasing swathes of the Jordan Valley from a future Palestinian state.”
The report said: “The radio quoted anonymous Israeli officials as saying Washington had suggested a seven-year lease. They said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not rejected the idea out of hand but was looking for a far longer period.”
The idea sounds, to put it mildly, nuts. The plan would put the Israelis in the role of “renter” to the Palestinian Arabs’ “owner”. And as with real estate, all rights reside with the owner. Israel can ask for 10 years, 20 years or 100, but the reality is they could only stay in the Jordan valley so long as the Arabs would permit them to stay.
The land-lease suggestion is essentially a gimmick, a U.S.-concocted plan to make it easier for Israel to agree to dangerous retreats that clearly threaten its existence. The proposal also offers a short-term political “out” for Israel’s sitting prime minister – a way for him to kick the can down the road in regards to the thornier issues, such as the wrenching of Jews from evacuated territories in order to make them acceptably Judenrein for the Arabs.
Fortunately, the proposal appears to be a non-starter – Palestinian Authority officials have already rejected its possibility. But is the notion that Israel rent its security zone from a future terrorist state whose purpose is its destruction any less absurd than other political gimmicks that have been taken far more seriously?
Take demilitarization. In several speeches, including his now famous Bar-Ilan University policy speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stressed that any PLO state be devoid of major weaponry. Will such a proposal work? In “Sharon’s Egregious Blunder” (The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 3, 2003), Shmuel wrote:
If Israel were to reach the nadir of political inanity of actually helping to establish a state for the Palestinian Arabs, the Arabs would reject with all vigor the idea that their state would be hobbled by a denial of major armaments. No less emphatic would be the hostile reaction of a large segment of the European and other nations.
Even friends, appalled and distressed, would find themselves bound, albeit reluctantly, to deplore such a limitation of sovereignty. They would find it intolerable.
For the Arabs the military issue is doubly critical. First because the very idea of demilitarization would be regarded as a blow to their honor; second, because a sovereign state has never been the ultimate purpose of Arab policy. The purpose is the destruction of Israel. A state could represent only the penultimate ‘phase’ in the policy of phases. It could be the staging ground – with a large and variegated arsenal – for the ‘final phase.’
That is the original Arab game plan.
Demilitarization is just one of many confidence tricks played on the Israeli public over the years. In the above case, Netanyahu knows full well demilitarization won’t work, having ridiculed the idea in a May 12, 2002 speech to the Likud Central Committee when then-Prime Minister Sharon proposed it. We won’t speculate as to what has changed between then and now.
Foreign “guarantees” might be the oldest trick in the book, and probably the one which Israel has suffered from the most. Shmuel documents many examples in “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” (Bantam Books, 1973). After 1948, for instance, he describes how Israel was coaxed into leaving Egypt in control of Gaza for an “Armistice Agreement that turned out to be worthless.” This happened again in 1956-1957 and in 1967.
The United Nations force in Sinai and Gaza – established as an international “guarantee” for Israel in 1957 – was immediately withdrawn at a word of command from Cairo. The American President could not find in the state archives the record of promises made ten years earlier to insure Israel’s freedom of navigation.
The American President and the British Prime Minister together were unable to get the United Nations Security Council (including the members who had joined in that promise) to consider the Egyptians’ demonstrative flouting of that freedom. Overnight, the gossamer safeguards by which Israel had been deluded were blown away.
Of smaller confidence tricks played on the Jews, there are too many to mention. It’s ironic that Israelis are highly sensitive to being caught out as “fryerim” – Hebrew slang for “suckers” – as the country has proven itself to be the biggest “fryer” in the region. Israel has been cajoled into swallowing bitter pill after bitter pill in return for empty promises, often from its chief ally the United States. As Shmuel said in an interview on the eve of the Gaza strip disengagement vote, “We have today to remember that we came out of all this as idiots who have been manipulated by the Americans.” (“End of the Ideology,” “Makor Rishon”, November 5, 2004)
To the uninitiated, the image of America as trickster wheedling Israel into territorial concessions will appear a puzzle. Isn’t the U.S., after all, Israel’s main supplier of money and materiel? As Shmuel explained, U.S. policy is itself a contradiction.
American policy after 1948, and most emphatically after the Six Day War, embraced a fusion of two elements: “commitment” to Israel’s survival, and the proposal of conditions that could only endanger that survival.
Specifically, the US gave Israel arms and financial aid while persistently demanding that Israel should again retire into the “death trap” (in Abba Eban’s definition) of the 1949 armistice lines. Since 1973, with America’s growing feeling of dependence on Saudi Arabia a distinct tilt against Israel has been manifest. (“The Chimera of Coordination”, The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 22, 1978)
The result has not been pleasant. To stuff Israel back into those ’49 Armistice Lines, the U.S. variously bribes, inveigles, deceives, threatens and condemns (depending on how obdurate the Jews are at the time). It employs every device it can think up, such as this most recent land-lease. Israel, for its part, ends up looking weak, bending to pressure after a show of adamant refusal, thereby losing respect and inviting more pressure.
Can the U.S.-Israel relationship be put on a sounder footing? The short answer is yes. As Shmuel writes in “The Chimera of Coordination”:
There are many [in America] who believe that every inch of territory, every scintilla of prestige lost by Israel reduces America’s own power and influence.
It goes without saying that in Israel, too, there are many who understand the dangers the country faces from reduced borders. They voted in Benjamin Netanyahu in the belief that he would stand firm against calls for further retreat. (Whether he will do so remains to be seen. Evidence suggests the prospects are grim.)
Yet, the war is winnable. It will require a broad informational and educational campaign, a renewed assertion of Jewish rights, and a leadership with the guts and nerve to see it through. Such an approach will strengthen Israel’s friends in the U.S. and provide them with the ammunition they need to stop America’s current schizophrenic policy and replace it with one that recognizes America and Israel’s common strategic interests.
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