A Durable Peace (42 page)

The only certain effect of these huge arms transfers is to bolster the conviction of the Middle East’s radicals that the wherewithal
to destroy Israel
does
exist in the Arab world. The more weapons the Arabs receive, the clearer it becomes to them that the only thing standing
in the way of victory over the Jewish state is Arab disunity itself. Many people in the Arab world are well aware that Israel
cannot possibly compete against the arms buildup currently under way. To them, the only thing lacking is the right strongman
to concentrate all this power in his hands and bring it to bear. The policy of massive sales of advanced weapons to governments
in the Arab world is thus an inducement for adventurers such as Saddam to make a bid for forcible unification. It is therefore
a policy that works directly to undermine deterrence—and as such is diametrically opposed to peace.

The Arabs justify this policy by insisting on Israel’s “aggressive” nature, a claim that they attempt to support by pointing
to the fact that Israel has gone to war several times since 1948. It is hard to believe that anyone in the West could swallow
this line, especially after the Gulf War. Night after night, Iraq dropped missiles on the civilian populations of Israel’s
largest cities, while Israelis huddled in rooms sealed against chemical attack, waking their children to place them in protective
plastic tents and gas masks. The attacks were unprovoked, but at the request of the United States and in the hope of depriving
Saddam of an excuse to deflect the Allied war effort, Israel did not retaliate—even when attacks on Tel Aviv
caused the deaths of Israeli citizens. There can be no more graphic a demonstration of how serious the “Israeli threat” is
and how “aggressive” Israel is.

Notwithstanding the false Arab claims, the United States has provided Israel with generous military assistance ever since
the Six Day War. This has helped the cause of Arab-Israeli peace a great deal by contributing to the gradual Arab recognition
of the fact that Israel will not be so easily destroyed. Reinforcing this perception and transmitting it to Arab regimes and
organizations that have not yet assimilated it are the keys to achieving a sustainable peace between Israel and the Arabs.

We can see precisely this kind of process occurring slowly but surely in Israel’s relations with the Arab states. In 1948
the Arab states thought they would have no difficulty in wiping out six hundred thousand Jews on their thin sliver of land.
In 1967 that sliver was still tempting, and Syria and Jordan joined Egypt in trying to strangle Israel. But this attempt,
too, failed. The Six Day War immeasurably improved Israel’s strategic position. The addition of the mountainous buffer of
Judea and Samaria for the first time removed Israel’s population centers and airfields from the possibility of direct ground
attack. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in October 1973, Jordan had to consider whether to join the fray.
Faced with the prospect of fighting across the Jordan Valley and up the steep escarpment of the Israeli-held Samar-ian and
Judean mountains, Jordan chose to sit out the war, sending only a token contingent to join the Syrian forces on the Golan.

Hence, while in 1948
five
Arab armies invaded Israel and in 1967
three
Arab armies fought, in 1973 only
two
Arab states attacked. And in the 1982 campaign against the PLO in Lebanon only
one,
Syria, entered into a limited war with Israel. Further, in the Gulf War in 1991, it was only Iraq, having promised to “burn
half of Israel,” that struck with missiles, but it did not attempt any ground engagements—promoting one observer to describe
it as “the half-effort of a half-country.”

This represents a promising trend, provided we understand what forces brought it about. (If we do not, we could easily bring
about its reversal.) Why has this decline in the number of countries attacking Israel taken place? It certainly has not happened
because the Arab world as a whole has changed its opinion of Israel. Yet King Hussein’s willingness to go to war in 1967 stands
in sharp contrast to his unwillingness to do so just six years later. Whether or not he went to war was determined by which
side of Israel’s protective wall (the West Bank) his army was on when the war broke out. Likewise, the results of the Yom
Kippur War strongly influenced Anwar Sadat in his decision to make peace with Israel. He may have restored Arab “honor” (by
not losing to Israel for a couple of weeks), and he may have even earned the opportunity to speak of the Egyptian “victory”
in that war, but he knew full well that despite the surprise attack on Israel that was launched on the holiest day of the
Jewish year, the Israeli army soon turned the tables and reached the outskirts of Cairo and Damascus within twenty-one days.

The declining number of warring Arab states reflects the underlying reality: Peace between Israel and its neighbors is the
second kind of peace, the peace of deterrence. The probability of achieving it is directly proportional to Israel’s ability
to project a strong deterrent posture—the stronger Israel appears, the more likely the Arabs will be to agree to peace. There
is nothing surprising about this. It is the classic doctrine of deterrence. It was not lack of desire that prevented the Soviet
Union from attacking the West but the Soviet fear of retaliation. Similarly, what has decreased the likelihood of a joint
Arab assault on Israel is not the absence of hostility but the fear of failure.

This deterrent effect not only prevents those Arabs who are in a state of war with Israel from actually going to war, it helps
keep those Arabs who are in a state of peace from reneging on it. This is why the single peace treaty between Israel and an
Arab country, the Camp David Accords, provides for a larger buffer space between
Israel and Egypt. The demilitarized Sinai is sufficiently vast that if Egypt were to violate the peace with Israel, Israel
would have time to mobilize its defenses and counterattack.

In the Middle East, security is therefore indispensable to peace; a peace that cannot be defended is one that will not hold
for very long. The relationship between security and peace is often presented in reverse—for Israel alone, of course. Nobody
would dream of telling Kuwait that its security lies in having peace treaties with Iraq. It
had
such treaties, and they were totally useless when Iraq came to believe it could swallow Kuwait whole. But those who confuse
the peace of democracies with the peace of deterrence nonetheless tell an Israel beleaguered by heavily armed dictatorships
that it can take inordinate risks with its security for the sake of “peace” because “peace is the real security.” On this
Henry Kissinger has remarked that all wars start from a state of peace. This is especially true of the Middle East, which
is littered with inter-Arab peace treaties and friendship accords, not one of which ever prevented a war.

If over the next generation the Arab world internalizes the fact that Israel is here to stay, this might produce a psychological
shift in its attitude toward Israel’s
right
to exist. The Arabs, like other people, will not bang their heads against a stone wall forever. But if the wall itself is
dismantled, if Israel’s most vital defenses are suddenly stripped away, the great progress that has been made toward peace
over recent decades could be reversed at once.

In one of his books, Max Nordau described a well-known experiment that the German zoologist Karl August Möbius designed to
study the relationship between predator and prey. The experiment was conducted with two fish:

An aquarium was divided into two compartments by means of a pane of glass; in one of these a pike was put and in the other
a tench. Hardly had the former caught sight of his prey, when he rushed to the attack without noticing the transparent partition.
He crashed with extreme violence against the obstacle and was
hurled back stunned, with a badly battered nose… He repeated his efforts a few times more, but succeeded only in badly hurting
his head and mouth.

Slowly, wrote Nordau, the pike began to realize

that some unknown and invisible power was protecting the tench, and that any attempt to devour it would be in vain; consequently
from that moment he ceased from all further endeavors to molest his prey. Thereupon the pane of glass was removed from the
tank, and pike and tench swam around together… All [the pike] knew was this: he must not attack this tench, otherwise he would
fare badly. The pane of glass, though no longer actually there, surrounded the tench as with a coat of mail which effectually
warded off the murderous attacks of the pike.
⁵

No matter how compelling the reasons, there is no point in attacking where there is no hope of success. This elementary understanding
is no less applicable to human behavior. It is precisely such an understanding that has been slowly evolving in the attitudes
of the radical Arab regimes toward Israel. But it cannot be said that they have reached the stage of having fully assimilated
the reality of Israel’s existence. Deprived of its equivalent of the glass partition, Israel might become the target once
again of pouncing predators. This partition, Israel’s defenses, is made up of several important elements: the physical and
human resources available to protect the country, and the material and psychological assets deployed for the common defense.
But without a doubt, central among them is the physical partition that separates Israel’s cities from the vast eastern-front
armies of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The separation consists of a wall: the dominating heights of the Golan and
the mountains of Samaria and Judea, commonly known to the world as the West Bank, whose military value I now turn to discuss.

7

O
n October 6, 1973, I was in my second year as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although this
was Yom Kippur, the news traveled fast, reaching Cambridge by early afternoon.

“Haven’t you heard? War’s broken out. Egypt and Syria have attacked.”

Several of us, Israeli students studying at MIT and Harvard who were reserve officers in the Israeli army, said good-bye to
our friends and quickly drove to Kennedy airport in New York to catch the first plane back. But that did not prove to be simple.
Israeli reservists were streaming to Kennedy from all corners of the United States and Canada. The first Boeing Jumbo had
already left, every seat taken. There was fierce competition to go on the second plane. I used all the pull and connections
at my disposal (what we in Israel call
protektsia)
, calling Motta Gur, Israel’s military attaché in Washington, and everybody else I could think of. Since I had served for
five years as a soldier and officer in the special forces, I was finally able to get on board. The plane was bursting at the
seams with doctoral students, computer specialists, physicians,
and physicists, some of whom I knew but had not seen for years. For too many of them, this would be their final trip.

On the plane, there was a serene confidence that within a few days, a week at most, the war would be over with an Israeli
victory. But things did not turn out that way. The Egyptians and Syrians achieved impressive initial gains with their surprise
attack. Syria sliced through the entire width of the Golan Heights, and the forward Syrian tanks almost reached the bridges
across the Jordan and into the Galilee. The Egyptian army in the south crossed the Suez Canal, overran the fortified Bar Lev
Line, and reached as far as the foothills of the Mitla and Gidi passes, some twenty miles east of the canal. Worse, both armies
were equipped with new and unfamiliar antiaircraft and antitank missiles, which took a punishing toll from Israel’s air force
and a less severe but nonetheless frightening toll of Israel’s armor.

In Israel everything was in confusion. Two days into the war, the reservists had not yet been fully mobilized—and some of
the troops were still arriving from abroad. By the time I reached my unit, it had already scrambled to the two fronts. We
formed a makeshift force of “returnees,” equipping ourselves with armed vehicles and jeeps, and made our way to the front
facing the Egyptian army When we reached the front the hemorrhage had been stanched and the lines stabilized, in preparation
for the counterattack across the Suez Canal that was to come days later under General Ariel Sharon.