A Durable Peace (50 page)

A second obstacle facing the realists is that no Arab leader or representative wants to end up like Abdullah of Jordan, Anwar
Sadat of Egypt, or Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon—or for that matter like the many thousands of moderate Palestinian Arabs whom
the Mufti and the PLO have butchered over this century for “betraying” the Arab cause by trying to make peace with the Jews.
For seventy years, ever since the heyday of the Mufti, every move and every gesture toward peace has been stifled by fear
of the radical Pan-Arab nationalists and Moslem fundamentalists.

Those who are interested in something more than a pyrrhic peace in the Middle East must recognize the harsh reality that there
is
always
a powerful Muftist faction among the Arabs ready to veto peace. The Mufti’s politics of terror is no less with us today.
So long as this branch of Arab politics is powerful enough to terrorize other Arabs into playing by its rules, making peace
will be an extraordinarily difficult business. When the radicals feel confident and powerful, the intimidated moderates run
to snuggle within the tiger claws of the dictators, much as King Hussein of Jordan snuggled in Saddam’s paws on the very eve
of the Gulf War. Without suppressing the power of intimidation of the radicals, there can be no hope that moderates will emerge.

This principle was much in evidence in the case of Morocco. When Qaddafi was at the height of his power, having conquered
most of Chad and terrorized much of the West with his threats, King Hassan of Morocco—as antithetical a figure to Qaddafi
as one could conjure up in the Arab world—entered into a bizarre
“marriage” between Libya and Morocco. Yet within months of the American bombing of Tripoli and the collapse of Qaddafi’s forces
in Chad, Hassan dissolved the union and invited Israel’s foreign minister to an open meeting in Morocco. Similarly, when Syria
came to realize in the wake of the Gulf War that the eclipse of its Soviet benefactor spelled a decline in its ability to
resist American pressure, it suddenly permitted King Hussein and other Arabs to enter negotiations and even went so far as
to sit at the same table with Israel itself. Pressing the radicals, curtailing their options to intimidate, and limiting their
political and military clout are continual prerequisites for engaging in any realistic efforts for peace.

Any Israeli diplomat who has ever dealt with the Arabs can recount endless variations on this theme. My own experience with
Arab diplomats has taught me how readily some of them would make peace if they were freed from the yoke of terror. When I
was deputy chief of the Israeli mission in Washington, I used to meet regularly with one such diplomat, an ambassador from
an Arab country with which Israel has no relations. On one occasion we had set a meeting in a small restaurant. I arrived
five minutes late and asked the waiter whether a gentleman answering the description of my Arab colleague had been there.

“Yes,” said the waiter. “He showed up, ordered something to drink, and left suddenly.”

I called him up. “Ali, what happened?” I asked.

“I came to the restaurant at the time we’d agreed on. I sat down. Who do you think I saw at the next table? The Syrian ambassador.
I walked out.”

It is a sad commentary on the pace of political evolution in the Arab world that many years after this conversation took place,
I am still unable to reveal the diplomat’s real name and have had to substitute a false one to protect his identity.

This little vignette, set in a quiet corner of Washington, D.C., contains in microcosm the story of countless foiled peace
attempts throughout the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The nonradicals might entertain the possibility of negotiating
peace
with Israel, but they fear the violent response of the radicals. This was painfully evident in the Madrid Peace Conference
and in the subsequent talks in Washington. Once again, my Israeli colleagues and I found that even the most reasonable among
the Jordanians and Lebanese were constantly forced to weigh every word for fear of the PLO and the Syrians, whose threatening
gaze they felt even in the most private of conversations.

The West often aggravates this situation by strengthening the hands of the worst radicals. It is often so grateful for any
reasonable gesture coming from these quarters that it proceeds to enter into economic and military agreements with them. It
operates on the belief that such carrots will lure a radical regime to become a less radical one—a view whose full wisdom
was revealed in the Western arming of Saddam in the 1980s. The fact is that the radicals should not be armed. There should
be a curb on weapons sales to the moderates as well, for the simple reason that in the Middle East today’s “moderate” could
be tomorrow’s radical, courtesy of a coup, an invasion, or mere intimidation.

So long as freedom of expression, the rule of law, and real representative government are absent from the Arab world, it will
continue to be next to impossible for realist Arabs to have an enduring influence on Arab policies toward Israel. For this
reason, there is a direct relationship between what the West does to press the Arab world to democratize and the chances of
attaining a durable Middle East peace. In the cases of Germany and Japan, of Russia and the Ukraine, of Latin America and
several African dictatorships, the powerful relationship between democratic values and the desire for peace has been obvious
to American policymakers, who for years have tied American trade and other forms of assistance to domestic policy reforms
and democratization. For example, the United States imposed sanctions on China after the massacre in Tienanmen Square that
suppressed the movement for democratization in that country. Similarly, when the president of Peru suspended democratic institutions
in 1992, the United States undertook a full-court press, including economic sanctions, in
order to prevent backsliding to authoritarian rule in a Latin America it had tirelessly worked for decades to push into democracy.

Only the Arab states have been entirely exempt from such pressure—much to the dismay of a handful of reformist Arabs in exile
in London who have seen their fellow Arabs abandoned to the unrelenting totalitarians of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and to the
unreconstructed dictatorships that form much of the rest of the Arab world; and much to the dismay of Israel, which must consider
the possibility that these regimes will at any moment return to savaging the Jewish state alongside the treatment they mete
out to their own people.

It might be argued that the West has been slowly inching toward broaching the subject of democracy with the Arab leaders.
But in the wake of the Gulf War, which the United States waged to save a helpless Saudi Arabia from Saddam and to resurrect
a Kuwait that he had conquered, it is clear that this is not the case. Never has a ruler been as helpless as was the exiled
Emir Al-Sabah of Kuwait, sitting in Riyadh waiting to have the West extricate his country from Iraq’s gullet. If ever there
had been a moment to extract a commitment to basic human rights, or a constitution, or a free press, this was it. None was
asked for.

Other than the fact that the Arab world possesses a good part of the world’s oil supply, the West seems to have granted the
democratic exemption to the Arab world for reasons virtually indistinguishable from those the British Colonial Office held
at the end of World War I: a kind of smug condescension that the Arabs are “not ready” for democracy, that democracy is somehow
incompatible with their Islamic heritage, that “their own traditional forms of government” should be considered “right for
them,” and so on—as though, for example, torture, amputation, slavery, a manacled press, and absolute rule by a family of
a few hundred cousins is anything but a tyranny by any standard. Most bizarre are the attempts by Westerners to convince themselves
that the Arabs should have their democratic exemption because what they already have is
as good
as democracy, as in the periodic journalistic
accounts of Saudi Arabia as a quiet, gentle kingdom—a kind of Tibet in the sands.

Arab culture and Islamic civilization are no better excuses for an exemption from democracy than were Japanese culture in
1945 and Russian civilization in 1989—although neither of these had been democratic societies before. For an enduring peace
to be built in the Middle East, America must stop coddling the various Arab dictators and autocrats and begin pushing them
to adopt the most rudimentary guarantees that will allow those willing to live peacefully with Israel to come out of the closet,
publish their opinions, organize political parties, and ultimately be elected to positions to make good on their beliefs.
Some argue that democracy cannot be introduced into the Arab states because it will bring the Islamic fundamentalists to power.
But of course the idea cannot simply be to establish majority rule, and thereby hand power to the tyranny of the mob. To advance
democracy in the Arab world, the West must promote the concepts of individual rights and constitutional limits on governmental
power, without which the existence of any genuine democracy is impossible. Without real and concerted steps in this direction,
the perennial search for Arabs willing to make a permanent (as opposed to a tactical) peace with Israel will be ultimately
futile.

I wrote the above before I was elected Prime Minister, and my views have substantially remained unaltered. But I have come
to recognize that neither the United States nor the Western countries are likely to act toward the goal of democratization
in the Arab world. Nor is it possible for Israel to do so, for any action on our part would be falsely interpreted as an attempt
to destabilize neighboring regimes, changing one ruler with another—something we have absolutely no desire to do. Consequently,
we must assume that for our generation and perhaps the next, the task of peacemaking is with the Arab world as it is, unreformed
and undemocratic. The prevalence of radicalism in the Middle East—and the danger that, in the absence of any democratic traditions,
a nonradical regime can turn radical overnight—means that peace in the Middle East must have security arrangements built into
it. I have already noted that
for the foreseeable future the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between Arab and Arab and between Arab and
Jew is the peace of deterrence. Security is an indispensable pillar of peace for any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the possibility of a
future
war. An Israel lacking security would eventually invite an act of aggression that would destroy the peace. The question we
must therefore ask is, what are Israel’s minimal security requirements that can sustain its defenses and thereby sustain the
peace?

This question need not be answered in territorial terms alone. The adoption of security arrangements between Israel and the
Arab states, such as a hotline between Damascus and Jerusalem, or procedures to alert the other side to planned military maneuvers,
can reduce the possibility of war. Buffer zones might be created to prevent the stockpiling of weapons next to particularly
sensitive borders. Such zones would be free of heavy military equipment such as tanks and artillery and could be accessible
to the officers of the other side. Of necessity, the configuration of these zones would have to take into account the tremendous
disparity in the dimensions of Israel as compared with those of its Arab neighbors.

But however useful such devices may be, they cannot meet a contingency in which Israel’s enemies decide to violate the rules
and invade. In the case of Israel, as we have seen, military distances are so tiny and warning times so short that without
minimal strategic depth to absorb an attack and mobilize its reserves, Israel’s existence would be placed in jeopardy. Nor
can its need for strategic depth be filled by international guarantees. Even if the guaranteeing powers summon the will to
act—which, despite a formal promise, the friendly American administration did not do on the eve of the Six Day War—there looms
the question of whether they could physically dispatch the forces in time. Kuwait, a country almost exactly the size of Israel
(minus the West Bank), was overrun in a matter of six hours, but liberated only after a six-month buildup of huge forces shipped
from West to East. Israel cannot be asked to play the role of Lazarus. It will not rise from the
dead, to whose ranks its defeat would surely consign it. For unlike Arab Kuwait, no one doubts that if the Jewish state were
ever conquered by Arab armies, it would be effectively, irredeemably destroyed. The problem with international guarantees
for Israel is therefore exactly what Golda Meir said it was: “By the time they come to save Israel, there won’t be an Israel.”

Israel’s defenses therefore must be entrusted to its own forces, which are willing and able to act in real time against an
imminent invasion or attack. When seeking, as we must, a peace based on security, we must necessarily ask what secure boundaries
for Israel would be. Clearly, the Six Day War boundaries are the boundaries not of peace but of war. But how much broader
does Israel need to be? As we have seen, the crucial question is not only additional increments of strategic depth but the
incorporation of the Judea-Samaria mountain ridge, which forms a protective wall against invasion from the east. It is not
feasible for Israel to relinquish military control of this wall. A similar situation prevails for the Golan Heights, which
dominate the north. When these territories were in Arab hands, the result was war, not peace. One simply cannot talk about
peace and security for Israel and in the same breath expect Israel to significantly alter its existing defense boundaries.

Arab leaders’ promises that the Palestinian Arabs would have the whole of Palestine in 1947, the whole of Israel in 1967,
and the whole of Jordan in 1970 all proved to be impediments to resolving the problem of the Palestinian Arabs, each one leading
to the rejection of rational compromises and to further calamity.