A Durable Peace (53 page)

An essential area for international development is in the field of nonconventional arms development in the Arab countries.
Nearly a decade after the victorious assault against Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons facilities are
still
being found in Iraq, and there are probably plenty more where these came from. As the request to clean out Iraq has proved,
it is exceedingly difficult to strip a country of the know-how and technology to build weapons of mass destruction once it
has them. The only possible way of forestalling the day when Arab states will have the capacity to wipe out Israeli cities
(and those of other countries) at the touch of a button is to secure a real, enforced moratorium on the transfer of such weapons
and expertise to Iran and the Arab world—and this means the imposition of sanctions on countries that are found to be in violation
of the ban. Without such concerted international action and in the absence of the democratization of Middle Eastern regimes,
it will only be a matter of time before one of the dictatorships in the region acquires nuclear weapons, imperiling not only
Israel and the Middle East but the peace of everyone else on the planet.

It is possible to present all of these steps as a peace plan comprised of three tracks: bilateral measures between Israel
and Arab states; international measures taken by the nations of the world (including assistance to joint projects involving
Israel and the Arab states); and measures taken to improve the conditions under which Jews and Arabs live side by side in
peace with each other. Each of these elements obviously requires careful articulation and much elaboration, which only painstaking
negotiations can produce. Such negotiations understandably might alter certain components and possibly add others. Nevertheless,
I am convinced that the approach described in this chapter ought to serve as a blueprint for the achievement of a realistic
and enduring peace between Arabs and Israelis.

In addition to the proposals for a resolution of the question of
the disputed areas, a comprehensive approach to an Arab-Israeli peace must include formal peace treaties between the Arab
states and Israel; security arrangements with the Arab states to protect Israel from future attacks and to enable all sides
to monitor compliance with the agreements; normalization of relations (including an end to the Arab economic boycott of Israel);
cessation of official anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in Arab schools and government media; an international regime
to ban the sale of nonconventional weapons or matériel to the radical regimes of the Middle East; internationally assisted
refugee housing and resettlement projects; and regional cooperation for water development and environmental protection.

This is the path to an Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East as it really is—turbulent, undemocratized, and as yet unreformed
of its underlying antagonisms. Those antagonisms will be extremely slow to disappear. This is why a genuine reconciliation,
in addition to having buttresses of stability, security, and cooperation built into it, must contain a strong element of gradualism.
Such a graduated approach would allow both sides to alter their conceptions about achieving peace, should the basic political
and military conditions of the region undergo a substantial transformation—for the better, one would hope.

While endless ink has been spilled in calling for various futile resolutions to the ongoing strife between the Jewish and
Arab peoples over the disposition of Palestine, the proposal made here takes full account of Israel’s security needs, while
granting control over their own needs to the Arabs living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Though it is certain to arouse furious
opposition from irredentists in the Arab camp, as well as from purists on the Israeli left and right, I believe that it offers
a real hope of a lasting peace—and one in which any realist in any camp can wholeheartedly believe.

9

I
n 1987 I visited Poland, then still under Communist rule. I landed at a military airport near Krakow and was then taken by
car to the drab countryside. We soon came across a dilapidated village whose only mark of distinction was a sign that startled
me: “Auswiescen.” Auschwitz. There were actually people who lived there.

A few minutes beyond the village, we reached the gates of the camp, inscribed with the infamous promise:
Arbeit macht frei
(“Work makes you free”). As I soon learned, the barracks of Auschwitz were not the actual place where the great part of the
destruction of some two million Jews occurred. Although many thousands died there, Auschwitz was used primarily as headquarters
for the German staff for interrogation and for torture. But the actual work of liquidation was done elsewhere. I marched with
fellow Knesset members and Jewish youngsters from Israel and other countries along the railroad tracks leading from Auschwitz
to nearby Birkenau. The tracks led through another infamous gate, coming to an abrupt end at a white ramp several hundred
yards into the camp. On either side was a crematorium, now partially in ruins. The trains would stop at the ramp each day,
depositing
thousands of Jews who were quickly dispatched to the gas chambers. Soon there was nothing left of them but ashes.

Until I stood there at Birkenau, I never realized how tiny and mundane the whole thing was. The factory of death could have
been put out of operation by one pass of a bomber. Indeed the Allies had been bombing strategic targets a few miles away.
Had the order been given, it would have taken but a slight shift of the bomber pilot’s stick to interdict the slaughter. Yet
the order was never given.

Many people visiting Birkenau assume that the Allies were unaware of the fact that all of Europe’s Jews were being systematically
annihilated. I knew differently. For a year and a half during my tenure at the United Nations, my colleagues and I had waged
a campaign to open the secret archives where the UN records on Nazi war criminals were kept. When we finally obtained access
to the files, we saw that the Allies War Crimes Commission, established by Britain in 1942 and staffed by the officials of
seventeen countries, had been receiving accurate and comprehensive information about what was going on in Birkenau, Chelmno,
and Dachau in early 1944, a year and a half before the ovens were put out of commission by Germany’s collapse. Had the Allies
acted on this information, untold numbers of Jews could have been saved. But they knew, and did nothing. European Jewry was
doomed.

How did the Jews come to this point of utter helplessness? How did an entire people arrive at a state where they were herded
quietly to the slaughter, unable to resist this monstrous assault on their persons and on their collective existence? And
how is it that they were able to do nothing to elicit even an ounce of action from their would-be saviors?

The question of Jewish powerlessness is central to the traumatic experience of the Jewish people, and it is the obverse side
of the question of Jewish power. It is between these two poles that Jewish history has oscillated in modern times. Certainly
in the last one hundred years, the period that is the primary focus of this book, the Jewish people has experienced the most
extreme shifts
of circumstance from one pole to the other. The pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus trial, the gathering storm of anti-Semitism
and its seismic explosion in the Holocaust, along with Great Britain’s cynical obstruction of the Jewish national movement’s
efforts to bring the Jews of Europe to a safe haven—these are the tragic steps in a people’s descent to utter impotence. Similarly,
the resurrection of Israel, the rebirth of Jewish military power, and its spectacular successes against adversaries far superior
in numbers and matériel signify a movement in the contrary direction.

Yet as dramatic as this oscillation has been during the last century, I believe that the rise of Israel can only be understood
in a much broader historical perspective, a millennial one. For the Jews are one of the oldest nations on earth, and they
are distinguished by their capacity for remembrance. In its essence, the rise of Israel has been a conscious attempt to wrest
redemption from the grip of unrelenting agony and to do so by weaving into the future the enduring threads of collective will
and purpose originating in a heroic past.

To fully understand the interplay between power and power-lessness in the history of the Jews, therefore, requires an examination
of the Jewish position over a much longer period than the modern era. Of necessity, such a perspective must begin with the
position of the Jews in antiquity, for it is in that period that the decisive experiences in the life of the nation took place,
shaping many aspects of the Jewish character, Jewish attitudes, and Jewish expectations of the future.

As opposed to the image of the Jew during most of the modern period, Jews in ancient times were not known as docile victims.
To the contrary, they were renowned for possessing the exact opposite qualities of national character. Biblical records attest
to this, as do Hellenistic and Roman sources. The Jews may not have been loved in antiquity, but they were respected for their
determination and capacity to resist assaults on their rights and liberty. In fact, it is hard to find a people that resisted
so persistently, for so long, and against such overwhelming odds. Although
the Jewish land was successively conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs,
the Jewish people resisted conquest, occupation, and exile for nearly twenty centuries.

In this first long phase of their history, the Jews produced a succession of remarkable military and political figures to
lead their protracted struggle, a list that has few if any rivals in the history of nations: Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samson,
Debora, Saul, Jonathan, David, the Kings of Israel and judah, Nehemia, the Maccabees, Bar Kochba, Elazar ben Yair, Judah of
Galilee, Simon bar Giora, and other lesser-known Jewish leaders of the successive revolts against Rome and Byzantium.

Furthermore, Jewish resistance characterized the Jewish Diaspora of the ancient world as well. From the second century
B.C.E.
through the end of the Roman period, the Jews of Egypt, Syria, and Rome evinced a capacity to resist politically and militarily
the pogroms, massacres, and violations of their rights by the non-Jews among whom they lived. “You know what a big crowd it
is, how they stick together, how influential they are,” pouted Cicero, seeking to avoid undue confrontation with the Jews
of Rome.
¹
Against Rome and Byzantium, the Jews of Judea stood utterly alone in the face of a superpower that had vanquished most of
the civilized world, waging a seemingly hopeless resistance for six centuries.

If there is one quality that emerges from Jewish history in antiquity, it is the obstinate refusal of the Jews to defer their
religious and political independence to other peoples, as well as their readiness to wage an unrelenting struggle against
their would-be oppressors. They sometimes succeeded, although more often they did not. But they never gave up the struggle,
which preserved in itself their identity and values and prevented them from assimilating and disappearing like the numberless
other nations that succumbed to the power of empires.

How did this capacity to resist vanish, to be replaced by the image and reality of the defenseless Jew? This did not happen
overnight. Conquered, subjugated, and exhausted, the Jews nevertheless
continued the struggle to assert control over their fate, sometimes requiring long decades to replenish their collective will.
Certainly the protracted and tragic struggle against Rome drained the nation of much energy. But contrary to popular notions,
this series of defeats failed to root out the Jewish will to resist, as shown by the later Jewish revolts against Rome and
Byzantium
after
Bar Kochba. For as long as the Jewish people lived on its land, it possessed a clear capacity for military and political
action, demonstrated as late as the beginning of the seventh century with the Jewish alliances first with and then against
the Persian invaders of the land.