A Durable Peace (22 page)

We can now appreciate what has prevented a resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute year after year. The Arabs’ wars against
Israel and their smoldering hostility in between those wars stem from three mutually reinforcing factors that together constitute
the true core of the many conflicts in the Middle East: the Pan-Arab nationalist rejection of any non-Arab sovereignty in
the Middle East; the Islamic fundamentalist drive to cleanse the region of non-Islamic influences; and the particularly bitter
historic resentment of the West. In all three, it is clear that Arab antagonism directed at Israel in its origins is in no
way specific to the Jewish state. Rather, Arab enmity toward Israel and the Jews is merely a particular instance of far more
generalized antipathies that would have existed even had Israel never been established.

It is also clear that the grievances the Arabs present as grounds for attacking Israel are mere pretexts. For Arabs were already
attacking Jews, killing any they could without mercy, thirty years
before
there was a Jewish state—which is to say thirty years before there was a single refugee who could qualify as a “Palestinian
Problem.” The three causes I have described explain why Arabs were committing pogrom after pogrom against Jews
outside
Palestine, both before and after the founding of Israel, even though the Jews of Arab lands presumably had nothing to do
with any “Palestinian Problem.” They explain why the Arabs went to war with Israel repeatedly
before
there was a single Jewish settlement or a single Israeli soldier in the Golan Heights, Judea, or Samaria. After all, the
wars of 1948 and 1967 were both waged against a truncated Israel,
without
the disputed territories. What is more, the years between
those wars saw thousands of terrorist raids and arbitrary assaults by Arab armies against Israeli civilians—in which hundreds
of Jews died. Sniper fire across the border was an everyday occurrence, not only against Jewish farmers working the fields
of the Galilee but even across divided Jerusalem.
⁴⁷

The Arab campaign against Israel is hence rooted not in a negotiable grievance but in a basic opposition to the very existence
of Jewish sovereignty. To hope for the abandonment of such a deeply entrenched animosity while Pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic
fundamentalism—both of which thrive by fueling this fire—wrestle for control of the Arab psyche is to hope for too much, too
quickly. This is not to say that peace is impossible between Arabs and Israelis, or between Arabs and Arabs, for that matter.
But it does point to the special nature that peace must have in the Middle East and the special requirements that must be
satisfied if it is to endure. (I will discuss these issues in
Chapter 6
.)

There flickers in the West a tendency to see the end of the Cold War as the “end of history,” the end of the threat of major
upheaval and violence. Within this context, it is thought that since the conflict between the superpowers had ended in peace,
it must be a matter of only a little bit of pressure and a little bit of compromise, and peace will come to the Middle East
as well. But while the end of the Cold War has thankfully deprived the Arabs of their Soviet patron, it unfortunately has
little to do with terminating Middle Eastern bloodshed, a perpetual-motion machine that requires no outside assistance to
maintain itself or to threaten the peace and stability of other regions. Long after fears of Soviet expansionism have become
blurry memories, Israel and the West, and quite a few Arabs, will still be contending with radical Arab regimes, immersed
in their culture of violence, mesmerized by their successes, and bent on furthering their ambitions of conquest and domination.

It is easy for Westerners to dismiss the threat that any Arab state poses as exaggerated. After all, the populations of the
Arab states (except for Egypt’s) are rather small, their military capacities
are still questionable, and they are far away. But to dismiss the threat would be a terrible mistake. When even a minor regime
like Libya, which rules over only four million people, used the machinery of a sovereign state to act out its ruler’s twisted
fantasies, the result was a campaign of global terrorism. When a more substantial and more powerful country like Iraq (seventeen
million people) armed itself feverishly, the threat exceeded that of Libyan terrorism a thousand times. Indeed, Saddam’s Iraq
was, and still is, a menace of the sort that has previously been the stuff only of suspense novels: a terrorist state with
a leader seeking to graduate from car bombs to nuclear bombs. If Saddam’s continuing quest for a nuclear capability were ever
to succeed, it would be the first time in history that a nuclear weapon could be launched on the decision of a single individual,
without the moderating and restraining influence of any scientific, political, or military echelons who were actually willing
or able to voice disapproval. The threat to world peace would be unprecedented—as would also be the case if nuclear weapons
fell into the hands of Syria or Iran.

During the 1980s, instead of heeding Israeli warnings that the threat posed by Iraq was imminent, foreign governments fell
into the trap that Arab propaganda had set for them and accepted the assertion that endemic instability in the region either
did not exist or was rooted somehow in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian Problem and could be mitigated or eliminated
altogether with Israeli concessions. Such was the power of the Theory of Palestinian Centrality that it entirely obscured
Iraq’s feverish building of its arsenal for an entire decade, between 1980 and 1990, and it even served as a cover for Western
supplies to that burgeoning arsenal. Israel’s protestations fell on deaf ears.

In 1981, when Israel destroyed Saddam’s nuclear reactor, which was primed to produce nuclear bombs, the entire international
community, including the United States, condemned it. No nation has yet apologized to Israel or even withdrawn its condemnation
to this day. It goes without saying that there have been no expressions of gratitude. (Although there was some
unofficial
jubilation: Over the years, Iraq’s representatives at the UN had referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity.” I am told that
when news of the Israeli raid on the Osiraq reactor reached the Pentagon situation room, a triumphant cry was heard: “Hurray,
the entity strikes back!”) Even after the Gulf War, it is tragically clear that the world has simply failed to perceive what
was clear to T. E. Lawrence in 1928: that many Arab regimes are “tyrannies cemented with blood”; that whatever the nonradical
Arab governments may wish in private, they are ultimately under the thumb of the more extreme positions in the Arab world;
and that only external force will curb Arab dictators and terrorists who, in possession of a modern state apparatus, will
use it again and again to pursue their Pan-Arabist or Islamic fundamentalist visions.

Western perception of this has been successfully obscured by an Arab world steadily spouting the Palestinian Problem, caused
by Israel, as the explanation for all strife in the Middle East. By 1990, a quarter-century after the Six Day War, this axiomatic
truth had spread to every corner of the earth. The sacred cow of Palestinian Centrality appeared inviolable.

Until the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait. For Saddam’s invasion forced many Arab leaders to make some quick calculations. As much
as the Arab states resent the world’s discovery of the true face of inter-Arab conflict and its peering into what they traditionally
call their “internal disputes,” they also understand that they cannot afford to neglect the dangers that Saddam poses to them.

When Saddam himself realized that he would face a coalition that included Arab states, he sought to emphasize his Pan-Arab
appeal by transforming the invasion of Kuwait into an Arab-Israeli dispute, a transformation that was to be achieved by invoking
the apparently irrelevant Palestinian Problem. The invasion of Kuwait, he claimed, was a blow to the West and its Arab lackeys;
it was the necessary first step toward building an Arab state that would be strong enough to liberate Jerusalem. He backed
up this claim by demanding that any concessions he made in Kuwait be preceded by Israeli withdrawals from Palestinian land.

At that point the Arab countries poised against Saddam found themselves in the incredible position of having to refute the
central tenet that they themselves had worked so laboriously to plant in Arab and non-Arab minds. No, said Syrian, Egyptian,
and Saudi spokesmen, the invasion of Kuwait has nothing to do with the Palestinian Problem. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak
admitted, “If we say we want to link the two issues, this means we do not want to solve anything at all.”
⁴⁸
Likewise, according to the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington:

[W]e see no linkage whatsoever between these crises…. [I]f anyone thinks that Saddam Hussein is caring for the interests of
the Palestinian people or the Lebanese by invading and killing their brothers in Kuwait [he] is completely mistaken.
⁴⁹

This forced admission of the truth, even if it was brought to the surface for only a few weeks, did much to damage the Arabs’
most basic success: their creation of a false idea of a Palestinian core to all Middle Eastern conflicts. For the first time
in decades, many in the West (and in the East) were exposed to the complex inter-Arab turbulence as they had never been before.
After the Gulf War it was difficult, at least temporarily, to completely disregard the intensity and influence of inter-Arab
and inter-Moslem hostilities.

But the sacred cow of Palestinian Centrality is by no means dead. It is still limping along, patched up by convoluted attempts
to explain that one way or another Israel drives or exacerbates all conflict in the region. And with the passage of time,
the Kuwait invasion slips from memory and the idea of Palestinian Centrality is allowed to rise once more, again obscuring
the real picture of the Middle East. To understand the consequences of this obfuscation, we need only think back to the period
immediately preceding the Gulf War.

On a visit to the United States in May 1990, I was besieged by some of Israel’s staunchest Jewish-American allies who were
concerned
about an altercation that had occurred near St. John’s Hospice in East Jerusalem. A yeshiva had rented, with Israeli government
aid, a building adjacent to a Christian monastery and turned it into a dormitory for its students. The furor that arose when
the church objected to this arrangement gave much comfort to Israel’s enemies and much discomfort to its friends. Some of
these friends, members of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, were now pressing me on how Israel’s government,
which was then led by the Likud party, could allow such a “fiasco” to take place.

“You’re right. It’s a big problem for us now,” I said. “But it will blow over in a week. There’s a much bigger problem that
won’t go away.”

“What’s that?” they asked.

“Saddam,” I answered. “Saddam Hussein is the Middle East’s, and Israel’s, number one problem.”

The response to that was as dismissive as it was scornful: “Come on,” I was told in exasperation. “That’s just a Likud diversion.”

Few incidents illustrate the distortion of Middle Eastern reality that is rendered by the Theory of Palestinian Centrality
as well as this exchange, three months before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Israel’s friends and foes alike falsely believed
the “Palestinian Problem” to be synonymous with the “Middle East Problem.” This perversion of truth is a monument to the success
of the Arab propaganda machine, and it certainly has done great damage to Israel. But a still more far-reaching effect has
been its capacity to cloud Western perceptions of the real nature of the Middle East and the dangers that loom inside its
fabric of fanaticism for the security and well-being of the world.

4

N
o less successful than the Arab campaign for the Theory of Palestinian Centrality was the campaign for the Reversal of Causality.
If in the first instance, the Arabs said that all the problems in the Middle East were telescoped into the Palestinian Problem,
they now proceeded to explain exactly what that problem was: not a by-product of wars in which the Arab states attacked Israel,
but in fact the
cause
of those attacks in the first place.