A Durable Peace (27 page)

In this regard the Arab world’s campaign against Israel is not the first time that totalitarian regimes have used a perversion
of the concept of self-determination in concert with threats of force as a weapon against a small democracy. The most striking
precedent for this strategy in this century is Nazi Germany’s campaign against Czechoslovakia. This campaign deserves a reexamination
because so many of its particulars are being eerily reenacted today against Israel.

Czechoslovakia was strategically placed in the heart of Europe, and its conquest was central to Hitler’s plans for overrunning
Europe. Though small, Czechoslovakia could field over 800,000 men (one of the strongest armies in Europe), and it had a highly
efficient arms industry. To complicate matters from Hitler’s point of view, it possessed a formidable physical barrier to
his designs in the shape of the Sudeten mountains, which bordered Germany and guarded the access to the Czech heartland and
the capital city of Prague only miles away. A system of fortifications and fortresses
had been built in the mountains over many years, making passage by force a very costly proposition, perhaps even impossible.
We now know from the Nuremberg trials and other sources that Hitler’s generals were utterly opposed to an assault on the Czech
fortifications. After the war, numerous German generals stressed the point, including Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief
of the German high command:

We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military operation because… we had always been of the opinion that
our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient. From a purely military point
of view we lacked the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the frontier fortifications.
³⁶

Worse, from Hitler’s point of view, the Western powers had promised at Versailles to guarantee the Czech border against any
aggressive attack. France, which in 1938 could field one hundred divisions (an army 50 percent larger than Germany’s), had
agreed in writing to come to the Czechs’ defense, and Britain and Russia were committed to joining in if France did so.

Since an outright military victory seemed impossible, Hitler embarked on an unprecedented campaign to politically force the
Czechs to give up the land, and with it any hope of being able to defend their capital or their country. The inhabitants of
the Sudetenland, he said, were predominantly German, and these three million Sudeten Germans deserved—what else?—the right
of self-determination and a destiny separate from the other seven million inhabitants of Czechoslovakia; this despite the
fact that the country was a democracy and that the Sudeten Germans enjoyed economic prosperity and full civil rights. To buttress
his claim, Hitler organized and funded the creation of a new Sudeten political leadership that would do his bidding, which
was, in the words of the Sudeten leader Konrad Henlein, to “demand so much that we can never be satisfied.”
³⁷
Henlein was instructed to deny that he was
receiving instructions from Germany. As William Shirer, who was a reporter in Europe at the time, succinctly summarizes it:

Thus the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was merely a pretext… for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted,
undermining it, confusing and misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose… to destroy the Czechoslovak state and
grab its territories…. The leaders of France and Great Britain did not grasp this. All through the spring and summer, indeed almost to the end, Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier apparently sincerely believed, along with most of the rest
of the world, that all Hitler wanted was justice for his kinsfolk in Czechoslovakia.
³⁸

In addition, Hitler backed the establishment of a Sudeten liberation movement called the Sudeten Free Corps, and he instigated
a series of well-planned and violent uprisings that the Czechs were compelled to quell by force.
³⁹
Further, he secretly summoned Henlein to Berlin and briefed him, instructing him in great detail precisely how he should
agitate for the so-called Sudeten independence. (Occasionally, Hitler would replace his principal demand for Sudeten independence
with his second demand for reunification with Germany, literally mixing self-determination with German irredentism.)

Most important of all, Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels orchestrated a fearful propaganda campaign of fabricated “Czech
terror” and oppression of the Sudeten Germans. The Czech refusal to allow the Sudeten territories to return to their rightful
German owners, Hitler prattled, was proof that the Czechs were the intransigent obstacle to peace. For what choice would Germany
have but to come to the assistance of its oppressed brethren living under intolerable Czech occupation? Rejecting plans for
Sudeten autonomy, he insisted on nothing less than “self-determination.”
⁴⁰
Moreover, the Germans reversed causality, claiming that the Czechs were trying to precipitate a European crisis
in order to prevent the breakup of their state, that the choice between war and peace in Europe was in Czech hands, and even
that “this petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race.”
⁴¹
But there was a simple way to simultaneously avoid war and achieve justice, Hitler said. The Western powers—meaning Britain
and France—could force the Czechs to do what was necessary for the sake of peace: Czechoslovakia had to relinquish the occupied
territories.

And it worked. With astonishing speed, the governments and opinion-makers of the West adopted Hitler’s point of view. Throughout
1937 and 1938, mounting pressure was exerted on Czechoslovakia by the leading Western powers “to go to the utmost limit” to
meet Sudeten demands.
⁴²
Czech leader Edvard Beneš was reviled as intransigent. The Western press published articles lamenting Czech shortsightedness
and its total disregard for the cause of peace in Europe, as well as the injustice of not allowing the Sudetenland to be “returned”
to Germany (despite the fact that it had never been part of Germany). The British envoy who was dispatched to investigate
the situation even went so far as to demand that Czechoslovakia “so remodel her foreign relations as to give assurance to
her neighbors that she will in no circumstances attack them or enter into any aggressive action against them.”
⁴³

On September 18, 1938, under the gun of Hitler’s September 28 deadline, a meeting was held between the British Cabinet and
the French prime minister and foreign minister, in which it was determined that democratic Czechoslovakia must accede to Hitler’s
demands. Despite the fact that the West had promised in writing at Versailles to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia’s borders,
it agreed that the Czechs must give up the Sudetenland for “the maintenance of peace and the safety of Czechoslovakia’s vital
interests.” In return, the Czechs would receive from Britain and France “an international guarantee of the new boundaries…
against unprovoked aggression.”
⁴⁴
If the Czechs did not accept the plan and thereby save the peace of Europe, they were informed by
the leaders of the free world, they would be left to fight Hitler alone. In Neville Chamberlain’s immortal words: “It is up
to the Czechs now.”
⁴⁵

But in fact it was not even left to the Czechs. Chamberlain realized that if the Czechs were to fight, France and Britain
might be forced to fight too. As the Czechs and the Germans mobilized, Chamberlain became increasingly hysterical about averting
war by buying off Hitler with the Czech defensive wall. He shuttled repeatedly to Germany to try to arrange the payoff. Finally,
minutes before his September 28 deadline, Hitler “agreed” to Chamberlain’s proposal for an international peace conference
to bring peace to Central Europe. At Munich, Britain and France pleaded with Hitler for eleven and a half hours to “compromise”
and take the Sudetenland peacefully. In the end Hitler agreed.

Having grasped the fact that his supposed democratic allies had allowed themselves to become tools in Hitler’s hand, Prime
Minister Beneš announced Czechoslovakia’s capitulation to the demands of the totalitarians. “We have been basely betrayed,”
he said.
⁴⁶

The Western leaders returned in triumph to London and Paris. In government, in parliament, in the press, Chamberlain and Daladier
were praised, cheered, thanked for having traded land for peace. “My friends,” said Chamberlain, “I believe it is peace in
our time.”

On September 30, the Czech army began its withdrawal from the Sudetenland, from the strategic passes, the mountain fortresses,
the major industrial facilities that would have been the backbone of Czechoslovakia’s effort to defend itself. But this was
only phase one of Hitler’s plan. The German annexation of the Sudetenland was followed by a renewed list of demands on the
Czechs. The Nazis continued to invent incidents of violence and oppression against the ethnic German minority in what was
left of the Czech state. Less than six months later, on March 15, 1939, the Nazi war machine rolled through the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Shorn of their defenses in the Sudeten mountains, the Czechs
were now powerless to resist. Phase two had been implemented. “It was clear to me from the first moment,” said Hitler, “that
I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution.”
⁴⁷

The Western powers again did nothing. Once more, all their assurances proved worthless.

Unfortunately, the parallels to today’s effort to gouge the remainder of Judea and Samaria out of Israel are all too easy
to see. Like Czechoslovakia, Israel is a small democracy with a powerful army much aided by defensive terrain. Like the Sudeten
district, the West Bank is mountainous territory, a formidable military barrier that guards the slender and densely populated
Israeli shoreline and Israel’s capital city. Like the Germans, the Arabs understand that as long as Israel controls these
mountains, it will not be overrun. They understand too that a military campaign to seize these mountains is at present unthinkable,
and that Israel’s removal from them can be achieved only by the application of irresistible political pressure by the West
on Israel to withdraw.

The Arab regimes have therefore embarked on a campaign to persuade the West that the Arab inhabitants of these mountains (like
the Sudeten Germans, comprising roughly a third of the total population) are a separate people that deserves the right of
self-determination—and that unless such self-determination is granted, the Arab states will have no choice but to resort to
war to secure it. As in the case of Czechoslovakia, Israel’s insistence on not parting with territories strategically vital
for its defenses is presented as the obstacle to peace. Echoing Munich, the Arabs repeatedly advocate “active” American (and
European) involvement, in the hope that an American Chamberlain can be found to force “the intransigent party” to capitulate
where it is otherwise unwilling to compromise its own security.

That the Arabs have borrowed directly from the Nazis in this, as in so many of their other devices against Israel, is not
surprising. What is surprising, or at least disappointing, is the speed and readiness with which this transparent ruse has
been received, digested,
and internalized by the elite of the Western world. Not a day passes without some somber editorial or political comment from
august quarters in America or Europe asking Israel to voluntarily accept the same decree that Czechoslovakia was asked to
accept. Israel is told that it should divest itself of its large Arab minority, making itself ethnically more homogenous for
the sake of securing internal security and demographic bliss. The London
Times,
the leading newspaper of the world in 1938, published a celebrated editorial that summed it all up:

It might be worthwhile for the Czechoslovak government to consider whether they should exclude altogether… making Czechoslovakia
a more homogenous state by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they
are united by race…. The advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogenous state might conceivably outweigh the obvious
disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district.
⁴⁸

Substitute
Israel
for
Czechoslovakia,
and
Palestinian Arab
for
Sudeten German,
and you could insert this same editorial into the leading newspapers of the West today without so much as raising an eyebrow.
Israel, still the object of genocidal designs by some of the Arab world, has become in the view of many Western opinion-leaders
the intransigent party, the obstacle to peace; Arabs who seek Israel’s destruction and say so openly within the Arab world
are often presented as reasoned and moderate.

We now know that the propaganda weapon of “self-determination” is aimed at the Achilles’ heel of the West. Westerners, and
in particular Americans with their tradition of inalienable rights and sympathies for national freedom, find it easy to identify
with the exaggerated national aspirations of the Palestinians today, just as others found themselves moved by the plight of
the German ethnic nationals in Czechoslovakia in the time of Hitler. Thus the argument of self-determination has been able
to succeed where
earlier Arab efforts to portray the conflict as one over refugees or Israeli territorial aggression had largely failed. As
soon as the Arabs recognized the susceptibility of the West to the image of an “oppressed people struggling to be free,” the
entire Arab propaganda machine was retooled to churn out arguments on this basis. The Arabs were suddenly capable of persuading
Western opinion-makers of what they had been saying since 1967: that Israel’s presence in the territories was based on an
inherently immoral act, and that any effort to strengthen the Jewish state was therefore fundamentally wrong as long as it
hung on to these territories.