A Durable Peace (43 page)

Our job was to protect the armored formations at night from Egyptian heliborne commandos. We alternated between reconnoitering
for marauding helicopters and guarding the perimeter of the tank encampments. Inside the perimeter the tank crews, exhausted
from the fighting and from the endless job of tending to the tanks, would get a few hours of fitful, grimy sleep. On one occasion,
in the pitch darkness that was enforced in the camp, I literally bumped into a buddy I hadn’t seen in years, and wild rejoicing
ensued. But more often I learned, usually from news delivered in hushed tones, of friends who had been killed in the first
spasm of fighting. I remembered many of them as children, and I wondered if their families had received the news. Many more
were to die in the counterattack, including soldiers from my own unit whose framed photographs would later fill up the memorial
wall in the unit’s modest library. But these were early days, and there was soon a tense lull across the front, the kind that
comes after the first violent exchanges in any firefight.

In the Golan Heights, where we were next taken, we found much the same thing. In fierce fighting, the Israeli units, outnumbered
ten to one by the advancing Syrians, had managed to hold the line until the reserves arrived. The Israeli command of the Golan
at Nafah had to vacate the sea to open terrain when Syrian tanks reached the fenced perimeter. Crews were having their tanks
shot out from under them, and the surviving soldiers jumped into new tanks to continue the fighting. Entire brigades were
wiped out. The officers were the first to be mowed down as they exposed themselves above the turrets in order to direct the
battle. In several brigades the command reverted to sergeants and corporals, who joined the remnants of other units to fight
with incredible, desperate tenacity, trying to ward off what Moshe Dayan warned could be “the fall of the Third Temple.” Later,
the ashen-faced survivors—the regulars just out of their boyhood and the reservists who were clerks, teachers, and farmers
in private life—would describe the feeling that at once overwhelmed and sustained them, that they held the weight of Jewish
history and the very fate of the Jewish people in their hands. If they were to lose here, all would be lost. The line held.

Once the other reserves had arrived in full, the Israeli armor went onto the offensive and quickly rolled into Syria. On the
southern front, the Israeli columns that had counterattacked and crossed the canal encircled and trapped the Egyptian Third
Army. Here the Arabs pleaded with the Soviets and the Americans to stop the war, which they did with a Security Council ultimatum.
At war’s end, the Israeli army was twenty-five miles from Damascus and eighty miles from Cairo.

Israel had achieved a stunning reversal. But the cost was staggering: In the pulverizing battle to keep the front from collapsing
entirely in the face of overwhelming numbers, the army had sustained 2,552 dead—the worst losses since the War of Independence.
This was proportionately as though the United States had taken three times the losses of the eight-year Vietnam War in a period
of three weeks.

There was an important lesson here for both Israelis and Arabs. On both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts, the Arabs had managed
to penetrate as much as twenty miles before Israeli forces finally checked them. If the war had begun not on the post-1967
lines but on the pre-1967 lines, and if the Arab armies had advanced the same distances, Israel would have ceased to exist.
The Egyptians would have reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv from the south; the Jordanians (who no doubt would once more have
caved in to the temptation to join in the attack) would have reached the sea, splitting the country in two; and the Syrians
would have cut deep into the Galilee.

Israel’s army was able, albeit by a hair’s breadth, to prevent defeat in the face of a surprise attack under the most auspicious
conditions the Arabs could muster, including their throttling of the Western economies with an Arab oil embargo. By hiking
up oil prices and denying the world economy the fuel it needed to run, the Arabs had mounted extraordinary international pressure
on Israel, and Israel’s relations with dozens of nations were severed for two decades. When the United States sought to airlift
emergency assistance to Israel during the three weeks of the war, it could not find a single country in Europe that would
let the American supply planes land and refuel there. (In the end, Portugal agreed to allow the planes to refuel in the Azores
Islands.)

But despite such enormous advantages, the Arabs were routed within the month. That they had so little to show for an onslaught
stacked so decisively in their favor was a crucial factor in inducing Anwar Sadat finally to come to terms with Israel. And
indeed, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Israel and Egypt ultimately
negotiated the Camp David Accords of 1979, the first peace agreement between an Arab state and Israel. While Israel returned
the Sinai to Egypt, it was agreed that the Sinai would remain for the most part demilitarized, with the bulk of Egyptian forces
staying on the western side of the Suez Canal. Three zones were established in the Sinai delineating permissible Egyptian
troop levels. An elaborate monitoring system was established, including a multinational observer force, to ensure that the
demilitarization was observed.

The fact that the Sinai is so large (more than twice the size of Israel and the West Bank combined) meant that any violation
of the demilitarization agreement on the part of Egypt would leave Israel with sufficient time and depth to intercept an incoming
Egyptian force before it reached the border. Since the only kind of peace that can endure in the Middle East is a peace that
can be defended (the peace of deterrence), the only kind of peace treaty that can be sustained is one that allows adequate
defense against its possible violation. Because of the availability of the Sinai as a buffer, it was relatively easy to achieve
such conditions along the Egyptian border, Israel’s southern front. On other fronts, however, the situation was much more
complicated.

To understand the prerequisites for keeping peace on Israel’s eastern front, facing Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, one must first
understand the building blocks of Israel’s military defense. Israel’s ability to deter aggression depends on three central
factors: its
military strength
relative to that of the Arabs; the
warning time
it has to mobilize its forces; and the
minimum space
that its army requires to deploy in the face of potential threats.

With regard to Israeli
military strength,
the Arab advantage in armaments has been mounting steadily against Israel for years. Since the Yom Kippur War the Arabs have
spent more than $150 billion on arms and military facilities.
¹
Saudi Arabia alone annually spends as much on its military as a major industrialized nation such as Great Britain.
²
Syria now has more tanks than the German
army used when it invaded Russia.
³
To this arsenal are added the F-15S, AWACs planes, and Sidewinder missiles of Saudi Arabia, and the Hawk missiles and advanced
artillery of Jordan—all supplied by the United States. To be sure, Israel has morale, training, and other qualitative edges
over the Arabs, but with the vast purchases of weapons by the Arab regimes, the Middle East is fast reaching a point beyond
which Arab quantity translates into quality.

Military strength is also a function of manpower. In 1999, Israel’s population is roughly six million, as opposed to thirty-five
million for the eastern front states of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. This advantage in population allows the Arab regimes to field
larger armies, and it means that they can afford to keep most of their forces on active duty—unlike Israel, most of whose
army consists of reservists who must be called up to fight. On the eve of hostilities in 1973, Israel’s usual contingent of
sixty tanks on the Golan was bolstered by the arrival of the Seventh Armored Brigade, bringing the total to 177 tanks. The
Israeli force was nonetheless vastly outnumbered by the Syrian active-duty force of 900 tanks. Israel’s defense therefore
requires a capability of deterring or defending against an attack in which its troops are initially outnumbered by a margin
of five or seven to one. This enormous Arab advantage in arms and manpower, which Israel cannot possibly match, makes the
two remaining factors in Israel’s security equation even more critical.

For Israel,
warning time
is a precondition of survival. Israel needs sufficient time to mobilize the civilian reserves that make up the bulk of its
army. This consists of calling them up from their homes all over the country, assembling them in units, issuing them weapons
and ordnance, briefing them, and then transporting them to the lines. To mobilize several hundred thousand soldiers simultaneously
in this way is a herculean task, and it cannot be performed in less than forty-eight to seventy-two hours. (The Syrians have
no analogous problem because their standing army is almost as large as Israel’s entire reserve force,
⁴
and they therefore need only a few hours’ notice to go to war.) Until mobilization is
completed, the survival of the entire country is literally in the hands of the few thousand soldiers on active duty on the
front at any given time. If they were to fail to hold the front until the arrival of reinforcements, the battle would sweep
into the streets of Israel’s towns and cities.

The situation in the air is even worse. For a jet fighter, the flight time between Jordanian air bases and Israeli population
centers is five minutes, and it is only ten minutes from Syrian bases—while the absolute minimum time required to scramble
an interceptor is three minutes, assuming that it is waiting in a condition of highest alert. This means that without advance
warning of an attack, Israel’s coast and airfields could be bombed without a fight. Such a scenario is so fearsome and so
plausible that during the Gulf War, Israel was forced to keep a large portion of its fighter force
in the air.
In many parts of Israel during the Gulf War, you could step out of your house and see combat aircraft circling overhead during
prolonged periods—for an entire month and a half. Moreover, this was only possible because the Americans had announced in
advance the starting date of the war. Such readiness is impossible against a surprise attack, so the air force relies heavily
on surveillance installations that hope to shave seconds off the period before Israel becomes aware of an impending blow.

Among the most important surveillance positions in the entire Israeli defense system are the “early-warning stations” in the
mountain peaks of Samaria. These bases are high enough to be able to monitor troop movements and air base activity over the
mountains in Amman and the other major cities in Jordan. At the same time, the high ground interferes with surveillance efforts
aimed at Israel. If a hostile country were ever to gain control of these mountains, the situation would be reversed: The Arabs
would be afforded unlimited surveillance of the Israeli coastal plain, while Israel would lose much of what it has in the
way of an early-warning system. In facing a potential threat from Saddam Hussein, for example, these stations are critical
and irreplaceable. Today, Israel’s surveillance positions on the crest of the Samarian
mountain ridge can tip off Israel to an attack; if they were in Arab hands, the same positions would be reporting to Saddam
about the activity of Israel’s forces instead. (Jordan, for example, has regularly shared surveillance intelligence with Iraq.)

While airborne and satellite reconnaissance is improving, these sources of intelligence are notoriously vulnerable to bad
weather and maintenance problems. They are still prohibitively expensive, and in the case of early-warning aircraft, they
can be lost to enemy missile fire. No nation relies exclusively on airborne or space-based early-warning and this is true
for Israel as well. For Israel, there is still no substitute for a good mountaintop.

During the critical first seventy-two hours of war, one of the most precious commodities the handful of defenders on the line
can have is
space.
The Israeli army must have minimal physical room to deploy men and hardware at the outbreak of war. Already squeezed in the
country’s present boundaries, it could not do so effectively if Judea and Samaria were lopped off, leaving the army to deploy
in the streets of Jerusalem and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Worse, almost the entire zone of mobilization and deployment
would be subject to artillery bombardment, which can be effectively directed at most of Israel’s major cities from the hills
of the West Bank. Once astride this mountain range, an enemy could easily take aim at airfields, mobilization centers, crucial
highways, power plants, and key industries. Such intervention at the outbreak of a war would spell substantial disruption
of the entire mobilization network. By physically shielding the coast from attack, the wall of the West Bank is able not only
to save the lives of the Israelis living below but to afford the Israeli army the time it badly needs to get the troops to
the front (see
Map 9
).

This is the crucial point to understand about a military buffer space:
Space buys time.
The distance the enemy has to cover before it can enter Israel’s populated areas, inflict enormous civilian casualties, and
conquer its cities translates into the time that Israel has to mobilize. The farther the advancing column has to travel, the
more likely it is that air harassment and resistance on the
ground will be able to stem the advance and thereby purchase time for the mobilization and deployment of the reserves. The
space available for such delaying tactics is called “strategic depth,” and NATO’s forces in Germany counted on a depth of
150 miles
for tank battles involving roughly the same number of tanks that Israel has to face along its eastern front.
⁵