A Durable Peace (47 page)

Can military control be separated from political sovereignty for very long? This is the difficulty with all the proposals
put forward on behalf of relinquishing the territories. The debate between Israel’s left-wing and right-wing generals over
the question of territorial compromise is ultimately not a
military
debate. There is a rough strategic consensus as to what kind of military presence must be retained in the territories in
order to make Israel defensible. Rather, the debate is one
over political
judgment: What kind of sovereign arrangements must exist on the ground in order to make Israel’s defense workable? Some have
asserted that one could have an Israeli military presence on sovereign Arab soil. But the Egyptians refused to allow the retention
of a single Israeli air base in the Sinai, and there is no reason to expect that any other Arab government would behave any
differently. Similarly, some have asserted that Israel could permanently control their space over an Arab country. All such
schemes would break down in the face of Arab domestic pressure—just as American control over the Panama Canal and British
authority in Suez broke down in the face of Panamanian and Egyptian pressure—leaving Israel hopelessly vulnerable to powerful
neighboring armies. If you wish to control a territory as minuscule as the West Bank, where the strategic points and the population
centers are in close proximity to one another, you have to control it
both
militarily and politically.
If you give up political control, you will ultimately have to give up military control. This is the challenge and difficulty
of reaching peace with
added
security with the Palestinians. They should have all the political powers to run their lives but none of those political
powers that could threaten Israeli security and survival.

In addition to such defense-related issues, there are other security issues that must be taken into account. One of the most
critical of security arguments pertaining to Judea and Samaria is seldom, if ever, discussed in the foreign media: water.
No country can survive without water, and in the Middle East there is not much of it to go around. Like its neighbors Egypt,
Syria, and Jordan, Israel is a country that is in severe water deficit, annually consuming substantially more water than is
replenished from natural sources. The situation is worst in Syria, whose capital, Damascus, is often without running water
at night.
¹⁴
A real peace in the region would require regional efforts to conserve water and develop alternative sources. Without such
efforts, the only thing that is likely to come of the severe and worsening crisis is more conflict. This has been most evident
in the case of the Tigris and Euphrates, which carry fresh water from the mountains of eastern Turkey to Syria and Iraq downstream.
Turkish moves to dam and otherwise develop the headwaters have met with outraged and bellicose reactions from its southern
neighbors in recent years, and the prospects look no more promising for the future.
¹⁵

In Israel’s case, fully 40 percent of the available fresh-water resources consists of ground water drawn from aquifiers wholly
or partially under Judea and Samaria. This is a supply without which Israel would be brought to the brink of catastrophe,
and no “solution” to the dispute over the territories can be resolved without this possibility being forestalled. The question
is how? The problems that would be caused by having the most vital of all resources under the control of an enemy do not stop
at water blackmail, a frightening enough scenario in itself. The underground water supply could be contaminated in ways that
could spread epidemics and even destroy the aquifier permanently, either on purpose or
by accident. Given that one of the weapons of the intifada was the burning of forests all over Israel, and that Saddam was
willing to fight America by pouring millions of barrels of crude oil into the gulf and setting oil wells afire, Israel cannot
rule out the possibility of deliberate diversion and pollution of its water supply. (Significantly, the first attacks that
Yasser Arafat’s Fatah ever launched in the 1960s were attempts to destroy the National Water Carrier, the Israeli pipeline
that provides water from the Golan and Galilee to parched communities and farms all over Israel.)
¹⁶

But accidental poisoning is no less a concern. The improper treatment of sewage and other industrial and urban waste-disposal
problems have an immediate impact on the fresh-water reserves under the ground. Poorly sealed sewers are capable of leaking
toxic wastes into the aquifier for years without detection, as are factory disposal sites. Preventing such deadly seepage
requires both a high level of governmental and public awareness, and the dedication of substantial funds to inspection, monitoring,
and repairs. If it is difficult to muster the necessary concern over environmental poisoning in the most advanced countries
in the West, it is clear that handing such fearsome responsibility to an impoverished and hostile Arab regime on the West
Bank would be an act of unalloyed foolishness, and no Israeli government could seriously be expected to do it.

When one considers the crucial factor of strategic depth and height, the topographical and geographical obstacles to invasion,
and the control of the precious water resources offered by this vital mountain ridge known as the West Bank, one thing becomes
apparent. It is the same stark conclusion that one reaches on a clear day standing on the ridge of the Samarian mountain of
Ba’al Hazor, seeing at once the entire breadth of the country, with the Jordan River Valley to the right and the Mediterranean
to the left: that western Palestine, the present territory under Israel, is
one
integral territorial unit, dominated by one mountain range that overlooks one coastal plain. For any nation this would constitute
a tiny physical platform on which to build and protect its physical life. To
subdivide this land into two unstable, insecure nations, to try to defend what is indefensible, is to invite disaster. Carving
Judea and Samaria out of Israel means carving up Israel.

The considerations of strategic depth, geography, and water are also crucial in considering the future of the Golan Heights,
and they render concessions on that front extremely dangerous as well. The Golan, which dominates the headwaters of the Jordan
River and the Sea of Galilee, controls
another
40 percent of Israel’s water supply. Like the West Bank, it too constitutes a natural barrier shielding Israel, rising nearly
four thousand feet above the farmland in the Hula Valley of northern Israel. The Golan is also similar to the West Bank in
that it is tiny—no more than sixteen miles at its widest point—as opposed to the Sinai, whose 120-mile expanse offered relatively
flat approaches to Israel and not a drop of water. Thus, while Israel could afford to be extremely generous in ceding the
Sinai in its peace with Egypt on the western front, there is no margin for similar concessions in the Golan and the West Bank
on its eastern front.

This becomes readily apparent when one considers that the conventional military threat to Israel’s existence can come from
three potential sources: the large and powerful armies of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The well-armed Egyptian army is separated
from Israel by the Sinai desert, which affords Israel sufficient strategic depth should Egypt ever choose to violate the peace
treaty with Israel. The Iraqi army, although reduced in strength after the Gulf War, remains a substantial threat and is in
the process of being rebuilt. It is separated from Israel by a buffer area roughly the same size as the Sinai—the Jordanian
desert. Although the Jordanian army that patrols this empty waste is a good one, it is too small to constitute a serious threat
to Israel on its own. Israel has always said publicly that it considers the entire territory of Jordan to be a buffer area,
and that it would under no circumstances allow “foreign forces” to enter Jordan—a warning with which King Hussein was never
too unhappy, since it shielded him from his Arab neighbors, just as it protected Israel itself. Thus during the Gulf War,
Israel issued repeated warnings that if the Iraqi army entered Jordan for any reason, this would be considered an act of war.
(A similar Israeli warning to Syria in 1970 caused the invading Syrian army to withdraw from Jordan.)

Most Israelis oppose the insertion of a PLO state on the West Bank because they do not want a state allied with Iraq and the
most radical forces in the Arab world on their doorstep. Such a state would nullify the whole value of the buffer area on
Israel’s eastern front.

But whereas Israel presently possesses sufficient strategic depth against potential threats from the south (Egypt) and east
(Iraq), it has no such strategic depth in the case of the Syrian threat in the north. It must be remembered that the Syrian
army is one of the largest and best equipped in the world. It is permanently deployed on the broad plateau between Damascus
and the Golan Heights, a mere sixteen miles from the Israeli breadbasket of Galilee, and another thirty miles from Haifa and
the Israeli coastal plain. While the Egyptian and Iraqi armies face a journey of days to reach Israel from their current emplacements,
the Syrians could reach the first Israeli population centers in a matter of hours. The only military obstacle in their way
is the necessarily far smaller Israeli force that is entrenched on the superior terrain of the Golan Heights. For ever since
the Six Day War in 1967, Israel has looked down
at the Syrians,
rather than the other way around. From the precipices of Mount Hermon and Mount Avital, Israeli soldiers can observe the
Syrian installations spread out beneath them. It is these commanding positions that make up for the lack of strategic depth.
This is the reason that the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin fought bitterly to retain this terrain in the 1974 disengagement
agreement with Syria—much to the consternation of the U.S. administration, which found it difficult to understand what difference
“a few miles” made.

Yet Israel is often told that, its security and water requirements notwithstanding, it is bound by international agreement
to cede
the territories to the Arabs. The Arabs invoke UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted in the wake of the Six
Day War and to which Israel has always been a full subscriber. This resolution, it is often claimed, expresses the will of
the international community that Israel withdraw from Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Gaza. By now the actual wording of
the text and the intentions of its authors have for the most part been forgotten. As in so many other things, the version
of the resolution frequently discussed by “experts” on television has more to do with the intent of Israel’s adversaries than
with fact.

As written, Resolution 242 was originally about peace. It called for an immediate “termination of all claims or states of
belligerency”; for the “acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state
in the area”; and for the recognition of the right of those states “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries
free from threats or acts of force.” (The full text can be found in Appendix F.) Thus the bulk of the resolution is a demand
by the international community that the Arab states make peace: by ending the state of war against Israel, recognizing Israel’s
right to exist, and assuring that Israel’s borders will be secure ones. That this was the central concern of the resolution
was confirmed by Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, who was one of the authors of the resolution:

It calls for respect and acknowledgement of the sovereignty of every state in the area. Since Israel never denied the sovereignty
of its neighboring countries, this language obviously requires those countries to acknowledge Israel’s sovereignty.
¹⁷

It took twelve years for Egypt to comply with the Security Council resolution. In explicitly refusing to make peace with Israel,
other Arab states flout the dictates of Resolution 242 to this day Yet with unsurpassed hypocrisy, they reverse causality
yet again and claim that it is
Israel
that is in violation of a resolution
with which they themselves have yet to make the slightest gesture of compliance. Their accusations are based on an additional
clause in Resolution 242, which calls for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
Israel, claim the Arabs, has never obeyed the directive to withdraw from “the territories.” Why should they make peace, when
Israel is still in possession of the West Bank, the Golan and Gaza? They conveniently choose to forget that
any
Israeli withdrawal was supposed to follow the signing of peace agreements, which the Arab states adamantly refuse to sign.

Viewed through the distorting prism of Arab propaganda, it is indeed possible to believe that the intention of the UN was
unmistakably to oust Israel from
“the
territories,” and that the resolution says only “territories” (leaving out the word
the)
due to a printer’s error. In fact, as the very people who drafted the resolution attest, evacuating Israeli forces from the
territories was not the central issue, and the
the
was left out on purpose so that Israel could negotiate to
keep
a portion of the land for security reasons. Hence Arthur Goldberg: “The notable omissions in regard to [Israeli] withdrawal
are the word ‘the’ or ‘all’… the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories, without defining the extent of
the withdrawal.”
¹⁸
This is also the view of Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the UN, who co-authored the resolution with Goldberg:

We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the [pre-] 1967 line. We did not put the “the” in. We did not say all the territories,
deliberately…. We all knew that the boundaries of [pre-] 1967 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a ceasefire
line of a couple of decades earlier…. We did not say that the [pre-] 1967 boundaries must be forever.
¹⁹