A Durable Peace (56 page)

But after the creation of Israel, with the successive attacks and the continuing absence of the long-hoped-for peace, the
gap between
the idyll and the reality grew greater and greater, creating an ever-increasing sense of frustration that was felt most acutely
at the extremes of the Israeli political spectrum. According to the views prevalent in these quarters, the problem was not
that the idyll was misplaced or in need of revision, but that we had strayed from the path of righteousness and were being
punished for our sins by the Arab refusal to accept us. If we would only correct our ways, we could reach the hoped-for pastoral
state of bliss, the desire for which is embedded so deeply in the Israeli psyche.

On the left, this messianic belief focuses today on the “sin” of Israel’s conquest of the territories during the Six Day War.
The proponents of this view look nostalgically back to the nineteen years in which Israel lived in a vulnerable, embryonic
condition. Somehow they manage to remember not the terrible danger to which the country was subjected but only the relative
degree of national unity that this danger produced.

In this leftist revision of history, the incorporation of the territories into Israel during the Six Day War was the beginning
of all evil. Israel became smug and self-satisfied, insensitive and inhuman, repressing the Palestinian Arabs and tarnishing
the Israeli soul in the process. To save Israel’s soul, we must amputate part of the body. If only the nation were to rid
itself of the territories, its economy would improve, Israelis would have to serve less reserve duty, and there would be jobs
for new immigrants and money for building safer highways. This strain of argument occasionally spills over into the foreign
press in articles about the ill effects of the “tensions produced by the occupation,” which are supposed to lead to such things
as increased child abuse and wife-beating. The essential thesis of this view is: Give up the territories and be saved. The
true believers are certain that we are at salvation’s gate but have simply been too blind or too foolish to go in.

A mirror image of this messianism is found on the religious right, where it is believed that the act of settling the land
is in and of itself sufficient to earn divine providence and an end to the country’s woes. If Israel were merely to hang tough
and erect
more settlements, it could dispense with world opinion and international pressures. A variation on the religious right’s view
is the idea advanced by a segment of the nonreligious right that Israel could achieve lasting stability if only it could get
rid of the Arabs living in its midst. That is, the left believes that getting rid of the territories would cure all of Israel’s
ills, the right believes that keeping the territories would achieve the same effect.

These are all quick fixes that are neither quick nor able to fix. For what needs fixing is the underlying problem of Arab
hostility—a problem that may or may not disappear with the passing of several generations. Both of these fantasies evidence
a fundamental immaturity in Israeli political culture, a desperate search for an escape from the difficult struggle that Jewish
national life among the Arabs has engendered throughout this century, and that Israel will have to face in the next century
as well.

True, continuing struggle does not necessarily mean perpetual war, but it does mean an ongoing national exertion and the possibility
of periodic bouts of international. confrontation. Ending the state of war with the Arab states and establishing formal peace
with them would substantially reduce the degree and the intensity of the conflict, but it can never fully eliminate the possibility
of
future
wars and upheavals, just as the end of the Cold War did not constitute an end to all conflicts or to history itself, as some
had inanely believed. You cannot end the struggle for survival without ending life itself.

It is this that Jews in general and Israelis in particular find so difficult to accept. A nation of idealists and closet idealists,
still lacking the experience of political sovereignty needed to sharpen political perspicacity, they have found it difficult
to adjust to the realities of international politics. The escapist tendencies to Israeli politics stem from this Jewish inability
to reconcile oneself to the permanent need for Jewish power.

Of course, after many decades most Israelis have come to terms with the idea that the military is, at least for the time being,
the indispensable
foundation of Israel’s security. But the evident successes of the Israeli army in protecting the country and its citizens
have obscured a crucial truth: Military strength is not enough to ensure the nation’s survival. Just as the Jews had earlier
failed to grasp the significance of military power, a great many Jews, including many Israelis, now fail to understand the
significance of, and the need for, other types of power—and the totality of strength that derives from a nation’s military, economic,
and political resources.

Thus, in contrast to their new-found willingness to defend themselves against
military
attacks, many Israelis show a marked and disturbing tendency toward conceding at the first sign of serious international
political
and
economic
pressure. Who are we, they ask, to resist the entire world? If this is the will of the powers that be, what choice do we
have but to go along? That it is sometimes—and in the case of Israel, often—necessary to dissent from and resist prevailing
opinion seldom crosses their minds. That dissent is
possible
is believed even less frequently. In the realm of political power, the habits of passivity and submissiveness acquired in
exile are still very much with us.

Yet the twentieth century has shown better than any other age that political power is no less important than military might
in international conflicts. This is a lesson that no one, regardless of his ends, can afford to forget. The Czechs neglected
this lesson and allowed Hitler, who understood it well, to paint them into a political corner in Munich, forcing them to surrender
their country’s defenses without firing a shot. But it is not only victims of aggression who pay the price for underestimating
the importance of political power. Sometimes the perpetrators of aggression forget it as well. Saddam Hussein, for one, did
not take it into account in his bid to rule Kuwait. His army had overcome all Kuwaiti resistance within hours, but the battle
that Saddam was unprepared to fight was the political battle, over the next six months, to persuade international opinion
that his cause was just, and that the governments of the world should not embark on embargo and war to pry
Kuwait from his grasp. He could have prepared the ground in advance by conducting a full-scale campaign in the West to obscure
his designs under a cloud of palatable arguments: that the Kuwaiti rulers were corrupt oppressors of their own people, that
Kuwaitis were an integral part of the Iraqi people, that they welcomed his populist rule, and so on. But having failed to
fight on this battlefield, Saddam lost ignominiously. He was completely isolated internationally, with virtually no one to
come to his assistance or broker an elegant, face-saving compromise. He was saved only by American timidity in the closing
hours of the war.

As Saddam learned the hard way, to win militarily you must also win politically; to win politically, you must win over public
opinion; and to win over public opinion, you must convince the public that your cause is just.

This chain of imperatives, culminating in the need to muster public support on a vast scale, is not a luxury that nations
may choose to forgo. The advent of democratic ideals and democratic terminology, along with the rise of the mass media, have
elevated international public opinion into the crucial arena in which political struggles are waged. It matters little if
your cause is just or unjust, moral or immoral. Anyone engaged in political or military conflict in this century must seek
to persuade international audiences that his cause is just. Indeed, Hitler and Churchill were quintessential examples of political
leaders who understood the logic of this new necessity. Hitler and Goebbels perfected the techniques of the propaganda blitz,
disguising their aggressive intentions in appeals to justice and self-determination. Although these were outrageous parodies
of the truth, they were nonetheless accepted at the time as plausible explanations of Nazi actions (and as excuses for Western
inaction). Churchill recognized that his first task as war leader was to mobilize the entire Western world by appealing to
its most cherished values of freedom and human dignity. His main weapons, his speeches, were carefully constructed toward
that end, as were those of his ally, Franklin
Roosevelt, who pioneered the systematic use of broadcasting as a device to rally public opinion.

To see the power of public opinion in the age of mass communication, one need only compare the electrifying effect of Churchill’s
speeches, broadcast to millions over radio, with the virtual initial noneffect of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. That address,
though at least as inspiring as any that Churchill wrote, was heard by only a handful of people, and it played almost no immediate
role in determining the course of the Civil War.
⁵
The millions who were swayed by its poetry and power became familiar with it only later, and not in the midst of the great
events that had led Lincoln to compose it. It could be argued that even if Lincoln had had broadcasting available to him,
his weak voice would not have carried the message, as Churchill’s stentorian delivery did. All this serves simply to underscore
the new realities of the century: that the effect of a powerful message powerfully delivered and powerfully broadcast to public
opinion has become an indispensable element in the waging of political and military struggles.

Many of the century’s chief antagonists in international disputes have understood this principle. Stalin applied it enthusiastically,
presenting himself as the world’s savior and changing democracies into despotisms in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people.
This legacy of the big lie hugely told has been bequeathed by Hitler and Stalin to an endless array of lesser dictators, from
Nasser to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro, who have used their techniques on their victims and on their victims’ allies to weaken
resistance to their aggression.

Take the North Vietnamese as an example. They pursued the propaganda war with great success against South Vietnam, presenting
themselves as a paragon of goodness while vilifying the South, whose government was anything but pristine but was certainly
not guilty of the mass killings and uprooting of entire populations that the North habitually practiced. The relentless North
Vietnamese propaganda campaign aimed at American public opinion made an important contribution to sapping the American will
to pursue the war. To the understandable question of why American boys should be fighting in a far corner of Asia was added
the corollary: especially when America’s ally is so corrupt and evil. With repetition of the question, the answer became increasingly
obvious, paving the way to North Vietnam’s victory.

But notwithstanding the success of the North Vietnamese, I believe that in the postwar era the preeminent masters of translating
propaganda into political pressure have been the Arabs. The Arab regimes and terror organizations have understood the importance
of this instrument as it applied to their particular objective: the destruction of Israel. They saw that to reverse Israel’s
military victory of 1967 they would have to defeat Israel politically, that this meant defeating it on the battleground of
public opinion, and that this in turn meant defeating it in the appeal to justice. They consequently proceeded to weave an
elaborate patchwork quilt of falsehoods: the false Theory of Palestinian Centrality, the false Reversal of Causality, the false
image of PLO Congeniality. Above all, the Arabs sought to rob the Jews of every aspect of the historical case that suggested
the justice of their cause, constructing an extraordinary distortion of Jewish history and substituting in its place a fictitious
Palestinian one: The Arabs took the place of the Jews as the natives in the land, and the Jews took the place of the Arabs
as the invaders; the horrible Jewish exile into a hundred lands was exchanged for a Palestinian Arab “exile” (into the neighboring
Arab states); the atrocities committed against the Jews were denied and dismissed, while any hardship encountered by the Arabs
was inflated into a miniature Holocaust. All this was meant to persuade the peoples of the world, especially those of the
United States and Europe, that Israel had committed a grave injustice, which the Arabs were merely trying to correct, and
that decent people everywhere were obligated to help them correct it.

While the Arabs were exceptional in waging the battle for public opinion so long and so systematically, the Jews of Israel
were unique in abandoning the field for so long. For as we have noted, the Israelis have been encumbered by the great debilitation
stemming
from the long Jewish absence from international political life and the renewed emphasis on military power. The majority felt
there was no
need
to counteract Arab propaganda. Had not the Israeli Defense Forces extricated Israel from destruction in 1948 and again in
1967? Were they not capable of doing so again? And if the Arabs kept prattling away at the UN, in the media and in universities
of the West—what of it? Surely Israel did not have to concern itself with such trivial carpings, as long as it possessed the
military power to defend itself. As David Ben-Gurion bluntly informed a young nation in the 1950s: What matters is not what
the
goyim
(Gentiles) say, but what the Jews do. He was half right, of course. Without resolute Jewish actions, the building and fortification
of the Jewish state could not take place. But he was flat wrong in dismissing the importance and power of public opinion—he
found out later, when Israeli forces responded to Egyptian-sponsored terror attacks by entering the Sinai in 1956. At the
time, Ben-Gurion announced that Israel would not leave the Sinai for a thousand years. But Israel’s failure to win support
for its action in the American administration, the Congress, and with the public in order to dampen Eisenhower’s opposition
resulted in a hasty Israeli retreat within months.