State of Seige

The Arab Israeli Dispute costs us more every day. Initially the price could be calculated in dollars, first in millions, then in billions every year. Next, as Americans overseas came under attack, American tourists found it prudent to avoid the Middle East and then Europe. Now, even inside the United States, the quality of life has suffered. Security is a costly and time consuming growth industry.

Because of the Arab Israeli dispute, the United States is, in fact, at war. It is a war in which our chances are no better than they were in Viet Nam. There we supported leaders whose corruption we would never have tolerated at home. Gradually the Vietnamese people, and the rest of the world, rallied to the other side. In the Middle East we provide arms and money to whomever governs Israel. Since our support comes with no moral strings, Israeli leaders are free to follow racist policies that negate everything we stand for, and to use torture, force and terror that no American would condone at home.

At first gradually, now pell mell, our European allies are being dragged into our Middle East war. They don't like it. As our own government and people suffer increasingly, and begin to realize what the war is all about, they may not like it either.

In our Middle East war we do not define the enemy: We do not explain who he is, where he is, how many supporters he has, and why he is willing to fight and die. Instead we confront a Lilliputian Muammar Qaddafi with one of history's greatest armadas, as if "flaky" Arab leaders or "radical" Arab countries are the source of all our troubles.

Arab residents and Jewish immigrants began struggling over Palestine 70 years ago. Though frequently divided and indecisive, Britain eventually threw its support to the Jews. Ask any Englishman if he believes tie betrayal of the Arabs is a pro d page in British history. When the British cut and ran in 1948, tie Palestinian problem grew into the Arab Israel dispute, with weak or newly-independent regimes in Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Egypt making a futile attempt to restore Palestinian Arabs to their lost towns and villages. The U.S., which had been Britain's chief tormentor in the Middle East, by then was having second thoughts and played no direct role in the fighting. In 1956, in fact, when France and Britain abetted Israel's expansionist grab for Sinai, it was the Eisenhower Administration that forced Israel to give back the land it had seized.

In 1967, however, when Israel took and held the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai, the U.S. acquiesced in Israel's violation of the basic premise of international law forbiding the acquisition of territory by force. As Israel, now an international outlaw, began to lose its former friends, it tightened a leech like grasp on the United States. We, in turn, barely acknowledged that Israeli had, in 1967, pushed another 200,000 Palestinians across international borders to join the 800,000 Palestinians who had already lost their homes between 1947 and 1949.

If we had been in a mood to find fault with our new Israeli friend we might have had qualms in 1967 when Israel killed 34 and wounded 171 Americans on the Liberty, a U.S. Navy surveillance ship. Instead, our political leadership joined Israel in a crude coverup that still rankles thoughtful men and women in uniform.

An Egyptian and Syrian juggernaut struck Israel in 1973, not to sweep it into the sea but to signal Arab determination to recover the territories seized in 1967. Israel lost 3,000 dead and many more wounded, not to defend its existence but to hold illegally occupied territories. Only a gigantic military air bridge from our bases in Germany and in the United States turned the tide in Israel's favor. When U.S. officers objected to the stripping of U.S. units defending our own front lines in Europe, the Israel lobby in Washington used its own juggernaut to pulverize the careers of those military officers. Since then, our men in uniform criticize Israel in whispers, and only among friends.

The 1973 war, nevertheless, changed everything. It showed that Arab armies could knock out Israel. Only with help from the United States, now clearly in the war on Israel's side, could Israel prevail.

Israel created larger standing forces to guard against a new Arab attack. We paid the bills, now in billions. We also supplied the millions Israel spent for military equipment secretly provided to extremist Christian militias in Lebanon. Emboldened by this clandestine support, the militias resisted the political power sharing that thoughtful Lebanese Christian leaders were advocating with Lebanon's overwhelming Muslim majority. The country was plunged into one of the most destructive civil wars of this century. By abetting this Lebanese bloodbath we abandoned one of our oldest, and closest friends in the Middle East. Nearly two million Americans of Lebanese descent may someday take note.

Dependent upon intimidated government officials and a co opted pro Israel press, Americans remained oblivious to the causes of these Middle East catastrophes. The Arabs, though helpless to prevent them, saw it all, however. Without quite knowing what they were doing, and quite spontaneously, they began a classic peoples war. An activist minority does the fighting while safely sheltered, supported and abetted within a passive but overwhelming majority.

Israel tried to extinguish the fire in 1982, barreling through to Beirut and killing up to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians in order to root out the PLO fighters among them. Although the PLO left under U.S. guarantees of safe passage, the remaining Lebanese and Palestinians took a fearful toll of the occupiers. In desperation the Israelis withdrew. Now Arafat's relatively moderate Palestinian forces in Beirut have been replaced by Syrian directed Palestinian radicals, and Khomeini directed Lebanese extremists.

While this was transpiring, the U.S. lost 241 Marines to one guerrilla driving a bomb loaded truck, and dozens of diplomats and government employees to truck bombers who in successive attacks demolished two U.S. embassy buildings in Beirut and one in Kuwait. In retaliation, American battleships fired giant shells into the Lebanese mountains, but these only produced new recruits for the anti American war.

After Lebanon, Israel is far less secure. Its people are divided. Emigration and extremism, feeding upon each other, are on the rise. Israel's economy is on the wane. Now Prime Minister Peres is asking from the U.S. a Middle East "Marshall Plan" of $20 to $30 billion. The original Marshall plan saved the economies of virtually the entire Western World. This one would be required just to enable Israel to go on occupying the lands seized from its neighbors.

To ensure that the U.S. continues its war, and Israel gets its way, its lobby in the U.S. spends million to elect Congressmen and Senators pledged to support Israel without asking questions, and to defeat any who do. The Lobby goes to any extreme to keep books and films critical of the American Israeli relationship from public attention. It uses all of its vast influence in the media to portray "terrorism" against the U.S. and Israel as an inexplicable, causeless phenomenon. Those who seek to explain the roots of this terrorism are fiercely denounced as "anti Semitic."

Will the U.S. mindlessly play the role of the helpless giant fighting swarms of furious Lilliputians? "Moderate" Arab leaders, many educated in the U.S. and passionately committed to the principles we espouse everywhere but in the Middle East, are watching helplessly as their people vent their fury at a country that refuses to grant Palestinians national or even human rights. Millions in Europe, whose parents remember us as their liberators, see us now as people who cruelly deny to the Palestinians the rights and privileges we insist upon for ourselves.

Europe, the Middle East, and perhaps soon the Far East as well, provide the fertile environment within which perhaps 20 separate groups, with no particular links to any government, recruit, expand, and pledge their lives to strike at Israel and its protector, the United States, until the Palestinian grievance is assuaged. Any U.S. aircraft, airport, embassy, consulate, federal building and when all of these are hardened any American business or individual can be targeted. No amount of money or military force can protect us all from deadly attacks so long as an activist few and a passive majority throughout the world feel we must be punished.

Our government is seeking another $4 billion now to harden federal buildings, as well it should in the absence of a policy change. But Americans will continue to die abroad and suffer at home until we realize that thicker walls are no substitute for a better policy. We cannot deny to people abroad the rights we insist upon for ourselves at home without paying an ever steeper price. We are indeed at war, and the battle is for the soul of the American people.

—Andrew I. Killgore