Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick Sets Record for Mideast Misinformation

By Sheldon L. Richman

"It's not what we don't know that hurts us," Will Rogers is supposed to have said. "It's what we know that ain't so. " Could he have had the Middle East in mind?

The person who "knows" the most that ain't so about the Israel-Palestine problem is Jeane Kirkpatrick, former UN ambassador under Ronald Reagan and now a foreign policy pundit. In The Washington Post on Feb. 11, Kirkpatrick packed about as much misinformation into one newspaper column as can be imagined. Titled "Roots of Arab Rejectionism, " it surely deserves an award.

"The first and most important aspect of the problem," she writes, "is to know when it did and did not begin. The problem did not begin when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war." This is the first and last piece of truth in the column. "It began," she continues, "in May of 1948, when Israel's Arab neighbors—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Trans-Jordan—rejected the Partition of Palestine and made war to destroy the new Jewish state. "

Kirkpatrick is correct, of course, that the problem did not begin in 1967. Who, I wonder, ever said it did? But it didn't begin in 1948 either. It began in the 1920s and even earlier, when Jewish-statehood advocates bought land from feudal landlords (mostly Arabs) in Palestine and had the Palestinian Arab peasants, whose families had lived on that land for generations, expelled. The Palestinians could not even return as employees, because the Zionist movement would not hire Arab labor. By May 1948 many Palestinians, who didn't share the vision of an Arab-free Palestine, had already become victims of massacres and expulsions perpetrated by Zionist paramilitary forces.

The late Israeli historian Simha Flapan writes in his book The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities that the Arab nations wanted peace with the new Jewish state and only reluctantly went to the defense of the Palestinians when the atrocities against them could no longer be ignored. The Israelis had made a secret deal with King Abdullah of Transjordan that allowed him to take the West Bank, which, under the UN partition plan, was to have been part of the Palestinian state. Israel took the rest of the proposed Palestinian state, except for the Gaza Strip, which ended up in Egyptian hands.

It is important to realize that the Arab armies did not attack the Jewish state, as it was defined in the UN partition plan. The fighting occurred in the Palestinian part, into which the Israelis had pushed from their UN-recommended borders in order to realize expansionist ambitions. The Israeli government had deliberately refused to specify its borders in its declaration of statehood in order not to foreclose opportunities for expansion.

When the war was over, Israel had enlarged its territory from 57 percent of mandatory Palestine to over 77 percent and had created thousands of refugees denied the right to return home. As for the Arabs who remained in Israel during the war of 1948 and who became Israelis, they lived under military rule until 1966. (Becoming an Israeli confers no great benefits on a Christian or Muslim Arab. Being a Jew is what counts.)

This, then, was the problem before 1967: some Palestinians were refugees, the rest were second-class citizens. That the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been the focus since 1967 shows, ironically, how far the Palestinians have been willing to compromise. The two-state solution essentially abandons the legitimate pre-1967 property claims. Who's intransigent?

Kirkpatrick goes on to assert the occupied territories did not become "important to the Arab-Israeli relationship until after Israel's Arab neighbors had again launched and lost an aggressive war in 1967 against Israel. " Here is a shameless invention of history. Who can deny that Israel's attack on Egypt started the Six-Day War? Jordan entered the war only after the attack on Egypt, with whom King Hussein had a mutual-defense treaty stipulating that an attack on either state would be considered an attack on both. The Israelis launched a pre-emptive strike? Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said that he "doubt[ed] very much whether [Egyptian President] Nasser wanted to go to war. " Yitzhak Rabin has said, "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war."

The Mainline Apologists' Position

Finally, Kirkpatrick writes that "as long as Arab governments refuse to establish normal diplomatic and economic relations with Israel and to make peace, Israeli governments will feel threatened, will probably be threatened and will make no concessions Before there can be talk about the West Bank, there must be talk between Arabs and Israelis." This is the position of mainline American apologists for Israel, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It could not be more erroneous. Ironically, Iraq's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, demonstrated this. After his failed meeting with Secretary of State James Baker and just before the Gulf war, Aziz was asked why Iraq doesn't discuss its grievances with Israel. Aziz said Iraq has no grievances with Israel. The issues, he said, are between Israel and the Palestinians. He added that what would satisfy the Palestinians would satisfy the Iraqis. With a war pending, Aziz had no reason to say this other than that it was true.

With two exceptions, the Arabs have no dispute with the Israelis once the Palestinian dispute is resolved. The exceptions, the Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon, are also related to the Palestinian problem.

So it is more than a little absurd for Israel's Deputy Defense Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say that peace with the Arab nations must come before a settlement with the Palestinians. No informed person seriously believes that this makes any sense at all. It is simply a stalling tactic.

What position will the Bush administration take on this matter? Secretary Baker could advance the prospects for justice and peace simply by acknowledging this reality, which is confirmed by our Arab allies, and not just by Tariq Aziz. Such an action would bring uncharacteristic clarity to the Middle East muddle, and could have earthshaking consequences. It would be the kind of shaking the earth could use.

Sheldon L. Richman is the senior editor at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.