June 1995, Pages 9, 87

The Retreat From Oslo: Tactical Repositioning or Total Abandonment?—Three Views

An American Middle East Specialist

The Good Cops and Bad Cops Who Killed the Peace Process

By Richard H. Curtiss

On Sept. 16, 1948, Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine, was assassinated in West Jerusalem by the Lehi Jewish underground, called the Stern Gang by the British. The group, whose three top leaders included Yitzhak Shamir, had approached the Nazis early in World War II about combining forces to eject the British from Palestine. Although they were ignored, they never stopped fighting Britain, even when it appeared that German General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was about to overrun the entire Middle East.

Such "Zionist revisionism" seemed totally contrary to the policies of the mainstream Zionists in Palestine, headed by David Ben- Gurion. He encouraged the British to arm and train a Palestinian Jewish Brigade which fought alongside a British-trained Palestinian Arab Brigade against the Germans in Italy. After the allied victory, the Jewish Brigade returned to Palestine to become the Haganah, nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces when Israel became independent on May 15, 1948.

Bernadotte was assassinated because he insisted that the Palestinian refugees who had been displaced in the 1947-48 fighting must be allowed by the Israelis to return to their homes. Thanks largely to a display of shock, outrage and concern by Ben-Gurion and Israel's then foreign minister, Moshe Sharrett, the perilous moment passed for Israel. Bernadotte's sacrifice is commemorated in a quiet alcove at U.N. headqarters by a plaque that doesn't mention who killed him. And none of the displaced Palestinian refugees were allowed back into Israel.

The triggerman in the assassination, Joshua Cohen, went underground for a time. Eventually, however, he surfaced and took a paying job—as bodyguard to David Ben-Gurion. Yitzhak Shamir also went undergound, and when Israel's war of independence ended, Shamir, too, tried his hand at earning a living. He wasn't much good at business so he went to work in an Israeli government department that could use his skills. He became chief of operations in Western Europe for the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence service. A number of "enemies of Israel" were assassinated in Europe and nearby in this period, although the government then was run by Labor party disciples of David Ben-Gurion.

In June 1967, Israel's Labor government, headed by Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and military chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, all protégés of Ben-Gurion, conquered East Jerusalem and the surrounding West Bank as well as Sinai and the Golan Heights in the "Six-Day War." Six years and an additional war later, as international pressure mounted on Israel to exchange all of the land seized in 1967 for peace with all of Israel's neighbors, the Labor government fell and was replaced by a government headed by the Likud, a direct descendant of the Zionist "revisionists." It was headed by Menachem Begin, another underground terrorist, some of whose followers had been forcibly disarmed during Israel's war of independence by Ben-Gurion's generals, including Dayan and Rabin.

Under heavy pressure orchestrated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Begin eventually agreed to exchange Sinai for peace with Egypt. Before the Israeli withdrawal was completed, however, knowing he was safe from retaliation by the army of the most populous Arab country, Begin seized half of Lebanon. He withdrew under pressure from most of it, after a lot of Americans were killed helping to separate his forces from their enemies. But Israeli soldiers have remained in southern Lebanon in the area of the Litani River ever since, calling that part of Lebanon their "security zone."

Conspiracy theories are pooh-poohed by most Americans. Anyone who has worked in either a Republican or a Democratic administration (or four of each as has the writer) observes that from the time most presidents assume office they work singlemindedly for re-election, and that involves seizing opportunities to belittle or discredit their opponents. That doesn't leave much time or opportunity for conspiracy across party lines. But every national leader also is working for history. There are certain things so sacred in each nation's collective consciousness that no rational leader wants to be recorded as having endangered them. For example, every U.S. president would love to stop unfair attacks by his opponents, but none would dare alter the First Amendment to the Constitution unless he and his supporters deemed it necessary in order to defend something equally sacrosanct, like the federal union or the nation's territorial integrity.

In the case of Israel, the disagreements among its leaders over the years have been more over tactics than goals. Whether to its 20th century adherents the revisionist goal of a "Greater Israel" really means the Biblical version extending from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq is questionable. But it certainly includes all of Palestine and Jordan, and parts of Syria and Lebanon. The secular and pragmatic Ben-Gurion also had a vision of Israel that he was extremely careful never to define publicly, even when he was asked to as a condition for Israel's membership in the United Nations. His caution paid off. Israel was admitted anyway, and for 47 years its borders have remained legally undefined.

The disagreements among Israel's leaders over the years have been more over tactics than goals.

From the writings of Ben-Gurion's protégés, however, and especially remarks of Moshe Dayan recorded in Moshe Sharett's diaries, it is clear that for them the "sacred parameters" included all of the former British mandate of Palestine (Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza), plus the headwaters of the Jordan River in the Golan Heights, and mountainous southern Lebanon, at least to the Litani River.

If, therefore, all of early Israel's right-wing revisionists and left-wing Ben-Gurion followers agreed on at least a minimal "sacred precinct" for the modern Jewish state, what would it have looked like? Well, it would look almost exactly like the area under Israeli control in 1991, at the time U.S. President George Bush put such pressure upon Israel to enter into the "peace process" that it precipitated the fall of the Israeli government of revisionist Yitzhak Shamir and its replacement by Laborite Yitzhak Rabin.

In fact, Israeli history from the time the Zionists arrived in Palestine at the end of the 19th century looks remarkably like a case of "good cop, bad cop." Whether or not they believe in conspiracy theories, that's something all Americans understand. In the old Soviet Union, the bad cop stripped the victim naked, beat him or her unmercifully, and then left the room. Enter the good cop who warned, "He's an out-of-control sadist and sooner or later he'll torture everything you know out of you but by then you'll be mentally, physically and morally destroyed. I don't want that to happen, so work with me now and we can stop this horror."

In contemporary America, the bad cop warns as he leaves the room, "I'm going to see that you and all your associates rot in jail for the rest of your lives." Enter the good cop with a cup of coffee and some furtive advice. "He wants to make an example of all of you but I can get one of you off if that person will tell the real story in court. I'm willing to make you that one person."

Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese describe as conspiracy the way alternating Israeli governments steadily have stolen their land while calming U.S. presidents and world opinion. Skeptical Americans might instead apply the "good cop, bad cop" theory to explain the seminal events in Israel's history:

Good cop Ben-Gurion accepted the 1947 U.N. Security Council plan to provide 53 percent of Palestine for a Jewish state and 47 percent for a Palestinian state and to internationalize Jerusalem. But the irregular forces of bad cops Begin and Shamir, and their Arab equivalents, made so much trouble that Ben-Gurion's forces ended up in control of 78 percent of Palestine and half of Jerusalem.

Then when Arab pressure to take back the land became dangerous, good cop Golda Meir and her loyal generals were forced to launch a "pre-emptive" war and ended up with the rest of Jerusalem, the West Bank, all of Sinai and the Golan Heights. They were prevented by revisionist bad cops from taking advantage of Arab offers to trade peace for the land seized in 1967.

Finally, bad cop Begin took over and, under U.S. pressure, promised to give back Sinai to Egypt in return for Egypt's recognition of Israel. Knowing he was safe from Egyptian attack, however, before completing his withdrawal bad cop Begin seized about half of Lebanon. Good cops Rabin and Shimon Peres took over and restored Israel's good name, but somehow never withdrew Israeli forces from the Litani River area of south Lebanon originally sought by all Zionists.

Then, as world pressure grew on Israel to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's injunction to withdraw from "territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict" in return for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries," good cops Rabin and Peres on one hand and bad cop Shamir on the other alternated and even cooperated in running Israel, but never gave up an inch of land.

Then came the Oslo agreement, approved by very good cop Peres, signed by sort of good cop Rabin, and opposed by new generation bad cop Benyamin Netanyahu. People who didn't believe in conspiracy theories assumed it would lead to Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank, some mutually acceptable sharing of Jerusalem, and territorial settlements and peace with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

But Jewish settlements expanded on expropriated Arab land in the West Bank and filled and surrounded Jerusalem. Even though the settlement expansion violates the Oslo agreement and is killing the peace process, the good cops can't do anything about them because the resulting bloodshed would ensure the return to power of the bad cops.

Now, however, it no longer matters because, unless the good cops can produce peace without giving up any more land to speak of, polls say bad cop Benyamin Netanyahu is going to win the 1996 Israeli election anyway. Nor will the fact that a bad cop again will be in charge affect U.S. aid to Israel for a while. George Bush wouldn't have liked it, but he's no longer around and Bill Clinton doesn't care.

So bad cop Netanyahu already has said no land for peace with Syria, no sharing of Jerusalem, and no Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank. What he'll leave to Yasser Arafat for some kind of "Palestinian homeland" is Gaza, with its nearly one million poverty-stricken Palestinians, and perhaps Jericho, a tiny town at the lowest point on earth, cut off from most of the rich agricultural lands around it. Arafat is stuck with these two economically unviable parcels of land because, although Gaza adjoins Egypt, Egypt won't accept it and, although Jericho adjoins Jordan, it's too small to matter.

Whatever happens, however, both Laborites and Likudniks will celebrate being free of one million Gaza Arabs, who, if they had remained inside the line of Israeli control, would have turned Palestinian Muslims and Christians into a majority within Israel-Palestine sometime between the year 2000 and 2005. Of course, even without the Gazans, that will happen anyway between 2005 and 2010. However, that gives a lot more time for the Israeli bad cops to do something genocidal to drive the Palestinians out, and then let the Israeli good cops placate world opinion while keeping the Palestinians from coming back.

So the Middle East once again is becoming a very dangerous and unprofitable place for Americans, whose presidents seem to be the only people left in the world who believe the peace process still lives. Since it died while the good cops were in charge, look for even worse to come when the bad cops return.