Who Wants Moderation?

The other day, Israel's Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, when asked his opinion of the present developments within the PLO, answered: "I am not afraid of the radicalization of the entire organization. Practically speaking, it may be that Arafat's tactics (of relative moderation) are sometimes more dangerous for us."

It's rare indeed for an Israeli leader to acknowledge with such candor what has long been obvious to many Israel-watchers: that extremism on the part of the Arabs really suits Israel much better than does Arab moderation. As long as the Arabs adopt radical positions, the Israelis always have a ready-made excuse—" self-defense"—to take something else that they want. This excuse, with varying degrees of credibility, has been used a number of times since 1948 to add to their country bits of Arab territory which they thought should be theirs.

Provoking or Inventing

Arab extremism fits in so well with Israel's plans, in fact, that whenever it doesn't exist on a particular issue the Israelis have not hesitated to provoke it—or even invent it. Both of these devices were used early last year, during a period when the PLO had been adhering to a U.S.-sponsored ceasefire on the Lebanon-Israel border for 11 months in the hope of convincing the United States that it was ready to be peaceful if the U.S. would back its claim for a state of its own side by side with Israel's. For several months prior to their invasion, Israeli troops—according to the testimony of United Nations observers on the scene—carried out hundreds of provocative actions along the ceasefire line, hoping to get the Palestinians frustrated or angry or confused enough to lash out. When this did not work, they finally resorted to the pretext of the attempted assassination of their ambassador to London—who, as it turned out, was shot by an anti-PLO group—to launch the invasion of Lebanon that they had long been wanting to make. And why did they want to make it? Not just to destroy the PLO, if they could, but to make sure that whatever might be left of it would be disillusioned with its experiment in moderation—which the Israelis had always feared could lead eventually to strong U.S. pressure on Israel. With the line in the PLO now becoming a very hard one, the Israelis appear to have succeeded in this objective.

When not actually cutting the hand off any conciliatory Arab approaches, Israel has persistently reacted to them over the years by pooh-poohing them—or ignoring them as though they did not exist. Few people now remember, or were even aware at the time, that Sadat passed the word as long ago as 1971 that he would be willing to sign a peace treaty with Israel based on the pre-1967 borders. But instead of regarding this offer as at least worthy of discussion, Prime Minister Golda Meir refused even to acknowledge it—and continued in both her public and private comments to harp on the various ways in which Sadat was really planning to "drive the Israelis into the sea." At the time, it was clear, Israel saw no circumstances that would ever make it necessary or desirable for Israel to evacuate the Sinai peninsula. So why bother with Sadat? What changed this perception eventually was Sadat's surprise attack in 1973; the U.S.'s renewed interest, which followed the war, in achieving a compromise Middle East settlement; and Prime Minister Begin's later realization that he could bamboozle Sadat by giving back the relatively unimportant Sinai peninsula in return for giving Israel an opportunity to hold onto the West Bank and Gaza forever.

When the PLO made its watershed decision in 1974 to go for a ministate on the West Bank—after having insisted for 26 years on getting the whole loaf—the decision was treated by Israel as a nonevent. Again, no attempt was made to probe the extent to which, behind its continuing rhetoric, the PLO might be serious. Instead, Israeli spokesmen implied that nothing had changed, and that it didn't matter a bean what the Palestinians said anyway as long as they hadn't changed their Charter (thus planting the cart firmly in front of the horse). This skillful downplay by the Israelis of a historic PLO attempt to compromise was so successful that few ordinary citizens in the West, even today, are aware that the PLO ever retreated from its earlier maximalist positions.

Lifting the Veil

We could go on and on. Was Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, a notorious hawk on Israel, trying to signal something to the Israelis when he told a U.S. Congressman not long ago that he recognized that Israel had "security needs?" If he was, he was wasting his time—because Israeli officials quickly threw cold water on his words, saying that he had not altered his policy but was merely trying to make points with the Americans. Could be. But it was the almost unthinking, reflexive way in which the officials quashed what might have been a signal that gave the Israeli game away.

The Israeli game, of course, has always been to sabotage any Arab moves towards moderation while making it appear to the world that nothing would please the Israelis more than an Arab willingness to be moderate. But what bothers us is that during the past year or two the Israelis have not tried as hard as they once did to keep this pretense going. Mr. Shamir's revealing statement is not the only one of its kind. Only a short while before the Hussein-Arafat negotiations broke down, a senior assistant to Mr. Begin allowed himself to be quoted saying: "We're facing hard times ahead—a possible peace offer from Hussein..." (Try that one on for cynicism). The reason for our concern about this occasional lifting of the veil on Israel's true motives is that it may mean that the Israelis, now in control of more Arab territory than ever, are feeling so strong and so secure about their future that they don't care anymore about pretending. If this is so, the outlook for the area is very sad—and very frightening.