Hangover in Israel

By Andrew I. Killgore

When the usual drunk is sobering up, he knows the cause of his hangover misery: too much alcohol. Even a punchy boxer is not too dazed to know the reason for his condition: Too many blows to the head. How is it, then that Hirsh Goodman, brilliant military analyst of the Jerusalem Post, confesses to bewilderment over Israel's 1982 Lebanon war? So unwise was that war, Goodman writes in a recent edition, that even 50 years from now scholarly researchers will be astounded by its stupidity. A Jerusalem Post editorial expresses similar bafflement over how Israel could have blundered into such a war, while nevertheless opposing a judicial commission of inquiry into its causes.

Americans of course are also wondering how it was that upon withdrawing from Lebanon Israel carried back 700 Shi'a and other Lebanese as hostages for quiet borders without considering possible consequences of such a flagrant violation of international law. Is there some unfathomable mystery here? Not if the United States is looked at in a new light: Not as Israel's sincere friend, but as its unwitting enemy.

Israel has a hangover from its war in Lebanon. It cannot understand its miscalculations because Israel still lacks any real understanding of Arabs, especially Palestinians. Israelis mourn the loss of more than 650 of their own youth in Lebanon, but the death there of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians receives little notice.

Palestinians are single-mindedly seen by most Israelis as terrorists, not as real people with whom peace must be made. Golda Meir said Palestinians didn't exist. Menachem Begin's writings portrayed them as simple obstacles, like rocks, that had to be removed. For decades the Zionist movement depicted Palestine as an empty land, waiting to receive Jewish settlers. A continuing refusal to accept Palestinians in their human dimension, with rights like other groups, is behind Israel's continuing insecurity.

Yet delusions about Palestinians are insufficient to explain Israel's skewed objectives in Lebanon which, according to the Jerusalem Post editorial, included expelling the Palestinians to Jordan where they were to establish their own state on the ruins of King Hussein's monarchy. A puzzle remains. Can the solution to that puzzle be that the United States has turned from a real friend of Israel into its de facto enemy? Is the biggest Israeli delusion of all about the United States?

Alexander Haig and Ariel Sharon

Look back at Ariel Sharon's discussion with Alexander Haig in Washington two weeks before Israel attacked Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Despite Haig's denials, many are convinced the Secretary of State approved at that time the Israeli Defense Minister's plans to attack. A self-respecting friend would have told Sharon the United States would not tolerate Israeli aggression against Lebanon, to whose political independence and territorial integrity we were (and are) pledged. An honest friend would have pointed out that for nearly a year the PLO had made no trouble on the Lebanese border; that Israel was already in a secure position; and that U.S. interests in the Arab World, even the lives of its officials, would be endangered if we supported Israeli aggression against a friendly Arab country.

Haig should have warned Sharon that wars, such as ours in Vietnam, are subject to Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Finally, Haig absolutely should have warned about inevitable Israeli casualties and internal divisiveness in Israel itself. The United States could pay the heavy financial costs, which Israel's sick economy could not bear. But Israel would have to suffer the casualties and internal dissension. There is little persuasive evidence that Haig said any of these things. The honest advice of a true friend was missing and in Israel extremism triumphed over moderation.

This is a far cry from 1956-57 when President Eisenhower told Israel firmly that it must relinquish its conquests in the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. Israel and its lobby in the United States railed but, as Eisenhower threatened economic pressure, Israel withdrew its troops. In 1967, however, President Johnson unwisely did not insist on withdrawal when Israel seized Sinai a second time, and other Arab territory as well. Eisenhower's wisdom was ultimately demonstrated in 1973 when a strategically over-extended Israel lost 3,000 men killed and many times that number wounded, mainly in Sinai, when Egypt and Syria struck by surprise to recover land Israel had seized in 1967 and refused to return.

The balance was slowly seeping out of the U.S.-Israel relationship. We had to save Israel in 1973 by a gigantic military airlift from Europe and the U.S. which gradually turned the military tide against Egypt and Syria. The normal consequence of military over-extension is defeat, which Israel, in spite of its huge casualties, managed to avoid due to U.S. intervention. Israel was saved but its small population and limited territory inevitably mean ultimate strategic inferiority and consequent insecurity vis-a-vis the Arabs. If the United States were to resume the role of a real friend rather than rubber stamp for Israeli ultras and their overzealous supporters in this country, Israel could have the peace it must have to survive. The effective role of the Israel lobby in silencing criticism of Israel, however, is a well-known but not widely discussed fact of Washington political life.

Ariel Sharon has never been likely to win prizes in Israel or elsewhere for moderation and good sense. Yet Alexander Haig apparently approved Sharon's aggression against Lebanon. Had Haig instead appealed to President Reagan to dissuade Begin and Sharon, it seems certain that Israel would not have launched the war against Reagan's opposition.

American Praise and Israeli Extremism

Heady indeed to Israeli leaders, especially the "crazies," is American praise of everything Israeli. Indeed, drunkenness has resulted. Phrases such as "America's strategic ally" and "the only democracy in the Middle East" are coming to seem restrained. Secretary of State Shultz recently said Israel represented the triumph of good over evil. A further example of praise gone wild was Henry Kissinger's addled prediction in the summer of 1982 that Israel's war in Lebanon actually provided a diplomatic opening for the U.S. Almost unbelievable has been the reluctance of U.S. political leaders this summer to admit that the taking of hostages from an American aircraft by Lebanese Shiite fighters was, from the standpoint of international law, neither more nor less reprehensible than the taking and holding of Shiite hostages by Israeli soldiers only two months earlier.

Goodman says that those sensible Israelis who spoke out against the war before it started and while it expanded, were branded traitors. If the United States, however, had only joined those prescient Israelis warning that the war would be a disaster for Israel, it almost certainly could have been averted. But we did not. Goodman and other sensible Israelis are bewildered because they are still unable to see the United States in its true relationship to Israel: the kind of irresponsible friend who is worse than an enemy.

If our political leaders had thought about the real interests of both Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, instead of how to please the greatly-feared Jewish lobby in the United States, death and destruction in Lebanon could have been averted; internal divisions in Israel would not have been aggravated; and billions of American taxpayer dollars would be helping U.S. farmers, university students and the elderly rather than simply prolonging a bankrupt Israel's refusal to face economic and political reality. If we were a real friend we would be encouraging the moderate Israelis towards peace rather than supporting hard-line extremists in Israel and their heedless supporters in this country.

And Hirsh Goodman might at least be assured that the next time an Israeli leader sets out on a self-destructive course of action, he will be restrained, not encouraged, by Israel's dangerous American "friends."

Andrew I. Killgore, former US. Ambassador to Qatar, retired after 32 years in the Foreign Service. He is now a political and economic consultant in Washington, D.C, and also president of the American Educational Trust.