Barriers to Peace: Israel's Security Obsession

By Andrew I. Killgore

A thicket of "ifs" still blocks the way, but even confirmed skeptics see a glimmer of hope for Middle East peace. President Reagan's peace proposals of September, 1982 have not been withdrawn, in spite of Israel's rejection of them. King Hussein and Yassir Arafat together have taken significant steps forward. The United States is inching towards preliminary talks with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Expanded talks including Israel and perhaps others are envisaged. The outlines of a solution to the Palestine Problem are set forth in United Nations resolutions: Israel gives up Arab territory to achieve peace. The negotiators' task is to work out the details.

Suddenly, however, a serious obstacle. Israel objects to the Palestinians with whom the United States will meet. The U.S. expresses rare irritation with Israel. If we back down, this glimmer of hope will fade. We will once again have indulged Israel's suicidal obsession with "security." This fixation reflects a nightmarish conviction brought to the Middle East by European Jews. That vision sees every non-Jew as an actual or potential enemy. American indulgence of the obsession threatens our own interests and Israel's existence.

A Case of Misplaced Paranoia

Israel's fateful obsession goes back to the central conviction of political Zionism: Anti-Semitism (more accurately, anti-Jewishness) is an incurable disease. Period. This was and is treated as immutable law. It had no beginning, ending or explanation. It simply was; it existed.

Long before Israel was established in 1948, Jewish settlers treated the Arabs, who make up the overwhelming bulk of the world's Semites, as if they were anti-Jewish Europeans. This was a tragic misunderstanding because, while European Christians had a deplorable record of mistreatment of the Jews, Arabs respected all the "Peoples of the Book": Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Such towering Israeli Jews as Dr. Judah Magnes, first president of Hebrew University, and Martin Buber, the moral philosopher, argued for reconciliation with the Arabs. Their warnings that Israel could not long exist in an Arab world made hostile, were rejected in the euphoria following the establishment of the State.

The age-old Jewish distrust of non-Jews translated into a fanatical Israeli obsession with security. Security was a God before which all must bow. Palestinians were not wanted in the state because they could never be trusted. Hundreds of thousands were expelled. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who came to symbolize the state, spoke frankly in his writings of Israel as a state which must expand. Former Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett quotes Moshe Dayan as advocating an Israel so cruel that Arab hate towards it would be assured. Dayan feared that the martial fervor of Israel's young men might flag without Arab hostility.

Reinforcing Israel's own haunting fears over security is a compulsive preoccupation with the same fixed idea by America's impassioned Israel Lobby. In an America relatively free of anti-Semitism, any criticism of the state of Israel is equated by the Lobby with anti-Semitism. Politicians who oppose even once the wishes of Israel are marked for political extinction. Witness Senator Charles Percy who voted for the sale of AWACS (a flying radar system) to Saudi Arabia. Israel claimed, against all objective evidence, that the AWACS threatened it. On fact, the Saudis have used the AWACS in combat only once, to repel an air attack on shipping in Saudi territorial waters by Khomeini's Iran, an implacable enemy of Israel.)

The Lobby swung into line with millions for Percy's opponent, slanderously accusing the high-minded former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of being Israel's enemy. Percy was defeated. The Israel Lobby boasts of its clout, and politicians literally fear to cross Israel. The result is that America, founded by Christians deeply committed to reconciliation, now supports confrontational politics in the Middle East.

So expansion in the name of security became the norm. Extra land was seized and held in the 1948-49 war. The Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula were grabbed in 1956, but President Eisenhower forced Israel to disgorge these. They were retaken by Israel in 1967, along with the West Bank and the Golan Heights. A bloody setback was suffered in 1973 when Egypt and Syria struck to regain territory Israel had taken six years earlier and not returned. The high cost of expansionism began to be paid. Israel later drew back from its strategic overextension in Sinai in a U.S.-brokered deal between Egypt and Israel. But Jewish settlements, designed to assure permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, thickened. Jewish vigilantism against Palestinians grows and threatens to turn on Jewish critics of the settlements policy. And on June 6, 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon in the latest manifestation of expansionism.

The countdown to Israel's attack against Lebanon started 28 years earlier in a secret Israeli cabinet meeting where—guess what?—expansionism was the subject. Prime Minister Sharett's diary records that Israel would invade Lebanon and set up a Lebanese Maronite army officer as head of the country. Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, whose valuable fresh waters Israel coveted, would be permanently annexed to Israel. The speaker was Mr. Expansionist himself, Moshe Dayan. Sharett notes that he warned against the dire consequences of such a misadventure, but was hooted down as a softy by the rest of the Cabinet.

What Price Expansionism?

Three decades later Sharett's wisdom was vindicated when everything went wrong with the Lebanon war. It was aggression, pure and simple. Israel's own military casualties were high, but the slaughter of some 20,000 innocent Lebanese and Palestinians is a dark stain on the United States whose tacit consent to the attack was presumably based on Israel's claimed security needs. Israeli society was deeply divided by the war, which pushed the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Only a vast shakedown of the American taxpayer keeps Israel alive. If security is pursued much further in this way, Israel will choke on it.

The essential objection to our policy of indulging Israel's security obsession is that it has failed. Israel is less secure today than at any time in its history, especially if internal divisiveness and a prostrate economy are taken into account. All of Israel's Arab neighbors—Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon—have suffered from Israel's military might. Each has lost thousands of citizens to an Israel armed with American weapons.

Insecurity has been the Arabs' lot, insecurity stemming from an overarmed and expansionist Israel. The Palestinians have suffered even more, yet been damned as terrorists. We denounced as terrorists the Shiite captors of 39 American air passengers. But in the glare of TV publicity the American people learned that, in fact, the holding by Israel of several hundred Lebanese Shiite hostages in violation of international law had led to our people being seized. Understanding that, Americans supported President Reagan's reliance on diplomacy rather than force. That crisis was resolved when the 39 hostages were released, but seven more Americans, indirect victims of Israel's aggression against Lebanon, are still being held hostage while their families suffer agony.

Now we face the broader crisis of Israel's attempt to sabotage the latest peace initiative struggling to be born. If we indulge Israel's obsession that it can never trust Palestinians, we betray our own national tradition of faith in our fellow human beings, and the religious commitment of our Christian citizens to reconciliation. If we do not demand a peaceful accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians, we destroy our own interests and condemn Israel to slow death. At the beginning of our national history we Americans made a pact with ourselves and with all of mankind. It's past time for us to demonstrate that we still believe in our principles.

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.