From the
beginning of the Jewish resettlement of Israel, the Jewish settlers ignored the
existence of a Palestinian people and searched instead for an outside power as
an ally, a trend that continues to this day from the Ottomans to the British to
a flirtation with the French and also the Soviets and finally to a strategic
alliance with the United States. I think this is important to understand
because it’s the “original sin” that causes a lot of the conflict from the
Israeli side. For the first forty years of Israel’s existence it worked, but
when the First Intifada began in 1987, Palestinians demanded to be recognized
as a people and to get statehood, beginning the odyssey that continues today.
Originally, the Gaza Strip was Egypt and the West Bank of the Jordan River was
Jordan.
From the
original partition of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister,
saw the borders as temporary. Immediately, Arab states attacked Israel from all
sides, he had an opportunity. He was relatively moderate. “Revisionists” were
Israeli territorial maximalists who wanted al the territory possible
immediately. Ben-Gurion also wanted all possible territory but was willing to
work to get the land gradually. Therefore, in the leadup to the creation of Israel,
Ben-Gurion accepted a smaller amount of land always knowing that he would
attempt to get more. The radicals were the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a
hard-right Jewish nationalist, in groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
Menachem Begin, commander of Irgun and future Prime Minister of Israel who
would sign a peace treaty with the Egyptians said in 1947, “The partition of
Palestine is illegal… Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel.
All of it. And for ever.”
Israel
was born into war and was attacked on all sides by its Arab neighbors Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Israel fought the war cleverly and well though, and
was able to deal with each enemy one by one. Israel won the war and hoped to gain
recognition from the Arab states, but they offered Israel even less land than
it was given in the 1947 UN declaration. Within three years of this
embarrassing defeat, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt all toppled their governments.
After the war, Ben-Gurion was solidified as Israel’s primary leader for about
another 15 years. He described his priorities:
“First and foremost, we have to see
to Israel’s needs, whether or not this brings improvement in our relations with
the Arabs. The second factor in our existence is American Jewry and its
relationship with us (and the state of America since these Jews live in it).
The third thing—peace with the Arabs. This is the order of priorities.”
In 1953, Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister, giving the
job to Moshe Sharett, who earnestly wanted peace with Israel’s neighbors,
however Ben-Gurion proved a harsh critic of his own anointed heir. After two
years Ben-Gurion would become prime minister again in 1955 and precipitate the
Suez Crisis in 1956.
In the
lead-up to the Suez crisis, Israeli generals and politicians, especially Moshe
Dayan, sought to provoke Egypt to attack them, starting a war. Dayan believed
that if Israel played nice it would not get any foreign arms, but that if it “misbehaved”
it could extort the major powers for arms as an incentive to act more
responsibly. Dayan was fundamentally a hawk and extremely loyal to Ben-Gurion. While
the Israelis attempted to provoke Egypt, Ben-Gurion complained that Nasser
would not meet with him one-on-one, claiming that if he could just get into a
room with Gamel Abdel Nasser, the new Arab Nationalist Egyptian leader, he
could make peace. Nasser refused to meet with him. The author suggests that Ben-Gurion
knew this and was only scoring political points, but I think that even if that’s
true, Nasser is at fault for not meeting with him. He should have called
Ben-Gurion’s bluff, but he refused to meet with any Israeli because he was a
hardliner. At this point, Ben-Gurion replaced his former partner Moshe Sharett,
who had been Foreign Minister, with Golda Meir, chosen precisely because she
knew so little about foreign policy. Her job was to rationalize and defend the
actions of the Israeli military, led by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.
Ben-Gurion
was able to team up with the French and the British to attach the Suez Canal,
which would be followed by an Anglo-French operation to “stop” the Israelis and
restore the canal to European control. The campaign failed when the US and USSR
got wind of it and forced everyone to stop where they were, though as a result,
Egypt opened up the Straits of Tiran for Israeli use, though not the canal. In
1967, Egypt would renege on this agreement. The Sinai campaign was in a sense
the last battle of the 1948 war as it confirmed the Egyptian-Israeli border. In
the aftermath of the war, Gamel Abdel Nasser emerged as the leader of the Arab
world. Israel found itself more isolated from the West, and its 1957
application to join NATO was rejected.
At 76
years old, Ben-Gurion resigned, and Levi Eshkol, who was everyone’s first
choice to succeed Ben-Gurion, won the Premiership. He was mainly qualified as an
economics expert, though like Ben-Gurion, he took on the job of Defense
Minister as well. The Arab League solidified Arab unity against Israel and in
January 1964, the Arab states declared their goal to be the destruction of
Israel for the first time ever. In the coming years, pressure would build
again, especially with Syria and Egypt, which symbolically united though they
were unconnected by land, a problem that would be remedied by the absorption of
Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces welcomed conflict and, led by Moshe Dayan
and David Elazar (Northern Command), began to provoke Syria by moving tractors
and other equipment into the demilitarized zone until the Syrians shot. This
led to a dogfight in which the Israelis shot down six Syrian planes.
On the
Egyptian front, it was not Eshkol but Nasser who did the provoking and he went
a step farther than he intended.
“Nasser took three steps that were
intended to impress Arab public opinion rather than be a conscious prelude to
war with Israel. The first step was to send a large number of troops into
Sinai. The second was to ask for the removal of the UN Emergency Force from
Sinai. The third and most fateful step, taken on 22 May, was to close the
Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. For Israel this constituted a casus
belli. It canceled the main achievement of the Sinai Campaign. The Israeli
economy could survive the closure of the straits, but the deterrent image of
the IDF could not. Nasser understood the psychological significance of this
step. He knew that Israel’s entire defense philosophy was based on imposing its
will on its enemies, not on submitting to unilateral dictates by them. In
closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, he took a terrible gamble—and
lost.”
Israel launched its planes into the air and destroyed the
entire Egyptian air force in the first day of the war. All their neighbors
declared war on them and Israel was able to defeat them each in order, seizing
the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, the first two of which
make up today’s occupied Palestinian territories. Israel also seized the Sinai
Peninsula, which it would give back later after the October War in 1973. Even
the author Avi Shlaim, who takes a very critical view of Israel, calls the Six-Say
war a defensive war. This is because Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, threatening
Israel’s existence and nullifying the agreement made after the Suez crisis. Territorial
aspirations did not drive Israel to war but emerged as a result of the war and
were then realized by Israel. However, prolonging the war to take the Golan
Heights cost Israel to lose its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, as
the Soviets became firmly allied with the Arabs and the United States with the
Israelis. On the other hand the Israelis won over the Americans by offering
land for peace with the Arab states. However, it was a ruse. They communicated
this to the US and not to the Arabs in secret and it was not a real offer. The
Arabs’ official position was made at the Khartoum Conference, which ended in
the adoption of the “three noes,” no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace
with Israel. This was actually a victory for the moderates, as the hardliners
wanted to continue active war, while the agreement made would be more of a cold
war.
Golda
Meir succeeded Eshkol as Prime Minister in 1969 and formed two principals that
became the bedrock of Israeli policy: no return to the pre-1967 borders and no
withdrawal without direct negotiations and peace treaties. She constantly
talked about peace but didn’t give it much space to develop. She made the
mistake of turning down an opportunity to trade Sinai for peace (which would be
the exact result of the October war in 1973, the basis of the peace treaty
eight years later) and she turned down Anwar Sadat’s (successor to Nasser after
his death) interim settlement, which forced him to go to war to save Egyptian
pride and honor.
In
October1973, Egypt invaded the Sinai Peninsula and made gains before being
turned around by Israel. It was an embarrassment for Golda Meir and she lost
the Premiership in 1974 to Yitzhak Rabin, who was unable to make any major
gains towards peace. He himself was defeated by Menachem Begin, leader of
Likud, the right-wing party that became the first party that was not Labor to
put their man/woman in the office of the Prime Minister. Likud’s ideology could
be summed up by the term “Greater Israel.” Their primary goal was to make the
West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jewish, Israeli territory. Their inspiration was
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, and their leader was
Menachem Begin, who lost both his parents and brother in the Holocaust. Likud
was more ideological where Labor had been pragmatic, and their ideology was
peace through strength. Israel’s foreign policy became more activist and
aggressive with Begin as PM, Yitzhak Shamir as the Foreign Minister, and Ariel
Sharon, “the relentless hawk,” as Defense Minister. This coincided with the inauguration
of American president Ronald Reagan, and the two countries signed a treaty of
strategic cooperation, creating closer military and intelligence cooperation s
well as defense research and development. Israel officially became an enemy of
the Soviet Union.
The PLO
(Palestinian Liberation Organization), began in 1964, started to conduct raids
into Israel in 1968. In 1975, a civil war broke out in Lebanon (that would last
until 1990) and Syria invaded in 1976. In 1978, Israel achieved its historic
peace with Egypt, giving back the Sinai Peninsula and earning much good credit
in the Arab world. All that changed when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to stop
Palestinian attacks and laid a siege upon Beirut, the only time Israel ever
laid siege to an Arab capital. It would be known as Israel’s Vietnam. Begin openly
proclaimed that he saw this as him fighting against another Hitler, which was a
controversial take among Israelis who were against the war of choice. The
Israelis had trouble leaving because they wanted a peace treaty from Lebanon;
Lebanon could not offer one because it was much weaker than Egypt and could not
defy the Arab world.
In 1984,
after a very close parliamentary election after which neither side could form a
government, Shimon Peres of the Labor Alignment and Yitzhak Shamir of Likud
formed a national unity government of both parties and agreed to alternate the
role of Prime Minister with Peres as Premier for the first 25 months and Shamir
as Premier for the following 25. Peres
succeeded in getting Israel out of Lebanon, which was truly a disaster. 660 Israelis
had died, Israel’s image abroad was damaged, and it spawned the terrorist group
Hezbollah, which continues to threaten Israel to this day. Israel was also
responsible for a massacre carried out by Christians against Muslims in an
Israel-run refugee camp in which 800 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered.
On
December 9th, 1987, an IDF truck hit a Palestinian car near the
Jabliah Refugee Camp, killing 4 Palestinians. This accident gave rise to the
First Intifada, the dramatic release of the tension that had built up after 20
years of Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Unlike Israel’s
past wars, this involved an internal enemy that fought with guerrilla-style
tactics. It lasted from 1987 until 1993, through the end of the Premiership of
Yitzhak Shamir in 1992 and peace was made thanks to the Oslo Accords until
Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. The result was the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority to govern parts of the West Bank and the Palestinian recognition of
the state of Israel. Another result was that Jordan washed their hands of the West
Bank, leaving it to the Palestinians and allowing Israel to sign a peace treaty
with Jordan after the Oslo Accords. A major negative result was the creation of
Hamas, a hardline terrorist group that refused to recognize Israel and that decided
to continue the fight until today. Finally, Israel was partitioned for the
first time since the failed plan in 1947, when the Palestinians rejected
partition, thinking they could get the whole of Israel. Rabin was assassinated
for his part in the peace deal and succeeded by Shimon Peres.
However,
like the accord caused a split between the PLO/PA run by Fatah and the
rejectors of the accord in Hamas, on the Israeli side rose Benjamin Netanyahu,
whose father was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky to the Premiership. He argued
that Shimon Peres was an appeaser and ripped up the deal, though he kept the
deal with Jordan, managing to survive even though it was based on the earlier
Palestinian deal. The Jordan peace deal was the first “warm peace” for Israel,
as the Egyptian deal came after a long time of hostility, Jordan had been a
consistent partner to Israel. By 1996, Israel established direct diplomatic
contacts with fifteen Arab states and no longer faced an Arab boycott, Israel
was on the way to peace when Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon intervened. As Ariel
Sharon said in 1998, “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as
they can to enlarge the settlementsbecause everything we take will stay ours…
Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
Ehud
Barak, the former Chief of Staff for the IDF was elected Prime Minister for
Labor in 1999 and attempted to make peace with the Syrians, but he found himself
trapped in a chasm between the doves and the hawks. The deal failed and he angered
American partner Bill Clinton in the process. During his premiership, Ariel
Sharon, the new leader of Likud replacing Netanyahu, decided to stage a highly
publicized visit with 1,000 security guards to al-Haram al-Sharif, what Jews
call the Temple Mount. The day after his visit, large-scale riots broke out in
Jerusalem and Palestinians on the Temple Mount threw rocks down at Jewish
worshippers praying at the Western Wall. The IDF returned fire with
rubber-coated bullets and the Second Intifada (AKA the al-Aqsa Intifada) began.
In the first five days 47 Palestinians were killed and 1,885 were wounded.
Sharon then won election as Prime Minister against Barak and dropped the hammer
on the Palestinians.
I’m
going to finish this up quickly even though there’s a lot more that can be
said. Ariel Sharon enjoyed a partnership with the George W. Bush
administration, which put the least restrictions on Israel of any American
government ever. Sharon decided to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip,
with the idea that it would reduce the demographic relevance of Palestinians to
Israel, put off the need for a peace treaty for several years, and give him
some room to bargain for more of the West Bank. It was a surprising move from a
far-right wing Prime Minister who wanted all of Greater Israel, but like
Ben-Gurion, he never intended this to be a final move. Instead it was to be a position
from which Israel would get more and more. The Second Intifada ended after 5
years in 2005 with Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the construction
of more Israeli settlements in the West Bank as well as the construction of the
West Bank barrier, a system of walls, barbed wire, etc. that cut off Palestine
from Israel. Out of site, out of mind.
Ariel
Sharon formed his own party as a centrist counter to Likud but had a stroke and
was incapacitated and later died, so he didn’t run in the election. Ehud Olmert
took up the Kadima banner and won, but his government lasted a short time,
managing to invade Lebanon, before the return of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu
has been the least interested in peace of any Israeli Prime Minister ever and
the farthest right-wing in every sense. The book only covers his return in the epilogue,
and mainly what you need to know is that he is uninterested in Palestinian
conditions of life, survival, and well-being.
This was
a very thorough book that covers conversations and deals in-depth, sometimes too
much so. I would have liked more info on the return of Netanyahu and some other
things to be cut, but what are you gonna do. Overall it was a great way to
understand why Israel acts the way it does and who the major players have been
in its foreign policy.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Theodor Herzl’s inspiration for a Jewish state came as a reaction to the Dreyfuss affair in France. He saw the Jews as not just a religious group but a nation.
- In 1953, Ariel Sharon, who would be Prime Minister of Israel nearly 50 years later, commanded Unit 101, an Israeli special forces group, and was responsible for a massacre at Qibya, Jordan, where 45 houses were destroyed and 69 civilians killed.
- The Norwegian chief of staff of the UNTSO (United Nations Truce Supervision Organization) was named “Odd Bull.”
- Major General Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the IDF wanted to blow up the Dome of the Rock after the Six-Day War but was denied this.
- Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was known for his humor and after the victory in the Six-Day War, “he began to sport a Churchillian V sign. His wife Miriam, a militant moderate, said to him: ‘Eshkol, what are you doing? Have you gone mad?’ With characteristic humor he replied, ‘No. This is not a V sign in English. It is a V sign in Yiddish! Vi krikht men aroys?’ Roughly translated, this means ‘How do we get out of this?’”
- Lea Rabin refused to shake Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand after her husband’s death because she blamed him for inciting it. She was moved by the sincerity and warmth of Yasser Arafat on the other hand.
Avi Shlaim. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
(Updated and Expanded) (Kindle Locations 2037-2039). W. W. Norton &
Company. Kindle Edition.
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