Berkeley No More

Sol Stern writes in the City Journal about his shift from a Berkeley leftist to an ardent supporter of Israel.

Three decades ago, I was a Berkeley New Leftist with a political and personal problem. I had been born in Israel, and, though I didn’t consider myself a Zionist, I certainly didn’t want to see the Jewish state disappear. Yet my comrades on the Left were starting on a long march whose ultimate objective was to demonize Israel and turn it into a pariah among the nations.

...

Giving peace a chance—a second and third chance, even—was what most of my wife’s friends at Hebrew University’s theater department wanted to do. All had served in the armed forces, and some had even served in elite combat units (my wife had spent two years in the air force). They were on average more than ten years younger than I, and it bemused me somewhat to watch them gravitate toward New Left enthusiasms that I had just left behind in Berkeley. Hanging out at Taamon, a nondescript cafe; in downtown Jerusalem, we rubbed elbows with young Moroccan Jews, who were protesting Israel’s alleged mistreatment of the Jews from Muslim lands and who called themselves the Black Panthers.

As Israel prepared for its 25th anniversary in May 1973, a fierce controversy erupted over the government’s plan to stage a military parade in Jerusalem as part of the festivities. Many of our friends opposed the parade, and a few wound up arrested during a protest. The controversy seemed to portend a deeper generational divide: one of the arrested Hebrew University students was Orli Yadin, whose father, Yigal, was the country’s most famous archaeologist and former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. Orli argued that the parade was unnecessarily provocative to the Arabs, and it wasted money that could help Israel’s poor. Orli’s father and other establishment elders believed that showing off Israel’s new weaponry would make the Arabs think twice about starting another war.

Back then, I supported the protesters’ arguments. But time proved both sides wrong: calling off the parade would not have affected Arab attitudes one iota, but holding the parade did nothing to avert another war. The Jews argued among themselves, while the Arabs tended to other matters.

He makes an excellent point here about the lack of symmetry in the taking of territory.

After the initial Syrian successes of the battle’s first two days, the Israelis had mauled their enemy so badly that the plain leading to Damascus was wide open. The Israeli army could have reached the gates of the city in a day. But the Kremlin threatened to intervene to save Hafez al-Assad’s regime. The United States then conveyed to Israel that it must not move its forces past the pre– October 6 cease-fire lines, from which Syria had launched its attack. Once again, the rigged Middle East rules were in full effect: the Arab states could break cease-fires without fear of international censure; Israel could defend itself and repel the Arab attacks, but if it made the war so costly to the aggressors as to deter the next one it would meet with widespread global condemnation.

I didn’t write about these questions at the time, but I couldn’t help but speculate. Suppose the Syrians had actually occupied a piece of northern Israel? Does anyone believe that Syria’s government would then have offered to exchange "land for peace"? And what kind of treatment could the Jews living in "Syria-occupied Galilee" have expected from the occupiers—from the same army units that executed most of the Israeli soldiers they captured during the war?

He continues here by noting the absurb asymmetry of first-strike politics.

In the evening, Sharon invited Olmert and me into his trailer for a snack. Some of his top officers were there, as well as another journalist. The conversation was off the record, and in any event my Hebrew was inadequate. Still, I caught the general drift—Sharon was venting about the absurd situation Israel now found itself in. Because Israel had to absorb the Egyptians’ first blow to appease international opinion, scores of its best young men had to die in the lightly fortified strong points on the east bank of the canal.

In all, Israel lost 2,400 men in the delayed effort to repulse the Egyptians and Syrians and throw them back to the cease-fire lines. Now, with the Egyptian Third Army surrounded and Sharon’s forces sitting astride the Ismailia-Cairo highway, the U.S. and the Soviets imposed yet another cease-fire and ensured that a defeated Egypt would not have to sue for peace. Several weeks later, negotiations initiated by U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger at Kilometer 101, not far from Sharon’s encampment, produced a disengagement-of-forces agreement giving Egypt control of the canal again.

Terrible lessons learned...

I remained haunted by the lesson I had learned in 1973 on the Golan Heights and at the Suez Canal about Israel’s vulnerability. Israel had zero margin of error—literally, it could not survive the loss of one war. The Arab regimes had nothing to lose except the lives of thousands of their own soldiers, which they were cavalier about anyway, and some treasure, which they could always replace with the help of one of the big powers or the Saudis. Thus, they were free to try and try again to destroy the Jewish state.

Nevertheless, I still found myself suppressing such dark thoughts, because they led to politically incorrect conclusions. Right-thinking people had to assume a certain degree of rationality on all sides. They had to assume that if you offered someone a better deal, he would take it, and that with enough goodwill all differences could be overcome—after all, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were now pursuing detente; Richard Nixon had even gone to China. Weren’t the Arabs rational human beings?

This orthodoxy held that anything called a “peace process” was always better than war. And it wasn’t just in Europe and the United States that the mindset prevailed, but in Israel too. Despite all of the failed peace overtures of the past, wasn’t it worth trying yet one more time? To think otherwise, to believe that there might be something inherently violent and unreasonable in Arab Muslim political culture was—well, racist.

Unfortunately, that appears to be the reality precisely. Yet Israeli opinion still clinges to its hopes.

It’s amazing how quickly public opinion in Israel had shifted on these issues. After the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s official position was that it would never relinquish the militarily strategic outpost at Sharm al-Sheikh, which controlled access to the Red Sea. Moshe Dayan expressed this national consensus: “Better Sharm al-Sheikh without peace, than peace without Sharm al-Sheikh.” But it took only one visit to Jerusalem by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat for all of Israel to swoon and forget Sharm al-Sheikh. Thus, in 1978, the allegedly “right-wing,” allegedly “rejectionist” government of Menachem Begin evacuated every square meter of the Sinai Peninsula in return for a cold peace with Egypt. It was Ariel Sharon, Begin’s defense minister at the time, who ordered the forcible removal of all Jewish settlers from the Sinai. In the 1980s and 1990s, two separate Israeli governments offered a similar “land for peace” deal to Syria. Given what I had seen on the Golan Heights in 1973, I found this gesture astonishingly optimistic—and I secretly sighed with relief when Hafez al-Assad rejected the offer.

Then, under the 1993 Oslo agreements, the Israeli government allowed the terrorist organizations to return to the West Bank and Gaza to begin creating the infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. Before there was even a peace treaty or ironclad security arrangements, Israel handed over tens of thousands of weapons to Yasser Arafat’s militias, supposedly for “peacekeeping.” All the while, the Palestine National Covenant stated explicitly that the goal of the liberation struggle was not a state next to Israel but rather the replacement of Israel with a Palestinian state from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River.

No nation in the world has taken so many mortal risks for a putative peace with its most implacable enemies. Even after the first Oslo agreement blew up in Israel’s face in the form of exploding commuter buses and pizza parlors, Ehud Barak’s government went back to Camp David and offered the Palestinians yet another agreement—same terms, no problem. Once again, the Palestinian leadership rejected the best deal they are ever likely to get short of Israel’s elimination (a far better deal, incidentally, than Jordan and Egypt offered the Palestinians when those Arab regimes controlled the West Bank and Gaza). Instead, Yasser Arafat went home to launch yet another savage war of extermination against Israel’s civilian population, with the guns that Israel had given him.

Why did so many well-meaning Israelis and Americans believe in the early 1990s that a reasonable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians was within grasp? One answer is that the Soviet empire had just collapsed, and the cold war was over. In Israel, as in other places, hope arose for a peace dividend. For Israel, the dividend included the fact that its traditional enemies, big countries like Syria and Iraq, could no longer count on Soviet military aid, so they were less of a threat. Israel could now take more chances trying to solve the problem of the West Bank and Gaza. The Clinton administration encouraged this optimism by promoting the idea that military force was becoming an anachronism in settling disputes.

Doesn't this sound remarkably like today? That we have a unique opportunity with the Battle for Iraq being largely won by the US? That this is the time to make the sacrifices (at least on Israel's side) for peace?

Among those who saw through the illusions of the time were the neoconservatives, of whom I had been so wary in the seventies. From the beginning, they viewed Oslo as a trap that would lead not to peace, but to the slaughter of innocents. And they made their case in the face of almost overwhelming support for Oslo within the Jewish community and the Washington political establishment (including most Republicans). I vividly recall a dinner I had at an East Side restaurant with neoconservative dignitaries Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, shortly after the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. My wife and I remained cautiously optimistic that this handshake, and all it symbolized, would lead to something good for Israel. In any case, we felt, no real harm could come from giving Oslo a chance. But Podhoretz and Decter were in despair, convinced that Oslo would lead inexorably to another major war with the Arabs, and on terms far more disadvantageous to Israel.

Things didn’t turn out exactly as the neoconservatives predicted—with, first, the creation of a Palestinian state, which would then become a springboard for another assault on Israel by the Arab states—but they correctly assessed the pathological nature of the Palestinian liberation movement. Like the premature anti-fascists of the 1930s, who understood the radical evil faced by the democracies of those days, the neoconservatives have had the bad taste to show us what we wanted to avoid admitting—that this conflict is not about disputed territories. It is about Israel’s right to survive as a democratic Jewish state. And after September 11, it’s clear that it is also about whether the Islamo-fascist movement that is at war with our civilization will succeed in making the Middle East safe for obscurantism and tyranny.

The late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban once famously noted that the Palestinians “have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” It was a clever line—except that it implies that the problem with Palestinian leadership is absentmindedness. In fact, Palestinian leaders have carefully thought out everything about the current suicide-bombing campaign, with the far from unreasonable expectation that it would bring tangible benefits to the Palestinian cause. After all, that cause was never as popular in the chancelleries of Europe and the campuses of America as it became after the first round of suicide bombings.

...

All of Israel’s concessions and offers of “land for peace” have not only failed to appease its enemies; they have actually intensified hatred for the Jewish state and for Jews period.

In the end, he is still hopeful for the future of Israel. Hmm...