Sunday, June 07, 2015
Elder of ZiyonNote that Time assumed that the borders of Israel almost certainly should not become the pre-1967 lines.
Note also that there is not one mention of "Palestinians." There is no distinction between Arabs from Jordan or the west bank (it was never capitalized then) or Gaza or Egypt. Isn't it amazing how they have managed to invent themselves as a people in such a short period of time?
ON FACING THE REALITY OF ISRAEL
FOR months and perhaps years, debate will rage about the borders of Israel and about how much (if any) of its conquered territory it has a right to keep. That debate, while important, is secondary. The real issue is not Israel's specific size or shape but its basic right to exist. Most of the world has accepted and acknowledged that right, but not the Arabs. After their disastrous defeat, the Arab leaders still proclaim that their ambition is to build up enough strength to eradicate the state of Israel some day, even if it takes generations. They sound a little like Russian Czar Peter the Great, who remarked that he would force the Swedes to defeat him until "they teach us how to beat them."
Whether the Arabs really mean it—in the Western, rational sense of meaning something—or whether they are merely caught up in a phantasmagoria of words, is beside the point. The Arabs have shown time and again that they are the prisoners of their hyperbole. Their refusal to accept Israel as a fact of life is at the bottom of the whole Middle Eastern conflict, of the war just concluded and of the diplomatic battles about to begin. If the Arabs recognized Israel, a territorial settlement would be relatively easy.
Do the Arabs have a case that goes beyond mere fanaticism? That question is linked to a series of other, deeper questions: What is a nation? What is a state? How does a people achieve the standing of nation or state?
The Ways to Nationhood
History, political science and even that elusive discipline, international law, are in substantial agreement on the answers. A nation is "a body of people who feel they are a nation," says Harvard Political Scientist Rupert Emerson. What is essential is "the sense of common identity, the sense of a singularly important national 'we' which is distinguished from all others who make up an alien 'they.' " In the long jostling of history, a group would stake out a territory and fight to defend its boundaries against any "theys." In short, a nation becomes a state when it has the power to occupy and hold a given amount of space and when other nations recognize this fact. This may not seem just or fair. It may smack too much of raw force and various doctrines of "the survival of the fittest" or "the territorial imperative" that have been used to justify force. Yet these basic conditions—identity, tradition, ability to stake out a territory, govern it and win recognition—are the only real criteria for sovereignty.
The rise and fall of nations is an endless process of territories being joined and rejoined in varying mosaics, of people displaced and resettled, of power expanding and contracting. A new nation may be established through conquest, as was England when the Normans defeated the Anglo-Saxons, who had in turn shaken off the Danes, who had in turn put down the Anglo-Saxons. The original population of France was subdued by the Romans, whose remnants were driven out by the Franks, who in turn established an empire that under Charlemagne embraced large parts of Germany and Italy. In most cases of nation building through conquest, sheer force is not enough: there must be emotional and psychological power at work that sooner or later legitimizes the seizure and leads to an amalgamation of conquerors and conquered. Otherwise, the process of conquest is reversed. This has happened countless times. A classic example: Netherlanders rebelled against the rule of Spain in the 17th century, and the Belgians in the 19th century rebelled against the rule of The Netherlands. The rebels, for their part, must be able to make their rebellion stick and have it recognized by the world.
New countries may be established through a combination of immigration and revolution, as in the U.S. and Latin America, where settlers cut loose from their colonial masters. The process may also occur through a kind of rebirth—a deliberate revival of an ancient state or civilization in a new form, often but not always accompanied by revolutionary war. Modern Greece fought for its independence from the Ottoman empire partly in the name of its ancient, glorious incarnation, and modern Germany struggled for national unity remembering its identity under the Holy Roman Empire.
The breakup of empires has always given rise to new states. After World War I, the Paris Peace Conference put together Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia from disparate (and still not fully united) remnants of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and independent Serbia. The collapse of the colonial empires after World War II brought about a rash of such arbitrary creations. Many ex-colonial countries had sovereignty conferred on them by their former masters under the U.N.'s aegis, without the often salutary experience of having to fight for their freedom. Such countries are apt to be based on arbitrary old colonial boundaries. They are either so small that they have no independent viability, as in the case of Chad or Dahomey or Upper Volta, or else so large and composed of such disparate tribes that they have no common sense of nationhood, as in the case of Nigeria.
In the creation of modern Israel, traces of most of these precedents can be found—conquest, war of liberation, immigration, rebirth, international action—although no really close parallel exists. Judaism is a unique mixture of race, nationality and religion. There is no other people that has been dispersed for so long from its original home, yet has maintained the memory of that home as a living reality.
The Homeland Plea
Almost every text and ritual of the Jewish faith recalls the land that the Biblical Israelites seized from the Canaanites and to which, according to Genesis, Abraham received the title deed from God. This religious tradition has maintained a sense of community among Jews scattered over the world since the Romans destroyed the Palestine Jewish community in A.D. 135. For centuries, Passover and Yom Kippur services have ended with "Next year in Jerusalem!" And the Psalmist sang:
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget its cunning.
The Arabs, too, have deep roots in Palestine and an undeniable moral claim: therein lies the tragedy of the situation. They seized the country in the wave of conquest launched by the successors of Mohammed in the 7th century after Christ, and later wrested it back from the Christian Crusaders. Arabs have lived in Palestine for 1,300 years, and until recently made up the vast majority of the population. To Arabs, the Israelis are newcomers who in a generation or two wrested the land away from them. For the Moslems, too, Palestine has sacred connotations: tradition holds that the Prophet visited Heaven by ascending a ladder of light from the spot that is now marked by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
The Jews' religious, emotional and historic claim to Palestine as their homeland is probably stronger than the Arabs', but by itself the homeland plea can never be sufficient. In countless other cases, that plea and its underlying impulse have dissipated themselves. If it were not so, confusion would be considerable: the Celts could claim England; the Ainus, Japan; and the American Indians, the U.S.
The Jewish claim to modern Palestine is more realistically based; it derives from the territorial mandate that the British received from the League of Nations after the collapse of Turkey in World War I and later passed on to the U.N. That mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, promising the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Most of the Arab states now contesting Israel's claim did not exist themselves at the time, but a few Arab leaders agreed to the Balfour Declaration (whose meaning may or may not have been clear to them). The majority of Arabs probably disagreed.
The fact is that in 1947 the U.N. proposed partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs objected to the plan; the Jews accepted. In 1948, Israel proclaimed itself a state, and the world so recognized it. Karl Deutsch, professor of political science at Yale, compares the establishment of Israel to an act of "eminent domain," carried out by the world community.
The Arabs immediately attacked the new state and were decisively beaten back. In another day, the war would probably have continued until one side sued for peace, thus settling the matter at least for a time. But the U.N., with the best of intentions, halted the war long before Israel could expand its territory to the boundaries that its real strength could command. The U.N.-negotiated armistice lines of 1949 reflected an unreal balance of power. Says Harvard Government Professor Nadav Safran: "The Arab-Israeli conflict was the first international conflict in which the notion of 'no-war, no-peace' got established. Had the big powers not interposed their protection—thus taking pressure off the Arabs in 1949—peace would have been concluded, and people would probably be talking today about the natural affinity of Semites, instead of their mysterious obstinacy."
For nearly 20 years Israel has existed as a nation, its status so confirmed by its membership in the U.N. as well as by its own plain ability to function. The fact that it has done so with outside help is hardly the point. Most countries today require outside help to survive, including most of those lined up against Israel diplomatically. In fact, many have demonstrated less of a right than Israel, by the usual criteria, to be considered sovereign states.
If Israel's right to exist must be conceded, what of its right to keep some of its recent territorial conquests for the sake of security? On that point, Israel is more vulnerable. Yet its claim follows logically from the fact of its existence and from Arab belligerence. As Yale Law Professor Myres McDougal puts it: "Under the U.N. Charter, a nation is not supposed to acquire territory by force. But the Charter doesn't require a country to be a sitting duck."
Israel's argument that it acted in self-defense is based not only on the fact that the Egyptian blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba was generally considered an act of war. It is also based on the Arabs' two-decade record of demanding and working for the extermination of Israel, contrary to U.N. resolutions. Whether Israel needed to go quite so far as it did in self-defense is a question that may agitate some international lawyers—but hardly any military men. The U.N. lines, the Israelis can argue, are not a permanent frontier, hence they have the right to adjust their boundaries to ensure their security in the absence of a peace treaty.
The Need for Protection
If the Arabs were to agree to negotiate a peace with Israel, thereby acknowledging its existence, the situation would be changed immediately. The case for Israel's retaining its conquered territory would be sharply diminished, if not wiped out. Compensation of all kinds to the Arabs, including a settlement of the bitter refugee problem, would become possible.
How long can the Arabs hold out against negotiating a peace, and thus against the fact of Israel? Perhaps longer than most Westerners can imagine. Too much of Islam is an arrested culture that has never undergone a true political revolution or a religious reformation that could move it into the modern world. What divides the Arabs from Israel is not merely tradition or religion—for centuries past, Jews were far more tolerantly treated by Arabs than by Christians—but a culture gap. Israel, which in size constitutes less than 0.2% of the Arab lands, is hated by the Arabs in part because it is a successful, modern, Western state. It stands for all the things the Arabs resent, and yet want. If and when the Arabs manage to enter the Western-style 20th century, they may be able to defeat Israel; more significantly, they may then no longer feel the need to do so.
The sad persistence of the Arab attitude is perhaps the strongest argument for Israel's need to protect itself. Since the U.N. has shown its inability to protect them, Israelis argue that they can give up the real estate they deem essential to their security only if the Arabs agree to peace—and to reality,
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