Will West Bank Turn Israel Into Permanently Besieged Fortress?

As an ardent Zionist, I watch the upsurge in riots and unrest in the West Bank with increasing pain and frustration.

The relentless cycle of demonstrations and response is escalating in frequency and violence on both sides to such an extent that recently Israeli officers have kept American television crews from filming the unrest. The area is a pressure cooker, and the flare-ups merely let off steam.

Israel’s adding the West Bank to its narrow pre-1967 borders, although offering the illusion of physical and psychological security, is a prescription for permanent war with the Arabs. The goal of acting with Jordan, or even with the Palestinians themselves, in demilitarizing the West Bank as part of a peace settlement would lead to a far more optimistic option.

Partisans of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin’s Likud policy of de facto annexation, offer an argument that is simultaneously pragmatic and ideological. On the prudent side, they say, the West Bank provides a bulwark not only against invading Arab armies but also against a Soviet Union that could encroach into the region via a Palestinian entity. But Israel’s right wing is not itself convinced of its own supposedly pragmatic reasoning. The paramount issue for those on the right is not security but ideological commitment to the “undivided land of Israel.” Alleged biblical right to “all of Israel” forms their central platform on the West Bank.

It is the moderates for whom the focal issue is political pragmatism. They maintain, with the support of the majority of Israel’s military leaders, that retaining an area with more than a million increasingly hostile Arabs poses, not reduces, a security risk.

The military occupation already is gobbling up military resources, and in time of war agitation on the West Bank would create problems of security and troop diversion of significant proportions. Security, the moderates argue, can best be achieved only if Israel relinquishes most of the West Bank.

Ironically, Israeli moderates and the ultra-right Meir Kahane find themselves uneasy bedfellows, for both recognize that Israel can remain Jewish and democratic only by ridding the Arabs from their body politic. The difference is that Kahane’s desire to expel the Palestinian population is regarded by moderates as a betrayal of their entire raison d’etre and is pragmatically suicidal for Israel’s relationship to the family of nations.

Even proposals for increased local autonomy for the Palestinians, which would keep them disfranchised on the national level, is viewed by moderates as a guarantee of continued and heightened unrest as well as a dismantling of the Palestinians’ national ethic. The moderates believe that it is not in Israel’s interest to become, or be perceived as having become, the type of colonial conqueror from which progressive nations must wrest their freedom.

To criticize what the occupation is doing to the Jewish soul is to risk being dismissed for liberal moralizing. Yet I believe that a nation created from biblical ashes must morally examine itself. The bulk of Israel’s soldiers today were infants or not yet born when the territories were won in the Six-Day War; thus they have no notion of pre-1967 Israel. Significant numbers of these young men are conscripted for guard and police duty in the West Bank--to be jailers and security-service investigators, to confront and sometimes shoot at rock-throwing boys--lest the situation disintegrate into chaos. This service disillusions and embitters many fine men.

Not long ago, driving through the West Bank, I picked up a hitchhiking Israeli captain from the elite Golani Brigade. As he told me how much he hated all this occupation and combat, he launched immediately into questions of how he could obtain a permit to live in America once his service was completed. He explained that his parents did not emigrate from Eastern Europe for him to serve on the West Bank. A single encounter is not paradigmatic, but I hear the voice of this frustration mounting among many of Israel’s best and brightest. I fear even more what serving as occupiers does to the less enlightened.

Two roads lie ahead--the ideology of “greater Israel” and the pragmatism of the moderates. The latter is the path lined with hope, while the former will lead only to Israel being turned into a permanently besieged fortress.