Israel: Looking Back

Twenty years ago Israel fought a war of survival and triumphed. Its brilliant military victory--achieved in six days against the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan--brought the nation the first strategic security that it had known in nearly two decades of perilous existence. But the war brought another legacy, immeasurably troubling and seemingly intractable. With victory came dominion over more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This population, with its high birthrate, represents a demographic time bomb. Unless there is political change, a majority of the people living under Israeli rule will eventually be Arab, and Israel’s essential nature as a Jewish state will be in jeopardy.

Israelis understand that there are three possible responses to this demographic challenge. Israel can divest itself of the greater part of this Arab population by negotiating a settlement that would trade occupied land for peace. Or it can go on as it has gone on, digging in ever more deeply in the West Bank while continuing to deny to the vast majority of those who live there and in Gaza the basic political rights that Israelis themselves enjoy, in the process further eroding its own moral foundations. Finally, Israel could adopt the unimaginable and unspeakable course advocated by the most extreme of its political elements. It could expel the Arabs living under its rule and formally annex the land that they live on.

About half of all Israelis, opinion polls show, favor negotiations to exchange occupied land for peace--clearly the only acceptable solution. But the divided Israeli government, representing a divided people, can’t bring itself to endorse this answer. Meanwhile, as time passes, it seems likely that fewer Israelis will be prepared to give up any territory, no matter how tempting the potential rewards. Each year the number of Israelis who in their lifetimes have known only the security of an Israel widened to the River Jordan increases. Each year the national psyche grows more comfortable within the physical presence of a greater Israel.

To say all this is by no means to attribute the inertia in peace efforts solely to Israeli indecisiveness. Emphatically, that is not the case. Jordan alone, with political support from Egypt, seems conditionally prepared to talk about territorial compromise, but Jordan alone is too exposed to the threatened vengeance of Arab extremists to act unilaterally. At a minimum it needs the tolerance of most other Arab states before it can overtly talk with Israel. No such hint of tolerance has been extended.

It is at the same time worth recalling, on this anniversary of the Six-Day War, that within weeks of its conclusion Israel offered to return virtually all of the territory that it had just conquered, if only its neighbors would unequivocally agree to making peace. The dismally inflexible response came at an Arab summit meeting a few months later: no negotiations, no compromise, no peace with Israel. Until Egypt chose to put its national interests first by making peace with Israel a dozen years later, that sterile formula prevailed. It continues to bind and paralyze other Arab states to this day.

The real tragedy of the Palestinian people has been not so much the Israeli occupation and its routine accompanying humiliations--although these are bad enough--but the abysmal failure of Palestinian leadership over the last half-century and more to accept the idea of political compromise, and the utterly cynical manipulation of the Palestinian plight by Arab governments. More than anything else, it is these things that have brought the Palestinian people to their bitter condition.

Certainly Israel alone cannot ameliorate that condition. Just as certainly, Israel too has suffered from it in ways that undermine its own democracy and spiritual fiber. The status of the Palestinian people is a reproach to their own leadership and to other Arabs. It is no less an increasingly weighty moral burden and political millstone for Israel. Twenty years ago, alone and unaided, Israel secured its national survival. It has not been the same since--in many tangible ways for the better, in some ways for the worse.