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JEROME SLATER is professor of political science at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is the author of a number of articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict and is working on a book on American policy toward the conflict from 1948 to the present.
Nearly one hundred years ago the nationalist movement of the Jewish people--Zionism--was founded in Europe. The core principle of Zionism was that two thousand years of European anti-Semitism left the Jews with no other choice but to found a state of their own, within which they could survive and build normal lives, free at last from the murderous rampages that had periodically decimated Jewish communities throughout Europe.
Given this history, perhaps no other nationalist movement in history has had a stronger claim to a state of its own. The problem, though, was that there was no obvious place to build such a state--no land, that is, large enough to accommodate a state, but yet not already claimed and inhabited by another people. Perhaps if the Zionist movement had been open-minded about the location of the prospective state, some solution might have been found. After a brief period in which the Zionist leadership was prepared to consider any reasonable location, however, it dropped its flexibility and insisted that only the land of ancient Palestine would do.
Therein lies the tragedy that has led to seventy-five years of terrorism and war between the Jews and the Palestinians--and which, if an overall settlement is not reached, could escalate into far greater violence than anything in the past. As powerful as was the Zionist claim for a Jewish state, its claim to Palestine as the only acceptable location for that state was startlingly weak. True, Palestine had been the original Biblical homeland of the Jews before the Romans had expelled them two thousand years earlier. But it hardly follows that this history gave the Jews a strong claim to this land in perpetuity, especially in light of the facts that both Islam and Christianity also had strong ties to Palestine and-much more importantly-that for 1,300 consecutive years the area had been largely inhabited by Arabs.
To be sure, the Zionists also had something of a contemporary claim to Palestine, thanks to the British promise in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to work for the establishment of a Jewish "homeland"--not a state--in Palestine, and the subsequent incorporation of this promise into a League of Nations mandate. But colonial impositions, even if backed by the major imperial powers who dominated the League, have little moral standing: Palestine was not for the British to dispose of, simply because they had gained control of it in World War I as a result of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the previous colonial occupiers.
The most salient moral and political fact was simply this: the overwhelming majority of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were unwilling to make way for the establishment of a Jewish state in their homeland. Unable to prevent the British and the Zionists from proceeding with policies that threatened their political rights, and perhaps their land, they chose to resist. The initial Arab resistance was primarily nonviolent; only when political efforts failed did they turn to violence. However tragic the results, it should be clearly recognized that it was the British/Zionist policies that forced the Palestinians to choose betwen violence or the loss of their rights.
In the Jewish-Palestinian conflict that broke out in the 1920s and has continued until today, it is the Palestinians who have been not merely the losers, but the victims. Over a million of them have lost their land, villages, and homes during the course of the conflict; and they have become dispossessed, stateless, occupied, politically repressed, and impoverished refugees. Even so, despite this tragic (and, by the Israelis, largely unacknowledged) history, once large numbers of Jews had immigrated into Palestine, once the Holocaust had demonstrated the continuing problem of savage anti-Semitism and Western indifference to it, and once--above all--the Jewish state of Israel was established in 1948, a new moral as well as political reality emerged. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict was no longer a clash of right and wrong, no longer a conflict between the rights of an indigenous people vs. the unimpressive rights" derived from a self-interested reading of ancient Biblical history or contemporary colonialism, however well-intentioned. Now it became a clash of two genuine rights: the rights of the Palestinians to dignity, self-rule, and political sovereignty in their own land versus the rights of the Israelis to survival and a normal, secure life within their state--however that state had originally emerged.
There is no mystery about how such a clash of two rights must be reconciled. From early in the conflict the solution has been obvious to the British, to the United Nations, to nearly every objective outside observer, and lately to most of the Palestinians and a growing proportion of Israelis: partition. The only settlement that would be both fair and have any realistic chance of ending the conflict is the division of the ancient land of Palestine between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, between the Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine.
By the late 1980s the Palestinian leadership under Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had officially accepted such a two-state compromise solution. In the last few years the Israeli Labor governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had slowly, reluctantly, but inexorably moved in that direction as well. During the fall of 1995, secret negotiations between Peres government officials and the Arafat-led Palestinian authority reached an agreement in principle, under which a demilitarized Palestinian state would be established in most of the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital to be either in or near Arab East Jerusalem.[1] While much of the details remained to be negotiated, on the eve of the May 1996 elections the Labor party began the process of preparing the Israeli public, adopting an election platform that for the first time made it explicit that an independent Palestinian state was a possible outcome of the peace process.
Thus, though there had been many setbacks on the road to peace, especially the fanatical Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jewish buses and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in early 1996, for the first time in seventy-five years there were strong grounds for optimism that the conflict was on the road to settlement. However, the election of the Likud government under Benjamin Netanyahu threatens to stalemate the overall peace process and lead to an escalating cycle of violence, perhaps even war. Given the Likud's religious-nationalist ideology and its past history, as well as Netanyahu's own public record, there was good reason for concern even before the new government took office. Today there is even more reason for concern (despite the agreement on the relatively minor matter of a partial Israeli withdrawal from Hebron), as a result of a number of Netanyahu government actions, especially continued Israeli settlement expansion in or near the formerly Arab sections of East Jerusalem.
Should the current stalemate in the peace process continue, there will probably be a new season of violence and terrorism in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict The recent terrorist bombings may well escalate with or without a green light from Arafat; they are clearly intended to demonstrate to the Israeli electorate that it was badly deluded in its apparent belief that the way to control terrorism and increase Israeli security--personal and national--was to turn the government over to the Likud.
If Palestinian terrorism escalates, it is likely that the Netanyahu government will respond by effectively ending the peace process and instituting unprecedented repression against the Palestinians. In turn, this will almost certainly lead to a resumption of the intifada in the occupied territories--but this time with guns and bombs and perhaps with greatly expanded outside Arab support. And should that occur, Israel might reoccupy Gaza and end all withdrawals from the West Bank; and it might even seek to expel large numbers of Palestinians into neighboring Arab states.
In that event, there would be a real danger that the neighboring Arab states, however reluctantly, would be drawn into the conflict, ending in another Arab-Israeli state war. Alternatively, if the moderate governments in Egypt and Jordan sought to stand clear of escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence, they would surely face increasingly militant fundamentalist opposition at home.[2] At least in the case of Egypt, a growth of fundamentalism could eventually jeopardize the government itself, already under heavy pressure in part because of its pro-Western stance and moderate position vis- a`-vis Israel.
At some point in this threatened process of escalating violence it is likely that an increasing proportion of the Israeli public will realize that it has made a catastrophic mistake, and once again the question of a Palestinian state will be on the agenda. Indeed, there are indications that this is already occurring. Once again there is serious debate in Israel and, because of the de facto U.S. alliance with Israel, in the American government as well, on whether a Palestinian state would truly threaten Israeli security. [3] My analysis is intended to contribute to that debate.
For both moral and practical reasons, Israel should allow the creation of a genuine, independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, so long as such a state does not threaten the rights and security of Israel or other states in the region. Because, however, the Israelis are largely blind to the clear historical injustice suffered by the Palestinians--sad to behold in a nation initially dedicated to serving as "a light unto others"--the moral argument is not likely to have a major effect on Israeli policy. Any argument for a Palestinian state that is to have some chance of success, therefore, must be couched primarily in terms of Israeli self-interest. And so, the central argument here is that the creation of a genuinely independent though constrained Palestinian state would enhance rather than threaten Israeli security in every important respect.
The creation of a Palestinian state would raise issues for Israel other than security, notably those of ideology and control over scarce water resources. Fortunately, these issues have considerably diminished in significance in the past few years. A decade ago perhaps as many as 40 percent of the Israeli population for religious or nationalist reasons rigidly rejected the principle of Israeli withdrawal from any part of "Greater Israel," including the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria"). Today it is estimated that no more than 10 or 15 percent hold to this position.
The 1996 elections apparently did not alter the overall division in the Israeli public on security issues. For some time now, Israelis have been divided into three general camps: the relatively small minority of Greater Israel "ideological hawks," and two roughly equal groups of "security doves" and "security hawks." The security doves, who voted for Peres, are already convinced that there must be a compromise with the Palestinians involving significant Israeli concessions, including the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
The security hawks are the swing vote in Israeli elections. In 1996 they broke largely for Netanyahu. Unlike the hardline religious and/or nationalist camp, the security hawks oppose a Palestinian state on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds, and therefore in any future election or referendum they might be persuaded by both argumentation and bitter experience that a Palestinian state is not an obstacle to but, on the contrary, the sine qua non for true Israeli long-term security.
On its face, the problem of Jerusalem, as opposed to the rest of the West Bank, appears to be intractable, even though--or perhaps precisely because--it has nothing to do with security but is only symbolic. Ideology, religion, and nationalism combine to make it difficult to imagine either Israel or a future Palestinian government agreeing to give up its claims to sovereignty over Jerusalem. Yet, before the recent elections there was an emerging consensus among analysts and intellectuals on both sides that some kind of dual or shared sovereignty arrangement must emerge: an undivided Jerusalem would be the capital of both states, with Israeli government institutions located in West Jerusalem, the Palestinian ones in East Jerusalem.[4]
The process of preparing the Israeli and Palestinian publics for the necessity of this kind of solution had only just begun before the 1996 elections and has now been shelved. Even so, there is reason for cautious optimism that, once all the other problems of creating a Palestinian state are settled, the Jerusalem issue can be resolved or bypassed by a creatively ambiguous diplomatic compromise, perhaps along the lines of the October 1995 secret negotiations between the Peres government and Palestinian authority officials, which provided for a Palestinian state capital in a nearby suburb of East Jerusalem. Remarkably, despite--or perhaps because of--the Palestinian terrorist attacks, recent Israeli public opinion polls show that for the first time a majority of Israeli Jews would be willing to grant the Palestinians some kind of sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem.[5]
Similarly, the water issueis important but manageable. Without assurances of adequate water supplies, Israel would be extremely unlikely to withdraw from the West Bank, the source of 30-40 percent of its present water. The problem is simply one of economics, not of literal scarcity. A number of technical studies have demonstated that both Israel and the Palestinians can solve their water problem by sharing existing resources while simultaneously greatly increasing the supply by desalinizing sea water and importing fresh water by tankers and pipelines. The model for a future Israeli-Palestinian agreement might be the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement of 1995, under which both countries agreed to share waters from the Sea of Galilee while working together to create new sources of fresh water. In any case, a 1996 study of the Israeli Environment Ministry concluded that within a few decades Israel will have to increasingly depend on desalinization for its drinking water--in effect even if it permanently occupied the West Bank and retained water sources exclusively for Israeli use. [6]
Any solution for the water problem will increase the price of water, but only by a surprisingly low amount. Recent studies have concluded that for a mere $110 million annually--a tiny faction of the amount currently spent on arms by Israel--Israel and other regional countries could increase the supply of fresh water to match the demand for it.[7] Even if this estimate proves to be too low, it is clear that the price for sufficient water for both Israel and the Palestinians will be quite affordable, indeed trivial, compared to the costs of not settling the conflict.
The typical argument of Israeli analysts fovoring the creating of a Palestinian state is that such a solution is the necessary price for peace. In their view, there would be a trade-off: in some respects a Palestinian state would complicate and potentially threaten Israeli security, but on balance and over the longer run there is no choice but to take the risks or pay the price in order to reach a stable peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole.
In my judgment, however, this argument is misleading, and the conclusion is unnecessarily weak. Far from requiring a "price" to be paid, at least in terms of security, an appropriately structured, limited Palestinian state would greatly enhance Israeli security against the three most important threats: terrorism, future Palestinian irredentism, or an attack by one or more powerful Arab states in alliance with Palestine.
Israel has had to live with what I shall call conventional terrorism since the early years of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine in the 1920s. Terrible as it has been, this kind of terrorism in no way threatens Israeli national security, as distinct from the personal security of the Israeli victims. Despite the carnage of the fundamentalist suicide bombings of 1994-1996, the odds of any individual Israeli becoming the victim of terrorism--as opposed, say, to dying in Arab-Israeli wars or even in traffic accidents--have been minute.
This is not to minimize the horrors of terrorism, but rather to place them in perspective. But in any case, the crucial point is that the establishment of a Palestinian state would greatly reduce the incentive for continued terrorism, most of which has been intended to force Israel out of the occupied territories. To be sure, the purpose of the fundamentalist terrorism since 1993 goes beyond that, for it has been designed to destroy the peace process and ultimately Israel itself. Faced with that kind of murderous fanaticism, Israel and its new-found allies in the PLO have no choice but to crush it. Following the suicide bombings of March 1996, the Palestinian Authority decided to closely cooperate with Israeli security forces to end the terrorism. The absence of any suicide bombings in the next year-until the Arafat-Netanyahu break in March 1997, following the Israeli government's decision to build new Jewish housing in East Jerusalem--demonstrates the crucial importance of such joint efforts. A breakdown of the peace process is likely both to increase the support for the fundamentalists within overall Palestinian opinion and diminish the incentives of the Palestinian Authority to control them.
Even with a political settlement, however, it is unlikely that every suicidal fanatic can be indefinitely stopped, so Israel will probably have to continue to live with some level of conventional terrorism. What does threaten Israeli national security is the possibility that terrorists may come into possession of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of mass destruction. This prospect is rarely publicly discussed in Israel, which is understandable but futile and even dangerous: minimizing the risk of catastrophe makes it improbable that the necessary steps will be taken to reduce its likelihood.[8] Given the increasing availability of weapons of mass destruction, Israel has no rational choice but to assume that it is only a matter of time before its enemies acquire them. At that point, Israel's main hope of averting an unthinkable catastrophe will have to rest on deterrence--that is, the threat, explicit or simply existential, of retaliation in kind.
But to whom will the deterrent threat be addressed? At present, deterrence is undercut by the very homelessness of the Palestinian people and the absence of a state that may be held responsible for nuclear terrorism. As a hostage to Israeli retaliation, however, a Palestinian state would give the Palestinian people an overwhelming self-interest in eliminating the fanatics. Continued terrorism, if conventional, would ultimately lead to Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza, putting an end to the Palestinian state. Nuclear or other forms of mass destruction terrorism would invite Israeli retaliation in kind; at the least, the Palestinian government would certainly have to make that assumption, and it would therefore go to great lengths to avoid a catastrophe that would put at risk not merely the state but the Palestinian people.
Israelis have long been concerned that a limited state in the West Bank and Gaza might become the base for a later Palestinian drive to regain all of Palestine, either because the PLO has all along secretly held to its original goal or, more likely, because it is replaced by a fundamentalist regime. It is certainly the case that no settlement of the long and bitter Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be based simply on trust or on optimistic assessments of the future intentions of a Palestinian state. Rather, the task is to ensure that a Palestinian state can never have the capability of threatening Israel, regardless of who is in power.
For a number of reasons, this should not be a difficult task. To begin with, Arafat and other PLO leaders have repeatedly said that they accept that any independent Palestinian state will have to agree to a number of restrictions designed to ensure that it does not pose a security threat to Israel--and, for that matter, to its other neighbors, particularly Jordan:
Important as these constraints would be, even more important are the immutable geographic, military, and economic realities: a Palestinian state would be one of the weakest and most vulnerable states in the world, scarcely in a position to defend its own security, let alone to expand. Any Palestinian attack against Israel would be suicidal madness, doomed not merely to total defeat but almost certainly ending with the reoccupation of the West Bank and an end to the Palestinian state.
The Israelis typically cite geography as the basis of their security concerns--the West Bank abuts Jerusalem and is only fifteen miles from Tel Aviv and other population centers along the Mediterranean. In fact, geography works in favor of Israel: a Palestinian state would be divided in two by Israel and surrounded on three sides by it. Moreover, a Palestinian attack on Israel would pit a tiny state with one of the world's weakest military forces against one of the world's most powerful ones--fighting for its survival. Israel today has a mobilizable army of nearly 600,000 men and women, many thousands of planes, tanks, and artillery pieces, short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons. The demilitarized Palestinian state would have a tiny army, no planes, few if any tanks and artillery pieces, and, of course no ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons. Any attempt to even acquire advanced weapons, let alone employ them against Israel, would be immediately detected and would constitute a casus belli, following which Israel would overrun the state in a matter of hours.
Moreover, Israel would hardly be alone in opposing Palestinian irredentism. Not only would the Palestinians have to contend with the United States and other members of the international community and, possibly, peacekeeping forces, but the neighboring Arab states would all vigorously oppose any effort by the Palestinians to disrupt the status quo. With the Palestinians comprising over 60 percent of the population of Jordan, King Hussein and his largely-Bedouin army have their own vital reasons to control Palestinian radicalism, and they have successfully done so in the past. Egypt also has an enormous stake in maintaining its peace settlement with Israel and on several occasions has demonstrated its unwillingness to be drawn into war on behalf of the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia, which will surely be asked to provide capital to help subsidize and develop a Palestinian economy, has no interest in promoting a new focal point of radicalism in the Middle East, especially if a peace settlement included some form of Islamic rule over or administration of East Jerusalem. Syria is the key external state. Even in the absence of an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement, Damascus has prevented Palestinian raids on Israel from its territory since the mid-1970s, thus demonstrating that it too has no interest in a war with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. Evidence revealed in late 1996 indicates that prior to the 1996 elections, Israel and Syria were close to a formal peace agreement, based on Israeli return of a demilitarized Golan Heights to Syria in return for peace. Moreover, such a settlement would almost certainly be accompanied by an agreement to end the continued violence in southern Lebanon, which sometimes spills over into northern Israel. Israel would agree to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon and refrain from further military intervention there, so long as the fundamentalists agreed to end attacks across the border, and the Syrians would agree to use their dominant political and military leverage in Lebanon to enforce the agreement. Both the Syrians and the Lebanese governments have indicated that they would move to effectively end the violence in the context of an overall agreement--but not without one.
Sooner or later this kind of Israeli-Syrian-Lebanese agreement will be on the peace-process agenda. If a deal is reached, the Syrians will have no incentive to destabilize an Israeli-Palestinian settlement or allow the fundamentalists to undermine it--and no one doubts the effectiveness of Hafez al-Assad's control, once he has an incentive to exert it.
In sum, the creation of an appropriately constrained Palestinian state would greatly enhance Israeli security. It would substantially reduce Palestinian incentives to continue the struggle against Israel, while adding little to its capabilities of doing so. The existence of the state would serve as a hostage against irredentism, for the Palestinians would now have a powerful interest in avoiding provocations to Israel that could result in massive retaliation or even the reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a permanent end to the Palestinian state.
Most Israeli defense analysts are much less concerned with the potential threat posed by a Palestinian state per se than they are with the possibility that such a state could be seized by a powerful Arab state (for example, Iraq or Syria) or coalition of states and then used as a base to invade Israel. However remote this is today, security analysts must plan against such worst-case scenarios. The present moderate governments in Syria and Jordan might be replaced by fundamentalist fanatics, or the United States might one day withdraw its military forces from the Gulf region and end its dual-containment policy vis-a-vis Iraq and Iran. But even so, a properly structured Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state would diminish rather than increase the risks of an overwhelming Arab attack from the east.
First, an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would change Arab perceptions of Israel and make an attack much less likely. Few Arab states will agree to the permanent Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and much of the West Bank and the continued suppression of Palestinian nationalism, but even fewer would be prepared to continue the struggle against Israel if the Palestinian issue were resolved.
Second, the Palestinian state would have an overwhelming vested interest in regional peace and stability and every incentive to oppose rather than support Arab rejectionism: it is not lost on the Palestinians that the survival of their state would depend on its not posing a threat to anyone. Indeed, if Palestine were to become the springboard for an all-out war against Israel, it would not merely be the "state" but its inhabitants who would not survive, for the West Bank would surely become the battlefield on which perhaps the technologically most destructive war in history would be fought.
Third, an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the emergence of a Palestinian state would change Israel's political but not its security borders, a distinction first proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol after the 1967 war and in effect embodied in the Israeli-Egyptian peace settlement of 1979 and the Israeli-Jordanian treaty of 1995. Israel's western political boundary is the Sinai peninsula, but its western security boundary is the Suez Canal: the entire Sinai, though under Egyptian sovereignty and administration, must remain largely demilitarized and garrisoned with international/American peacekeeping forces. And the ultimate guarantee against major violations of these restrictions is the known capability of Israel to reoccupy the Sinai.
Similarly, Israel's eastern political boundaries at present are the Golan Heights, the Jordan River, and the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea south to Eilat. Its eastern security boundary, however, is the Jordanian border with Iraq, an existential fact that is widely understood in the Middle East and which undoubtedly played an important role in constraining Saddam Hussein from moving troops toward the Jordanian border in the 1990 Gulf War. This reality has now been formally recognized in the Israeli-Jordanian treaty, which explicitly recognizes Israeli's right of military response in the event Arab armies cross into Jordanian territory.[9]
These precedents provide the model for an Israeli withdrawal from both the Golan Heights and the West Bank, for regardless of the change in sovereignty, Israel's security boundaries would remain unchanged. Any larger-scale movement of Syrian troops toward the Golan; Jordanian troops toward the West Bank; or Iraqi, Iranian, or Syrian troops toward Jordan would trigger an overwhelming Israeli military response.
A formal U.S.-Israeli defense alliance would further enhance deterrence against an Arab attack, especially if given added credibility by the stationing of U.S. troops, either unilaterally or as the central component of an international peacekeeping force stationed in the West Bank or even inside Israel-much as the U.S. commitments to defend Berlin and South Korea were made credible by the stationing of ground combat troops there.
To be sure, there would be considerable political opposition in both Israel and the United States to any permanent U.S. ground combat presence in the West Bank, Gaza, or the Golan Heights. The Israelis have always been of two minds about this idea: many favor it because of the increased deterrence against an Arab attack that it would bring, while others are opposed because they fear excessive dependence on the United States and want to preserve an unconstrained Israeli freedom of military action in the area.
However, in the event that a future Israeli government decides that the trade-offs--more security, less unilateral freedom of action--are worth it, it is likely that Congress and American public opinion would go along. Much of the present congressional opposition to preliminary contingency planning for U.S. troops on the Golan has simply been a reflection of the opposition of the Israeli right wing to any steps that would facilitate a return of the Golan to Syria. It would be a different matter if there proved to be positive Israeli support for an increased American military commitment to stabilize a new status quo along Israel's borders.
In that event, the American government would surely emphasize that a formal Israeli-American defense alliance would not constitute a radical new commitment for the United States, for it would merely formalize what has been a de facto commitment since the 1950s. It is well established that most American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have privately offered to strengthen and formalize the U.S. commitment if Israel would make the territorial and other concessions necessary to bring about a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement. Even in the absence of such a settlement, American soldiers manning Patriot batteries helped defend Israel in the Gulf War. Thus, there is every reason to expect that in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, formalizing the American military commitment to Israel would receive the necessary political support in Congress and from the American public.
In any case, the argument that Israeli security would be enhanced by its withdrawal from most of the territories conquered in 1967 by no means stands or falls on whether or not there is political support in Israel and the United States for a formal defense alliance, with or without the stationing of U.S. forces in the area. While such an alliance would provide additional deterrence against war, by far the most important factor in Israeli security would be, as now, its own enormously powerful military forces. In short, in no sense would Israel be relying" on international or even American guarantees, peacekeeping units, or armed forces. All of these would be a net addition to, rather than a substitute for, Israel's own deterrence and war-fighting capabilities.
It ought to go without saying that the most crucial component in Israel's ability to deter--or, if necessary, defeat--an all-out Arab attack is its overwhelming nuclear capability, now estimated to comprise several hundred warheads and to include tactical nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use as well as strategic weapons for deterrence or retaliation. But it does need saying, for as a consequence of the Israeli government's unwillingness to acknowledge its nuclear capability, Israeli security analysts feel required to ignore reality and limit their discussion (in public, at any rate) to conventional deterrence of the Arab threat. The rather bizarre consequence is that many of the most prestigious and important Israeli defense analyses are quite misleading, for they all but ignore the single most critical variable in any realistic assessment of Israel's security problems. It is as if Western assessments of the ability of NATO to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe during the cold war had ignored the role of nuclear weapons.
Fortunately, Israeli nuclear silence or coyness has not prevented Arab political and military leaders from drawing the appropriate conclusions about the risks of war with Israel. It is well established that from the late 1960s onward Nasser and Sadat in Egypt and Assad in Syria were deterred from initiating major war against Israel by fear of nuclear retaliation. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, neither Egypt nor Syria had plans to attack Israel within its pre-1967 borders, and there is no reason to think that Arab states would be less deterred by the far more powerful Israeli nuclear forces of today. For example, retired General Ori Orr, one of Israel's leading security experts and a key member of the Knesset, has argued that Israel does not need to retain the Golan Heights to deter a Syrian attack. In a clear allusion to Israel's capacity to destroy Syria, Orr asks: "Why doesn't Assad make war today, if he has such a preponderance of ground forces? Because he knows what would happen. And the same holds true whether we are on the Golan or not." [10]
Israel's nuclear deterrent will not be significantly undercut, even if the Arab states eventually gain possession of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. The consequences of the arrival of MAD (mutual assured destruction) in the Middle East are likely to be mutual deterrence-and not only of nuclear attacks but also of large-scale conventional aggression, just as was the case in Europe during the superpower nuclear standoff of the cold war. Any minimally rational Arab leader must assume that if Israel faced imminent destruction by invading Arab armies it would not shrink from using its nuclear weapons, regardless of whether it faced retaliation in kind; rather, in Samson-like fashion it would pull the walls down around its enemies as well as itself. Nor is the Samson myth the only one that predicts Israeli behavior. Even more important is Masada-suicide over surrender or defeat. But above all, nothing could be more central to the Israeli identity than the Holocaust and its most crucial imperative: Never Again.
For a number of reasons, the creation of a limited Palestinian state would enhance Israel's security rather than endanger it. First, the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank (as well as from the Golan Heights) and the fulfillment of the Palestinian demand for self-determination would largely remove the two most important causes of general Arab hostility to Israel: its occupation of Arab lands and its suppression of Palestinian nationalism. Second, the creation of a Palestinian state would give the Palestinians a vested interest in peace and therefore a reason to oppose rather than support further Arab rejectionism; far from posing a threat to Israel, a Palestinian state would be a force for as well as a hostage to peace. Finally, a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict would solidify Israel's alliance with the United States and enormously increase its support in the rest of the world.
National security is relative, not absolute, and it is far more a function of the overall state of relations between states than it is of the raw military balance of power among them. Canada, for example, does not worry about threats to its national security from the United States. Israeli security analyses have tended to focus excessively on Arab military capabilities while slighting what Israel could do to improve its relations with its neighbors. Similarly, there has been a tendency to spin out worst-case scenarios that run only in one direction, exaggerating the potential risks of change while downplaying the already existing costs and risks of attempting to preserve the status quo.
Compare, for example, two worst-case scenarios. In the first, Israel withdraws from the West Bank and allows the creation of a small, demilitarized Palestinian state in the context of international and U.S. guarantees for peace, perhaps including the stationing of international and American peacekeeping forces along the Israeli-Palestinian borders, the negotiation of a formal American defense alliance with Israel, and even the stationing of U.S. troops inside Israel. Under these circumstances, how great is the likelihood that the Palestinian state would be used as a base for an all-out attack on Israel, either by the Palestinians themselves or by an Arab war coalition? To begin with, preparations for such an attack would be quickly detected, and Israeli forces would reoccupy the West Bank within a matter of hours, well before Arab armies arrived there. Moreover, an attack would constitute an act of war not only against Israel but in a sense against the United States and the international community, especially if the invaders had to overrun substantial international or American military forces. If these factors alone are insufficient to deter a major attack, potential invaders are not likely to forget that overrunning international or American forces would be the mere preliminary round, prior to coming up against the fully mobilized armed forces of Israel, considered to be among the best in the world, armed with nuclear weapons, fighting to defend the very survival of the state, and undoubtedly carrying the battle from its outset to the armed forces, territory, and perhaps even population centers of its attackers.
On the other hand, consider an alternative and unfortunately more plausible worst-case scenario-the early signs of which may already be emerging-if the Netanyahu government refuses to negotiate a fair and reasonable compromise settlement with the Palestinians:
In my judgment, the second scenario is considerably more likely than the first. If that is persuasive, then it must follow that far from constituting a potential threat, a Palestinian state is the sine qua non of true Israeli security.
NOTES
1. There have been a number of reports on these negotiations. The most detailed is "A Would-Be Palestinian Pact; Rabin Aide Discloses Details," New York Times, 1 August 1996.
2. It is by no means certain that Egypt would even try to stand clear, for Mubarak has been increasingly warning Israel not to count on Egyptian passivity in the event of the breakdown of the peace process. For example: "Israel will be making the greatest mistake in its history if it lets things deteriorate into a new war, because we won't sit with our arms folded and the situation will become very dangerous." (Jerusalem Report, 12 December 1996.)
3. For example, several recent polls have found that about 50 percent of the Israeli public will agree to the creation of a Palestinian state, provided that acceptable security arrangements can be made. (Jerusalem Report, 1 May 1997.)
4. There has been a burst of scholarship in recent years on ways in which the Jerusalem issue can be resolved. For one of the more important and persuasive arguments, see Ian Lustick, "The Fetish of Jerusalem: A Hegemonic Analysis" in Michael N. Barnett, ed., Israel in Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1996).
5. Chemi Shalex, "Living with Terrorism--and Hope," New York Times, 1 August 1997.
6. Jerusalem Report, 5 September 1996.
7. Peter Passell, "Economic Scene--In the Middle East," New York Times, 24 August 1995.
8. In one of the few exceptions, three years ago the Jerusalem Report, 23 February 1994, gingerly noted the concern that Islamic extremists might get a nuclear weapon from Russia and detonate it in Tel Aviv.
9. For a discussion of the security provisions of the 1994 Israel-Jordon peace agreement, including Israel's right of military response in the event Arab armies enter Jordan, see Jerusalem Report, 11 August 1994.
10. Jerusalem Report, 29 June 1995.