INTRODCTION
POPULAR SUPPORT of Israel over the last
quarter of a century has been based on a number of myths, the most Persistent
of which has been the myth of lsrael's security, Implying the permanent
existence of grave threats to the survival of Jewish society in Palestine,
this myth has been carefully cultivated to evoke anxious images in public
opinion to permit, and even encourage, the use of large amounts of public
funds to sustain Israel militarily and economically. "Israel's security"
is the official argument with which not only Israel but also the U.S. denies
the right of self-determination in their own country to the Palestinian
people. For the past three decades it has been accepted as a legitimate
explanation for lsrael's violation of international resolutions calling
for the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. Over the past
thirteen years Israel has been allowed to evoke its security to justify
its refusal to retreat from the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied
in 1967. Security is still the pretext given by successive Israeli governments
for widespread massacres of civilian populations in Lebanon, for expropriations
of Arab lands, for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories, for deportations, and for arbitrary detentions of political
prisoners. Although the security of the Arab populations in the whole region
has been repeatedly threatened over these years by overt and covert warfare,
terrorist plots and subversive designs, and although UN resolutions demand
the establishment of secure borders for all states in the region, so far
only lsrael's security has been at the center of international discussion.
The persistence of the myth
of Israel's security shows that there is considerable public belief in
the so-called Arab commitment to eliminate the Jewish state. Most of the
distinguished Western writers who present this case derive their arguments
from Zionist versions of events in the late 1940s, at the time of the establishment
of Israel, and in the mid-1950s, when Nasser came to power. They go on
from these arguments to present Israel's so-called struggle for security
and survival as a moral issue. The media often furnish politicians, who
have other reasons for their political and military support of Israel,
with the convenient issue of the West's moral commitment to Israel.
Other versions or approaches
to the facts have more often than not been ignored. For example, recent
disclosures by Nahum Goldmann (Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1979) have
gone practically unnoticed. Goldmann, who for more than thirty years headed
the pro-Zionist World .Jewish Congress, charges that the Arabs were not
consulted about the partition of Palestine in 1947, and further that their
willingness to negotiate a political compromise that might have prevented
the 1948 war was vetoed and undermined by Ben Gurion before May 1948
The recently published Personal
Diary of Moshe Sharett (Yoman Ishi. Tel Aviv: Ma'ariv, 1979, in Hebrew)
now offers a decisive and authoritative contribution to the demystification
of the myth of lsrael's security and its security policies. Between 1933
and 1948 Sharett guided the foreign relations of the Zionist movement,
as head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, and from 1948 to 1956
he was lsrael's foreign minister. In 1954 and 1955 he was its prime minister
as well. The following pages present extracts from Sharett's diary demonstrating
the following points:
1 .The Israeli political /military
establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence
of Israel. On the contrary, it sought and applied every means to exacerbate
the dilemma of the Arab regimes after the 1948 war. The Arab governments
were extremely reluctant to engage in any military confrontation with Israel,
yet in order to survive they needed to project to their populations and
to the exiled Palestinians in their countries some kind of reaction to
lsrael's aggressive policies and continuous acts of harassment. In other
words, the Arab threat was an Israeli-invented myth which for internal
and inter-Arab reasons the Arab regimes could not completely deny, though
they constantly feared Israeli preparations for a new war.
2. The Israeli political/military
establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations
which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal
of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region
radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle
East.
3. In order to achieve this
strategic purpose the following tactics were used:
a) Large- and small-scale military operations
aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in
the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively
under the control of Jordan and Egypt. These operations had a double purpose:
to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization
stemming from tensions between the Arab governments and the populations,
who felt they were not adequately protected against Israeli aggression.
4. lsrael's achievement of
its strategic purpose was to be realized through the following means:
a) New territorial conquests
through war. Although the 1949-50 armistice agreements assigned to Israel
a territory one-third larger than had the UN partition plan, the Israeli
leadership was still not satisfied with the size of the state, the borders
of which it had committed itself to respect on the international level.
It sought to recover at least the borders of mandate Palestine. The territorial
dimension was considered to be a vital factor in Israel's transformation
into a regional power.
b) Political as well as military
efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims
to Palestine through the dispersion of the Palestinian refugees of the
1947-49 war to faraway parts of the Arab world as well as outside the Arab
world.
c) Subversive operations designed
to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create
puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.
In providing documentation
on the above points, Sharett's Diary deals a deadly blow to a number of
important interpretations which are still being presented as historical
truths. Among these are the following items:
1. To this date the majority
of scholars and analysts cite the nationalization of the Suez Canal as
the chief motivation for the October 1956 war, It is thereby implied that
the projected British and French aagainst Egypt provided Israel with an
opportunity to achieve the termination of fedayeen attacks from across
the armistice lines, and to settle its accounts with Nasser's regime, to
which these attacks were attributed.
What Sharett tells us now is
that a major war against Egypt aimed at the territorial conquest of Gaza
and the Sinai was on the Israeli leadership's agenda at least as early
as the autumn of 1953, almost a year before Nasser ousted Neguib and consolidated
his leadership. It was agreed then that the international conditions for
such a war woumature within a period of about three years. The Israeli
military attack on Gaza in February 1955 was consciously undertaken as
a preliminary act of war. A couple of months later a government decision
to commence a war to conquer the Gaza Strip met with the strenuous opposition
of the foreign minister, whose political liquidation was thereupon decided
by the supporters of the war policy, headed by Ben Gurion. Had the prospect
of the tripartite aggression not appeared on the horizon in later months,
Israel would have gone on to attack Egypt according to its own plans, and,
moreover, with U.S. consent.
2. The occupation by Israel
of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 has been described, and is still widely
understood today, as an Israeli defensive action in the face of Arab threats.
Sharett's Diary offers unequivocable evidence that the occupation of Gaza
and also of the West Bank was part of lsrael's plans since the early fifties.
American Zionist leaders were informed about these plans in 1954, In 1955,
Jewish and Arab lives were sacrificed in a series of provocative attacks
undertaken to create a pretext for the occupation of Jordanian territory.
The chief obstacle postponing this occupation was Britain's residual presence
in Jordan upholding the Hashemite throne.
3. The continuing, violent
Israeli aggression in Lebanon still is being attributed, shamelessly, to
Israeli security needs. In particular, Israeli spokesmen, echoed by Western
media, try to explain lsrael's massive intervention in Lebanon and the
Lebanese events in general, with the following historical arguments:
a)In the struggle between Muslims
and Christians, a conflict which would have broken out regardless of outside
interference, Israel's role has been limited to the defense of the Christian
minority.
b)The presence of the Palestinian
resistance, or in Israeli terminology, of Palestinian terrorism in that
country required Israeli intervention.
Sharett's Diary, however, provides
the entire documentation of how in 1954 Ben Gurion developed the diabolic
plans to "Christianize" Lebanon, i.e., to invent and create from scratch
the inter-Lebanese conflict, and of how a detailed blueprint for the partition
and subordination of that country to Israel was elaborated by Israel more
than fifteen years before the Palestinian presence became a political factor
in Lebanon.
The use of terror and aggression
to provoke or create the appearance of an Arab threat to lsrael's existence
was summed up by the then "number two" of the Zionist state's hierarchy:
"I have been meditating on
the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and
on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on
the violations of the law by our men-all of which brought grave disasters
and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security
crisis".
A week earlier, Moshe Dayan,
then lsrael's chief of staff, explained why Israel needed to reject Any
border security arrangements offered by the neighboring Arab States, or
by the United Nations, as well as the formal security guarantees suggested
by the United States. Such guarantees, he predicted, might "tie lsrael's
hands." Presumably, that would render unjustifiable or even impossible
those attacks and incursions across the armistice lines which through the
mid- 1950s went under the euphemistic name of reprisal actions. These actions,
Dayan said, "are our vital lymph. They
. . . help us maintain a high tension among our population and in the army.
. in order to have young men go to the Negev we have to cry out that it
is in danger". (26 May 1955, 102 1)
The creation of a siege mentality
in Israeli society was necessary to complement the prefabricated myth of
the Arab threat. The two elements were intended to feed each other. Although
Israeli society faced a serious risk of social and cultural disintegration
under the impact of a mass immigration of Asian and North African Jews
into the pre-state's ideologically homogeneous community, the purpose of
the siege mentality was not so much that of attaining a defensive cohesiveness
in Israel's Jewish society. It was calculated principally to "eliminate
the moral brakes" required for a society to fully support a police which
constituted a complete reversal of the collective ethical code on which
its formal education was based and from which it was supposed to derive
its vital strength. Of course, this ethical code had not been respected
in the past either. Aggression and terrorism had been exercised by the
Zionists before and during the 1947-48 war. The following testimony of
a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village
of Duelma in 1948 is only the most recently disclosed of a long chain of
evidence:
Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs,
women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with
sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the
villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs
came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two
women into a house he was about to blow up. . . . Another soldier prided
himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another
Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple
of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered
commanders who were considered "good guys". . . became base murderers,
and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination.
The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better. (quoted in Davar, 9 June 1979)
But these episodes did not
filter through to the society at large. The War of Independence was ritualized,
on the contrary, as a miraculous victory of (Jewish) right against (Arab)
might. Deir Yassin was (falsely) described by tile ruling Labor establishment
as an isolated and even condemnable case, a product of the brutality of
the minority lrgun group. Manuals, school textbooks, history books, anthologies
and the media placidly glorified the moral quality of the war, the "Puritv
of the weapons" used by the army, the Jewish ethos underlying the state.
The security or reprisals policy
of the 1950s represented, in this sense, a qualitative leap. The strategic
designs were perceived, by the Israeli leaders themselves, is totally irrational
in respect to the regional realities, and especially in respect to the
international context to which Israel had formally committed itself. Therefore,
the support required for it inside the country had to be total, i.e., emotional,
almost instinctive, with no concessions to rationality and no moralistic
cover. A strategic goal such as the transformation of Israel into a regional
power inevitably presupposed the use of large-scale, open violence, and
could not pretend even mythically to be achieved on the basis of the earlier
moral superiority doctrine which, therefore, had to be replaced with a
new one. Terrorism and "revenge" were now to be glorified as the new "moral.
. . and even sacred" values of Israeli society. The resurgent militarism
no longer needed the idealistic, socialist varnish of a Paimach: the military
symbol was now Unit 101, led by Arik Sharon.
The process of this cultural
even more than political transition was not automatic. In fact, as Dayan
admitted in the above quotation, much anxiety to be generated to encourage
it. The lives of Jewish victims also had to be sacrificed to create provocations
justifying subsequent reprisals, especially in those periods in which the
Arab governments succeeded in controlling the reactions of the harassed
and enraged Arab border populations. A hammering, daily propaganda, controlled
by the censors, was directed to feed the Israeli population with images
of the monstrosity of the Enemy. More images showed that negotiated security
arrangements with the Enemy could only be interpreted as a fatal proof
of Israeli weakness.
The final point of this process
which Sharett watched in the 1950s was the election of Menachem Begin as
prime minister in 1977. Sharett's Zionist perspective was baseon a political/diplomatic
alternative to the terror strategy of Ben Gurion and his followers. This,
he thought, could consolidate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine
and perhaps enlarge it in the future, without major concessions to the
surrounding Arab world. Sharett believed his goals could be achieved without
disturbing the West. Indeed, he thought Israeli plans could be coordinated
with the West's. He lucidly perceived as fascist the logic behind lsrael's
security doctrine, and correctly evaluated its consequences of moral corruption
on the internal level and increasing violence on the regional level. He
opposed it, and was certainly its most illustrious victim. His defeat,
however, was inevitable, because his dissent from the strategy was quantitative
more than qualitative: on methods rather than substance; on the number,
for example, of the victims of a given military action and only vaguely
on the ideology behind such actions. Basically, in the light of his unflagging
Zionist faith, he was as fascinated as repelled by the strategy, as envious
of its immediate successes as he was worried over its longer range consequences
and international repercussions for Zionism and Israel.
The liquidation of his dissenting
presence was considered indispensable to the realization of the Israeli
political/military leadership's megalomaniac and criminal designs. His
intrinsic weakness consisted in his seemingly rational hope that the so-called
liberal West would prevent the implementation of his opponents' designs.
He relied on the West rather than on the awakening of a local, popular
conscience which he had the power and the information to provoke but which
as a Zionist he could not and dared not do.
On the contrary, notwithstanding
his scruples and torments he almost invariably ended up collaborating with
his adversaries, and with those elements in the security establishment
who conspired against him, in the fabrication and diffusion of deliberately
distorted versions of events and policies for domestic and international
consumption.
In a historical perspective Sharett's
self-portrait as it emerges from his Personal Diary, thus also explains
why no so-called moderate Zionist proposal is possible,and how any attempt
to liberalize Zionism from the inside could not but-as has repeatedly been
the case-end in defeat. A clear, lucid, coherent logic runs through the
history of the past three decades. In the early fifties the bases were
laid for constructing a state imbued with the principles of sacred terrorism
against the surrounding Arab societies on the threshold of the eighties
the same state is for the first time denounced by its own intellectuals
as being tightly in the deadly grip of fascism.
This may be just one more reason
why Western journalists, scholars sand analysts may find themselves greatly
embarrassed by the following document. These commentators still insist
on upholding the presumed moral commitment of the West to what they obstinately
continue to mystify is Israel's security. In this sense Sharett's Diary,
is potentially devastating to Zionist propaganda as the Pentagon Papers
were in regard to U.S. aggression in Vietnam.
AAUG Publications
Committee
November
1985