10/4/02 La guerra di Israele Efraim Karsh, docente anglo-israeliano di storia contemporanea, è conosciuto per essere stato tra i primi a mettere in discussione i nuovi storici revisionisti israeliani (Morris,Pappe,Shlaim ecc.).Purtroppo i suoi libri non sono tradotti in italiano.
Israel's War
by Efraim Karsh
LATE IN February, in the first such action since Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority opened its war of attrition in October 2000, Israel undertook military operations against terrorist bases in two Palestinian refugee camps. For many Israelis, this move was long overdue: terrorists had been operating with virtual impunity from inside these camps, where they had stockpiled large stores of weapons and were able to mobilize and train new recruits with utter freedom. To some in Israel, it even seemed that rooting out these terrorists might herald a turning point in the eighteen-month confrontation. "If we carry out clear-cut missions in two or three refugee camps, the rest will crumble," argued Brigadier-General Efraim Eitam. "They'll . . . understand there is no military benefit to their conflict."
Critics of this strategy were no less convinced that it was misconceived: "not a calculated risk," as one of them put it, "but a dangerous gamble," bound to inflame still further the ongoing cycle of violence. "The politicians are demanding that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) achieve the impossible: military victory," wrote the respected political commentator Yoel Marcus even before the operation took place. He went on:
This kind of victory was achieved [by Israel] in 1967 by conquering Sinai and the Suez Canal, and in 1973 by encircling the [Egyptian] Third Army and threatening Cairo. It was achieved by threatening Damascus. But military victory over an entire nation is not possible when the government has no political objective.
Marcus's point seemed to be vindicated when the incursions into the refugee camps were met with fierce and almost instantaneous reprisals in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians. But the analysis on which it rests is flawed. In the narrow sense, Israel's actions in the current intifada have been no more directed at "victory over an entire nation" than the 1991 Gulf war led by Washington was directed against the Iraqi nation, or the anti-Taliban campaign of the last months has been directed against ordinary Afghans. For several years now, virtually the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza has been under the hegemony of the Palestinian Authority, and no one in authority in Israel desires to reoccupy those territories or to reassert rule over them. The conflict, rather, is with a ruthless and militant leadership that has itself always viewed "armed struggle" as its primary political instrument-if not its raison d'être-and that has no compunction about using its own people as pawns in the pursuit of extremist and uncompromising goals.
In a larger sense, though, Marcus has touched on a real truth about modern warfare, albeit one whose significance seems to have eluded him. Victory "over an entire nation" is indeed feasible when political objectives are clear, and such victories have occurred regularly throughout modern history. Ever since war was transformed in the late 18th century from a contest between professional armies into a clash between whole national entities, its outcome has been decisively dependent on the vicissitudes of national morale. No nation can sustain a prolonged war unless an influential portion of its population endorses the effort and is willing to make the necessary sacrifices, and victory or defeat in such a war is often determined less by battlefield strength than by sheer grit, cohesion, and persistence.
In 1948, by dint of just these qualities, the newly-born state of Israel managed to rebuff an all-out assault by the far larger and better armed Arab world, while the atomized Palestinian Arab community, lacking an equivalent sense of corporate identity, crumbled under the weight of war. Some 55 years later, however, the situation seems to have come full circle, as a militarily far stronger and economically more affluent Israeli society shows signs of fatigue and fragmentation and Palestinians appear to be on the offensive and holding their own.
Having shrewdly defined the terrorist war as a religious duty-it is called the "al-Aqsa intifada," after the mosque in Jerusalem-both the Palestinian Authority and its tightly controlled media have gone out of their way to extol not just every suicide bomber but every casualty of war as a holy martyr, thus instilling in the Palestinian people fresh zeal for the battle against their much better equipped foe. At the same time, expressions of Israeli self-doubt or dissent, like the recent refusal of some reserve officers to serve in the disputed territories, are widely trumpeted throughout the Palestinian world as confirming the rightness of the Palestinian cause and its inevitable triumph-and the rightness, as well, of the path of military confrontation over the path of compromise and negotiation.
In the national struggle in which the Palestinian people are engaged, argues Hassan al-Kashef, director-general of the Palestinian information ministry, the point is to break the will of the Israelis to resist. In a recent article in al-Hayat al-Jadida, the official daily of the Palestinian Authority, al-Kashef asserts that the "most effective negotiator" in this struggle is not the talker or the diplomat but "the fighter active in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem":
We will lose much, and the loss will be shameful and historic, if we agree [now] to restore calm with security measures requiring us to protect the occupation's soldiers, bases, and settlers. We will lose even more by agreeing to an interim solution that solves nothing and does not put an end to occupation. We will lose [the military] interaction with the Israeli society-an interaction that brings 1,000 Israeli [army] officers to take a stand and 14,000 Israelis to demonstrate in Tel Aviv.
We will lose if we extricate [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon from the crisis he is in-a crisis that will cause him to end his life in political and military defeat. Economically and militarily, Sharon will bring Israel nothing but the worst [predicament] in its history.*
HASSAN AL-KASHEF displays a keener grasp of the realities of war and peace than do some of his Israeli counterparts. While war (in Clausewitz's famous formula) may be the continuation of politics by other means, it is frequently also the engine that drives the political process. The long peace enjoyed by 19th-century Europe was established only after the defeat of the continent's main revisionist power, Napoleonic France; the present European order was established only after the smashing of the Nazi bid for world mastery. Even in the relatively rare cases in which there has been no clear military decision one way or another, postwar arrangements in the modern world have almost always reflected the prevailing balance of power between the belligerents. In the words of the British military historian Michael Howard, "It is hard to think of any nation-state, with the exception of Norway, that came into existence before the middle of the 20th century which was not created, or had its boundaries defined, by wars, by internal violence, or by a combination of the two."
Certainly the Middle East has been no exception to this rule. The contemporary state system in that part of the world is a relic of World War I, in the aftermath of which the European powers and their regional allies dismembered the defeated Ottoman empire and distributed the parts in accordance with their interests. But the artificiality and instability of the resultant regimes also guaranteed that violence would continue to plague the Middle East at both the local and the regional levels.
This is not so difficult to understand. Israel excepted, the Middle East is still a place where the role of the absolute leader supersedes the role of political institutions, and where citizenship is largely synonymous with submission. Power in Arab countries is often concentrated in the hands of small and oppressive minorities (Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq); religious, ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; for sovereigns, the overriding preoccupation is survival. In such circumstances, it is hardly to be wondered at that the main if not the sole instrument of political discourse is physical force.
The scale and the endemic nature of violence in the region are hard to exaggerate. In most Arab countries, political dissent is dealt with by repression, and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and murder. (One need only mention Syria's massacres of its Muslim activists in the early 1980's, or the brutal treatment of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish communities and of the Christian minority in southern Sudan.) As for foreign policy, it, too, is often pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression. In the Yemenite, Lebanese, and Algerian civil wars, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians perished; the Iran-Iraq war claimed nearly a million lives.
Nor has this violence been the sole property of the likes of Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, and Ayatollah Khomeini. The affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan did not shrink from slaughtering thousands of Palestinians during the single month of September 1970, known as "Black September," when his throne came under threat from Palestinian guerrilla organizations.
So, too, in the case of Arab policy toward Israel. From the very beginning, the Arabs' primary instrument for opposing Jewish national aspirations was violence, and what determined Arab politics and diplomacy was the relative success or failure of that instrument in any given period. As early as April 1920, Arab nationalists sought to thwart Zionist activity (and to rally support for incorporating Palestine into the short-lived Syrian kingdom headed by King Faisal ibn Hussein) by carrying out a pogrom in Jerusalem in which five Jews were killed and 211 wounded. The following year, Arab riots claimed a far higher toll-some 90 dead and hundreds wounded. In the summer of 1929, another wave of violence resulted in the death of 133 Jews and the wounding of hundreds more.
For quite some time, this confrontational approach seemed to be working. It was especially effective in influencing the British, who had been appointed the mandatory power in Palestine by the League of Nations. Though the explicit purpose of the British was to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, the mandatory authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab violence aimed at averting that purpose and to the demands that followed upon it. In two White Papers, issued in 1922 and 1930 respectively, Great Britain severely compromised the prospective Jewish national home by imposing harsh restrictions on immigration and land sales to Jews.
In July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward when a British commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, recommended repudiating the terms of the mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with Transjordan, that would occupy some 90 percent of the mandate territory, and a Jewish state in what was left. This was followed in May 1939 by another White Paper that imposed even more draconian restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, closing the door of Palestine to Jews desperate to flee Nazi Europe and threatening the survival of the Jewish national project. Agitating for more, the Arabs dismissed both plans as insufficient.
They did the same in November 1947 when, in the face of the imminent expiration of the British mandate, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine; rejecting this solution, the Arab nations resolved instead to destroy the state of Israel at birth and gain the whole for themselves. This time, however, Arab violence backfired spectacularly. In the 1948-49 war, not only did Israel confirm its sovereign independence and assert control over somewhat wider territories than those assigned to it by the UN partition resolution, but the Palestinian Arab community was profoundly shattered, with about half of its population fleeing to other parts of Palestine and to neighboring Arab states.
FOR DECADES to come, inter-Arab politics would be driven by the determination to undo the consequences of the 1948 defeat, duly dubbed "al-Naqba," the catastrophe, and to bring about Israel's demise. This phase culminated in June 1967 in yet another major war that was irretrievably to change the course of Middle Eastern history.
It was, indeed, the magnitude of the Israeli victory in the Six-Day war of 1967 that punctured the bubble of denial and forced at least some Arabs to confront the reality of Jewish statehood. Even Gamal Abdel Nasser, the high priest of pan-Arabism and champion of the 1967 Arab campaign, seemed to recoil from the ideals he had preached for so long. A few days before the outbreak of hostilities in June 1967, Nasser had proudly prophesied that "the battle will be total and our basic aim will be the destruction of Israel." A couple of years later, shaken by defeat, he was scolding the Arab leaders who were still urging Egypt to resume hostilities: "You issue statements, but we have to fight. If you want to liberate, then get in line in front of us."
The trauma of the 1967 war thus suggested to the Arabs that military force had its limits, and that the death of Israel might have to be pursued in other ways. If that war was fought with a view to destroying the state physically, the next war, in October 1973, launched by Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat, had the far narrower objective of triggering a political process that would allow Egypt to regain the territories lost in 1967. Israel's remarkable military recovery in October 1973 after having been caught off-guard further reinforced Sadat's determination to abandon the path of outright violence, and culminated in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of March 1979.
But it would be wrong to construe that treaty as a fundamental acceptance of Israel's legitimacy. While one can only speculate about Sadat's own ultimate intentions-he was assassinated in October 1981 for having gone as far toward peace with Israel as he did-there is little doubt that his successor, Hosni Mubarak, has never had any desire to transform the formal Egyptian peace with Israel into a genuine reconciliation. For Mubarak, peace is of no value in and of itself; rather, it is the price Egypt has had to pay for such substantial benefits as U.S. economic and military aid.
Over the decades, Mubarak has reduced interaction with Israel to the lowest possible level, while simultaneously transforming the Egyptian army into a formidable modern force. He has also fostered a culture of virulent anti-Semitism in Egypt, a culture whose premises he himself evidently shares. Here is his candid assessment of the lessons and consequences of the 1973 war:
Against us stood the most intelligent people on earth-a people that controls the international press, the world economy, and world finances. We succeeded in compelling the Jews to do what we wanted; we received all our land back, up to the last grain of sand! We have outwitted them, and what have we given them in return? A piece of paper! . . . We were shrewder than the shrewdest people on earth! We managed to hamper their steps in every direction. We have established sophisticated machinery to control and limit to the minimum contacts with the Jews. We have proven that making peace with Israel does not entail Jewish domination and that there is no obligation to develop relations with Israel beyond those we desire.† If this is the view of the leader of the largest and most powerful Arab state, other Arab players, with the partial exception of Jordan, have similarly never felt the need to acknowledge the Jewish state's legitimacy, and have declined even the most tempting offers in exchange for normalized relations. Four successive Israeli prime ministers, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak, were willing to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace. The late Hafez al-Assad rejected every proposal, not because of petty squabbles over a few hundred yards of territory around the Sea of Galilee but out of a fundamental unwillingness to acquiesce formally in the very existence of the "neo-Crusader state," whose fate, Assad never tired of reiterating, would eventually be that of the medieval Crusader kingdom before it.
As for the Palestinians, they too have persistently denied legitimacy to Israel, denigrated Jewish history, and even gone so far as to repudiate any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or, by implication, to the land of Israel itself. All in all, and up until now, contractual peace with Israel has represented, for the Arab party, not a recognition of legitimacy but a tacit admission that, at least for the time being, the Arabs have been unable to defeat Israel by force of arms.
THE REALITY I have been sketching was keenly recognized by at least some Zionist leaders at a very early stage of the conflict. In a 1923 article entitled "The Iron Wall," Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forerunner of todayLikud party, argued that Arab acquiescence in the Jewish national revival in Palestine would only follow upon the establishment of an unassailable Zionist power base-political, diplomatic, and military.
"So long as the Arabs have a glimmer of hope to get rid of us," wrote Jabotinsky in his characteristically frank tone,
no smooth talking or far-reaching promises will induce them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a riffraff but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful questions only when it has lost all hope of "ridding itself" [of foreign settlers]: when there is not the slightest crack in the iron wall. Only then will the extremist groups with their slogan "No, never" lose their influence, which will shift to the moderate groups. And only then will the moderate groups approach us with suggestions for mutual concessions and begin honest negotiations with us on such practical matters as guarantees against pushing them out, and equality of civil and national rights. It is my hope and belief that we shall then give them such guarantees that will satisfy them, and that both peoples will be able to live as good neighbors. But the only road to such an agreement passes through the iron wall. The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the past century vindicates Jabotinsky's stark prognosis. It has been Israel's technological edge, the performance of its armed forces, the commitment and resilience of its society, and, above all, its decisive military victories that have gradually driven the Arabs toward the path of politics and a grudging acceptance. Every Arab defeat, every military setback, has meant an increased acquiescence in the reality of Israel. By contrast, every perceived crack in Israel's "iron wall" has meant a revival of the old dream of destroying the state utterly.
IN THE 1990's, the Oslo accords, the biggest of all cracks in the "iron wall," provided the ultimate proof of Jabotinsky's thesis. Here was Israel extending the hand of friendship and inviting Yasir Arafat back from exile. And here was the PLO, the "sole representative of the Palestinian people," ostensibly saying it was willing to shed its historic commitment to the destruction of Israel, to renounce the use of violence as a political tool, and to accept a territorial compromise based on a two-state solution. But as the actual behavior of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority over the past decade reveals, beneath the rhetoric of compromise lay the old commitment to violence and to victory, now fueled by Israeli accommodation.
Yasir Arafat himself testified as much within months of the September 1993 ceremony on the White House lawn when, at a closed meeting with South African Muslim leaders, he asserted that the Oslo agreements fell into the same category as the Treaty of Hudaibiya signed by the Prophet Muhammad with the people of Mecca in 628, only to be reneged on a couple of years later when the situation tilted in Muhammad's favor. In the year 2001, the prominent Palestinian "moderate," Faisal al-Husseini, was even more explicit, describing the Oslo process as a "Trojan Horse" designed to promote the strategic goal of "Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea"-that is, to a Palestine in place of Israel.
While speaking the language of peace to Israeli and Western audiences, Arafat, from the moment of his arrival in Gaza after his years of exile in Tunisia, began to lay the ground for an eventual confrontation with Israel. Hence his failure to disarm the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad as required by the Oslo accords, and his tacit approval of the murder of hundreds of Israelis by these groups; hence the creation of a far larger Palestinian army (the so-called police force) than was permitted by the accords; hence the frantic acquisition of prohibited weapons; hence the reluctance to abrogate those clauses in the Palestine National Covenant calling for Israel's destruction; hence the systematic indoctrination of the Palestinian public, especially schoolchildren, with violent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda; and hence the Palestinian Authority's resort to outright mass violence, first in September 1996 with a view to discrediting the then newly-elected Benjamin Netanyahu and then in October 2000 as a means of turning the tables on Netanyahu's successor, Ehud Barak.
What enabled Arafat to pursue his war preparations was a combination of international sympathy for his cause and Israeli self-delusion. Fatigued by decades of fighting, and yearning for a normalcy that would allow them at last to enjoy their recently won affluence, many Israelis clung to the Oslo process as to an amulet, turning a blind eye to the evolving danger at their doorstep. Even Netanyahu, for all his scathing criticism of Oslo, proved unable to win from Arafat the reciprocity he demanded, and was reluctantly forced to follow in the footsteps of his two predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, in surrendering territory to the Palestinian Authority without any tangible return.
In this light, Arafat's rejection of Barak's generous territorial concessions during the Camp David summit of July 2000, followed by his launching of the al-Aqsa intifada in October of the same year, made perfect sense. Indeed, not only did the international community react to the renewed violence by pressuring Israel to moderate its response, and be still more "forthcoming" to Palestinian demands, but the Barak government itself succumbed to Palestinian military pressure. In January 2001, during a summit meeting at the Egyptian resort of Taba, Israel's prime minister ceded virtually the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, together with some Israeli territory, and made breathtaking concessions over Jerusalem and the question of Palestinian refugees.
Had Arafat chosen to pocket these Israeli concessions, a Palestinian state could have been established within the very near future. Instead, and perhaps understandably from his point of view, he went for broke, insisting with renewed adamancy that no peace would be possible unless Israel guaranteed the right of the Arab refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants to return to territory that is now part of the state of Israel. Only then, faced with the prospect of the destruction of Israel through demographic subversion, did the Israeli public react decisively, voting Barak out of office within days of the Taba summit. This left Arafat little choice but to intensify his war against Israel still further in an attempt to turn the clock backward and coerce the incoming prime minister, Ariel Sharon, into concessions similar to those of his ill-fated predecessor.
AND SO the fight has gone on. In the year since Taba, numerous pleas have been voiced by a string of self-appointed referees, from the European Union to Israeli architects of the Oslo process, to end the hostilities in a strategic draw and return to the negotiating table. Such proposals, which have struck a deeper chord among Israelis than among Palestinians, are a recipe for assured disaster. Aside from the absurdity of entering into a new and more far-reaching contractual agreement with a partner who has demonstrated a perfect disregard of every previous commitment, there is the deeper legacy of violence that lies at the core of Arab political culture and that, as in the 1920's and 1930's, today seems to be bearing fruit. Similarly with calls for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories. Just as Israel's hasty pullback from Lebanon in the summer of 2000 helped to catalyze the al-Aqsa intifada, so a simple evacuation of the disputed territories in the wake of years of inconclusive fighting is certain to fuel Palestinian hopes of defeating the Jews once and for all.
A new generation has come of age in the Palestinian Authority and throughout the Arab Middle East. It is a generation born after the 1967 war, that momentous event which so profoundly traumatized an older generation. For today's Arabs, the 1967 defeat is but a dim memory, one more historical injustice that has to be redressed by any means necessary. Today's young have no recollection of Israeli forces routing four Arab armies in six days in June 1967, or of Israeli tanks rolling across the Sinai in October 1973 to encircle the mighty Egyptian Third Army, or of Israeli commandos successfully raiding the Ugandan town of Entebbe, thousands of miles away, to free scores of hostages in 1976. This generation's formative experience has been, instead, of an increasingly fatigued and retreating Israel: an Israel hit in 1991 by dozens of Iraqi missiles against which it did not retaliate; an Israeli army that failed to suppress the Palestinian intifada of the late 1980's, and in 2000 fled from Lebanon in disarray before a small but determined guerrilla force; an Israel evidently prepared in 2001 to yield vast territories after a few months of Palestinian military pressure.
So long as the "iron wall" created during Israel's early decades continues to be eroded, both the Palestinians and the Arabs in general are bound to turn to physical force, or to the threat of physical force, to accomplish their ends. This war has already cost Israel dearly in terms of human casualties, economic and social dislocation, international reputation, and national morale; failure to end it swiftly and decisively will be nothing short of catastrophic. The first, unavoidable step must be the comprehensive and unequivocal routing of the al-Aqsa intifada, including the disarming of the various military organs of the Palestinian Authority and the destruction of the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the arrest of the largest possible number of terrorists.
True, even a knockout blow, one that included the dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority itself, would not eliminate the propensity for violence from the Middle East's political scene; the phenomenon is simply too pervasive. Besides, the Arab peoples can absorb successive setbacks while Israel cannot afford a single decisive defeat. But it was the dawning consciousness that the costs of violence would far exceed its potential political gains that persuaded at least some Arabs to think Israel was here to stay in the first place. If only for want of other alternatives, this may be the only way to persuade others today.
