scars of war, wounds of peace Also by Shlomo Ben-Ami The Origins of the Second Republic in Spain La Revolución Desde Arriba: España, 1936–1979 Fascism from Above: The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923–1930 Los Origenes de la Segunda República Española: Anatomía de Una Transición Quel Avenir Pour Israel? A Front Without a Home Front: A Voyage to the Boundaries of the Peace Process scars of war, wounds of peace The Israeli-Arab Tragedy SHLOMO BEN-AMI 2006 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by Shlomo Ben-Ami Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of war, wounds of peace : the Israeli-Arab tragedy / Shlomo Ben-Ami. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-518158-6 ISBN-10: 0-19-518158-1 1. Arab-Israeli conflict. 2. Arab-Israeli conflict—1993– —Peace. 3. Zionism—History. 4. Israel—Politics and government. I. Title. DS119.7.B3826 2005 956.9405—dc22 2005025383 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Let war yield to peace, laurels to paeans. (Cedant arma togae, concedant laurea laudi) Cicero, De Officiis, Book I, Chapter Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Sir Winston Churchill, speech at the Mansion House, London, November Contents List of Maps ix Preface xi I Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict II Bisecting the Land or Zionism’s Strategy of Phases? III The Early Years: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? IV The Rise and Fall of the Third Kingdom of Israel V The Jewish Fear and Israel’s Mother of all Victories VI Sedanlaghen – The Sin of Hubris and its Punishment VII Begin’s ‘Capsule Theory’ and Sadat’s ‘Separate Peace’ VIII The Road to Madrid IX Oslo: The Glory and the Agony X The Barak Phase: On Freedom and Innocence XI The Politics of Doomsday XII Conclusions Bibliography Index Maps . The United Nations partition plan, . Israel after the armistice agreements in . Israel and the occupied territories, . Clinton’s peace plan, Preface ‘Do you think we can still make it?’ I was asked by President Clinton when, on Saturday, December , I was leaving the Cabinet Room adjacent to the Oval Office in the White House where the President had just finished communicating to the Israeli and Palestinian delegations to the peace talks his final parameters for a settlement. ‘I don’t know, Mr President,’ I replied, ‘if we have enough political time left to wrap up an agreement, but what I am sure of is that if we fail, we’ll all have plenty of time to write books about it.’ After the sad chapter of our failure, Israelis and Palestinians, to reach a final peace settlement during President Clinton’s last year at the White House, I did write about it in a book published in France (Quel avenir pour Israel?) and, in a more comprehensive work written in Hebrew, my personal account and perspective of the evolution of the peace process in its last phases, A Front Without a Home Front: A Voyage to the Boundaries of the Peace Process. When considering the preparation of an English version of those books, I decided that, however important a separate analysis of both the Oslo process and the latest chapter of the peace talks surely are for drawing the necessary lessons for any future attempt to solve the Israeli– Palestinian tragedy, it should not be seen in isolation from the wider history of the Arab–Israeli conflict and of earlier stages in the quest for peace in the Middle East. Our capacity to better understand the present and look with sobriety at the future needs to draw on, and be inspired by, a broader historical perspective. When we went to Camp David, Prime Minister Ehud Barak took with him Alistair Horne’s book on the war of Algeria and the subsequent peace with France, A Savage War of Peace, while I looked for inspiration in Henry Kissinger’s study on the Congress of Vienna and the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, A World Restored: the Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age. Neither of these books is, of course, a bad adviser for anyone willing to draw lessons for a transition from war to peace. But I later thought that an insightful overview of the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and especially that of the Palestinian dilemma, might certainly have been no less helpful to us both. xii Scars of War, Wounds of Peace It subsequently occurred to me that I might try some day to write such a book myself. After all, I have always kept abreast of the literature, old and new, about the subject. And for years the Arab–Israeli conflict and the frustrated attempts to solve it have been for me a profound personal and intellectual preoccupation. Throughout my public life, both in politics and outside it, I have participated in the heated debates on the subject of war and peace, I have written extensively on ways to solve the conflict, and I was privileged eventually to be allowed to make my own effort at peacemaking on the tortuous road of trial and error that is the Arab– Israeli peace process. The war was was a watershed in the life of the Israelis of my generation. Zionism was being dangerously redefined, we thought, by the encounter of the Israelis with the biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria, and by an infatuation with the new territories. The occupation also turned Zionism into a highly loaded term, too frequently vilified outside Israel as a reproachable ideology. I am a Zionist, and an ardent one at that. But I have fought to define the boundaries of the idea by a respect for the right of Israel’s Palestinian neighbours to a life of sovereignty and dignity. What drove me to look back at the source and at the history of the conflict, and later into the attempts to solve it, can be summed up in something that I said to an Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, before I departed for Taba to lead the Israeli team in a last-ditch attempt to save the Israeli–Palestinian peace process from collapse: A normal state is not supposed to settle beyond its legitimate borders. We have created a state, we have been admitted to the UN, we strive to have orderly relations with the international community, yet we still continue to behave as if we are a Yishuv. The entire peace enterprise of this government is aimed at leading the nation to choose, once and for all, between being a state or a Yishuv. It is to the shaping of the Israeli mind by the legacy of the Yishuv, where the utter rejection by the Arabs of a Jewish entity in their midst died so hard, that one needs to go back in order to trace the origins and the evolution of Israel’s penchant for formulating policies only on the basis of worst-case scenarios. Zionism was the territorial answer to the Jewish fear and this fear has never subsided since. Raymond Aron was once asked why he, who had such a keen interest in politics, was never tempted to become a politician himself. ‘The reason I am not a politician’, he said, ‘is that I want to understand.’ This book is my own attempt to ‘understand’. The need to look at the broader picture and to put the short, even if certainly significant, chapter where Preface xiii we played a role in its proper context accompanied me when I came for a two-year academic sabbatical to England. This gave me the opportunity to turn my intellectual preoccupation into an orderly effort of which this book is the result. Though written by a historian who is aware and respectful of the requirements of the discipline, it should not be read as exhaustive academic research or as a meticulous narrative history, for it is neither. Rather, it is a general interpretative overview where my understanding of, and my insights about, the story of the pendulous move of Jews and Arabs between war and peace are intertwined in the very broad lines of the unfolding story. It might, therefore, be a relief to the general reader that the book is not loaded with a heavy apparatus of primary sources and archival material. I was fortunate, however, to have been allowed the time and the chance to consult a large body of literature on the subject, the essential part of which is referred to in the Bibliography. The major works of the leading scholars in the field like Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris, both of whom have written excellent general histories as well as some enlightening monographs, have been an invaluable reference.