MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XV, NO. 3, FALL 2008 ABANDONING THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND “THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK” Ian S. Lustick Dr. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Chair of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Trapped in the War on Terror. ionists arrived in Palestine in the the question of whether Israel and Israelis 1880s, and within several de- can remain in the Middle East without cades the movement’s leadership becoming part of it. Zrealized it faced a terrible pre- At first, Zionist settlers, land buyers, dicament. To create a permanent Jewish propagandists and emissaries negotiating political presence in the Middle East, with the Great Powers sought to avoid the Zionism needed peace. But day-to-day intractable and demoralizing subject of experience and their own nationalist Arab opposition to Zionism. Publicly, ideology gave Zionist leaders no reason to movement representatives promulgated expect Muslim Middle Easterners, and false images of Arab acceptance of especially the inhabitants of Palestine, to Zionism or of Palestinian Arab opportuni- greet the building of the Jewish National ties to secure a better life thanks to the Home with anything but intransigent and creation of the Jewish National Home. violent opposition. The solution to this Privately, they recognized the unbridgeable predicament was the Iron Wall — the gulf between their image of the country’s systematic but calibrated use of force to future and the images and interests of the teach Arabs that Israel, the Jewish “state- overwhelming majority of its inhabitants.1 on-the-way,” was ineradicable, regardless With no solution of their own to the “Arab of whether it was perceived by them to be problem,” they demanded that Britain and just. Once force had established Israel’s the League of Nations recognize a legal permanence in Arab and Muslim eyes, responsibility to overcome Arab opposition negotiations could proceed to achieve a by imposing Jewish settlement and a compromise peace based on acceptance of Jewish polity in Palestine. realities rather than rights. This strategy of By the 1920s, however, it was obvious the Iron Wall served Zionism and Israel that Arab opposition to Zionism was broad relatively well from the 1920s to the end of and deep, especially within Palestine. the twentieth century. Converging streams Arab demonstrations and riots erupted of evidence now suggest, however, that regularly. In addition to “Muslim-Christian Israel is abandoning that strategy, posing Associations,” a number of clan-based © 2008, The Authors Journal Compilation © 2008, Middle East Policy Council 30 IAN S. LUSTICK: ISRAEL AND “THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK” nationalist organizations and parties they naturally understood Zionism to have emerged, all opposed to the British Man- inflicted. Nonetheless, he predicted that date and the growth of the Jewish National the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Home. Across the board, Palestinians Arabs and Arabs in the surrounding rejected the Balfour Declaration and the countries would eventually come to the Mandate that incorporated it and de- conclusion that a practical settlement with manded a plebiscite to implement Wilsonian Zionism was preferable to unending and principles of national self-determination for humiliating defeats. Only then would the majority of Palestine’s inhabitants. A negotiations be productive, and only then series of British investigating commissions would Zionism achieve its ultimate objec- identified the taproot of Arab discontent as tive: a secure and permanent peace, albeit Zionism itself and the immigration of Jews a peace based on resignation of the enemy and land transfers to Jews that were to an unchangeable reality rather than associated with it. It was against this acceptance of the justice of the Zionist background that Zionism found a way to cause. cope with the unavoidable fact of intransi- The Iron Wall strategy did produce a gent Arab opposition to its objectives. long series of military encounters with The policy adopted was that of the Palestinians and other Arabs that resulted “Iron Wall,” famously advanced in an in lopsided defeats and painful losses. As I article published in a Russian Zionist and others have shown, it also produced a journal by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky in fundamental split between those Arabs 1925 (“O Zheleznoi Stene”). The central who were willing to negotiate based on lines of its analysis came rapidly to be accepting the permanence of Israel and accepted across the broad spectrum of Arab “extremists” who Jabotinsky had said mainstream Zionist organizations and would never be brought to settle for half-a- parties, from Jabotinsky to David Ben- loaf, but who could be isolated by the Gurion, Berl Katznelson to Menachem productivity of negotiations with the Begin and Chaim Arlosoroff to Chaim “moderates.”3 Where the strategy ran into Weizmann.2 The only way, Jabotinsky trouble was the expectation that, inside the argued, that the necessary peace agree- Iron Wall, the objectives of the Jewish ment with the Arabs could ever be protagonist would remain stable. Instead, achieved was if an “Iron Wall” were to be especially following the 1967 war, the constructed. This wall would be so strong center of gravity of Israeli politics moved that Arab enemies trying to break through toward maximalist positions. Israel did not it would experience a long series of welcome moderate Arab offers to negoti- devastating defeats. Eventually this ate (such as those of West Bank Palestin- strategy would remove even the “gleam of ian notables in 1967 and 1968, King hope” from the eyes of most Arabs that Hussein in 1972, Egyptian President Sadat the Jewish National Home, and then the in 1971-72, or King Hussein again in the State of Israel, could ever be destroyed. mid-1980s). Rather, successive Israeli Jabotinsky acknowledged that some Arab governments in the late 1960s, 1970s, and extremists would always maintain a violent 1980s adopted the view that the Arabs in attitude of resistance toward the injustice general, and the Palestinians in particular, 31 MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XV, NO. 3, FALL 2008 were only advancing moderate-sounding efforts to “teach” Arabs anything and by positions in order to deceive Israel and Arab/Muslim rejection of the principle of a regain territories that would be used to Jewish state’s existence in the Middle destroy the Jewish state “in stages.”4 East. While I will make some references This expansion of distrust and demands to the radicalizing transformations that by the consistently victorious side of the have occurred on the Arab/Muslim side, conflict should be understood as just as my main concern in this paper will be to natural (“normal” is the word Jabotinsky consider the logical implications of Israel’s used) as the contraction of the demands effective abandonment of the Iron Wall and greater realism associated with strategy along with evidence that these repeated and costly defeats. However, this logical implications are indeed manifesting was, in fact, not anticipated by Jabotinsky themselves in Israeli thinking and behavior. or the generally applied theory and policy of the Iron Wall. The result, from the War A CHANGE IN STRATEGY? of Attrition in 1969-70 through the first Jabotinsky and others based the Iron Intifada, 1987-93, was a bloody and Wall strategy on their recognition that it complex process by which both Arabs/ was not reasonable to expect that Arabs Palestinians and Israelis used force to would consider what Zionism was doing to incentivize negotiations toward some sort them and to Palestine as just or right. of mutually tolerable settlement.5 The logic Jabotinsky admitted that, for the Arabs of of “ripening” dominated thinking about how Palestine, Zionist Jews were correctly seen the conflict might eventually be resolved. as “alien settlers” making unjust and This was a well-established idea, related to unacceptable demands. Thus a corollary the Iron Wall theory but anchored in a of the Iron Wall strategy was that Zionism fundamentally symmetrical view of the would not demand Arab recognition of the antagonists” that only when both sides to a justice of the Zionist project. It would protracted conflict feel themselves caught demand only that eventually Arabs would in a “hurting stalemate” will realistic accept the reality and permanence of a prospects for a negotiated settlement based Middle East that included Jewish immigra- on painful and mutual compromises be tion and a Jewish polity. With characteris- possible. tic eloquence, Foreign Minister Abba Eban This progression of Zionist -Arab put this point very clearly in a speech in relations — from increasing but 1970, identifying the root cause of the uncalculated hostility (1882-1925) to the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict as unilateral pedagogy of force (1925-68), to the reciprocal impact of Israeli and Arab the refusal or the inability of Arab “Iron Walls” (1969-93) — appears now to intellectual and political leadership so have entered a new stage. Foreshadowed far, to grasp the depth, the passion, by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the authenticity of Israel’s roots in the accelerated by the collapse of the Oslo region….The crux of the problem is whether, however reluctantly, Arab peace process, and inaugurated by the leadership, intellectual and political, outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, this stage comes to understand the existential is marked by Israeli abandonment of character of the Middle East as an area 32 IAN S. LUSTICK: ISRAEL AND “THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK” which cannot be exhausted by Arab have shifted their discourse. Since the nationalism alone.6 mid-1990s, Israeli leaders have increasingly demanded, not Arab reconciliation to the The direct implication of this position — of fact of Israel’s existence, but explicit Arab requiring existential acceptance of reality, approval of Zionism itself via demands to not moral approval — is the rejection of recognize the right of Israel to exist in the demands that Arabs or anyone else “recog- Middle East as a Jewish state.