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A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS |
NATIV ■ Volume Twelve ■ Number 2 (67) ■ March 1999 ■ Ariel Center for Policy Research |
SYNOPSIS |
The Israeli death wish finds expression in the systematic destruction of the national existential purpose. This process is implemented both by the leadership and the general public. In Camp David, Menachem Begin signed an agreement which he, himself, characterized “a war treaty”. Yitzhak Rabin’s decisive contribution to the establishment of a Palestinian state stands in polar opposition to his claims that a Palestinian state will bring about the end of the Jewish state. Shimon Peres, who is leading Israel declaratively and publicly, back to the 1967 borders, is the one who repeatedly sounded warnings that “in the absence of defensible borders the State will be obliterated in war”. Binyamin Netanyahu’s spiritual world is based completely on the assumption that Judea and Samaria, the cradle of the Hebrew nation and the very foundation of Zionism, are an organic part of the Jewish state and relinquishing them will terminate the national existential purpose. But it was he who, in the Hebron agreement and with greater vigor in the Wye Plantation agreements, for all intents and purposes, ceded most of Judea and Samaria, and has accomplished more than any of his predecessors in bringing about the actual partition of Jerusalem.
The assumption guiding the four Prime Ministers in their actions is that a far-reaching process of moderation has taken place in the Arab world
vis-à-vis Israel, and as a result, Israel can take more chances and yield territorial strategic assets. But this assumption is clearly mistaken. Over the course of the decade since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the level of armaments in the Arab world has ascended to a new degree – in terms of conventional, but especially in terms of non-conventional weapons and in the ballistic ability to launch these weapons on Israel. If in 1985 the number of ballistic missiles pointed at Israel numbered merely a few dozen, today the number is over a thousand. In addition, the Middle East is undergoing an accelerated radicalization process both fundamentalist (witness Iran, Sudan, Algeria and Israeli Arabs) and nationalist (witness the elimination of Lebanon by Syria and the attempt to conquer Kuwait by Iraq). Conversely, Israel has lost its “strategic asset” status in its relations with the United States. Furthermore, Israel is cutting its defense budget and developing weapons systems (the Arrow) which are irrelevant in light of the nature of the ballistic threat.
The attempt to analyze this phenomenon of systems collapse leads the author to the conclusion that there are three basic factors involved:
This article was published as the ACPR's Policy Paper No. 53, 1999
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