At Camp David, Menachem Begin laid the groundwork for
Israel’s gradual capitulation in four domains:
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The evacuation of the Sinai destroyed Israel’s
status as a regional power in the Middle East.
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A principle of justice that is fundamental to
international law was violated – namely, that a territory that served
the aggressor in its war and was wrested from it by the state under
attack, will not be returned to it. In relinquishing the Sinai, Israel
not only violated international law but became a supporter of
aggression. There is a certain poetic justice to the fact that this
aggression is directed against Israel.
-
For the first time in the history of Zionism, a
precedent was established of the destruction of Jewish settlements.
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The “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people”
were recognized. In other words, the cornerstone was laid for the
Palestinian state, which is aimed at subverting the legitimacy of the
state of Israel, eliminating it, and replacing it.
Thus Menachem Begin perpetrated the gravest strategic
blunder in the history of the Jewish
state.
His successor, Yitzhak Shamir, made two grave errors.
(1) The lack of response to the volleys of Iraqi missiles in the winter of
1990/91 severely harmed Israel’s deterrent image and led to an escalation
in the arms race for weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic
missiles that can deliver them. If in the late 1980s the missiles aimed at
the Greater Tel Aviv area numbered in the dozens, today their number is
close to two thousand, some of them tipped with weapons of mass
destruction. (2) Shamir brought Israel to the Madrid Conference. This
conference saw the infraction of the red line that had always guided
Israel’s policy: face-to-face negotiations rather than an international
conference where Israel would play the role of the accused in a field
trial. That, indeed, is what occurred. Binyamin Netanyahu, Deputy Foreign
Minister, was liberated from his inactivity and frustration under the
heavy hand of David Levy, and dispatched to Madrid. Finding himself in the
spotlights of the world media, he – predictably – was carried away and
sold all that could be sold under the prevailing circumstances. The Syrian
demand for the Golan acquired legitimacy; the PLO came out of the closet
and Israel was put in the pillory of international committees in the areas
of water, refugees, disarmament, and so on.
The momentum (what Sadat loved to call “the momentum
toward returning the Zionist entity to its true size”) of Madrid led to
Oslo. The late Yitzhak Rabin gave his seal of approval to an agreement
essentially aimed at withdrawal to the borders of June 4, 1967, the
division of Jerusalem, and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the
outskirts of Greater Tel Aviv. The Oslo agreement did not suffice for
Rabin, and before his assassination he also managed to commit himself to
the delivery of the Golan Heights to Damascus.
Immediately upon his accession to the Prime
Ministerial throne, Netanyahu handed over Hebron to the Arabs, an act that
Shimon Peres during his own brief tenure as Prime Minister had not dared
to perform. Netanyahu gave backing to his predecessor’s steps regarding
the Golan Heights and hastened to the Wye estate so as to provide the PLO
with the needed territorial continuity for setting up the Palestinian
state. Netanyahu, however, mainly busied himself in bestowing his party’s
approval on the policies of the Left. Thus, on the day he left office,
Binyamin Netanyahu could point with satisfaction to his decisive
contribution to “running amok toward destruction” (as he referred to the
“peace process” in the Hebrew version of his book A Place under the Sun,
see p. 19).
Ehud Barak would be justified in saying that he
deceives less than his predecessors. He does not openly deceive either the
public as a whole or the residents of the Golan Heights in particular as
his mentor, Yitzhak Rabin used to do. He does not, like Netanyahu, compose
a fiery credo and then hasten to delete every jot and tittle of it before
the ink has dried. He states that the IDF will flee from Lebanon, and the
IDF flees. He announces that he will betray our allies in Southern
Lebanon, and he betrays them. Even when he does fail to follow through on
his promises, not he but objective circumstances can be blamed. If he has
declared his intention to hand over the entire Golan Heights and carry out
an ethnic cleansing of the Jewish settlers there, yet so far has not done
so, he is not at fault but rather Assad, who died without prior notice.
Since there was an intermission on the Syrian front,
the Prime Minister was quick to perform two further steps that are on the
agenda of the “peace process”: the ceding of Jerusalem and the recognition
of the “Right of Return”. To these ends he met with Arafat in Clinton’s
backyard. The lame-duck American president needs, after all, some sort of
fig leaf to cover the nakedness of the sexual outrages he has engaged in.
Amid the plethora of his foreign-policy failures, the sale of Israel to
the Arabs is well-timed, a golden opportunity, if only because it can be
done with the enthusiastic cooperation of the designated victim.
Like the selling of the Golan to Assad a few months
earlier, the selling of Jerusalem to the PLO at Camp David 2000
encountered a built-in difficulty that has characterized the whole
process. Since the Arabs, having learned from a good deal of encouraging
experience, know that the Jews are in any case making a clearance sale,
they can simply put off the negotiations for a few days, weeks, or months
if they do not receive Jerusalem on the terms they have posited. After
all, the Arabs, unlike the Jews, are not afflicted with national-suicide
syndrome of the Peace Now school. This approach – “Always demand more than
what the other side is prepared to concede at the moment” – constituted
Hitler’s standing order to Konrad Hönlein, the “Führer” of the Sudeten
Germans who negotiated with the Prague government on the eve of the Munich
agreements. Arafat, who is Mubarak’s Hönlein, acts on the orders of the
ruler in Cairo. Hence, even if officially Jerusalem has not yet been ceded
to the Arabs, its de facto relinquishment was consummated at Camp David.
The legal authorization will soon follow.
Barak’s second duty in the Palestinian arena is the
recognition of the “Right of Return”. The Arabs need the implementation of
the “Right of Return” so as to augment the delegitimization of the Zionist
entity as they progress toward the next phase, which is already at the
point of advanced preparations on the diplomatic level, namely, to move
Israel back to the Partition borders.
On the issue of the “Right of Return”, the average
Israeli politician regards the Arabs as standing on solid ground in moral
terms, as merely seeking the “rectification of past injustices toward the
Palestinian people.”
The “Right of Return” enjoys the full backing of the
international community. The United Nations, in its famous Resolution 194
of December 1948, stipulates that the refugees must be returned to their
homes. The six hundred thousand refugees of 1948 have meanwhile become two
million people who demand their homes in Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Haifa, and all
the other parts of the state of Israel that were captured in the War of
Independence. Ehud Barak has accepted this principle, and the influx of
Arabs into the state of Israel has already begun, the official number now
being twenty thousand per year in the framework of what is called “family
unification and humanitarian cases”. The actual numbers, however, are four
and more times greater. Whoever will be Barak’s replacement on the Prime
Ministerial throne will have to carry out the legacy of Barak: to withdraw
from the Golan Heights, divide Jerusalem, and arrive at a settlement on
the “Right of Return” issue. The Arab world’s next challenge to Israel,
using the lever of the Palestinian state, will be a return to the
Partition borders.
