The New Middle East (23 page)

‘Under the stress of the World War’, the British made two offers as they struggled to defeat Germany. ‘In order to obtain Arab support in the War, the British Government promised . . . the greater part of the Arab provinces of the Turkish Empire would become independent. The Arabs understood that Palestine would be included in the sphere of independence.’ And ‘In order to obtain the support of World Jewry, the British Government in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration. The Jews understood that, if the experiment of establishing a Jewish National Home succeeded and a sufficient number of Jews went to Palestine, the National Home might develop in course of time into a Jewish State.’
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That is how in 1937 the UK’s Palestine Royal Commission, also known as the Peel Report, summed up what it called ‘THE PROBLEM’. It was appointed in August 1936 ‘To ascertain the underlying causes of the disturbances which broke out in Palestine in the middle of April’.
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If that summary sounds as if the British promised two peoples the same land, that is because they did.

This contradiction was supposed to be glossed over because of ‘the belief that Arab hostility . . . would presently be overcome, owing to the economic advantages which Jewish immigration was expected to bring to Palestine as a whole’. The Commission concluded that the Arab people were financially better off, though ‘not unnaturally they deny it’. However, ‘Their feeling in the matter has been put in some such figurative language as this. “You say we are better off: you say my house has been enriched by the strangers who have entered it. But it is
my
house, and I did not invite the strangers in, or ask them to enrich it, and I do not care how poor or bare it is if only I am master in it.” ’
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Even back in 1937 the authors believed that the two sides were as ‘incompatible as their national aspirations’.
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Those aspirations spread to a broader mass of the Jewish people, becoming profound and urgent after six million of them were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.

The Arab–Israeli war of 1948 settled none of the underlying issues raised by the creation of the state of Israel. So successful was Israel in repelling the Arab armies in that war that it ended up with 78 per cent of the former Palestine rather than the 55 per cent allocated under the United Nations partition plan adopted by the General Assembly on 29 November 1947. The UN plan had been immediately rejected by the Arab states. The day after the state of Israel was established the Arab armies invaded and tried to destroy it. The 1948 war didn’t actually come to an end. The Israelis managed to push most of the Arab forces to the edges of the former Palestine Mandate boundaries. The West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem were all areas bounded by what became the 1949 Armistice or Green Line. The Jordanians controlled the West Bank and the Egyptians controlled Gaza. West Jerusalem was controlled by Israel, but the eastern part was controlled by Jordan. This included the ancient walled city and its important Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious sites. The Green Line formed the boundaries of what the world recognises today as Israel.

The region continued to seethe with resentment. There was no talk of peace or reconciliation. The Arab nations refused to accept the reality of Israel. The Israelis believed their reality was that if they let their guard down they would be driven into the sea. What changed between the first and second Arab–Israeli wars was the entrance of a new and enduring player in the region, America.

When the Cold War marched into the Middle East, each nation had to pick a team. The Israelis chose the right side of history, those who bought into Nasser’s Arab brand of socialism did not. In 1967 Nasser, ever the gambler, overplayed his hand by threatening Israel with a war he couldn’t win. He set himself up and the Israelis knocked him down, shaping the contours of the struggle between the Israelis and Palestinians to this day.

In the spring of 1967 Israel was threatening action against Syria for the growing number of guerrilla raids across its border by Palestinian gunmen.
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This escalated into a dogfight between their fighter planes, with Israel downing six Syrian MiGs. Then the Soviet Union upped the ante by sending Egypt a bogus piece of intelligence that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border. Egypt and Syria had a mutual defence pact.
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But the American embassy in Cairo wired back to the State Department that it didn’t believe protecting Syria was driving Nasser’s thinking: ‘It . . . seems clear that Nasser has resolved to deal with this imagined threat thru massive power play which, if successful, will be his biggest political victory since Suez, even if no shot is fired.’ The cable was sent on 21 May 1967.

If Syrians continue Fedayiin incursions and Israelis retaliate, there will be serious hostilities and Arabs apparently confident they can win in long run. If Israelis do not retaliate, Nasser will have forced them to back down and will have won first Arab victory over Israelis, and incidentally will have won another victory over US in Arab eyes. He is playing for keeps and we should make no mistake in this regard.
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As part of his bluster, on 16 May Nasser moved his troops across the Suez Canal and into the Sinai so that they could travel up towards Israel with the intention of massing ominously near the border. Only they could not, because there was still a UN peacekeeping mission between them and the Israelis that was left over from the last conflict in 1956. Having the UN in the way meant Nasser’s play was unlikely to be taken seriously, so Egypt asked the UN to pull out from the eastern frontiers between Israel and Egypt. The UN said it was either all or none of the four thousand five hundred troops in the Sinai. On 18 May Nasser chose none, and so by default the UN handed back to Egypt control of the Straits of Tiran, which were an important shipping route for Israel. Nasser then closed the Straits to them. By 31 May all the UN troops were gone.
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Everyone, publicly, was ready to go to war.

‘Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight,’ said Nasser on 27 May 1967.
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But it was a huge bluff, because he knew the Arab armies were in a pitiful state. More importantly the White House knew it, and so did the Israeli military, though they tried to suggest they were less equipped to take them on than they really were. The CIA said of an assessment by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service: ‘We do not believe that . . . was a serious estimate of the sort they would submit to their own high officials.’
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So, ‘Informed by these [CIA] assessments, President Johnson declined to airlift special military supplies to Israel or even to publicly support it. He later recalled bluntly telling Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, “All of our intelligence people are unanimous that if the UAR [Egypt and Syria] attacks, you will whip hell out of them.” ’
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One of those CIA assessments said: ‘Israel could almost certainly attain air supremacy over the Sinai Peninsula in less than 24 hours after taking the initiative.’
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And that is exactly what they did. The Egyptians blustered and stumbled their way into a conflict they were bound to lose. The Israelis listened to the constant threats and assumed they would have to fight another war with the Arabs, and at this moment they knew they had the upper hand. Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on the morning of 5 June.

They drove the Arab forces from the divided city of Jerusalem, capturing the holy sites. By taking the entire Sinai Peninsula up to the Canal Zone, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights they also more than trebled the area of land under their control. The fate of the ancient city, perhaps more than anything, is still the main stumbling block for attempts to find a peaceful resolution to Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians and the Arab world at large.

Contained within the old walled city is what the Jews call the Temple Mount and what the Muslims call Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary. This is where the seventh-century Dome of the Rock was built over the spot where Jews believe Abraham was about to sacrifice his son to God. The golden dome is the iconic symbol of Jerusalem. This is also the location of the eighth-century Al-Aqsa mosque. Judaism’s Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, which is believed to be a perimeter wall of the second biblical Temple, is below. It is an important Jewish prayer site. But the most sacred site for Judaism is the Temple Mount. The Jews believe the biblical King Solomon built the first temple there 3,000 years ago. Many Jews believe they are forbidden by ritual law from visiting the Temple Mount out of fear they might tread on sacred ground where the faithful believe the Holy of Holies, which enshrined the Ark of the Covenant, once stood. A second temple was razed by the Romans in ad 70. Christians believe Jesus taught at the Temple during the Roman period and this was where he drove out the money-changers.

Muslims see Al-Haram Al-Sharif as the third-holiest site after the cities of Mecca and Medina in modern Saudi Arabia. They believe that this is where Muhammad was transported by the archangel Gabriel on his way to ascend to the heavens. The Koran began to be revealed to Muhammad from the age of forty, and this went on for more than twenty years. It culminated in that journey to Jerusalem where he rose from the rock to be in God’s presence and receive his final revelations. The passion felt for this small area of land by both Arabs and Israelis still fuels their unwillingness to compromise. The loss of Jerusalem and control over access to Al-Haram Al-Sharif became a rallying cry for the Islamists. They increasingly saw it as their role to fight against Israel and its Western allies after the failures of their national armies. Liberating Jerusalem and their holy sites became their new cause.

Unlike the war of 1948 and the war that would come in 1973, according to a future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, the 1967 conflict could have been avoided:

In June 1967 we . . . had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. This was a war of self-defence in the noblest sense of the term. The government of national unity then established decided unanimously: We will take the initiative and attack the enemy, drive him back, and thus assure the security of Israel and the future of the nation.
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There are still arguments over who was to blame for the war, but there was no getting away from the fact that the Arab armies had been thumped again by a nation just a fraction of their size. It was partly that the Arab armies were just not good enough, partly that Israel had superior military hardware. But there is a more fundamental issue at the core of the outcome of the three Arab–Israel wars. The Arab states did not and do not, even today, properly understand the stakes. These were essentially wars of choice for the Arab armies, even if they didn’t always fire the first shot. For Israelis in their own minds they were and always will be wars of survival. They have no other choice but to defend where they are because they have no alternative. Their military leaders believe that when it comes to fighting wars, lack of choice is Israel’s biggest advantage. The present Israeli chief of staff, Benny Gantz, once showed me a photograph on the wall of his private office. It was of the main entrance of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This history reminds Israel’s military leaders of the stakes they believe they are sometimes playing for.

The 1973 war with Egypt was the closest Israel had come to losing. The oil embargo or ‘supply shock’ imposed by the oil-producing Arab nations meant that the Americans were to remain fully engaged in the region from then on. When Sadat made it clear that he was serious about talking to Israel, it completely surprised Washington but also energised the then US president Jimmy Carter into working towards a grand plan to bring peace and stability to the region.

The 1979 peace deal with Egypt changed everything for Israel. It wasn’t just about making peace with the largest Arab nation and the region’s biggest standing army. The treaty fundamentally changed Israel’s ability to wage war against its other Arab neighbours and enabled it to keep a firm grip on the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967 and still occupies today. ‘From that moment Israel enjoyed dramatic changes,’ Major General Giora Eiland told me. As an Israeli paratrooper he had fought in the 1973 war. He went on to serve as the country’s national security adviser, and even in retirement still advises the Israeli government today.

After we signed this peace agreement we could assume that whatever Israel does on other fronts it is not going to cause any security risk from the Egyptian side. So we could have the first war in Lebanon in 82, in which we sent most of our divisions to Lebanon and we did not have to be too concerned about the possibility that Egypt will take the opportunity to attack us from the south. We conducted the second war in Lebanon [in 2006]. We had a very wide large-scale ground operation in the West Bank in 2002, we attacked Gaza in 2008 and in all those years although we knew the Egyptians would criticise us at the political level we could be quite confident that Egypt would not take any real military measures. For many, many years we used to say almost as a mantra: ‘Well we will continue to assume that Egypt is not going to be part of our enemies as long as the situation is intact.’