The conditions of Semitic peace
It will be for the best if the limited war that has been fought by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, with help from Iraq and most of the rest of the Arab world, is sufficiently successful to force Israel to negotiate from other than a position of total victory. A cease-fire which produces a situation in which Israel has gained further territory in Egypt and Syria will be worse than useless in securing the basis for any kind of durable peace. There will never be a secure peace in the Middle East until Egypt and Israel come to terms; and they will never come to terms which the Egyptians are prepared permanently to accept as satisfactory if the negotiations take place under military duress and with Egyptian honour tarnished. It remains true of this war, as of the previous Israeli wars, that whereas the Arabs can afford to lose war after war and return to fight again, Israel cannot afford to lose any war at all. It might be thought that the full realisation of this fact of Israeli life would induce a more sensible, more historically realistic, diagnosis of the situation by Israeli politicians. Unfortunately, although understandably, the Israeli diagnosis takes more account of the experience of the Jews in the diaspora than of the Israelis in Israel. There is a reluctance to accept that Israel is one — albeit the most efficient — among many Middle Eastern states of Semitic origins, which cannot hope to survive indefinitely .without coming to terms with its neighbours. It is bombast when an Israeli says that time is on Israel's side. It is not. And it would do the Israelis no harm to assume that God is not necessarily on their side either. Myths about a chosen race serve well enough to hold together scattered communities of Jews Preserving a common religion and culture in alien countries; but they are unsuitable beliefs for modern civic states to found themselves on and especially to trust in. Israel still derives strength as well as comfort from the myth of invincibility, too; but this is also a myth which is only as good as it lasts. Disproved, it could unnerve the state. Israel is right to put its trust in the force of its arms; but it would be foolish to imagine that those arms will always prevail. They will not; although it is Probable at the same time that they will not be overcome. That is, it is unlikely that the Arabs will ever be able to conquer Israel; but at the same time, it is unlikely that Israel will always be able militarily to defeat the Arabs. Already, the course of this short but very bloody war bears out the truth of this thesis.
The war has succeeded in at least one of the Arab objects, which was to brighten Arab military honour. The Egyptians and the Syrians have fought well and hard and bravely, as the Israelis have generously come to recognise. In the early days, Israel sustained a defeat in Sinai, losing control of the east bank of the Canal. The Israeli counter-attack across the Canal into west bank Egypt has proved to be a characteristically brilliant Israeli riposte. At the time of the cease-fire it was not clear whether Egypt or Israel had gained on balance from the two related battles (or aspects of the same battle), although it was beginning to look as if the advantage would increasingly lie, as was to be expected, with the Israelis. But Israel had already made it clear, before the Kissinger trip to Moscow and the Security Council call for a cease-fire, that it would accept a cease-fire, if asked first. It never looked as if the Egyptians were preparing themselves to ask; and indeed it took the Egyptians appreciably longer, in terms of hours, to accept the Security Council's call than it did the Israelis. While the war raged, it was obvious that the best prospects of peace lay in Moscow, in the Russo American dialogue conducted between Dr Kissinger, Mr Brezhnev and, freshly back from Cairo and Baghdad, Mr Kosygin, and so it turned out. A cease-fire is not peace. But it is better than war. An imposed peace has been much talked about, although even were detailed agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union to be reached, it by no means follows that the two super-powers would be able indefinitely to impose their disciplinary wills upon their client states. The joint RussoAmerican reference to the Security Council, the subsequent cease-fire and the inevitable return to Resolution 242 to some extent passes the diplomatic initiative back to Israel and the Arabs. Direct negotiations are the sensible way. Egyptian troops have earned the right for Egypt's leaders to look Israel's in the face, and Egypt need no longer flinch from meeting Israel at the conference table.
Nevertheless, the way to peace in the Middle East may still lie through Moscow and Washington. Both capitals have had a nasty shock in the outbreak and subsequent severity of hostilities with an inflammatory situation which could easily enough, if uncontrolled, lead to a much wider conflagration. Neither Washington nor Moscow will wish to see the detente between their two countries — which has been so laboriously achieved and which marks the chief contributions of President Nixon and Mr Brezhnev to their countries' policies — set at risk by Israel and the Arabs. They will seek to strike a bargain. Peace suits them better than war; and the basis of that bargain — which is to say, the way to peace in the Middle East — will be found where it has always resided, in Resolution 242. If the way to peace lies through Moscow and Washington, the key to it lies in this Resolution. This is not because 242 possesses any normative or influential authority of its own, nor because it has the backing of the United Nations and once secured the unanimous agreement of the Security Council. It is not even because it had, and still has, the backing of the United States and the Soviet Union. It is because Resolution 242 is a reasonably simple statement of the outline of the only possible settlement. The force Resolution 242 possesses is the force of its own rationality; and, this accepted, its chief virtue resides in its ambiguity. Were it not for its rationality and its ambiguity it would long sirice have become a dead letter, a forgotten sheet of paper.
It is worth looking once again at the Resolution, which was unanimously adopted by the Security Council on November 22, 1967. It said that the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East should include the application of the following principles: (a) withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; (b) termination of all claims or states of belligerency and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free front threats or acts of force. The resolution also called for freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area, a just settlement of the refugee problem and a guarantee of the territorial inviolability and political independence of every state in the area through measures including the establishment of demilitarised zones. At the time Egypt was still smarting under defeat and Israel was very flushed with victory. The day after the resolution was adopted President Nasser laid down Egypt's hard line: I can tell you that if the time comes for military action we will not be on the defensive. We will attack to liberate our territories occupied by the enemy. This is our legitimate right. We cannot accept another setback . . . We must not be provoked by the enemy before the time is propitious. We must choose the time and place." Israel had already declared its terms: it demanded then, and still does to this day, direct negotiations either separately or collectively with the contiguous Arab states. Three weeks before the UN resolution Mr Eshkol, then Prime Minister of Israel, justified Israel's pre-emptive strike in the Six Days War, saying to the Knesset: "Our people and all the people of the world should remember that between May 15 and June 5 [1961 an aggressive triple alliance was concluded against Israel and that a powerful war machine was arrayed against us on three fronts. We exercised our right of national self-defence. We repulsed the aggressors and routed aggression . . . The Six Days War ended with a cease-fire and there began a political struggle which still continues . . . In this struggle Israel is fighting for the right to exist in honour and peace, making it perfectly clear that the situation which prevailed before June 5, 1967, shall never be restored." A month later, after the UN resolution, he declared Israel's policy, in a five point list of requirements: (1) permanent peace between Israel and her neighbours; (2) the achievement of peace by direct negotiation and the conclusion of peace treaties between Israel and her neighbours; (3) free passage for Israeli ships through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran; (4) agreed. and secure borders between Israel and her neighbours, which would be possible only in the context of peace treaties; and (5) following the establishment of peace in the Middle East and the regional co-operation which would follow, a settlement of the refugee problem within a regional and international context.
It is possible, looking through the smoke of war and peering back through the years of rhetoric, to discern in all this the terms of a settlement; and it may be that the exhaustion which must inevitably follow the conclusion of this war, given the ceasefire holds, and the new-found respect the Israelis have for the Egyptians as fighters, will work some healing ways, particularly if the United States and the Soviet Union are prepared themselves to jog Israel and Egypt towards a deal which the superpowers will themselves underwrite. In the heat of war, things have been said which ar,e better unsaid on both sides; but there need be no Israeli, nor any Egyptian or Syrian, tome to that, unable to echo the words of King Hussein of Jordan last week, "Peace cannot be secured by positions on ground, on hills, rivers and hilltops; security is found where people have a willingness to live together under conditions of peace and when solutions have been found, a just solution based on honour." Egypt has won its honour back. Egypt can therefore, without any shame whatever, accept, the Israeli requirement for direct negotiations. Neither ' Syria nor Jordan need stay out of such negotiations. The first four points of Eshkol's proposals of December 1, 1967, need not be unacceptable to the Arabs. Resolution 242 did not require Israel to withdraw from all the territories it occupied in 1967. But if the Suez Canal were re-opened as an international waterway able to be used by Israel and if Sinai were to be totally demilitarised, then Israel, in the context of a peace treaty with Egypt, could afford to withdraw from territory the long-term holding of which cannot but be to Israel's disadvantage. A treaty with Syria would likewise secure the demilitarisation of the Golan Heights. As to the west bank of the Jordan, it is not reasonable to suppose that this be returned to King Hussein — the Palestinians, after all, have little regard for the Hashemite dynasty, and some kind of autonomous Palestinian region can be envisaged. The old, largely Arab, city of Jerusalem, it must be recognised, will not be given up by Israel; but no doubt arrangements for Christian and Moslem administration of their respective holy places could be permanently provided for. A series of treaties negotiated between the belligerents could also be guaranteed by the Soviet Union and the United States, or a larger consortium of powers, or by the United Nations. This is the kind of settlement which will eventually be reached; it is the only kind Of settlement which the situation in the Middle East can tolerate. It may need yet another war, after the conclusion of this one, to bring it about. But this would be a needless tragedy, and make the latest bloody fighting an obscene mockery of the legitimate war aims of Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The conditions of a Semitic peace already exist, if the warring statesmen and soldiers of the Middle East have the sense themselves to settle, or have the sense knocked into them by the United States and the Soviet Union.
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