Israel's young hawks
Dilip Hiro
Despite five days of intense talks in the seclusion of Camp David, the Egyptian and Israeli negotiators failed to reach an agreement on the peace treaty. The differences between them have now come down to three points: the timetable for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza; the extent to which the peace treaty would take precedence over Egypt's other security commitments; and a review of the defence arrangements after Israel's departure from Sinai.
Although Mr Begin has agreed to go and see President Carter this week-end there is no immediate prospect, at the time of writing, that President Sadat will join them. This must worry the Israelis, who have had nothing but bad news for the past weeks.
Syria and Iraq have already concluded a mutual defence pact, and plan to create a unified state— a development likely to draw in Jordan, which has already arranged an economic union with Syria. Attempts are also being made to heal the eight-year old rift between Jordan and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, whose prestige has risen sharply in the wake of Yasser Arafat's dramatic visit to Teheran within a week of the overthrow of the last vestiges of the Pahlavi dynasty. The subsequent decision of Iran to sever commercial and diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, and the handing over of the Israeli mission to the PLO, was received with gloom in Israel. 'The final removal of the Shah represents a major strategic victory in the Palestinian struggle against Israel,' conceded Wolf Blitzer of the Jerusalem Post.
In contrast, these events have created a mood of cheerful confidence among the Arabs, both within Israel and outside. 'Now that we have seen how all those thousands of American tanks and planes failed to save the Shah's regime in Iran, we feel that the same thing will happen one day to the Zionist regime in Palestine,' said the Arab taxi-driver, who drove me from Jerusalem to Birzeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank.
During my visit to Birzeit University I found the students and staff enthusiastically endorsing the action of the Israeli Arab student followers of the Nationalist Progressive Movement, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in sending a cable of support to the PLO's parliament-in-exile meeting in Damascus. A week later an assembly of 28 of the 56 mayors of the Arab municipalities in Israel endorsed the struggle of the Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza, under the leadership of the PLO, to set up 'an independent Palestinian state'.
The Israeli Arab students' cable had gone farther than this. 'The Nationalist Progressive Movement being an inseparable part of the people suffering the yoke of Zionist occupation in the whole of Palestine, and struggling against the occupation with rare courage does not recognise the Zionist entity,' it read. At Haifa University, the Arab students' magazine described Zionism as 'racist, colonialist movement to which we, Arabs, relate with hate — in theory and in practice.' The Israeli reaction to these statements has been predictable, both at the official and popular levels. The Israeli government blew up the houses of four convicted PLO guerrillas in the West Bank, and banished six Israeli Arab student leaders to their homes in Galilee for three months, with orders to report to the police twice a day.
Zevulum Hammer, the minister of education, demanded disciplinary action against all Arab students supporting the PLO; and the rectors of two universities agreed to ban those Arab students who reject Israel and Zionism. Rafi Ben Hur, the chairman of the Students Union at the Hebrew University, declared: 'We should beat them [Arab students] up, otherwise they'll not be moderate'. Eli Haoven, the chairman of the Students Union at the Tel Aviv University, gave a similar call; and the result was physical assault on three Arab students. Taking their cue from the events at the campuses, six young volunteers of the Civil Defence Guard beat up two Arabs from the occupied territories at gunpoint at a Tel Aviv beach. The incident was one of the half a dozen such incidents reported to the police ombudsman.
Such actions are becoming representative of the new mood of, for example, the stu dents at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: the younger generation of Israeli Jews is distinctly more hawkish than the older one. And, after visiting the three Palestinian universities on the West Bank, it became clear that eleven years of occupation by the Israeli military had toughened and radicalised the Palestinian youths to an extent that even their own traditional leaders had failed to grasp.
Of course the older generation of both sides has a number of `hawks'; Meir Kahana, the Jewish Defence League leader in Haifa, for instance, recently called for the evacuation of all Arabs from `Eretz Israel' — which includes the Occupied Territories. This would amount to evacuating 1,600,000 Arabs: twice as many as were driven out during the Palestinian war of 1947-48. It is, perhaps, not surprising that there has been no diminution of subversive activities by the Arabs in `Eretz Israel'. The abortive attempt by three Palestinian guerrillas to take over a vacation camp near Maalot on the Israeli-Lebanese border, six weeks ago, was followed by a series of bomb explosions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. Since then news of attempted or successful acts of sabotage has become a daily feature of life in Israel.
As if this were not enough, the Israelis face the prospect of petrol rationing, as their government struggles to find alternative sources of supply for the 60 per cent of the country's annual consumption of 8 million tonnes that used to come from Iran. They also have to learn to take their Arab adversaries on the eastern front more seriously than they have done so far. The combined forces of Syria and Iraq would amount to 415,000 troops, 4,400 tanks, and 750 planes. The comparative figures for Israel are 400,000 soldiers (on full mobilization), 3,000 tanks and 550 combat planes.
Undoubtedly, the quality and organisation of the Israeli forces are much higher, but both Syria and Iraq are intent on improving their armed forces and equipment. With an annual income of $18 billion from oil, Iraq should have no difficulty financing its arms modernisation programme. And Syria, backed by an aid of $1.8 billion by the conservative Arab states, has just announced an increase of 70 per cent in its defence budget for the current year. (After some hesitation the Soviet Union has now agreed to supply advanced weapons to these states). This makes it clear that the rulers of Syria and Iraq have already written off Egypt an ally against Israel, so long as Sadat is 10 power. It therefore makes little difference to them whether President Carter's efforts to push the Egyptian and Israeli negotiators over the remaining hurdles, on the way to signing a peace treaty, succeed or Instead, nudged by the PLO, they vvill probably be more interested in courting the. revolutionary Iran with its vast arsenal of sophisticated American weapons to Join them in their struggle against Israel.
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