The Tenth Corbishley Memorial
Lecture 1986
Peace in the Middle East
by Dr Abba Eban
FOREWORD by Professor George Wedell
The Trustees were very glad when Dr Abba Eban, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Israel Parliament and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel, accepted their invitation to give the Tenth Thomas Corbishley Memorial Lecture. In the same spirit as that of the Ninth Lecture by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan on Islam and the West, Dr Eban’s lecture demonstrated that concern for peace and the rule of law which is the mainspring of the Trust’s activities. Dr Eban spoke on Peace in the Middle East. As a veteran architect of the foreign policy of the State of Israel, Dr Eban’s analysis of the present position commands the closest attention.
It is the Trust’s hope that the distribution of this lecture will contribute, in even a small measure, to the establishment of a lasting peace in the Middle East.
PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
My tribute of gratitude is to you for converging here tonight. By this you bear witness to the creative disquiet with which many across the world follow the fortunes of the Middle East in this turbulent and formative hour. I confess that, had I appeared before you - let us say - three or four months ago, I would have been able to give a more hopeful picture of the prospects of peace in the Middle East than it is that I can conscientiously communicate to you this evening. There did appear to be a certain convergence, not yet to an agreement but towards the idea of a dialogue within the framework of an international conference; and the issue now is whether the deadlock which has since intervened will continue or whether there is still a chance in what remains of this year to make the opening which at one time seemed to be in prospect.
The task is to take as the basis for Middle Eastern peace the achievement already recorded - the historic breakthrough in the relationship between Israel and the largest and most central of all Arab states. The setbacks and disappointments which have occurred since then have not changed my view that this is a revolutionary event. Certainly in Israel’s life it is by far the most far-reaching historical development since the establishment of our state and its acceptance into the international community. But even that gain is unlikely to be durable or effective unless it is ratified by extension into other parts of the Middle East. The hope was that this would not be an isolated initiative but that it would in fact be the starting point for similar agreements, based on the principles which have enabled these two countries to meet. Egypt and Israel are two names that resound throughout history from the very dawn of man’s recorded story, and now they face each other in terms and conditions quite different from any that they had known in the past. We must not underestimate the difficulties which both parties have to overcome in order to reach that culmination.
The Arab and Israeli peoples are saturated with history. They are obsessed with the past, and the past is the enemy of the future. History is the adversary; it is not the ally of Arab-Israeli co-operation. There is nothing in the Arab past which makes Arabs familiar with the idea of an independent non-Arab, non-Moslem Jewish sovereignty in the heart of what they call their own region; or in the consciousness and experience of the Arab world or the Moslem world. Anything which is not Arab or Moslem reflects itself in their historic imagination as eccentric, unusual, abnormal, artificial as a break in the geographical and historical continuity of the Middle East. Jews and Arabs have had many encounters in history, but the Arabs admit Jews as a community, as a religious fellowship the Jews as merchants, Jews as scholars, Jews as philosophers, Jews as advisers, Jews as physicians, but not Jews as the incarnation of a sovereign political entity. We should not underestimate the intellectual difficulty for Arabs and Moslems to come face to face with what is a phenomenon for which their historic experience does not prepare them at all. Similarly, the Israeli past is not conducive to easy harmony. The Jewish historical experience is traumatic. It is marked with almost continuous tragedy ‘with some interludes of consoling redemption. The result is that Israelis, as the legatees of Jewish history, are much more alert to dangers than to opportunities, suspicious of anything which might seem to have an effect upon their physical security. When Israelis in the light of their Jewish identity confront new situations, new ideas, new proposals, the question they ask is not "what are the opportunities?" That is not the Jewish question. "What are the dangers?" that is the Jewish question. It’s no use being apologetic about this. In the recent visit to the United States, on the aeroplane crossing the Atlantic, the foreign minister of a friendly European country asked if I would explain to him what he called Israel’s obsession with security. I took no objection whatever to the word - call it an obsession if you like. We are entitled to our sovereign obsessions. Now this obsession is the product of experience. Our experience has not been normal and therefore our reactions cannot be normal. It is, I think, a general experience that no country can ever expect another country fully to identify itself with that country’s sensitivity on questions of security.
In the early l96Os, a president of the United States said to me, "Ambassador, I am much less worried than you are about Soviet missiles in Egypt". I said to him "Mr President, I am much less worried than you are about Soviet missiles in Cuba". Everything depends on the proximity of the danger. My experience, I’m afraid, is that almost all governments take their decisions in the name of self-interest and they explain their decisions in the name of morality. It is very rare to find a government that doesn’t think that other governments are excessively rigorous and suspicious on matters of their security. This explains the general tendency of Israel as a nation, and of the Jews as a people, to react with the kind of sensitive scepticism to anything that requires the acceptance of hazard in matters of their physical security. We are the only people that mourn the loss of six million of its kinsmen, carried off in an avalanche of hatred and violence: the only state in the international community that hasn’t known a single year of peace in all the years of its international independence. How can such a nation and such a state not have an abnormally sensitive relationship to threats to its physical security? Many things in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in their history too terrible to have occurred. Therefore if, in the years 1977 and 1979, an Arab leadership was able to overcome the traditional rhetoric and the traditional view of the Middle East as a continuous Arab patrimony - the concept that the Jews could not have a corporate or equal existence - this was an act of statesmanship. It required a departure from accepted norms. If Israel could be persuaded to give up what seemed to be the tangible guarantees of security provided by territorial possession and to give up the oil fields, to give up the naval base, to give up the air fields, to give up the settlements, to give up the sense of space and distance whereby occupied Sinai had reassured Israelis about their security, this was an act of political imagination. It was because both parties were willing to take leave of the past and not to regard their history as mortgaging their future, that they were willing to accept the idea of a future substantively, ideologically, philosophically different from their past. It was for this reason that converging audacities enabled that treaty to be signed.
Can it endure unless it is extended? Recently, this very day in fact, we have had contacts which illustrate the inter-relationship between the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty and the prospects of peace in the Middle East. There is in the literature and consciousness of Egypt, to strain the particularity, a special lineage dating from the Pharaonic pre-Islamic period. Egypt’s national movement did not always belong intimately to the general movement for Arab awakening. Yet fundamentally, and especially in recent decades, this particularism which once featured very strongly in literary movement has been totally transcended by a sense of Arab fraternity. In other words, Arabism is an essential part of Egyptianism and it is an illusion to believe that they can long be separated. Therefore there is a danger that even the achievement already made will, if it is left in isolation, become corroded as Egypt suffers the torment of the pull between two interests’, the definite interest in maintaining the peace treaty (this I heard from President Mubarak only four weeks ago) and the belief that that treaty brought Israel great benefits which no other method of diplomacy or war has brought it. Therefore in the dialogue between Egypt and the other Arab states Egypt is on very strong ground. I mean, it says to its Arab colleagues "Well, what have you achieved by your methods of revolutionary violence, by boycott, by pressure, by international criticism and condemnation? Not a single grain of sand; whereas by our method, initiated by Anwar Sadat and followed by Hosni Mubarak, the method of dialogue and peace, Egypt was able to restore its territorial integrity and therefore its national honour, as well as the tangible assets of the territory and oil and an open Canal which it could not have achieved by any other method.
My own experience teaches me that men and nations do sometimes behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. When you compare the results of what I call the Anwar Sadat method of probing the Israeli mystique of peace and fertilizing that mystique for the sake of Egyptian interest, certainly the results have been more fruitful than the results of rejectionism, refusal of contact and refusal of peace which so far characterise so many other parts of the Arab world. Nevertheless the family instinct is strong and thus especially during the recent war in Lebanon a very heavy burden was laid upon the Egyptian-Israeli relationship and it is the year that is now coming to an end - the year of the peace process - that illustrates so many of the paradoxes and the potentialities of the Middle East.
You can’t consider the past year without a reference to Israel’s domestic constraints and especially to a unique constitutional road on which we have embarked This is the establishment of a government of national unity, bringing together the two largest political groups in our country divided by a long history of antagonism and rivalry, divergent in the very image that they make of their country in its relations to its region and the world; forced by electoral deadlock to transcend their differences and to try to seek consensus in certain very concrete and specific domains, But let there be no mistake: we are fundamentally divergent. There is no parliament in the world whose two major political groups are divided on such a sensitive issue as the very shape of our country, its character, its nature, its configuration, its dimensions, its boundaries, its human composition, the question of who belongs and who does not belong to its national enterprise. Where the two major parties come together in Britain, in the United States, in France, in Italy, they at least bring to their encounter the same map of their own country and the same vision of who is and who is not identified with the national adventure. When you say France, you immediately think of the solid hexagon. You say Italy, you think of the leg and the boot. You know very well who Frenchmen are and Italians are. When you say Israel, you haven’t said anything; you have simply asked the question. What does that mean? Does that mean Israel in which the law of Israelis now applied, which is a democratic, juridical, parliamentary State, strongly linked by a coherent sense of patrimony, identity and language? Or do you mean that plus 1.3 million Palestine Arabs, now held in a coercive jurisdiction without any definition of their civic status or their national rights? When you speak of the State of Israel you are speaking about one thing; when you say the Lend of Israel - Eretz Israel - you are speaking of something totally different. They happen to overlap geographically. They are not the same kind of society; that is the difference which keeps our parties apart. On the one hand, there are those who assert the doctrine of the indivisibility of the Land of Israel and who appeal to sentiments and memories and pieties and emotions, some of them with very strong roots. Since many of them are passionately emotional and metaphysical it is very hard to argue with them, certainly for those of us who do not share their view. I am going to try and present you both with views that I share and those that I don’t share. I have in mind the felicitous example of the late Justice Holmes who, at the age of 90, retired from the Supreme Court of the United States and summarized his record as follows: "I have always tried", he said, "to be scrupulously fair, avoiding partiality on the one hand and impartiality on the other."
This doctrine of territorial indivisibility evokes passions. There is another doctrine, easier for me to expound because I share it. This says that we must at all costs avoid exercising a permanent jurisdiction over a foreign nation whose identity and particularity are recognized by the entire world, including by Israel in the Camp David Agreement. It argues that our society is structurally fragile and incoherent if we perpetuate the present situation in which more than a third of the total number of people under our jurisdiction are members of a foreign nation, recalcitrant to our rule, not really obliged by their history to any allegiance or devotion, whose flag is not our flag, whose tongue is not our tongue and whose faith is not our faith, and whose sentiments of devotion and pride all flow outside and sometimes against the current of Israeli history. Nothing of the kind exists anywhere else in the world. Therefore those of us who share this view; and that includes especially my colleague the Prime Minister of Israel, believe that we must not perpetuate this structure and we must find a way of seeking an agreed form of disengagement from the task of ruling a foreign people against their will. Now, do you know of any country whose major political groups are divided by such a sensitive and far-reaching issue as this?
Nevertheless, we were compelled to seek some consensual tasks. Well, we found some consensual tasks. Our lack of unity did not prevent us from disengaging ourselves from the war in Lebanon. Let there be no mistake. The Israeli people does not regard the Lebanese war as a successful enterprise; it is the least successful enterprise on which any Israeli government has ever embarked. None of its declared objectives was achieved largely, it seems to some of us, because they were objectively unattainable. You remember what the targets and aims were - stability in Lebanon, a Christian government in Lebanon protected by Israeli power, elimination of the Syrian military presence, the end of terrorism in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon, the strengthening of Western influence, the weakening of Soviet power and, above everything else for Israel, the safeguarding of Israeli lives. In each of these objectives the opposite result was achieved. Stability in Lebanon - never use the word Lebanon and the word stability in the same breath. Instability is endemic in Lebanon -Moslems against Christians, Maronites against Druses, Sunnites against Sluites, militias against Falangists -a tangled web, an anarchy of rival hatreds and hostilities nowhere transcended by a unifying allegiance which might draw all the sects, concessions, tribes, families of Lebanon into a single devotion. A Christian state in Lebanon is a nostalgic illusion - it is not a vision of relaxed loftiness, it simply belongs to the past. There might once have been a chance of leaving Lebanon with its Christian particularity - a compact community in the mountain area on Mount Lebanon - but then the Lebanese Christians themselves expanded Christian Lebanon and created what they called Greater Lebanon - Le Grand Liban. They were very much intoxicated by the extension of their territory, but they failed to note that in extending their territory they had incorporated hundreds of thousands of Syrian Moslems for whom the Christian identity of Lebanon had no meaning at all. So the Christians had expanded their territory and they had lost their identity, their coherence. But because they preferred territorial expansion to national cohesion they had signed a very long suicide note.
When I’m asked what Israel can take away with it from Lebanon, my answer is; let us take away with us the lesson of the Lebanese experience. This could happen to Israel if it were to prefer territorial expansion to the maintenance of its identity and its particularity. Not to become Lebanon seems to be the first law of wisdom. If Israel were to try to perpetuate its jurisdiction over so large a part of its total body of inhabitants, fragmentation, fermentation, secession, revolt would be inevitable, supported by the great Arab hinterland and also evoking a large measure of sympathy within the international community as a whole. The world is not full of nations, especially democratic nations, ruling foreign peoples. What was normal in the 19th century is abnormal in the 20th century. There is a kind of characteristic of different centuries, what the Germans call Zeitgeist and the French l’esprit du siecle. In the 20th century it’s a very unfamiliar task. In fact there doesn’t exist on the face of the inhabited globe a single state that resembles what Israel would look like if it were permanently to incorporate the West Bank and Gaza and their populations into its own sovereignty. Where does anything of that kind exist? Could Holland exist if for the sake of territorial extension they were to take in 4-1/2 million Germans against their will? I am giving the exact proportion of 38%. Or if the United States had not been able to buy Alaska (as it did for 7 million dollars: a rather profitable real estate transaction), but had had to take in 80 million Russians - wouldn’t we have said that it had resigned from history? I had a visit from the Foreign Minister of Denmark who reminded me that there was an area in Denmark - in Germany now, unfortunately. It’s Holstein, once part of the Danish kingdom. After the Second World War the victorious Allies, in a great burst of Churchillian magnanimity, discussed the idea of rewarding the gallant Danes for their fidelity. But the Danes asked "what goes on in that place today?". They were told that there were a million and a half Germans who just don’t want to be a part of Denmark. "No, thank you very much", said the cautious Scandinavians, because no accretion of territory and population could compensate for the fragmentation and the tension which would be inseparable from such a coercive jurisdiction.
When the first president of Israel, Heim Weizman, was elected to his high office this, for some reason unknown to me, caused great excitement in Burma whose government, emotionally moved by the spectacle of the Jewish people returning to political history, wanted to honour our president with a gift. The gift was to be an Indian elephant weighing several tons. President Weizman asked me to write a courteous letter, saying that in his native village there used to be a proverb amongst the Jewish farmers: "never accept a present that eats". So if somebody offers us new territory, we shall look very carefully at the corrosion that would take place. Fundamentally, the security of a state does not depend only on its territorial configuration but on the rhythm of solidarity, common experiences, common patrimony, a common sense of destiny and identity which makes people want to live within a single state. So that is the division that runs across us and that, of course, is both an issue of domestic contention within Israel and is the major source of tension in Israel’s relations with its external domain. Therefore I felt a sense of promise when changes began to take place some time in February, 1984.
There was Israeli change, Jordanian change, Egyptian change, American change. The Israeli change was simply the arrival of the head of our government - of a Prime Minister and party who do not believe that Israel must incorporate those territories. In fact the party platform, including that which was adopted two months ago, states "It must be a national aim to terminate Israeli rule over the one million three hundred thousand Arabs. Therefore we should try to secure on our eastern boundary the establishment of a Jordanian-Palestinian State which would unite the present Jordan with those areas in the West Bank and Gaza which would be renounced in a peace settlement." Now, this is innovation compared with the platform of our predecessors who asserted the territorial indivisibility of Arab Israel: " all of it is Israel, nothing to do with Jordan or Palestinians". That, after all, was the doctrine until 1984 and in September of that year it ceased to be the doctrine. As a condition of the Labour Party’s adherence to the coalition this had to be expunged from the coalition agreement on which the mandate of the government is based. Similarly our Party accepted a resolution pointing out that Israeli settlements in the heart of what are populated Arab areas are a burden to our economy and to our security and a potential source of friction and disruption. Well, this is an innovation. It would have been extraordinary if the message had not crossed the river Jordan and introduced other parts of the Arab World to the idea that there is an opportunity in the Perez administration that didn’t exist before and that, who knows, might not exist afterwards.
This was linked with the second change - there was a Jordanian change when the Jordanian leader announced his willingness to negotiate directly and publicly with Israel without making the acceptance of Jordan’s position a condition of the negotiation. The traditional Jordanian position had been: "yes, we are willing to negotiate with Israel, provided that we know the result of the negotiation in advance and provided that result is 100% of what we would like". This induced me to make Heroditical reply: "Well in that case, I wouldn’t know what the negotiation is for, because negotiation is by definition unpredictable. You can never hope to come out with what you hoped when you went in. You cannot disassociate the word negotiation even from its etymological context; it’s simply a Latin word for bargaining, and therefore no country has escaped the ritual whereby you begin with fictitious opening demands in order that your real hopes should appear moderate. Neither in labour disputes, industrial disputes or in diplomacy has anyone begun with his opening position and prospered". My illustration from experience comes from 1974 in what was then the great achievement an Israeli-Syrian agreement on the d~ engagement of forces. This was an unexpected development because of the ideological virulence of the Syrian regime’s attitude to Israel, but I remember when the American mediator came from Damascus to meet me at the airport with a map, he presented me with President Assad’s view of what the demarcation - the disengagement - line should be, somewhere between Safed and Natalia. So I said: "Secretary of State, cbviously he doesn’t want an agreement, otherwise, he wouldn’t have given you this very unrealistic map." Kissinger said "I think he wants an agreement, otherwise, he wouldn’t have given me a map at all; my advice to you is why don’t you put your disengagement line somewhere between Istanbul and Baghdad and you will probably end up somewhere near the suburbs of Kunitra". This was what actually occurred; so that if King Hussein was willing to say his positions are - let me not deceive you or others - his positions, as I understand, he wants every inch of the territory back as it was in June 1967, but he didn’t want Israel’s commitment to this as a prelude or a condition of negotiation, this means that he must have understood that there is a chance that there wouldn’t be a hundred per cent satisfaction of that demand. That was a change.
There was an Egyptian change, because Egypt had been deterred by the Lebanese experience from taking any part in Middle Eastern diplomacy because of what President Mubarak described to me as the family relationship. Egypt is at peace with Israel and considers that to be in the national interest. But Israel is not at peace with members of Egypt’s family, not only not at peace but there are military confrontations with Iraq over a reactor, with Syria over its missiles, with Lebanon over Beirut and the Palestinians over terrorism and the response to it. The President pointed out that the merits of that confrontation are not very decisive. Let us assume that he believes in some of these cases the Arabs got themselves into some of these troubles and that a great deal of their own lack of prudence and foresight explains these outbreaks. But as he pointed out, if your family is at stake, you don’t ask questions about who is right and who is wrong. You just assert solidarity. Especially when members of your family are in violent conflict with somebody who is not a member of your family, the first thing that you do is to rally to your family and then afterwards you make an accounting about whether your family treated the problem in the correct way. Therefore they couldn’t possibly avoid weakening their relationship with Israel when we were in military confrontation with Lebanon, irrespective of any merits of this or any other situation. Therefore it was only when Israel announced its departure from Lebanon that Egypt was willing to return to the arena and send its emissaries to Jerusalem in February of 1985 (which was really the beginning of the peace progress) with the suggestion for an international conference with Egypt and Israel, the two major nuclear powers and the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. In the latter the Palestinian delegation would not have to be blatantly members of the PLO but certainly people who were accepted by the Palestinian organisations as representative of the national will. So here was an Egyptian change.
There was also an American change which is a very important factor because, with all respect to the principle of sovereignty and direct negotiation, we have never reached an agreement with an Arab without assertive external mediation.
The period between 1974 and 1979 was a triumphant period for American diplomacy in the Middle East. There were signatures of agreement between Israeli and an Arab state: 1974 the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement; 1974 Israeli-Syrian disengagement: 1975 the Sinai interim agreement in which there was partial Israeli withdrawal with a partial normalization of the relations with Egypt; 1978 the Camp David framework agreement on autonomy for the Palestine people, not prejudicing the possibility of autonomy becoming independence; 1979 the Treaty of Peace. But by the beginning of last year, the United States was almost traumatically reluctant to have anything to do with the area at all. This arose from certain spectacles of fiasco in recent American destiny in the area. First of all, the failure in the American attempt to conclude a Treaty between Israel and Lebanon. An agreement in fact was signed. The negotiation took place between Israel and the government of Amin Gemail, and if countries want to negotiate with any amiable people, nothing could have been more amiable than our negotiation. We drank very good French wines; we talked French to each other and they did sign an agreement. The trouble was that the agreement was signed by people who hadn’t the slightest influence on their own country’s destiny by the Gemail government whose effective sovereignty ceases about 10 yards from the Presidential Palace and didn’t commit the Lebanese nation at all. It didn’t commit the Shi’ites who are now predominant in the south; it didn’t commit any part of the Moslem community Sunnites, didn’t commit the Druzes and therefore it was an excellent agreement, except for the signature.
They signed a cheque without having an account in any bank and this very much offended Secretary Shultz who thought he had an achievement rather like the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty. He reacted traumatically. More serious was the fate of the very ill-conceived American Marine presence. I could understand the logic of 20,000 Marines, or I could understand the logic of zero Marines; 1 couldn’t understand the logic of 1,600 Marines, large enough to he a target and not large enough to be a source of authority, power or deterrence. You know what happened in the event: the reaction was again traumatic: 250 members of an elite military corps killed by two Arabs in a car bomb. There was not only the sense of loss of course; there was also a sense of humiliation. It is very important not to humiliate a nuclear power, because the dignity of the United States is an essential component of the international system. If it is undermined, the system loses its psychological equilibrium. The sense that power has no possible application, that it’s useless, that it’s irrelevant, affects and dislocates the international balance almost at every stage. It is therefore understandable that the USA preferred to think about other things, other priorities and other new pastures from Grenada to Nicaragua and elsewhere. It is for them after all to cite their priorities, and their priorities ceased to put the Middle East in that central place which it had occupied and which, I believe objectively, it should occupy. They just refused to enter the picture and therefore there was no mediating. I happened to meet Secretary Shultz in the New York Museum of Modern Art, showing some Picassos to rather puzzled grandchildren, and asked whether he wouldn’t like to help to secure a contractual withdrawal from Lebanon in other words, that Syria should in some sense be associated with the withdrawal. "Leave it alone; our fingers are burned; we want nothing to do with the Middle East" was the reply.
After the healing hand of time they are now prepared to use good offices to help the parties communicate with each other, not at the assertive high level of authority that they adopted in 1974 and 1977, but at least to assist communication between Amman and Jerusalem and the Palestine organisations and Egypt. There has been converging change - Egyptian, Israeli and Jordan and American, but one element didn’t change - the PLO didn’t change. It was unwilling to join this convergence. And if on a single road there are several vehicles and one of them refuses to move, it creates a bottleneck in which the others are paralysed. They were unwilling or unable to accept what the other four considered to be the condition for an international conference. They were not prepared to accept the international resolutions 242 and 338, sponsored in each case by the United States and the Soviet Union together. They were not prepared to give an undertaking about abstention from military action, and they were not prepared to make any gesture on the question of the legitimacy of Israel as a sovereign state. Now these were conditions required of them, not by us, but by the United States and Jordan and, more cautiously, by Egypt. They were not prepared to qualify what were regarded by others as the credentials of participation in an international conference. There’s an even more serious charge, because in a very dramatic speech a few weeks ago, which really reflected the present deadlock, King Hussein laid the blame and onus on the PLO. He said that it was not Jordan’s fault; he said, unexpectedly, it’s not Israel’s fault; it’s not America’s fault ; although he has now, I think, changed that generous judgement. It is the fact that he claims he had achieved the agreement of Mr Arafat to the conditions that the other participants thought reasonable - 242, 338, abstention from terrorism - something to do with the recognition of states and that in his words - his word - Arafat’s word was not his bond. That was the central sentence. The speech went on television for 3 hours and I listened to all of it with great admiration for its eloquence and with envy of a regime whose leaders can talk for 3 hours on the television. The Arabic language which I greatly admire has I 0 ways of expressing every idea and King Hussein used every one of those ways in expressing each of his ideas. Although it was a rhetorical virtuosity, because he is a most eloquent exponent of the classical Arabic tongue, it really ended up in one sentence. ‘Their word isn’t their bond". He claimed to have received the agreement of the PLO and the PLO went off to wherever it went - Baghdad, Tunisia -and came back and said "sorry, no deal". This lead to his very indignant and vehement reaction which continues to resound across the Middle East. Since then there has been deadlock and the question is whether to accept it or not. Now, there are those who advise Israel to accept the deadlock. We have long experience in dealing with the designs of our enemies; but how to react to the benevolent advice of friends is a more delicate art and there are people in the world, especially in the United States, who said (and they were neo-conservative journalists who said this to Mr Peres) "why are you looking for negotiation; don’t you understand that in this negotiation you would have to make concessions; the negotiation is about something that you possessed, not about what they possessed; you will come out of that negotiation with less than what you have now; why not leave it alone? You are in possession of the field and there is tranquility; just leave it alone". His reply and it’s my reply is that the tranquility cannot be left alone; it is a volcanic tranquility. It is an intolerable status quo. Deadlock is much more likely to explode into war than to merge into peace and, as in a volcanic landscape, it all looks wonderful above the ground, but the rumblings go on beneath, and we believe that the present situation is hostile to the national interest and to any kind of regional peace. We have a tragic diagnosis of what is likely to happen soon, not eschatologically in the future, but to happen in a matter of months or a few years and this diplomacy can operate again. Therefore we are embarrassed when very friendly books are written by my alphabetical neighbour in the United Nations, Ireland’s Connor Cruise O’Brien, advising us to enjoy the present tranquillity and applying -it’s the first attempt to do so - the psychology of Irish history to the Middle East. This has predictably bizarre results.
No, we couldn’t accept. Why do we think it is tragic? Because Israeli structure is fallacious; because the status quo will not be accepted; because there is a danger of a united coalition, perhaps led by Syria this time. A few weeks ago this seemed quite possible, because within the relationship between the West Bank Arabs and governing State of Israel there could only be an increase in secessionary violence. Israel as a society cannot flourish if it is loaded with this structural fallacy for there are some things which are just not possible. You can’t build a bridge which is half steel and half wood. You can’t build a building on a foundation of ice. The question is not whether our rule is desirable but whether it is in the long run possible. Therefore we favour movement, even movement without an immediate result would be better than no movement at all.
We have come out of these wars, and especially the war with Lebanon, with what I will offer you as our concluding reflection - a sense of the limitation of military power. Israel is in effect inferior to the neighbouring Arab world in most of the dimensions of power. We don’t have the territorial space. We don’t have the demographic strength. We don’t have the mineral wealth. We don’t have the monetary power. Therefore we don’t have the same powers of strategic influence. e don’t have the same capacity to punish adversaries and to reward friends. Therefore we naturally are very attracted by the one thing in which we do have superiority, and that has been in the military sphere. But doesn’t the experience of our decade teach us something about the limitations of military power and that the preponderance of military strength is singularly unable to lead to political success? The United States is stronger militarily than South Vietnam, or Cuba, or Panama. That doesn’t mean to say that it gets its way. There was even a spectacular North Sea dispute between the United Kingdom and Iceland - a nuclear power and an unarmed country, but the results worked out in Iceland’s favour. There is something called the impotence of power and to some extent the power of impotence. That’s the great generality and since vast power is not usable, because of its vastness, it is not a credible deterrent. That’s the paradox: the stronger military power is the less people believe that it will be used. And if power cannot be used, does it continue to be power?
We had enormous preponderance; for the first time in an Israeli war we were numerically preponderant: hundreds of thousands of Israelis and thousands of tanks and thousands of missiles against what must have been seven to ten thousand PLO people. The military results were not in our favour. I am reminded of the dictum of a Western philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who said "War can prevent: it cannot create". It can prevent your adversary from destroying your life, your home, your freedom, your country, and that is your crucial justification. But it’s extraordinary how once its purely preventive vocation is achieved how little it can do by itself to create the recognition, acknowledgement, harmonies, accommodation which lie under the mysterious title of peace. Therefore it must be succeeded as soon as possible by diplomacy and politics which have to do with persuasion and not with coercion.
Therefore our message is that in what remains of this period of the Israeli government under its present leadership, we should try to revive the effort and the one idea that I have put forward so far with a great absence of responses. Let’s stop these complex programmes 242 and 338 and recognition and legitimacy. Let’s concentrate simply on the aim of encounter, since it has been proved that encounter transforms positions. It’s interesting that there are precedents. In 1973 we were brought together at foreign minister level at Geneva without any of this semantic infrastructure. A letter written by the Secretary-General of the United Nations formulated by the Secretary of State of the United States simply said: "Will you come to Geneva please at foreign minister level on 21St of December to see how we can all get out of the mess that we are in". We got together and we signed and concluded disengagement agreements. In 1977 President Sadat simply said: "Since we’ve got to get out of this situation, I intend to go to their place and talk to them about at". He was tremendously insensitive to all these philosophical formulae - I don’t think he knew anything about them at all - and when we began to talk about documents, he took on a very glazed look and he even said to me at our last meeting: "Tell me why you attach importance to 424".
And so I wonder whether we shouldn’t go back to a simple formula in which we don’t ask the Arabs for 242 and we don’t ask them for recognition. Frankly, to ask them to recognize our right to exist, is I think to be extremely insulting. After 38 years, we want somebody to recognize our right to exist? Israel, the oldest state in history, incidentally, also one of the veterans of the modern international community, the 59th member of an international community which now numbers 164. Why do we have to go around asking for recognition of our right to exist which is juridically already founded. Stop asking each other for the kind of concessions which we ought to get in the negotiation; concentrate simply on a procedural formula which will bring us together and hope that encounter will have between us, the Palestinians and Jordanians, the transforming effect that encounter had with Egypt. If you’d asked any of us, including myself, a month before Sadat’s voyage "Wouldn’t it be a good idea to give up the oil fields and the naval base and the airfields and the territory and settlements?" everybody would have said it sounds a crazy idea. Once he, by his encounter, transformed peace from an Utopian fantasy into a concrete diplomatic prospect, the Israelis became capable of renunciations and flexibilities that nobody in our State believed to be possible before.
Perhaps that answer is too simplified, because you can argue about 242 for about another 19 years. If anybody accepts it, what have you achieved because they will accept it on their terms with their interpretation. 242 is a kind of musical score which everybody plays in accordance with his own national anthem and you can accept the document in theory and take no notice of what it says in practice. I wonder whether we shouldn’t cut through the semantic tangle. I’ve received from students in universities twelve dissertations on 242. What did it all end up with? It was then a way of expressing a national consensus. It may have fulfilled its purpose. I don’t believe that Palestinians will accept 242. One reason is this: 242 is pre-Palestinian. It was adopted at a time when nobody thought of the Palestinians. In the 1967 debate, I looked up the legislative history, which has been written up by a diplomat, Prof. Lal, of Columbia University. I wouldn’t call it a bestseller. It contains everything that all of us said in the discussion on 242: what Mr Gromyko said and what I said and Mr Goldberg - what everybody said. I took the index and looked for Palestine - there was nothing there at all. In other words, we talked for eight weeks without mentioning that word. We talked about occupied Egyptian territory and occupied Syrian territory and occupied Jordanian territory.
The idea of the Palestinians as an independent factor arose later in the national context of recognition. They are not going to accept without a reference to the Palestinians. The United States said: "In addition to 242, we recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestine people". The PLO replied: "No, you must say that you recognize the right of self-determination". "No", said the United States ,"we want a Jordanian-Palestinian configuration". "All right, self-determination in the context a Jordanian-Palestinian configuration". But, my friends, this debate is good for mother 19 years, and my idea is simply to forget about it; bring the parties together, because this is the great paradox of the Middle East. I flew from Cairo to Jerusalem in 52 minutes and you could take a helicopter to Amman in 40 minutes and everybody agrees that three central figures in the peace process are Hosni Mubarak and King Hussein and Mr Perez, but they don’t meet each other. Every 6 weeks we get a Deputy Under-Secretary of State of the United States to come 6,000 miles to bring about communication between these three people in that little triangle. How crazy can we continue to be? Since the key is communication, let us try and cut through. At any rate, one thing we mustn’t do is to satisfy ourselves with the present deadlock. We must not resign ourselves to it. Having tried and failed, the answer is simple try and try and try again.