A Secure Israel is a Condition for Peace
Objectively,
how vulnerable is Israel? To say that Israel is a tiny nation does not
begin to describe the state’s predicament. Slightly larger than the
Canary Islands, more or less the size of the state of New Jersey, Israel
fits into Lake Michigan with room to spare.
Israel’s
pre-1967 borders – the borders Palestinian Arabs want Israel to pull
back to – lacked rhyme or reason and reflect the deployment of Israeli
and Arab forces when the 1948 armistice agreement was signed. This
pre-1967 frontier with the West Bank is known as the Green Line simply
because a green pencil was used to draw the map showing the armistice
line in 1948, a demarcation that is neither ‘sanctified’ nor a border.
At
one of the narrowest points in central Israel, the entire width of the
state from the Mediterranean coastal town of Netanya to the Green Line
is a mere nine miles – just about three times the length of John F.
Kennedy Airport’s runway (14,570 feet or 4,441 meters). Not
surprisingly, proximity has made Netanya, nearby Hadera and other
Israeli communities along the narrow Sharon coastal plain just north of
Tel Aviv, popular targets where Palestinian handlers drop off suicide
bombers. If Israel would relinquish the foothills on the east side of
the Green Line to Palestinian control, Ben-Gurion International Airport
would be within range of shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles, Katyusha
rockets and mortars. The heart of Tel Aviv, Israel’s New York City, is
merely 11 miles from the West Bank.
The
West Bank juts into Israel like two clenched fists. No major Israeli
city is more than 22 miles from a former Arab border. Until the Six-Day
War, the Golan Heights escarpment – once bristling with Syrian gun
emplacements and minefields – towered above Israelis living in the upper
Galilee. In an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel in
November 1969, the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, a lifelong dove,
described Israel’s pre-Six-Day War borders as ‘Auschwitz’ lines’ that
threaten Israel’s survivability. IDF Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror
puts Eban’s ‘Auschwitz’ metaphor in operational terms in regard to the
West Bank. In a 2005 analysis of what ‘defensible borders for a lasting
peace’ entail, Amidror explained that even from a technical
standpoint, the Green Line lacks minimum ‘defensive depth’
– an overarching principle of military doctrine for all armies: There
is insufficient battle space for a defensive force to redeploy after
being attacked, there is no room for reserves to enter or counterattack
and there is no minimal distance between the battle front and the
strategic interior necessary for any army to function.
U.S. Generals on Israel’s Security after the Six-Day War
American
military experts have recognized the importance of shoring up Israel’s
borders to provide some territorial depth. In a study published
immediately after the 1967 Six- Day War, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Earl Wheeler said that “the minimum required for
Israel’s defense includes most of the West Bank and the whole of Gaza
and the Golan Heights.” The need for territorial depth has not decreased
over time. Lt. General (ret.) Tom Kelly, who served as Chief of
Operations during the 1991 Gulf War, said in the wake of the Gulf War:
“I
cannot defend this land (Israel) without that terrain (West Bank) … The
West Bank Mountains, and especially their five approaches, are the
critical terrain. If an enemy secures those passes, Jerusalem and Israel
become uncovered. Without the West Bank, Israel is only eight miles
wide at its narrowest point. That makes it indefensible.”
This
sentiment was echoed in the assessment of the late Admiral James Wilson
“Bud” Nance, who told Congress in 1991 that there was:
“No
logical reason for Israel to give up one inch of the disputed areas.
Quite to the contrary, I believe if Israel were to move out of the Golan
Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it would increase
instability and the possibility of war, increase the necessity for
Israel to preempt in war and the possibility that nuclear weapons would
be used to prevent an Israel loss, and increase the possibility that the
U.S. would have to become involved in a war.”
The
prospects of a new Arab state, a Palestinian state, on Israel’s border
have raised concern by U.S. policymakers, as well. Writing in Commentary in
1997, Douglas Feith, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, said
such a state would give the Arab world “a much greater capacity than
they now have to facilitate terrorism against Israel, conduct
anti-Israel diplomacy, assist or join enemy armed forces in the event of
war, and destabilize local states (such as Jordan and Egypt) that
cooperate with Israel.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was even more candid, remarking in a talk with Pentagon employees in August 2002:
“If
you have a country that's a sliver and you can see three sides of it
from a high hotel building, you've got to be careful what you give away
and to whom you give it.”
In
the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, after three Arab armies
converged on Israel’s nightmarish borders, even the United Nations was
forced to recognize that Israel’s pre-Six-Day War borders invite
repeated aggression. Thus, UN Resolution 242 – which formed the
conceptual foundation for a peace settlement — declares that all states
in the region should be guaranteed “safe and secure borders.”
Czech
author Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as “one whose very
existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can
disappear, and it knows it.” Israel is even smaller than Czechoslovakia
was in 1939 before it was gobbled up by Germany.
Despite
this, Israel has been willing to take great risks to make peace with
the Palestinians and is prepared to reach a territorial compromise that
settles for far less than what these leading American military experts
view as the necessary minimum. In the wake of Hamas’ victory in the
January 2006 elections, however, Douglas Fieth’s words about “a greater
capacity to facilitate terrorism” and Admiral Nance’s warning of the
“destabilizing effect” a Palestinian state could wrought and the
ramifications of pressuring Israel to take ‘one risk too many’ seem
almost prophetic.
A
study done by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 29, 1967 under
Gen. Earl Wheeler points to the minimum territory Israel required “in
order to permit defense against possible conventional Arab attack …” The
study content was considered so explosive and contrary to State
Department policy, it was stamped ‘Top Secret’ until the Wall Street Journal revealed it in 1983.
The
hostility of its neighbors goes beyond conflicting claims to territory
and recognized borders, rivalry or regional domination. The object of
Israel’s enemies is neither to dominate nor reach parity with Israel, it
is to destroy Israel as a state and send surviving Jews back to where
they came from. No other nation is the target of such a potentially
genocidal threat.
Under International Law, Palestinian Arab illegal aggression cannot and should not be rewarded.
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