'Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs at the End of the Century'
By Itamar Rabinovich

July 19, 1999
Web posted at: 12:34 p.m. EDT (1634 GMT)

(CNN) -- In "Waging Peace," the noted scholar-diplomat Itamar Rabinovich goes beyond the old formulas to suggest new ways of understanding how to achieve normalized relations between Jews and Arabs.

Excerpt

The Background

The Arab-Israeli conflict has crossed the half-century mark. A conflict between the small Jewish and the much larger Arab community in Palestine had first erupted in the late Ottoman period. It became fiercer and more significant after the First World War, the publication in 1917 of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government supported the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," and the establishment in 1920 of a British Mandate over Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River. During the next three decades, Arabs and Jews fought over rights and control, their conflict culminating in a war that broke out after the United Nations' decision in 1947 to partition the country between a Jewish state and a Palestinian-Arab one.

Throughout the decades of conflict, the indigenous Palestinian Arabs were supported and helped by a large part of the Arab world, but it was the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the invasion by five Arab armies that gave birth to the full-fledged Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel's victory, the consolidation of its existence and expansion of its original territory, the Arabs' military defeat, the failure to establish the Palestinian Arab state envisaged by the UN resolution, and the consequent problem of Palestinian refugees were the fundamental facts in the process that transformed the Arab-Jewish conflict in Mandate Palestine into the Arab-Israeli conflict we still know today.

The conflict's fifty-year history is evenly divided by the October War of 1973. For twenty-five years, the old wounds festered as efforts to heal them or at least address some of their causes failed for reasons that I shall analyze. But after the Israeli victory in October 1973, diplomatic procedures were inaugurated that four years later developed into an Israeli-Egyptian peace process, which in March 1979 produced Israel's first peace treaty with an Arab state, though this subsequently came to a grinding halt; the stasis lasted through the 1980s. Then a new phase of peace negotiations was inaugurated in October 1991 at the Madrid Conference. The ensuing set of negotiations gave birth to a second Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1994, with Jordan, to a Palestinian-Israeli breakthrough, and to a significant degree of Arab-Israeli normalization; but even in its heyday in 1993-95 the "Madrid process" failed to bring about a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict or to end the political disputes and the bloodshed between Israel and parts of the Arab world. New developments in 1996 slowed it down and in 1998 brought it near collapse.

The Madrid process represents the first sustained international effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is significant that no comparable effort -- as distinct from short-lived attempts, various mediation efforts, and partial settlements -- had been undertaken before, and that twenty-five years of an uneven peace process have still failed to produce a comprehensive settlement. The Arab-Israeli conflict has indeed been one of the more complex and difficult international problems of the second half of the twentieth century. The first step to understanding its complexity is a recognition that there is no single Arab-Israeli dispute but a cluster of distinct, interrelated conflicts:

1. The core conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This is a classic conflict between two national movements claiming title to and vying for possession of the same land. This original strand in the Arab-Israeli dispute was overshadowed for some fifteen years (1949-64) by the pulverization of the Palestinian community that had been dispersed during Israel's war of independence, and by the pre-eminence then of pan-Arab ideologies and Arab state interests. The resurgence of Palestinian nationalism in the mid-1960s and, ironically, the establishment in 1967 of Israeli control over the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan River restored a major role to the Palestinians in the Arab world. Their new importance was reinforced by the PLO's offensive against Israel, conducted with the defeat of the established Arab armies in the background.

2. A broader dispute between Israel and Arab nationalism. This is a national, political, cultural, and increasingly also religious conflict. Both sides came into this conflict carrying their historical and cultural legacies. The Jewish people's national revival in their historic homeland in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and after millennia of exile and persecution, unfolded during a head-on collision with an Arab national movement seeking revival, renewal, and power after a century of soul-searching and humiliation at the hands of Western powers. Unfortunately, most Arabs have perceived Zionism and Israel as either part of the West or, worse, a Western bridgehead established in their midst.

3. A series of bilateral disputes between Israel and neighboring Arab states created by geopolitical rivalries combined with other factors. Thus Egypt was drawn into war with Israel in 1948 by the Palestinian problem, but its decision to join the Arab war coalition and its subsequent conflict with Israel were also affected by the ambitions of Arab and regional leaders, by its sense of competition with Israel as the other powerful and ambitious state in the region, and by a desire to obtain a land bridge to the eastern Arab world through the southern Negev Desert. Similarly, Syria's bitter relationship to Israel has expressed both its genuine attachment to Arab nationalism and to the Palestinian cause, and its acute sense of rivalry with Israel for hegemony in the Levant.

4. The larger international conflict. The "Palestine question" has always been an important and a salient international issue. The interest and passion aroused by the "Holy Land" (Falastin to Arabs and Muslims), the saliency of what used to be called the "Jewish question," the rivalries of colonial powers and later the superpowers in the Middle East, and the overall geopolitical importance of the Arab world were some of the considerations and forces that have accounted for the significance in international affairs of the evolving Arab-Israeli conflict. It was not originally and was never allowed to be a local squabble. Arabs and Israelis from the outset sought international support for their respective causes, while foreign governments and other actors -- out of genuine commitment to one of the parties, in search of gain, or for the sake of peace and stability -- have always intervened. These international factors were magnified and exacerbated by the Cold War. The Middle East, because of its intrinsic importance, its geographical closeness to the Soviet Union, and its openness to change, became an important arena of Soviet-American competition. In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union shifted from initial support for Israel to sweeping support for the Arab states, and it exploited the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to weaken the Western position in the Middle East and enhance its own. After about a decade of fluctuation, the United States decided on a policy of open cooperation with Israel and other Middle Eastern allies against the region's radical and pro-Soviet regimes. So, in the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973 and in other Middle Eastern crises, the two superpowers contended by proxy. Israel's power was increased dramatically by American aid and support, but the Soviet Union's military assistance to its allies and clients, the prospect of Soviet military intervention, and Soviet help in rebuilding the defeated Egyptian and Syrian armies were important in denying Israel the political fruits of its military power and achievements.

Whereas in the 1950s and early 1960s it was the Soviet Union that tended to take advantage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the equation was altered by Israel's victory in the 1967 war. Within a few years, the Arab world grasped that the key to regaining the territories Israel had gained in that war was to be sought in Washington. American endorsement of the principle of exchanging "land for peace," and a willingness and ability to act on it, were at least some of the time the basis on which the United States was able to orchestrate the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and register several impressive achievements. For example, the Egyptian-Israeli peace process initiated after the 1973 war, the first major breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict, was intimately linked to one of Washington's greatest Cold War accomplishments: Egypt's transition from a Soviet ally to a nation in the American orbit.

Copyright © 1999 Itamar Rabinovich