DON’T COMPOUND THE HEBRON TRAGEDY BY EXPOSING ISRAELIS TO RISK OF STILL WORSE MASSACRES

(Washington, D.C.): The odious
attack last Friday on Palestinian Arabs
in the West Bank town of Hebron is being
seized upon by various parties to justify
recommendations which, if followed, will
surely make matters much worse.
These recommendations range from
disarming some settlers — a step the
Israeli Cabinet actually approved in
principle yesterday — to promptly
closing all settlements in the disputed
territories.

The latter is proposed as a first step
toward turning the land occupied by such
settlements and the rest of the West Bank
and Gaza over to the PLO. At its root,
this suggestion is predicated upon the
reasonable expectation that enmity
between the Arabs and the Jews
(particularly on the part of the Arabs)
is so entrenched as to make genuine peace
in the region impossible for the
foreseeable future. The solution, if it
could be achieved, is obvious: Disengage
the two peoples without compromising
the security of either.

Two Options for
Disengagement

Theoretically, such a separation could
be accomplished at no expense to Israeli
security — or that of Arab states — by
expelling all Palestinian Arabs from the
disputed territories. As a practical
matter, however, this option is a
complete non-starter: Its disregard for
the rights of those Arabs currently
living on the land in question would be
universally condemned; the bloodshed
entailed in such a forced expulsion would
be utterly unacceptable.

Interestingly, little concern is
generally expressed about the rights or
lives of those who would be evicted under
the alternative disengagement option: the
removal of all Israelis who have settled
in the territories. To the contrary,
Jewish settlers in the disputed areas are
routinely given short shrift by those in
Israel, in the American Jewish community
and elsewhere disposed to view the
settlements as “obstacles to
peace.” Baruch Goldstein’s criminal
behavior has been seized upon by some in
this camp — notably, Michael Lerner and
Milton Viorst whose scathing
denunciations of the settlers have
recently appeared in the New York
Times and Washington Post,
respectively — to impugn the motives, if
not the sanity, of all Israeli settlers.

Why Israeli Disengagement
from the Territories Won’t Work

There are two major problems
with the notion of achieving peace with
security by eliminating Israeli
settlements from — and, in due course,
Israeli control over — the disputed
territories. The first is that it will
not produce peace. The second is that it
will not provide the security Israel
needs to contend with the intensified
threats that would arise from the changed
strategic situation.

Appeasing the Arabs
Will Not Promote Peace:
Were Israelis to abandon their
rights to build and inhabit
settlements in the disputed
territories in the face of Arab
violence, the results are
predictable. Palestinian Arab
appetites for Israeli-occupied
land will be whetted, rather than
sated, by such concessions. The
response will not be peaceable
disengagement, but hot
pursuit into Israel, itself.
What will be seen to have failed
is not, as some are now claiming,
Israel’s settlements policy but
the Zionist dream of establishing
a state in the Jews’ ancient
homeland.

One need look no farther for
evidence of this reality than the
most recent article declaring the
bankruptcy of the settlements
policy — an op.ed. in today’s Wall
Street Journal by David
Brooks entitled, “Forget
Mideast Peace, Aim for
Divorce.” In it, Brooks
notes that:

“Hebron was the first
Jewish city. Abraham, the
founder of the Jewish
religion, is buried a few
yards from where [Baruch]
Goldstein emptied his machine
gun, as are Isaac, Sarah,
Jacob, Rebecca and Leah. It
was the first town Jews
resettled when they regained
access to the West Bank in
1967.”

It is hard to imagine a site
to which Jews have a more
irrefutable claim than the locale
of this settlement in the
“occupied” West Bank.
Should the Israelis choose,
nonetheless, to abandon Hebron
rather than confront Arab
hostility and demands, by what
logic will they resist claims
against Tel Aviv and even
Jerusalem?

Israel Cannot Be
Secure Without Strategic Depth:
Worse yet, an Israel bereft of
its strategically located
settlements in the disputed
territories would be in serious
jeopardy. As a practical matter,
it will be unable to control this
critical real estate or otherwise
prevent the speedy emergence of
what may well be a radical
Palestinian Arab state on the
West Bank of the Jordan River.

Thoughtful military experts
have for many years recognized
the risks for Israel should it no
longer be able to control the
territories it acquired in the
course of the Six-Day War in June
1967. For example, shortly after
the end of that conflict, the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff
concluded that, “From a
strictly military point of view,
Israel would require the
retention of some captured
territory in order to provide
militarily defensible
borders.”

The Chiefs made the following
specific findings:

• “The prominent high
  ground running
  north-south through the
  middle of West Jordan
  [Judea and Samaria]
  generally…would provide
  Israel with a militarily
  defensible border.”
• “The commanding
  territory east of the
  boundary of 4 June 1967
  [the Golan
  Heights]…overlooks the
  Galilee area. To provide
  a defense in-depth,
  Israel would need a strip
  about 15 miles wide
  extending from the border
  of Lebanon to the border
  of Jordan.”
• “By occupying the
  Gaza Strip, Israel would
  trade approximately 45
  miles of hostile border
  for eight. Configured as
  it [was prior to 1967],
  the strip serve[d] as a
  salient for introduction
  of Arab subversion and
  terrorism and its
  retention would be to
  Israel’s military
  advantage.”
• “To defend the
  Jerusalem area would
  require that the boundary
  of Israel be positioned
  to the east of the city
  to provide for the
  organization of an
  adequate defensive
  position.”

These findings are as
valid today as they were in 1967.
In fact, they have been
reaffirmed again and again by
knowledgeable military
professionals. For example, in
October 1988, 100 senior U.S.
generals and admirals issued a
public call for Israel to
“retain the Jordan River
line as [her] eastern security
border” noting that:

“…If Israel loses
this line, it would have
virtually no warning of
attack, its border would be
three times longer than the
present one. In the
midsection of the country it
would be 9 to 18 miles from
the Mediterranean. Virtually
all the population would be
subject to artillery
bombardment. The plain north
of Tel Aviv could be riven by
an armored salient within
hours. The quick mobilization
of its civilian army —
Israel’s main hope for
survival — would be
disrupted easily, and perhaps
irreversibly.”

In 1991, Lieutenant General
Thomas Kelly, the highly
respected chief of Operations for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff during
Desert Storm, said,
“Israel’s control over these
areas is the only guarantee,
however imperfect, of peace.
Their loss is a prescription for
war.” He added that:

“The West Bank
mountains, and especially
their approaches, are the
critical terrain. If an enemy
secures those passes,
Jerusalem and all of Israel
become uncovered. Without the
West Bank, Israel is only
eight miles wide at its
narrowest point. That makes
it indefensible.”

Importantly, the Israeli
Defense Forces are under no
illusion about the abiding
importance of strategic analyses
like that performed by the Joint
Chiefs. As the IDF Chief of Staff
Ehud Barak said in May 1993:

“The 1967 Joint
Chiefs of Staff memorandum
[is] still applicable. The
Arab arms are reaching
superiority over Israel with
a qualitative as well as
quantitative edge….If
Israel has to retake the
territories proposed to be
given up, we cannot do it
without tremendous
casualties.”

The Bottom Line

In the course of heated political
debates in which each side has an
entrenched position, it is not uncommon
for partisans to find in unanticipated
developments confirmation of their
pre-existing positions. This tends to be
particularly true of events like the
massacre at Hebron that get enormous
amounts of publicity.

If the international attention
focussed on the Arab-Israeli conflict as
a result of this heinous crime is to
prove constructive, however, it must be
accompanied by some fresh thinking — and
rethinking — concerning the
Middle East “peace process.” As
presently conceived, this process is
likely to produce neither peace nor an
Israel that can safely deal with the
insecurity sure to follow. This will be
even more true if the Hebron tragedy
impels the Rabin government to undertake
“disengagement” by closing
Israeli settlements, by accelerating
discussions on the “final
status” of the disputed territories
or by otherwise reducing Israel’s control
over these areas.

Awful as the Hebron incident
was, it would be infinitely more
deplorable were it to have the effect of
setting in train negotiated arrangements
that jeopardize the future survival of
the Jewish State. There are, in short,
outcomes even more unsatisfactory than
the status quo.

The Center for Security Policy urges
policy-makers in Washington, Jerusalem
and elsewhere to refrain from compounding
the present tragedy by exposing to grave
new dangers, in the first instance,
Israeli settlers in the strategic,
disputed territories and, in due course,
their countrymen in Israel. The violent
instability sweeping Egypt and much of
the rest of the Islamic world, the
evident inability of the PLO to control
its constituency in the territories and
the abiding validity of military analyses
of the importance of these territories to
Israeli security make one thing clear: Israel
should be encouraged to “stand
down” on new concessions to the
Palestinian Arabs — not urged or coerced
to make them.