The Cold Truce Between Israelis and Arabs

By: Mitchell G. Bard Wednesday, August 2007

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The Arab states never wanted to see a Jewish state created in the Middle East and for a long time tried to destroy it. The general perception remains that a conflict exists between Israel and the Arab states and that Israel’s security remains an issue. In fact, the Arab world has fractured and is no longer united against Israel, as individual states pursue their own interests, which they fear would be jeopardized by fighting Israel.

Moreover, states that once relied on the Soviet Union for arms and political support lost their principal non-Arab ally with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and their armies are no match for the Israelis. The decisions of Egypt and Jordan to sign peace treaties proved that conflict between Arabs and Israel is not inevitable.

The Palestinian issue remains an obstacle to a more comprehensive peace, but the Arab states are not prepared to go to war on their behalf and limit their commitment to rhetoric and modest financial support. This is indicative of the shift that has occurred as the conflict with Israel has transformed from a war over land and ideology to one based on religion.

* * * * *
On November 27, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly expressed the international community’s consensus that the best option for resolving the conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs in Palestine was to divide the country and create a Jewish state and an Arab state. Had the Palestinians accepted that decision, they would be celebrating along with Israel their 59th birthday instead of nearly six decades of statelessness.
Following the partition vote, the Arabs made no secret of their intentions, announcing their plan to use force to prevent the implementation of the resolution. These threats were immediately followed by outbreaks of violence in Palestine and throughout the Arab world where Zionism quickly became a capital crime and Jews who had lived in relative peace and security, in some cases for centuries, suddenly found themselves in grave danger.

The international community set an unfortunate precedent at that time – one it has followed ever since – by failing to provide the means to implement the UN’s decision. Though the partition resolution called for the creation of a commission to carry out the UN’s wishes, it was never supported.

As a result, violence escalated in the months preceding the withdrawal of the British, who had governed the area following World War I. When the British left, Israel declared its independence. Within hours of the announcement on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newborn state and the secretary-general of the Arab League announced: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

After defeating the Arab armies in the war that followed, Israel hoped the Arabs would be prepared to accept the Jewish state and live in peace, but that was not the case. The most any of the Arab states would agree to was an armistice agreement; none entertained the notion of a peace treaty.

For the next 30 years, Israel fought a series of wars that were portrayed as battles for survival, but only one really posed a threat to the existence of the Jewish state. In 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, they came so close to defeating Israel that Prime Minister Golda Meir considered deploying nuclear weapons as a last resort. Thanks in large measure to a massive resupply effort by the United States and the bravery of the Israel Defense Forces, the soldiers reversed the situation on the battlefield.
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Though no one realized it at the time, and few understand it even today, the turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict was 1973. Israel was surprised and nearly defeated, yet it staved off destruction and proved that for the foreseeable future no combination of Arab armies could conquer it. Equally important, the United States intervened at a critical moment, albeit only with supplies, and demonstrated that it would not permit Israel to be overwhelmed.

Since 1973 Israel has not fought a war with an Arab state. Think about that. Despite the common perception of the region in a constant state of turmoil with the Arab-Israeli conflict as the principal source of instability, it has been more than 30 years since Israeli and Arab armies met on the battlefield. Israel did fight with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon and Syrian forces were very briefly engaged, but the Lebanese army didn’t really fight in either 1982 or 2006 and Israel’s other military campaigns have been with the irregular forces of the Palestinian terrorist groups and Hizbullah.

Though formally maintaining a state of belligerency, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria have avoided attacking Israel. Although Syria has used Hizbullah and Palestinian terrorists as proxies to attack Israel, Syria has not launched an attack from Syrian soil since 1973. Syria avoided a fight even after Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 and had its troops sitting on the Syrian doorstep.

The Arab country that had been most threatening to Israel, at least rhetorically, was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Iraq saw itself as the leader of the rejectionists and always contributed to the Arab war effort. In the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel, killing 74 people (two died in direct hits, four from suffocation in gas masks and the rest from heart attacks) and frightening the entire population with the prospect of Iraq using chemical weapons.

Even after losing that war, Saddam continued his threats against Israel, supported Palestinian terrorists, and was believed to be rebuilding his nonconventional capability to the point where he might again threaten Israel. The U.S. war and removal of Saddam from power has eliminated Iraq as a threat to Israel; its new leadership has shown no desire to continue Saddam’s belligerence toward Israel.
Whether Iraq turns into a greater danger will depend on what happens during and after the U.S. occupation of the country. Should Iraq become a new base for terrorists or a radical Islamic stronghold, it could once again become a threat to Israel.
While it is possible for the situation to change and for worst-case scenarios to play out, for practical purposes the Arab-Israeli conflict has come to an end at the governmental level. Today, Israel’s principal enemy is militant Islam, and the Arab states have all but accepted Israel as an inconvenient reality in their midst.
The informal end of the conflict at the state level occurred in late 2001 when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon declared that PLO chairman Yasir Arafat was irrelevant and isolated him in his headquarters in Ramallah. Television pictures showed Arafat sitting in a small candlelit room with a gun beside him as he made desperate calls to Arab leaders begging them to come and save the Palestinians from the Israelis. To his dismay, no one answered his pleas.

Meanwhile, people throughout the Arab world and journalists in the government-controlled press of Arab states openly talk about being tired of the Palestinians and their unwillingness and inability to put their house in order and reach an agreement with Israel. The Palestinians have learned – or should have by now – that their Arab brethren really don’t care about them and see them primarily as pawns in the wider propaganda war with Israel.

As long as the Palestinians remain stateless, the Arab states can complain about Israel’s policies and try to wring concessions out of the rest of the world, particularly the Europeans, if their parochial demands are not met. The Arab states are willing only to send relatively paltry sums of money to help the Palestinians, make pious declarations of support, and engage in anti-Israel rhetoric in international forums, none of which has gotten the Palestinians any closer to achieving independence.

Similarly, the Arab states were silent as Israel attacked Hizbullah in Lebanon. No Arab state was prepared to go to war to defend Lebanon, and Arab leaders made no secret of their belief that the Muslim radicals brought the disaster on themselves.
* * * * *

The fact that the Arab states are unwilling to defend their fellow Arabs doesn’t mean that they have come to love Israel. Most, if not all, of the Arab states still would prefer that Israel did not exist, but they have neither the military power nor or the financial wherewithal to pursue the war any longer.
Although to date only Egypt and Jordan have signed formal peace agreements with Israel, the gulf states and some North African nations have been willing to engage in trade and limited diplomacy with Israel. The main obstacle to closer ties is the continuing peer pressure of the Arab League to maintain the facade of a united anti-Israel front while the Palestinian issue remains unsettled.

The good news for Israel is that the danger of facing the conventional armies of its neighbors has been greatly reduced. Though still unlikely in the short term, the possibility at least exists now of reaching informal, if not formal understandings with much of the Arab world.

The bad news is that the war is now with religious fanatics with whom no political compromise is possible. Despite the wishful thinking of the diplomatic class, the conflict with Hamas and Hizbullah cannot be resolved because they are driven by a religious rather than a political agenda. They believe Allah has given them marching orders to reconstitute the Islamic empire and, ideally, expand it throughout the world. For them, Israel is a cancer in the Islamic body that must be excised.

Israel cannot achieve the type of peace its citizens long for if radical Muslims have a foothold near its borders. So long as the Islamists are denied nonconventional weapons, however, they can only terrorize Israel, not threaten its existence. The war Israel continues to mount against Hizbullah and Hamas is motivated by its determination to remove this danger. The Arab states silently cheer Israel on because they understand that the region would be better served by quiet than by instability and, more important, that the Islamic radicals want to undermine their regimes and create Iranian-style theocracies throughout the region.

The Palestinian conflict today is not really about land, it’s about religion. Israel has proved willing to trade land for peace, but experience has shown the Israelis that no territorial compromise is sufficient to satisfy the Palestinian leadership. The current Palestinian agenda is dominated by Hamas, which is unambiguous about its commitment to Israel’s destruction because of the view that Jews cannot rule over Muslims or Islamic territory.

The tilt toward Islamism in the Palestinian Authority illustrates the potential for changes in the region to dramatically alter the strategic picture. For example, Islamists could conceivably come to power in Egypt and Jordan and those countries might then form a coalition with Syria and Iran aimed at destroying Israel. At the moment it is farfetched, but these are the types of scenarios that Israeli war planners must at least consider.

What is striking is that the region has not become more radicalized. Following the revolution in Iran in 1979, the fear was that fundamentalism would sweep across the Middle East, endangering oil supplies to the West and the future of Israel. Not one country around Israel, however, followed in the footsteps of Iran.

It is also important to reiterate that Israel is not at war with all of Islam, only the radicals. This is evident from the peace treaties with two Muslim states and from its diplomatic relations with other majority Muslim governments in Turkey and Mauritania and its economic interests or trade offices in Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, and Qatar.

In September 2005 Israel had a major breakthrough in meetings with Pakistani officials. Publicity about the contacts led to pressure on Pakistan to say it wouldn’t recognize Israel until the Palestinians had a state. Nevertheless, this was a major development, spurred in large part by Israel’s close and rapidly improving relationship with India.

The times have changed dramatically from the days when Arab officials always walked out of the room when an Israeli spoke. Abba Eban, Israel’s UN ambassador, used to tell a story about walking into a restaurant where Iraq’s UN ambassador was eating. When the Iraqi saw Eban, he got up and left. Eban said he liked having the power to keep him from enjoying a meal. Today, Israeli and Arab ambassadors eat in the same restaurants and may even share a table.

No one should confuse the Arab states’ unwillingness to engage in a war with Israel as a permanent acceptance of Israel’s presence in the Middle East. If the balance of power in the region shifts and a coalition of Arab governments can form with the capability to destroy Israel, especially if they acquire weapons of mass destruction, it is possible the conflict will be renewed.
It is more likely, however, that most Arab states will do the minimum required to satisfy their populations that they don’t accept Israel -- namely, spout pious slogans about the Palestinian cause, sponsor anti-Israel resolutions at the UN and other international forums, support terrorists, and engage in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t peace, but Israel can survive.

Excerpted from "Will Israel Survive?" by Mitchell G. Bard. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Available now wherever books are sold.

Dr. Bard is the executive director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and one of the leading authorities on U.S.-Middle East policy. He has written and edited 18 books, including "The Complete History of the Holocaust" and "Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict."