Oslo, the Bomb, and Other Home Remedies

By Amnon Lord

Over a political career spanning five decades, Shimon Peres has fought for the idea that inexorable human progress will solve everything, real soon.

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But despite these successes which resulted from the projection of Israeli military power, the Sinai campaign was ruinous for Peres’ beliefs about the utility of an Israeli preemptive strike in quelling Arab belligerence. The lesson that Ben-Gurion and Peres learned from the conflict was that conventional military might and preemptive strikes were severely limited in their ability to deter war. Instead of taking their quick defeat in the Sinai to heart, the Arabs, it seemed, only took it as a signal that they needed to work all the harder to increase their weapons stockpiles, shoring up their strength for yet another “next round.” The next round had come and gone, and it would do so repeatedly, unceasingly. Peres, who had believed in the possibility that conventional might and preemptive war could achieve a “knockout”—that is, a one-time and absolute rejoinder to Israel’s security problem—was also one of the first to realize that nothing was to be gained from additional rounds, even victorious ones such as the Sinai campaign, since they would never bring an end to the cycle of conflict. From this perspective, the Sinai campaign as well as the Six Day War were, as Raymond Aron put it in late 1967, nothing but successful incursions beyond the borders of the camp.

Towards the end of the 1950s, Peres came to believe in a new solution, a radically different means of effecting a “knockout”: Nuclear armaments. In this sense, the Israeli nuclear program became for Peres a race against the clock to prevent the successive rounds of war which would otherwise inevitably recur. This was the period during which Peres forged his famous slogan that nuclear arms in the superpower arena are less dangerous than conventional bombs in the Middle East, because regular bombs explode while atomic bombs are designed to prevent wars.¹⁰ Indeed, by 1959, and apparently as a result of the Sinai campaign, Peres was already prepared to declare that “if, for example, there were a choice between expanding the country’s geographic borders and broadening its scientific and industrial horizons, I myself this very minute would be counted among those choosing the latter—from a security perspective as well.”¹¹ Thus the entire range of geopolitical and military solutions, from Jewish settlements to preemptive strikes to punitive seizure of territory, were by now found wanting in comparison to the new panacea: “Broadening Israel’s scientific horizons.” Certainly, one may attribute this shift in part to an attempt to rationalize the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai after the war, which had been forced upon it by the United States—saying, in effect, that Israel did not really need the territory anyway. But it is also true that Peres grasped at a fairly early stage that the military component of Israeli power was limited and one-dimensional, and that this recognition also marked the beginning of a new strategic outlook for Peres, one in which Israel would resign itself to its present borders.¹²

When reading Peres’ articles from the early 1960s, one cannot help but notice the sense of urgency with which they were written. Even without uttering the “ineffable name” of nuclear weapons,¹³ it is clear that Peres considered the nuclear option a means to create strategic depth and replace preemptive war. Peres realized that the victory in Sinai had tremendously strengthened the school of thought within the military that supported initiated ground war as the most potent prophylactic to Arab threats (especially those emanating from Egypt). Having no military background himself, Peres was to a large extent an outsider to the generals building up Israel’s young armed forces, and it is this which one detects in his almost frenzied efforts to persuade his readers that the entire doctrine was, as a means of keeping the peace, futile.¹⁴ The result was that, ironically, the Peres-led race to obtain an Israeli nuclear option was conducted not only against the Egyptians, but also against the Israeli army’s top brass, whom he knew would respond to the “next round” as they had responded to the last—with a doctrine advocating a massive preemptive strike that made war inevitable.

There can be little question, therefore, that it was during this period, after 1959, that Peres decisively parted company with the rest of the Israeli security community, believing that Israel must attain its strategic depth not in territory or settlement but in a different dimension—the technological “third dimension,” as he would later call it.¹⁵ His preference for scientific investment over political borders almost immediately translated into a downgrading of the importance of terrain, which ceased to be a factor the moment one lost the belief in the paramountcy of ground-based might.¹⁶ This dispute over security theory bred a wide political rift, with Peres and Ben-Gurion, believers in technology, facing off against the headstrong stance of the general staff, which continued to hold firm in its belief in territory—at whose vanguard stood Yitzhak Rabin, who in 1964 assumed the position of Chief of General Staff.

In fact, the race to secure an Israeli nuclear option was only one aspect of a larger vision of technological progress and prowess that Peres entertained for the Jewish state. An article he wrote in early 1966 offered a summary of his approach. Although at the time the attention of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and the Israeli public was riveted on the conflict with the Syrians over the headwaters of the Jordan River, and on the steady increase in terrorist activity in the north, Peres kept his geopolitical gaze focused on Egypt, which in his view held the key to all developments in the Middle East. “The precondition for mutual concessions is in the process of development, though this process has not yet come to fruition: Arab despair of ever being able to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict by force of their military superiority.” In other words, Peres believed that the shattering of the impulse for war was the solution, and that it would occur via technological breakthroughs: “Just now, the president of Egypt, Abdel Nasser, declared that he will launch a preventive war against us if he becomes convinced that his suspicion of us—nuclear capability—is justified.” Peres hurled his own threats in return but also presented the following analysis: “[Nasser] should take into account that [the war’s] conclusion is liable to be such that it does not at all justify its undertaking. A preventive war that is prevented is the best of wars, for him and for us.”¹⁷

The crisis on the eve of the Six Day War should have been the test of the nuclear deterrence policy of Peres and Ben-Gurion. But as it turned out, both of them had left the Labor party in 1965 and were ensconced in opposition when the crisis hit—unable to play any of the hard-won cards which were supposed to have prevented the war. In the race of the nuclear strategist to prevent the “next round” and preemptive war, the nuclear school lost. In the outbreak of the war one could discern, to a certain extent, the collapse of the Peres security doctrine as it had developed since the Sinai campaign. Yuval Ne’eman, who had headed the nuclear research project at Nahal Sorek in the early 1960s and went on to lead the conservative Tehiya party, writes that “on the eve of the Six Day War, Israel had an extensive nuclear infrastructure, with all the security potential implied therein,”¹⁸ and yet the six years that followed the May crisis of 1967 were the bloodiest since the War of Independence. The Six Day War in June 1967, the War of Attrition which continued until 1970, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War can, against this backdrop, be seen as a substantial Arab success, in that Egypt managed to trap Israel into fighting a series of bruising conventional ground wars without ever being able to make any use of its massive technological advantage—whose entire purpose had been to obviate the need for endless military sparring.

After the 1967 victory, most of Israel’s political spectrum saw the newly acquired territories—Sinai and Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights—as decisive bargaining chips in future negotiations with the Arabs. Sinai alone was three times the size of Israel before the Six Day War, and for the first time the possibility of cashing in all or most of its chips for a diplomatically negotiated “peace” became the focus of Israel’s foreign policy—and the yardstick for measuring the actions of every Israeli government. Whereas prior to 1967, the state’s energies were overwhelmingly devoted to development and survival (with all in agreement that Israel had little choice but to wait, as Peres had suggested, for the Arabs to despair), since 1967 Israeli politics has been characterized by a sense of unlimited ability to tempt the Arabs out of the cycle of war—as if a safe and tranquil life, the nation’s most cherished dream, had suddenly moved within reach. It was only after 1967, when Israel acquired what was almost universally perceived to be an exceptionally strong bargaining position, that Peres ceased to be a lonely voice in the wilderness believing in the possibility of an absolute end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, as he had been until then. Ironically, it was the very same war in which Peres’ decade-long belief in the nuclear panacea was obliterated, that he suddenly found himself face to face with another, far more popular, strategy for achieving the termination of the Arabs’ “desire for war”: The goal that he established for Israeli foreign policy already in the first year after the war was full peace, with the territories as leverage in negotiation. Peres’ greatest foreign policy worry at the time was that Israel would withdraw under political pressure, from without or within, rather than in exchange for a permanent settlement.¹⁹

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