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Oslo, the Bomb, and Other Home RemediesBy Amnon LordOver a political career spanning five decades, Shimon Peres has fought for the idea that inexorable human progress will solve everything, real soon. Naturally, the Shimon Peres of the 1970s was unprepared to associate himself with such views. But the situation changed gradually, and he and Oz developed a friendship which carried with it an important political component. Already in 1981, when Begin first stood for reelection, Oz was mobilized in support for Peres, appearing in a televised campaign ad which featured the moralist-guru of Israeli literature sitting under a tree, chewing on a reed, his hair blowing in the wind. In later years, the two grew even closer; by the early 1990s, Peres went as far as declaring that Oz should be the one to replace him in the party leadership, and that he saw in Oz a candidate for prime minister.26 Their intimate political relationship played a role even in the secret negotiations leading up to the Oslo agreements. “One day my friend, author Amos Oz, called me,” wrote Peres in The New Middle East. “‘Shimon,’ he asked, ‘did you ever think about what would happen should the PLO cave in completely?’”27 Peres did think about it, and came to the conclusion that the elimination of the PLO would only augur the creation of even more vicious Palestinian groups—hence the Oslo accords, which scrapped Peres’ long-standing desire for an accommodation with the Jordanians in favor of Oz’s preferred solution.
Reading The New Middle East, one gets the impression that even as he was adopting the agenda of those Israeli political elements most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, Peres never adopted their beliefs, seeing the entire Oslo process only as an important step in the direction of his larger regional vision—a “Golden Age in the Middle East” ushered in by technological progress and economic development. That is, the tilt to the PLO remained, for Peres, not really a matter of justice for the Palestinians, but rather only a means towards accomplishing the long-cherished goal of bringing all of the Arab world to abandon its desire to wage war against Israel. Seen from this perspective, Oslo emerges as only the latest incarnation of Peres’ steadfast belief in a sweeping, technologically driven solution to Israel’s existential dilemmas. Drawing upon the European model, Peres calls for the creation of a “regional system” to replace the national one in matters of trade, tourism, water, sharing of technology and, later, security.28 This “knockout” blow to the Arab war-urge remains Peres’ real goal, for which Oslo was but a stepping-stone.
For Peres, the acceptance of the PLO (as well as other positions adopted from Israel’s far-left) is essentially a tactical concession. For years, and even after the beginning of his strategic political alliance with Peace Now, Peres continued to see the Palestinians as a key enemy and the PLO as a factor that must be eliminated. In October 1985, as prime minister he sent the air force on a long-range bombing mission to Tunis to destroy PLO headquarters, in an effort to deal it a death blow. Peres’ readiness to begin the Oslo process, and thereby to prepare the groundwork for a Palestinian state, was never more than a means, a temporary stage before the realization of his final objective. Recognition of the PLO was of marginal importance compared with his larger vision for the entire region—for where borders are soft and economic ties have rendered war irrelevant, what difference does it really make which Arab states are where? While he may have given in on much in the way of long-standing political positions in order to win the support of people such as Amos Oz, Yossi Sarid and the editors of Ha’aretz, it was all to be chalked up to tactics in the service of a greater strategy.
But Peres’ choice was, of course, not ultimately about tactics. Because once set in motion, the alignment with the left took on a life of its own, tearing asunder many basic principles that Peres preached with all his might for most of his career. Peres, with his own hands, created the mechanism that led to “forced withdrawal under pressure without a permanent settlement,” the very thing he had so feared after the Six Day War.29 Although he once saw Israel’s secure borders as not being a legitimate subject for negotiations, he now wrote in The New Middle East that precisely the opposite was the case: “We need soft borders, not rigid, impermeable ones.”30 And where he once expressed fear over the fact that over-reliance on diplomacy and negotiations could bring about intervention in Israel’s internal matters, Peres now conceded—both to the U.S. of today and to a “Middle Eastern Union” of tomorrow—everything short of veto power over Israel’s security considerations, even in matters pertaining to areas just a few miles from its population centers.
Yet the more worrisome phenomenon with Peres and the intellectual-political circle around him is not the softness of the borders, but rather the softness of their diplomatic and strategic posture, a softness so soft that it has become indistinguishable from complete inconsistency. For example, when The New Middle East was published several months after Oslo, in late 1993, Peres was still adamant in his rejection of a Palestinian state:
Since Peres wrote these words, the Palestinian army which he feared has come into being already, even without the advent of a Palestinian state.32 Meanwhile, suicide bombings emerged as one of the factors in the demise of his Labor government. In response, Peres guided his ideological ship on a new course headed for the same port, sacrificing yet again a once-crucial position which now appeared to stand in his way: Peres has come to agree that there is no possibility of reaching a permanent settlement that does not result in a Palestinian state. Thus, while declaring that he sees the Palestinian state as a danger to the existence of Israel, he creates the very mechanism that brings about its establishment, and, at the same time—and no less important—the psycho-ideological mechanism that paves the way for reconciliation with the event. When political beliefs so significant as the question of Palestinian sovereignty adjacent to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are so readily adopted or discarded, one begins to wonder about Peres and his more extreme constituents: Who really used whom as a means to achieve their ultimate political goals?
Peres’ primary security rationale for the Oslo agreements is the danger of missiles and nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Again, as in the years before the Six Day War, Peres finds himself in a frantic race against the clock. Oslo, from his perspective, is an attempt to push the entire region onto a “peace” track before militant nations such as Iran and Iraq become nuclear powers. As for Israel’s might, Peres now sees it in terms of economic globalization: Partnerships, joint business ventures, a common market and so forth. In other words, a vision based on the belief that business and economic progress will solve all problems and eliminate the need for nationalism—once again, a belief in the absolute power of technological progress, vintage 1960s.
Peres’ understanding that missiles and nuclear weapons are Israel’s gravest security concern may be correct. But just as the Dimona initiative did not in its day bring the “knockout” blow to Israel’s security problems, so too did the Oslo project fail to bring in the much-promised peace. Perhaps the lesson of Peres’ career is that in order to lessen the likelihood of war—an aim for which Peres, as a devoted public servant of the State of Israel, has striven for so long—what is needed is to reject his basic guiding principle: The very idea of an absolute and comprehensive solution. Is there really an identifiable finish line, towards which one can race at full speed so as to finally “win,” once and for all? Or is there instead a dynamic reality which may never be too pleasant to look at, and which demands of us flexibility and a constant, patient grappling with the issues as they arise? A vision, every vision, is tested by its ability to serve reality—and not only by its simplicity and charm.
Amnon Lord is a cultural and political commentator, whose articles appear regularly in the Israeli press.
Notes
1. Shimon Peres, The New Middle East, (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 3-5.
2. See, for example, Shimon Peres, “Protecting Our Security,” in Niv Hakvutza (June 1954), p. 413.
3. Shimon Peres, The Next Step (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1965), p. 15. [Hebrew]
4. Peres, The Next Step, p. 11.
5. Peres, The Next Step, p. 19.
6. The question that demands to be asked here, against the background of preparation for the next round, is whether or not there might have been, in the years before the Sinai campaign, the opportunity for Israel to enter a process of trading concessions for a peace agreement. Since the publication of former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s diaries and the research conducted in recent years by Itamar Rabinovich, Ilan Assia, Murla Baron and others, it is now clear that such an option existed. However, the price demanded from Israel for peace agreements with Egypt and Syria was too high in the opinion of Ben-Gurion, and thus he wisely avoided entering into a negotiation process. Furthermore, when Sharett undertook peace initiatives that could lead to negotiations, Ben-Gurion torpedoed them via aggressive military actions, such as the Gaza and Sea of Galilee operations in 1955.
7. Peres, The Next Step, p. 40.
8. See Yuval Ne’eman, “Israel in the Nuclear Era,” Nativ (May 1995), p. 37.
9. Peres, The Next Step, p. 40. Emphasis in original.
10. Peres, The Next Step, p. 65.
11. Ha’aretz, August 28, 1959.
12. The Sinai campaign offered two justifications for such a position: First, that the mass flight of Arabs from conquered areas that occurred in 1948 did not repeat itself in the Sinai campaign; second, that the major powers acted decisively to prevent territorial adjustments, and would likely do so again in the future.
13. To this day, Israel officially does not admit to possessing nuclear weapons, speaking instead in euphemisms; even as Peres was writing in 1993 about his involvement in the nuclear weapons project of the 1960s, he wrote only of a “nuclear generator built in…the city of Dimona”—a nuclear plant which somehow could bring about a “Middle East without war.” Peres, The New Middle East, p. 4. In the index of that book, an entry entitled “nuclear weapons, Israel’s program of” refers the reader to discussion of the Dimona plant on pp. 4-5.
14. As is known, the intelligence community did not foresee the impending war. Peres was the only one who read the map correctly and saw that the maturation of the nuclear option was becoming a casus belli from the point of view of Egypt, and that war was therefore likely to erupt in the near future.
15. Ha’aretz, August 28, 1959.
16. It was thus no coincidence that Yigal Allon, the architect of the famous “Allon plan” for partial annexation of the territories of the West Bank, was the leading supporter of the preventive war theory. He viewed the Jordan Valley and the eastern slopes of the Samarian mountain range as a natural goal to be pursued by Israel, a territorial ambition for adjusting the eastern border. See Zaki Shalom, David Ben-Gurion, The State of Israel and the Arab World 1949-1956 (S’deh Boker: Ben-Gurion Heritage Center, 1995) p. 221. [Hebrew]
17. Ha’aretz, February 25, 1966.
18. Ne’eman, “Israel in the Nuclear Era,” p. 38.
19. Ha’aretz, April 26, 1968. It seems that, in effect, the Israeli public did not grasp that the very situation it considered a victory, elimination of the threat of Arab siege, in objective military and diplomatic terms was no victory at all. There was no Arab surrender and no peace agreement following the end of the fighting. In other words, the supposed card that would give Israel the winning hand, the territories, turned out not to be as decisive as was imagined.
20. See for example Michael Ben Zohar, Ben-Gurion, (Jerusalem: Keter, 1980), p. 548. [Hebrew]
21. Menachem Begin, “Realistic Fundamentals for National Policy,” in Ha’uma, December 1974, p. 5.
22. He came out with this position when the PLO became a dominant factor in Arab politics, in 1974, following the UN resolution regarding the PLO and Yasser Arafat’s appearance before the General Assembly.
23. Ha’aretz, December 6, 1974.
24. Ha’aretz, July 30, 1982.
25. Ha’aretz Supplement, October 1, 1982.
26. Ha’ir, November 24, 1995; Tzomet Hasharon, November 24, 1995.
27. Peres, The New Middle East, p. 18.
28. Peres, The New Middle East, pp. 61-86.
29. Ha’aretz, April 26, 1968.
30. Peres, The New Middle East, p. 171.
31. Peres, The New Middle East, pp. 168-169.
32. Ha’aretz, December 8, 1967. |
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