To the Editor:
It is futile to argue with an ideologue, but particularly so when the ideologue is Norman Podhoretz. In “The Tragic Predicament of Benjamin Netanyahu” [December 1996], Mr. Podhoretz argues that the next Arab-Israeli war is imminent because Benjamin Netanyahu is being pressured to return occupied Arab territories under the Oslo accords.
Mr. Podhoretz favors Israel’s retention of all the territories occupied in 1967. Why? Because the Arabs cannot be trusted, and those drooling Israelis such as the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his successor, Shimon Peres, who have supported peace with the Palestinians have only succeeded in setting the stage for the next war.
Under Adolf Hitler, Jews could not be trusted, and the Final Solution was the logical answer to the Jewish problem. Of course, Mr. Podhoretz is not suggesting a similar fate for the Palestinians. His Final Solution is more convoluted. We are told that we should not mess with Netanyahu’s plans for the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights. We should not protest his starvation policies or his declared policy of populating the occupied territories with more Jewish settlers or his policy of creating facts on the ground to make the return of these territories to their legal owners meaningless. The time will certainly come, not for a holocaust but for final expulsion. Netanyahu’s Minister of Infrastructure is on record as favoring such a course.
The rantings of Mr. Podhoretz against Egypt, Jordan, the Arabs, and indeed against the whole world are to be expected from a crypto-fascist thinker who views the Palestinians and Arabs as subhumans with no rights. But this type of thinking proved to be the undoing of fascism.
Abdelaleem I. El-Abyad
Minister and Head of
Office, Press and
Information Bureau
Embassy of the Arab Republic
of Egypt
Washington, D.C.
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To the Editor:
In his article, Norman Podhoretz writes that I was “forced to concede” that the opening of the archeological tunnel in Jerusalem by the Israelis in September 1996 could be justified from an archeological, touristic, and spiritual viewpoint and that it threatened no Muslim religious sites.
Nothing of the sort. I was not “forced” at all. And I was not “conced[ing]” anything. I was simply trying to write a balanced piece. Would Mr. Podhoretz say that I was “forced to concede,” as I wrote in the same piece, that “[Arafat] is incompetent, duplicitous, and corrupt. He breaks agreements. He tortures his own people and denies them basic rights”?
Mr. Podhoretz paints in black and white; I, in shades of gray. Just because he does not like my conclusion (“[Netanyahu] is very clever, but he has no judgment”), Mr. Podhoretz refers to “the likes of Shanks” and to my criticisms of Netanyahu in opening a new exit to the tunnel as simply a “compendium of the conventional wisdom and politically-correct interpretation of the crisis.”
Mr. Podhoretz would be far more effective if he did not regard everyone who disagrees with him as a knave or a fool.
One question he does not face: why were so many Israelis and so many American Jews and all the commentators that he cites in his article so critical of Netanyahu’s opening of the tunnel exit? Are we all part of an anti-Zionist conspiracy? Are we all completely lacking in judgment?
In the Washington Post op-ed piece (reprinted in the International Herald Tribune) from which Mr. Podhoretz quotes, I refer to the continued closure of the border, preventing Palestinian workers from working in Israel, as a “needless economic restriction” imposed “under the guise of security needs.” Mr. Podhoretz is incredulous that I could question the security basis of closure. The fact is that closure is generally recognized as an economic lever rather than a security measure. As the Jerusalem Post (hardly a Peace-Nownik publication) observed, “It is hard to think of a single case in recent times of a Palestinian worker with a permit committing a terrorist act.”
Moreover, the border between the West Bank and Israel is inevitably porous: it is over 300 miles long; conservative estimates are that between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinian workers cross illegally every day. Even during the intifada, men over thirty-five with wives and children and no previous record were not likely to be terrorists: such people quite clearly do not fit the terrorist profile, and keeping them out serves no security purpose.
Now to Hebron, about which I have written that providing security to the Jews living there while at the same time redeploying Israeli troops is like squaring the circle. No less a hawk than Hillel Halkin, writing in the generally hard-line Forward, has criticized Netanyahu for demanding the right of “hot pursuit.” Such a right, he says, is, in the Hebron situation, “all but meaningless. . . . [I]t has no military value.” Terrorists do not make their moves in view of Israeli soldiers. The right of hot pursuit, Halkin concludes, is merely a “symbol,” and a “poorly chosen” one at that.
The point is that Netanyahu has not conducted himself well since his election, even in the view of many of his supporters. This does not make demons or traitors out of those of us who say so.
Hershel Shanks
Editor, Moment
Washington, D.C.
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To the Editor:
It eludes me why Norman Podhoretz insists on bringing up the canard of the “Jewish” electoral majority in an ostensibly strategic and political analysis of Israel’s current situation.
As a campus activist in the early 1980’s, I frequently found myself in agreement with neoconservative foreign-policy positions—despite my social-democratic convictions—because I understood them to have derived from a fundamental commitment to democratic values. Has the meaning of democracy undergone a miraculous transmutation? Netanyahu himself unabashedly courted the Arab vote during the elections whenever the opportunity arose. Presumably he did not warn them in advance that their votes counted for less than those of Jews.
For the past ten years, as an Israeli citizen and soldier, I have watched with concern the evolving delegitimation of Israeli Arabs by a small but growing minority on the Right. It was manifest in the elevation of Rehavam Zeevi, whose party advocates the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs, to a cabinet post in the Shamir government. It was manifest in the ugly campaign of defamation carried out against Yitzhak Rabin, claiming that he had no “mandate” to negotiate on the basis of “Arab votes.” It was manifest in statements by Ariel Sharon that Arabs should not vote on questions of strategic importance to the country. It was manifest in the racist slogans which sullied the election campaign, such as “Bibi or [Ahmed] Tibi,” or “The Arabs are with Peres.” It has also been manifest in the actions of Baruch Goldstein, Noam Friedman, Ami Popper, Yigal Amir, and a litany of other Jewish terrorists who thrive in an atmosphere charged with xenophobia and hate.
The creeping delegitimation, and the concomitant dehumanization, of 20 percent of Israel’s citizenry is part of the price we Israelis are paying for our generation-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This goes far to explain why opponents of the “Greater Israel” concept—erroneously defined, even by Mr. Podhoretz, as the Left—range over Israel’s entire political spectrum, united only in their conviction that continued Israeli rule over two million Palestinians constitutes a dangerous strategic liability to Israeli society. Many an army reservist will attest to the brutalizing effects of daily occupation duty, and acknowledge that scenes such as the televised humiliation of Arabs near Ramallah by Israeli border police are far more widespread than is generally reported.
Mr. Podhoretz’s strategic observations are a legitimate contribution. But why, for heaven’s sake, must he provide a mouthpiece for the racist expletives excreted by the lunatic fringe of Israel’s political culture?
Sam Shube
Ashdod, Israel
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s assessment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s predicament hits the nail on the head. Netanyahu now has no choice but to capitulate on most points, and this because of the seriously weakened position the previous government put Israel into. What Mr. Podhoretz does not stress enough, however, is the viciousness of the Left’s attacks on the new Prime Minister. Blatantly and cynically, Israel’s leftist Knesset members, news media, businessmen, and even entertainers gave no quarter in what began to look like a conspiracy to bring Netanyahu down and return a leftist government, with no thought for justice or even long-range planning to benefit the country. Always (in my view) short-sighted, leftist Israelis (and not only they) seemed to have no desire to work together for the good of the country’s future. They have one goal: to cause the fall, by any ugly means available, of the country’s democratically elected government.
Marilyn Magen
Tel Aviv, Israel
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To the Editor:
Like Norman Podhoretz, I too have felt that I should have voted for Shimon Peres so that history would have no choice but to lay blame for the upcoming war on the right person. I have even thought that Netanyahu ought to bring Peres into the coalition so as to force him to take some responsibility for what he has wrought. However, living in Israel, I feel safer with Netanyahu at the helm. I am convinced that the Prime Minister is on the right course in following the signed agreements without using the Peres strategy of tactical appeasement. I only hope that Netanyahu has the courage to change his aptly stated “tragic predicament” into a strategic opportunity.
Ira Slomowitz
Kfar Saba, Israel
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To the Editor:
I believe, sadly, that Norman Podhoretz’s analyses, starting with his “Israel: A Lamentation from the Future” [March 1989], have been consistently correct. In his latest article, however, I think that he is too lenient with Benjamin Netanyahu. There were two points at which Netanyahu could understandably and justifiably have stopped the Oslo process. The first was in September, when the PLO used Israeli guns to kill Israeli soldiers; the second was when the PLO refused to return the killers of the Tzur family. I really think that as soon as Netanyahu took office he should have called a moratorium until the PLO met all its previous commitments. However, I have to assume that he would then have been accused of all kinds of things by the rest of the world. But the two items I just mentioned would, I believe, have been understood.
As a member of the central committee of Israel’s National Religious party who campaigned hard for Netanyahu’s election, I think I can say with a certain amount of assurance that he fooled us. It was not a mistake to vote for him, since the other option was Peres and my opinion of him matches that of Mr. Podhoretz. But I now believe that he does not have the strength of character required to stand up for the things he believes in. And in the final analysis that is what counts.
No matter how much territory Israel gives up to Arafat and his terrorists, their ultimate goal remains the same. The question that arises is which particular scenario will bring the inevitable war. Mr. Podhoretz mentions several, but I would like to suggest additional possibilities, all of which could easily lead to an all-out war with the other Arab nations joining in.
- The PLO eventually declares a state and, actively supported by the other Arab states, starts a war with Israel.
- Israel allows the PLO to declare a state but disagrees with some other demand, such as having East Jerusalem as its capital or the return of Arab refugees from the wars of 1948 and 1967 to Israel. This could trigger a mini-war like the one that occurred when the Hasmonean tunnel was opened in Jerusalem, which would then escalate.
- At some point, either before or after the declaration of a PLO state, the various terrorist factions—Hamas, Habash, Ahmed Jibril, George Hawatmah, etc.—begin internecine warfare and turn the areas under PLO control into a second Lebanon. Israel would have to step in, since it could not allow such a state to exist on its borders.
- PLO-controlled territory, either before or after the declaration of a state, becomes the base for continuous terrorist attacks against Israel. This would not be tolerated by any Israeli government and Israel would be forced to stop the terrorism.
- Arafat is assassinated and some other terrorist group takes over. This could develop into another version of Item 4 above. A variation is the assassination or death of King Hussein and the breakdown of the Hashemite regime in Jordan. Then the whole area would blow up, but the one sure thing is that Israel would be the target of one or all or a combination of Arab states and by then it would have already given up much of the strategic territory.
Take your choice of any of the above. They all lead to the same conclusion: that we are headed toward a war for our very existence. One hopes we will win it but, considering the nature of weaponry today compared with 1967, the loss of life may be very large.
I write all this with sadness, but I cannot escape feeling that what I describe is the reality. I hope and pray that my family, friends, and the people of Israel survive with minimal damage. But I fear that the conflict is unavoidable and the results will depend on many things, not the least of which is our spirit and our belief in the righteousness of our cause. About that, I have no doubts.
Jay Shapiro
Ginot Shomron, Israel
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s excellent analysis, although correct in every particular, manages to lose the main point. As Mr. Podhoretz makes clear, the Arabs universally regard the “peace process” as a one-sided process of Israeli surrender. Further, as Arafat demonstrated in his September mini-war against Israel, the Arabs are prepared to use violence whenever they feel the surrender is not going fast enough.
By endorsing “Oslo,” Netanyahu has boarded the same train to destruction started by Rabin and Peres. What he must do is stop the “peace process” cold. Of course, the price for stopping is to be universally accused of being against peace. This is Netanyahu’s true predicament: the salvation of Israel depends on an apparent renunciation of peace.
A true peace can become possible only after the Arabs realize that their dream of some day destroying Israel is hopeless and must be abandoned.
Alexander Firestone
Ames, Iowa
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To the Editor:
I recently made a brief visit to Israel. With relatives on both sides of the political spectrum, I had hoped to find out whether they shared any common ground. Upon my return, scrutinizing accumulated newspapers and magazines, comparing what I had heard and seen with what I was reading, I was appalled at the amount of misinformation. Personal bias, reliance on one-sided sources, mainly Palestinian or of the extreme Left, form the core of reporting on Israel. In his article, Norman Podhoretz proves that the hostile media coverage continues unabated.
Reports in both the mainstream media and the Jewish press might lead one to believe that in Israel people are afraid to walk the streets, that Orthodox and secular Israelis are in constant conflict, that no Arabs are visible—one gets an image of a country about to fall apart. Yet I saw prosperous-looking folks, Orthodox, secular, and fezzed gentlemen talking seriously to one another. I saw overcrowded shopping centers, women dressed in the latest fashions. In short: I saw a lively country.
The timely, well-informed, but frightening article by Mr. Podhoretz further restored the balance. He is on firm ground when he describes Arab hatred toward Israel, yet in my conversations with Israelis, I did not discern any apprehension of impending war. People on both the Right and Left told me that the problems are solvable. They also agreed, however, that neither the “peaceniks” nor their opponents are blind to Arab intentions. I returned home believing that Netanyahu will succeed, and that Israelis and not Americans will make the final decisions on peace.
Samuel L. Tennenbaum
West Orange, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
As COMMENTARY readers have come to expect, Norman Podhoretz has offered a logical and cogent analysis of the current state of the Arab-Israeli conflict in “The Tragic Predicament of Benjamin Netanyahu.” Unfortunately, I too believe that the Middle East is heading toward another war, one that, for the first time since 1948, all of Israel’s neighbors could choose to join.
Like Mr. Podhoretz, I pray that we both are wrong. But contributing to my own pessimism is a set of factors that he did not address. If there is a war, it might be the first that Israel will be forced to fight without the support of the majority of the Jewish community in the Diaspora and particularly in the United States.
I base this prediction on disturbing trends that I have noticed in Jewish communal life within the last decade or so. When I started becoming interested in Jewish communal affairs, individuals who blamed Israel for the absence of peace were kept on the margins of the Jewish community. No mainstream Jewish organization would have ever given them a platform. Today, such people regularly speak from synagogue pulpits and at events sponsored by Federations and other mainstream Jewish organizations. Furthermore, the failure of the Jewish community to come to Israel’s defense after the tunnel fiasco would have been unthinkable just twenty years ago.
How did these changes come about? I think that one factor more than others is responsible. Like other institutions in society, Judaism has been “dumbeddown.” That is, the standards for what constitutes adequate Jewish literacy have declined significantly. Within the near future, the leadership roles of major Jewish organizations will be assumed by people whose view of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been shaped more by CNN and the New York Times than by Hebrew schools or Zionist youth groups. In a few years, leadership will pass to individuals who, unlike me, have no personal memory of the fear that gripped world Jewry in the immediate weeks before the Six-Day War, to say nothing of the events that led to the creation of Israel.
All this leads me to believe that any Israeli government which will refuse to appease Arab tyrants in the name of advancing “peace” will find American Jews giving it only lukewarm support. It is even possible that leaders of prominent Jewish organizations may in some future crisis publicly side with Israel’s adversaries.
American Jews may have only limited influence in galvanizing their government’s support for a safe and secure Israel. On the other hand, the American government can hardly be expected to have concern for Israel’s legitimate security interests if American Jews are not acting as strong advocates for them.
Martin S. Krossel
Mamaroneck, New York
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
I thank Minister El-Abyad for confirming with his almost ludicrously virulent rhetoric what I said in my article—that even after all these years of living under the regime of a peace treaty with Israel, the Egyptians still show “little sign of diminished animosity toward the Jewish state,” and that much the same is true of the rest of the Arab world. This judgment, writes Mr. El-Abyad, is only “to be expected from a crypto-fascist” like me. But is Fouad Ajami, who comes up with an assessment very similar to mine, a crypto-fascist too? In a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report, the Lebanese-born Ajami, now a scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of a number of definitive works about the Middle East, flatly states that “There has been no discernible change in the Arab attitudes toward Israel,” and goes on as follows:
The great refusal persists . . . in that “Arab street” of ordinary men and women, among the intellectuals and the writers, and in the professional syndicates. The force of this refusal can be seen in the press of the governments and of the oppositionists, among the secularists and the Islamists alike, in countries that have concluded diplomatic agreements with Israel and those that haven’t.
This assessment is confirmed by no less fervent a supporter of Palestinian statehood than the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In a report from Casablanca, Friedman acknowledges that “Up to now the Arab intellectual Left, as well as the unions of Arab doctors, lawyers, and writers, have refused to reconcile themselves to Israel, even though their regimes have.” But what is most significant about Friedman’s piece is that it focuses on Morocco, supposedly the least hostile to Israel of those regimes:
I just participated in a roundtable discussion with 50 Moroccan professors . . . , and I heard attacks on Israel that were so bitter I finally said to them: “I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp and woken up at an Arab League meeting in 1960.”
According to Ajami, the great refusal “remains fiercest in Egypt,” where opposition to Israel “has become part of the ethos and the ideology of the state” as well as of “the gatekeepers of Egyptian culture [who] remain unalterably opposed to normal traffic with Israel.” But it would seem from Friedman’s account that things are just as bad even in Morocco.
Minister El-Abyad’s letter can thus be taken as representative of prevailing sentiment in the Arab world in general and Egypt in particular. It can perhaps also be taken as a demonstration that chutzpah, often considered a distinctively Jewish trait, may now be even more characteristic of Arabs. For this official of a country whose controlled press is full of cartoons reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany in their anti-Semitic ugliness, and whose capital has become a leading center for the publication and distribution of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has the gall to compare me to the Nazis.
The Israelis as the Nazis and the Palestinians as the Jews: this disgusting inversion has long been a staple of Arab propaganda, and Minister El-Abyad’s continued reliance on it is yet another sign that the “peace process” has failed to work a change of heart in the Arab world. Although he does not come right out and denounce Prime Minister Netanyahu as a Nazi (that honor is reserved for me), he slyly associates Netanyahu with the “convoluted” Final Solution for the Palestinians I allegedly wish to see. Netanyahu, he declares, is planning to hold onto “the Palestinian territories,” from which he means to expel the Palestinians; he also intends to maintain control over the Golan Heights.
Well, if Netanyahu harbors any such plans, he has a peculiar way of implementing them. For not only has he withdrawn from Hebron since Minister El-Abyad’s letter was written, and not only is he preparing further withdrawals from the West Bank, and not only has he refused to build new settlements there, and not only has he begun hinting that he is now ready to accept a Palestinian state, but he has also been pressing to reopen negotiations based on an exchange of the Golan Heights for a peace treaty with Syria.
All this exposes Minister El-Abyad’s letter as a tissue of hysterical lies. And it also makes Hershel Shanks’s piece on the little war Arafat started over the opening of the tunnel last September look even more like a “compendium of the conventional wisdom and politically-correct interpretation of the crisis” than it did then. Indeed, so completely have subsequent events borne out my arguments against that interpretation that Mr. Shanks’s complacent restatement of it now sounds positively silly.
Thus his lucubrations over Hebron matter even less now than they did before the agreement on Israeli withdrawal was reached—an agreement that he would have known was in the works had he not been so eager to participate in the worldwide gang-up on Netanyahu. The same eagerness accounts for his carry-on over “closure,” or what Minister El-Abyad, who agrees with him on this issue, calls Netanyahu’s “starvation policies.” Whatever the merits of closure, Mr. Shanks conveniently continues to forget that it was Shimon Peres, not Netanyahu, who closed the borders to Palestinian workers from the territories. Furthermore, as I also pointed out in my article, Netanyahu had already begun opening them at the time Mr. Shanks joined the jackals snapping at his heels (if I may borrow from the title of an article Daniel P. Moynihan once wrote for COMMENTARY about the UN and Israel). This, too, Mr. Shanks persists in ignoring.
Sam Shube thinks that in stressing the Jewish vote in my analysis of Netanyahu’s victory in the last election I was being undemocratic and racist. Since I cannot believe that he agrees with the infamous UN resolution condemning Zionism (that is, the right of Jews to self-determination in a Jewish state) as a form of racism, I will refrain from engaging him on the level of principle and confine my response to the level of psephology.
On that level, then, it was obvious that the Arab citizens of Israel overwhelmingly backed the policies of Rabin and then Peres (and in itself alone the fact that they have the vote disposes of the canard that Israel is undemocratic); the only question concerned the sentiments of the Jewish majority. Supporters of the “peace process” assured us that most Israeli Jews approved of Oslo; others said that they were split right down the middle; but no one predicted that they would go by a large margin for Netanyahu. Hence when they did, it told us something significant about the Israeli political climate that we did not know before. I fail to understand why it was racist of me or anyone else to highlight this important reality.
Mr. Shube, like many other people both in Israel and in the world at large, is convinced “that continued Israeli rule over two million Palestinians constitutes a dangerous strategic liability to Israeli society.” Well, all these people can relax, since contrary to what they expected, Israel under Netanyahu is well on the way to divesting itself of any such liability. Already all but about 30,000 of those two million Palestinians are being governed by the Palestinian Authority, and given the direction in which Netanyahu is now moving, they will soon be living in a state of their own. At that point we will find out whether Mr. Shube and practically everyone else in the world are right in their belief that this is the road to peace as against those few of us who cannot help seeing it as the prelude to a major war.
Jay Shapiro and Alexander Firestone are among those few, but they contend that Netanyahu could have put a halt to Oslo when he first came into office. I still find it hard, however, to imagine how he could have done this without bringing the world down on his head and losing the support of the American government and even the American Jewish community (about whose current attitudes toward Israel Martin S. Krossel is even more pessimistic than I am). There was simply no way Netanyahu could have stopped or derailed the train that Rabin and Peres had sent speeding full-throttle down the tracks. Nor can I imagine anything he might do now to keep that train from crashing into the terminus of a major war. I sketched out two scenarios of how such a war might break out. Mr. Shapiro adds three more and, as he says, “Take your choice.”
Even so, Marilyn Magen, Ira Slomowitz, and Samuel L. Tennenbaum, despite their respective disappointments with Netanyahu, still prefer him to his opponents on the Left and still feel safer with him than they did with Peres. I do too, mainly because Netanyahu has no illusions about the state of mind in the Arab world and is therefore putting a greater emphasis on military preparedness (by, among other things, increasing the defense budget) than a reelected Peres, with visions of a “new Middle East” dancing in his eyes, could have been expected to do. Alas, under the circumstances so vividly described by Fouad Ajami, strengthening Israel’s defenses is not likely to deter war, but it can at least ensure that, when war comes, Israel will be ready to fight and in a better position to win.
Having repeated all that once again, let me also once again (this time joining with Mr. Shapiro) pray that my analysis is wrong.
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