Netanyahu's ModelNetanyahu’s Model of Defeat
By David Isaac
By Bernard J. Shapiro (1994)
Friday, 17 September 2010
Shmuel Katz Blog
“I hope to find a courageous partner as Begin found in Sadat,” said Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on August 30 to Likud party supporters before heading to Washington for the start of “peace talks”. It’s not the first time Netanyahu has invoked the Camp David accords. He seems to hold them up as a model, one which he hopes to emulate. But was the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty a success?
That Netanyahu treats it as one isn’t surprising. The agreement, which was signed 32 years ago this week, was reached by a Likud government and has since entered Likud lore as the party’s greatest accomplishment. Here was a land for peace deal unlike any other, different in that it worked.
A closer look shows the only real difference between that land for peace deal and any other was that the Likud bore responsibility for it. So flimsy was the peace agreement that it contains an appendix permitting Egypt to go to war with Israel if called to do so by other Arab states.
Shmuel Katz had no illusions about the agreement, which he battled before, during and after its consummation. An adviser to then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Shmuel eventually resigned his post after the prime minister’s intention to abandon the Sinai became clear. When Begin then attempted to buy Shmuel off with the high prestige post of UN ambassador, Shmuel refused.
In 1981, Shmuel published “The Hollow Peace,” a scathing first-hand account of Begin’s collapse and his betrayal of long-held principles, (an astonishing phenomenon then, but one which we have grown accustomed to now).
In “The Hollow Peace,” Shmuel wrote:
Israel has agreed to hand over to Egypt its strategic depth, its territorial security belt, and has thereby facilitated possible aggression – from Egypt, from Saudia and from the eastern front. It will thus give up the naval base on the coast of the Red Sea, eleven air fields, of which three – among the most up-to-date in the world – were built specially for strategic defence, and its only independent supply of oil. It will remove all the Jews living in Sinai, from their town of Yamit and the complex of their villages in the north and the cluster of small communities in the south near Sharm-el-Sheikh. As against all these concessions on Israel’s part, Egypt has given up nothing tangible and of the commitments it has undertaken there is not a single one that could not be abrogated within 24 hours.
Even Egyptian President Anwar Sadat couldn’t resist reveling in the one-sidedness of it all, bragging in an October, 1980 New York Times interview: “Poor Menachem, he has his problems … After all, I got back … the Sinai and the Alma oil fields, and what has Menachem got? A piece of paper.”
According to that “piece of paper,” Egypt promised to establish “normal and friendly relations” with Israel. It appeared at first that Egypt was moving in that direction. But once Israel had completed its three-year phased withdrawal from the Sinai, relations ceased. Egypt has honored virtually none of the 50 odd agreements associated with the treaty. Indeed, it has actively flouted them. Just one example is Egypt’s promise to end “the teaching of contempt.” So important was this to the Israeli side that it included the promise “to abstain from hostile propaganda” in the text of the treaty itself.
Today, Egypt is a world center of anti-Semitic propaganda, its newspapers, television shows and magazines are filled with Nazi-style graphics, medieval “blood libel” conspiracies and other wild charges, such as Israel introducing “most of the plagues that afflict agriculture and animal health” and of causing earthquakes in Egypt.
Must the story be told once more of Egypt’s failure to implement any of those agreements – except for those that could be actively violated? For example, any tourist in Egypt who reads Arabic need only pick up a Cairo newspaper or journal to discover that, where vilification of Jews is concerned, Egypt has nothing to learn from the most vicious publications of the German Nazis, adding only its own twist: vilification of the Jewish State. Thus it honors the ban on hostile propaganda proclaimed in that peace treaty.
One may argue that while Netanyahu is wrong to praise the treaty, perhaps he is right about Sadat. We have all at one point been exposed to the storyline of the brave Arab leader who took risks for peace. But the real Sadat differs markedly from the “official” portrait. As Shmuel reveals, Sadat agreed to visit Israel only after he had Begin’s promise to relinquish the Sinai already in his pocket.
Much was made of Sadat’s visit and his speech before the Knesset, but Shmuel writes in “The Hollow Peace”:
Not in a single word did he deviate from the traditional Arab demands. Nor was he sparing in harsh phrases aimed at Israel, again in line with the accepted Arab mythology, such as Israel’s being an aggressor and the source and cause of the conflict. “Between us and you,” he said, “there has been a great high wall, that you have been trying to build up for twenty-five years.” Such being the case, all he was demanding was unconditional surrender.
What also emerges is that Sadat was an anti-Semite in the fullest sense of the term. Shmuel quotes Sadat speaking in a Cairo mosque in 1972 (“Egyptian Intransigence”, May 25, 1979):
“The Jews are a people of plotters,” Sadat said “of deceivers and traitors. They were born to lie and to betray… I promise you that we shall restore them to their previous state. As it is written in the Koran: ‘they are fated to be oppressed and downtrodden’”. After he had visited Jerusalem, after Israel had made her peace offer, Sadat persisted in his anti-Semitic remarks, and they were published in the weekly journal “October” — a regular fountain of vulgar anti-Semitism. His lifelong admiration of Hitler, his continued demonstrative pilgrimages to Berchtesgaden — are all of a piece.
And so here we have Netanyahu’s model statesman, an anti-Semitic admirer of Hitler, and his model agreement – a sham treaty in which Israel gave up something real for promises, which proved hollow once the Arab side had obtained the one tangible asset offered by Israel, in this case 23,000 square miles of territory.
It’s tempting to throw up one’s hands when listening to the rubbish Israel’s supposedly hard-line leader is shoveling. But one thing Shmuel never did was despair. At the very end of “The Hollow Peace,” a book filled with many bitter personal and painful disappointments, Shmuel yet ends optimistically.
The crisis of leadership that now besets Israel will pass. A national leadership worthy of the name will arise. From within the people, from within the ordeal itself, there will grow – and there is surely already growing – a new generation of leaders with the integrity, the prudence and the courage to cope with Israel’s problems, and who will pilot it through the perilous, tempestuous, unruly seas of the contemporary world.
Netanyahu has his models. We have ours.
WILL ISRAEL FALL FOR THE
'MUBARAK GAMBIT' ON THE GOLAN?
The word has gone forth from Jerusalem. Now there is no doubt, despite a multitude of denials. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has already agreed to surrender the whole Golan Heights to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad. It took months of couching, but finally Syrian dictator Hafez Assad has learned to say the word "peace." Does he mean it?
The United State's State Department has announced that once peace is made with Syria, then 18 other Arab countries will make peace with Israel. The pressure to accept a withdrawal will be immense. Golan residents are beginning massive resistance, including hunger strikes and demonstrations. Labor MK Avigdor Kahalani is organizing a faction in the Knesset to resist withdrawal from the Golan. He has tabled a bill to raise the vote necessary for approval of territorial change from a simple majority (61) to 70 Knesset members.
The time has come to clear the smoke and mirrors. There is a significant Israeli dilemma in the negotiating framework with Syria. I call this dilemma: the "Mubarak gambit." After Egyptian dictator Anwar Sadat's death, his successor Hosni Mubarak discovered that Egypt could ignore its peace treaty obligations to Israel with impunity. Sadat had signed over 50 agreements and amendments to the Camp David Accords, which spelled out in great detail normalization of relations with Israel. These included trade, tourism, science, cultural and other attributes of peaceful relations.
The late Menachem Begin, of blessed memory, fully believed that his sacrifice of Sinai, with its air bases and oil, was worth the inauguration of peaceful relations with the most important country in the Arab world.
With every passing year, it became clearer to Mubarak that the Israelis were too timid to protest Egyptian violations. It also became clear that America would continue to supply aid in the billions of dollars to Egypt, despite Egypt's obvious violations of their most solemn commitments to both President Jimmy Carter and Begin.
From this experience Mubarak devised the "Mubarak gambit," which sets out the principle that an Arab country can promise Israel peace and full normalization as a negotiating tactic in order to force an Israeli withdrawal from territory. Then after the territory is recovered, the Arab country can ignore the normalization part of any agreement.
It is such a painless gambit, one would have thought that all of Israel's neighbors would have rushed to use it. In the Arab world, however, symbolism is very important and it took many years before they were ready to use this tactic. Mubarak, first convinced terrorist leader, Yassir Arafat, to try out the "Mubarak gambit." We all know what has happened, including the famous handshake on September 13, 1993. We also know that all of Arafat's promises to the Israelis, including revising the PLO Charter and stopping violence, have not been honored.
Now, after much tutoring, Assad has learned the principle. It has been with great difficulty that he even speaks about peace with Israel. While he is never very clear about his meaning of peace, one thing was clear: he has learned to use the "Mubarak gambit."We will be hearing a lot from him and State Department officials about how he has changed and now "really" wants peace. Don't believe it.
Most of you understand the strategic significance of the Golan Heights so I will concentrate on the other side of the equation. If Syria wants Israel to exchange the Golan for peace, we must ask ourselves the following: (1) Is Syria capable of giving Israel peace? (2) Is peace really possible? (3) Does Syria deserve to get the Golan Heights ? (4) Is the Golan really Israeli territory? (5) What are Syria's true intentions toward Israel?
Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, while very intelligent, is a sociopath with extreme paranoid delusions. His brutal record of killing everyone who disagrees with him or poses even the slightest political threat bears out this analysis. In my opinion, he is incapable of living up to any peace agreement with Israel. Whether peace is possible depends upon your relative propensity to believe in fairy tales. If you believe in the real possibility of achieving utopia or nirvana; and if you believe in the tooth fairy, then peace with Syria is not only possible but desirable.
Any review of Israel's relations with Syria would indicate that the Syrians do not deserve to get the Golan. This point is rarely mentioned but is important. The bloodthirsty behavior of the Syrians, when they controlled the Golan (1948-67), makes me comfortable with depriving them of its return. When the Israeli Defense Forces conquered the Golan, we all vowed never to give it back. Nothing has changed.
Is the Golan really Israeli territory? The Golan was a part of the original League of Nations Mandate at the San Remo Conference in 1920 to Great Britain, for the purpose of establishing the Jewish National Home. In 1921, The British gave Eastern Palestine to Emir Abdullah, who named it Transjordan. Then in 1923, they gave the Golan to the French to become part of the French Mandate of Syria. In both cases, the intent of the League of Nations was violated and the area of the future Jewish state was diminished. Going back even farther, one finds reference to the Golan as an Israelite territory in the Holy Scriptures (Deut. 4:43; Josh. 20:8; I Chron. 5:56). Israeli archaeologists have also found numerous ancient synagogues on the Golan.
My final question is: What is Syria's true intention? The answer can be found in a recent meeting of ten rejectionist Palestinian terrorists groups held in Damascus . They swore with Assad's backing to prevent peace with Israel and to work for its total destruction. Syria is also involved in an unholy alliance with Iran whose aim is to make the Middle East Judenrein (Jew-free).
In conclusion we find Syria incapable of making peace; that peace is not possible now anyway; that the Syrians do not deservethe Golan; that the Golan really belongs to Israel; and that war, not peace, is Syria's true intentions. Assad maybe whispering sweet nothings in Rabin's ear about peace, but we must tell Rabin not to be seduced.
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[This article was published by The Jewish Press (NY) on September 23, 1994, the October 1994 issue of The Caucus Current, and the October 1994 issue of THE MACCABEAN. Mort Zuckerman of US News plagiarized this article in one of his editorials shortly thereafter.]
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