Since 1948, Arab countries have used Israel’s presence, and the
“holy cause” of Palestinian exile, as the focus of their foreign
and domestic policies, the spur of their ambitions, and a goad to
one another.
“Palestinian guerrilla raids, first used by Nasser in the 1950s,
had proven a viable means of goring the Israelis while scoring
points in Arab public opinion,” writes Michael B. Oren in Six
Days of War: June, 1967, and the Making of the Modern Middle
East (Oxford University Press, 2002). “Their operations were
cheaply financed and, in face of charges of government collusion,
plausibly denied, especially when mounted from neighboring
countries.”
Ironically, Arab nations owe their very present-day existence to
the presence of what the French ambassador to England famously
called “that s**ty little country.”
Imagine there’s no country, as John Lennon idiotically wrote —
in this case, imagine no Israel. The post-colonial Middle East
breaks into two Arab factions, as it actually did: “progressive”
regimes driven by demagogues and financed by the Soviet Union
allied against “reactionary monarchies,” originally Iraq, Jordan,
Iran, and Saudi Arabia. In reality, of course, all these regimes
are corrupt, rife with violence, factional in-fighting, and subject
to serial assassinations and blundering foreign adventurisms.
Syria, heavy with Soviet armaments, swallows up Lebanon and
Jordan (no more Hashemite monarchy, no more King Hussein, never any
nice beautiful Queen Noor), then turns toward Saudi Arabia. At that
point, Syria has yet another coup, and nobody knows what happens
next. Initially goaded by Syria, Egypt attacks Saudi Arabia (as it
actually did, repeatedly, from its outpost in a
Soviet/Afghanistan-style incursion into Yemen). The House of Saud
falls from the pressure, but Egypt blows itself apart, too, from
sheer internal incompetence and from the military pressures of its
occupation of Yemen. There is an Iran-Iraq War, merely 20 years
earlier than the one that actually did happen. The Shah is deposed
a decade before he actually was. The Soviets achieve a long-desired
southern strategic goal, isolating Turkey, opening a route to the
Indian Ocean and the Eastern Mediterranean.
All this regional violence would take place against a backdrop
of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and against the potential for a
superpower standoff — a potential that underlay every world
development in the 1960s and 1970s. Obviously, the United States
and England could not have stayed out. Russia could not have stayed
out, either.
And guess what? Nobody would ever have heard of “Palestinians.”
The region now so sharply divided between “Palestinians” and
Israelis would have disappeared in the first Syrian rush. The name
“Palestine” would be a remote historical curiosity, like
Prussia.
Indeed, almost all the country boundaries we assume fixed would
not exist — if Israel did not exist. Today, the United States, for
all purposes alone, must contemplate not only a “regime change” in
Iraq, but the potential for reshaping an entire region along some
revolutionary lines. Arabic countries are hanging on by their
fingernails, sustained only by their historic hatred for Jews and
for “the Zionist entity.”
We would like to believe that, in the “war on terror,” we
confront “extreme” elements, that, once dealt with, these
“extremists” would disappear and countries fall back inside their
familiar identities and boundaries.
But it is all of a piece, the hatred, the backwardness, the
lies, and the threat. The Jerusalem Post published a sad,
beautiful, immensely charitable editorial on May 29, noting the
launch of an Israeli spy satellite, the Ofek-5, as sophisticated as
any from the United States, Russia, or China. The Post
took justifiable pride that the satellite was “built entirely in
Israel” and launched on an Israeli rocket. The satellite will
circle the earth every 90 minutes, and is capable of photographing
virtually any spot on earth to a resolution of one meter. Its
existence, as the Post says, “renders a repetition of the
onslaughts attempted in 1948, 1967, and 1973 increasingly
unthinkable.”
“Technology is not a panacea,” the Post concludes, “but
it is a great handicap to be without it. No Arab state can dream of
doing what Israel did this week until the Arab world is politically
and economically transformed. This transformation, as a handful of
mostly Western-based Arab intellectuals have pointed out, has been
blocked by the Arab obsession with Israel. The launching of the
Ofek-5 symbolizes not only Israel’s technological prowess, but how
badly the Arab world needs peace.”
Not only could no Arab state launch such a satellite. No Arab
newspaper could approach the magnificent generosity of that
sentiment.
But, as the editorial notes, the transformation of Arab
countries — to prosperity, modernity, and peace — is “blocked by
(their) obsession with Israel.” That is the conundrum. Without
Israel, they would not exist. Without the obsession, they will
disappear.
