Luttwak:
Bad newspaper headlines aside, it’s been a
pretty good century for the Zionists.
In
1912, David Ben Gurion moved to Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, to
study law at Istanbul University. The land of Israel had been under Ottoman
rule for centuries, and the only way the Jews could grow their villages and
towns, family by family, house by house, was to be accepted as loyal Ottoman
subjects.
Two
years later, when the World War broke out, Ben Gurion recruited 40 fellow Jews
into a militia to serve the empire. Given the strategic situation, it was the
only intelligent choice: The Ottoman Empire had persisted for centuries as its
declining military strength was perfectly offset by increasing diplomatic
support—by 1912, it was backed by both the British and the German empires, a
double assurance of its long-term survival. That is why Ben Gurion was studying
Turkish and the law, confident in the expectation that in 10 or 20 years he
would master Ottoman political complexities to attain the rank and seniority of
an ethnic leader for the thousands of Jews who were arriving each year.
But Ben
Gurion’s strenuous efforts were wasted. Instead of enduring for several more
centuries, in a mere six years the Ottoman Empire went poof! Just like that.
Many
things changed in the ensuing confusion of World War I and its disordered
aftermath—but not the determination of the Jews to return to their ancestral
land to grow their villages and towns family by family, house by house. With
the Ottoman Empire but a memory, from Sept. 29, 1923 on, it was the British who
officially ruled the land.
Managing
relations with the Ottomans had been fraught with complexities—aside from their
ambivalence toward the immigration of Jews, even the language that Ben Gurion
had to study was no mere street Turkish but the complicated Persian-Arabic-Turkic
mixture of the official imperial language. With the British, however, matters
were even more complicated. Instead of straightforward colonial rule, the
British governed as the “Mandatory Power” under the League of Nations, forcing
the handful of emerging Jewish leaders to contend with Foreign Office officials
whose taste for intrigue was only exceeded by their distaste for Jews, while
also trying to fend off other League of Nations powers. The French acquired a
Mandate of their own over neighboring Syria, from which they soon carved out
what is now Lebanon, but they also demanded privileges in Jerusalem especially,
and were anything but sympathetic to Jewish settlement. The Italians were much
nicer of course but to no avail after 1926, when Mussolini ended the quarrel
between king and pope, and Italian officials started to serve the Vatican,
whose prelates viewed the return of the Jews with outright alarm, as if it
undermined the very legitimacy of their own church, which in a way it did. The alliance
between Arab rejectionists—violent ones definitely included—and the Franciscan
“custodians” who represented Vatican interests started already then, generating
another layer of complexity that the Jewish leaders had to deal with.
In
order to be able to grow Jewish villages and towns, family by family, house by
house, the Jewish communal leaders—themselves still callow youngsters—had to
outmaneuver highly experienced British officials, sophisticated European
diplomats, and especially relentless prelates. Given all this, Ben Gurion’s
20-year timetable to understand and overcome Ottoman imperial complexities was
definitely optimistic when it came to the Mandate. But just when he and his
colleagues had finally learned how to avoid its traps, on May 15, 1948, British
rule went poof!
By
then, the newly minted Israeli state was engulfed in war, not least with the
British-officered Arab Legion. And in spite of President Harry S. Truman’s
instant recognition, Israel was also at war with the U.S. Department of State,
for its officials were relentless in denying arms and ammunition to the
beleaguered Jewish forces who were fighting on five fronts. At the time, there
were huge unwanted inventories of armored vehicles, artillery, personal weapons,
and combat aircraft in U.S. military depots across Europe and the world. But
the same officials who had gone to inordinate lengths to deny immigration visas
to Jews desperate to escape the Nazis were equally assiduous in denying any
military supplies whatever to Israel, on the poisonous theory that more weapons
would only add to the fighting and the suffering—blithely ignoring the
resulting imbalance with Arab military forces already equipped. Moreover, in an
excess of zeal, the U.S. State Department used the United States’
then-overwhelming influence to persuade other countries as well to deny weapons
to the Jews. The fledgling CIA joined the British Secret Intelligence Service
in trying to intercept pathetic shipments of ancient cannons from Mexico, worn-out
rifles from Italy, and others such purchased by desperate envoys. In the end,
it was only by Stalin’s will, for his own anti-British ends, that the Jews were
able to buy in Czechoslovakia the vast majority of the weapons with which they
won the war, thereby being able to keep growing their villages and towns and
cities family by family, house by house.
U.S.
policy toward Israel did not change even after the fighting ended in
1949—indeed the sale of Canadian-made F-86 jet fighters to the Israeli air force
was prohibited as late as 1956. But by then Israel had found an all-round ally
in France, so that its originally Polish-and Russian-speaking leaders who had
taught themselves Hebrew, who had once striven to study Ottoman Turkish before
having to learn Mandatory English instead, now found themselves struggling to
learn French. They also had to understand the peculiar but far more important
complexities of French foreign and defense policies, which were entirely
incompatible: French diplomats wanted to woo the Arabs by opposing Israel,
while French soldiers wanted to defeat the Arabs by befriending Israel. Given
Israeli dependence on shipments of French jet fighters and much else, Ben
Gurion and his juniors, notably Shimon Peres (still hard at work 60 years
later!), made every effort to immerse themselves in French politics, while
reserving their principal energies to grow Israel’s villages and towns and
cities family by family, house by house.
It was
not until 1967, which witnessed the splendid performance of French Mirage fighter-bombers in what became
known as the Six Day War, that Israel’s leaders finally became confident in
their much-valued alliance with France. But in the May 1967 prewar crisis
Charles De Gaulle replied with a sinister threat when asked for his support,
and in his infamous press conference of Nov. 27, 1967 contrived to both
compliment and damn the Jews—“a
self-assured elite people and domineering”— and Israel, “which had started a
war on a pretext,” i.e., the Egyptian army massed in Sinai. With that an
exceptionally broad, exceptionally close alliance abruptly and entirely
unexpectedly went poof!
By then
Israel faced a new and most formidable strategic opponent in the Soviet Union.
Reacting to the humiliation inflicted on their Arab allies and by extension on
Soviet weapons and Soviet military craft, the rulers of the world’s largest
state decided to direct their power against one of the smallest. So, they cut
diplomatic relations with Israel and forced their Warsaw Pact allies to do the
same. (Romania’s refusal was its declaration of independence.) They unleashed
the then still very influential Communist and “fellow traveler” propaganda
networks to demonize Israel and Zionism and sent weapons and trainers to Egypt,
Syria, and Iraq in wholly unprecedented numbers: armored vehicles by the
thousand, jet fighters by the hundreds, along with all manner of military
supplies and thousands of instructors.
All
this inflicted much damage on Israel. Instead of being able to reduce military
spending in the aftermath of its great victories of June 1967, Israel had to
double spending to ruinous levels to try to offset the Soviet-supplied growth
of Arab military forces. At the same time, Moscow-directed propaganda turned
much of European and Latin American opinion against Israel, increasing its
political isolation, which was further compounded when the French betrayal was
not offset by American support. As of June 1967, the United States had not
delivered a single combat aircraft, armored vehicle, or war vessel to Israel.
(In June 1966, though, after years of entreaties, 48 A-4s, the smallest and
least advanced U.S. combat aircraft, were promised—but they would not arrive
until 1968.)
In the
wake of its historic June 1967 victory, therefore, Israel found itself facing
the total hostility of both the Soviet bloc with its sympathizers world-wide,
and the Islamic bloc with its camp followers. The Chinese and Indians were also
unfriendly. It was 3 billion against not quite 3 million.
But
Israel’s leaders and citizens were not intimidated by 1,000-to-1 ratios and
were not lacking in tenacity—they continued to grow Israel’s villages, towns
and cities family by family, house by house—within the 1967 lines, and beyond
them, too.
Their
serene confidence was soon justified. Faced with the massive Soviet military
investment in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, even the U.S. State Department (if not the
CIA, hostile till now) came to accept that American national interests mandated
counterveiling support for Israel in order to deny a strategic victory to the
Soviet Union. It took time for U.S. military supplies to arrive, but arrive
they did, increasing over time in quantity and quality, albeit in fits and
starts as bureaucratic opposition persisted.
Moreover,
the smashing victory of June 1967 had other positive consequences for Israel’s
global position. Though mostly invisible at the time, they were in part
significantly helpful, and in part not less than utterly momentous. In the
former category was the growth of military-industrial trade with ambitious
players who were properly impressed by Israel’s war-winning talents. Among
them, the Shah of Iran had the deepest purse, the longest shopping list, and a
particular willingness to invest in co-development; that allowed Israel to
produce weapons that the United States would not supply. The Israeli alliance
with the Shah was always problematic and hardly central—Israel’s leaders were
not under pressure to learn Persian (though it was spoken with classical
over-perfection by Foreign Minister Abba Eban), yet it absorbed much
well-rewarded efforts, until it went poof!
in 1979 with the shah’s overthrow by the ayatollahs.
***
By
then, the other and even less visible consequence of the 1967 victory had
become visible. For many American Jews previously untouched by Zionist passion,
now was the time to join a winning team; for the Jews of the Soviet Union
Israel’s victory awakened the will to liberate themselves from fear, to demand
the right to emigrate in order to live as Jews. Of the 80-odd nationalities of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Jews were the most vulnerable
simply because they were the most dispersed—that, in addition to officially
despised, unofficially promoted anti-Semitism. Yet it was the Jews and not tens
of millions of Ukrainians or Uzbeks who stood in Red Square right in front of
the Kremlin to demand the right to emigrate. When they were swiftly arrested,
the authorities were no doubt sure that it was the end of the madness. But it
was only the beginning, in a movement that kept growing despite persecution,
prosecution, and imprisonment.
In the
meantime, Israel was trying to cope with Soviet power by every means possible,
including the famous July 30, 1970, episode of direct combat, in which the
best fighter-pilots on each side fought it out over Egypt, with five jets shot
down, none of them Israeli. Again, Israel’s resistance to Soviet intimidation
had other consequences, including the encouragement of other kinds of courage.
Communist intellectual hegemony—by then an anti-Zionist hegemony—in France,
Italy, and beyond was breached by the “new philosophers,” Jean-Marie Benoist,
Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksman, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy —a
fact that was hardly noticed at the time but would soon help to dismantle the
entire Soviet support system among intellectual “fellow-travelers” that had
once operated globally, lately against Israel (e.g., to secure a prestigious
New York publication for the Stalinist hack Maxime Rodinson). That of the “new
philosophers” several of the most prominent were Jews was no doubt a mere
coincidence, as was the post-1967 timing of their intellectual revolt. Yes or
no, it too was a factor in the collapse of Soviet ideology and Communist Party
morale that would transform Israel’s external environment when the USSR and the
entire Soviet bloc went poof!
One
immediate consequence of Gorbachev’s liberalization that preceded the final
collapse was that the growth of Israel’s villages, towns and cities, family by
family, house by house, hugely accelerated as ex-Soviet Jews arrived from Alma
Ata, Zlatoust, and hundreds of places in between, inaugurating a statistical
miracle: Jews kept leaving the former Soviet lands but the number that remained
in their Jewish communities did not decline anywhere near in proportion, as
more and more ex-disaffiliated Jews and newly affiliated semi-Jews kept joining
up, in a process that continues still.
Back in
the 1980s, when it was not yet known that the Soviet Union would collapse,
Israel still faced the elemental military threat of much more populous Arab
states with very large standing armies, notably Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. When it
came to air power, Arab numbers mattered less because of the phenomenal
advantage of Israeli piloting and air command skills, but in ground combat
there are no 60-to-zero kill ratios, and even if 100 battle tanks can resist
1,000 (it happened on the Golan Heights Oct. 6-9, 1973) they could not resist
3,000. The Israelis therefore had to make an extraordinary effort to man and
equip as many armored divisions as the U.S. Army (!), to be able to contain a
simultaneous Egyptian and Syrian offensive while guarding the Jordanian front.
Even that was not enough to cope with the Iraqi army as well, whose oil-fueled
growth accelerated after 1973. Two Iraqi armored divisions with 30,000 men and
hundreds of tanks had arrived during the October War just when the Israelis
with a supreme effort had repelled the Syrian offensive to attack in turn—and
poorly handled as they were, those fresh Iraqi forces almost tipped the
balance. Iraq’s military growth therefore loomed very large in Israeli war
planning, in which the “eastern front” of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq had become
more dangerous than the “southern front” with Egypt, even before the peace
treaty of March 1979.
But
that reality also turned out to be an evanescent, because just when Iraqi
military strength was reaching really dangerous levels, the fall of the Shah
ignited the tensions that would send the Iraqi army east instead of west—to
invade Iran in September 1980. That started a truly bloody war that would last
until 1988, exhausting Iraq’s armed forces even before they went poof! in the 1991 contest with the
United States and its Gulf War allies. Thus the fall of the Shah, which had
cost Israel an important quasi-ally, ultimately brought down Israel’s most
dangerous enemy, whose strength could have tipped the balance in a repeat of
the 1973 war—still the most probable threat scenario right up until the
outbreak of civil war, when Syria itself went poof!
But of
course the fall of the Shah also brought into existence the present Iranian
threat, whose expressions range from the nuclear and ballistic-missile programs
on which the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent many billions of dollars since
1985, to the funding of Hezbollah in Lebanon and of “Islamic Jihad” in the Gaza
Strip, as well as the support of Nouri Hasan al-Maliki’s intolerant Shia rule
in Iraq, and Assad’s rule in Syria.
Each of
these dire manifestations of the Iranian threat will have its own fate of
course, though it is already clear that Hezbollah will not go poof! because it is deflating with a peeeeeeef…as it over-extends in fighting
vastly superior numbers of Sunnis across Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. The
contention that all Arabs would rally to its cause if only it starts launching
missiles and rockets against Israel was a fair calculation in the past, but
would be pure delusion today, when Hezbollah membership is a capital offense in
Sunni eyes; and the Israeli response might not be as gentle as it was in 2006,
now that the number and quality of Hezbollah projectiles demands an all-out
ground offensive. Nor can it be known if Iran’s regime will also go poof! on its own or if it will require
outside action, even though at this particular time President Obama’s
categorical promise to end Iran’s nuclear-weapon efforts by diplomacy or by air
attack is not universally deemed to be entirely credible.
In the
meantime, however, other and greater things had changed in the world. From
1978, as China started to emerge from the smelly misery of late Mao rule (in
those days Beijing had hand-pulled “night soil” carts instead of sewers), its
earliest military purchases were from Israel, which could best upgrade China’s
Soviet-pattern tanks as it had upgraded its own captured Soviet tanks. Long
before the advent of formal diplomatic relations in 1992, China’s rulers had
replaced the pre-1976 nullity with a widening range of trade and cooperative
ventures that were only limited years later by U.S.-imposed prohibitions on
military sales. These restrictions did not apply to Israel’s relations with India, which extend from the mass tourism of post-army backpackers and all
manner of commerce—Mumbay’s Hindu merchants now include Yiddish-speaking
diamond traders—to joint projects in the most sensitive of military spheres. In
some cases, moreover, Israel is engaged in tri-lateral ventures with Russia as
well, as in one of the most ambitious of all Israeli military ventures, the
Phalcon radar and command aircraft, which is an Ilyushin-76 in the version sold
to India. That in turn is a very small part of the full range of
Israeli-Russian and ex-Soviet area relations, whose significance is perhaps
best summarized by the abundance of non-stop flights from Tel Aviv to Russian
and ex-Soviet airports, 39 of them at present, as opposed to the 5 non-stop
flights to U.S. airports (albeit with much larger aircraft).
All of
the above are merely disjointed reflections of a veritable transformation of
Israel’s position in a transformed world. After 1967, when the U.S. State
Department and U.S. Joint Chiefs, compelled by the Soviet engagement with
Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, reluctantly accepted the necessity of supplying and
supporting Israel, their spokesmen missed no occasion to remind Israeli
diplomats and soldiers that they were entirely dependent on the United States,
for it alone stood between Israel and complete isolation. That was true enough,
because in those years China, India, and the entire Soviet bloc were aligned
with the Islamic countries, while even the two key U.S. allies, the United
Kingdom and Japan, went out of their way to minimize relations with Israel. Now
the situation has been almost entirely reversed across the globe, so much so
that even among the Islamic countries only Iran and a few of the most lethargic
and peripheral still refuse all dealings with Israel.
Looking
back on the vast, abrupt, unpredicted, and amazingly rapid transformations of
the world in which the Zionist project advanced over the last 100 years, it is
perfectly evident that the importance of “geopolitical realities” and “Great
Power Politics,” and of the political preferences and Middle East priorities of
the mighty of the earth—sultans, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, and
Popes—were all of them very greatly overrated, at every remove, when compared
to the growth of Israel’s villages, towns and cities, family by family, house
by house.
