Opportunities for peace are missing, not being missed

Moshe Sharett

Clever people counsel never to waste a good crisis. In the US, Europe, and the broader international community, Jerusalem is told not to miss the prospect of peace that a postwar Gaza might bring.

There is an entire literature, spanning the past 75 years, on missed opportunities for peace between Israel and the Arabs. Among the most sound is Prof. Elie Podeh’s Chances for Peace – Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

I am particularly interested in the 1950s and 1960s because I was too young then to follow events based on sound knowledge and in real time.

Scholars who research “missed opportunities” during the 1950s tend to examine the role of Moshe Sharett, who was born in Ukraine in 1894 and died in 1965. Besides his de facto role as foreign affairs chief of the pre-state Jewish Agency, the comparatively dovish Sharett served as Israel’s first foreign minister from 1948 to 1956. During the interlude when David Ben-Gurion “retired” and moved to Sde Boker in the Negev, Sharett became prime minister, serving from December 6, 1953, to November 3, 1955, when Ben-Gurion returned to the job.

Sharett began keeping a diary in October 1953. He is our only Arabic-fluent prime minister and the only one who spent his adolescence on a farm in Samaria. In Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate, Gabriel Sheffer characterizes him as humane, realistic, and restrained. 

Reading Sheffer, I got the sense that Sharett would not have “missed an opportunity” to make peace — but he was not Israel’s top leader; Ben-Gurion was, and you need an Arab partner anyway.

Take Syria, for example. Husni Zaʽim, a bellicose, mercurial military man of Kurdish stock, took power in Damascus on March 30, 1949. Israel’s War of Independence ended with armistice deals with Egypt (February 24, 1949) and Jordan (April 3, 1949). Zaʽim messaged Israel via the US that he was ready to go beyond an armistice deal to settle some 400,000 Palestinian refugees and sign a peace treaty.

In return, he wanted Israeli territorial concessions that included the shoreline of the Kinneret/Sea of Galilee along terrain that Syria had conquered beyond the 1947 UN Partition lines. Zaʽim asked for a secret, face-to-face meeting with Ben-Gurion. The Israeli leader sent word that there was nothing to talk about until Syria pulled back to the partition boundaries. He felt confident that the IDF could recapture the territory if need be. Sharett offered to see Zaʽim instead, but the Syrian insisted it had to be Ben-Gurion. The Americans kept up the pressure on Ben-Gurion until he was willing to see Zaʽim, but by then the atmosphere had soured, and the Syrian strongman announced he would not cut a separate peace with Israel. After lengthy negotiations, Damascus signed an armistice deal on July 20, 1949. On August 14, 1949, Zaʽim was assassinated. Whether a genuine “opportunity for peace” had been missed is anyone’s guess.

Sharett came closer to not missing an “opportunity for peace” with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Nasser and his junta of Free Officers took power on July 23, 1952. Israel had quietly maintained contact with the comparatively liberal-minded, anticolonial Wafd Party during King Farouk’s regime. Before the coup, Wafd’s popularity had dissipated due to its willingness to work within Egypt’s parliamentary system (created in 1923) — and irrespective of the monarch’s obeisance to Britain. When the Free Officers took power, it looked like General Muhammad Naguib was in charge. On July 26, 1952, the New York Times termed him the “undisputed master of the country.” Naguib seemed to want Wafd’s support for his agenda, which promised a corrupt-free constitutional government. Israel hoped its Wafd connections could serve as a conduit to Naguib. He seemed receptive to peace feelers. An Israeli emissary, Zalman Divon, held secret talks with Egypt’s Ahmad Abudd in Paris on Sharett’s behalf. The Egyptians wanted to move slowly, saying they needed first to get their domestic house in order.

On February 7, 1953, the UN’s emissary Ralph Bunche arrived in Israel from Cairo with an Egyptian offer, which he presented to Ben-Gurion and Sharett. The Arab states would absorb the Palestinian refugees who had left or been forced out during the 1948 fighting in return for financial reparations. Coincidentally or not, Israel announced that it was unfreezing $2.8 million in blocked Palestinian refugee bank accounts. Israel also took steps to compensate Arabs, who were displaced within Israel because of the fighting, by creating new neighborhoods, including near Ramle, Tzfat, and Nahariya. “We are carrying out this policy undeterred by the agitation on our borders or the obstinate refusal of neighboring states to make peace with us,” Sharett said at the February 11, 1953 ceremony in Ramle.

These conciliatory decisions were taken despite an intensification of the Arab economic boycott of Israel, cross-border attacks from the West Bank, and Egypt’s blockade of Israel-bound ships using the Suez Canal.

Moreover, Bunche told Ben-Gurion and Sharett that Egypt was demanding a territorial link between Gaza (which it occupied) and the Jordanian-held West Bank, and it wanted Jerusalem internationalized. It is hard for me to see how Jordan would have agreed to give up East Jerusalem to an international regime, and Israel had no interest in internationalizing West Jerusalem. In any case, Bunche’s peacemaking efforts did not pick up steam.

In November 1954, the world discovered that Naguib was not the master of Egypt. Nasser revealed himself to be the real powerbroker among the Free Officers. They had needed Naguib out front as a sort of responsible adult. When he began taking himself too seriously, Nasser placed him under house arrest and openly took control. (Anwar Sadat, another Free Officer, freed Naguib in 1971, and he lived unobtrusively until he died in 1984.)

In January 1953, according to Sheffer, Nasser signaled Sharett via Abudd that he was ready to open a dialogue. He sought Israel’s backing in demanding that Britain hand over control of the Suez Canal. Sharett asked for assurance that Israel would have free navigation of the waterway. He also wanted Radio Cairo to stop broadcasting anti-Israel propaganda.

Meantime, Palestinian infiltrators engaged in a series of deadly attacks into Israel across the Jordanian and Egyptian armistice lines, targeting passenger trains and busses. For example, in the Ma’ale Akrabim Massacre of 1954, 11 passengers were killed on a road connecting Eilat and Beersheba. Ben-Gurion’s instinct was to order the IDF to embark on ever harsher retaliatory raids. Sharett was less than convinced that reprisals were serving as a deterrent. Instead, he wanted to spotlight the Arabs’ atrocities in the international media to pressure Jordan’s King Hussein and Nasser to reign in the terrorists.

Sharett’s strategic assessment differed from Ben-Gurion’s. He thought Israel should consider declaring that it could accept the 1949 Armistice Lines as its borders. Ben-Gurion’s stance was that since the Arabs did not recognize Israel’s right to exist within any borders, the IDF should push to achieve strategically better positions. Ben-Gurion mocked Sharett as too attuned to the US and the international community. “Our future does not depend on what the Gentiles say but on what the Jews do,” Ben-Gurion famously needled.  

In January 1954, as Sharett settled into the prime minister’s office, Ben-Gurion continued manipulating policy from Sde Boker. He had eased out Mordechai Makleff as IDF Chief of Staff, replaced him with Moshe Dayan, and appointed Pinchas Lavon as minister of defense (a role Ben-Gurion had filled in addition to prime minister). He sniped at Sharett in opinion pieces in the Labor Party newspaper Dvar.

That is the context in which an ill-fated Israeli sabotage operation (which came to be known as the Lavon Affair) got underway in July 1954. Israeli military intelligence ordered a cell of Egyptian Jews it was running to sabotage Nasser’s relations with the West and make it seem as if the country was unstable. They were instructed to carry out a series of fire bombings of American cultural centers in Cairo and Alexandria. The operation quickly unraveled, and the spies were arrested. The affair blindsided Sharett.

Before the spies were put on trial, on September 28, 1954, at the southern entrance of the Suez Canal, Egypt impounded the Israeli freighter Bat Galim bound from Eritrea to Haifa.

Despite all this, Sharett and Nasser kept lines of communication open, with Yigael Yadin sometimes serving as an Israeli intermediary in London. At other times, they communicated through US Jewish leader Jacob Blaustein or British Jewish MP (Labour) Morris Orbach.

Concurrently, another “opportunity for peace” presented itself. Between 1954 and 1955, British and US officials were covertly pushing Project Alpha aimed at solving the Palestinian refugee problem. The plan called for Israel to pull back from the 1949 Armistice Lines in the Negev, with its shrunken boundaries to be guaranteed by Britain and the US. Israel would also resettle 75,000 Palestinian refugees. In return, Israel would get — not peace treaties — but an Arab declaration of non-belligerence. Nasser was not keen on the idea because he felt it signaled acceptance of the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Alpha died a quiet death.

Despite pleas for leniency — open and secret — on January 27, 1955, Egypt sentenced two of the Lavon Affair spies to hang (a medical doctor and teacher) and six others to hard labor. One supposedly committed suicide in his cell. Nasser quickly approved the death and prison sentences. Two members of the cell had avoided arrest and escaped.

That same day, the UN’s armistice commission, citing an “extremely grave” situation because of repeated attacks from Gaza against Israelis, called on Egypt to act against the infiltrations.

Sharrett halted the clandestine talks he was holding with Nasser through intermediaries. On February 28, 1955, a devastating Israeli retaliatory raid in Gaza sent relations into a permafrost. Sharett was tormented because the military operation had gone far beyond what he approved to the point of being counterproductive, since there were signs the Egyptians had indeed started to crack down on Palestinian infiltrators into Israel. After this raid, Cairo told Sharett’s secret emissary, Joseph Tekoa, that further talks were pointless.

Cross-border attacks into Israel intensified, and Ben-Gurion returned from Sde Boker to replace Levon as defense minister on September 1, 1955. He was keen for a big military operation.  

By November 3, 1955, Ben-Gurion had eased Sharett out of the prime minister’s office, taking the job back. Sharett stayed on as foreign minister, a role he had never relinquished. However, Ben-Gurion needed Sharett out of the way as he put the finishing touches to a secret alliance with France and Britain to attack Egypt. Ben-Gurion ruthlessly humbled Sharett until he felt forced to resign on June 14, 1956. His last remarks to the cabinet were to warn against pre-emptive war. On October 29, 1956, the government launched the Sinai Campaign, in coordination with Britain and France. It proved militarily brilliant but a diplomatic dud.

In June 1963, Ben-Gurion was himself compelled to resign due to pressures from inside the Labor Party. His successors, Levi Eshkol (1963-1969) and Golda Meir (1969-1974), are also reputed to have “missed opportunities” to make peace with Egypt. For instance, Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress sought to arrange a clandestine meeting between Nasser and Golda Meir in 1970.

***

As we think about a hoped-for day after in Gaza, it behooves us to remember that supposed “missed opportunities” don’t happen in a vacuum but in frenetic international, regional, and domestic political environments.

The Palestinian Arabs, in particular, have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, to paraphrase Abba Eban. While there were peace flirtations with states like Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — Sharett and King Abdullah secretly agreed on a peace treaty in 1949, before the monarch got cold feet — the Palestinian Arab leadership has seldom taken the initiative to propose a way out of the conflict.

During the British Mandate period, Palestinian Arabs who were prepared for normalization and accommodation with Zionism were shunted aside, intimidated into silence, or assassinated as collaborators. Of course, the Palestinians’ rejection of the UN’'s 1947 Partition Plan was the mother of all “missed opportunities for peace.”

al-Hawari

This is not to say that individual Palestinian Arabs with little street cred have not talked about peace. There was an intriguing 1952 proposal by the exiled Muhammad Nimer al-Hawari (of the prominent Jaffa family) for a Palestine-Israel federation based on the Swiss Canton system. Israel would have to agree to repatriate 400,000 Palestinian refugees, according to Benny Morris in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Al-Hawari warned that otherwise, Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler cheerleader, along with the Arab states, would keep the displaced Palestinians as permanent refugees and as a battering ram against Israel. Al-Hawari, who led his own militia during the War of Independence, had broken with al-Husseini. He was eventually invited to resettle in Israel and became a prominent lawyer and judge. Was his proposal a missed opportunity? Aside from a mountain of other obstacles, Israel’s population at the time was 1.3 million (including Arab citizens), meaning that absorbing that many Palestinians would have been an immense demographic conundrum.

So, back to the notion of never wasting a good crisis. Elie Podeh calls attention to a Middle East Journal article in which scholars Ilan Peleg and Paul Scham point out, “A traumatic experience or a significant change might turn out to be a precondition for peacemaking in the Middle East in years to come.”

In thinking about today’s traumatic Gaza nightmare, suppose Israel doesn’t, sometime after January 7, 2024, simply declare “victory” and, in doing so, pull out in a Qatar-engineered deal that would exchange dozens more Israeli captives held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners, as Netanyahu seems inclined to do. Such a “victory” would likely still leave our soldiers taken on October 7 behind to be traded for “heavy” Palestinian prisoners in another Schalit-like deal.

If this is the scenario, Hamas would have achieved the goals set forth by Mohammed Deif on Day One of the war. Nonetheless, let’s, for argument’s sake, say that I am traducing Netanyahu and that, of course, he would allow the IDF, against the relentless interference by the international community, to defang Hamas.

Would the vacuum created in a post-Hamas Gaza present an “opportunity for peace” Can the nihilistic energies of the Palestinian polity rooted in a political culture toxically nurtured since 1948 on victimization, antisemitism, and religious chauvinism be redirected toward constructive self-interest?

And how are we Israelis supposed to sift opportunities for peace from the horrifying debris of October 7?

I won’t here belabor why elephants can't fly — why the PLO can’t be counted on to lead the Gaza Strip into a better tomorrow. Nonetheless, click your heels and fantasize with me that a group of daring Palestinians comes along to establish a Palestinian Authority 2.0 that is genuinely up for serving as Palestine’s government-in-waiting. This idealized PA2 categorically accepts the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland — a prerequisite to ending the conflict — and is willing to create and enforce a demilitarized state in the West Bank and Gaza. Furthermore, it has popular legitimacy and — the cherry on top of the icing — does not tolerate violent Islamist recidivism.

In such an undoubtedly far-fetched scenario, we non-apocalyptic and non-messianic Zionists had better not miss the chance of making peace. So, yes, in such an alternate universe, I would give up the West Bank except for strategic settlement blocs. As for the Holy Basin, I would let the Disney people — or another suitable agency — administer all its sacred attractions.

Back to the world we live in.

Arab intransigence isn’t going anywhere. My daydreams will not soon become a challenging reality.

Sharett was not far from right when he said, “We might have no other way but to launch military operations for the sake of security, but we should know that these are not going to bring peace, only postpone it. We should have no illusions — we would not attain peace by war — peace would be attained only through peaceful methods. This is not naivety, not an empty belief, nor is it a moralistic proclivity. This is the most logical and pragmatic view of things as they actually are.”

I don’t believe our military operations serve only to postpone peace. Mostly, they allow us to survive; for now, that is the best we can hope for. We need to be alert to opportunities for peace. I fear the problem is not that we are missing them, but they are just not presenting themselves.