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.

 

 

Maladjuster of the Middle East - New Nasser Book - A Review

We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World by Alex Rowell  (W.W. Norton, 2023).

If you think it is time to bone up on Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and his contributions to today's Middle East chaos, I can vouch that Alex Rowell's deeply researched and lucidly written We Are Your Soldiers is a good place to start.

Rowell is an Arabist – I mean that in a nice way. He lives among the Arabs, understands Arabic, and, as a journalist, endeavors to rationalize the Arab and Muslim Middle East in prestigious American and British media outlets. Don't let the fact that Rowell is not a philo-Zionist put you off for this book, for he has a solidly constructed thesis and presents a wealth of color and material that observers who care about Israel may want to squirrel away.

I look past lines like Israel captured the "Palestinian West Bank and Gaza" in 1967. Rowell knows those territories transferred from Turkey to England to Jordan and Egypt before falling to Israel in the Six-Day War. Maybe he means that they would have been Palestinian had the Palestinian Arabs not rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan. But let's not quibble. The book relates only tangentially to Israel.

Rowell brings something new to the table. He proposes that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who died in 1970 at age 52, not only left behind a fractured Egypt but that he is blameworthy for the instability that today troubles Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya.

Start with Egypt. Except for the brief 2012 to 2013 presidency of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, the country has had only military men at its helm – Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who (on December 19, 2023) captured 89.6 percent of the vote to secure a third term. Astonishing not.

Rowell spells out in a gripping narrative the damage Nasser did as he habitually interfered with the normal political development of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, and his own Egypt. The real Nasser, as opposed to the iconic revolutionary caricature, "methodically destroyed the institutions of parliamentary democracy, banned all political parties, muzzled the press, gutted the judiciary, strangled civil liberties, and jailed or outright killed his opponents" and did so not only "at home but abroad."  

It didn't have to be this way. By 1952, it was indeed time for the ineffective King Farouk to go and for British suzerainty to end. Egypt was ready to run its own affairs and control its resources, including the lucrative Suez Canal. Waiting in the wings were the comparatively liberal reformist Wafd Party but also its competition, the Muslim Brotherhood (which eventually spawned al-Qaida, Islamic State, and Hamas). Wafd would have been the better choice. Instead, the motley "Free Officers," of whom Nasser was the most dominant, took power in a bloodless coup on July 23, 1952. The monarch sailed into exile on his yacht.

The figurehead of the putsch was General Muhammad Naguib, but when he imagined that he was more than that, Nasser promoted him to a ceremonial position. Nasser, like other Arab tyrants – Assad the Elder, Saddam, and Muammar Gaddafi – had found his path toward upward mobility through the military, making frenemies and influencing people who would comprise their juntas.

He completed the consolidation of power in 1955 and set out to restructure the country's polity, creating a cult of personality. At first, Nasser cooperated with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, while going after Wafd politicians. The crushing of parties like the Wafd, which promoted a semblance of tolerance and democratic values, is a motif throughout the Muslim Middle East. Hence, outside Israel, there is not a single country in our region with a democratic-oriented ruling party.

In 1954, Nasser was ready to turn against the Brotherhood. Along the way, he banned political parties, purged the army, politically neutered university campuses, controlled broadcasting, and closed newspapers. Transistor radio, which became available in 1954, transmitted his Voice of Cairo throughout the Middle East.

In April 1955, as European states were shedding their colonies, he appeared on the world stage at the Bandung Conference, where the non-aligned/third-world bloc of countries supposedly neither loyal to Soviet communism nor US capitalism was born. Israel was not invited due to Arab pressure. Nasser met Red China's Chou En-Lai, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sukarno of Indonesia alongside representatives from Pakistan and Jordan. The conference was a Muslim opportunity to gang up on "aggressive Zionism" and support "the rights of the Arab peoples in Palestine." It passed a unanimous resolution calling for the internationalization of Jerusalem (odd since, at the time, east Jerusalem was in Jordan's hands), called for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1947 Partition Plan lines, and a return of Arab refugees who had left or been forced out during the 1948 War. There was no mention of recognizing the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland within any boundaries.

Nasser "came back from Bandung a different man" full of himself, writes Rowell. He nationalized the Suez Canal, in which France had a substantial financial stake. This decision and Nasser's encouragement of cross-border attacks from the Gaza Strip (which Egypt occupied) into Israel precipitated the 1956 Sinai Campaign, in which Israel captured Gaza and Sinai while the French and British recovered military control of the Suez Canal. US President Dwight Eisenhower came to Nasser's diplomatic rescue and pressured Israel back unconditionally to the 1949 Armistice Lines. After flirting with him, the CIA mistook Nasser for a Soviet pawn and gave way to Moscow.

Around this point, foreigners, educated Arabs (Rowell mentions the family of Edward Said), and Jewish people found it expedient to leave Egypt. Once cosmopolitan, Cairo was becoming increasingly religious, provincial, and overpopulated because of urbanization. Nasser built concentration camps – Rowell describes these in detail – to punish political opponents; forced labor and torture by the sadistic secret police became a routine tool to maintain his authoritarian control.

The stage was now set to export Nasserism. But what was Nasserism? It was essentially secular pan-Arab nationalism. Throw in a dash of nationalization of major industries and a pinch of bloated government. Power and wealth accrued to the officer corps. Its foreign policy prescription was to keep Western influence at bay while tilting toward the Soviets.

Nasserism was also an imperialism. Nasser's bloody fingerprints were all over the coup that overthrew Iraq's Hashemite King Faysal II on July 14, 1958. Iraq's "Free Officers" (a recurrent euphemism for "revolutionary" nationalists coming out of the military) tormented and murdered moderate reformist politicians. Antisemitism went up a notch. With the sensible monarch and his wise prime minister out of the way, Iraq was spoiled for intramural warfare among its contending ethnic, tribal, and religious groups. The Free Officers turned on one another. Each successive strongman sought Nasser's approval. A Nasser protegee named Saddam Hussein emerged. As Rowell tells it, "If Nasser did not literally install Saddam on the throne, he nonetheless did a great deal to create the conditions that enabled him to get there – not the least during the three years he hosted, paid, and protected him as his guest in Cairo." The fiend clutched ruthlessly onto power from 1979 to 2003 until he was finally hung in 2006.

After a Nasser-instigated revolution in Syria, he pushed for a merger of the two countries into the “United Arab Republic.” Next, he appointed a high commissioner to administer affairs in Damascus and benefited from the services of a sadistic secret police chief. The Ba'ath Party of Syria wanted only to be Nasser's political tool, seeking closer union with Egypt. For Nasser, total devotion was not enough. Once he took over, Nasser sought to dismantle surviving trace elements of Syrian independence.

"The speed with which Nasser proceeded to squander" the "adulation" he enjoyed in Syria "was remarkable, writes Rowell. There was a "mismatch between Nasser's intentions and Syrians' expectations." A period of vicious instability followed that forced the Egyptian overlords out. Nonetheless, a pro-Nasser faction emerged that included a certain captain Hafez al-Assad. He, too, had been on  Nasser's payroll, was influenced by his style of rule, and lived in Cairo, perhaps rubbing elbows with Saddam Hussein. In September 1970, Assad wrested control of the country.

The psychopath does not fall far from the sociopath. Hafez's son Bashar replaced his father in July 2000. At least 350,000 Arabs have been killed in the fighting to keep the Assad clan of Alawites in power. Bashar, having butchered his way back into Arab good graces, is today a rehabilitated member of the Arab League hectoring Israel and praising the "Gaza Resistance."

In Lebanon, Nasser played a central role in stoking the 1958 intramural fighting, which heralded the unraveling of Lebanon's delicate sectarian political system. Then in 1964, he created, funded, and trained the Palestine Liberation Organization. He endorsed the ascendency of Cairo-born Yassir Arafat in 1967, as he edged out the PLO's founding chairman, Ahmad Shuqayri of Lebanon. The Palestinians had arrived in Lebanon after the 1948 War. By 1968, their "refugee camps" (opposition to permanent resettlement is a core ethos of Palestinian victimization) became autonomous, and PLO militias developed into a potent armed force. Nasser pressured the disintegrating Lebanese polity into accepting the “Cairo Agreement” (1969), which created a state within a state and gave the PLO the right to attack Israel from Lebanon. The country never regained sovereignty over its borders.

Nasser also did his darndest to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein (father of the current monarch Abdullah II). The young Hussein tried to placate Nasser, seek his guidance, and follow his lead. With Nasser's deceitful approval, Jordan flirted with becoming a member of the pro-Western Baghdad Pact. To his credit, the King experimented with democratic institutions, but Nasser's agents exploited every opening to undermine his regime. Nasser employed the Syrian secret police to destabilize Jordan. He tried repeatedly and continually failed to kill Hussein by poisoning his food and even his nasal spray and (using the Syrian airforce) shooting down his plane. Cairo either ordered or acquiesced to the assassination of Jordanian politicians close to the King. Fear that a genuine parliamentary government would be exploited to create insecurity helps explain how Jordan devolved into what it is today: a police state.

A wary Hussein and Nasser buried the hatchet by 1964 when Cairo created the PLO. Its establishment was awkward as Jordan had annexed the West Bank and held east Jerusalem. The only part of Palestine the PLO could liberate was Israel. In 1967, Nasser bamboozled Hussein to join him in going to war with Israel, which led to Jordan's loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Had Jordan stayed out of the war, as Israeli leaders pleaded for him to do, there would be no Jewish presence today in Judea and Samaria, no "settlements," and – who knows – Jordan, with its overwhelmingly Palestinian population, might today be a confederated Hashemite-Palestinian state.

It is de rigueur among anti- and post-Zionists to imagine that Nasser wanted to make peace with a recalcitrant Israel going back to the days of Moshe Sharett. I don’t doubt that Israel missed opportunities, but not obviously so. After losing the 1967 War, Rowell writes that Nasser was prepared to accept peace offers that would essentially undo his military losses. These included UN SC Resolution 242, crafted to be open to interpretation, and the 1969 Rogers Plan put forth by William Rogers, Richard Nixon's Secretary of State. He claims that, unlike Arafat, Nasser accepted a two-state solution to the conflict. I am not sure how he squares these assertions with Khartoum's "Three No's" – No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel - announced at the Arab League Summit on September 1, 1967.

As for the Roger's Plan, Egypt demanded a total Israeli withdrawal from all the territory captured in the 1967 war and restoration of the "legitimate rights" of Palestinian refugees – presumably meaning repatriation within Green Line Israel. The Rogers Plan implied the Palestinian right of return. For Israel, this was a non-starter. Golda Meir wanted to negotiate permanent borders and peace treaties directly with Egypt and Jordan. The plan did not call on the Palestinian Arabs to end terrorism or accept the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland. It struck Israeli leaders as an attempt to appease the Arabs at Israel's expense.

In June 1970, the PLO tried to overthrow Hussein in what became known as Black September. One of its constituent groups hijacked five airplanes, four of which were ultimately flown to Dawson's Field in Jordan and blown up – TWA Flight 741; Swissair Flight 100; Pan Am Flight 93; and BOAC Flight 775.

Meantime, the hijacking of El Al Flight 219 was foiled, although the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, became the poster girl of the "destroy Israel by-any-means-necessary" crowd. Palestinian terrorists had also taken Western hostages, staying at two Amman hotels. And Palestinian gunmen had repeatedly shot at the King's motorcade. All this messaged Hussein's powerlessness to control his country.

To survive, the King unleashed his tanks and artillery on the PLO, which was embedded in the Palestinian refugee camps. Thousands were killed. Arafat, in his slippery way, sued for peace, and Nasser hosted a sulha reconciliation meeting in Cairo on September 26, 1970. The Egyptian leader suffered a heart attack and died on September 28, 1970, but not before he had rescued Arafat to fight another day.

Leaving Jordan, the PLO leader set up shop in Beirut, deploying his men in south Lebanon, which became Fatahland, to launch terror attacks into northern Israel. That ended in 1982 when the IDF ousted the PLO from Lebanon, and Arafat's entourage moved on to Tunisia until the 1993 Oslo Accords brought him to Ramallah.

No country suffered more than Yemen from Nasser’s interference. The Egyptian leader's involvement in Yemen was unprovoked and pure aggression, according to Rowell. In September 1962, Yemen's "Free Officers," inspired by Nasser, overthrew  Muhamad al-Badr, the Shi'ite imam running the country. His base was in northern Yemen among the Zaydi-Shi’ite tribes – the same population from which the Houthi clan would emerge in the 1990s. The fanatical Wahhabi Sunni Saudis and the evanescent British Empire joined forces with the Shi'ite imam against Nasser.

Today, as the war Hamas wrought rages in Gaza, Yemen is much in the news. Instead of Egypt, imperial Persia, which is Shi'ite, is on the scene. Yemen is dominated by the Houthi clan, who are Shi'ite Arabs. They are in strategic control of the strait of Bab al-Mandab, which leads to and from the Suez Canal (and Eilat). It is a choke point between the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. By putting a squeeze on boats sailing between Asia and Europe, they hope the international community will pressure Israel to abandon its must-win war to defang Hamas.

In his day, the Egyptian leader used his airforce and sent tens of thousands of foot soldiers to Yemen. It was the only country where Egypt used poison gas and biological weapons (even after Nasser lost the 1967 war to Israel). He pulled out in defeat only in November 1967. Even his supporters referred to Yemen as Egypt's Vietnam.

Nasser left a further lethal legacy before he died – one Muammar Gadaffi. A Nasser-wannabe, he took power of Libya in September 1969. "Tell President Nasser we made this revolution for him," the young lieutenant cabled to Cairo. In his early days, Gadaffi was charismatic and feigned sanity, not the Caligula figure that comes down to us in history. To guide his acolyte, Nasser sent a viceroy to direct the development of Libya (as if the master had not run Egypt into an economic and political ditch). According to Rowell, from behind Libyan proxies, Nasser directed the country's foreign policies and negotiations with the outside world. Saddam Hussein tried to elbow Nasser out, but Gadaffi was true to his love. Nasser told Gadaffi that Allah had chosen him to rule Libya and implied that he would succeed him as leader of pan-Arabism and Nasserism.

Nasser's interest was understandable – Libya had a small population and immense oil wealth. Like his mentor, Gadaffi spread terror and destruction at home and beyond. He was behind multiple plane hijackings and assassinations, including  Pan Am Flight 103, blown up over Lockerbie, and the La Belle disco bombing in Germany. Rebels belatedly killed Muammar Gaddafi while one of them sodomized him with a bayonet in 2011; a fitting end.

Alas, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen are hopelessly failed states. Jordan and Egypt are, at best fragile states.

Rowell's book should put the final nails in the coffin of those who pretend Nasser was some avuncular revolutionary uncle. 

Approaching 70 Days of War * plus Addendum * Netanyahu Must Resign

 “You have not been blogging lately,” a regular reader dug.

“I have nothing new to say,” was my response.

פונדעסטוועגן 

Nevertheless. Alright. 

For those of you just returning to the Milky Way Galaxy, I have been making the same boringly consistent points since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel with butchery, rape, and pillage. And I am happy - in a manner of speaking -  to reiterate.

Israel’s mission in this war of no choice needs to be to defang Hamas and make it improbable for it – or any other Palestinian force in Gaza or the West Bank – to pose a military threat to Israel. The rest is commentary.

***

The November 24 to November 30, 2023 ceasefire in which Israel exchanged violent incarcerated Palestinian prisoners for kidnapped civilian captives was a mistake. We lost precious time. The enemy regrouped and reinfiltrated areas that had been cleansed.

All the while, the international “community” grew more restless over the fate of Hamas. As a matter of course, the time Jews are given to defend themselves, much less go on the offensive, is limited. Some of that valuable time was irretrievably spent during the moratorium.

Like all Israelis, I was relieved to see the return of captives – children, women, the elderly, and some men. That said, the war’s goal should not be to free captives but to crush the enemy.

Exchanging Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israel for some of our captives, I warned, would raise the morale of the enemy and strengthen Hamas. It did. Like previous prisoner deals, I warned that more lives would be lost than saved. Sure enough, when combat resumed, the pressure on the IDF to fight under impossible constraints (not imposed on any other army) only intensified.

***

This morning, the Washington Post complained that we were not using the type of bombs its editors would employ were they responsible for battling Hamas.

***

Aside from the Rabin-Peres-initiated September 13, 1993, Oslo Accords, the worst self-inflicted strategic damage done to Israeli security was implemented by Binyamin Netanyahu on October 18, 2011, when he released some of the most blood-thirsty killers in Israel’s prisons in exchange for one captive IDF soldier.

This same Netanyahu is culpable for the October 7 catastrophe. Being amoral, he has shirked all responsibility. Watch the old wizard accuse those of us who opposed his regime change putsch for what happened. He will blame the general staff, the Shin Bet, the Mossad, and IDF Intelligence. He has already reproached Yitzhak Rabin. Likud cult members remain under the spell of his enchantment and, with the help of Channel 14 agitprop, will lap up his lies.

Now, Likud and its Hardal and Haredi confederates have passed a national budget laden with patronage as if the times called for politics as usual. For example, the country will now spend more on Haredi schools than any other educational network.

From Start-Up Nation to Dumb-Down Shtetl.

Many of the sociopathic brutes Netanyahu set free went on to rebuild Hamas in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, who was serving four life sentences. Others proceeded to conduct terror operations in the West Bank. Still, others have played a role in Hamas “outside” operating from Turkey and Qatar.

Today, Netanyahu talks about Gaza as if he has just arrived on the scene. As if someone else has been shtuping Hamas with satchels full of Qatari money.

***

Since October 7, Israeli soldiers - young men and women just out of high school hoping to maybe one day see the world and later study at university, reservists who have left their jobs as doctors, principals, software engineers, grocers, and tour guides - have fought and died for our survival. 

How it pains us that even as Israeli blood is spilled,  callow Jewish American and Jewish British turncoats have been marching for the enemy "as Jews" נאָך.

I have no interest in changing their minds only to express my opprobrium. May they be cursed to live under Islamist rule!

They have made their morally relavatist beds. And they will be tarred forever by their October 2023 choices. These wretched, juvenile-minded quislings are so desperate for acceptance in the woke world. To march with the masses. To chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be [Jew] Free.” They were raised, educated, and acculturated in a sea of woke. They have little, if any, Jewish education. What precious little Jewish literacy they do have has accentuated the Holocaust and Tikun Olam. Either their teachers were themselves ignoramuses, or they willfully misunderstood the significance of the Shoah and the meaning of Tikun Olam.

***

An automatic UN majority votes against Israel in the General Assembly. Britain abstains. France sometimes abstains but mostly votes with the Arabs. Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak talk the talk, but when push comes to shove, they thrust the Zionists under the bus.

UN chief António Guterres’s brownnosing of Hamas didn’t happen in a vacuum. He’s done his arithmetic. There are 56 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation members who also hold UN seats. Twenty-two of whom are correspondingly member states of the Arab League. Add in assorted shithole countries. Then factor in Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China and their satellites.

If you were Guterres, whose side would you be on?

***

Some closing thoughts:

Joe Biden is already the most pro-Israel president in the history of the relationship. That amazes me, but it is the case.

Yet his agenda and Israel's priorities are not congruent. He wants us to finish off Hamas to save the PLO. No matter what, though, he wants to end the war before the 2024 US Presidential Election season begins in earnest. 

We need to do what is best for us.

***

Speculating about what happens next is premature because victory is far from assured. That said, it would be daft to turn over the Gaza Strip to Mahmoud Abbas and his PLO (again).

There can be no peace with security that is dependent on the corrupt Palestinian Authority.

The PA has allowed the towns and cities of the West Bank, which it is supposed to administer, to fall into a Hobbesian state of nature. Since 1993, it has not dismantled one refugee camp. Its UN-funded schools taught hate and antisemitism.

***

Israel, it is true, failed to come up with a consensus strategy to protect our security interests in the West Bank. While we dawdled, the ethos of the Hilltop Youth permeated the national religious settler community and metastasized into a messianic strain of fanaticism that has seen the old-line Dati Leumi vanquished by Hardal. But let me leave this fashla for another jeremiad.

While the craving for “peace now” brought us Oslo and the second intifada, Hardal’s messianic parties are in their own La-La-Land of the Apocalypse (with Red Cows grazing, goats and sheep ready for Temple sacrifice - and caravans hitched to resettle the Gaza Strip).

All that, too, for another time.

                                                                                ***

For the foreseeable future, Israel is deeply mired in this war. Thousands are dislocated on our northern boundary with Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon. We know that sooner rather than later, Hezbollah will have to be pushed back beyond the Litani River and that the UN won’t do it for us. Thousands more are dislocated along our frontier with Hamas-Gaza. Both Hezbollah and Hamas continue to attack our civilians with rocket fire and anti-tank weapons.

Our country is traumatized. Though "life goes on," a dark cloud hangs over us.  It is hard to concentrate. We dread the 6 AM news when the names of the fallen are made public. More and more, we are hearing about soldiers who have suffered life-changing wounds. Virtually every extended family (in the population that serves and pays taxes) has someone who has been doing reserve duty.

On top of it all, Israelis and pro-Israel Diaspora Jews are dumbfounded by the tsunami of anti-Israelism and antisemitism sweeping the world, by the power of intersectionality that neatly pulls together all our enemies: white Nazis, Black chauvinists, Islamists, socialists, craven university presidents, and woke things. 

The worst of the worst are the quislings of Jewish ancestry who slither into the enemy’s rancid bed, expecting that collaboration will buy them acceptance.

What a torment, 69 days long...

***

On the dawn of Day 70 of our ongoing collective nightmare, victory remains as imperative as on day one. Israel must come out of this conflict as the Strong Horse. Otherwise, the days of the Third Commonwealth are numbered.

 December 17, 2023

Addendum.

Netanyahu I signed Oslo II. Netanyahu II opposed Oslo. Netanyahu I formerly accepted the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state. Netanyahu II opposed it. Netanyahu I allowed Hamas to finance its tunnels and weaponry. Netanyahu II opposed it. Netanyahu I and his confederates tolerated and even glorified Elor Azaria and made excuses for Aviad Frija. Netanyahu II opposed such behavior and had his heart broken when he learned that undisciplined IDF units shot dead Israeli captives who held their hands up, waving a white flag, and when one survived, lured him out and shot him too.

 

 

 

Ceasefire was a mistake - the joy of having many of the captives back notwithstanding

 The Security Cabinet convened this evening and made a series of operational decisions, the goal of which is to achieve the destruction of the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a way that will preclude their ability and willingness to threaten and attack the citizens of Israel for many years.

          -October 8, 2023

 

The Government of Israel is committed to achieving the goals of the war: Releasing the hostages, eliminating Hamas and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to the residents of Israel.

-                        - December 1, 2023-

Time will tell what damage the moratorium Israel took in battling Hamas has done. It began on November 24 and ended today. Like all Israelis, I am grateful that some 80 captives have come home. At the same time, I have been watching how the release of busloads of Palestinians in Israeli custody has boosted the standing of Hamas in the West Bank.

I believe the release of terrorists and suspected terrorists has already had deadly consequences. And I fear precious momentum and time have been lost in Gaza.

Now that we are back to fighting, I pray for victory and the safety of our soldiers and security forces.

 

The Fruits of Netanyahu's Prisoner Exchange Becoming Apparent - More lives will be lost than Saved

My blog below was written  very early Friday, November 24, 2023 --

Israel began releasing dangerous Palestinian prisoners in return for innocent captive women and children, and men.

On November 29, 2023, the prime minister pledges the war will resume ...

Let's see what happens next...

Overnight November 29/ into November 30

More Palestinian prisoners were released to east Jerusalem and into the West Bank

Hurt, scared but free now. Palestinian boy recalls abuse in Israeli prison

Mohammad Salhab Tamimi, 18, was returned to his family on Tuesday as part of an ongoing prisoner exchange deal. (https://www.aljazeera.com)

Early November 30

6:44 AM  

גלצ

@GLZRadio

20 דקות לפני סיומה, צה"ל מודיע: ההפוגה באש תימשך

@Doron_Kadosh

7:46AMחשד לפיגוע בירושלים: דיווח ראשוני על ירי בכניסה לשכונת רמות

@noabaranes10
Analysts on Army Radio say worth checking if the release of prisoners and a sense Palestinian victory was the impetus for attackat the entrance pf Jerusalem
8:23 AM מגן דוד אדום @mda_israel בהמשך לפיגוע ירי בשדרות וייצמן בטרמפיאדה בכניסה לירושלים: חובשים ופראמדיקים של מד"א קובעים את מותה של צעירה בת 24 ומפנים לבתי החולים שערי צדק והדסה עין כרם 8 פצועים, בהם: 5 במצב קשה, 1 בינוני ו-2 קל.

The war that began on Black Saturday, October 7, 2023, ended in Israel's defeat on Black Friday, November 24, 2023. It will be seen as Israel's first defeat in a war of "no choice."

The extent of our loss will become apparent over time. In the Islamic world, the Arab, Persian, and Turkish perception will be that the Jewish state is brittle and vulnerable. "Dazed and crazed, Israel lashed out, killed thousands of babies, women, and children, left Gaza in ruins, yet in the end, failed to overcome the steadfast Palestinian resistance," the enemy narrative will say.

How did we lose? We abandoned our stated mission of removing Hamas as a military threat. Destroying Hamas was supplanted by "freeing the captives" that Hamas and other Palestinian criminal gangs took on day one of the war. Mission creep became mission lost.

The needs of the few overcame the safety and, ultimately, I fear, the existence of the many.

Once Binyamin Netanyahu made the decision (early in the war) to negotiate with Hamas about the captives via the US and Qatar, defeat was foretold. The Persians and Arabs have always seen through his bluster. It did not help that interested players got involved to "advise" and "champion" the captives' families. The intense public relations that came out of nowhere and made the hostages the focus of the war had – unintended or not – the consequence of saving Hamas's ability to fight another day.

The issue of the captives obfuscated the goal of the war. And then it derailed it.

Israel's leading media outlets encouraged the mission creep so that the return of the captives became the first imperative. Most of the population drank the cool-aid. Getting our hostages home trumped everything. I see this as a self-destruct gene in Israel's DNA.

The Jews are supposed to be shrewd bargainers. Maybe with each other. Not so in the Arab-Israel conflict. I refer you to Yitzhak Rabin's Oslo Accords and Netanyahu's fulfillment of Oslo II.

In this instance, the price will go steadily higher for each successive release of Israeli captives. The IDF's offensive will stand indefinitely paused. Gazans' humanitarian needs will become paramount. Our army's presence in the Strip will, in due course, become militarily and diplomatically less than useless. The enthusiasm of the reservists will drop. The Arabs will shoot occasionally to demoralize us, but not enough to torpedo the process. And at each stage, Israel will be forced to set loose more and more of the most dangerous terrorists from our prisons. A mass prisoner release was what Hamas has been demanding all along. The Islamists did not lose sight of their mission. Yahya Sinwar, who got his current job in Gaza thanks to Netanyahu, knew he could count on our PM to repeat the Schalit deal blunder.

Ours will be a two-front defeat as Hezbollah has managed to drive thousands of Israelis away from their homes in the North, and Hamas has made life in the South untenable.

Netanyahu's implied contract with Israel's citizens is that despite changing missions, mid-war, he can get all the civilian and IDF captives – alive or their remains – brought back to Israel, then resume our offensive against Hamas, ending its military capability to threaten our security. After that, Mossad will hunt down and liquidate the entire Hamas leadership abroad (which granted might take some time). Finally, the released sociopathic killers will be expected to sign lawyerly affidavits pledging not to engage in terrorism. I can't see how he can pull this scenario off, but I would be thrilled to be proven wrong.

However, if my realism turns out to be closer to the truth than Netanyahu's Rosy Scenario, he will spin our horrific reverses as the fault of the "leftist" IDF high command and the bad advice he got from the Shin Bet and Mossad - not to mention pressure from the Biden administration. He will say those who protested against his regime change putsch were a fifth column that undermined our deterrence. And he will assert that, thank heavens, he was nonetheless able to pull our chestnuts out of the fire. 

His wizardry is not what it was, but Israel is full of gullible people.