Shmuel Katz

Israel’s function in the modern world

Chapter 8 - Battleground

State Department establishment and a usually more widely ranging, more sensitive, outlook in the White House. Hence, too, the sometimes surprising fluctuations in American foreign policy (as in the tug-of-war between President Truman and his State Department in 1948).

The intrinsic merits of a pro-Arab policy have always been open to serious doubt on a longer view even of the pragmatic and political consideration - certainly in the case of Britain and the United States. But the politicians and bureaucrats who pursued it could always make out a case to themselves and their colleagues. That case, since the Six Day War, becomes increasingly irrelevant to the interests of the Western nations. The Western statesmen have appeared to be unaware of the vast geopolitical change taking place –a change that in fact reduces to insignificance their commercial and political bookkeeping. Clinging to the formula of giving back to the Arabs their domineering territorial status preceding the Six Day War, believing facilely that at most only Israel will be merely crippled thereby, they have in fact weakened the structure of Western defense, bringing into doubt the future of democracy and Western culture over large parts of the globe. They have ignored, or pretended to be unaware of, the connection between the metamorphosis already in progress in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, and the far-ranging historic purpose of the intense activity by the Soviet Union over the oceans and continents.

The intervention of the Soviet Union was the most momentous, most far-reaching happening, in the development of Arab intransigence after 1948. Russian interest went far beyond the material considerations of trade benefits. The purpose of the Soviet union and of its consequent activity was on the order of the historic adventures that brought about the vast colonial empires between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Planning in the context of the later twentieth century, employing its scientific and technical resources,
employing the methods perfected in two generations of its own efforts at subversion, the Soviet Union is in the midst of one of the great imperialist leaps forward that have marked Russian policy for two hundred years.

In the nineteenth century, Russian expansionism, thrusting toward the Middle East and directed specifically against Turkey, created the so-called Eastern Question. It was halted by energetic British initiative at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Other Tsarist essays in expansionism in the Far East and in Europe followed. Some proved successful; others were frustrated. The Communist regime set out on its own expansion after the Second World War. Its objectives were by then not secret-they had been made clear in the published documents of the Nazi regime. In Molotov’s Berlin dialogue with his Nazi allies in November 1940 on parceling out the British Empire after its projected dissolution by the Germans, it was the Persian Calf zone that the Soviet Foreign Minister demanded as the Soviet Union’s share of the spoils.

After the defeat of Germany and after the Soviets had established their dominion over the satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe, they turned once more to the Middle East. They directed their attentions and their pressures first to Turkey and Iran. Checked there by American steadfastness, they undertook a major effort to achieve domination of the rest of the zone. Success here would not only give them control of the Arab oil-bearing areas, but would also in, fact enable them to outflank Turkey and Iran from the south.
The political strategy of the USSR in the Middle East after the Second World War presents a picture of pragmatism in action. For nearly thirty years the Soviet regime had outlawed Zionism and persecuted its supporters as “agents of British imperialism.” When they discovered that the success of the underground struggle for Jewish independence would mean the end of British rule in Palestine, they made gestures of sympathy. This was followed by strong and consistent diplomatic support for the proposal to establish a Jewish state. The USSR was the only power, apart from France, that supplied arms (through Czechoslovakia) to help the embattled state ward off the Arab invaders and prevent a British comeback in 1948.

The brief collaboration with Zionism having achieved its object, it was terminated abruptly. With the end of the British presence in Egypt came the injection of direct Soviet influence. No genius in Moscow was required to realize that in the Middle East spheres of influence, bases, staging posts, and jumping-off grounds toward consummation of Mother Russia’s historic destiny could be acquired only through friendly relations with the Arab states. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union appeared in the arena as the champion of the Arabs against “Zionism and imperialism.”
Through identification with the Arab purpose and supplying arms and aid in unprecedented quantities and on most generous terms in the decade that followed the Soviet Union won increasing influence in the Arab states. Egypt and Syria were the main recipients, but help was also accorded to Iraq, Algeria, the Yemeni republic, and Southern Yemen. By the middle of 1971, the Soviet Union had invested civil and military aid to the value of nearly five billion dollars in the Arab states, more than half of which went to Egypt.

In constant dynamic thrust the Soviets developed and extended their objectives southward. They sought to widen their foothold of influence on the East African littoral down to the gates of South Africa and to establish a substantial presence in the Indian Ocean. Soviet activity in East Africa derived greater impulse from the need to compete with the growing influence of China.
Soviet penetration was comprehensive. Precisely like the classic “capitalist” imperialists of earlier centuries, the Russians established economic footholds, fostered military dependence, vigorously inseminated and propagated their ideology. “It is not difficult,” one perceptive historical, writer of our times has written, “to envisage-given the necessary acquiesence-a great Soviet Empire of the future in which the Soviet Union, with perhaps some territory still to be annexed to it, would form the ‘united provinces,’ while the rest is left to be directly administered through native princes and tributary chiefs, no doubt  suitably emblazoned with the left-wing equivalents of imperial style and titulature.”

It is an ironic fact that it was the Soviet Union
itself that played a major part in forcing on Israel the
role of barring its imperial progress. Moscow provoked the Arab leaders into opening the war of June1967, by proclaiming the imminence of an Israeli at
tack on Syria. Nasser confirmed this circumstance in
big broadcast of June 9, 1967. Levi Eshkol, the Israeli
Prime Minister, immediately invited the, Soviet ambassador to accompany him to the Syrian border to see for himself that no Israeli troops were concentrated
there, but the ambassador refused (UN Document
A/PV/1526, p. 37). The Soviet Union presumably
helped the Arabs believe that the conditions laid down
for victory already existed. The USSR may have believed that the Arab states could crush Israel quickly while the United Nations were still engaged in discussion. The Soviet delegate to the United Nations delayed the speedy adoption of a ceasefire resolution
which might force to a halt the destruction of Israel
that was being described in the official Arab com
muniqu6s and news reports. He realized too late that
he was the victim of a fantasy. By the time a ceasefire
was achieved, the Israeli Army stood along the Suez
Canal and the Jordan — and was established in depth on
the Golan Heights.

The presence of Israeli forces on the banks of the Jordan and on the Golan Heights was of no immediate concern to the Soviet Union.. Their presence, on the Suez Canal, however, brought in its train a severe blow to Russia’s operational schedule and long-range plans for expansion. The Egyptian dictator closed the Canal, he would not countenance its being reopened while Israel controlled its East Bank. By this entirely unexpected outcome of the war, the Soviet supply train to North Vietnam was disrupted and the vast Russian move across the world was brought into disarray.

During the 1960s, the Soviet Union quietly established its power throughout the Mediterranean area. It acquired bases covering the complete length of the sea. Its vessels put in not only at Port Said, Alexandria, and Matruh in Egypt, but also at Latakia in Syria in the east and at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria in the west. Without much noise, Algeria became the central base of Soviet power in the western Mediterranean. Algeria-threatened, after all, by no one-was supplied 150 Mig aircraft, 3,000 Soviet advisers were installed in the country, Soviet Tupolev planes flew in and out of bases at Laghouat and Ouargla, and a missile base came into being at La Calle. All these face Western Europe. A force of between forty and sixty warships of various kinds became a standard feature of the Mediterranean scene.

The Mediterranean Sea was indeed bursting at the seams with Soviet activity. For the Soviet Union intended it to be more than a base; it was also to be a corridor. Part of the concentration of power in the Mediterranean was designed for application in the vast area south and east of Suez, where traditional Russian ambitions were now merging with new modem horizons. Southward and eastward in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, there were, by 1971, clear signs of the beginnings of Soviet penetration. At Aden in the South Yemeni republic, Soviet vessels enjoyed the facilities once possessed by the British Royal Navy. At Socotra, an island also belonging to that republic, the Russians planned the establishment of a base. In the southern Indian Ocean, they concluded an agreement for facilities on Mauritius. In the eastern Indian Ocean, they were negotiating for base facilities at Trincomalee in Ceylon. Their actual use of facilities, however, remained sparse-because the short passage through the Suez Canal was barred. Soviet vessels can reach the Indian Ocean and any point on earth by
the roundabout route across the Pacific Ocean or by way of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, then along the West African seaboard and around the Cape of Good Hope.

Communications are also maintained by other than naval means. But these possibilities provided only a comparative trickle. For the Soviet grand design, for the strong swinging flow of ships and goods and guns, for sheer ubiquitous Soviet presence whenever and wherever required south and east of Suez, the Canal is still irreplaceable. The most intensive pressure was exerted on Israel to withdraw from the Canal. In this effort, the Soviet Union and Egypt were given consistent public support by the United States, against whom the Soviet strategy is primarily directed.
There is indeed a startling similarity between the psychology of United States policy toward the Soviet Union in the Middle East at this time and the British appeasement of Germany in the 1930s, which led to the Munich Pact, the piecemeal subjugation of Czechoslovakia, and the Second World War.
The consequences of a withdrawal by Israel in Sinai could be foreseen as clearly as were the obvious consequences of the surrender to Hitler of the Sudetenland with its formidable fortifications. Israeli withdrawal from Sinai would almost certainly be followed within days by an Egyptian armed occupation of Sinai. The base for a new offensive against an attenuated Israel could thus be built up. Or such an offensive might merely be threatened and the concentration of force used to impose a permanent state of siege on Israel, confined behind a long, vulnerable land fine. The maintenance of permanent large-scale mobilization would have disastrous consequences for Israel’s economy and her very way of life. The Soviet Union might, it is true, oppose the Arab plan for the complete physical destruction of Israel, finding it more useful to reserve a place in her imperial system for a small, dependent Israel.

The Soviet presence would be free to move on the large objectives when conditions permitted establishing hegemony over Saudi Arabia. While Soviet warships maintained a westerly warning presence in the Red Sea along the southern shore of the Arabian Peninsula and in the Persian Gulf on the cast, and while a demonstrative base in Sinai warded off any interference across the land border, it would probably need no more than an Egyptian political offensive against Saudi Arabia to bring about the establishment of a republican “progressive” government to take over from the Wahabite king. If forces were required, Egypt’s resources would be adequate for this purpose.

To Turkey and Iran-whose northern borders
march with the Soviet’s-the full arrival of Soviet
Power in their strategic rear in an encircling posture,
with a now fading Israel their only buffer on the south,
would be the irrebuttable proof of Soviet supremacy
and of the valuelessness of American and of NATO
plans and undertakings. There would then be no sense
in their resisting the Soviet embrace.
The Soviet Union moving forward in full confidence and with the heightened purpose of a triumphant imperialism, would in that case not need decades to establish itself. Both in the Middle East and in Africa there would be no lack of local leaders to extend the appropriate invitations and to open the required doors for speeding the. process. The outflanking of southern Europe would then assume its full dramatic significance. At that point, the only way for the West to try to halt the Soviet advances would be by war.
Such a prospect, or the alternative of a bloodless Soviet victory, is certainly not inevitable. Of an the lessons to be learned from, the recent history of the Soviet Union’s expansionism, not the least important is its refusal to risk war for objectives outside Europe. It gained much by the comparatively peaceful means of shows of force against European satellites, such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, or by purchasing advantage, as in some Arabic and some black African states. The USSR certainly does not contemplate a major war.

The United States itself has had first-hand experience of the Soviet Union’s backing down, even risking loss of face, when confronted by a resistant attitude. In Turkey, in Iranian Azerbaijan, and most incisively in Cuba, the pattern of retreat was unequivocal. The Soviet Union has been likened by United States Senator Henry Jackson to a burglar going down a hotel corridor trying the doors and going in only when he finds one unlocked.
Even now, after the opening of the Suez Canal, with its tremendous advantages to the Soviet Union, this pattern has not changed. The opening of the Canal did probably serve as a spur to the Soviet adventure in Angola-by sending Cuban troops to intervene. Growing military strength too increases Soviet self-confidence. Yet it is quite safe to say that the USSR will not risk getting herself involved in a major war.

The vilification of Israel has, of course, been an essential part of the campaign against her. The Soviet dissenting liberal, Andrei Amalrik, wrote a book published in the West under the title Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Amalrik himself would no doubt agree that in important respects the Soviet Union has long ago reached 1984, has survived, and is indeed flourishing. The Soviet Union has transmuted absoltely the concept of truth. Truth, if it does not serve the immediate Soviet interest, enjoys the status of a crime, a hindrance, at best an irrelevance. Amalrik himself was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for writing his book and publishing it abroad. According to reports in the summer of 1971, he was sent to one of the labor camps in the far north. At any given moment, Moscow will be found to be supplying the world with information especially composed to suit the purpose the country is at that moment pursuing. Inanities, nonsense of all degrees, and, most particularly, denunciation of her victims or its opponents for actions and policies of which she is guilty, are repeated and reiterated and disseminated through many channels until some people begin to believe some of them.
One of the leading experts in the West on the policy and methods of the Soviet Union has described Soviet propaganda as “an amalgam of truth and falsehood.” “There is a great deal of whispering campaigning,” he notes, “and a great deal of untrue information as well as exploitation of things that are true.”

Propaganda campaigns of this kind are directed with special energy and persistence against those who obstruct the Soviet Union in its expansionism.. Such victims were, for example, the Yugoslav government during Stalin’s day, the more liberal Czech leaders in 1948 and again in 1968, the Western powers over the years because of their defense of Western Europe -especially the United States which, for all its weaknesses and errors had tried
to counter Soviet expansion in various parts of the world. What evil, what crime, was not attributed to each of them?
Zionism has been a principal target for most of the Soviet era. Inevitably Israel, the ordained “puppet of Western imperialism” and, in her own right, an “aggressor” and “expansionist,” has been the object of one of the more comprehensive campaigns of Soviet denunciation. In this the Soviets are ideally mated with the Arab fantasists.

A study of the Western press during the past twenty five years would reveal astonishing, if spasmodic, support for various Soviet themes designed to lull Russia’s victims or undermine her opponent. Widespread ignorance in the West of the character of the Soviet regime has helped its brainwashing campaign achieve notable successes in camouflaging its own ambitions and even its short-range purposes. This is notably true of the campaign of the Soviets, in partnership with the Arabs, against Israel. Because of their desire to support or at least not to anger the Arabs, Western governments have countenanced, if only by silence, and organs of opinion have helped to disseminate, wildly mendacious propaganda against Israel A major example is that none of the Western governments has said a single word to refute the Soviet-Arab “axiom” that Israel was the aggressor in 1967. Again, the most fantastic versions of the events accompanying the birth of the Arab refugee problem in 1948 are published as established fact in Western newspapers that do not even bother to check their own back files and the reports of their own correspondents at the time.

Predictably, this propaganda has been welcomed and supported by all the traditional enemies of the Jews. A motley collection of bedfellows has in fact collaborated since 1967 in berating and besmirching Israel. Russian, Chinese, and Yugoslav Communists, feudal and republican Arabs, American capitalist oil companies and nihilist New Left patrons of mythical underdogs, British Laurentian and post-Laurentian pan-Arabists, French exponents of calculating Gaullism–all are to be found rubbing shoulders in the same gallery. They have been joined by old-style anti-Semites: The so-called philo-Semitic period that followed the revelations of the Nazi Holocaust and awakened a flickering of conscience in the Christian world has gradually evaporated, and from many parts of the world-including Germany-come warning signals of renewed anti-Semitic activity and respectability. Where anti-Semites have not dared to undertake organized action against local Jewish communities, long-suppressed anti-Jewish feelings have found an outlet in the dissemination of every possible libel on the State of Israel and its people. In the unfolding story of our time, the restored Jewish state, for all the strength and self-confidence it has injected into the still dispersed Jewish people–aild maybe because of them-has become the focus, the ready-to-hand target of the anti-Semites.

The Catholic Church, which played a leading role over the centuries in the persecution of the Jews and in the indoctrination of contempt and hatred for Jews in generation after generation, and which in our time has been active in trying to prevent the Jewish restoration, has indeed in recent years (notably at the instance of the saintly Pope John XXIII and his school) relaxed its harsh attitude toward the Jewish people and many are the ardent forward-looking Catholics who would seek a fuller rapprochement. However, a
hard core of influential makers of policy in the Church continues to cherish and to foster the doctrine that the very revival of the Jewish state is intolerable. By sheer logic, they hope for the reversal of the Jewish restoration. As long as the State of Israel was excluded from the Old City of Jerusalem-which is the historic Holy City-the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine could, no doubt, still be rationalized as not being a real “restoration.” (And the Arabs vandalistic destruction of Jewish synagogues and desecration of Jewish graves in the City could perhaps be - accepted as further evidence of God’s will.) But now that Israel governs the whole City, what happens to the doctrine that the Jews could not and must not be restored and must be eternally punished because of their rejection of Christ?

The very benevolence of Israeli rule, the relaxed liberalism, operating since 1967, for the first time in history, under which all the religious sects in the City have had equally free and unconditioned access to their Holy Places, only emphasizes a Jewish sovereignty that requires no bans on other religions for its self-assertion or destruction of their property for its self-assurance.

Strangely enough, despite many centuries of the Church’s expertise in the dissemination of ideas, its spokesmen have not found any better public means of combating Israel than the Soviet and Arab method. Thus, as an example, a reputable Vatican journal published in the summer of 1971 an article by a Vatican official, Professor Federico Alessandrini alleging Israeli desecration of Christian cemeteries in Jerusalem. The account he gave was an uncritical repetition of a story disseminated for years by the Arab propaganda machine in Beirut.

The interests of the variegated front of warriors waging the propaganda and psychological warfare against Israel an themselves varied and often conflicting. Uniformity is, however, easily achieved by invoking in their support such semantic euphonies as justice, humanity, and even peace, all of which their activities are most calculated to undermine and destroy.
To maintain a correct perspective, it must be said that while Israel-and indeed the Jewish people at large-have been an outstanding target of pragmatism and cynicism, they are not alone in this role. In our time, we have been and still are witnesses to severe, and even gruesome, examples of smaller, weaker peoples being crushed politically and even physically.

A special tragic fate has been borne by Czechoslovakia, which has been subjugated three times in a generation. In 1938, collaboration existed between her would-be destroyers and the leaders of Western democracy, of which she herself was an honest and justly admired exponent. At that time, most blatantly, Western democratic organs of opinion (notably the London Times) depicted Czechoslovakia as the obstinate villain frustrating the search for justice by a peace-loving and reasonable Adolf Hitler. A second time, in 1948, barely three, years after the restoration of her independence, she was forced by a combination of subversion and brutality into the Soviet orbit. The Western democracies remained neutral. Twenty years later, when the Czech leaders tried to free themselves even partially from the Soviet straitjacket and to humanize the Communist way of life, the Western powers tacitly acquiesced in the Soviet invasion and in the brutal crushing of the Czech leaders and of the liberalizing reforms they had begun to introduce.

Other small peoples have had to suffer the interlocking effects of imperialist brutality and the pragmatic complaisance of the world’s democratic powers. For five years, from 1962 to 1967, the Western nations looked on and gave aid and comfort to the Egyptians who, in pursuit of their imperialist purpose (primarily to gain control of Saudi Arabia and its fabulous oil wealth), carried out an aggressive invasion of Yemen. The invasion was spearheaded by air attacks, with liberal use of napalm bombs, against the rural civilian population. Even sympathy for the certainly innocent Yemeni villagers was minimal. Not only governments bear that guilt. The combined front of self-declared humanist intellectuals, liberals, and Socialists, looked the other way or gave their propaganda support to the “progressive” invaders.
Acquiescence also accompanied the killing of vast numbers of Ibo people in Biafra by the forces of the Nigerian government in their effort to put an end to the striving for Ibo autonomy. In this instance there was international and even indeed Interbloc collaboration. There was no remonstrance against, the active intervention of Egypt and the Soviet Union, who carried out low-flying air attacks on defenseless lbo villages. The Nigerian forces were armed by Britain. The United States looked on. Probably a million people were killed or died of hunger in the two years between 1967 and the collapse of the Biafran struggle.

For several years, quietly, a campaign of large-scale extermination was in progress against the Nilotic Negro people of southern Sudan. A community of pagans and Christians, they dislike and resent the oppressive and discriminating rule of the northern Arab Moslems. When they raised the banner of autonomy, the Sudanese Army launched a merciless slaughter of the population, -combatant and noncombatant alike. According to the findings of visiting journalists, at least half a million people were exterminated. This operation, too, enjoyed the active support in arms and material, and even some personnel, of Egypt and the Soviet Union. It proceeded with the silent acquiescence of the Western states, none of which lifted a finger to help the hard-pressed southerners or even to admonish the Khartoum government. No voice was raised in protest. In this conflict, too, the United Nations found that it had no role to play. Appeals to the Secretary General by spokesmen for the Nilotic Negroes remained unanswered.

The grim series has been supplemented-one dare not say completed-by the unbelievable tragedy that overtook the people of East Pakistan in the spring and summer of 1971. In this conflict, the principles on which Western democracy prides itself were trampled underfoot; every human value was crushed. On this tragedy there was indeed no silence. Despite the efforts of the Pakistani government to prevent the spread of information, journalists succeeded in conveying the truth of the events in East Pakistan.

In March 1971, the ruling party in Pakistan was defeated in a general election by East Bengali autonomists. Instead of handing over the reins of office, the defeated government sent the army to crush the autonomist movement The army set about systematically liquidating intellectuals and other leaders, an action that developed into an operation of mass extermination. Harrowing eyewitness reports of deliberate slaughter of men, women, and children, of dead bodies littering the streets or being carried down the river, sketched out the quality and the scope of the massacre. People began to flee into neighboring India. By the end of October, ten million refugees were estimated to have crowded into the poverty-stricken, already overcrowded Indian province of West Bengal. Extreme squalor, hunger, and disease reigned among this stricken mass of people. Many countries sent food and medical supplies. Altogether they could achieve but slight amelioration.
Finally, a meaningful military offensive against Pakistan by India, bringing about the secession of East Bengal, made possible the return of the refugees to their often devastated houses. The behavior of West Pakistan did not alter her status: She remained an honored member of the world community. No government so much as recalled an ambassador in protest either at the crushing of democracy or at the mass murder. The United States continued to supply the
Pakistani government with arms. Nor was this concentrated agony of a whole people a matter of concern to the United Nations. The people of East Bengal, too, now discovered that that organization, which sponsored the Declaration of Human Rights, was last source from which they could expect succor. That is the way of the world, and the United Nations is no more than a faithful sounding board of its constituents. The powerful and the influential use it at will, or ignore it at will, or silence it at will, for their purpose. It could not, it seems, be otherwise.