Originally published in 1975, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West offers us this: “Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; … why is it that societies … with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception?”
The truth is sometimes painful, and regrettably not always self-evident. When it comes to Israel and that elusive peace that so many pretend is possible, the truth is always painful, and seemingly never self-evident. Understanding this requires some simple common sense. Sir Isaac Newton seemed to understand the concept when he proffered the following advice three hundred years ago: “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
For the sake of brevity, we shall advance here three interrelated perspectives, each which has its own simple explanation – and yet, dots which somehow remain unconnected. Employing the very elementary rules of logic, three premises that ought to be known to all will lead axiomatically to the only conclusion that can be drawn. Painful, and yet self-evident. Peace with a hostile enemy, one espousing a genocidal ideology entrenched on a Middle East that will be Judenrein, is not only improbable, it is also impossible.
It has become the lie that we live. Peace with its Arab neighbors requires Israel to make significant concessions, minimally the return to pre-1967 borders with some minor modifications, or the more significant forfeiture of all territories seized in the Six Day War, truncating Israel to indefensible frontier borders. Those are the preconditions set by Israel’s adversaries and adopted as well by so many of Israel’s so-called friends. Even where negotiations are asked to begin with no preconditions, they are the preconditions. On the other side of the negotiating table are the Israeli demands that the final outcome will be based on two fundamental elements (read: preconditions): recognition and security.
Item 1.
In January 1955, Major-General Moshe Dayan, while Israel’s Chief of General Staff, published a piece titled “Israel's Border and Security Problems” in Foreign Affairs. Now long forgotten, the article is no less relevant today – particularly given the ubiquitous calls for a 2-State solution from friends and foes.
Dayan’s thesis was as simple as it was factual, and troubling. We reprint here, piecemeal, its opening.
“Seven years after its war of independence the State of Israel still faces a security problem of unusual complexity. The area of the country is only 8,100 square miles. But owing to the configuration of its territory there are 400 miles of frontier. Three-quarters of the population of Israel lives in the coastal plain, running from north of Haifa to south of Tel Aviv, with a slender salient branching off to Jerusalem. This densely settled area has an average width of no more than twelve miles between the Mediterranean and the Jordanian border. From the Israel Parliament buildings in Jerusalem the armed sentries of the Jordanian Arab Legion can be seen a few hundred yards away. The headquarters of the Israel General Staff in the coastal plain are within clear view from the hills which mark the Jordan frontier. The country's main roads and railways are exposed to swift and easy incursion. Scarcely anywhere in Israel can a man live or work beyond the easy range of enemy fire. Indeed, except in the Negev, no settlement is at a distance of more than 20 miles from an Arab frontier.
And it continued:
“Thus the term ‘frontier security’ has little meaning in the context of Israel's geography.”
Moshe Dayan was describing the “Auschwitz borders” that Abba Eban would later speak about.
Now, substitute ‘Palestinian Arabs’ for ‘Jordanian’ and we have the same problem as Dayan warned us about in 1955 – and the only reason needed to put to rest any delusional thought of pursuing a discussion of a 2-State solution. A 2-State illusion. Where all the security concerns articulated then by a rather youthful Moshe Dayan are still extant today.
Israel’s topography has not changed during these past decades, nor has the rejectionist Arab ideology which has been inherited by the Palestinian Arabs, and remains at its core genocidal. Two things have changed. Israel’s military prowess, and the proliferation of arms in the hands of the terrorists who sit on the borders of the Jewish State. It is only by virtue of Israel having expanded its frontier security with the expanded post-1967 borders, coupled with an Israeli military presence in those areas, that Israel has been able to deter an incursion across the lines that Dayan had described as so perilous. That protective buffer zone would summarily disappear with the creation of an Arab Palestinian state, and the weapons – and missiles – that would be directed in any assault on Israel would be Iranian.
The experts know this to be true. The so-called experts do not. And virtually the entire Western world doesn’t seem to care. Count among those: most of Israel’s so-called friends – chief among them the United States and the European Union; most American Jewish organizations coupled with the naïve constituents who blindly follow them; and the media, academia, and of course, a sizeable segment of Israel’s population that sits in opposition to the present government as well.
Item 2.
In the immediate aftermath of the Abraham Accords just a few years ago, foreign policy analysists and other political commentators who had engaged for so many years as “export” observers of Middle East affairs, concurred that the Palestinian issue had now – finally – been relegated to secondary status. They were part of a chorus of opinions that suggested that the Palestinian Arabs had once again lived up to former Israeli diplomat and politician Abba Eban’s oft-quoted quip that “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” and would no longer be relevant.
Those forecasts were premature, and decidedly wrong. Those comments were as erroneous as the frequent and ubiquitous misuse of the nomenclature “peace treaty” to describe the same events. They were not – they were agreements advancing a normalization of relations between Israel and some of the Arab states. Many so-called experts seem not to know the difference, while some of the experts know fully well the difference, but leverage the distorted misrepresentation for political gain. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands with the latter element, speaking often about his accomplishment having achieved ‘peace treaties’ with some of the more conciliatory states.
Where language is important because it often defines the narrative that ultimately drives the debate, the careless and inaccurate lexicon is irresponsible. Take for example the recent excitement that has permeated the discourse of a possible breakthrough in talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Media reports, mostly representing western news agencies, have mimicked the frequent thoughtless comments made by diplomats which speak about an ostensible and inevitable peace between those two nations. After all, they reasoned, the experts had already assured us for several years that the Palestinian Arab issue – as unresolved as it was at the dawn of the Oslo Accords on September 13, 1993 – was no longer an obstacle.
Once again – decidedly wrong. Because these so-called expert opinions are fashioned out of a fraudulent exercise in self-deception and ignore completely Soren Kierkegaard’s truism: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Both are in play here. Familiarize yourself with the Arab Peace Initiative (originally called the Saudi Peace Initiative in 2002) and understand the preconditions. Yes, Eban’s ‘Auschwitz’ borders.
Item 3.
If intellectual integrity is to mean anything one must readily accept what the Palestinians Arabs say quite unabashedly; they refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State. The version of that very affirmation is spoken with an unapologetic and fatalistic enmity when addressing a domestic Arab audience. The Palestinian Arab rejectionism is blatantly obvious, as evidenced by Mahmoud Abbas’s meeting with Joe Biden – when they met on July 15, 2022 – when he called on the American president to erase the 74-year-old “occupation”. Yes, seventy-four years, referencing Israel’s very establishment as a modern state in 1948.
Other numbers are also quite telling.
Here is where the truth is indeed painful. The Arabs are quite clear about their perspective of what was “occupied.” For The Palestinian Arabs, all of Israel is occupied. Not beginning in 1967, but in 1948. Everything, from the river to the sea. Israel proper and the territories of Judea and Samaria, including Jerusalem. It is on this that we separate the experts from the pretenders, those who speak only of the 'West Bank' and East Jerusalem – as “occupied”. The details are often explained away as, “well, it’s rather complicated.”
No – it is not. The Muslim world has yet to embrace a Middle East where Israel possesses the right to exist as a Jewish State. De jure and not de facto. Period. Not because anything Israel has done or failed to do – but because Israel exists.
Let’s understand the disconnect. Israel proper within the pre-1967 lines measures 8522 square miles. Add to that the 2183 square miles that make up Judea and Samaria. The latter are the “occupied territories” that the non-Arab world, and many of Israel’s false friends demand that Israel withdraw from. But of course, the Arabs have a completely different understanding, and they occasionally remind us. Their calculators tally the two aforementioned numbers and arrive at: 10,705 square miles. From the river to the sea. The translation, is again, quite simple: the Palestinian Arabs – embracing a shared understanding that unites Fatah and Hamas – view Israel’s very existence, in toto, as occupation. They deny even the frontier security lines that Dayan opined about in 1955.
Conclusion.
So, let’s connect the three interrelated perspectives, and arrive at the obvious. The truth is painful and it ought to be self-evident. But, with an anorexic appetite for the truth, it is readily ignored by most ‘experts’ because engaging in critical thinking would lead us all to believe that peace is not improbable, it is impossible.
It’s what Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke about –societies, with access to every kind of information willfully plunging into a kind of mass blindness and a voluntary self-deception. It is really that simple.
Yes, Isaac Newton was right: “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.