“What an Extraordinary Place!”

Rosh Hashana Reflections on Several Intertwined Anniversaries: 80, 30, 25, 10, 3, 2

It has been a while since Israel has witnessed such an array of visiting international dignitaries, with Bill Clinton as the warm-voiced star of the evening (joining a group of Israeli and Palestinian children in a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—not my favorite lyrics, in that a world without countries or religions seems somewhat anodyne to me, but a beautiful piece nevertheless). The day after, our Nobel Peace Prize winner and the cause of all this—Shimon Peres on the occasion of his eightieth birthday—was joined by an impressive lineup of Nobel laureates including Fredrik Willem De Klerk of South Africa, David Trimble of Northern Ireland, and Mikhail Gorbachev of Russia. All of them offered their ideas on generosity and caution, on the need to be flexible and the need to demand compliance, on their hopes for the future and their fears about the dangers of globalization. Above all, they offered an impassioned plea that children not be educated to hate. It was a wise and useful, but at times somewhat contradictory, cascade of advice.

“What an extraordinary place,” exclaimed Clinton during the evening celebrations. “I feel at home here.” (Our own AJC president, Harold Tanner, who was there, can attest to the immense warmth with which Clinton was received by the Israeli public.) As the heroic (in Hebrew, gvurot, a term associated with the age of 80) celebration rolled on, it brought into focus not only politics, but also Peres’s other favorite set of issues—namely, the need to reshape Israel as a society based on science-driven industries (such as nanotechnology)—a vision for which he now actively seeks the support of American Jewry. Again he opened windows to a vision of prosperity spreading to parts of the region beyond our borders. None of our trials and tribulations over these last few years have changed this man’s focus on the future.

  And yet the past is still very much with us, as various anniversaries pile on top of one another at this evocative time on the eve of Rosh Hashana 5764. As a former intelligence analyst, I joined this week in a gathering of active and reserve officers and some of the great men of the former generation, to discuss what we all— the Directorate of Military Intelligence, which bore the main responsibility for early warning, the intelligence community at large, the IDF, and  Israeli society as a whole—learned from the catastrophic failure thirty years ago to alert the IDF and to prepare for the Egyptian-Syrian surprise offensive of Yom Kippur 5734, October 6, 1973. Some 2,600 Israeli fighting men and women paid with their lives then, and the pain will not go away. But lessons have been learned—in openness and integration of intelligence, in broadening our range of sources and our use of information, and, above all, in never again underestimating the enemy.

 Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned was not from our failure, but from our success—in rebounding in less than three weeks (compare that to the time it took the Soviet Union to rebound after the Barbarossa surprise in June 1941 or the United States after Pearl Harbor), with a victory borne on the shoulders of the rank and file, the fighting troops on the company and battalion level. A democratic society once again proved the immense resilience that freedom instills in those who live under it; and five years later, almost to the day, the very same Egyptian ruler who had launched the war, Anwar al-Sadat, signed at Camp David the framework of peace. He had come to recognize that only a bold leap over the psychological chasm—reaching out to the one true “decision maker,” the Israeli voter—would bring him within range of his goals. As the archives open, we learn more and more about the internal dynamics and complications that attended that historic peace conference twenty-five years ago.

 A more recent event, again still fraught with painful questions (which tended to sour some of Peres’s joy) has been the tenth anniversary of the Oslo Declaration of Principles—“the right agreement with the wrong people,” or to be more precise, with the wrong man. Now that we are stuck with some of the consequences of this fateful choice of a partner, some among us—important Israelis, prominent Americans, and any number of European and UN officials—are willing to look at any old way out, including the one solution Arafat has been pining for (and I suspect, shed all this blood to achieve), namely, an international intervention to replace the IDF and secure the two-state solution. “This,” declared the PA “Foreign Minister” (formally the PA is not a state and so is not supposed to conduct foreign policy) Nabil Sha’ath, “would be the salvation for both, and would bring an end to terrorism”—an elegant way of saying that until he gets what he wants, Arafat will do what he can to hasten this intervention.

What is wrong with such an intervention? Two main issues arise:

·        There is a reason why Arafat is so eager to bring about, even at this hideous cost, an international intervention. If mandated by the UN, any such intervention would define its mission in line with the Arab interpretation of “international legitimacy,” i.e., the June 4, 1967 lines (even within Jerusalem!) and the “right of return”—without any compromise, without even the pretense of negotiating.

·        Moreover, such an intervention would imply a dangerous degree of disregard, even disdain, toward the democratic outcome of the Israeli political process and an urgent wish to “impose a solution” on the “reluctant” Israelis. This will never happen, and must not happen. An imposition would break, perhaps irretrievably, the back of Israeli democracy—the very same backbone that has seen us through the present conflict and has marked American responses since 9/11. As it happens, two other, tragic but interlinked anniversaries bracket Rosh Hashana this year: We already marked, at a solemn ceremony at AJC headquarters, two years since 9/11, the “Pearl Harbor” of Islamist totalitarianism. Soon we shall all mark the third anniversary of Arafat’s own decision to “cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war” after the failure of his Camp David summit. Much has been lost since. Have the lessons been learned? We should not be quick to assume they have. Saddamist—and Arafatist—terrorists are still trying to undo all lessons and destroy all achievements. In one specific case, known to U.S. policymakers (hence the harsh judgment on Arafat in President Bush’s speech at the UNGA) but not widely publicized in the United States, the offices of the best and most honest Palestinian leader, Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, were attacked and trashed in both Gaza and Ramallah by goons and thugs who answer to Arafat alone and do not want to see his money lines brought under orderly supervision.