Israel Advised by Israeli Military Historian: Pull Out Of Palestinian Lands to Save ITSELF

Israel Advised by Israeli Military Historian: Pull Out Of Palestinian Lands to Save ITSELF

  by

Max Hastings

March 29, 2005

Read here full article by Max Hastings in "The Guardian (UK)

Read here "Interview with Martin van Crefeld by the Dutch magazine Elsevier " Professor Martin van Creveld is an internationally known professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

("Defending Israel", by Martin van Crefeld, is distributed in Britain by Artellus, London )

"Israel has no choice but to withdraw from the West Bank - not to indulge the Palestinians but to save itself."

When someone says that today the chances for Middle East peace have improved, it is worth asking two questions:

Can there be a sustainable truce, as long as Israel maintains a significant presence in the West Bank? And,

Do the Israelis seem remotely interested in giving this up?

If your answer to both is negative, then you share my view that we should not be deceived into optimism by a pitstop in mutual vilification between Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian Authority.

The key challenge now, as ever, is to convince Israelis that their own security interests are best served by evacuating the Occupied Territories.

And this does not mean getting out of Gaza merely in order to strengthen Israel's grip on the West Bank .

These issues are addressed in a new book by Martin van Crefeld, who was born in Holland but has lived in Israel for much of his life, and is an internationally respected military historian and strategic guru, even if also a prophet somewhat disdained in his own country.

His book, published in the US (but for which he could find no Israeli, or British, publisher), makes a powerful argument for Israel's withdrawal, not to indulge the Palestinians, but to save itself.

He believes unilateral action is essential, because the Palestinians will never become viable partners in a bilateral deal.

He accepts that some terrorism will continue anyway, and thus proposes that Israel should shield itself with a security wall established on its pre-1967 frontiers.

He acknowledges that most Arab states will remain irreconcilably hostile, which means that Israel must maintain stringent security measures to protect its people from harm.

But he believes these must be based upon internationally recognised borders, because to sustain Israel's explicitly expansionist policy of the past 25 years has become intolerable militarily, financially and diplomatically. No amount of neo-conservative encouragement from Washington, such as the Bush administration offered last week for Israel's West Bank settlements, can change this.

Hawks who argue that Israel's security demands a buffer zone beyond its borders are living in the past.

In the new age of military technology, Israel's superiority over the Arabs will increase.

Iraq is out of the reckoning as a foe.

Syria, Egypt and Jordan can't look to US or Russian patronage to build new conventional arsenals - and the conventional threat to Israel is now almost non-existent.

Weapons of mass destruction are another matter.

The only credible defence against an Arab state will always be deterrence, perhaps eventually supported by an anti-missile system.

For all the Arabs' extravagant rhetoric, self-interest will dissuade them from launching a nuclear strike against Israel when they can be sure of an annihilating response.

The key to defusing Jewish settler militancy, Van Crefeld argues, is a guarantee of alternative housing.

Most of the 200,000 people who have gone to live beyond Israel's borders have done so not as eager colonists, but because the West Bank offers affordable homes.

If they are promised accommodation in Israel as part of a deal, the government will have to deal only with a small minority of madmen, who are convinced that Israel has a divine claim on biblical Israel.

He suggests that, after withdrawal, Israel should scrap most of its conventional forces and adopt much more effective, and less manpower-intensive, technology-based defences: balloon- and drone-mounted surveillance devices; beyond-smart, so-called "brilliant" missiles; and unmanned aircraft.

At the hub of the author's argument is a stark question:

What is Israel's choice?

If it rejects withdrawal, if it seeks to sustain its strategic roads and colonial settlements in the West Bank, then it faces an eternity of debilitating and unwinnable counter-insurgency, "which opens the door for vandals, thieves, extortionists, sadists and perverts of every kind [in the Israeli army] to realise their fantasies at the expense of the hapless population".

From October 2000 to June 2003 alone, 360 Israel soldiers were put under investigation, an average of two a week, including 153 cases of suspected homicide. Those figures ignore countless cases that went unreported.

Withdrawal will eliminate "by far the most important source of friction between [Israelis and Palestinians], namely the occupation itself".

A comprehensive wall protecting the new frontiers will cost at least £500m, possibly more than double that. But the occupation has already cost at least £10bn, so a wall will be cheap at that price.

Van Crefeld rejects the strategy of seeking to negotiate piecemeal "concessions" with the Palestinians.

There is no goodwill left to work with.

"After years of bloody repression ... Partly to be on the safe side, partly to please Israel's hawks, the working assumption should be that the hawks are right ... Israel should seek to rid itself of as much Palestinian ballast as possible.

Once this is done, the remaining threat can be dealt with by military rather than political methods."

Martin van Crefeld is, in Israeli terms, a maverick and even close to an outcast, but only the Likud would readily dismiss him as a fool.

Most of what he says reflects a lifetime as a respected, sometimes brilliant, strategic analyst.

Today, few Israelis will heed what he says, because most of those who claim to want peace in truth want victory. They still cannot reconcile themselves to abandoning the West Bank, less still East Jerusalem.

Yet I suspect that reality will prove to be on Van Crefeld's side, even if the timeframe is very protracted.

Sooner or later, Israel will have to recognise that the cost of occupying what other nations, almost without exception, recognise as legitimate Palestinian territory is intolerable.

Attempts to institutionalise illegal occupation, by placing chunks of unilaterally annexed territory behind Sharon's fence, will ultimately fail.

Even if few Israelis today think rationally about these things, we should welcome the fact that one of them is doing so.

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