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PARTISAN REVIEW
powerful amongst all Arabs, including the migrants.
If
this can be done,
and it will take time to organize, it would eliminate terrorism from the
Israeli labor market, which would be a very considerable achievement.
This would indeed be a major contribution to Israel's security, but it
would still leave Israel damagingly entangled with its Arab neighbors
through the Jewish settlements on Arab territories on the West Bank.
If
Israel were to withdraw its own forces from the area, simply leaving the
settlers there, all the settlers, deprived of Israeli protection, would sim–
ply be massacred by their Arab neighbors. There is only one remedy.
If
Israel does decide to withdraw from the West Bank, the Israeli defense
forces must take their settlers along with them, if necessary using force
against them for their own protection.
It
may be said, perhaps will be
said, that this is an improbable scenario. Yet it has been done before.
When Menachem Begin was engaged in peace discussions with Sadat of
Egypt, the proceedings were stalled for some months by disagreement
over the Jewish settlers in the Sinai Desert. Begin wanted to keep them
there. Sadat said that unless Israel agreed to withdraw all the settlers
from Sinai, he would never sign a peace treaty with Israel. When Begin
found that Sadat could not be budged from that position, he agreed to
withdraw all the settlers and did so. The peace achieved has lasted into
our own time. And as Aristotle said with his usual lapidary wisdom,
"When a thing has been done once, we know it can be done again."
Ariel Sharon seems personally, heavily committed not only to the
existing settlements on the West Bank, but to reenforcing these settle–
ments. This probably means that a stable peace covering Israel on the
West Bank is simply not attainable under Sharon. But that does not
mean that peace is not attainable at all.
It
seems to be widely agreed,
first, that Sharon will not long be leader in Israel, and, second, that his
most likely successor is Benjamin Netanyahu. As it happens, I know
Netanyahu quite well. When he was permanent representative of Israel
with the United ations, he invited me there to help in a project on
which he was then engaged. The project was getting the general assem–
bly to cancel a resolution that it had passed years before, a resolution in
effect equating Zionism with Nazism. I was among the speakers
involved in this effort, and the withdrawal of the resolution was even–
tually successfully achieved.
It
was at this time I came to know
Netanyahu and to admire him greatly. While he will never sacrifice
Israel's security, he knows America very we ll indeed, and is strongly
committed to improving relations with America.
If
he is elected Prime
Minister of Israel, I propose to call on him immediately, rehearsing the
above arguments, and stressing the necessity for the withdrawal of all
