October 1989, Page 23, 45

Media

Before Doing Things "The Israeli Way," Look Again at Israel

By Richard H. Curtiss

In discussions following the Israeli kidnapping of Sheikh Obeid and the announcement by Hezbollah terrorists that they had "executed" Lt. Col. William R. Higgins "in retaliation," a familiar exhortation arose.

"The US should do what the Israelis do," some journalists and congressmen declared. This presumably meant the US should seek to extract the remaining American hostages from Lebanon by force, or kidnap Shi'i leaders, or bomb military or economic targets in Lebanon, Iran or both.

President George Bush did not resort to any of these actions, which almost certainly would have caused civilian deaths in the areas attacked, and further deaths among US hostages. Through judicious leaks, however, he let it be known that if another hostage were killed, he would order military strikes at undisclosed targets by US forces assembled off the shores of both Lebanon and Iran.

To date, his restraint has worked. He has received no credit, however, from commentators who advocate the "Israeli approach" to diplomacy. Some are the same journalists who, a generation ago, wanted to "bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age." Others are of the "what's-good-for-Israel-is-good-for-America" persuasion and have never reported an Israeli action they couldn't justify.

Some, like New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, probably would lose little sleep over putting Israel ahead of American interests. Others like syndicated columnists George Will or Jeane Kirkpatrick are not Jewish, but they defend Israel vigorously when it takes actions detrimental to US interests, and they attack, with equal vigor, any American Middle East action not approved by Israel.

Still other advocates of "the Israeli way" can only be described as pack journalists. Like theWashington Post's Haynes Johnson, they have learned the hard way that they can criticize US policies without repercussions, but that criticism of Israeli policies results in reader outrage and editorial retribution. Together, Israel-first journalists and their media and political fellow travelers have bamboozled two generations of Americans into believing that Israelis know what's best for themselves and for the US in the Middle East.

It's instructive, however, to examine what Israel has accomplished by doing things its own way. Israel's raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda is invariably cited as an example of the Israeli way to deal forcefully with a hostage situation. The reason is that it is virtually the only major Israel "storm the terrorists" operation that has succeeded in extracting a large number of hostages without getting a sizeable percentage of them killed. Israel is dotted with monuments marking where its citizens have been killed in terrorist actions. The deaths generated resulted from a rush by Israeli troops in which the victims were caught in the crossfire, killed in the final seconds by doomed terrorists, or both.

In fact, that version of "the Israeli way" seems primarily designed not to save hostages but to demonstrate that, whatever the outcome of any terrorist act, its perpetrators will die. That point was driven home a few years ago in the investigation of a civilian bus storming in which an Israeli woman soldier passenger was killed by Israeli bullets. The two hijackers from Gaza, who turned out to be unarmed, surrendered before they could be killed. They were photographed being led away in handcuffs, but the next day turned up dead in the morgue.

When the Israeli army officer pictured leading them away testified that they were alive when he turned them over to Israeli Shin Bet internal security police agents, the police said the hijackers died under "interrogation." Eyewitnesses reported that the "interrogation" consisted of using blankets to toss the bound hijackers high into the air to fall upon rocks until they were dead.

With the advent of Shi'i suicide bombers, who destroyed themselves and those around them by setting off explosives in trucks, automobiles, or, in one case, a mule's saddlebags, the Israeli warning that terrorists would die in the course of any action they undertook became meaningless.

By this time, however, "the Israeli way" had changed. Increasingly it involved exchanging Arab soldiers and civilians in Israeli prisons for Israelis in Arab hands. Israel, so long praised by its apologists for its "no negotiations" policy, had become the Middle East's chief practitioner of hostage negotiations.

It was Israel's Shimon Peres who suggested through Michael Ledeen, an American-born "terrorism expert," the secret swap of American arms for Iranian-held hostages in Lebanon. That set in motion the Iran-contra scandal, and an Iranian-born Israeli Mossad agent, Manoucher Ghorbanifar, kept the operation alive by suggesting using money it generated to finance the contras.

By the time this furtive Reagan administration attempt to substitute the "Israeli way" for the firm US government policy of "no ransom for hostages" was exposed by Iranians, the kidnappers held just as many Americans as they had at the beginning of the swaps. Iran, however, had received so many Hawk anti-aircraft missiles and TOW anti-tank missiles that the tide was turning in its favor in its war with Iraq. It took the intervention of a fleet of 60 American naval vessels in the Persian Gulf, and the loss of some 40 American servicemen, to restore the balance.

Clearly, the ever-changing "Israeli way" doesn't work for Americans. Nor, in fact, does it work for Israelis. It has turned them into prime terrorist targets, and has proved a long-run disaster for their country. It is a policy of creating new problems to avoid having to solve old ones.

A prime example is the timing of the Sheikh Obeid kidnapping, which had virtually nothing to do with rescuing three Israeli servicemen in Shi'i hands. Two, ambushed near Israel's Lebanese "security zone," had almost certainly died during or immediately after the action in which they disappeared, a fact that apparently eluded Israel's vaunted intelligence services. As for the third missing Israeli, the navigator of an aircraft brought down by Shi'i gunfire over southern Lebanon, it is hard to visualize anything short of an overall peace agreement that would persuade Iran's hard-line mullahs to agree to his release.

However, the Israeli raid on Sheikh Obeid's Lebanese village, in which two of his aides were kidnapped with him and one of his neighbors killed, sidetracked a looming Israeli confrontation with the Bush administration over Yitzhak Shamir's "peace plan" for Palestinian elections in Israeli-occupied territories. Shamir adopted the plan (originated by Labor Coalition Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin) because the newly installed Bush administration had warned he was no longer welcome in the US unless he brought peace proposals with him. Shamir gambled that, because the plan was devoid of details and he was publicly promising his own party followers that he would "never" exchange land for peace, it would be rejected by Yasser Arafat's PLO.

The Bush administration used its "dialogue" with the PLO to counsel patience, however, and when Shamir declined to supply details, the US began to set its own conditions. Faced by irreconcilable demands from Israelis and Americans, Shamir seized Sheikh Obeid on the same day Iran's new president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was sworn into office.

It was a perfect example of "the Israeli way" of avoiding the solution of an existing problem by creating a new one. If, in the furor that followed, George Bush had listened to the pro-Israel "bomb anything" claque in the media and his own administration, it would have set off a new, downward spiral in America's troubled relations with Iran. The impasse over Israel's election plan might have been forgotten, while Israel's bloody repression of the Palestinian intifada continued. Instead, the Israel-US confrontation may have been postponed only briefly, or until the Shamir government manages to distract the US again.

Wasted Resources

In fact, this "Israeli way" of creating new problems for others to avoid solving old problems of its own is destroying Israel. Had Israel not devoted the past 20 years to consolidating a military occupation of areas that the rest of the world, including the US, insists must be returned to Arab sovereignty, Israel would be at peace today with all of its Arab neighbors.

Israel would not have wasted its human and fiscal resources on creating beleaguered Jewish settlements in West Bank areas that inevitably will be returned to their Palestinian inhabitants. Instead, it might have devoted the more than $50 billion it has received from the United States during that period to creating jobs in industry as well as housing, and educational and medical facilities that would have enabled it to attract Jewish immigrants from all over the world.

This is the year in which Israeli hopes might have been realized. Some 20,000 Jews were permitted to leave the Soviet Union in 1988. This year that figure may double. There may be nearly half a million more Soviet Jews seriously considering following them. But fewer than 10 percent of those Soviet emigres are going to Israel.

In fact, Israel for a generation has been plagued by a hidden Jewish emigration that probably exceeds Jewish immigration. The drastic new measures to combat the intifada, including extension of annual military service to 60 days for able-bodied Israeli males up to 52 years of age, can only speed up this surreptitious Jewish flight. An Israeli government dedicated to a "Greater Israel," which means confrontation and war with its Arab neighbors for generations to come, will not attract immigrants.

The US, faced with a daunting mass of Soviet Jewish would-be immigrants, already is refusing refugee status to close to 20 percent of them. Will even those turned down by the US refuse to go to Israel? If so, probably most of those backed up behind them who cannot obtain US visas will choose to remain in the USSR.

It would not be surprising, based upon the example of other major Jewish communities. At present, Jews are leaving South Africa as apartheid crumbles. Virtually all go to North America, Australia or Western Europe.

In Argentina, a quarter-million Jews are poised for a mass exodus, fueled by that country's recurring economic problems. Over the past year, 3,000 have arrived in Israel, which already is having difficulty absorbing even such a small, impoverished group.

To date, however, the chief sufferers have been some 15,000 Jewish "Falashas." Most of these Ethiopians, who say they are descendents of one of the 10 ancient lost tribes of Israel, were rescued by an airlift from refugee camps in Sudan. At first, the Falashas, who had been farmers and craftsmen at home, were grateful for whatever help the Israeli government could provide to help them settle into their adopted homeland. That gratitude has been replaced by increasing skepticism.

The Falashas recognize that they are being exploited on behalf of the Israeli Likud's dream of "Greater Israel." After long waits in "temporary" quarters, they are being forced to choose between permanent housing in dangerous and beleaguered West Bank Jewish "settlements," or substandard housing in remote areas where there are few jobs. As a result, they find little employment except as members of the Israeli military.

Like Soviet Jews, Jewish Ethiopians left behind may choose not to follow their peers to Israel. And those who are there may follow the example of so many of the Soviet Jews who emigrated to Israel a generation ago but now live, "temporarily," in Russian-Israeli emigre colonies in the US where there are jobs, housing and security.

Reasonable people may differ over how to face the frustrating impact of terrorism, but Americans who support adoption of the "Israeli way" should look again at what it has done to Israel.

Richard Curtiss is editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.