June 1992, Page 15, 89

Special Report

The Battle of America: Final Chapter in the 100-Year Arab-Israeli War?

By Andrew I. Killgore

"At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in 5 years, and certainly in 50, everyone will know it."
-Theodor Herzl's Diaries, Vol. II, p. 24 (1897)

The Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome (264 B.C.-146 B.C.) lasted more than 100 years. Carthage lost despite the brilliant generalship of Hannibal, which almost, but not quite, compensated for Carthagenian deficiencies in manpower and resources. This titanic trans-Mediterranean struggle between two empires centered in present-day Tunisia and present-day Italy was the first hundred years war.

Professional historians call the trans-channel struggle between Britain and France from 1337 A.D. to 1453 A.D. the "Hundred Years War." Like the Punic Wars, the Hundred Years War consisted of periods of intense physical conflict alternating with periods of relatively peaceful competition.

In both cases, after interim victories, the "outsider" eventually lost.

Outsider Carthage had to cross the Mediterranean from its smaller base to defeat stronger Rome on its home territory. When that effort eventually failed, Rome invaded and inflicted on Carthage a decisive and lasting defeat.

Outsider Britain had to cross the English Channel from its main concentrations of strength and defeat France decisively in its own continental redoubt in order to prevail. This it was unable to do.

If we count from 1897, the year in which Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, wrote the entry quoted above concerning the first World Zionist Organization meeting in the Swiss city of Basel, a third hundred years war, that of Israel against the Arabs, may be approaching a climax. If President George Bush is re-elected in November, and by withholding unconditional American aid forces Israel to evacuate the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights by 1997, the Arab-Israeli War will have lasted just 100 years.

Like the other "outsiders," Israel's Likud government, called upon in 1989 by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to "forsake its dream of greater Israel," will have failed to implement its imperialistic goals. To have succeeded, despite its inferior numbers and resources on the ground, it would have had to defeat the Arabs on their home territory-and keep them defeated.

It could do so only by continuing to draw on enormous outside support from the United States. With such unconditional support now dwindling, Israel appears to be losing the climactic final struggle, the Battle of America, in its campaign not only to secure physical possession of all of Palestine, but also to control sufficient additional terrain and resources to hold it.

Herzl's "50 years" prediction had been realized.

As originally conceived, political Zionism was a European movement having little to do with the United States. Zionism's aim in 1897 and thereafter was to carve a Jewish state out of Arab Palestine. The Battle of America began in a peculiar way in 1917 with the issuance by Britain of the Balfour Declaration, promising a Jewish state in Palestine. Behind that declaration was a secret promise to the British from the World Zionist Organization to use Jewish influence in the United States to bring America into World War I on the side of the sorely-pressed Allies.

In fact, that claimed Jewish influence had little to do with President Woodrow Wilson's move to put the United States into the Allied camp. The U.S. entered the war in April 1917. British officials and Jewish leaders in Britain continued to debate the text, its timing and the potential impact of the Balfour Declaration on the Jews of Britain until it was issued the following November. But the "habit" of involving the U.S. had begun.

The conflict on the ground began in Palestine in the 1920s, and by the end of the 1930s and the outbreak of World War II, the Palestinians had lost 10,000 dead in a spontaneous and desperate revolt to force the British to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine. The political and military defeat in 1938 and 1939 had disastrous consequences for the Palestinians after the war, when Jewish immigration from Europe resumed. In 1947, the United Nations, pressed ruthlessly by the United States, voted to partition Palestine into two states, awarding 53 percent of the land to the Jewish one-third of the population.

Herzl's "50 years" prediction had been realized. Six months later the state of Israel was established. By 1949 the Arabs had lost the military contest and another 25 percent of Palestine to the Israelis. More than 750,000 Palestinians became homeless refugees.

Serving as both cause and effect of its military victories in Palestine were Israel's political victories in the Battle of America. These political victories secured the American support Israel required to hold its military conquests of 1948 and 1949 and eventually to seize the rest of Palestine.

A Serious Setback

A serious Israeli setback occurred after the Suez War of 1956, however, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, both of which it had seized from Egypt. But this proved to be only a temporary Israeli setback in the Battle of America.

In 1967, by militarily defeating Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Israel was able to seize and hold Sinai, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Syria's Golan Heights. And this time the U.S. allowed Israel to keep the captured territories, because President Lyndon Johnson thought he needed American Jewish support to sustain his continued prosecution of the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War.

In 1973, after Egypt and Syria surprised Israel with an attack to recover territory lost in the 1967 war, the U.S. set up three air bridges to resupply Israel from its military stockpiles in Europe and the Far East and directly from the United States. This American help turned Israel's near defeat into a victory of sorts.

Nevertheless, Israel lost some of the territory it had occupied in both the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Hardly noticed at the time was the reluctance of the U.S. political and military bureaucracy to rescue Israel from a mess so clearly of its own making. While winning another war in the Middle East, Israel had demonstrated its eroding support in the Battle of America.

Israel's 1982 aggression against Lebanon cost it dearly in terms of American public support. With instinctively pro-Israel Ronald Reagan in the White House and a supinely pro-Israel George Shultz at the State Department, the U.S. gave Israel extra billions of dollars to pay for the bloody misadventure in which Israeli forces killed 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, virtually all of them civilians. But the American people had watched on their television screens the ruthless Israeli bombing and shelling of nearly defenseless West Beirut for 41 days and nights. Israel lost public opinion assets hard to regain in the expanding Battle of America.

Two wars clearly associated with Israel's 100-year struggle with its neighbors were the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, in which more than 100,000 were killed, and the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, in which as many as one million soldiers may have been killed. The gradual realization that such repeated, large-scale Middle Eastern struggles around the fringes of two-thirds of the world's petroleum reserves could only be ended with a solution to the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict inflicted further serious losses on Israel's psychological warriors in the Battle of America. Lebanon, in particular, had been close to American hearts for a century and a half, and Israeli machinations there left a bad impression in the minds of the many Americans with direct ties to that once-fabled Mediterranean playground.

Israel lost public opinion assets hard to regain in the expanding Battle of America.

Then, despite bipartisan White House and congressional attempts to shield Israel, came revelations of its hand in the secret machinations to provide fundamentalist Iran with American weapons throughout most of the Iran-Iraq war. The use in congressional testimony of such euphemisms as "country number one" and "a third country" in referring to the architect, instigator and prime mover of Irangate, the worst foreign policy scandal in American history, did not protect Israel from further severe erosion of its standing in America.

Ultimately, with the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in December 1987, the Palestinians of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem became the major combatants in the Battle of America. They also bore the casualties. More than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been shot dead or beaten to death. More than 100,000 have been wounded. And 15,000 have been imprisoned with no charges lodged against them and no due process accorded them.

Meanwhile, on the lands stolen from them, the building of Jewish "settlements" in the occupied territories continues at breakneck speed, all obviously made possible by American funding.

The Cold War ended when Germany was reunited and the Soviet Union fell apart. And with it ended an era when international disputes remained unresolved whenever the Cold War protagonists became involved. Now, solutions based on the merits of the dispute rather than the alliances of the parties have again become thinkable, as has the "peace dividend" that can follow a curb on production of weapons of mass destruction.

Outsider Israel's escalating demands for astronomically expensive support from across the seas for its increasingly destructive wars against enemies with vastly superior numbers and resources are becoming increasingly anachronistic. As a result, President Bush's resistance, beginning last Sept. 12, to further unconditional aid has elicited the support of more than 80 percent of the American people. This is far more support than he enjoys on other issues.

It seems, therefore, that Israel's loss of public opinion marks the abandonment of its last redoubt in the Battle of America, and the decisive climax of the 100-year Arab-Israeli War.

Andrew I. Killgore, former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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