Focus on Issues No Israeli Waterloo at 32

In Israel’s joyous 32nd year an irony has become apparent that just when the Jewish State is making a breakthrough towards regional cooperation, it is precisely at this moment that the West appear to be doing its utmost to undo that incipient, incremental process. Is this truly a new variation of Europe’s old maxim, “divide at imperial” — to divide and rule?

Is the West afraid that, should the warring, Balkanized Mideast states move towards real regional cooperation, such as the European Economic Community (EEC), that the lands of the silken curtain might comprise a new power bloc on the world scene — more powerful than the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) grouping with their one-crop economic? Do they fear some new “a live peril” which seems still to haunt Western chancelleries with visions of Hannibal’s elephants and Mohammed’s horsemen?

THE SHADOW OF IRONY

On the surface at least, the shadow of irony falling over the Mideast bears a striking similarity to the World War I era, when Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes and France’s Charles Picot together with the Russian Czar and the Italian government agreed in 1915-16 to divide and rule the Ottoman Middle East for Europe’s benefit.

Both the pan-Jewish (Zionist) and pan-Arab (then Hashemite) leaders objected that the Sykes-Picot agreement was inconsistent with Western assurances to their movements.

Even when the Bolsheviks led by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin opened the Czar’s foreign office archives in 1917 and made the Sykes-Picot agreement public, the Western powers went ahead anyway to divide and rule the Middle East from Sinai to Iraq. Later, suitable noises aside, the West acquiesced in Benito Mussolini’s conquest of all Ethiopia, almost a model for their behavior over Afghanistan.

A POSSIBLE MYSTICAL LINK

The words of Christopher Sykes, son of Sir Mark Sykes, on that imperial period speak for themselves: “So far as the British government were concerned, they could not welcome a Feisal-Weizmann agreement….”It is hard not to think of those days of Chaim Weizman and the Emir Feisal two generations ago, when witnessing the current disdain that Western Europe appears to be displaying towards the Anwar Sadat-Menachem Begin accord.

Sykes and Picot; Ernest Bevin and Adolf Hitler; Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt–is there somehow a mystical link between them? Far from looking for hidden motives or “conspiracies” against Jewry in particular and Semites in general on the part of the West, and rather than searching for morality in international affairs as practiced by the powers, Israel and her supporters are simply facing the reassertion of Euro-interest.

EUROPEAN SELF-INTEREST

European self-interest–some would call it opportunism–is simply returning to the world scene after its post-war loose. It is surely not imperialism. It is not the ancient hatred of Judaea or sudden love for Falastin that motivates them now. It is merely their need for oil that makes those democracies pander to the whims of feudal, reactionary sheikhs.

And it is not a real concern for the Afghans that underlies the noises from the West about the Soviet invasion. It is the sensing of an opportunity to embarrass the Russians in the eyes of the resource-rich Afro-Asian world. If Western scientists developed an alternate means of energy tonight, their politicians would drop OPEC tomorrow. And if the West had really been concerned about “Soviet imperialism” they’d also have made noises about the Tadzhiks, Uzbeks, teal. Nor did the West go to war over Czechoslovakia.

BASIS OF ISRAEL’S RESILIENCE

Thanks to her founding fathers, Israel’s resilience is still rooted in her diversified economy and in her lively democratic system. The current diplomatic pressures may cause many Israelis to feel again the pangs of international isolation. Does she become a fortress–what the proud British called “splendid isolation?” Should she take comfort in the fact that even within her own region she is not the only “add man out?” Must she accept as permanent Sen. Patrick Maynihan’s cutting description of the bulk of the UN membership as creating “a theater of the absurd?”

In certain quarters, proposals of tanning a kind of commonwealth of the world’s pariah states into a “fifth world” alliance have been mooted. Does Israel’s future lie in that direction? Yet Israel is by no means alone on the global scene. And in her 32nd year she has a rare opportunity to influence events in her own region.

Not only is Israel trying hard to consolidate her accord with Egypt and, hopefully through Cairo, putting out feelers to other African states; she also has on opportunity to do something constructive about the Palestinians and, possibly, with Arab Asia.

BUILDING A REGIONAL PEACE

To speculate for a moment: If, as former Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan suggested, Israel might make a unilateral gesture in respect of the West Bank and Gaza, might not such a step be made conditional on, among other things, Israel’s admission to the Arab League? If a non-Arab country like Somalia can become a League member, then why not Israel, Ethiopia, Malta, Cyprus, Turkey, Chad and several others?

By thus ending the exclusivist Arab nature of a potentially broader-based regional organization, all the countries of the Middle East–from the Sahara to Pakistan–would be taking a major step in building regional peace in the center of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Yet there are fears of the Soviet Union establishing yet another surrogate in the Middle East if Yasir Arafat gets his state, fears fanned also by the oil states in the region. There are suspicions that the Palestinians will serve as proxies for North Africa, almost as if the old Fatimid Empire was again seeking to penetrate West Asia’s fertile crescent, and as if the Khedive Mehemet Ali and Gamal Nasser were again seeking to control Araby across the Jordan Valley.

There is speculation as to what Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia might do if Arafat succeeds. And might his success be taken as a model for secessionism elsewhere, from Baluchistan to the Basque country, from the IRA to the Boder-Meinhoff element, from Corsica to Sicily, and from Bosnia to Pakhtunistan? While Israel’s future is being discussed by Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and Arafat, by Giscard and Morocco’s King Hassan, and by the U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the new EEC head Gaston Thom, the political kaleido scope does not remain stationary.

Only recently Davar, Israel’s Labor daily, quoted British Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jacobovitz as mentioning a Soviet suggestion for improving relations with Israel. Given the changing permutations in international and regional relations, Israel is far from facing her Waterloo as prophets of doom would have it. Indeed, the Jewish State’s 32nd year may mark a watershed in the ongoing progress of the Mideast’s gutsiest country.