Why Israel Feels Threatened

MANY Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

December 30, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor
Why Israel Feels Threatened
By BENNY MORRIS
Li-On, Israel

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/opinion/30morris.html

MANY Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their
60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched
the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai,
the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

More than 40 years ago, the Egyptians had driven a United Nations peacekeeping force
from the Sinai-Israel border, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping
and air traffic and had deployed the equivalent of seven armored and infantry
divisions on Israel’s doorstep. Egypt had signed a series of military pacts with
Syria and Jordan and placed troops in the West Bank. Arab radio stations blared
messages about the coming destruction of Israel.

Israelis, or rather, Israeli Jews, are beginning to feel much the way their parents
did in those apocalyptic days. Israel is a much more powerful and prosperous state
today. In 1967 there were only some 2 million Jews in the country — today there are
about 5.5 million — and the military did not have nuclear weapons. But the bulk of
the population looks to the future with deep foreboding.

The foreboding has two general sources and four specific causes. The general
problems are simple. First, the Arab and wider Islamic worlds, despite Israeli hopes
since 1948 and notwithstanding the peace treaties signed by Egypt and Jordan in 1979
and 1994, have never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s creation and continue
to oppose its existence.

Second, public opinion in the West (and in democracies, governments can’t be far
behind) is gradually reducing its support for Israel as the West looks askance at
the Jewish state’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors and wards. The Holocaust
is increasingly becoming a faint and ineffectual memory and the Arab states are
increasingly powerful and assertive.

More specifically, Israel faces a combination of dire threats. To the east, Iran is
frantically advancing its nuclear project, which most Israelis and most of the
world’s intelligence agencies believe is designed to produce nuclear weapons. This,
coupled with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s public threats to destroy
Israel — and his denials of the Holocaust and of any homosexuality in Iran, which
underscore his irrationality — has Israel’s political and military leaders on
tenterhooks.

To the north, the Lebanese fundamentalist organization Hezbollah, which also vows to
destroy Israel and functions as an Iranian proxy, has thoroughly rearmed since its
war with Israel in 2006. According to Israeli intelligence estimates, Hezbollah now
has an arsenal of 30,000 to 40,000 Russian-made rockets, supplied by Syria and Iran
— twice the number it possessed in 2006. Some of the rockets can reach Tel Aviv and
Dimona, where Israel’s nuclear production facility is located. If there is war
between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah can be expected to join in. (It may well join in
the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, too.)

To the south, Israel faces the Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza
Strip and whose charter promises to destroy Israel and bring every inch of Palestine
under Islamic rule and law. Hamas today has an army of thousands. It also has a
large arsenal of rockets — home-made Qassams and Russian-made, Iranian-financed
Katyushas and Grads smuggled, with the Egyptians largely turning a blind eye,
through tunnels from Sinai.

Last June, Israel and Hamas agreed to a six-month truce. This unsteady calm was
periodically violated by armed factions in Gaza that lobbed rockets into Israel’s
border settlements. Israel responded by periodically suspending shipments of
supplies into Gaza.

In November and early December, Hamas stepped up the rocket attacks and then,
unilaterally, formally announced the end of the truce. The Israeli public and
government then gave Defense Minister Ehud Barak a free hand. Israel’s highly
efficient air assault on Hamas, which began on Saturday, was his first move. Most of
Hamas’s security and governmental compounds were turned into rubble and several
hundred Hamas fighters were killed.

But the attack will not solve the basic problem posed by a Gaza Strip populated by
1.5 million impoverished, desperate Palestinians who are ruled by a fanatic regime
and are tightly hemmed in by fences and by border crossings controlled by Israel and
Egypt.

An enormous Israeli ground operation aimed at conquering the Gaza Strip and
destroying Hamas would probably bog down in the alleyways of refugee camps before
achieving its goal. (And even if these goals were somehow achieved, renewed and
indefinite Israeli rule over Gaza would prove unpalatable to all concerned.)

More likely are small, limited armored incursions, intended to curtail missile
launches and kill Hamas fighters. But these are also unlikely to bring the
organization to heel — though they may exercise sufficient pressure eventually to
achieve, with the mediation of Turkey or Egypt, a renewed temporary truce. That
seems to be the most that can be hoped for, though a renewal of rocket attacks on
southern Israel, once Hamas recovers, is as certain as day follows night.

The fourth immediate threat to Israel’s existence is internal. It is posed by the
country’s Arab minority. Over the past two decades, Israel’s 1.3 million Arab
citizens have been radicalized, with many openly avowing a Palestinian identity and
embracing Palestinian national aims. Their spokesmen say that their loyalty lies
with their people rather than with their state, Israel. Many of the community’s
leaders, who benefit from Israeli democracy, more or less publicly supported
Hezbollah in 2006 and continue to call for “autonomy” (of one sort or another) and
for the dissolution of the Jewish state.

Demography, if not Arab victory in battle, offers the recipe for such a dissolution.
The birth rates for Israeli Arabs are among the highest in the world, with 4 or 5
children per family (as opposed to the 2 or 3 children per family among Israeli
Jews).

If present trends persist, Arabs could constitute the majority of Israel’s citizens
by 2040 or 2050. Already, within five to 10 years, Palestinians (Israeli Arabs
coupled with those who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) will form the majority
population of Palestine (the land lying between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean).

Friction between Israeli Arabs and Jews is already a cogent political factor. In
2000, at the start of the second intifada, thousands of Arab youngsters, in sympathy
with their brethren in the territories, rioted along Israel’s major highways and in
Israel’s ethnically mixed cities.

The past fortnight has seen a recurrence, albeit on a smaller scale, of such
rioting. Down the road, Israel’s Jews fear more violence and terrorism by Israeli
Arabs. Most Jews see the Arab minority as a potential fifth column.

What is common to these specific threats is their unconventionality. Between 1948
and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies.
Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of
organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate from across international
borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing
disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a
completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s
leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior,
appear to find particularly difficult to counter.

Israel’s sense of the walls closing in on it has this past week led to one violent
reaction. Given the new realities, it would not be surprising if more powerful
explosions were to follow.

Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the
author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”