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Security Is Elusive
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16799 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
3,452 Words |
| Author
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Robert G. Neumann
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Security is both an objective and a subjective matter. To be secure and to feel secure are not the same thing. It may be said of an insecure person that he or she can never feel secure. Is this also true of states? Peace in the Middle East may well depend on the answer.
This state of mind is particularly true of Israel but also applies to its neighbors. Thirty years before Israel came into existence, when the British government published the Balfour Declaration (1917), anti-Jewish riots broke out because the resident Arab population of Palestine saw that the vaguely worded British promise of a "Jewish home in Palestine" would lead to the implementation of a Jewish state. They realized that it would displace the Arab Palestinians, regardless of the declaration's promise of its "being understood, that … nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
The two parts of the Balfour Declaration were rightly understood by both Jews and Arabs as being basically in contradiction to each other. And in contradiction they have remained, creating seemingly permanent insecurity for both peoples. As far back as 1918, this basic fact was recognized by the King-Crane Commission, which President Woodrow Wilson had sent to the area.
The moment that its statehood was proclaimed, seemingly overwhelmingly strong Arab armies attacked Israel and were repelled. Three more Arab-Israeli wars followed in 1956, 1967, and 1973. In a sense, this was inevitable since the Israelis regarded their national existence as a right, either because it constituted the fulfillment of a divine promise or, for the majority of (secular) Israelis, because it was deemed a just compensation for centuries of persecution and the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. For the Arabs, the very creation of the Jewish state constituted an invasion into Arab land by an alien people, a form of neocolonialism.
These are two different outlooks; though each is fully justifiable in its own right, they are continually contradictory. No wiser word has been spoken about this conflict than by Israel's first president, Chaim Weizman, who said that the difference between Israelis and Arabs is "not between right and wrong, but between right and right."
What is implied here is that agreement on peace between those two parties cannot be the result of a single concept of justice's prevailing, but only of a compromise that one or both sides, certainly parts of both sides, will regard as unjust. Hence, conflict is written not only into the present but also into the future, even under the best of circumstances, and security remains a formidable problem for both sides.
For the Israelis, physical security remains a problem of the first order. It is also the topic of an ever-present political argument because Israel's security can seemingly be so easily demonstrated.
True, for 20 years, from 1947 to 1967, Israel lived successfully while Jerusalem was divided, the West Bank of the Jordan River was occupied by Jordan, and Jordan's border was only 14 kilometers (8-9 miles) from the sea. After the Six Day War in 1967, Israel's border was moved to 60 miles or more from the Mediterranean, a fourfold
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