Amos Perlmutter's article in Current Issues, "The Changing Soviet Role in the Middle East," presents a persuasive picture of the effects of Gorbachev's policies upon Israel's situation. More Jews are leaving the Soviet Union and many of them are going to Israel. The hard-line Arab states clearly have been warned by Moscow that it will not support any wars against Israel and that it will not build up their forces to the degree necessary to support an attack.
Although most analyses I have seen agree with Perlmutter's, there is a downside to the change in Soviet foreign policy that friends of Israel would do well to consider. Israel's greatest claim upon the United States was not that it was a democracy but that it was an implicit, effective, and reliable ally against the Soviet Union in an area that contained only enemies or unreliable and ineffective friends. Although the Bush foreign policy is slow in adjusting to the changed meaning of Soviet foreign policy in Central America or the Middle East, the message clearly is getting through. Israel needs the United States, but there are only a few remote scenarios in which the United States needs Israel.
Furthermore, a Middle Eastern threat to Israel is not as unlikely a possibility as Perlmutter suggests, although Israel still has some time before such a threat is likely to materialize. Shortly after Israel destroyed the Iraqi nuclear site, I spoke to an Israeli political figure who shall remain nameless. I said that Israel likely could not repeat that strike, that it had bought time but now there likely would be several Arab states that would get the bomb. His response was that there were only seven significant Arab cities and that Israel could hit each of these. That response would not lead me to feel secure if I were living in Israel.
Israel's security needs are likely to be greater now than in the past. True, the Soviet Union used to supply the weaponry for Arab attacks. But it also was determined to control the outcome of such attacks and it had an interest in preserving Israel, the existence of which was the paramount reason for its shifting influence in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.
Israel is miniscule in territory and extremely vulnerable to nonconventional weaponry. It needs more support than in the past, and it is managing to dissipate that support.
Even if one believed, and Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, does not, that it is reasonable to have Jewish settlement in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem, one could never have imagined that such a move would occur during Easter week. And with surreptitious government financing! Israel's Arab enemies could not have found a ploy better designed to undermine Israel's external support.
Israel is ungovernable, its electoral system is madness, its policies are self-defeating; and it is led by a prime minister who would compete closely with Yasser Arafat in a popularity contest. The future of Israel is in doubt unless it can first reform its electoral system and make itself governable. Then it must pursue policies that, even if they do not mobilize external support from the non-Arab world, at least do not mobilize opposition.
Israel had two splendid opportunities to pursue a general peace. The first was after the
...
Read Full Article
|
