A Mandate for Israel

National Interest, The, Fall, 1993 by Douglas J. Feith

HAS A CONFLICT evolved into peace when fighting between the opposing armies has ceased? In one sense, yes; but a cease-fire, or even a formal armistice, falls short of true peace. Should the description "true peace" be reserved until the antagonists have signed treaties requiring exchanges of ambassadors and other visible signs of "normal" relations? Perhaps, but again the essence of peace is not paper. Neither is it embassies, business deals or tourism. Vicious wars--including World Wars I and II--have erupted between countries actively engaged with each other in diplomacy, trade and cultural exchanges.

True peace, as opposed to a mere ceasefire or a balance of power, is bound up with concepts of justice--that is, law and morality. It describes, for example, relations now between the United States and Canada, but not relations during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. It has to do with attitudes of mind--with a mutual belief that each state has sovereign rights and a shared conviction that no party should take what belongs to another. The ultimate success of the current Arab-Israeli negotiations, therefore, will hinge on how they deal with the legal and moral essence of the conflict: the longstanding Arab legal and moral arguments used to oppose Zionism and Israel.

As a result of the recently revealed Israel-PLO negotiations in Norway, there are high expectations for Israeli peace agreements with (respectively) the Palestinian Arabs, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The Soviet Bloc's demise and the Desert Storm coalition's action against Iraq laid the foundation for the new diplomacy. Though not the first negotiations between the parties, the current talks are the first that have been open (that is, not conducted secretly) and direct, and that purport to seek a final settlement. U.S. officials attribute much importance to these new elements. They are said to signify that the Arab parties want peace with Israel, are willing to conclude peace treaties, and intend to abide by them.

It is devoutly to be wished that this reading is correct. But, while negotiations have on occasion ended conflicts, they have also sometimes served as the continuation of war by other means. Has the Arab-Israeli conflict truly changed from an existential quarrel not susceptible to diplomatic resolution into a simpler, non-philosophical dispute over subjects like boundary lines, water rights and security arrangements--or not? Have the relevant Arab powers transcended their ideological objections to Zionism and permanently resigned themselves to deal with Israel as a legitimate state? Or is there a calculation at work that negotiating, at a time when other good options are lacking, is the only realistic means of getting from Israel territorial concessions that may be exploitable in the future?

Statesmen and states beg such questions at their peril. The American "full partner" in the Madrid Process needs the capability to gauge the parties' actual intentions and evaluate the legitimacy of their claims, requests and actions. This requires, if the job is taken seriously, a plunge into the conflict's political and legal history.

LATE IN 1917, Allied forces under British General Edmund Allenby fought hard in their advance on Jerusalem through the hilly region of central Palestine designated on their maps as "Judea." On December 9, they reached the goal. The city's surrender ended a period of Turkish dominion of precisely 400 years, one which had begun with the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Palestine from the Mamluks in the year 1517. Immediately after the war, British officers at the headquarters of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force published an account of the Ottomans' retreat from Jerusalem:

On this same day 2,082 years before, another race of conquerors...were looking their last on the city which they could not hold, and inasmuch as the liberation of Jerusalem in 1917 will probably ameliorate the lot of the Jews more than that of any other community in Palestine, it was fitting that [it] should have coincided with the national festival of the Hanukah, which commemorates the recapture of the Temple from the heathen Seleucids by Judas Maccabaeus in 165 B.C.

The Bible-reading British were conscious of Palestine's ancient history. David Lloyd George, Britain's wartime prime minister, said that as a result of his childhood religious instruction he was more familiar with the place names figuring in Allenby's reports from Palestine than those in the military dispatches from Europe. The British associated Palestine with the Bible and with the Jews. These associations inspired the Balfour Declaration, which led to the Palestine Mandate, which created the legal framework within which (and against which) Jews and Arabs have conducted diplomacy and war from 1920 to the present day. Though one can listen for years without hearing a U.S. official even mention the Mandate, the fact remains that nothing rigorous can be said about the rights or duties of the parties to the Palestine conflict without reference to that fundamental document.