THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP69B00369R000200290031-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 7, 2001
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: July 1, 1967
• Content Type: OPEN

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July 196T
1\f
by 1. F. Stone
No journalist has been closer to the birth of Israel than
I. F. Stone, for the last 15 years editor and publisher of the
uniquely independent Washington newsletter, I.F. Stone's
Weekly. He has been in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan
and Turkey. He first reached Palestine on November 2, 1945. the
day the underground Jewish Army, the Haganah, blew up
bridges and watchtowers to begin its struggle against the British
in order to open the country to the survivors of the Hitler death
camps.
In the spring of 1946, Stone was the first journalist in the
world to travel from Poland to Palestine as an illegal Jewish
immigrant through the British blockade on one of the Haganah's
vessels. In 1947 he went on one of the British prison ships to
spend Passover in the camps in Cyprus where captured illegal
immigrants were detained. In 1948 he covered the Arab-Jewish
war, and was the first correspondent to reach Jerusalem in the
early hours of the morning when the siege was lifted. He returned
to Israel in 1949, 1950, 1956 and again in 1964. His Under-
ground to Palestine was published in 1946 and This Is Israel, a
history of the Arab-Jewish war and of Jewish Palestine, in 1948.
He was awarded a medal by the Haganah for his underground
trip in 1946.
'TER. her swift military victory
Israel now faces a prolonged
,
war of nerves. Her antagonists in this war will not be the
iArabs but the two "superpowers," the Soviets openly, the
United States more covertly. Both countries will bring strong pres-
sure to bear on Israel to give up her territorial gains in return for
new international guarantees at Aqaba, on the Suez, along her
borders and in reunited Jerusalem.
Israel's diplomatic position is as difficult as her strategic
position. On the one side are the superpowers for whom she
has been a pawn; on the other the Arabs for whom she is an
enemy. The Soviets voted for partition of Palestine in 1947 and
recognized the state of Israel in order to dislodge British power
from the Middle East. Two decades later, the Soviets armed
Egypt and Syria against Israel in the hope of dislodging Amer-
ican power; they saw Israel as Nasser's means of reuniting the
Arab world under a revolutionary leadership which would
seize the oil fields and evict the Western powers from Arabia
and Iran, just as Nasser evicted England and France from Suez.
This was the Grand Design of Russian realpolitik.
Israel's unexpectedly swift military victory upset that design.
By defeating Nasser, Israel did Lyndon Johnson an enormous
favor, but it is a mistake to assume that he will reciprocate.
From an Arab point of view, Israel appears as a Western tool:
she was planted in Palestine under Anglo-American auspices;
she is financially dependent on Western, especially American,
Jewry; she joined with England and France against Egypt in
the Suez adventure of 1956; and she has now handed a stun-
ning defeat to the chief nationalist leader of the Arab world, for
whom a coalition of feudal chiefs, Anglo-American oil com-
panies and (according to Nasser) CIA agents have been
gunning. But from an Israeli point o v i w, all of her Western
allies let her down when the crunch came: the U.S. declared
neutrality, France went back on her alliance with Israel, and
Britain was abject in trying to assure the Arabs that she wasn't
taking sides. Had Israel been overwhelmed-so the Israelis
feel-none of these "allies" would have come to her aid in
time-if at all. In a showdown, for the West as well as for the
Russians, the main concern is.Arab oil and Arab numbers.
The ambivalence of American policy in this Mideast crisis
is hardly new. It has been characteristic of U.S. policy since
the beginning of Israel's struggle for independence. Although
in November 1947 the U.S. voted for the U.N. plan to partition
Palestine into linked Arab and Jewish states, the State Depart-
ment tried desperately to prevent that plan's consummation
in the first. few months of 1948. When I left Washington in
April 1948, to cover for the newspaper PM what everyone
felt would be an Arab-Jewish war as soon as the plan took
effect on May 15, Secretary of State Marshall was threatening
privately to cut off United Jewish Appeal funds for Palestine
if the Jews there went ahead and established a state. The Num-
ber One question with which I was greeted everywhere was
whether the U.S. would actually carry out that threat. Ben
Gurion was determined to declare statehood in spite of it, and
there was a burst of jubilation in Tel Aviv-already blacked
out in expectation of Egyptian air raids-on the night of May
15, when word came that President Truman had recognized
the newly declared state. The United States was torn then, as
it still is, between oil' interests in the Arab states and the
Jewish vote at home.
The same pattern was visible in the new crisis. To take sides
with Israel would have endangered the $2.5 billion stake that
American oil companies have in the Middle East. No politician
from an oil state like Texas could fail to be aware of this. The
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major oil companies are the most powerful influence on
American foreign policy: Standard Oil (New Jersey) earns
4 per cent of its net income abroad; Texaco earns 35 per
Cent. The oil-rich Arabian deserts are the holiest places of the
Middle East for the world's oil cartels. The realpolitik of oil
dictated, firstly, a hands-off policy in any Arab-Israeli war, for
fear that oil holdings might be sabotaged and expropriated.
But secondly, it would have called for intervention, had Nasser
won, for fear that oil-poor Egypt would then take over the oil
resources of the Arab Middle East as she had seized the Suez
Canal in 1956.
It was out of fear of Nasser and Arab nationalism that the
United States provided pro-Western regimes in Saudi Arabia
and Jordan with arms which were later mobilized against
Israel. Had Israel fallen, the U.S. would have moved. The
Middle East is more important strategically and economically
by far than Vietnam, and the U.S. would have had to mobilize
for a second "Vietnam" in the Middle East, with all the
attendant risk of a confrontation with the Soviet Union. This
is the dimension of America's debt to Israel, but it is not a debt
Israel can collect, even though her very existence was at stake.
And it was at stake because both superpowers had poured
enormous quantities of arms into the hands of their respective
Arab client states, while Israel had to scrounge all around the
world in order to supply her arn,ie:;. She owed her Air
Force to a French conflict with Arab North Africa, long since
healed and ended. Both Washington and Moscow will now
be impelled to resume the rearmament of the Arabs in their
rivalry for influence, while France no longer wishes to strain
her new friendship with Arab North Africa and Egypt by
supplying Israel with aircraft. Just as Moscow and Washington
joined forces in 1956 to make the English, French and Israelis
withdraw from Suez, so they will now, separately or in concert,
pressure the Israelis to give up their territorial gains without
firm guarantees from their Arab neighbors. Both superpowers
will play for Arab friendship.
T HE OTHER SIDE OF THE RAVINE in which Israel finds
herself isolated looks as forbidding but, if scaled,
would be more promising in the long run. This would
be to independently seek reconciliation with her Arab
neighbors. The problem is given a new urgency by the conquest
of the Gaza strip and the west bank of the Jordan, which now
puts the bulk of the Palestinian Arab refugees right back under
Israeli control. It is as if, no matter how or where they turn,
two million Israelis find themselves, even in victory, sur-
rounded by the same sea of Arabs. The original U.N. partition
plan called for an Arab state and a Jewish state linked together
in an economically united Palestine. Gaza and the west bank
were to be part of the Arab State. One wing of the Zionist
movement, albeit a minority, had always supported a bi-
national solution anyway, somewhat along Swiss lines. It is
not beyond political ingenuity to work out a scheme whereby
some kind of confederation could be created, perhaps also
including Jordan by giving her a corridor to the Mediterranean.
There could still be a predominantly Jewish state, but one
linked fraternally with one or two Arab states, one Palestinian,
one Jordanian. The funds for Arab resettlement could be spent
in providing new homes in a developing economy for all Arab
residents, whether they are refugees from Jewish-occupied
Palestine or not.
Moshe Dayan himself has spoken cryptically if reluctantly
of confederation. Israel's swift and brilliant military victories
only make some such settlement and reconciliation all the
more urgent. There lies the final solution of the refugee prob-
lem and permanent security for Israel. The funds which the
world Jewish community has been raising to aid Israel could be
diverted to this constructive and human cause, and diverted
iin gratitude that the war ended so swiftly with relatively little
damage to either side. Imagine how impossible reconciliation
would now be if Tel Aviv had been destroyed by the Egyptians,
and Cairo or Aswan Dam by the Israelis. It was a moral tragedy
--to which no Jew worthy of our best prophetic tradition
could be insensitive-that a kindred people was made home-
less in the task of finding new homes for the remnants of the
Hitler holocaust. Now is the time to right that wrong, to show
magnanimity in victory, and to lay the foundations of a new
order in the Middle East by which Israelis and Arabs can
live in peace.
This alone can make Israel secure. This is the third Israeli-
Arab war in 20 years. In the absence of a general settlement,
war will recur at regular intervals. The Arabs will thirst for.
revenge. The Israelis will be tempted again to wage preven-
tive war. The Israeli borders are so precarious, the communica-
tions so easily cut, as to be untenable in static defensive warfare.
A surprise attack would cut Israel into half a dozen parts. A
long war would be suicidal for a community of little more than
two million Jews in a sea of 50 million Arabs. Only total
mobilization can defend it, and total mobilization is impossible
for any extended term in Israel, since it brings the wheels of the
economy to a crawl. The strategic and demographic circum-
stances dictate blitzkrieg, and blitzkrieg is a dangerous gamble.
To be forced to keep that weapon in reserve is ruinous.
It is ruinous financially and it is ruinous morally. It imposes
a huge armament burden. It feeds an ever more intense and
costly arms race, as each side seeks frantically for newer and
more complex weapons. It brings with it a spiral of fear
and hate. It creates within Israel the atmosphere of a besieged
community, ringed by hostile neighbors, its back to the sea,
skeptical, with good reason, of the world community, relying
only on her own military strength, turning every man and
woman into a soldier, regarding every Arab within her borders
distrustfully as a potential Fifth Columnist, and glorying in
her military strength. Chauvinism and militarism are the in-
escapable results. They can turn Israel into an Ishmael. They
can create a minuscule Prussia, not the beneficent Zion of
which the prophets and Zionists dreamed. The East will not
be redeemed by turning it into a new Wild West, where Israel
can rely only on a quick draw with a six-shooter.
In justice to Israel, no one can forget the terrible history that
has turned the Jewish state into a fighting community. Events
still fresh in living memory illustrate how little reliance may
be placed on the conscience of mankind. Long before the
crer1toria were built, in the six years of Nazi rule before
World War II, refugees met a cold shoulder. Our State De-
partment, like the British Foreign Office, distinguished itself.
in those years by its anemic indifference to the oppressed and
its covert undertone of admiration for the Axis; our few anti-
fascist ambassadors, like Dodd in Berlin and Bowers in
Madrid, were treated miserably by the Department. The
welcome signs in the civilized world were few, and even now,
if events were reversed and Israel were overrun, it could expect -
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little more than a few hand-wringing resolutions. If the upshot
of this new struggle is the expropriation of Western Europe's
oil sources in the Middle East, it will only seem to history a
giant retribution for the moral failure- that forced the sur-
vivors of Hitlcrism to scck a refuge in the inhospitable deserts,
drawn by the pitiful mirage of an ancestral home.
HE PRECEDENT OF THE CEASE-FIRE resolution at the U.N.
is a most disturbing one. It accepts preventive war
and allows the country which launched it to keep the
.. fruits of aggression as a bargaining card. But Israel
has a right to ask what the U.N. wqs prepared to do if Nasser
lad been able to carry out his threats of total war and the
complete destruction of Israel. Who would have intervened in
time? Who would take the survivors? These are the bitter
thoughts which explain Israel's belief that she can rely only on
herself. But to understand this is not to accept it. The challenge
to the world is the creation of a better order, the first step
toward which would be to remove the Middle East from the
arena of great power rivalry; this alone can keep it from sooner
or later becoming the starting point of another world war.
The challenge to Israel is to conquer something more bleak
and forbidding than even the Negev or Sinai, and that is the
hearts of her Arab neighbors. This would be greater and more
ttil~t+a~\.=ctt thatt atty. tttilitat\? 1i~t.t.i.1'?, At`t`A t.t4'i11 C\i11f41ntty
calLu Eh;; sweep of Israel's armies "the finest day in Israel's
moaern history." The finest day will be the day she achieves
reconciliation with the Arabs.
To achieve it will require an act of sympathy worthy of the
best in Jewry's Biblical heritage. It is to understand and forgive
an enemy, and thus convert him into a friend. A certain
obtuseness was unfortunately evident in Abba Eban's brilliant
presentation of Israel's cause to the Security Council. To rest
a case on Jewish homelessness, and to simultaneously refuse to
see the Arabs who have been made homeless, is only another
illustration of that tribal blindness which plagues the human
race and plunges it constantly into bloodshed. The first step
toward reconciliation is to recognize that Arab bitterness has
real and deep roots. The refugees lost their farms, their vil-
lages, their offices, their cities and their country.
Just as Jews everywhere sympathize with their people, so
Arabs everywhere sympathize and identify with theirs. They
feel that anti-Semitic Europe solved its Jewish problem at
Arab expense. To a rankling sense of injustice is now added
a third episode in military humiliation. Zionist propaganda
always spoke of the role that the Jews could play in helping
to modernize the Arab world. Unless firm steps are now taken
towards a general and generous settlement, this will become
true in a sense never intended. The repercussions of the 1948
war set off seismic tremors that brought a wave of nationalist
revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The repercussions of
this current defeat will lead a new generation of Arabs to mod-
ernize and mobilize for revenge, inspired (like the Jews) by
memories of past glory.
Considering their 'numbers and resources and the general
rise of all the colonial people in this period, the Arabs must
eventually prevail. Those who shudder to think that Israel,
with all the cost in devotion and all she honorably won in
marsh and desert, might be destroyed after a short life, as were
the Maccabean and Crusader kingdoms before her, all who
want her to live and grow in peace, must seek to avoid such a
solution. Israel cannot live very long in a hostile Arab sea. She
cannot set her face against that renaissance of Arabic unity
and civilization which began to stir a generation ago. She
cannot remain a Western outpost in an Afro-Asian world
casting off Western domination. She cannot repeat on a bigger
scale the mistakes she made in Algeria, where Israel and Zion-
ism were allies of Soustelle and Massu and the French rightists.
She must join the Third World if she is to survive. No quickie
military victories should blind her to the inescapable-in the
long run she cannot defeat the Arabs. She must join them. The
Jews played a great role in Arabic civilization in the Middle
Ages. A Jewish state can play a similar role in a new Semitic
renaissance. This is the perspective of safety, of honor, and
of fraternity.
NE CRUCIAL STEP in this direction would be, in the
very hour of victory, to heal wounded Arab pride
as much as possible, and in particular to reach a
new understanding with Nasser. Both American
policy and Israeli policy have sacrificed long range wisdom
to, short-sighted advantage in dealing with the Egyptian leader.
He is a military dictator, he wages his own Vietnam in Yemen,
he uses poison gas there against his own people, he runs a
police state. But he is also the first Egyptian ruler to give
F~at,pt's dowtitil~ddclt a break. It is fas; inatine to recall
that Egypt has been ruled by foreigners almost since the days
when David and Solomon ruled in Israel. Not until Nasser's
time, and the eviction of the British and French at Suez, have
the Egyptians become the master in their own ancient house.
Nasser's program has given Egypt its first taste of reform, on
the land, in the factory, in health and educational services. His
accomplishments certainly surpass those of a comparable mili-
tary figure, Ayub in Pakistan. The U.S. oil interests, Johnson's
animosity and Israel's ill-will have been united in recent years
in efforts to get rid of him. They have all favored feudal
monarchs like Saudi Arabia's whose day is done.
It is Nasser who represents the future and who can create
the internal stability so necessary to peace. The alternative
if he is overthrown will ultimately be some far more fanatical
and less constructive force, like the Moslem Brotherhood.
If war makes sense only as an extension of politics by other
means, then Israel's victory will make political sense only
if it leads to a new era of reconciliation with all her Arab
neighbors. There is no reason why Israel's little "Peace
Corps" could not do for the Arab states what it has done in
many of the African states. To win Arab friendship will in the
long run be worth far more than any military victory. Two
millenia ago, Isaiah envisioned just such a war as we have
now seen, and predicted just such a reconciliation as the one
here projected. "And the land of Judah," the greatest of the
Hebrew prophets foretold, "shall be a terror unto Egypt...
And the Lord shall smite Egypt; he shall smite it and heal it.
. In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt to
Assyria; and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the
Egyptian into Assyria; and the Egyptians shall serve with the
Assyrians. In that day. shall Israel be the third with Egypt
and with Assyria, even a blessing into the midst of the land;
whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt
my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel
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