The launching of the ''Third Way" Movement in June 1994 was
initiated by Labor Party "hawks", some Rightist MK's and religious
personalities including Gush Emunim MK Hanan Porat. It claimed to
offer an ideological and political alternative to the two major
blocs on Israel's present political map - the Labor-Meretz bloc and
the rightist Likud- Tsomet-religious bloc. Mati Peled questions the
underlying premises of the Third Way.
Though claiming to offer an alternative to Israel's two main
political blocs, the "Third Way" is in fact an amalgam of political
falsehoods, deep prejudices, a bitter resentment against
Palestinian self-determination, and the misuse of security
arguments. While the program declares support for the peace process
as outlined in the Oslo Declaration of Principles (DOP), the actual
effect is to sabotage the continuation of the peace process. The
bearers of this old-new message are mainly members of the hawkish
wing of the Labor Party. However, pretending to represent a
cross-section of the truly "patriotic" stream in Israeli public
opinion, they managed to adorn their first public appearance with a
gallery of right wing and religious personalities, who, it
transpires, also contributed financially to the event. Not
unexpectedly, Yehuda Harel, a leader of the Golan lobby, was in the
center of the organization of the new body.
The platform, while claiming support for the peace process,
proceeds to outline the limits which it can be permitted to reach:
a limited autonomy for the Palestinian population of the Occupied
Territories in densely populated areas, while retaining Israeli
control over the whole of the area and rejecting Palestinian
statehood; retaining all existing settlements in the Territories,
and setting up new ones; and formally annexing Greater Jerusalem in
its entirety, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.
The movement's spokespeople obliquely indicate that such ideas
tally with the thinking of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and that
the new venture is meant to help him resist the dovish trends in
his own party, which may force him to go further than he would like
in the course of the peace process. It seems highly doubtful,
however, whether Mr. Rabin would today subscribe to the ideas of
the Third Way, even though it is no secret that he harbors no
particular enthusiasm for the DOP. He knows that before the
beginning of the third year after the Gaza-Jericho First Agreement
he will have to start negotiating in earnest with the PLO on the
remaining issues of Jerusalem, the settlements and the refugees -
and ultimate, Palestinian statehood. He is also aware that any
progress with Syria depends upon withdrawal from the Golan Heights.
Consequently, it is unlikely that at this stage he would lend
support to a set of ideas so clearly designed to force his hand
before the negotiating process is resumed.
Territorial Considerations
Leaving aside aspects of internal party politics, it is necessary
to understand the nature of the new "program", where its roots lie
and why its underlying premises are so false. The program pretends
to speak from a purely secular and rational point of view,
insisting on what it considers legitimate security considerations
which, if ignored, would place Israel at the mercy of any future
aggressor.
It should be emphasized that these considerations are purely
territorial.
The platform states that occupying the West Bank and the Golan
Heights back in 1967 was necessitated by strategic considerations
since these two territories posed an unacceptable threat to
Israel's security. However, the historical fact is that these
territories were never considered in these terms by Israeli
politicians or strategists: their occupation in 1967 was a glaring
example of the fragility of Israeli democracy at that time. They
were occupied only because the military establishment felt free to
overlook the political leadership, except for extracting a
half-hearted permission to go ahead and enjoy easy victories.
The permission granted was of uncertain legal validity. Indeed, the
only legally valid decision taken by the Israeli government
concerning the 1967 war referred to the attack on the Egyptian army
in Sinai. According to the decision, once that attack had been
carried out, the JDF was to cease fire. This was not the case in
practice. Due to the fact that Jordanian forces on the West Bank
and Syrian on the Golan Heights opened sporadic fire on Israeli
territories, the commanders of the Central and Northern Commands
advocated launching attacks on these territories. On the West Bank,
Levi Eshkol made a point of informing King Hussein through UN
mediator, Ralph Bunche, that Israel would not involve Jordan in the
war as long as Hussein kept out. The development was clearly
chaotic. No better description can be provided than that offered by
the commander of the Central Command, Gen. Uzi Narkiss, in his book
A Soldier of Jerusalem:
It is very clear that the Israeli government was not prepared for
the development that occurred on the Eastern border and had not
defined in advance the war aims on that sector. Was there reason to
halt the troops prior to the occupation of Ramallah and Nablus, or
alternatively, prior to their descent to the Jordan Valley? Was
there reason not to allow the breakthrough to Qalqilya and Tulkarm?
These and similar questions remained unanswered. In the absence of
a clear strategy we were swept by events at a high speed and within
four days we were facing accomplished facts. The West Bank of the
Kingdom of Jordan was entirely in our hands.
An Act of Aggression
Israel never had any plans to occupy the West Bank, as seems clear
from the description quoted, because it was not considered a
potential threat. The politicians now advocating its annexation
keep pointing to the proximity of Israel's eastern border from the
sea in order to impress the public with their demand. What they
fail to point out, or indeed to understand, is that the West Bank
was an enclave bulging into Israeli space, exposed from the North
and the South to an Israeli pincer movement which could within
hours cut it off from the rest of the Kingdom. The hasty retreat of
the Jordanian army from the West Bank in June 1967 was clearly
caused by the fear that it might be caught in such a pincer
movement and lost to Jordan for ever. Far from constituting a
threat to Israel, the West Bank was a hostage in Israel's hands
which obliged Jordan to take care lest Israel be given a chance to
snatch it away.
Therefore when IDF forces started moving eastward, they had no
prepared plans and the occupation proceeded haphazardly, guided by
the principle of "catch-as-catch-can". Nobody on the Israeli side
knew where it was leading.
By the time the area fell entirely into Israeli hands, the only
outstanding question was: on whose authority did the IDF thus
occupy a foreign land? This was an unconstitutional and unwarranted
act of aggression that even at this late date should not be allowed
to stand unchallenged.
Nevertheless, this unfortunate development could have been utilized
to good purpose were the Israeli politicians to have had the wisdom
to allow the Palestinian population to make peace with Israel and
form their own state. As reported in his book by Gen. Narkiss,
there was no doubt about Palestinian willingness for such a
solution. But it was at this very point that an ill wind began to
blow on the Israeli scene: politicians and public alike "fell in
love" with the territories and all sorts of arguments were now
heard against the logical step of trading them off for peace.
The Allon Plan
It was at this point that Labor and kibbutz leader Yigal Allon
announced the Allon Plan which was meant to provide the reasonable
Israeli with rational arguments for holding on to those parts of
the Occupied Territories which he saw as possessing supreme
security value for Israel. By now the air was full of messianic,
religious, nationalistic - and even economic - reasons for a
"Greater Israel". The majority of the people found such arguments
unbecoming to a nation accustomed to high moral values in the
conduct of its social and international relations. The Allon Plan
feigned security considerations which aimed only to assure the
nation's safety, a value which stands uppermost in any list of
national priorities.
Avoiding Jewish rule over places with dense Arab populations, the
Allon Plan had Israel controlling and settling the Jordan Valley
Rift, the Golan Heights and the Jerusalem area, as well as points
along the Red Sea. Though the Plan was never officially accepted,
Jewish settlement south of Jerusalem (Gush Etzion and Hebron), in
other parts of the West Bank, in the South and in the Golan, took
place within the parameters of the Plan under Labor governments, to
be greatly extended by Menahem Begin after 1977.
In terms of strategic thinking, the Plan was nonsensical, lacking
any relationship to the real problems facing Israel. Without a
basis in Israel's military history, it failed to dwell on any
eventual situation which might remotely justify it. However, it
succeeded in blurring over the real goals and firing the
imagination of people in Israel and abroad with the idea that,
unlike Imperialist powers, Israel has no desire for worldly
possessions for their own sake, but only in order to avert another
holocaust, God forbid.
These are also the elements of the Allon Plan as it reappears so
many years later in the "Third Way" program. With all their desire
to avoid a mystical posture, while presenting themselves as
rational people who avoid a mystical posture, the new plan could
not avoid sanctifying the vision of a united Jerusalem as Israel's
eternal capital. This is indeed the one issue which enables the new
movement to link hands with rightist and religious trends in
Israeli public opinion.
What of the Golan Heights? The reality of Israel's situation has
been replaced by a myth about a threat to security caused by the
Heights' rising above the Huleh Valley. The history of
Israeli-Syrian confrontations prior to 1967 lends absolutely no
support to such a myth since strategically the Heights never posed
a problem for Israel. Neither Israeli artillery nor its air force
found any difficulty in reaching Syrian villages or military
positions when a clash broke out. In most cases, Israeli targets
were hit less than those of the Syrians. In general, the clashes
never revolved around major strategic issues but were caused by
arguments about land ownership, rights of passage or control over
water resources. More recent developments in modern warfare serve
only to emphasize that the myth is even less valid today than it
was in former decades.
The Ultimate Excuse of a Scoundrel
It was only towards the close of the Six-Day War that pressure was
exerted by local military leaders and residents for launching an
attack on Syria. This was expressly forbidden by the government
since there was simply no reason to enlarge the area of conflict to
include Syria, especially since Syria had throughout the war
indicated its unwillingness to get involved.
Finally Moshe Dayan, minister of defense at the time - who could
never resist the temptation for popularity - gave permission to go
ahead without referring the matter for the consideration of the
government. The attack on the Heights was launched hastily, with
the ill-prepared main attacking force hailing from the South, where
the war with Egypt had just ended. Once again - a case of a war
against a foreign country without a minimal pretense of legality.
Some 80,000 Syrian refugees fled their homes due to this
unwarranted attack and soon Jewish settlements were established so
as to facilitate eventual annexation. The old excuse was again
brought into play so that decent people could justify events
without a feeling of shame: national security - whose misuse is the
ultimate excuse of a scoundrel.
The "Third Way" thus takes two major lies produced after the 1967
war (one concerning the area south of Jerusalem and the Jordan
Valley, and the other on the Golan Heights), and proceeds to
produce a third lie: that these territories are today so crucial to
Israel's security that even peace with the Palestinians and our
Arab neighbors would not justify giving them up. The intellectual
dishonesty in the program is so glaring that one feels embarrassed
in exposing it. But hopefully, in this very dishonesty there lies
the cause of its eventual rejection by reasonable people who cannot
be misled by intellectual trickery, old or new, into rejecting the
present prospects for peace - which is the real meaning of the
"Third Way".