It's the mantra of the post-Oslo "peace process," the theory behind the 'roadmap,' the mother of modern misplaced hopes and dreams for a resolution of the "Arab-Israeli conflict." And, truth be told, it didn't originate with Oslo. Way back in 1977, Israel traded the Sinai peninsula, a hard-won, strategically significant, huge chunk of land, for "peace" with Egypt. Today, Israel is reaping the fruits of that "peace," with weapons, drugs and human contraband being freely smuggled into Gaza from the Sinai, with Mubarak still refusing to set foot in the Jewish State, with Egyptian national television, radio and newspapers still regularly publishing virulent anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda. Land for peace?
In the general consciousness, the concept was born in the wake of the Six Day War. That was, after all, when Israel "expanded" beyond her "internationally recognized" borders in a war of self-defense, a war in which she was intended to cease to exist. That has been, for the past 40 years, her cardinal sin -- that she was unable to prevail in the face of the "three nos" issued at Khartoum in convincing the Arab world to take the Sinai, the Golan, Gaza, Judea and Samaria "back" in return for recognizing Israel and allowing her to live in peace.
How surprising, then, to discover that the "land for peace" mantra is considerably older than the Six Day War. In fact, as I first discovered while reading this fascinating essay by Michael Oren in the latest issue of Azure, it goes all the way back (at least) to the early 1950s.
Actually, back then, it was more accurately characterized as land for non-belligerency. And there was another unpleasant surprise hiding in this account.
America and Britain reacted to the Soviet threat by trying to organize Middle Eastern states into a regional defense organization similar to NATO. The alliance, known first as the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) and later as the Baghdad Pact, was to include Iraq, Jordan, and hopefully Egypt. Israel, though it repeatedly petitioned for admission to the group, was continually rejected.
Moreover, while actively fortifying the Arabs, the Powers also implicitly upheld their own interpretation of the armistice. They refused, for example, to pressure the Arab states to end their economic boycott and blockade of Israel or to stem armed infiltration. Rather, they condemned Israel’s attempt to establish settlements in the demilitarized zones, to send ships through the canal and the straits, and to retaliate against Fedayeen strongholds. They also opposed Israel’s construction of a national water carrier that would transfer Galilee water to the Negev, thus facilitating the desert’s settlement. The Negev, the Americans and the British determined in 1949, would eventually be detached from Israel and transferred to Arab sovereignty as part of a land-for-peace deal. Indeed, an Anglo-American plan, inaugurated in 1954 and codenamed “Alpha,†called for the transfer of large swaths of the Negev to Egypt as a means of incentivizing it to join MEDO; the Egyptians, in turn, would grant non-belligerency -- not peace -- to Israel. Though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected Alpha, American and British leaders were prepared to exert immense pressure on him to implement the plan should Cairo accept it.
(my emphasis). Cairo, as it turned out, did not accept it, and thus the immense pressure to trade the Negev for "non-belligerency" never materialized. Instead, Nasser managed (by nationalizing the Suez Canal) to so irritate Britain and France that they decided to make secret cause with Israel, resulting in the Sinai Campaign of 1956. That was Israel's first incursion into the Sinai, from which she withdrew under, well, immense pressure from the United States.
Please read Oren's essay in its entirety. It's full of important information and thoroughly discredits any number of contemporary defeatist myths about the counterproductive nature of Israel's military successes. And consider a Western world that in 1954 was convinced that the key to peace in the Middle East lay in Israel's withdrawal from the Negev desert. Consider it and draw your own conclusions as to what the inevitable outcome of that strategy would have been. And then project forward.
