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Michael Oren
Author, Six Days of War
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Comment on the current, mutually murderous war, which resembles two old, embittered prizefighters punching each other to death in a ring where there is no referee and the crowds left long ago in disgust.
A: I'm not an advocate of the Sharon versus Arafat personal vendetta school of interpretation of the current conflict. Israel is a democracy; the minute Sharon is not a reflection of democratic opinion, he will not be the leader anymore. If the Palestinians come out and say, We're going to end the terror, and Sharon doesn't respond to that with a peace offer, he will fall as prime minister. Joe Israeli has reached several fundamental conclusions about our relationship with the Palestinians: We recognize that there is a Palestinian people, that there has been an historic injustice done to the Palestinians, and to the degree it's consonant with our interests, we're willing to help rectify that historical injustice; the Palestinians have a historic claim to at least part of this land, and we're going to share this land with them.
But you can count on one hand the number of Palestinians who say the same thing about us, who say there is a Jewish people, because Arafat can say in front of President Clinton that there's no Jewish people. They don't recognize that there have been historical injustices done to the Jews and that they're willing to help rectify them, and that the Jewish people have a legitimate claim to at least part of this land. Once you have that, you will have national reconciliation.
Q: Arafat forged the PLO 20 years ago. Who in the Palestinian Authority can now be an honest peace negotiator?
A: Arafat did not found the PLO; Nasser founded the PLO in 1964. This is when Arafat was busy running al-Fatah, and then in 1968 al-Fatah essentially took over the PLO and Arafat became the chairman. I can't choose the Palestinian leadership for them. The Palestinians have reacted to Israel's retaliation for terrorist attacks in two seemingly irreconcilable ways: they have become more embittered toward Israelis, but on the other hand, they begin to look around at their own leadership, see the ruins of their neighborhoods and the rubble of their economy and say, Why does this happen when the Israelis essentially offered us everything we wanted two years ago? If the Palestinians conclude Arafat as a leader is a dead end - that he's only going to bring more destruction, more suffering - and a democratically-elected leadership could conclude this conflict, that could have immense reverberations. Once you have a Palestinian democratic entity created, the Syrians will begin to say, Wait a minute, they can vote for their leaders and we can't? Egyptians will say, Wait a minute, they can criticize their government in the press and we can't? You're going to have Arab regimes falling like dominos. It could have a tremendous impact on the Middle East.
President Bush's recent speech reverses 50 years of American policy on peacemaking in the Middle East. Building peace from the bottom up rather than trying to impose it from the top down is quite a revolution in American policy. But I noted one inherent contradiction in this speech: Bush called on Arab states of the region - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan - to assist in creating a Palestinian democracy. You're asking the Saudis to help create a democracy? You're asking Egypt, which is a military police state, to help create a democracy? One of the ironies of the Middle East situation is that, maybe five, ten years from now, if the Palestinian democracy is created, the one state that will defend that democracy from invasion by Arab states will be the state of Israel. Democracies, incidentally, rarely go to war against one another, historically.
Q: What do you think really happened to the USS Liberty?
A: Two years ago, I wrote an article for my academic center's journal, Azure, called "The USS Liberty: Case Closed." There were hundreds of documents that I was able to lay out on the floor in a minute-by-minute recreation of the incident - the case of an American spy ship, Liberty, that on the morning of June 8 was attacked by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats. Thirty-four American servicemen were killed. Israel apologized for the incident, claimed it was an accident; restitution was paid.
I concluded, as the restitution committee did many years ago, there really was nothing more to say about the incident. I stand by everything in my article, except for its title. Since publication of the article, two important sources have come to light. One was testimony of an American spy, Marvin Nowicki, who was flying an American spy plane over the coast of Israel at that time. He overheard parts of the attack, and he concluded in his deposition and in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, that without a shadow of a doubt this was a mistaken attack. The last piece of evidence I received before closing the final copy was the permission from the Israeli army to listen to the actual tapes of the Liberty attack. You hear the pilots reporting that they've spotted an Egyptian ship. It's not an Israeli ship; it's a military ship in the middle of a war zone, Israeli troops on the shore reporting that they're being shelled from the sea. The pilots ask for permission to shoot at it and you hear the pilots reporting their direct hits on the ship. But then you hear as the pilots see the markings, which are in Latin letters; Egyptian ships are usually not marked in Latin letters. They notice that there's no anti-aircraft fire and they think that they've attacked a Soviet ship. Then they realize that they've attacked an American ship, and then the ground controllers call in and acknowledge that they've made a terrible mistake. It was a terrible, awful tragedy, a low-point in U.S.-Israel relations certainly, but an accident.
Q: Was there anything that might have been done at the end of the Six-Day War to lead to a more permanent solution to the continuing conflict in the Middle East?
A: On June 19, 1967, scarcely ten days after the cease-fire, the Israeli government decided in a secret cabinet session to return all of the Sinai Peninsula, all of the Golan Heights, to Egypt and Syria respectively in return for full peace treaties. At the same time, the Israeli government launched a clandestine operation to canvass 80 Palestinian notables on the West Bank about the possibility of creating an autonomous Palestinian entity, leading potentially to an independent Palestinian state. The Egyptians and the Syrians rejected this overture. They convened at Khartoum at the end of the summer, and they passed the infamous Three No's: no negotiations, no peace, no recognition of Israel. The Palestinian notables in the West Bank, the protocols of the discussions, all said they'd be interested in having an autonomous entity. They certainly wanted independence. But they were afraid if they concluded any peace treaty at all with Israel, they'd be executed. A historic opportunity was lost that summer, and we've lived with the consequences ever since.
