Abba Eban |
November 14, 1970
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Abba Eban
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Israel; Israel's first Ambassador at the UN; Author, My People: The Story of the Jews
I'm grateful to you, Mr. Chairman, for the warmth and sincerity of your welcome. When you gave a list of the things that have happened to me in so short a time, I was nearly overcome by a sense of fatigue, mitigated only by the generosity of your reference. If you can manage to be around in Israel at election time and make that speech again, you will do neither me nor my country any harm at all.
I have, as you have been told, been at this Commonwealth Club many times, always in the afternoon, and always, until tonight, in an environment of austere and total masculinity. I welcome the innovation. There is, after all, no need to exclude the more intelligent half of the human race from the opportunity to pass a gentle, but objective judgment on a righteous cause.
I do nothing here but exercise the duty of reciprocity. As you have said, Mr. Chairman, we were recently your host. One of the more engaging of the Israeli customs is to reduce all our guests to a state of total exhaustion, and I'm certain that you did not come unscathed out of that ordeal.
It is always for me a source of deep contentment to be in the commonwealth of California. The common features of California and Israel go far beyond the benevolence of our climates. You, of course, are bigger, more numerous, almost as turbulent and restless in the rhythm of your lives. You have a similar nobility, a pioneering spirit, a creative genius, an instinct for freedom. All that I find wrong with you is that you have a disturbing practice of growing your own citrus fruit instead of buying ours. This, however, is not enough to place any barriers between us. Certainly nobody can come to discuss the problems of the Middle East without feeling the warm waves of kinship and understanding that flow to Israel from the United States.
Well, our subject tonight is the Middle East; its past agony and its future hope. We speak of a region which has had a determining influence on the thought and spirit of mankind. In the heart of that region, at the very center of its history and geography, there lives a small state called Israel. From Israel there have gone forth currents of influence which have flown into the stream of universal culture and have fashioned the lives and the ideas of the Mediterranean and, later, of the Atlantic world.
There is tension, there is peril in the Middle East for one single cause: Israel's right to statehood, sovereignty, nationhood, security, economic development, have, for the whole 22 years of her existence, been violently assailed. There are many symptoms of the Middle Eastern crisis, but there is only one cause. The tension is not caused by territorial problems, or by a refugee problem, or by problems of navigation. These are the episodic symptoms of the basic disturbance. None of these problems would exist - or, if they existed, all of them would have been solved - were it not for the fundamental challenge to the concept of Israel as an organic part of the Middle East.
The alienation, therefore, exists first of all on the level of thought and emotion. It is an ideological conflict. The political and the military tensions flow from the refusal or the inability of Arab intellectual and political leadership so far, to grasp the depth, the passion, the authenticity of Israel's roots in the region in which our nation was born and from which it sent out a radiant influence across the entire range of human history. The crux of the problem is whether, however reluctantly, Arab leadership, intellectual and political, comes to understand the existential character of the Middle East as an area which cannot be exhausted by Arab nationalism alone. Of course the Arab nation has a large, even a predominant place in Middle Eastern life, but it has no monopoly. Not only must the modern world reach an equitable distribution of its material resources, it must also distribute nationhood and sovereignty with a sense of equity. In the Middle East these cannot be monopolized; they must be shared.
The scales of equity show the protagonists in this dramatic conflict in their true light. The Arab nation, in the era of its triumph, resplendent in 14 sovereignties over an area of 4.5 million square miles, in which 100 million Arabs live under their sovereign flags, replete with immeasurable resources of mineral wealth, endowed with a vast power of exercising influence on the scales of world strategy, a multiple representation in international organs. If Arab nationalism had a true understanding of its own achievement, it would be striding toward the future in a mood of confidence and buoyancy. Rarely in all history has any people achieved so large a measure of its ambition in so short a time. But turning its back upon this affirmative promise, Arab nationalism broods these 22 years with senseless rancor on the fact that another people has simultaneously achieved its national independence in an area one five-hundredth of their size, with a population one-fiftieth of theirs, with a parsimony of resources which mocks their pretensions to see us as a danger to their existence.
What is at issue now is not the self-determination of the Arab people, which is lavishly assured. Because of their 14 states and their 4.5 million square miles, and their multiple sovereignty, the Arab states face Israel on the wrong side of the balance of equity. Israel is the only nation which stands or falls in history by the way in which this conflict is resolved, yet the basis of the Middle Eastern tension lies in this refusal to regard Israel as an organic part of the Middle East. We find ourselves being victims of a grotesque paradox and fantasy, which regard the Middle East as an area in which Israel's existence is optional, or illegitimate, or inorganic, or external or alien. Israel inorganic, alien to the Middle East, indeed.
There are 127 members of the organized international community, but there is one state and one alone which speaks the same tongue, upholds the same faith, inhabits the same land as it did 3,000 years ago. There is no parallel in all the history of nationhood for the strength and the mystery of this continuity. So much for the Middle Eastern past. The Middle Eastern present is determined by an international structure which endows Israel for the past 22 years with a right of sovereign equality on the same level as that of any other state. There must be some axiom, there must be some starting point in any international discussion; and the existence of legitimate sovereignties is axiomatic. It is the starting point, it is not the destination, of any negotiating process.
This then is the posture with which Israel faces the world in the long and unending dialogue between the Jewish people and the rest of mankind. Israel's existence as a sovereign state is for us, not something to be defended, or to be explained, or to be apologized for. It is something to be proclaimed as an inexorable part of historic reality, and those who plan the future without it are building their concepts on foundations of sand.
There are some governments which in a benevolent spirit, offer to secure the consent of the Arab states to the recognition of our right to exist. It is sometimes my duty to say that we do not ask any recognition of our right to exist, because our right to exist is independent of any recognition of it. An international community which can accommodate 127 sovereign states from Afghanistan to Zambia in alphabetical order, from Fiji to Albania in chronological order, with dozens of statehoods, not all of which have such a sharp identity of spiritual and cultural individualism as Israel: such a world community can accommodate a state of Israel within a few thousand square miles and give to the Jewish people, after its long, tormented martyrdom, the opportunity to deploy its energies in creativity and in peace.
What would have happened if, 25 years after the new international order was established in this city of San Francisco in the absence of our people - if 25 years later we were to see a world community in which every nationhood and culture and political entity was represented, except, except for the eternal exception. The decision of our people in this generation is no longer to be the exception to the universal rule. We have ceased to be the passive victims of historic process and have become autonomous agents in fashioning our own destiny.
Now this violent challenge to our existence has erupted at many times in overt war. In 1948 an attempt was made to strangle the state of Israel at its birth. Nearly two decades later, circumstances came together which conspired to bring about a new attempt to cut Israel off from the roots of its security. Through a design mounted by the United Arab Republic with Soviet endorsement and support, we live today in the aftermath of the great traumatic and glorious memories of 1967, the unforgettable summer, the days that will never perish from our recollection. A new dimension has been added to our nation's memory, and the exploration of it will take many years.
I have in mind not principally the memory of military victory, great and glorious as it was, but rather the memory of the peril and the solitude which went before. Nobody in Israel can forget that 40 months ago, the prospect of our physical extinction was being seriously discussed across the world - in Arab capitals with wild exaltation of spirit, in other lands with genuine anguish but in total impotence of intervention. It is the sense of having stood upon the brink, of having passed from danger to salvation on a very narrow margin of vigilance. This is the haunting obsession which broods upon all Israel's life today; the knowledge that many things in our history are too strange to be believed, but nothing is too terrible to have happened.
The universal conscience was then aroused across the world, because at issue was not simply the fortunes of any state, but of a state whose name evokes the deepest spiritual memories of mankind - a state which is nothing, after all, but the last station, home, sanctuary of a people that had already lost 6 million of its sons in the greatest orgy of violence and hatred that had ever swept over any family of the human race. The consciousness that this, the vastest crime of modern history, might be compounded by the murder of that state, which was the remnant and the refuge of the most martyred of all peoples. This it was that created that high sense of moral drama which attended Israel's ordeal and Israel's emergence from it.
Now from these memories, which are still vivid with us, we draw the central themes of our policy. Does anybody expect us to forget those memories? We brood upon them day and night. We live intimately with them. From them, we have taken this resolve - never, never again to put ourselves into a position of danger and fragility such as that from which we narrowly escaped. National suicide cannot be an international obligation. Experience exists in order that men may learn from it. Our task is not to reconstruct the old armistice corroded by hatred and weighed down by war, but rather to embark upon an exercise in innovation, to build a new order of relations in the Middle East, to unfold a story that has never been heard or told before, to be satisfied this time with nothing less than peace.
It was, of course, interesting intellectually, to hear Mr. Kosygin three years ago and Mr. Gromyko three weeks ago confront the world community with the following logic: they say the best way to get peace in the Middle East is to reconstruct the precise conditions which brought about the war. It is against this conservative logic, against this concept of regression that we rise up in this resolve. And it is against that background that, in our dialogue with ourselves and with the world, we try to define in simple terms what Israel will do, what Israel will not do, and what are the central purposes and interests of our national life.
Let me say first what we will not do. We will not withdraw from the positions necessary for our security, except in the context of permanent peace. No withdrawal without peace. This is not a unilateral Israeli position. This is the law, the precedent, and the tradition of the nations. This is the policy, which has the sanction of the main body of enlightened opinion. If we were to withdraw without peace, we should be doing something so irrational and unprecedented that it is extraordinary to hear it ever suggested at all. Even in international organs in which Israel has a permanent and vast numerical disadvantage, we have been able to defeat any idea that there can be withdrawal from the cease-fire lines, except in the context of a permanent peace; and in the context of that permanent peace there must be an attempt for the first time to define Israel's territorial structure.
The time is passed for cease-fire lines and truce lines and armistice lines. The results are sometimes the cause of war. The time has come to fix by negotiation and agreement the permanent territorial boundaries of Israel and of its neighbors. Therefore, we shall not withdraw without peace. We shall not renounce our right in the peace negotiation to determine secure boundaries, as distinct from cease-fire lines or armistice lines. There is no reason for us to be apologetic about the concept that there must be an element of territorial negotiation. It is not good enough to say "the old armistice lines," just as we do not say "the present cease-fire lines." The old armistice lines reflected a military situation in 1948. The present cease-fire lines reflect a military situation created in 1967. What must be done is to achieve a negotiated boundary in which the dignity and the interests of all the contiguous states are brought into harmony. This, after all, has always happened after wars.
Mr. Gromyko, in the speech that I had heard three weeks ago, took an attitude of territorial fundamentalism. Ah, but he took that attitude only about the Middle East. When he came to discuss the security system of Europe, he was full of lucid realism. Of course it was necessary after the Second World War not to reproduce the inflammatory situations which had caused the war. The Soviet Union even has its Golan Heights. It was arranged after the Second World War that it was impossible for Leningrad to be within 38 miles of the "ferocious Finns", and therefore the Soviet Union claims secure and recognized boundaries. I suggest to you that our farmers in the Jordan Valley and Upper Galilee are in rather more imminent danger from Syrian guns than is Leningrad from the fury of the modern but pacific descendants of the Vikings.
Nobody suggests in central Europe that the Polish agony be reconstructed by a mutilation of the post-war boundary, or by the introduction into Poland of tens of thousands of Germans who had lived there for centuries, but whose reintroduction would break up the cohesion of the state and open it out to the kind of internal disruption which contributed so mightily to the tragedies of 1939. Therefore, every precedent, every law is on our side when we say the boundaries have not yet been decided. They should not be dictated unilaterally, neither by Israel nor by the Arab states. Therefore, the only course is to establish them by agreement within the peacemaking process. This concept of a territorial negotiation, upheld by Israel, by the United States and by the majority of central-international opinion, marks the second of our principles: not to withdraw without peace, not to renounce the opportunity for negotiating secure and recognized boundaries. This does not mean that we have an encyclopedic attitude to all the territory now under our administration. Of course we would withdraw armed forces from the cease-fire lines, but only to those boundaries which, taking account of our vital security, are determined in the peace negotiation - to boundaries which have not yet been determined, because the negotiation has not yet started.
A third thing that we will not do is to suffer such an inundation of our country as to change its basic vocation as the central expression of the civilization and the culture and the language of the Jewish people. If there can be a Swedish Sweden and a French France and an almost unlimited infinity of Arab states, then there can be an Israeli state in the Middle East - that is to say, a state whose central purpose is to reanimate, preserve the Hebrew culture and the levels which the Jewish people bestow upon our state in respect of its democracy, its parliamentary system, its social originality, its technological, intellectual and scientific standards.
But no less important is to say what we shall do. We shall be ready to negotiate with each and any Arab state for the establishment of a permanent peace. Negotiation, of course, presupposes the concept of the sanctity of agreements. There is now an obstacle to the dialogue between Israel and the United Arab Republic, because that government, having signed an agreement for a cease-fire standstill, violated it the following day with the full support and endorsement of the Soviet Union. This raises issues more important than the military issue itself; it raises the transcendent question of the credibility to be attached to Egyptian signatures and to Soviet engagements. For Israel, the problem of the credibility of the Egyptian signature is the crucial issue, because if we negotiate, it will be with the object of reaching an agreement. Under that agreement, Israel would have to renounce something concrete and tangible - territory, not all of them but much of them. There would have to be a heavy measure of territorial renunciation. What shall we get in return? An agreement, a signature, something intangible, something much more easily revocable. Therefore, the degree of trust and confidence to be ascribed to an Egyptian engagement is at the very heart of any negotiation.
On the broader level, the violation by the Soviet Union of a solemn engagement to the United States raises international issues which have an adverse effect across the whole range of international life, because if that engagement could be so easily repudiated, then what value can be attached to other engagements which either exist or are in negotiation concerning arms limitation, concerning the future of Europe, concerning Southeast Asia. It is a very grave event to have a Soviet engagement thus violated. That is why both Israel and the United States, from their respective vantage points - in our case a regional vantage point; in the American case a global vantage point - refuse to pass over in silence and acquiescence this violation. That is why we call for rectification of this violation, not only in order to restore a disturbance of the military balance, but, more fundamentally, in order to create that confidence in the validity of contracts, which is the first law of international civility. But there is no such obstacle with Jordan.
If and how and when we overcome the obstacle with the United Arab Republic is a matter on which I cannot make any definitive statement now. Let us believe and hope that 1971 will be the negotiating year. We are ready to negotiate; we are ready to reach agreement. It is a central theme of Israel's policy that the Middle Eastern peace must be built by the Middle Eastern peoples, and cannot be imposed upon them from outside. The days are passed when a small hierarchy of great powers inflicted, or imposed or bestowed upon smaller nations the conditions of their existence. Agreement and not an imposed solution. Of course the great powers, and especially the two greatest, exercise their influence upon the course and the flow of events, but it is certainly not possible for external jurisdiction to replace internal agreement.
Yes, we shall negotiate; we shall reach agreement. Yes, there will be a withdrawal of troops, but only to those boundaries that are determined in the peace negotiation. There are four or five neuralgic points, which, if they are not treated differently from the past, will be the cradle of future wars. There is a difference in the prospect of peace between the situation with Israel in the Valley and Syrian troops on the Heights, that is a recipe, that is a prescription for war. Israel on the Heights and in the Valley: that is a prescription for peace.
We have a vital interest in our egress to the Southern and the Eastern seas. A position in which there are no Israeli troops standing guard upon our maritime approaches is one situation full of dynamite and of explosive potentiality. A situation in which we can control this innocuous but vital interest creates a different prospect for peace.
Divided cities create wars: the natural condition of a city is unity. But of course the unity of Jerusalem is not incompatible with a special status for the holy places of Christendom and of Islam, in order that that which is truly universal in Jerusalem, beyond its secular jurisdiction, can be the subject of international agreements. We want not only secure boundaries but open boundaries such as those which exist in the European community, boundaries which define jurisdiction and cultural identity but which are otherwise open to the free and mutual flow of commerce, men, and ideas. That is the modern concept of the boundary - it should be a bridge and not a barrier; and although boundaries must exist to define sovereignty and cultural identity, there should be in the Middle East, beyond a formal peace, a high measure of economic and social integration, especially across the whole of the former Palestine area - that is to say in the relationship of Israel with its eastern neighbor. The situation that exists in Scandinavia, in Benelux, between Canada and the United States - these are the models of a 20th century boundary which are open to all lawful movement, and which do not close and separate peoples hermetically from each other.
Yes, we will contribute to a solution of the refugee problem. That problem was created by war; therefore it can be solved only by peace. It is the refusal to make peace which perpetuates that problem, which creates a vested and a deliberate interest in its perpetuation. But if there is a mutual desire for peace, this will be accompanied by a mutual desire to contribute, by regional cooperation and with international aid, to the solution of one of the easiest problems in their bulk, which have ever existed. Smaller than the refugee problems of Europe and of Africa, and of the Indian subcontinent, those problems were solved because there was a desire by the states concerned to live in peace. This problem has been perpetuated as a consequence of a determination not to live in peace. It is not the case, as some of us used to say (I must say I used to say it), that a solution of the refugee problem will bring about peace. No. Peace will bring about a solution of the refugee problem. It is the context of interstate relations which creates the situation congenial to a solution of all the population problems of the area.
Yes, we are prepared for cooperation in economic development. The Middle Eastern states, Israel and the Arab states, in 22 years have spent $20,000 million on war. A small proportion of that sum would have been sufficient to solve all the population problems of the Middle East, and to open out for our area a new horizon of development.
These, then, are the things we will do: cease fire, negotiation, agreement, the determination of agreed boundaries, withdrawal of forces to the boundaries when agreed, the construction of a community of Middle Eastern states, each secure in its separate sovereignty, but united in a common devotion to the region in which both the Arab and the Israeli peoples took their birth, and from which they have written such radiant chapters in the story of civilization.
Now, beyond all of this, we strive to do something other than to survive: to be the working model of a free society. I hope that those of you who visited us were struck by the difference between the Middle East as it is described in the newspapers, and the Middle East as it is in the world of truth. We are sometimes told that we only have one state of Israel against the Arab 14. That isn't quite true: there are two Israels. There is the Israel of reality and there is the Israel of the newspaper headlines. Unfortunately, only one of them has a vote in the United Nations. Now the Israel of the newspaper headlines is a very turbulent place in which everybody is preoccupied with hand grenades and bombs. But the Israel of reality, although the cares of security can never be far away, is also a society full of vital energies, pioneering zeal, enterprise, growth - growth of population, growth of industrial product, growth of agricultural profusion, growth in the scope and range of international contacts, growth in the number of technical development agreements that we have with 65 other nations with whom Israel is sharing its accumulated pioneering experience, growth in its cultural base, growth in the intensity of its scientific intellectual and technological penetration.
Our neighbors would have secured a great victory if they could so paralyze Israel and obsess it with the need for survival that we were doing nothing else. An Israel that was doing nothing except survive would not be Israel in the deeper moral and historical sense. Israel is not Sparta; for three and a half years we have had to be a fighting nation; we have not become a warrior state. The central vocation of democracy, of freedom, of immigration, of economic development, and of international cooperation have gone forward without any decrease of momentum.
This is the spectacle that we would like to present to the world, of a nation whose impulse for growth triumphs even in conditions of siege. And if you come to us, we can show you the spectacle of a people for whom affirmation is still more important than protest, even amongst its youth. We can show you strange things: we can show you universities in which professors can be seen giving lectures to which students are listening. In other words, this is still a nation in which it is more important to build than to smash, more important to construct than to destroy. We may perhaps be old-fashioned and out of touch with the nihilistic currents in contemporary culture, perhaps because we are still living the rhapsodical age in our youthful and formative life.
And finally, all of this has relevance as well as deep fascination for all other peoples and especially for the people of the United States, which has accompanied the drama of Israel's emergence with fidelity and with constant interest. I do not claim that our policies are identical. There are no two free countries whose policies are identical. If you ever see two countries whose policies are identical, then one of them is in serious trouble. We are not satellites of each other, but there is a parallelism and a general harmony of interests. Americans understand, from their own historic consciousness, those processes of pioneering, immigration, creation of a new culture out of so many diverse and disbursed elements, the sense of enterprise, the affirmative vision of the scientific and the technological age. They also share with us devotion to the same set of moral principles, which were first proclaimed on Israel's soil and later became the heritage of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic world.
Today we follow and pursue these common objectives: the maintenance of the cease-fire, which was concerted in August through American diplomatic initiative, the maintenance of a balance of Israel's strength. I feel that there was never a time when the United States government had embraced this principle with a stronger understanding than today. Never has the harmony between our interests and our policies been as deep and close as it is today in the month of November 1970.
We ask from American policy four things: to maintain the balance of strength, for if Israel is weak there will be no cease-fire and there will be no peace. There would not be a cease-fire today if the United States had not replenished our defenses in the past 90 days. If Cairo had had any impression that its own massive import of arms had been unaccompanied by a parallel reinforcement of Israel, of course they wouldn't have accepted the cease-fire; of course they will not extend it beyond the 90 days if they have any impression that they have achieved military superiority. That is the first objective, the balance of strength.
The second: deter the intervention of the other great power, of the Soviet Union. I believe that if the Soviet Union is aware that its active participation for the expansion of this conflict risks a global confrontation, it will recoil. This idea of preventing confrontation exists in American policy; we think it should be enunciated, illustrated, and developed with the utmost consistency.
Third, we ask that our efforts to maintain a common interest of the free world against such heavy pressures should not be at the price of our economic collapse. Therefore noting that the United States makes prodigious efforts to enable other small countries to maintain their security without wrecking their economy, we hope for a similar consideration here. Israel makes no claim, actual or contingent, upon American manpower. That is what distinguishes the Middle East from Southeast Asia. Here in the Middle East you can defend a common interest without any risk of that vast involvement of your manpower, which has had such poignant results in tragedy and sacrifice, and which has cast and created so heavy a scar across American society. Here, because of Israel's vigor, and autonomous spirit, you can achieve the defense of the common interests of the free world with nothing but the supply of some hardware. Surely if that were your position in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, the sigh of relief that would go out across the United States, would almost deafen our ears.
And fourthly, to support our right to the negotiation of a secure boundary and to use your influence for a renewal of the peace dialogue in conditions of mutual confidence. These are our four requests: the balance of power, the deterrence of Soviet intervention, the support of economic progress and the promotion of negotiation and conditions of confidence. I believe that in making these proposals Israel becomes America's most undemanding ally because all of these requests involve no burden upon the internal cohesion or the external security of the United States.
This then is the message that I bring these many thousands of miles from Jerusalem. And the Jerusalem of which I speak is a dual concept. Above the Jerusalem of bricks and mortar, of streets and cities, there is the ideal Jerusalem that lives forever in the hearts and hopes of men, symbol in every land and every age of man's unending quest for individual and social perfection. To the reconstruction of that ideal Jerusalem in our days, let us forever dedicate ourselves.
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