The following informative article about Israel’s grand strategy, past and present, appeared in Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading daily.

The goals Israel set for itself in its early years concerning the problem of borders and refugees are not unlike the ones that Ehud Barak has set for the state in the Taba talks.

The election-eve political rhetoric and the contradictory declarations coming out of the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem are making it difficult to understand Israeli foreign policy goals and are sending confusing and directionless messages. But the confused impression is created mainly by the prime minister’s difficulty in communication. The instructions Ehud Barak gave the Israeli delegation do, in fact, demonstrate consistency. The three restrictions he presented to the cabinet session on Sunday are a further continuation of the line set out by the founders of the State of Israel in their shaping of Israel’s foreign and defense policies. If he were able to explain his goals and policies in that vein, Barak’s political situation might be considerably less bleak.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Yossi Beilin and Amnon Shahak arrived in Taba to attain three goals, in accordance with Barak’s restrictions: to set Israel’s eastern border east of the Green Line; to retain a hold on the holy sites in Jerusalem; and to keep the Palestinian refugees out of Israel.

Barak succeeded in garnering the support of the previous president of the United States, Bill Clinton, for these three goals. Yasser Arafat refuses to accept them, preferring to continue his struggle against Israel. At the root of the current talks lies an Israeli attempt to frighten the Palestinians by telling them what they can expect under the extremist Ariel Sharon and the indifferent George W. Bush, and thus force them to accept the Israeli map.

Barak’s unilateral separation plan was intended to attain the same goals, if Arafat persisted in his recalcitrant stance. The Israeli positions are not new and were in fact born in the early days of the state.

A few months ago, Shimon Golan’s book, “Gvul Ham, Milhama Kara” (Hot Border, Cold War) was published. It is about the formulation of Israel’s security policy in the years 1949-1953, from the signing of the armistice agreements until the large-scale retaliatory raid on Kibya, which fixated the active hostility between Israel and its neighbors, and elevated Sharon, currently leading in the 2001 pre-election polls, to military greatness. Golan is a senior researcher in the Israel Defense Forces history department. But despite his role at the heart of the establishment, and his caution when dealing with sensitive subjects, his conclusions will not surprise even the “new historians.” Like them, Golan, too, is convinced that Israel did not rush to seek peace after the War of Independence, because it feared to pay the price of the concessions that the superpowers demanded of it, in borders and refugees.

The refusal of the Arab countries to accept Israel as their neighbor only served its purposes in attaining long-term goals. Golan states that the main goal of Israel’s foreign and defense policies, as they were formulated after the War of Independence, was to establish the territorial and demographic outcome of the war and the armistice agreements. The very same problems are still the main obstacles in the negotiations with the Palestinians and the Syrians.

Arafat wants the “right of return” for the Palestinian refugees, and Syria is demanding the shores of the Kinneret and other territories, which were declared demilitarized after the War of Independence. First things first. Victory in the battles left considerable territories in Israeli hands beyond the partition borders allocated to it by the United Nations in November 1947, leaving most of the Arabs who had lived in the territory of the Jewish state beyond its borders.

The founders of the state did not want to lose any of the achievements and administered a policy of striving for peace - but not too fast. They successfully withstood the heavy pressure exerted by the United States and Britain to make territorial concessions and allow the refugees to return. They were aided in this by the Arab recalcitrance, which demanded Israeli concessions as a precondition for negotiations. At the Lausanne conference in 1949, Israel agreed to take in 100,000 refugees, following heavy American pressure, and was saved from having to carry the plan out by the Arab insistence that the number was not large enough.

Israel initially viewed the armistice agreements as the first step to peace, and tried to achieve permanent agreements with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. All the efforts to do so failed, leaving interesting lessons behind. Then, as now, the positions of the parties “had never been closer.”

The mutual interests were also clear. Only the political desire remained evasive. Syria and Israel almost succeeded in dividing the demilitarized area between them. The talks Israeli representatives held with King Abdullah of Jordan once almost led to peace, and another time almost led to a nonbelligerence treaty. The Israeli media was optimistic, as usual: “A nonbelligerence treaty and a commercial economic agreement are about to be signed between Israel and Jordan,” Ha’aretz announced in its headline of March 5,1950. Even previously, some in Israel had toyed with the idea of setting up a Palestinian state on the West Bank, led by the refugee leaders. But it all came to naught.

Israeli policy-makers correctly assumed that Egypt would be the first Arab country to make peace, but from secret contacts held with Egyptian officials, it was clear that they were in no rush to do so. The more Israel got used to a situation of neither peace nor war, the voices calling for a maintaining of the status quo, even at the price of Arab hostility and problems with the superpowers, grew louder. This was the tone in a session that then prime minister David Ben-Gurion held in October 1952 with foreign minister Moshe Sharett and senior Foreign Ministry and IDF officials. Ben-Gurion said: “The main interest is not peace with the Arabs. . . Viewing peace as the principal interest is similar to the improper way in which the army views itself as the center of affairs, convinced that the economy, manpower and foreign relations must adapt themselves to its needs.”

Ben-Gurion set down the priorities: Israel’s principal interest was its own existence, and its second interest was relations with the United States. Peace with the Arab countries was only in third place. “I am tautly awaiting peace with the Arabs. I am ready for it in the middle of the night, but there are things that must come first, and other things that come later. The vital matter just now is America.”

The first prime minister did not believe in a New Middle East, in which Israel would integrate with the Arab nations. His worldview was the forerunner of that of Barak and Ben-Ami, who believe in a peace of high fences and separation. “We are a European nation, and this region just happens to be next to it, but we are not part of it,” said Ben-Gurion. “As long as the Arab world is the way it is, America must relate to [us] as if we were located in Siam. We have no connection to them; our entire regime, our culture, all our relations are not the fruit of this region. We have no political unity with them.”

Contingency plans

The Israeli establishment refused to accept the armistice line, today known as the “June 4,1967 borders,” as the country’s final borders. Moshe Dayan, a rising star in the army at the time, thought that the time was still ripe to change Israel’s borders in its favor. Ben-Gurion’s foreign-policy advisor, Reuven Shiloah, spoke of a border along the Jordan River. The foreign minister objected to their approach because he feared international opposition to Israeli belligerence and the domination of a large Arab population. But even Sharett, the most moderate in the group, was convinced that if the Arabs “in their stupidity or evil” created an opportunity for Israel to take over territory without having to annex too many Arabs into its borders, “we should consider taking advantage of it.”

The striving for an “improvement” of Israel’s borders was characteristic of the IDF’s operational planning in those years. Israel got ready for a “second round” with the Arabs, and in the general staff’s planning division, they prepared a comprehensive plan in case of an Arab attack on all fronts. The planners decided what the borders of the “diplomatic expanse that the country aspires to capture in the future” would be - from Beirut, via the Beirut-Damascus highway, to Damascus in the north; the line going from Damascus to Aqaba in the east, including Mafraq and Amman, Jordan’s principal cities; Wadi Al-Arish and the Mediterranean Sea in the west. As a secondary goal, the Litani River and Marjayoun in Lebanon, Quneitra on the Golan Heights, the Jordan River in the east and Wadi Al-Arish in the Sinai. Golan is cautious in portraying these military plans and emphasizes that they do not reflect “a country seeking to take over territories,” but rather alternatives examined by the army, which were not necessarily accepted by the political echelons.

Golan writes that Ben-Gurion believed that Israel should make do with the achievements realized in the armistice agreement, and not seek to go beyond them. “I did not find any reference in the documents of the political echelons, or in papers belonging to the echelon above the planning division, to the possibility of the extensive expansion that was discussed in the planning division’s papers,” writes Golan. But even if the ideas of extensive conquest were received in silence, the lesson to be drawn from them is that contingency plans are eventually realized. The Six-Day War achieved the goals of the comprehensive plan and even went beyond in the Sinai. The Lebanon War carried out the northern part of the plan. The two initiated wars were led by Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, defense ministers who grew up in the army of the 1950s and who clearly internalized the thinking of those days.

According to Golan, the comprehensive plan included another important stage. In October 1952, Colonel Shalom Eshel completed his job as head of the planning division and wrote a memorandum to Ben-Gurion, in which he pointed to the IDF weaknesses in the face of the Arab armies and to its inability to defend Israel within the current ratio of forces, if the Arabs were to strike first. He feared that if there were a “second round,” the Arabs would win it. His conclusion was that Israel must always be the one to take the initiative in war.

“This conclusion should be viewed as the beginning of the move over to the philosophy of a preemptive war, initiated by Israel,” writes Golan. The next stage was in the writing of the Lavi operational program, the parent of the Six-Day War, which was composed by Eshet’s successor in the planning division, Colonel Yuval Ne’eman.

Military planning

Military planning in the early 1950s “soared far beyond the ability” of the small IDF, so lean in new weaponry. The problem of borders preoccupied the state and its leaders, especially on the day-to-day security level, where two major problems were apparent: the infiltration of Palestinian refugees on the border with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the struggle with Syria over control of the demilitarized areas in the North.

The problem of infiltration and terror attacks from the territories has not essentially changed to this day, even if over the years, it has taken on different forms, and even if the control over the territories moved from Jordan and Egypt to Israel, and in the last decade, from Israel to the Palestinian Authority.

Entire chapters of Golan’s book can be read as if they were headlines of today’s newspapers. The relations with Jordan in the early 1950s are greatly reminiscent of the current dilemma concerning the Palestinian Authority and the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Israel sought, then too, an address that would take responsibility for quiet on its borders and restrain infiltrators. Time and time again there were attempts to reach agreements with the Jordanians, on the level of local commanders, as well as on more senior levels, and there were even attempts at joint patrols, which failed.

The armistice committee of the 1950s, headed by a United Nations representative was reborn in the Wye Agreement, which appointed CIA representatives as arbitrators between Israeli and Palestinian security representatives. In the early 1950s, Israel could not impose a closure on or encircle the territories, and it adopted reprisals in order to demonstrate a heavy hand against the infiltration. The dilemma for the political and security echelons concerned the extent to which the actions were effective, in view of the political price Israel had to pay. The international community, explained Foreign Ministry officials, sanctifies the concept of the border as the basis for world order, and finds it difficult to accept a situation in which regular army forces cross over to a neighboring country in order to conduct military actions.

The army claimed then, just as it does today, that reprisals were necessary in order to bolster the sense of security of Israeli citizens. “The purpose of the reprisals was to bolster the spirit of the people and to motivate the authorities to act, because they were the only ones who could put a stop to the phenomenon,” said chief of staff Mordechai Maklef at a debate in June 1953, which sounded very much like Barak’s cabinet sessions discussing the air force bombings of the Palestinian Authority facilities in Gaza.

Walter Eytan, the director-general of the Foreign Ministry, took the opposing view, claiming that the actions had no real value. But the foreign minister and most of the ministry officials did not support that line, and accepted the necessity of conducting occasional military actions to release pressure, on the condition that diplomatic considerations would also be taken into account. Indeed, in one case, an action was canceled because of a summit meeting between the leaders of the United States and Britain. Golan’s research does not go as far as the Six-Day War, which realized the aspirations of those who sought to expand Israel’s borders, but there were also the fears of Sharett and his colleagues, who were apprehensive at the thought of ruling over such a large Arab population. The compromise Barak is currently trying to attain attempts to stretch the policies of Ben-Gurion and Sharett in order to include the results of the Six-Day War in Jerusalem’s Old City and on the borders of the West Bank.

Barak is seeking to move the border more to the east in order to widen the Jerusalem corridor and gain Israel a mountain crestline at its narrow waist. That is the strategic logic behind his demand to annex settlement blocs in Samaria and around Jerusalem, over which Ben-Ami and Abu Ala are currently dueling in Taba