This is not the Yom Kippur war 2.0
- The Joe Biden White House goes along all the way with Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist cabinet – to which Hamas sees terrorism as the only answer
Golda Meir once told Henry Kissinger that all she wanted was absolute security for Israel. To that, he supposedly quipped, “Absolute security for Israel means absolute insecurity for everyone else.”
Kissinger was frustrated with Meir’s intransigence. More specifically, Meir preferred to have another war with the Arab states rather than explore overtures from Egypt. Contrary to Israeli-American propaganda up to this day, she could not escape responsibility for the war of 1973. For the latest reiteration of the propaganda, watch the new movie, Golda, starring the ever-convincing Helen Mirren.
By the time Anwar Sadat kicked the Soviets out of Egypt, he was ready to talk to Washington. So months before war broke in October, Kissinger was having his famous “backchanneling” with his Egyptian counterpart, the very able Hafiz Ismail. As a soldier, spy, diplomat and courtier, Ismail had an even more brilliant and versatile intellect than Kissinger’s. So much for Arabs being savages or barbarians!
Together, the two men came up with a formula: so long as Israel recognised Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai, taken by the Israelis during the six-day war of 1967, Cairo was willing to wait for its full return in phases, over an extended period. Meanwhile, it was willing to pursue a separate peace with the Jewish state based on the UN resolution that recognised Israel within its pre-1967 borders. Egypt would do so without the need to coordinate with the other Arab states and the Palestinians; so much for that professed Arab unity!
That was a promising start, something to build on.
“Was the Yom Kippur war … inevitable?” asked Yigal Kipnis, historian and author of 1973: The Road to War.
“Documents newly released from the Israeli state archives and their integration with American archival material suggest that it wasn’t. The records show that in the months leading up to the conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who presented herself as a tireless seeker of peace, was resolute in rebuffing the many peace overtures sent her way by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat,” Kipnis wrote.
Who knows what might have happened if Meir had not just said to hell with all that? Egypt and Israel could have had their Camp David moment half a decade earlier, and without a war that Israel only won by the skin of its teeth; or at least fought a war without Egypt in it. When war did break out, Kissinger was so mean he withheld vital weapons for the Israel Defence Forces for a whole week just to watch them sweat.
What that sorry episode shows is that Washington once had the semblance of mastery of the great game of diplomacy in the Middle East. For all my Marxist/Chinese-communist/anti-American leanings, this is how I have often imagined a true American empire ought to act like.
Not Yom Kippur
Fast forward exactly half a century. The latest horrors visited upon Israel by Hamas are pure terrorism, no doubt about it. Comparisons have been made by pundits with the Yom Kippur war because, in both instances, the famed Israeli intelligence services completely failed to anticipate the attack, and the Jewish state was taken by surprise. Both attacks took place on a Jewish holiday.
But it’s not just the Israelis this time; the Americans have nothing to write home about, too. With Meir’s stubborn rejectionism, the Nixon administration at least knew another war was coming.
Not so Jake Sullivan, who holds the same post as Kissinger as national security adviser. He was so obviously clueless that more than a week ago, this foreign policy “wunderkind” – sold as such by the US mainstream press to reassure the American public that the White House was in good hands despite Biden’s obviously worsening senility – declared that the Middle East had reached a reassuring level of calm and normality. How?
Partly because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said so, but also because Sullivan thinks the US is besting China, which helped Iran and Saudi Arabia re-establish ties, by engineering a historic rapprochement – not happening now! – between the Saudis and Israelis. When it comes to Israel and the US, the relationship between vassal and master has been strangely reversed; what Israel says goes.
Sullivan has been drinking his own Kool-Aid. After all, six Arab states now recognise Israel, and the Saudis are supposedly coming along nicely. (What’s that about the Arab states being united by their hatred of Jews and they only want to wipe Israel off the map? Which century are you living in? But what about Iran? They are Persians, not Arabs.)
Oh yes, the Saudis. Wasn’t their country supposed to be a pariah state for its butchering of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi?
But with the diplomatic equivalent of a bait and switch, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is back in favour with the Biden White House. Even so, with or without the latest terrorist attacks, no Saudi-Israeli rapprochement was probably forthcoming. Salman was asking for the moon, including a full US security guarantee comparable to that granted to Israel. This didn’t stop all three sides from advertising the new normal in the Middle East.
The Arab states seem happy to throw the Palestinians under the bus. Israel thinks it can make them disappear, at least as a political problem, through a combination of military and economic repression, including a 16-year-old blockade against the Gaza Strip – which the Red Cross calls illegal, while the UN stops short of it – that is a cause for war under international law for the Palestinians.
