Posts
A FORMER cabinet
minister, an intelligent person (nonetheless) asked me the other day:
"Let's assume that your plan is realized. A Palestinian state will come
into being side by side with Israel.
Even some kind of federation. Then, in a few years, a violently anti-Israel
party will come to power there and annul all the treaties. What then?"
My simple answer was:
"Israel
will always be powerful enough to forestall any threat."
That is true, but that
is not the real answer. The real answer lies in the lessons of history.
HISTORY SHOWS us that
there are (at least) two kinds of peace agreements. One kind, the stupid one,
is based on power. The other, the intelligent, is based on common interest.
The most notorious of
the first kind is the Treaty of Versailles
that followed World War I.
It was signed four
years before I was born, but as a child I was an eye-witness to its results.
It was a
"dictated" peace. After four years of fighting, with millions of victims,
the victors wanted to inflict the maximum of damage on the vanquished.
Large parts of Germany were
separated from the Fatherland and turned over to the victors East and West.
Huge indemnities were levied on Germany,
which was already totally exhausted by the war.
Perhaps worst of all
was the "war guilt" clause. The origins of the war were manifold and
complicated. A Serbian patriot killed the Austrian heir to the throne. Austria
answered with a harsh ultimatum. The Russian Czarist Empire, which saw itself
as the protector of all Slavs, declared a general mobilization to frighten the
Austrians off. The Russians were allied with the French. To prevent an invasion
from both sides, the Germans, who allied to the Austrians, invaded France. The
idea was to knock the French out before the cumbersome Russian mobilization was
completed. Fearing a German victory, Great Britain rushed to the aid of
the French.
Complicated? Indeed.
But the victors compelled the Germans to sign a clause that indicted them as solely
responsible for the outbreak of the war.
WHEN I went to school
in Germany, there hung
before my eyes a map of Germany.
It showed the present borders of the Reich (as it was still called), and around
it a prominent red line that showed the prewar borders.
This map hung in every
class in every school in Germany.
From earliest childhood on, every German boy and girl was daily reminded of the
great injustice done to the Fatherland, when large chunks were torn from it.
Worse, every German
child was taught that his or her father had fought valiantly for four whole
years against a vastly superior enemy and surrendered only from sheer
exhaustion. Germany had played only a minor role in the events that led to the
war, yet the whole blame for the war was laid on it. So were huge
"reparations" that ruined the German economy.
The humiliation of
signing such an unjust treaty was a permanent sting, and became the battle-cry
of Adolf Hitler's new National-Socialist party. The politicians who had signed
the document were assassinated.
History has blamed the
leaders of the victorious allies for their stupidity in dictating these terms,
especially after the far-sighted American president, Woodrow Wilson, had warned
against it.
Probably they had no
choice. The terrible war had bred intense hatred, and peoples were thirsting
for revenge. They paid for it dearly when Germany, under the leadership of
Hitler, started World War II.
THE OPPOSITE example
is provided by the Peace of Vienna
of 1815, almost a hundred years earlier.
Napoleon's troops had
overrun large parts of Europe. Unlike Hitler's
Germany, Napoleon's France brought
with it a civilizing message, but its troops also committed many atrocities.
When France
was exhausted and broke down, the victorious allies could easily have imposed
on it the same punitive and humiliating terms imposed by their successors a
century later. They did not.
Instead of treating France as a
vanquished foe, they invited it to the table. Napoleon's ex-foreign minister,
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, was welcomed as one of the leaders to shape the
future of Europe.
The leading spirit of
the Congress of Vienna
was Klemens von Metternich, ably assisted by the British Lord Castlereagh. France was
allowed to recuperate within a short time.
One of the great
admirers of Metternich and his colleagues is Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately he
did the opposite when he himself became the US Foreign Minister.
The "Concert of
Nations" created by the Peace of Vienna
established a solid system that kept Europe
peaceful for almost a hundred years, with a few exceptions (like the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870). The spirit of its founders shines today as an
example of wisdom.
WORLD WAR II, the most
terrible of all, could have ended with a second Versailles treaty. It did not.
After Germany's
Unconditional Surrender, no peace treaty was signed at all. After the awful
atrocities of the Nazis, no generous treaty was possible. Germany was divided,
but instead of paying huge indemnities, it – incredibly – received huge sums of
money from the victors, so it could rebuild itself in record time. It did lose
a lot of territory, but a few decades later Germany
became the leading power in a united Europe.
Any major war in Europe is now unthinkable.
Winston Churchill and
his partners had obviously learned the lesson of Versailles. They disproved the popular saying
that nobody learns anything from history.
Even the new State of Israel behaved with a lot of wisdom – as far as Germany was
concerned. The chimnies of Auschwitz had hardly stopped smoking when Israel, under the leadership of David
Ben-Gurion, signed a treaty with Germany. Sadly, Ben-Gurion did not
display the same wisdom facing the Arab world.
There was the moment
of Oslo, when
everything was possible. Martin Buber once told me: "There is a right
moment for a historic act. The moment before it
is wrong. The moment after it is wrong. But for one moment it is right."
Unfortunately, Yitzhak Rabin did not recognize that. I doubt if he knew much
about world history.
WHAT IS the lesson?
Kissinger put it well in one of his books, before he became a war criminal.
It is this: Peace will
hold only if all sides profit from it. Peace will not hold if one major side is
left out.
At the moment of
victory, the victor believes that his power is eternal. He can impose his terms
and humiliate the enemy. But history shows that power changes, the strong of
today may be the weak of tomorrow. The weak may become strong and take revenge.
That is the lesson Israel should
absorb. Today we are strong, and the Arab world is in shambles. It will not
always be so.
A peace treaty with Palestine and the Arab
world will hold if it is wise and generous. Wise enough so the Palestinian
people, or at least a great majority, will come to the conclusion that it is
both worthwhile and honorable to keep it.
It is always good to
have a strong army. Just in case. But history shows that it is neither strong
armies nor an abundance of weapons that guarantees peace. It is the goodwill of
all sides, based on self-interest.
And
the wisdom of politicians – a rare ingredient, indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment