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Oslo, the Bomb, and Other Home Remedies

By Amnon Lord

Over a political career spanning five decades, Shimon Peres has fought for the idea that inexorable human progress will solve everything, real soon.


At first glance, no two foreign policy initiatives undertaken by the State of Israel since its founding seem as dissimilar as the nuclear weapons program of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Oslo accords of the 1990s. Yet not far beneath the surface of both initiatives one finds a common intellectual genealogy, a striking similarity in fundamental assumptions and aspirations without which it is doubtful that either project would ever have taken wing. And this is no surprise, given that both projects were to a large extent the brainchild of Israel’s singular strategic wizard, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Indeed, despite his celebrated transformation from one of the Jewish state’s most militant hawks to the arch-guru of its peace camp, Shimon Peres has nevertheless, in a career spanning five decades, retained a consistent philosophical outlook and an unchanging intellectual style which is probably without parallel in the imprint it has left on the country’s foreign policy.
In his literary capstone to the Oslo accords, The New Middle East, Peres himself takes note of the similarity between the two crowning achievements of his political career. By Peres’ own account, both the nuclear weapons project, which he supervised as director-general of the Defense Ministry from 1953 to 1959, and the 1993 Oslo agreement with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, reflected his sense for “when to ignore history,” as well as his passion for the “element of surprise” in putting forth dramatic political initiatives. “More than thirty years have elapsed between the completion of the Dimona [nuclear weapons] project and my second—even more crucial—opportunity to contribute to the welfare of Israel… the situation was similar: Only a few people could see the potential for peace.”1 Yet a look at the scores of interviews he granted and articles he wrote over the past fifty years reveals that the Dimona and Oslo projects had much more in common than perhaps even Peres himself might like to admit.
Already at the outset of Peres’ career in Israeli public service in the first years of independence, the young protégé of Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion became known for his unorthodox articulation of the challenges Israel faced in its struggle for survival, and in his formulation of the aims of its foreign policy.2 As the thirty-year-old director-general of the Defense Ministry, Peres cut his political teeth in an environment which was saturated with high-blown ideology. Most of the nation’s political movements and leaders—from Labor movement stalwarts Yigal Allon and Meir Ya’ari, to Herut’s Menahem Begin—framed their causes and their attendant political campaigns in stridently ideological terms, with relatively little effort expended on pragmatic or historically grounded analyses which could illuminate the turbulent relationship between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. Within this context, Peres first made his name as an innovator eager to depart from the dogma-driven conventional wisdoms of the new state’s efforts to solve its security problems—a quality that would serve him well throughout his career.
In one of his first articles on Israeli security, published in 1954, Peres enumerated the main principles of his security doctrine—principles which were strongly reminiscent of the views of Ben-Gurion, Peres’ mentor and the source of his political strength throughout that period. These ideas, which guided the Israeli security community as well as Peres’ own thinking until after the 1956 Sinai campaign, included balancing investment in immediate security concerns against the construction of a long-term defense infrastructure; building up the army’s deterrent posture and the unity of purpose of the reservists on which this deterrence depended; and maintaining a balance between classic military approaches to security as against those based on the Zionist principle of Jewish settlement in vulnerable border areas. In fact, in the early stages of his career, Peres saw Jewish settlement as being a kind of unique, Zionist secret weapon with a very special role to play in eliminating future wars. For him, Jewish settlement was “an essential factor in times of danger, and not because the battle will be focused on border settlements…rather, it is because Jewish settlement diminishes the Arabs’ desire for war….”3
Central to Peres’ foreign policy conception was the belief that such a combination of realistic and positive steps in the realm of defense policy could suffice in bringing security. In this view, little was to be gained by projecting an image of a Jewish state which was too anxious for peace. “Declarations by us of our desire for peace are not received by them [i.e., the Arabs] as being righteous …but rather as a sign of weakness.” Moreover, the “overuse of diplomacy [invites] increasing intervention by foreign powers in the internal matters of the State of Israel.”4 For the young Peres, the question of securing Israel’s borders had to be totally divorced from the “high policy” of the negotiators and diplomats.
Today, revisionist historians like to portray Ben-Gurion’s distaste for negotiations with the Arabs as essentially aggressive, and the result of a lack of peaceful intentions. But when one takes into account the fact that Egypt was, for most of this period, demanding as a condition for peace the Israeli cession of much of the Negev (the southern half of pre-1967 Israel), while Syria laid a similar claim to half the Sea of Galilee in addition to other territorial demands in the north of the country, one does not have to strain too hard to understand Ben-Gurion’s reluctance to engage in negotiations. As Peres never seemed to tire of explaining, secure borders would not, for Israel, be a subject for discussion. Peace would be ensured by the army’s deterrent posture, whereas international diplomatic intervention would only drag Israel into negotiations whose negative outcome was assured: “Israel cannot, therefore, be active in the fundamental direction it desires—the direction of peace—because the current call for peace is intended more to please the Arabs than to take into account the needs of peace. And the call for peace does not include, for example, free passage in Eilat, but rather suggests ‘study’ of the ‘sentimental’ borders [i.e., the Negev, which U.S. Secretary of State Dulles had defined as only having sentimental value] of the State of Israel. Thus we have come to the absurd situation in which the spirit of compromise strengthens the will of the side that seeks war, and presents Israel with peace proposals similar to the conditions presented to the vanquished side in a war.” Instead, Peres saw strategic self-reliance as the only solution: “Dependence on our own strength was and remains our only realistic security policy.”5
 
It was not too long before Peres began to move away from his belief that Jewish settlement could serve as an essential tool for dispelling the Arabs’ military aspirations. Yet the goal of somehow managing to eliminate the Arabs’ “desire for war” would remain the constant focus of all of his efforts. When the Arab regimes continued to give voice to a “desire for war,” despite the successful solidification of Israel’s border towns and the organization of an increasingly well-prepared military, Peres’ analysis shifted accordingly. By the mid-1950s he came to believe, as did Ben-Gurion, that the “next round”—as it was called then—simply could not be prevented, and Israel therefore had no choice but to prepare for it. Indeed, over the course of the two years subsequent to the article in which he expressed confidence in the value of Jewish settlement for robbing the Arabs of their belief that Israel could be uprooted militarily, he gradually drew the logical conclusions of the belief in an inevitable “next round”: Peres became one of the leading advocates of preemptive, initiated conflict, whose purpose was to allow Israel, rather than its enemies, to determine the time and place of battle, and thereby achieve a victory so decisive that it could eliminate the Arabs’ desire to engage in future rounds.6
This approach reached its height in Peres’ assessment of the Sinai campaign of October 1956, in which Israel, together with Britain and France, initiated a preemptive military engagement against Egypt, which resulted in the rout of the largest of the Arab armies. Among the achievements of the Sinai campaign, Peres lists the strategic alliance developed as a result of the French decision to undertake joint operations between its forces and Israel’s—a major component of which was military aid to the Jewish state, proffered out of a belief that it advanced French interests, and therefore without diplomatic strings attached.7 The jewel in the crown was what Shlomo Aharonson dubbed the “royal gift”: The supply of essential technologies for the development of Israel’s nuclear program. During the year prior to the Sinai campaign, the nuclear project had received a shot in the arm with the return of its great supporter, Ben-Gurion as prime minister and defense minister after a fifteen-month absence.8 Peres, who played a pivotal role in the French nuclear connection, hinted publicly as early as April 1957, just after the withdrawal from Sinai, at the importance of the developing relationship with Paris: “The French weaponry helped us win the day on the battlefield. That, however, was just the beginning. After the Czech deal [with the Arabs] we ran all over the world pursuing quality materiel…The French were the only ones who decided to be friends in time of trouble…Friends that gave us what we needed, that which we thought was needed.”9


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