Ronnie D., our Israeli military guide, first mentioned the ‘schnitzel principle’, while we were driving in an army car around what could be called the tourist spots of Southern Lebanon—the panoramic view of Beaufort where the PLO are entrenched, the much-shelled cowshed known as Radio Free Lebanon run by Americans addicted to God, Love and country-and-western music, and, of course, the Good Fence.
He dropped the term casually but meaningfully into the conversation, but wc journalists, all three of us, were too ashamed of our ignorance to ask what it meant. There were also other things on our mind. It was March, officially spring but abnormally hot. In theory, some might say, we were invading a foreign country. In either theory or practice, wc could be shot.
There was little real danger. In March, this wild stretch of rock and rift was controlled by Major Haddad, the Lebanese commanding officer of the mainly Christian militia, who, having been appointed to his post by a former Beirut government, chose to go there via Israel, to avoid the troubles inland. With the help of the Israeli government and his family connections, Haddad established a buffer zone between Israel and the various bands of Syrian and PLO forces, who would otherwise hover on the border for a quick raid or a fresh invasion.
In theory again, the United Nations should have been doing the buffering, but at the mention of the UNIFIL forces, a look of benign wisdom flickered across the Major's brusque, soldierly countenance. ‘We have no quarrel with UNIFIL,’ Haddad explained to TV cameras, having blown up three Nigerians the day before, ‘They are the ones who are quarrelling with us.’
Major-General William Callaghan, the region's UN commander, is a no-nonsense Irishman. His policy was simple—to keep the sides apart with an ‘iron fist’ by any means at his disposal short of actual fighting.
Haddad was sceptical of Callaghan's ability to do so. Intelligence sources have warned that Syrian troops were creeping up behind the UN shield, and, risking an international incident, Haddad was quite prepared to bombard the shield to singe the arm behind it.
This is bandit country. This is the wild west in the Middle East, where wolves have been seen in the foothills of Mount Hermon and vultures circle lazily over the dying calf. A native like Haddad can look around at the small villages perched on the hilltops, and know exactly to whom each belongs, what the religions are, and the shades of religion, and thc loyalties and feuds which stretch back generations before the United Nations was conceived or misconceived.
It is all very well for the UN to police an area like the Sinai desert, where you can't hide a flea on a camel, but here a small army can hole up in the valleys, led by friendsfrom the villages, and an outsider like Callaghan will be none the wiser.
To support Haddad's argument, Ronnie waved as arm iii the direction of Beaufort, a crusader castle cut out of the mountain rock, which has so far resisted everything that twentieth-century ammunition manufacturers have thrown against it. There are caves and tunnels behind Beaufort, stacking arms from God knows where, although the Israelis could give Him a clue.
Ronnie was an excellent guide. He looked like a smoother Castro, and with a similar reticence. In his civilian life, for he was on his month's annual military service, he was an editor of an economics magazine, which gave him what could be termed a global outlook. He didn't support Haddad too openly, to leave the impression that the Lebanese major was just an Israeli stooge. Nor was he prepared to hand out the schmaltz of official propaganda, which was why we had to prise from him the story of the Good Fence. He wanted to talk about smuggling.
Haddad may have been the best commander that Israel had got in Southern Lebanon, but he couldn't do everything. Taxation remained a problem, which was why the area had become virtually a tax-free zone. On both sides of the border, there were those engaged in the smuggling trade, thus adding to the security risks, for it is not always easy to distinguish between the casual transporter of cheap radios and the determined terrorist. Both look equally guilty.
As for the Good Fence—well, what did we want to know about it7 It was there, you could see it, a batch of army huts on the border where the Lebanese get the benefit of the Israeli health service.
How did it start? In 1973, this whole place was a battlefield. Kiryat Shmona was being blasted. The Syrians were swarming on the Golan Heights. One night, the Israelis heard a girl crying for help in no-man’s-land. She was badly wounded. They decided to rescue her, and take her back to hospital. Next morning there were dozens of Lebanese, all injured, all waiting to be rescued—and that's how the Good Fence began.
Propaganda? ‘Well,’ said Ronnie, ‘If that's what you mean by propaganda, I'm all for it.’ The Good Fence is nonetheless very elective propaganda, proof positive of Israel's humanitarian intentions; and on Israel's side of the border, coach loads of American tourists arrived at half-hour interval, with their cameras and Bermuda shorts, to gaze at these nondescript shacks in the middle of nowhere. There was even a small bazaar, just for them, where the Druse sell sticky cakes and plastic chess sets.
‘There are some vultures then,’ I murmured, ‘even above the Good Fence.’ ‘Of course,’ said Ronnie, ‘but’, he added as a bright green lizard stalked across our path, settled on a branch and turned brown with the effort, ‘there are more chameleons.’ I had no idea what he meant.
We drove back for lunch to the Hotel Arizim, in the border town of Metullah. Metullah used to be a holiday resort, but now ordinary tourists avoid the place, if only because transport is so difficult. It still seems prosperous though, and the Arizim was used as a kind of meeting place for journalists, military personnel and UNIFIL officers. Haddad sometimes dropped in for tea in the afternoon.
There were also some sight-seers, elaborately casual, lounging around on the off-chance that something might happen; and others, whose motives were less clearly defined, Ronnie's chameleons perhaps, who might have information to sell, or services.
Metullah is one of those places where building-site labourers unexpectedly have been to the Sorbonne. When somebody asks you the time, you look not at your watch but your wallet. The waitress who brought me a cold Coke spoke perfect English and possessed two university degrees.
Over lunch, Ronnie pulled out the military maps of the region, with their shaded areas, indicating the estimated concentrations of Syrian and PLO troops. Then we pondered the national maps, showing the forces of the Arab world lined up against Israel.
Did I know that Saudi Arabia was spending 24 billion dollars a year on arms? I had been told so. ‘But where,’ I asked, ‘does the main threat come?’ The economist in Ronniecame to the surface. ‘From inflation, he replied.
Inflation has become an Israel speciality. Few countries have so much of it (more than 140% in 1980), cultivate it more carefully and, as with pot and alcohol, are quicker to condemn its pernicious e8ects. As a rule though, Israelis do not personally suffer from inflation, for all wages and investments are index-linked.
That is the problem. A seasonal price rise can set off a spiral of wage increases; but breaking this spiral is full of political complications. Begin's former finance minister, Yigael Hurvitz, tried to do so by negotiating wage agreements at a level below that of inflation. The result was a wave of strikes and the increasing unpopularity of the government.
Begin sacked Hurv‹tz and chose a quiet man in his Likud coalition, Aridor. Aridor tackled the same problem by a different route. He subsidised those goods which made an impact on the inflation index, so that price rises came at less frequent intervals and did not thus set off the demands so often. Although Aridor was accused by his opponents of simply trying to bribe the electorate with subsidies, the polls started to shift once more in Begin's favour.
In Ronnie's view, these manoeuvres were more a matter of getting to grips with the electorate than the economy. He mourned the fact that Jacob Levinson, the strong silent man of Israel's financial system, a banker and a formidable presence, had refused to join the list offered by Shimon Peres, the Labour coalition leader.
The real problem with inflation was external, rather than internal. Who would invest in Israel, other than dedicated Zionists, if its currency were so unstable? Israel might possess the most efficient army in the world and a small, but flourishing, arms industry; but how could it continue to afford to buy arms from abroad?
It is an article of faith in Israel (but not just of faith) that the Arabs have all the weapons, but none of the skills to use them. The sheer volume of arms pouring into the Middle East caused general alarm, heightened in March by the news that the United States were selling four AWACS (advance warning and command systems) to Saudi Arabia,having sold them sixty F-15s a few weeks before.
However mishandled, those new capabilities altered the military balance, but what particularly galled the Israelis was the thought that their economic difficulties, added to their sheer smallness, prevented them from matching the challenge. They simply couldn't go on competing in the arms race.
If the situation continued to develop along these lines, Israel would be left with two equally dangerous options—to attempt some kind of pre-emptive action against its enemy neighbours, to sort out its international boundaries once and for all, or to rely on non-conventional weapons.
No Israeli spokesman would admit that Israel possessed nuclear arms, for that would open the door for others to beg, borrow or even buy them too, but none would totally deny that possibility either. It was a war of nerves.
But if Israel could keep a grip on its economic problems, to stay in a race which it had no chance of winning, there was a chance, a faint chance, that time could come to its side.
Buffer zones, such as that in Southern Lebanon, could keep the combatants apart; while the diplomats could negotiate peace agreements, as with the Egyptian government and the Camp David agreement.
That is the theory, but whatever Ronnie's opinions on the matter may have been (for I did not ask him), I did not find much confidence about the Camp David agreement in Israel. The various members of the Knesset I met had different opinions about what Camp David actually meant.
In outline it seems simple, a peace treaty after a war, whereby Egypt received back most of its former lands in the Sinai (with oil wells), while the Israeli-conquered West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, were to be autonomous for five years pending a final decision as to its exact status. The trick word here is ‘autonomous’. The Begin government, sticking to the exact wording of the treaty, insists that autonomy has been granted to the Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, but not to the land itself.
The Arabs can choose to live under Jordanian law, but since the area itself is not autonomous, they can have no objection to Israelis setting up settlements in the same district and looking towards Israeli law.
The opponents of Begin insist that this is legalistic nonsense. You cannot grant autonomy to the inhabitants of a region without defining the boundaries of that region and, once you have defined those boundaries, automatically you are giving autonomy to the region as well as its inhabitants.
Shulamit Aloni, the lone Knesset member of the Civil Rights Movement, was forthright in her views. Camp David was a tragic misunderstanding, made worse by the behaviour of Begin, who was implementing his interpretation and creating ‘facts’ (Israeli settlements) on the West Bank.
Josef Romm, a member of the Likud coalition who nevertheless voted against Camp David, was more moderate in his opinion. Camp David was an agreement to try out a limited autonomy in the West Bank region, which was likely to fail through its internal contradictions. Meir Amit, an MK from the other side of the fence, argued that it was an agreement to disagree without which no peace treaty could have been struck.
Amit feared that the concessions made by Israel were balanced by no kind of reciprocal promises, thus giving Begin an unofficial licence to seize whatever advantage he could find.
There was much speculation about the secret motives behind Camp David, in which the consensus view seemed to be that Begin had agreed to hand over the Sinai to Sadat, in exchange for Israeli control over the West Bank. Since such a deal would have aroused the hostility of the Arab world towards Egypt, which is already hostile enough, autonomy had to be invented as a disguise for the facts.
From such an unspoken premise, the Labour opposition parties had devised its ‘Jordanian option’, whereby, just as the Sinai Desert had bought peace with Egypt, the WestBank could be offered to Jordan as part of a Camp David-style treaty. There are some flaws in this argument, among them the fact that, as the result of Camp David, the West Bank is not Israel's to hand over. If autonomy means anything at all, it means that, in this matter, the Arabs have the right to choose. And the Arabs I spoke to in the region, admittedly an infinitely small sample, were almost as hostile to Amman as they were to the Israeli government.
Their loyalties lay with the PLO and an independent Palestine. But the chief problem could be appreciated from the very maps which Ronnie laid before me at the Hotel Arizim.
Israel is a very small country. The West Bank area is no larger than Norfolk, but it contains strategic height› to control the coastal plains, the Yizreel Valley and other regions which, by international agreement, are definitely Israel. In Britain, we are sometimes led to believe that the West Bank is as remote to Tel Aviv as Northern Ireland is to London. In fact, it is like having Ulster at Rickmansworth.
Even if, therefore, Jordan were prepared to take on the responsibility of the dissident Arabs on the West Bank, any Israeli government would be unwilling to give up even part of its existing control without receiving the strongest guarantees from the other side. There could be no ‘agreement to disagree’ as there was with Camp David.
For either Israel or Jordan to accept such guarantees, for them to be implemented, they would have to be supported by international pressure. A world opinion expressed much more forcibly than through Callaghan's UNIFIL troops would have to maintain them. Here Israel feels particularly vulnerable, for it senses that world opinion has slipped from its side. The Boy David is now presented as a Goliath.
Colette Avital, the press officer of the Foreign Ministry, was bitter about all the anti-Israel nuances which seemed to creep into apparently non-aligned reporting of Israeli affairs. But the real danger came not from bitchery, or even from the outright alignment of countries like France with the Arabs; but from the steady growth of a Western political opinion which regards Israel as a disposal luxury.
Here in Israel's eyes, the traitors are often the well-intentioned liberals. Let us suppose that a Western leader, seeking détente with Russia, were to propose an arms-free zone in the Middle East—or, at least, an embargo on further arms supply. It might be tempting poEtically but very hard to implement fairly; and its likely consequence would be that Israel would be left without support from the West while its enemies would be supplied and trained from the East. Another scenario could involve a partial implementation of the Brandt report, which envisages a recycling of oil dollars from the Arab countries.
This re-cycling could visit some familiar places before arriving, if it ever did, at its destination, the under-developed Third World. Slowly, inexorably, the world's banks are fastening their attention on the vaults of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
It might be distracting for them to avert their gaze, even for a moment, to the little local difficulty of their former ties with Israel. And if foreign financial support were withdrawn from Israel, and the Israelis continued to suffer from the Arab trade embargo,how could Israel survive?
Beneath the surface anxieties, if you can call inflation and Camp David as such, that floated around during the election campaign, there lay a residual fear that the tide of world events was sweeping past Israel, and could even sweep it away, that allies were no longer as staunch as they had been, and that Israel had less to offcr in exchange for help, nothing perhaps other than the thought that it is the sole Western-style democracy in the Middle East, with Western standards of social care and, for the most part, with enlightened Western views on human rights, even though they may not always be applied to dissident Arabs.
Israelis, no strangers to a justified paranoia, arc sensitive to the approach of another Kafkaesque trial, where the judges and jury are remote, arbitrary and unwilling to give reasons for what they do, although the sentence is a foregone conclusion.
It is against that background that Begin's bellicose remarks in the Knesset and elsewhere during May have to be measured, the wholesale swipe against Helmut Schmidt and the German people for belonging to a race which massacred Jews, the cavalier dismissal of Saudi Arabia as another potential Iran, the emotional appeal to Jews to remember their past—and the desperate, foolhardy raid on the nuclear reactor near Baghdad.
It was not just a calculated gamble during the election campaign, a last-ditch appeal to patriotism; or an untimely response to the events in Lebanon; but the attempt to express something which is nearly inexpressible, and certainly untranslatable, a Jcwinh foreboding of another final solution.
It is hard for me to believe that the events in Southern Lebanon are as serious as they now seem. My memories of that hot, lazy afternoon in the Hotel Arizim are too strong. Ronnie made no mention of the SAM missiles which the Syrians must have been sidling into Lebanon and which, by May, were to launch the American special envoy, Habbib, into frantic rounds of shuttle diplomacy; which were to threaten the bi-partisan approach to defence enjoyed by Israel since its foundation; which were to demand the watchful presence of two Soviet ships and their American counterparts o8 the Lebanese coast; and which were, as it happened, to overshadow all other issues in the June election.
In March indeed, it seemed highly unlikely that the Lebanon would emerge as an election issue at all. During the afternoon admittedly, a UNIFIL truck drove up in a hurry, to disgorge Major-General Callaghan, who strode into the dark back rooms of the Arizim, to emerge a few minutes later, baton under his arm, full of an iron resolve.
Otherwise the problems seemed very local, even a little ridiculous. One freedom-fighter, or terrorist, what you will, had tried to cross the border on a power-operated hang-glider, with a better chance of breaking a leg than blowing up an army dump.
It is easy enough to provoke a minor crisis in Lebanon. The place is full of minor crises. The Israelis could do so, simply by maintaining too high a profile; the Syrians could do so, by shifting their missiles too close to the border and shooting down, as they have done, some Israeli planes; even the UNIFIL forces could do so, by whittling away through diplomatic pressure at he protection afforded by Haddad's enclaves, thus letting the PLO through.
But a major crisis must involve the threat of invasion from one side or the other; and in this curiously anarchic region, so watchfully patrolled, so inherently disordered, it is hard to imagine how the forces could gather enough of an army to mount an invasion without cries of protest being heard from one side of the world to the other.
The situation is not the same as in 1967, when the Syrians controlled the Golan Heights, and the Israelis could look across their border to the hill-slopes, fifty yards away, and see the troops massing.
Nor was there a trace of that feeling, which you can sense elsewhere in the Middle East, that the Divine Head Waiter, having shaken the champagne bottle, was slowly placing his thumbs on the cork. There was not that kind of simmering menace; and I remember asking Ronnie, quite casually, whether he had ever felt afraid
'Why should I feel afraid?’ he replied, 'I know Israel. The harder you knock it, the more it expands.’
Is that,’ I asked, 'what you meant by the schnitzel principle?’
July 1981