Peril in Sinai
On June 19, 1967, Abba Eban, then foreign minister, gave the UN General Assembly a masterly review of the events and situations that had led to the Six Day War. He recalled the arrangements made in 1957 after the Sinai Campaign and the assurances then given to Israel in the General Assembly by the US, France, Britain and Canada, as well as other states.
"These assurances," he said, "expressed with special solemnity by the four governments which I have mentioned, induced Israel to give up positions which she then held at Gaza and at the entrance to the Straits of Tiran and in Sinai." The first of these assurances related to the stationing of a UN Emergency Force "to separate the armies" in Sinai and Gaza, and the exercise of free and innocent passage in the Gulf of Akaba and the Straits of Tiran.
"As we look back," said Eban, "it becomes plain that the Arab governments regarded the 1957 arrangements merely as a breathing space, enabling them to gather strength for a new assault."
That assault on Israel within the 1949 Armistice fines came in 1967. On May 14, Egyptian forces began to move into Sinai. On May 21 President Nasser announced he was blockading the Gulf of Akaba to Israeli ships. Meanwhile, on May 18, he had ordered the removal of the UN Emergency Force. The UN secretary general, ignoring all the procedures and safeguards laid down for that force, and indeed the very reason for its existence, acceded instantly to this order.
"It is often said," Eban declared, "that UN procedures are painfully slow. This decision was disastrously swift. Its effect was to make Sinai safe for belligerency from north to south ... and to leave an international maritime interest exposed to almost certain threat ... "Israel's attitude to the peace keeping functions of the UN has been traumatically affected by its experience. What is the use of a fire brigade which vanishes from the scene as soon as the first smoke and flames appear? Is it surprising that we are firmly resolved never again to allow a vital Israel interest and our very security to rest on such a fragile foundation?"
Eban spoke then for all Israel, and his undertaking was unequivocal: that no government in Israel would ever allow itself to forget what happened in 1967, nor ever again rest any part of the security of the state or the lives of its people on the assurances and guarantees of other peoples. That agonized declaration, that bold assurance of future steadfastness in the face of foreign promises, has been swept away like chaff in the wind. In the Israeli Government's headlong rush towards the disaster of the surrender of Sinai, it embraced anew the transparent illusion that an international force would be an effective barrier to renewed Arab aggression. Indeed, Israel's security in the south is planned to be based on foundations even more fragile than those of 1957.
Even an international force that would fulfill its function conscientiously will be of little value for keeping the peace when Egypt decides (together with other Arab states) to launch war on Israel. Former chief of staff Haim Bar Lev in criticizing the surrender of Sinai on security grounds pointed out that "all security arrangements, from demilitarization to the presence of UN forces, have one single value: a so many hours' warning. Even if all of Sinai is demilitarized, and there are large numbers of UN forces and an infinite number of American early warning stations, the military value is of half a day, at most a day of warning." (Knesset Minutes September 27, 1978).
The precise detailed sequence of future events is hidden from us; yet their thrust is sharply delineated in the present facts. When President Sadat signed the peace treaty and agreed to the stationing of a multi national force in Sinai he also launched Egypt on an arms purchasing spree, substantially strengthening her tank and air forces, and ordered the digging of a tunnel under the Suez Canal.
There can have been no doubt in his mind that, faced by Egyptian determination to go to war, such a multi national force would be no obstacle. Which government British or Italian, French or Dutch would risk the storm of public protest and obloquy at the hazards to which its sons would be exposed in protecting the State of Israel against attack? If the Egyptian Government orders them out, they will leave with alacrity.
In addition to the illusion such a force will create, however, it will become a positive danger in the foreseeable circumstances in which Egypt would launch war.
The essence of those circumstances is public knowledge. If Israel does not succumb to Egyptian, all Arab, American and European pressures (perhaps including sanctions) to give up control of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the arms build up now in progress throughout the Arab states will be brought to its prescribed consummation: the threshold of war recalling to mind the prelude to the 1967 war.
What happened in 1967? Then Israel, still believing in the validity of international assurances, turned to the Security Council for action against Egypt's flagrant violation of the 1957 undertakings and of the UN Charter. Then, all that happened was, in Eban's words, a "desultory debate which sometimes reached a point of levity."
As in 1948 and again subsequently in 1973 the UN did not lift a finger while all the world waited in agony or hope for the Arabs to destroy Israel. Now, in 1982, the European governments to be represented in the multinational force are not even formally neutral. They are all on the side of the Arabs accepting the guidance of Saudi Arabia. They are all parties to the arrogant Venice Declaration which calls, inter alla, for Israeli surrender of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. They will consequently see a just cause in a renewed Arab effort to force Israel out of those areas.
That they will not countenance action by their soldiers to obstruct the Egyptians may be taken for granted. Who is prepared to guarantee that they will not use their forces to impede the Israelis?
This is not a merely logical prognostication. The governments involved have themselves made it plain that their bias their identification with the Arab purpose inspires their participation in the multi national force. That is the only rational explanation for their persistence in introducing the otherwise irrelevant Venice Declaration in succeeding texts of their letters of acceptance of a share in the multi national force. They want it to be clear that their soldiers' role in Sinai will be a function of the Venice Declaration.
They adopted that Declaration in the best tradition of international cynicism and double talk as a "policy for peace" whose consummation would spell peace without Israel. Helping Egypt not too obtrusively, for example by withholding "early warning" information from Israel, in a war for achieving the objective of the Venice Declaration the return of Israel to the 1949 Armistice lines would thus be a safe contribution to the Europeans' own "peace plan." What could be more logical than to use their own forces, already on the spot, to this end? What, indeed, is more likely?
Seven years before their Venice Declaration, the European nations extended a helping hand to Egypt in its Yom Kippur aggression by refusing US planes, carrying supplies to a most hard pressed Israel, permission to land and refuel on their soil.
Agreement to any international force to keep the peace in Sinai thus compounding the reckless surrender of Israel's security belt is a breach of the solemn pronouncement by Abba Eban, backed by the whole people, that Israel would never again allow itself to be led into the same trap. To allow into Sinai troops whose governments not only identify with the objectives for which the Arabs will be launching war against Israel, but openly announce that it is in the spirit of those objectives that their troops will in fact be sent to Sinai, is an act of unparallelled irresponsibility.
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