Itamar Rabinovich: Peace, Normalization and Finality
Itamar Rabinovich is Distinguished Global Professor at New York University, Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an AI editorial board member and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States. This essay draws from The Lingering Conflict: Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, 1948–2011, just published by the Brookings Institution Press.
In the mid-1970s, an unusual book was published in Egypt under the title After the Guns Fall Silent (“Ba‘d an taskut al-madafi”). Written by the Egyptian left-wing intellectual and journalist Muhammad Sid-Ahmed, the book featured the first explicit Arab vision of accommodation with Israel and the first Arab effort to spell out what the Middle East might look like after the establishment of Arab-Israeli peace. Roundly criticized in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, this bold, pioneering work broke a taboo by endorsing a peaceful accommodation with Israel. That taboo held strong despite the signing in 1974 of the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreements, and two Arab summit conferences that redefined the Arab consensus to embrace the principle of a political settlement with Israel. But a full-fledged vision of Arab-Israeli peace written by a major Egyptian intellectual still angered those who remained ideologically and emotionally committed to the struggle against Israel.
Sid-Ahmed clearly had difficulties with his own proposals. Ambivalence and vacillation inhabited the very core of his book. He had not completely overcome the deep-rooted conviction in the Arab psyche that any conceivable settlement would be tantamount to surrender. Nevertheless, he grasped that the psychological leveling effect of the October 1973 Middle East War had midwifed a change in the Arab view of a political settlement. The Arab world had decided to settle, he argued, but Israel would not believe it until “a settlement with Israel and the future of peace in the region were embodied in a clearly defined vision.” That “clearly defined vision” is what Sid-Ahmed determined to set out in his book.
As Sid-Ahmed saw it, an enduring peace would require Israel to play a “functional role” in the Middle East, comparable to but different from that of Lebanon. “There is . . . more or less tacit acknowledgement that the existence of Israel within secure and recognized borders is unavoidable after the Arabs recover their occupied territories and after the establishment of some Palestinian entity.” Then, once a settlement is achieved along these lines, the chief psychological barrier to Israel’s integration into the region could be addressed: “The stumbling block has always been the Arabs’ fear of Israel’s technological superiority and her ability, if peace came to the region, to dominate the Arabs economically and to prevent them from becoming masters of their own fate.”...