HOWARD EPSTEIN – WARS TO END ALL WARS
After the “War to End All Wars”, that itself ended at 11:00 hours on 11/11/1918, the next world war erupted just 21 years later. It may be that the war to end all Israeli-Arab wars was the one that occurred fifty years ago this week (according to the Gregorian calendar). The Yom Kippur War of 1973 has barely been mentioned – acknowledged, yes, but hardly recognised for the tumultuous and almost existential trauma that it represented for Israel. It was fully fifty years ago.
If the significance to Britain and France of WWI was the destruction of the flower of the youth of those countries, such that the only foreign policy acceptable to their peoples, when faced with the Nazi threat, was appeasement, the Yom Kippur War was no less traumatic for an Israel barely 25 years old. Being deprived of some three thousand young men out of an overall population of 3.3 million was as great a loss as those of the Anglo-French allies in WWI.
A desire for peace – but never appeasement – has always been Israeli policy. It was, accordingly, uplifting for the still-young nation to receive the Egyptian Premier, Anwar Sadat, at the Knesset in November 1977. Peace with Egypt and Jordan followed, and providence supplied what Shimon Peres later called a “one-time gift from G-d”, the arrival of some 750,000 starving but well-educated Russian immigrants in the 1990s.
Thus fortified – the Russians represent some 10% of the 10 million Israelis today – Israel was able to grow its then-embryonic hi-tech industries to create its present-day global powerhouse. The Russian brain drain had the same sort of effect on the Jewish state as the one created by Hitler on American science, technology and innovation eighty years ago.
As one indicator of where all the foregoing has led, consider a report at the end of 5783 that, within the next five years, all Israeli defense systems against incoming kinetic attacks will be by laser technology. No one else comes close.
But I hear mutterings of dissent: Israel has been engaged in several wars since 1973. That’s true, but as compared with the Six Day War of 1967, and that of 1973, they have not involved an existential threat. There have been battles and skirmishes with the proxies of Iran, in which Israel has prevailed.
In the meantime, Iran has been negotiating a rocky but determined road to become the possessor of an atomic bomb. There will probably be a YouTube video on how to achieve it before long, and Israel had the bomb before it celebrated its 15th Independence Day. One wonders whether the Iranians really want the bomb or merely to use The Device, as politicians euphemistically refer to it, as a device for extracting more liquid dollar billions from a credulous American administration. (Biden the Insentient, properly so described if only for this reason, released last week some $6 billion to the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism.)
Global war has not recurred in the past almost 80 years because Nagasaki was one nuclear detonation too many. Politicians know a nuclear exchange is not survivable – omnicide is the guaranteed result – but threats of nuclear deployment have been issued on at least 25 occasions between 1948 (the Berlin Blockade) and 1996 (in regard to Libya’s underground chemical weapons facility). That’s according to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, providing some insight into the mental gymnastics that nuclear war planners have been faced with since Russia acquired the hydrogen bomb in 1953.
Ah. The threat of deployment. That’s what Iran really wants! Not Against Israel, of course. Iran knows about the constant patrols of nuclear missile-loaded Israeli submarines, that dictate a glassy outcome for Tehran within minutes after the losing of an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile towards Tel Aviv, especially once its multiple warheads can be frazzled by a laser beam.
It is Iran’s neighbours and competitors who would be the object of Iranian nuclear blackmail. That most compellingly explains why normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia is likely soon to follow those with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. For Israel to move from near annihilation in 1973 to possible friendship now with the Saudis is the stuff of miracles.
But, as Chaim Weizmann said, upon the founding of Israel that he most indispensably brought about, “Miracles do sometimes occur, but you have to work awfully hard to get them”.
One more anecdote: Shimon Peres, whom we remember with affection, was not always highly regarded by the Israeli public (to be generous). But once he turned 80, he enjoyed their widespread affection.
The great thing is survival. It is not persecution on which the Jews have a monopoly, but survival. Where today are the traces of the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the others with whom the ancient Hebrews rubbed shoulders? They are in the hands of historians and archaeologists. Only Israel has survived with its religion, its language and its traditions intact.
Survival, too, through almost eighty turbulent years, since Israeli independence was declared in May 1948, appears to be leading to an outcome similar to that of Shimon Peres. If you want to be successful in this world, first you have to survive.
Israel survived the Yom Kippur War. Now all it has to do is survive its present government.
© Howard Epstein, September 2023 – www.howard-epstein.com
