If Menachem Begin had worn swim trunks, he would never have completely withdrawn from Sinai and kept Gaza. Actually everything was pretty clear when Begin -- with Ariel Sharon's help and approval -- basically unilaterally withdrew from Sinai, bulldozed Yamit, and kept Gaza. This was in response to "the mouse that roared" Jimmy Carter, who won a Nobel Peace with him and Sadat because of it, but would soon be thrown out of office by the Americans themselves -- Obama already has one, so probably the same thing won't happen in precisely the same way again with him.
So who said, "the Jews were so smart" or not stupid or, to put the proposition as an American might: "A fool and his money are soon parted". In any event, for Israel anyhow, it has been a slow, downhill slide politically-speaking -- and sometimes not so slow -- ever since. It was in response to this slide that I began characterizing this episode from the Eighties onwards, "If Begin wore swim trunks, he would have never withdrawn from Sinai (and kept Gaza)". Rather, he would have drawn a line halfway down the middle or, as the old adage would have it, "You keep half and we'll keep half" (can you picture Menachem Begin in swim trunks -- I can't?).
Nor would Golda Meir or Levi Eshkol -- swimsuits or no swimsuits -- have ever done this. They were far too practical, thoughtful, and careful to do anything as precipitous as this. Anyhow, it was their legacy to apportion as they saw fit, since it was they who had led the two crucial wars that formed the bookends, as it were, to this episode; and they never admired the D'Annunzio-style "grande geste" of a Moshe Dayan (also Begin's Foreign Minister at the time), Begin, or an Ariel Sharon.
Nor has there has been any real peace since. Not only did Israel lose all the resources of Sinai, but once Begin and the Israelis had withdrawn from Sinai, all attention was focused on the Palestinians in both Gaza, and the West Bank, a problem which had been purposefully left unresolved -- "the Trojan Horse" left behind, very cannily, by Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak -- and it was crystal clear that no one would settle for anything less than Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak settled for; and no one ever has or ever will! But the young Israelis celebrated their withdrawal -- or, as some would put it, 'their discomfiture' -- and released "peace doves," unmindful of the downhill slide, even towards illegitimacy, that had commenced and has not let up even to this day. How "au courrant," yet how humbling and humiliating. So what has been achieved since? Almost nothing; and now, some thirty-five years on, everything is on the table once again, as it has been really all along, even with sympathetic presidents. Nor is there any point to retreating to "the Green Lines" people like to speak about while "forgetting" -- ever so conveniently -- that there was never anything "official" about these. They was just where the 1948 fighting stopped, c. 1949. If one were going to go that far back, why not go further, to older "Partitions" or, better still, all the way back? One could go back to 1919 or, even perhaps before that and World War I, but 1919-1922 will do. What is so important about then? Well, first of all, there was the Versailles Peace Conference establishing Mandates and, in particular, the Mandate for Palestine with the "Balfour Declaration" subjoined. Then in 1922, there was the Palestine Order-in-Council promulgated by the British Authorities and fixing the Government. But "Palestine" at that time consisted of both sides of the Jordan River, an area in which there was enough space to solve the national problems of the two Peoples, "the Arabs" and "the Jews," as they were then referred to ("Jews" at that time even calling themselves "Palestinians boys"). But no one ever imagined or said that "the Mandate for Palestine" was supposed to end up setting up three states -- two Arab and one Jewish, or maybe even four.
Any realistic person would have, either at that time or this, realized that there was not room for three or four Independent States in the cramped territory between the desert and the sea -- there was hardly room for two. The whole point of the now-seemingly futile exercise was the supposed setting up a "Homeland for the Jews" -- "the Arabs," presumably, not needing another, already having so many -- a purpose which failed, since half of "the Jews" were wiped out in the ensuing twenty-twenty-five years; but in "the Mandate" and in the 1922 Order-in-Council, there were no borders set forth -- and certainly no "Green Lines". So who were the biggest war "profiteers" of the whole process -- why the "Jordanians" of course, never even mentioned or conceived of at its beginning! No one ever questions their existence or their right to exist as a State, which is why they always remain so silent, just in case anyone should. They "swallowed the canary" as it were. This was another bit of British map-drawing, just like the disastrous one creating modern "Iraq" -- a country which also never existed before, except in the imagination of extravagant British map-makers like Gertrude Bell and her Foreign Office sponsors.
But where "Jordan" was concerned, it was courtesy of Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence, et. al., who cut away two-thirds of the Palestine Mandate and gave it, for services rendered in the First World War, to the Hashemite Family of Mecca (later to be given "Iraq" too for a time), after they had been unceremoniously expelled by the House of Saud. This has always made a tenable solution to the Jewish-Palestinian problem impossible -- as, once again, one goes back to the question of land or space and any clear-eyed person would be able to see that there was not enough space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to accommodate the needs of two Peoples -- one of whom not "a People" at all but simply a political entity. Nor has any of this anything to do with so-called "Green Lines" so many so much enjoy talking about as already signaled.
So what then is the solution? The solution is to keep driving this point home until it begins to be understood; and no one has put it better than, of all people, former Cuban President Fidel Castro three weeks ago. This is about the greatest Rosh Ha-Shanah present the Jewish People could ever have received or, for that matter, imagined -- and from such a source? No left-wing terrorist State will ever be able to raise its voice with impunity and without addressing his words on this issue again and one can see, even in Ahmadinejad's recent speech to the U.N., he was at pains to parry some points while avoiding others. Even Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has already started talking about being concerned about "Anti-Semitism"!
But certainly Castro knew what he was doing and chose his words very carefully. He, of all people, realized the problem had to do with "Christianity", putting it in terms of what he had heard as a six-year old boy: "The Jews", whom he had never heard of before except as -- in his own words -- "jewbirds," "had killed God" -- a proposition inherited to some extent in the Koran and, therefore, by Islam in the constantly-reiterated assertion, "the Jews killed all the Prophets" and originally given voice by Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2:15.
In fact, when I ask my students or any Muslim, for instance, who says such things to name one, because not a single recorded Old Testament "prophet" had ever been killed by "Jews" as it were -- not Moses, not Aaron, not Eli, not Deborah, not Samuel, not Nathan, not Elijah, not Elisha, not Amos, not Hosea, not Isaiah, not Jeremiah, not Ezekiel, etc. (if they have heard of any of these) -- the only ones they can ever come up with are John the Baptist and Jesus. But both of these, in so far as they existed, were patently killed by foreigners -- Herodian Puppet Kings or "Tetrarchs" or Romans -- not "Jews" per se, despite the deliberate libelous incitement involved.
No one has ever put it as succinctly or tellingly as Castro just managed to do and in so few words -- no friend previously of the Jews. He even put it in religious terms because, being as an intellectual, he recognized truth and historical accuracy, even specifically telling the Muslims, in particular, that no people, group, or religious community had ever suffered as much and that besides the suffering of the Jews over two thousand years the Muslims had suffered nothing - who publicly ever said such a thing? For him, "the Holocaust" incontestably occurred and, as such, was an incomparable historical event. In fact, the Muslims had really not suffered at all by comparison. This was the astonishing gist of what he said.
So back to my original point, which Castro put even more eloquently than I ever could. It is the Jewish People whose existence is and always has been threatened. It is they who need "a Homeland" -- not the 22 or so other "Arab" States whose right to exist no one questions. Nor does anyone seem to question just about any other country on Earth, including even such far-away places as Fiji, Ecuador, Oman, or Chad -- so why is it always the Jewish People's right to exist that is questioned? The answer goes back to the documents in the West, I have just been alluding to, particularly the New Testament and, following it the Koran, and the accusations contained in the "blood libels," I (along with Fidel) have described -- in "the East", these exist only so far as they have "bled in" from the West -- and which Castro admits were the only things he and most others had ever heard of regarding "Jews" when he was a boy.
I have alluded to these things in previous articles but, for the present, suffice it to say, "if Menachem Begin had worn swim trunks, there would have been no outright withdrawal firm Sinai" and therefore no "Palestinian problem" on "the front burner" -- which Mubarrak and Sadat had deftly left behind on the table unsolved when they went home having received everything they wanted. Nor would there have been any issue of withdrawal from Gaza, nor any armed Palestinian militias both there and on the West Bank. Nor would there have been any First Lebanon Campaign by Sharon, to show how tough he was after bulldozing Yamit -- the first Jewish "settlement" to be "pulled down" -- by all reports then simply a paradise. Nor would there have been a Second in Lebanon by his successors (while he lay comatose) to make up for the weakness of his subsequent unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. These things would have been present, as they always were, but "on the back burner" so-to-speak, waiting to be solved, "not on the front". "On the front burner'", there would have been the issue of how to fairly divide Sinai -- and this should have been, as already remarked, in half -- right down the middle, as any objective observer at the time would have realized since the Eastern border of "Egypt" had never really been actually delineated and fully recognized even in British times. Over the centuries, it had classically been in Arab texts something "west of El-Arish" and this was how it was seen in Muslim sources. But Anwar Sadat was a political genius. He realized that all he had to do was kiss Menachem Begin on the cheek and everything, he wanted, would be forthcoming -- and so it was.
So where are all these supposedly "clever Jews"? Everything stemmed from the decisions and commitments made at that time to a lame-duck United States President like Jimmy Carter. A fair division would have been to divide the oil, Israel keep for early-warning time and areas some of the sophisticated airfields it had just built, and certainly Nueiba, Sharm el-Sheikh, and Ophira -- the perfect scuba-diving, sunbathing, and "Club Med" locales, utterly devoid of any significant population at the time except tourists (and these, mostly Israelis). Instead, Egypt got these and the wonderful tourist and scuba-diving attractions and sun-bathing locales and Israel was left with the population nightmare, it and all the world now call "Gaza." No wonder there is a demographic time-bomb in the making. As P. T. Barnum put it, "There is a fool born every minute".