The Gaza Disengagement Deal: An Addendum

I have written that the most important part of the April 14, 2004 exchange of letters between Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush was not the widely publicized portion about settlements and refugees, but the explicit promises made to Israel in other parts of the correspondence, including this one:

"The United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats."

I focused on “secure, defensible borders” — a term of art in Middle East diplomacy — and Israel’s ability to “defend itself, by itself” as a linked assurance that any negotiated peace would not depend on a reversible “agreement” (which might simply re-position the parties for the next war), but rather on borders that would make any such peace sustainable:

The concept of "secure, defensible borders" recognizes that Israeli security ultimately depends on borders Israel can defend on its own, even if the Palestinians do not honor their agreement, or there is a future dispute with a Palestinian state.

Such borders are also important because they do not depend on third-party guarantees by the UN or others – a mechanism that failed spectacularly in 1967.

Moreover, defensible borders are also an important American interest, because the last thing the U.S. wants is to place American troops in a dangerous situation to secure the "peace," or to obligate itself to defend Israeli borders not defensible by Israel itself.

Finally, borders that are not militarily defensible are themselves an invitation to the aggression supposedly foresworn in a "peace agreement."

Ed Lasky has called my attention to an interesting article in the February 9 issue of The Jerusalem Post, in which Herb Keinon notes that Israel’s “capability to deter and defend itself, by itself” also refers to something else:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a briefing with The Jerusalem Post in August, said that US President George W. Bush’s famous letter from April 2004 also included a line pledging US commitment to Israel’s deterrence capacity.

In that letter. . . there is also one line — largely overlooked — which Sharon was always fond of mentioning.

This line reads, "The United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats."

In [that] briefing, Sharon pointed out that international pressure pushed the Libyans into abandoning their nuclear ambitions, and would also ultimately move the Iranian issue to the UN. Once this happened, he said, certain "countries would be looking at us, and there could be pressure."

Which is why he pushed for the inclusion of that one line in the Bush letter — a line that on the face of it seems innocuous, but which he termed "very important."

Sharon interpreted this as a US promise to back Israel when there were attempts — which he believed there would be — to dismantle what he called "Israel’s deterrence ability."

This is an issue, like defensible borders, where U.S. and Israeli strategic interests are aligned.  An Iranian nuclear weapon would threaten not simply Israel, but also (and perhaps more so) the entire West.  A nuclear-armed — and thus militarily invulnerable — Iran could effectively control all Middle East oil-producers (including Iraq and Saudi Arabia) and determine how (and whether) the West’s energy needs would be accommodated. 

A nuclear-armed Iran might also dictate political or economic terms to Europe, separating the Continent from the U.S. and accelerating the creation of Eurabia.

Israel is a pawn in a much larger chess match, dependent on U.S. backing to retain its basic defensive capability.  Sharon’s sentence, virtually unnoticed at the time, has assumed even greater significance in the two years since it was negotiated.