There Are Two Kinds of Peace by Binyamin Netanyahu 05/28/93 Now that the Middle East peace talks have resumed, we are entitled to ask: What kind of peace is achievable in this turbulent region? Fundamentally, there are two kinds of peace: peace among democracies and peace among dictatorships. In a community of democracies, as envisioned by Immanuel Kant, "The consent of the citizens is required to declare war." But "under a despotism," Kant wrote, "it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war...for the ruler has it in his power to order thousands of people to immolate themselves for a cause which does not truly concern them." Among democracies, concessions by one side are usually interpreted as signs of good faith by the other, encouraging compromise and agreement. To dictators, concessions send the opposite message - enticing them to further aggression. In the latter case, only a peace of deterrence is possible. The greatest tragedies in this century occurred when the democracies did not distinguish the one type of peace from the other, and the greatest boon to peace occurred when they did. Toward Nazi Germany they practiced appeasement, and got war. Toward the Soviet Union, the most powerful dictatorship in history, they practiced deterrence, and won half a century of global peace. Here in a nutshell is the problem of achieving peace in the Middle East: Except for Israel, there are no democracies in the region. Furthermore, the Arab countries show absolutely no sign of democratizing - bucking the nearly universal trend toward liberalization evident in the ex-Soviet republics, in Latin America and in certain parts of Asia and Africa. Since the prospects for genuine democratization of the Arab world are not imminent, a durable peace in the Middle East must be based on deterrence. The West, which is unwilling to agitate for democracy in Arab societies, should at least enhance the deterrent capacity of the Middle East's solitary democracy, Israel. Yet too often the West does the very opposite. It pressures Israel to make sweeping concessions (called "risks for peace"), while unremittingly seeking to appease its despot neighbors. The West's current darlings are Syria's Hafez Assad and the PLO's Yasser Arafat. These veteran masters of international terrorism have replaced the previous "moderate," Saddam Hussein, who was courted by the West with arms and economic aid until he devoured Kuwait. It is now being said that if Israel would surrender the Golan Heights to Assad and the "West Bank" to the PLO, it could purchase peace. This assumption is groundless. The 1979 peace treaty with Egypt included a built-in deterrent - the 192-km. strategic depth of the demilitarized Sinai desert; and deterrence on the eastern front (facing Iraq; Syria and Jordan) has been supplied by the strategic height of the Golan ridge and the mountains of the "West Bank". What has discouraged an eastern-front war in the past two decades has been Israel's control of this strategic terrain. It constitutes a protective wall that sheild our cities and airfields from ground attack. Far from being an obstacle to war. Ceding the defensive wall of the Golan would perch the Syrian army over our northern cities, while a fundamentalist Palestinian state on the heights of the "West Bank" would mean a new Iraq or Iran a mere 16 km. from Tel Aviv and 3 km. from the government buildings in Jerusalem. Such a dismantling of the country's most vital defenses would at once reverse the slow but steady progress made in recent years toward stability and peace. The argument that such land defenses are unnecessary in an age of missiles is demonstrably wrong. As the Gulf war demonstrated, missiles alone cannot conquer territory and decide the Outcome of a war. Similarly, the claim that land barriers would become obsolete once Israel's enemies acquired nuclear weapons is based on false premises. Although an Arab nuclear threat might be neutralized by Israel's adoption of similar capabilities, such weapons in the hands of Iraq or iran would immensely bolster the confidence of the Arab states to challenge Israel on the conventional battlefield. This would require Israel to strengthen its ground defenses even more, much as NATO had to expand its conventional forces tremendously once the Soviet Union acquired a nuclear capability. If anything, Israel's land barriers become more, not less, important In a nuclear age. An Arab-Israeli peace must therefore enable Israel to maintain its crucial geographical defenses, while addressing the question of the Palestinian Arabs living on the high ground of the "West Bank.'' A proper resolution would allow these Palestiruans to live with minimal interferencc, while still guaranteeing Israel's security against threats from the east. This would be a far cry from the endlessly promoted "solution" that Israel abandon control of the Golan and the "West Bank." That some Israelis endorse such a scheme does not make it right, any more than British politicians' backing of the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s made that right. To those who espouse a policy of wholesale withdrawal, I suggest that they at least wait for the appearance of a Syrian Lech Walesa or a Palestinian Andrei Sakharov. In the meantime, they should look again at the differences between the peace of democracies and the peace of deterrence, and consider which is applicable to the Middle East.