revolution. Several Prime Ministers asked to meet Hafez al-Assad. Only Sadat outsmarted the smart ones and turned the tables on them. He came to Jerusalem on his own initiative.
When the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted
Resolution 242, the Israeli government did not accept it. Only much later, when there was no way out, it accepted it "according to the Israeli interpretation." This concentrated on the article "the" that is missing in the English version (which demands withdrawal from "occupied territories" instead of from "the occupied territories"), contrary to the French version, in which the article duly appears. (The Soviets were caught napping, because there is no article in the Russian language.)
The preferred method is to kill the spirit of the offer slowly, to talk about it endlessly, to interpret it this way and that way, to drag negotiations on and on, to put forward conditions that the other side cannot accept, until the initiative yields in silence. That's what happened to the Conciliation Committee in Lausanne, that is what happened to most of the European and American peace plans.55
PHASE C: If phases A and B have not worked, the liquidation stage arrives. Nowadays it is called "targeted prevention" or, simply, "ascertained killing" by the army.
Against the original UN mediator, the Swedish Count Folke
Bernadotte, "targeted prevention" was applied literally: he was shot and killed. The killers were "dissidents," but Ben-Gurion did not shed any tears.
Usually, Israeli governments use two deadly torpedoes in their arsenal: the US Congress and the US media. William Rogers, President Nixon's secretary of state, for example, proposed a peace plan that included the withdrawal of Israel to the pre-1967 border, with "insubstantial changes." Israel released its torpedoes and sunk Rogers together with his plan. His job was taken over by the Jewish megalomaniac Henry Kissinger, and that was the end of peace plans.
Can the Saudi initiative be sunk in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it will not be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small frigate, not even a destroyer, but a mighty aircraft carrier. A great effort will be needed to torpedo it.
But Shimon Peres and his foreign office are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it for decades. Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor party, under the leadership of a small-time copy of Sharon, will join the chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having to end the occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government.
Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In Israel, real public discourse