WILLIAM MEHLMAN

The "two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict is old snake oil in a new bottle. As Shmuel Katz, then media advisor to newly minted prime minister Menachem Begin made clear in an illuminating exchange with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy guru, at a 1977 White House luncheon, it was no more palatable then than it is now.

"Why shouldn't you agree to a plan [for a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria] that will guarantee your security without the Arab problem?" Katz reported Brzezinski as remarking (The Hollow Peace, 1981, p. 124): "The Jordan River can serve as a security border and your army will be positioned there and the zone will be demilitarized."

Katz: "First of all, I do not believe the Arabs would concur in any arrangement of that kind. From their point of view, it is 'without honor...' If they do agree, it would be with the intention of reversing the situation within a year or two. And, of course, arms would be brought into the region from the very first moment...."

Brzezinski: "But you would always be able to go back in."

Katz: "And you would be the first to demand our withdrawal from the 'Arab sovereign territory.' You would give us 24 hours to get out. You or whoever replaces you... And the whole world would side with you..."

It is this remarkable clarity of vision that will be most sorely missed with the passing of Shmuel Katz. While he proved overly optimistic in believing the arming of Israel's implacable enemies would at least have to wait upon their acquisition of statehood, who in 1977 could have foreseen an Israeli political leadership standing in silent witness to and in some cases outright complicity with this process?

In respect to that leadership, Katz minced no words. He regarded Ehud Olment as "totally unprincipled" and challenged the prime minister, President Bush and their respective foreign ministers to "provide a smidgen of evidence to suggest that a Palestinian state will not be a terror state." Evidential truth was the hallmark of all his writings. Nothing before or since his classic Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine has come near matching the effectiveness of his assault on "the fog of fantasy and dissimulation" surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict—not least the hoax of forced Arab displacement in 1948 at the hands of the fledgling Jewish state. It is with no small sense of pride that AFSI's representatives in Israel have seen to it that every new media correspondent arriving in the country is furnished with a copy of this landmark work. While its influence may be only rarely detectable in their reporting, it is difficult to imagine any new journalist trying to make sense of events in Israel without Battleground as context.

Unlike some historians, Shmuel Katz never cushioned the truth, even when the truth hurt. For all his devotion to his leader and mentor Ze'ev Jabotinsky, there is not a hagiographic note intruding on the 1,800 pages of Lone Wolf, his definitive two-volume account of the life and times of Zionism's towering visionary. He resisted what must surely have been the temptation to marginalize the ramifications of Jabotinsky's inexplicable rejection of the presidency of the World Zionist Organization when it was literally handed to him by Chaim Weizmann, following the latter's defeat in a no-confidence vote by delegates to the 17th Zionist Congress in 1931. Katz spared himself an editorial verdict on Jabo's fateful decision, but his wonderment at the course Zionism and the history of Israel might have taken had Jabotinsky grasped the challenge can hardly be doubted.

Shmuel Katz never lost the philosophical twinkle in his eye or his fascination with the bizarre turns history can take, even in the final months of his growing physical infirmity. Among the most amazing of these reminiscences was his account of a confrontation with Henry Kissinger sometime after the Yom Kippur War. Katz had only a nodding acquaintanceship with Richard Nixon's and Gerald Ford's secretary of state, but Kissinger was apparently well aware of Katz's underground activities in behalf of the pre-Israel Irgun Zvai Leumi. He must also have been sensitive to allegations that he had deliberately delayed American resupply of munitions and military spare parts to Israel during the first critical week of the war. When a rumor -- totally unfounded -- began circulating that Shmuel had put out a contract on his life, Kissinger reportedly went into a frenzy.

Shmuel, informed of what had transpired and anxious to put the rumor to rest, arranged a face-to-face meeting with Kissinger at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. "From the moment I entered his suite until I left three minutes later," Katz related to a small circle of friends in Tel Aviv, "he did not stop shouting at me. He never gave me a chance to refute the rumor. In fact I never got a chance to say a word. Finally, I just turned around and walked out."
Whatever debt Henry Kissinger may or may not have felt he owed his conscience, he must surely have learned by now that it wasn't Shmuel Katz who had come to collect.

William Mehlman represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the Internet magazine Zionnet.net.



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