America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

To hear Saddam Hussein tell it, he and the leaders of Israel are involved in similar altercations with the United Nations over real estate. In most respects, the comparison is as invalid as it is invidious. Most, but alas, not all.

Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began 23 years ago quite differently from Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in August. Jordan attacked Israel and forfeited the West Bank. A series of Labor-led governments held on to the territory for two defensible reasons: as a buffer against another Arab onslaught and for bargaining leverage in negotiations.

But once the Likud bloc came into dominance in the late '70s, an additional motive that had been lurking on the fringes of Israeli politics moved front and center: irredentism -- one state's claim, rooted in history, to the land of another. So Israel's policy today does indeed have something in common with Iraq's. Saddam says that since Kuwait and Iraq were part of the same province under the control of the Ottoman Turks, they should be rejoined now. For their part, many Likud leaders believe that since the West Bank was ruled by Israelites in biblical times, not one square inch should be traded away as part of an Arab-Israeli settlement. Yitzhak Shamir's talk of "Greater Israel" is as ominous for the prospects of there ever being real and lasting peace in the region as Saddam's militant nostalgia for Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian empire.

The original case of irredentism, the desire of Italian nationalists to seize lands governed by Austria -- Italia irredenta, or unredeemed Italy -- was a complicating factor in World War I. Nor does the trouble necessarily end when irredentists achieve their goals. Tibet, after centuries under the sway of China, declared complete independence in 1913, only to be invaded by Chinese troops in 1951. Largely as a result, India and China fought a border war in 1962.

Even when irredentism does not lead to open conflict between countries, it tends to cause misery and injustice within them. The occupying powers are so intent on righting old wrongs done to their ancestors that they commit new wrongs against the people now living in the disputed territory.

, Only in the Middle East would a nation's most notorious warrior become -- all too enthusiastically, it seems -- Minister of Housing. Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat zoning as the conduct of war by other means. He is busily creating "new facts," in the form of Jewish settlements, on the West Bank. Saddam too is in the new-facts business with his systematic obliteration of Kuwaiti nationhood.

To be sure, Saddam's methods are far more ruthless than Sharon's, but Israel's human and political dilemma is more acute than Iraq's. Because Israel is, in origin and essence, a Jewish state, most Arab residents are never going to feel that it is truly their country. That problem is vexing enough within Israel's pre-1967 borders, where the population is 82% Jewish. But on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.7 million Palestinians constitute an overwhelming majority that will feel forever oppressed, forever cheated, never reconciled, never redeemed.

The one-sidedness of the carnage on the Temple Mount two weeks ago -- 19 Arabs dead -- bespeaks a state of affairs that brutalizes all concerned. For now the Palestinians are the principal victims. But in the long run, the casualties of Likud irredentism will include David Ben-Gurion's ideal of Israel as "a light unto the nations," perhaps even the viability and credibility of Israel's democracy, and certainly its support from the rest of the world.