WASHINGTON — The Middle East is on the verge of a major war, according to a congressional report.
“The present vulnerability of Israel is so great that there is a unique opportunity to, at the very least, begin the process leading to the destruction of Israel,” reads a Dec. 10, 1996 study by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.
But Mideast experts — including champions and critics of the peace process — call the report “garbage” and “alarmist and unreliable.”
The report’s authors, Yossef Bodansky and Vaughn Forrest, who serve as task force staff members, had planned to keep their document, titled “Approaching the New Cycle of Arab-Israeli Fighting,” secret.
But members of Congress received the report, and it has been leaked to the media and posted on the Internet.
The report appeared just as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government signed the latest agreement with the Palestinian Authority on Hebron.
Just as most Israelis were letting down their guard, the report challenged assumptions about the Arab world held by champions of the peace process.
Instead of peace, the report argues, Arab states are pursuing war. Driving this is the growth of fundamentalism in the Islamic world, distrust of Israeli intentions and a belief that Israelis, embittered by internal dissent, have lost the will to fight.
Experts disagree.
“There has hardly been a frantic military buildup, certainly not in comparison to the past,” said Barry Rubin, senior resident scholar at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of Bar-Ilan University.
Rubin called the report “garbage.”
“The idea that there is some kind of Arab-Islamic conspiracy to attack Israel is totally unbased on any fact whatsoever.”
Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia think tank that publishes the journal Middle East Quarterly, agreed.
The report is merely “stitched-together quotes” of dubious provenance and authority, he said. While the Mideast is “a dangerous place,” for Israel this is “the best of possible times” because, he said, “for the first time Israel is not facing any existential threat.”
States that would make war against Israel are either too weak militarily or too preoccupied domestically to do so, or both, Pipes says.
According to the report, moves suggesting preparations for war began early in 1996.
“These activities range from highly irregular and highly significant military exercises to political and international agreements,” reads the report.
The authors maintain a belief that “political-strategic dynamics in the Middle East have already reached a deadlock that makes a dramatic breakout possible only through cataclysmic violence.”
But according to some analysts, the breakout came peacefully, when Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat signed the Hebron accord last month.
Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects at the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, said the report was written at a low point in Israeli-Arab relations, when Hebron negotiations seemed deadlocked.
Bodansky, credited with writing the bulk of the report, defended his conclusions.
“This is a very prudent and reasonable assessment given the overall regional dynamics over the last few months,” he wrote.
Among the events chronicled in the report:
*A spring 1996 summit between Syrian President Hafez Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to agree that Iranian troops could cross Iraq to join a Syrian offensive against Israel.
*A May 1996 Iranian military exercise simulating a deep offensive in an area identical to the distance between Iran and Israel.
*A mid-June 1996 agreement between Iran and Syria to codify military cooperation against Israel. In mid-August, Iraq signed on as well.
The report states that Iran has functional nuclear weapons obtained from former Soviet Central Asia.
According to the report, Syria briefed Arab allies in late November, stating: “The Syrian leadership now believes the military option to liberate the Golan Heights from the Israeli army is a legitimate option. It also believes Syria has the right to resort to this option at any time.”
According to Rubin, there has been concern over the possibility of war with Syria, “but intelligence assessments argue that this will not happen.”