Six Days, and Forty Years

[thedrifter]

Six Days, and Forty Years
By Adam Garfinkle
Published 6/5/2007 12:09:24 AM

On Saturday, June 3, 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol concluded a meeting of his inner cabinet with these words: "Nothing will be settled by a military victory. The Arabs will still be here."

Eshkol, who had for weeks resisted the eagerness of his generals and much of his public for war in hopes that diplomacy might yet avail, had finally given in to what he came to see as inevitable. But despite his confidence that Israel would win the war, and with lower costs if it struck first, he felt none of the enthusiasm or sense of gamesmanship known to abide in the hearts of some leaders at such heady times. Like his predecessor David Ben-Gurion, who also counseled patience and restraint in the face of the May-June 1967 crisis, Eshkol sensed too keenly the ironies of history -- Jewish history, in particular -- to allow a hope that the impending war would deliver peace and security for Israel. It would bring, he knew, mixed and unanticipated consequences, but like all successful military operations, it would probably prevent even worse ones. "Probably" is all one can say in such circumstances, however, because war prevents still worse outcomes only in an ethereal, counterfactual world where none of us can ever go to find out for certain.

Eshkol, Ben-Gurion, and other Israeli leaders from its pioneer generation thought about war in the idiom of the European intellectual tradition from which they came. More than a few American leaders and many of their countrymen with them, on the other hand, have believed that a war could be "a war to end all wars," a war to end the scourge of aggression through collective security, or a war to transform an entire region of the world into a tidy assemblage of market-based liberal democracies. If war could be transformative and heroic, why not the Six-Day War whose drama and seeming clarity of plotline was more vivid than most? And so many Americans, particularly many American Jews, will not know quite what to make of Eshkol's remark, for the standard account of the war still etched into the consciousness of most doesn't admit of anticipatory irony.

That standard account goes something like this. The Arabs, led after 1952 by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, had been from the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 determined to spare no effort to destroy it. Arab aggression caused the Sinai War of 1956 and now, in the spring of 1967, the Arabs (with Soviet help) were preparing to take their revenge and push Israel and Israelis into the sea. The numbers of now united Arab soldiers and weapons massively outnumbered those of Israel. Massacre and extermination loomed. The great powers, including the United States, which had made all sorts of promises to Israel to secure its withdrawal from the Sinai in 1957, failed to honor its pledges, leaving Israel to fend for itself. Former staunch allies, like France, not only abandoned Israel to its fate, but effectively switched sides in the conflict. Even the most moderately inclined Arab leader, Jordan's King Hussein, lost his wits in the frenzy and made the worst decision of his reign -- to join the Arab war party. Alone with its back against the wall, Israel struck first in desperation and, miraculously, triumphed on all fronts against all odds. Israel's victory heralded a new era, as Israel would graciously return territories taken from the Arabs for peace from a now humbled and more realistic group of foes. That peace is only partial even 40 years later is a bitter surprise, and wholly the fault of the Arab side.

It's a nice story -- dramatic, noble, almost Biblical in its moral dimension. But none of it, strictly speaking, is true. (Of course, some Arabs have developed an alternative "standard account" of the war that's even less true, but that is, literally, another story.) The actual causes of the 1967 war are more complex; the real military situation, as understood by professionals at the time, was much different; and the calculations of American, French, and other statesmen were more subtle. In this small space it is impossible to detail what actually happened, though many competent historians have used archives, memoirs, and other materials to do so. But by unpacking the ten sentences of the "standard account," the main themes of the scholarly consensus can be sketched out. From that, perhaps, something may be learned.


The Arabs, led after 1952 by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, had been from the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 determined to spare no effort to destroy it.

It is true that if the Arab states could have managed to destroy the State of Israel after 1949 they would have. But they could not, and one key Arab actor did not really wish to do so: the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. During the 1948-49 war, Jordan aimed only to secure for itself the territories allotted to the Palestinians in the 1947 UN Partition Resolution (and Jerusalem), not to threaten Israel proper. Jordan's Hashemite rulers have always shared with Israeli leaders a fear of Palestinian nationalism, and reached certain limited understandings, some explicit and some tacit, on the basis of that shared interest both before and after Israel's War for Independence. Jordan's Hashemite conception of its own interests, and its central location, contributed much to the Arab failure in 1947-49 to coordinate policies or military activities, and contributed mightily to the Arab debacle in that war.

The 1952 overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy magnified Arab divisions, leading to much blood-thirsty rhetoric as each tried to outdo the other in being pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli. But this rhetoric was matched on the whole by little action. Jordan excepted, the Arab states oppressed Palestinian refugees in their midst and kept them weak as well as stateless. The Arab states did not do this as a favor to Israel, but a favor it objectively was.

More important, between 1949 and 1967 the Arab states mounted not a single serious military threat. Terrorism and infiltration of course existed, and there was the occasional skirmish. Israel's sense of existential siege did have a basis in reality as did its concern for the future, particularly after the Soviet Union began arming key Arab states in the 1950s. But "spared no effort to destroy"? Not accurate. Indeed, the Arabs' combined bombast and fecklessness helped the fledging State of Israel to socializing new immigrants, build a strong army, acquire the sympathy of the international community, and attract the financial support of world Jewry and wealthy Western states alike.


Arab aggression caused the Sinai War of 1956 and now, in the spring of 1967, the Arabs (with Soviet help) were preparing to take their revenge and push Israel and Israelis into the sea.

Arab terrorism and infiltration before October 1956 was problematic for Israel. Innocent people died. But the cause of the Suez War was more complex than that. Fear of massive new arms shipments from the USSR to Egypt played into Israeli domestic political divisions, and into a diplomatic vortex that made Britain, France, and Israel objective allies in opposition to Nasser's Egypt. Israel colluded with France and Britain in the attack against Egypt which, at the time, posed no significant conventional military threat to Israel. Israel started the Suez War, and that war, not its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, was its first "war of choice."

As for the spring 1967 crisis, it had its origins, once again, in inter-Arab competitions. To make a long, Levantine story short, a radicalizing change of government in Syria in February 1966 led to a virulent competition for prestige and regional leverage between Egypt and Syria, each using Palestinian proxy groups in their efforts. Each goaded the other to take greater risks in using Palestinian proxies to kill Israeli civilians, and their common Soviet patron, for reasons of its own, added fuel to the fire, telling Nasser on May 13 that Israel was preparing an attack on Syria. The result was that these two Arab states, ultimately dragging most of the others behind them, blustered themselves into a crisis with Israel without being remotely prepared for war. (Nasser himself confided to King Hussein at the end of May 1967 that he had not expected or wanted a war with Israel until another four of five years of preparation. And some of Egypt's best troops were far away, fighting a proxy war in Yemen at the time.)

Thus, when Nasser demanded on May 16 that UN Secretary General U Thant order the removal of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai, eliminating the buffer between Egyptian and Israeli armies, he believed Thant would decline to do so, as he was bidden by prior obligation. When he quickly agreed instead, Nasser was flummoxed, and then proceeded to make his biggest mistake: the May 22nd announcement of the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli and Israel-bound shipping. The opening of the Straits was the one benefit Israel still retained from the Suez War, and the unilateral announcement of its closing was technically an act of war.

Before the Soviets' message and U Thant's unexpected behavior, the evidence shows that Nasser did not want or expect war. Egypt's mobilization had removed the (non-existent) Israeli threat to Syria, he believed. Even after his closing of the Straits, Nasser hoped for a diplomatic triumph over Israel short of war, the better to face down his Syrian competitor and recoup his reputation as the leader of the Arabs. But he was most reluctant to start a fight without unambiguous Soviet backing to help him if he got in trouble, and that backing was never promised.

Nonetheless, as the war frenzy of the Arab street gained momentum throughout the rest of May, Nasser and other Arab leaders appeared at least to lose whatever grip they had on reality. Goaded on by optimistic Egyptian military leaders with a connection to reality even more tenuous than that of their political masters, Nasser came to believe, at least on one side of his head, that war was inevitable and that the Arabs would win. On the other side of his head, however, he thought as late as June 2 that the point of maximum danger was passed and that there would be no war for months, if at all.

Clearly, then, the "standard account" image of Nasser as a decisive, genocide-minded "Arab Hitler" who wanted war all along is simply untrue. For years the Egyptian army had spent vastly more time and resources planning for annual military parades than it did to fight a war. Nasser blundered his way into disaster. That's the way these things usually happen.


The numbers of now united Arab soldiers and weapons massively outnumbered those of Israel.

The Arabs were not united despite their many declarations, pacts, and treaties. As the crisis unfolded, Syria refused to cooperate militarily with Egypt, and barely even to communicate with it. Jordan joined the Egyptian war party at the last minute, far too late for serious planning. King Hussein did, however, turn control of his army over to an Egyptian commander, thus integrating the ineptness the Arabs were about to demonstrate. Most of the other Arab expeditionary forces promised for the war never showed up, and those that did proved more adept at obstructing military operations than augmenting them (as the case of Iraqi troops in Jordan, for example, showed).

Gross calculations of soldiers and weapons were therefore always irrelevant. Yes, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had between them more fighter aircraft and main battle tanks than did Israel, but they were poorly maintained and soldiered. Significant numbers of Arab planes were not air-worthy, and few of their pilots were properly trained. In Syria, significant numbers of experienced officers had been recently replaced by relatives of new high Ba'athi officials, few of whom knew a lick about military matters. Israeli equipment, particularly its state-of-the-art French-supplied air force, was far superior, and its soldiers vastly better than anything available to the Arabs.

Professional military analysts in Israel, the United States, and most West European countries knew all this, and so had concluded that Israel would defeat the Arabs should war break out. Many Israel officers were very worried about the logistical strains of a multi-front war, and most feared that their losses would be multiplied many times over if the Arabs were to strike first and thus make the war more protracted. But about the ultimate outcome they were not in much doubt.


Massacre and extermination loomed.

Although serious military analysts predicted more or less accurately what would happen in a war, most people are not serious military analysts. Moreover, for understandable reasons, government military analysts and their political keepers don't go blabbing what they know in public. It was not surprising, therefore, that lots of people, including most Jews in Israel as well in the United States, became frightened as the crisis deepened.

This, of course, has also to be seen against the psychological background of the Holocaust, which was at the time only 22 years past -- a little more, in others words, than half the time between the Six-Day War and the present. One fact illustrates the point: Not knowing for sure what might happen if war broke out (it was impossible to completely rule out a Soviet intervention, for example), the Israeli government ordered the digging of 10,000 graves.


The great powers, including the United States, which had made all sorts of promises to Israel to secure its withdrawal from the Sinai in 1957, failed to honor its pledges, leaving Israel to fend for itself.

Thanks to the Vietnam War, the United States lacked the resources as well as the will to get into a confrontation in the Middle East in the spring of 1967, particularly one that might involve a U.S.-Soviet confrontation. The most the Johnson Administration contemplated in a bid to keep the U.S. promises of 1957 was to organize an international maritime "regatta" to demonstrate the international right of passage through the Straits of Tiran, but this plan was painfully slow in getting organized.

While true as stated, this description of U.S. behavior is not true as understood because, as already pointed out, U.S. leaders believed that Israel would master the battlefield. And if it turned out otherwise, the United States could still intervene both to keep the Russians away and to save the day if it came to that.

The documents do not shed definitive light on whether President Johnson would have acted in extremis, simply because governments in crisis do not make such decisions, inscribing them in memoranda and such for historians later to find, until they have to. But the logic of the Cold War strongly suggests that the U.S. government would not have stood by idly as Israel was destroyed by Soviet client states, and especially not if that destruction were abetted by direct Soviet help.

Lyndon Johnson's personality suggests likewise. Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, a close friend of the President, revealed years later that during the 1967 crisis Johnson had told him of Texas boyhood memories in which his father had quoted to him God's words to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: "I will bless those who bless thee, and curse those who curse thee." We will never know how seriously Lyndon Johnson took such hearth wisdom, but stranger things have happened.

In any event, U.S. diplomacy was predicated on Israeli military superiority. American thinking in the days before the war went basically like this: We're strapped militarily because of Vietnam, and too close a U.S. association with Israel during a war will make it harder on our anti-Soviet Arab friends. It would also hand Moscow a globe-spanning propaganda coup. So let the "regatta" wither on the vine, give the Israelis a "green light" to usefully bash a Soviet client or two, and stay far enough away from their planning so that we can't be accused post hoc of collusion.


Former staunch allies, especially France, not only abandoned Israel to its fate, but effectively switched sides in the conflict.

As for the French, well, de Gaulle did what realists do: He saw a changed balance of interests for France in the Middle East, and he adjusted policy accordingly. With the end of the Algerian debacle and the looming age of OPEC oil, France wished not to associate itself with Israel politically, even as Israeli-French military cooperation helped shape the war's outcome.

De Gaulle knew, however, that France would be associated with Israel in a war; that's what recent history from Suez onward dictated. So he tried both to prevent a war and to change the optic of Franco-Israeli relations. To achieve the former he announced an arms embargo, confronting Israeli planners with a daunting prospect of running short of ammo in a protracted war. And to achieve the latter he refused to publicly affirm Israel's right to exist. It was a betrayal, yes, and selfish, too. But that's nothing unusual as statecraft goes.

Moreover, it was not, nor was it intended to be, a fatal betrayal. Here is what de Gaulle said privately to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Paris on May 24: "If Israel is attacked, we will not permit her to be destroyed; but if you attack, we will denounce your initiative. Despite the numerical inferiority of your population, I have no doubt that in the event of war you will gain military achievements, as you are much better organized, more united, and better armed than the Arabs." De Gaulle was in a position to know, after all; Israel's order of battle, especially in the air, was overwhelmingly made-in-France.

De Gaulle also added, speaking, he believed, as a friend of Israel: "Afterward, however, you will be stuck in one place, and in ever increasing difficulty." Israel, he said, will become a conqueror, having to engage in the repression and oppression universally required by occupation. And he repeated publicly a few months after the war something else he had predicted to Eban, that "it is obvious that the conflict has been suspended only temporarily, and that the only solution is through international action" requiring, among other things, the return of Arab territories that Israel in any event cannot digest without risking grave harm to itself.

Be irritated at the French all you like; I have been, often. But has de Gaulle been proven wrong on these points? Have Eshkol and Ben-Gurion, whose anticipations were not much different?


Even the most moderately inclined Arab leader, Jordan's King Hussein, lost his wits in the frenzy and made the worst decision of his reign -- to join the Arab war party.

The King did dream some dreams unprotected against the demands of waking reality. But not many, and his decision to join Nasser's war party was based on wide-awake calculations in the glaring light of pure trouble.

Arab war hysteria hit Jordan and its predominantly Palestinian population hard. There has been anti-regime demonstrations and riots in previous months, most financed and goaded on by Egyptian, Syria, Iraqi and PLO agents. And now there were Iraqi soldiers on Jordanian soil, too. Hussein had only two choices: He could resist Nasser and face revolutionary insurrection at home, with a likely prospect of losing his crown and his head; or he could join the war party and lose only the West Bank. His prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal, urged him to resist Nasser, promising that he would personally order the massacre of many thousands of Palestinian rebels if that's what it took. Hussein decided otherwise, reasoning that many thousands might not be enough, and that he would not be able to stay out of the war anyway if both Egypt to his south and Syria to his north were involved. He tipped his decision by withdrawing his best forces from the West Bank to protect his own palace in Amman.

The worst decision Hussein made as King came later, in the Arava in 1972. There, as he and Israeli leaders secretly tried to negotiate a peace treaty, Israel offered to return virtually all of the West Bank and give Jordan special rights in East Jerusalem. The King concluded, however, that he needed everything back for Jordan to survive the dagger-strewn alleys of inter-Arab relations, and so said no. Considering that two years later an Arab Summit in Rabat empowered the PLO as the sole legitimate spokesman for the Palestinians, and that three years after that the Israeli Labor alignment lost political power to Revisionist Zionists, this has to have been Hussein's biggest miscalculation ever.


Alone with its back against the wall, Israel struck first in desperation and, miraculously, triumphed on all fronts against all odds.

Israel was not really alone, as suggested, just cold-shouldered in Washington for reasons of diplomatic prudence. Its back was not really against the wall, although lots of Israelis (and many others) had perfectly good reason to feel it was. Israel struck first not in desperation, but to improve its position and reduce expected casualties, which were, in any event, not so light. And it triumphed as its general staff (and U.S. and West European analysts) had predicted, even if more spectacularly than anyone had dared hope.


Israel's victory heralded a new era, as Israel would graciously return territories taken from the Arabs for peace from a now humbled and more realistic group of foes.

Well, it did and it didn't. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War did make peace possible by persuading serious Arabs that Israel could not be defeated by force. More important, it made the Palestine issue, which had until 1967 been mainly a symbolic cudgel with which the Arab states beat each other in their various competitions, into a far more concrete kind of problem. "Palestine" was now entangled with the first-tier territorial and security interests of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and so it was only a matter of time before the vacuity of gesture and grievance rhetoric gave way to the currency of real diplomatic exchange.

The Hashemites had always been the most willing to make peace but also the least able, given Jordan's regional weakness and volatile Palestinian demography. Egypt had been able but not willing before the Six-Day War; before long it was both (though it had to start another war, in October 1973, to force the effort forward). To retrieve the Sinai, Egypt made peace with Israel in March 1979; Jordan followed in October 1994, after getting the Palestinian "cover" it needed, supplied by the Oslo Accords of September 1993. By historical standards, this was not a long time (though it didn't feel that way to those of us following its every up and down).

Of course the peace is not complete, and may never be. While moderation and realism gained ground in some respects, extremism and religious fanaticism have gained ground in others. The Six-Day War itself, by helping to discredit Arab nationalism in the eyes of the Arab peoples, contributed to that process. In a way, the periphery of the Arab-Israeli conflict has fallen to solution even as its core has hardened. It has become less dangerous on the whole, but more intractable. Some think the conflict is again getting broader and more dangerous through the advent of other means -- religion and Iran instead of nationalism and the Arab states. Maybe so. In any event, since June 1967 it has all been complicated, unpredictable, frustrating and generally difficult -- just as Eshkol predicted.


That peace is only partial even forty years later is a bitter surprise, and wholly the fault of the Arab side.

If Levi Eshkol and David Ben-Gurion were alive, it is the fact that peace has gotten as far as it has that would surprise them, not the fact that it remains incomplete. And the sources of its incompleteness are very, in fact, ecumenical.

Palestinian leadership, first under Ahmed Shuqairy and then Yasir Arafat, was as obtuse as any in modern history. Egypt and Jordan partially excepted, the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world have distinguished themselves only by their timidity and devotion to bad habits. The cravenness of most European states as time has passed has only encouraged Arabs illusions that someone else would do their heavy lifting for them, and Israeli premonitions of endless gentile perfidy.

And then there are the Israelis. Between muscular Jabotinskyite nationalists, opportunistic real estate tycoons, and para-messianic religious idealists, Israel grew used to possessing the occupied territories. Just as the war undermined Arab nationalism to the benefit of politicized religion, the same thing happened, at least to some extent, in Israel. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Arabs under occupation were so docile for so long, and the Arab states so politically inert for the first seminal dozen years after the 1967 war, that what had been at first bargaining chips for peace transmogrified into taken-for-granted tokens of collective national virility. (Israel's first plan for West Bank settlements, drawn up in the first few months after the war, envisioned not Jews living in them but Gazan Arabs relocated there in the context of a quick and comprehensive peace treaty. If you're in the market for political irony, that's top-shelf material.)

Does that mean Israel is mainly at fault in the current impasse? No. Every time a prospect for peace seems to arise, Israelis vote into power those best suited to turn the prospect into reality. (And peace prospects have been consummated twice, once with Egypt and once with Jordan, so Israel's desire for peace and its willingness to make concessions to get it should not be in doubt.) And every time it seems like there is no such prospect (like now), the same voters elect hard-asses to manage affairs until the political weather again looks to turn fair. Israelis are as a people very pragmatic and some of their leaders, like Yitzhak Rabin, have been, too.

Other of its leaders, however, have in recent decades often resembled a rambling wreck of dialectical idealism, with peacenik dreamers on the Left vying with "greater Israel" dreamers on the Right to see who could be the most oblivious to reality. This is no one's fault as that word is ordinarily understood, and it doesn't follow anyway that consistently better Israeli leaders could have cracked the nut of the Palestinians' almost totally dysfunctional politics. The current impasse is not Israel's fault in the main.

Nor is it the fault of the Bush Administration. American diplomacy, though much criticized much of the time over the past forty years, comes off well by historical standards. Given the raw materials with which it has had to work, its net achievements rank somewhere between excellent and darned good. Have mistakes been made? Sure; but would there be a blossom-sweet, happy-ending peace on all sides today spread from Rabat to Ramadi had those mistakes been avoided? Not a chance.

Diplomacy is not a form of thaumaturgy. American diplomats cannot force unwilling Arabs and Israelis to make peace anymore than you can pilot a soap-box derby racer across the Atlantic Ocean. A startling number of people are under the impression these days that if the U.S. government wanted to badly enough to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety, it could do so. I wish I had a bridge to sell to each and every one of them.


WHAT, IF ANYTHING, CAN WE learn from the experience of the past forty years?

The first is that history isn't nearly as stable as we think. The common sense most people have is that facts are facts, history is made up of facts, and these can't change "after the fact." It's not so simple as that, however, not least because all historical narratives are sacred narratives to one extent or another to those who care most about them. What people desire to read into their history has a way of overtaking, rearranging, and selecting in or out the mass of available facts on offer. That is why "standard versions" of epochal events like the Six-Day War are mostly impervious to correction by dint of facts, for their purpose is not to explain but to reassure.

A second lesson is that the personalities and capacities of leaders matter. It has for nearly forty years been a "fact" that Eshkol was indecisive and Nasser decisive, King Hussein foolish and Lyndon Johnson feckless, Moshe Dayan an unblemished hero and Charles de Gaulle a cynical anti-Semite. None of this is right, but what is right is that all of these actors (and some others) mattered enormously to the outcome. History does not unroll in mechanistic patterns. Leaders have leeway, and they exercise it for better and for worse.

As for Israel's leaders, they acted wisely in May-June 1967. It was wise to avoid war if diplomacy might work instead. It was wise to go to war rather than allow Israel to be defeated and its deterrent posture unhinged by an Egypt diplomatic stratagem. And it was wise to strike first under the circumstances, for a mobilized Israel could not outwait the Arabs, and an Israel that forsook the military initiative would have suffered far more than it did, not just in blood, but also in reputation.

Third and finally, there is something to learn -- or to be reminded of, as the case may be -- about war itself. As Levi Eshkol understood, not even the shrewdest statesman is wise enough to foresee all or even the main consequences that will pour forth from a major war. Just as our best friends sometimes turn out to be our worst enemies, and the other way around, so military victories we think will do us good sometimes turn out to undo us altogether. No political leader should ever start a war intending to lose it, just to test theories of historical irony. (That's for Peter Sellers and the Grand Duchy of Fenwick alone.) But to pick up the gun is to roll the dice. That is the ultimate message of those six days in June, forty years ago.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

No Pyrrhic Victory
Most of the conventional wisdom about the Six Day War is wrong.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, June 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

On the morning of June 5, 1967, a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it. This act of military pre-emption helped save Israel from what Iraq's then-President Abdul Rahman Aref had called, only several days earlier, "our opportunity . . . to wipe Israel off the map." Yet 40 years later Israel's victory is widely seen as a Pyrrhic one--"a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors," according to a recent editorial in The Economist.

And the alternative was?

The Six Day War is supposed to be the great pivot on which the modern history of the Middle East hinges, the moment the Palestinian question came into focus and Israel went from being the David to the Goliath of the conflict. It's a reading of history that has the convenience of offering a political prescription: Rewind to the status quo ante June 5, arrange a peace deal, and the problems that have arisen since more or less go away. Or so the thinking goes.

Yet the striking fact is that all of Israel's peace agreements--with Egypt in 1979, with the Palestinians in 1993, with Jordan and Morocco in 1994--were achieved in the wake of the war. The Jewish state had gained territory; the Arab states wanted it back. Whatever else might be said for the land-for-peace formula, it's odd that the people who are its strongest advocates are usually the same ones who bemoan the apparent completeness of Israel's victory in 1967.

Great events have a way not only of reshaping the outlook for the future but also our understanding of the past, usually in the service of clarity. "Why England Slept" was an apt question to ask of Britain in the mid-1930s, but it made sense only after Sept. 1, 1939. By contrast, the Six Day War laid a thick fog over what came before. Today, the pre-1967 period is remembered (not least by many Israelis) as a time when the country's conscience was clear and respectable world opinion admired "plucky little Israel." Yet these were the same years when Israel lived within what Abba Eban, its dovish foreign minister, called "Auschwitz borders," with only nine miles separating the westernmost part of the West Bank from the Mediterranean Sea.

It is also often said today that the Six Day War humiliated the Arabs and propelled the region into future rounds of fighting. Yet President Aref of Iraq had prefaced his call to destroy Israel by describing the war as the Arabs' chance "to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948." It is said that the war inaugurated the era of modern terrorism, as the Arab world switched from a strategy of conventional confrontation with Israel to one of "unconventional" attacks. Yet hundreds of Israelis had already been killed in fedayeen raids in Israel's first 19 years of existence.

It is said that the Palestinian movement was born from Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was already in its third year of operations when the war began. It is said that Israel enjoyed international legitimacy so long as it lived behind recognized frontiers. Yet those frontiers were no less provisional before 1967 than they were after. Only after the Six Day War did the Green Line come to be seen as the "real" border.

Fog also surrounds memories of the immediate aftermath of the war. To read some recent accounts, a more sagacious Israel could have followed up its historic victory with peace overtures that would have spared everyone the bloody entanglements of its occupation of the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Or, failing that, it could have resisted the lure of building settlements in the territories in order not to complicate a land-for-peace transaction.

In fact, the Israeli cabinet agreed on June 19 to offer the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace deals. In Khartoum that September, the Arab League declared "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." As for Jewish settlements, hardly any were built for years after the war: In 1972, for instance, only about 800 settlers had moved to the West Bank.

It's true that the war caused Israel to lose friends abroad. "Le peuple juif, sûr de lui meme et dominateur" ("the Jewish people, sure of themselves and domineering") was Charles de Gaulle's memorable line in announcing, in November 1967, that France would no longer supply Israel militarily. Such were the Jewish state's former friends.

On the other hand, Israel gained new friends. The U.S., whose declared policy during the war was to be "neutral in thought, word and deed," would never again pretend such indifference, something that made all the difference to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Tens of thousands of American and European Jews immigrated to Israel after 1967, sensing it was a country not on the brink of extinction. Christian evangelicals also became Israel's firm friends, expanding the political base of American support beyond its traditionally narrow, Jewish-Democratic core.

None of this is to say that the Six Day War was an unalloyed (or unironic) blessing for Israel. By gaining control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel swapped its old territorial insecurities for new demographic ones. As Palestinian numbers grew, Israel's efforts to find a new strategic equilibrium--first through negotiations with the PLO, later through unilateral withdrawals--became increasingly frenetic. Who knows whether they will succeed.

Then again, when the sun rose on June 5, 1967, Israel was a poor, desperately vulnerable country, which threw the dice on its own survival in the most audacious military strike of the 20th century. It is infinitely richer and more powerful today, sure in its alliance with the U.S. and capable of making concessions inconceivable 40 years ago. If these are the fruits of Israel's "Pyrrhic victory," it needs more such of them.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Remembering The Six-Day War
By David Meir-Levi
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2007

By late 1949, Israel’s willingness to accept the UN partition plan, to establish peace with its neighbors, and to repatriate refugees were all for naught. The Arab world, and especially the five confrontation states -- Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq -- insisted that although they had lost ‘round one,’ there would be another, and if need be, another, and another, until the Zionist entity was destroyed.


So Israel set about building itself into a 20th century, democratic, technologically advanced Western state with a strong army. It absorbed more than 800,000 Jewish refugees who were forcibly expelled, penniless, from their ancestral habitations in Arab countries. It focused on developing its economy, creating an infrastructure that rivaled western states, establishing 5 world-class universities, and extending a broad network of social services to all of its citizenry, Jewish, Christian, and Moslem. As the population swelled, settlements in the Negev and Galilee grew in size and number. The port of Eilat at Israel’s southernmost tip opened trade via the Red Sea with the Far East.

But the Arab states were not joking when they promised “round 2.” Unable as yet to mount another hot war, Egypt perpetrated a legal act of war (casus beli) by closing the Straits of Tiran, thus denying Israel any access to the Far East from Eilat. Egypt also supported the fedayyin (‘redeemers’, ‘freedom fighters’), a terrorist movement in the Arab refugee camps of the Gaza strip. These terrorists perpetrated almost 9,000 attacks against Israel between 1949 and 1956, concentrating primarily on civilian targets. Hundreds of Israelis died, and thousands were injured. Israel’s policy was to retaliate by mounting ‘pin point’ attacks against Egypt’s military emplacements, rather than against the refugee camps in which the terrorists hid. Without actually adumbrating it, Israel presaged President Bush’s doctrine of 9/11/01: any country that harbors and abets terrorism is itself a terrorist country and, thus, a legitimate target in the war against terrorism. By attacking military targets (and avoiding countless civilian deaths), Israel tried to force the Egyptian government to dismantle the terrorist fedayyin. It didn’t work.



In 1956, France and England induced Israel to join them in a war against Egypt. These two European powers wanted control of the Suez canal; and they had their own foreign policy reasons for desiring the overthrow of Egyptian President Nasser. Israel was to handle the ground war, and thus end the fedayyen threat, while England and France would offer air support. Israel’s Suez war was a brilliant military success. The whole of the Sinai was captured in a few days. But under pressure from US President Eisenhower, France and England withdrew their air support. Due to foreign policy and Cold War considerations, Eisenhower and the USSR threatened Israel with an invasion unless it withdrew from the Sinai. Within a few weeks, Israel had retreated, and the Sinai was unilaterally returned to Egypt, without any negotiations or peace agreements. But Nasser did agree to have a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai, to keep the Straits of Tiran open and to refrain from any military build-up at Israel’s western border. It took less than ten years for this arrangement to unravel.



Inter-Arab rivalries during these ten years pitted Egypt against Syria, and Egyptian military interference with domestic troubles in Yemen (including the use of poison gas against civilians) had Egypt at odds with Saudi Arabia. Soon, in the context of these tensions, a number of Arab states accused Egypt of “hiding behind the skirts of the UN” instead of preparing for ‘round 3’ against Israel. As a result, Nasser began a major military build-up, with the assistance of the USSR, including the illegal construction of ground-to-ground missiles in the Sinai.



In April, 1967, the Soviets in the UN accused Israel of mounting a massive military build-up on the Syrian border. Israel denied the accusation and invited the USSR to send observers to verify the truth. The USSR refused. But the UN, under Secretary General U-Thant of Burma, sent a commission to investigate. It quickly ascertained that the Soviets were lying. There was no Israeli military massing at Syria’s gates. The reason for the Soviet deception is a matter of speculation. Most historians assume that the USSR wanted to spark a war that they were sure the Arabs would win, thanks to the armaments that the USSR had provided them. Such an outcome would cement Soviet relationships with the Arab world and push the US onto the sidelines in the Middle East.



The Arab states used the Soviet ploy as an opportunity to regroup for ‘round 3’. First, in mid-May, Egypt, Syria and Jordan formed a mutual defense pact against Israel. Then Egypt closed the straits of Tiran and expelled the UN peacekeeping forces. U-Thant very surprisingly removed the UN troops within a few days, leaving the field open to Nasser and his war machine. For that, U-Thant earned the sobriquet "bungling Burmese." Then Egypt engaged in illegal violation of Israel’s air space with aerial spying by means of fly-overs in the area of Dimona where Israel had its nuclear reactor. Finally, Egypt mobilized its troops and massed armored brigades on the Israeli border. By June 1, the stage was set for war; and Nasser began announcing to the world that it was finally time for the Zionist stain on Arab honor to be expunged with Jewish blood.



With missiles only minutes away from major Israeli cities, troops and armor and air force of hostile nations primed for attack on three separate fronts; the Straits of Tiran closed; the Arab world clamored for the destruction of Israel and the butchery of its Jewish inhabitants, while Israel approached the UN, USA, France and UK in search of diplomatic solutions. Israel’s President made a groveling speech at the UN in which he implored the Arab states, especially Egypt, to pull back from the brink of war.



It is important to understand that at this point Egypt had perpetrated six specific actions which, in international law, qualify as casus belli, legal justification for war.


Conspiring with other belligerent countries (in this case, Syria and Jordan) for a coordinated attack.
Closing Israel’s access to international waterways (the straits of Tiran).
Violating the terms of the 1956 armistice by re-militarizing the Sinai.
Expelling the UN and USA peace-keeping troops form the Sinai.
Perpetrating illegal spy-plane fly-overs to reconnoiter Israeli sensitive areas.
Massing troops and tanks on Israel’s borders.

Israel could have legally launched a defensive war after any one of these casus belli. It chose, instead, to try diplomacy, which not only failed to resolve the problem, but gave Egypt and Syria time to accelerate their own preparations for invasion.



Finally, in the early morning of June 5, when Israeli intelligence indicated that Egypt was about to attack, Israel launched its pre-emptive strike. In doing so, it applied the Kennedy doctrine developed during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962): no state need wait until attacked before taking defensive action. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were adequate provocation for the US blockade. The Arabs’ massive build-up and threats of annihilation were adequate provocation for Israel’s attack.



On 6/5/1967, in a pre-dawn raid, Israeli jets destroyed almost all the fighter planes of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq before their pilots could get them off the ground. With most of their air forces a smoldering wreck, the Arabs had lost the war almost as soon as it had begun. Arab armor without air cover was destroyed by Israeli planes; and Arab infantry without armor was no match for the Israeli land forces. In six days, Israel re-gained the Sinai, drove the Jordan Legion from the West Bank, and took control of the Golan Heights within artillery range of Damascus. Suddenly there was a new order in the Middle East.



Israel had done much more than is generally acknowledged to avoid this war. It struck only after working for weeks under threat of annihilation to exhaust all reasonable diplomatic channels, and after begging the Arab states to honor their cease-fire agreements. But even more compelling, unnoticed by many but thoroughly documented in diplomatic archives is the communication between the Israeli government and King Hussein of Jordan. On Tuesday, June 5, several hours AFTER the Jordan Legion had begun its bombardment of Jerusalem and Petakh Tikvah, Israel sent a message via the Rumanian Embassy to King Hussein. The message was short and clear: stop the bombardment now and we will not invade the West Bank.



But King Hussein had already received a phone call from Nasser. This call was monitored by the Israeli Secret Service. Even though he knew that his air force was in ruins, Nasser told Hussein that Egyptian planes were over Tel Aviv and his armor was advancing on Israeli positions. Hussein believed him, and disregarded Israel’s plea. Had Hussein listened to Israel, the West Bank would still be in Jordanian hands. Instead, he sent his troops into the Israeli section of Jerusalem. Only AFTER its territorial integrity in Jerusalem was violated did Israel mount an assault on the Jordanian West Bank.



A few days after the UN cease fire of 6/11/67, Abba Eban, Israel’s representative at the UN, made his famous speech. He held out the olive branch to the Arab world, inviting Arab states to join Israel at the peace table, and informing them in unequivocal language that everything but Jerusalem was negotiable. Territories taken in the war could be returned in exchange for formal recognition, bi-lateral negotiations, and peace.



Israel wanted peace. Israel offered land in exchange for peace. As Lord Carendon, the UK representative at the UN, noted with considerable surprise after Abba Eban’s speech, never in the history of warfare did the victor sue for peace -- and the vanquished refuse.



Twice within a few weeks of the war’s end, the USSR and the Arab Bloc floated motions in the UN General Assembly declaring that Israel was the aggressor. Both motions were roundly defeated. At that time, the world knew that the Arabs were the aggressors, and that Israel, victim of aggression, had sued for peace both before the war and after their amazing victory.



Unable to brand Israel the aggressor, and in disarray following Israel’s public request for peace and reconciliation, The Arab world faced what for it was a difficult choice. Recognize Israel, negotiate for the return of conquered territories, and make peace…or not.



Rather than respond to Israel’s invitation, the Arab states met in Khartoum, Sudan, for a conference in August, 1967. They unanimously decided in favor of the now famous three Khartoum “NO’s”: No recognition, No negotiation, No peace. This was only round 3. The Arab world could suffer many more defeats before its ultimate victory. Israel could suffer only one defeat. Better that Israel hold on to the territories taken in the war. Better that the refugees continue languishing in their squalor and misery. Better that the Arab states re-arm for round 4…than to recognize Israel’s right to exist or negotiate toward a peaceful settlement of the conflict.



With the Khartoum “NO’s”, the Arab world forced Israel to unwillingly assume control over the approximately million Arabs living in the West Bank, Golan Heights, Sinai and Gaza Strip.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Recollections from the Six-Day War
By Joseph Puder
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 6, 2007

In the early morning hours of Monday, June 5, 1967, the sun was already heating up everything around the Tel Nof airbase.



In central Israel, as some of us were making our way to the mess hall of the base, Jordanian artillery shells shook the earth, fragments reaching our barracks, puncturing the outer walls with significant holes.



The airbase, in central Israel, was located just a few miles away from a Jordanian base. In the preceding few weeks, it was the IAF (Israel Air Force) that carried the brunt of the preparation for a war no one wished for. The war however appeared to be imminent as Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, ordered the UN forces to vacate the Sinai and then moved over 100,000 Egyptian troops into the Sinai in early May, while at the same time closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli navigation, in breach of international agreements.



All ground and aircrews were restricted to the base, and all leaves were canceled already in early May. Our base was on alert, and the work assigned to every squadron was feverish. We were on a 24 hour work shift, with most of us getting a mere two hours of sleep in those numbing weeks, restocking, testing systems, receiving instruction on emergency procedures. Maj. General Motti Hod, the commander of the IAF was busy with the top brass reactivating shelved plans. The IAF alone could save Israel, and in briefings we received from the commander of our airbase we were left with that indelible impression.



The bombs exploding in our airbase in the early morning hours of June 5th were a fearful reminder that war broke out. We were confident that we have done all we could in the sleepless weeks, and hoped for the best. According to news reports on the Voice of Israel, the government of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had appealed to King Hussein of Jordan not to attack Israel, and assured the King that Israel would not attack his kingdom unless attacked first.



Nasser assured the diminutive king, whom he despised, that the Egyptian forces are on the their way to Tel Aviv, and promised him a part of the war spoils. In solidarity with his Arab brethrens, Hussein decided to join Egypt and Syria in the attack on Israel. Jordan received military contingents from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Algeria, including an Iraqi armor brigade. A top Egyptian general was dispatched to Amman to coordinate the war effort against Israel.



The commotion in our airbase was visible as squadrons of French made Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers took off and landed with great rapidity, breaking a world record in refueling and rearming and thus committing the largest number of sorties on record per pilot. At our rescue squadron we stood on alert to pick up pilots who parachuted into sea or land.



We felt in our bones that our efforts meant life or death to our nation.



Just before lunchtime on that historical Monday June 5th, we received orders to assemble at the parade ground of the base. The mood was tense and we were filled with a great deal of apprehension. The Voice of Israel news reports were sketchy, a fact that added to our anxieties. The Voice of the Arabs radio transmitting from Cairo boasted the destruction of the IAF and reported Egyptian forces on their way to Tel Aviv. “The IDF (Israel Defense Forces), “ Cairo reported, “had suffered many casualties, and were retreating…”



The next few moments were probably the most memorable to those of us at the parade ground that day. The airbase commander began slowly, but with an excitement in his voice, “Soldiers and airman of the IDF, as of this moment the Arab air-forces no longer exist.” The relief and joy that followed was indescribable, we threw our berets up to the sky embracing each other in a manly dance, we hugged and kissed, and one could sense the relief on these young faces. We worked hard, we prayed for salvation, albeit, secretly in our hearts, and we were now victorious. It was not however so much the joy of victory as the answer to our prayers that we celebrated. Israel had survived the onslaught of three Arab armies, and large contingents from additional Arab states all determined to “wipe the Jewish State off the map” and as Nasser promised, “to drown the Jews in the sea.”



The IAF was first to mobilize for the war and last to demobilize, and we did not receive a pass to go home on much needed leave until several weeks after the war ended. The nation of Israel transformed overnight and euphoria pervaded everywhere. Hitching a ride home, we were met at various intersections by high school girls and mothers, handing out sandwiches and cold drinks to us, along with smiles and kisses. Even the lowliest of soldiers felt like a heroes in that miraculous month of June 1967.



On the outskirts of Tel Aviv, graves had been dug for thousands of would be casualties. The somberness of May 1967, and the early days of June had turned to celebration and joy. A second Holocaust had been averted, and the world recognized that Jews can and will fight for their freedom, dignity, and self-determination. The epithet “Masada shall not fall again,” became a reality reinforced by the dedication of thousands of young soldiers and reservists, and the blood of 800 IDF soldiers killed in action.



June 7, 1967, the third day of the war, was a day no one in Israel will ever forget. It was on that day that the magical, yet laconic, voice of the paratrooper brigade commander Motta Gur announced, “Temple Mount is in our hand.” The battle-hardened soldiers that captured the Old City of Jerusalem and reached the Western Wall cried the cry of generations of Jews who dreamed of their returned to Zion. Even in the hell of Auschwitz, or under the torturer’s hand of the Inquisition, Jerusalem was on their mind.



This was the most solemn moment of the war and its most glorious as well. As the Blue and White flag with the Star of David was hoisted near the Wall, the Jews the world over cried together with those young paratroopers.

Ellie