The legacy of 1967

Editorial

Forty years ago this week, the Jewish world held its collective breath as Israel struggled for its survival – then proved itself stronger than its combined enemies.

The impact on history has been profound and lasting. The reaction at the time – by Israelis, by Israel's amassed enemies and by Jews worldwide – was unprecedented and remains unique.

For Israel's enemies, the Six Day War was the surest sign yet that the Jewish state was here to stay. The roundly defeated Arab states that, under the guidance of Egypt's president, Abdul Gammel Nasser, had promised their people total annihilation of the Jews of Israel, were faced with humiliation and disorder.

Prewar whoops of hysterical blood-thirstiness came from across the Arab world. Syria's Hafez Assad promised to "explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland to enter a battle of annihilation." Iraq's president Abdul Rahman Aref said, "Our goal is clear: to wipe Israel off the map." And Nasser declared, "Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel."

But in just six days – the time tradition says it took God to create the heavens and the earth – Israel was triumphant.

For Israelis, the events of 1967 were beyond the imagination. Having carved out a tiny sliver of sovereign territory by the skin of its teeth and through the sacrifice of its pioneers, Israel had fulfilled the Zionist dream but was surrounded on three sides by Arab countries explicitly committed to pushing the Jews out the fourth side, into the Mediterranean.

At the same time, the Six Day War was the first time Israel had faced such existential threat since the consciousness of the true impact and intent of the Holocaust had been recognized following the Eichmann trial in 1961, before which a sort of socio-psychological repression had kept full appreciation of the genocidal uniqueness of the Holocaust from being fully appreciated. By 1967, when the contemporary understanding of the nearly successful attempt to wipe out Jewish civilization was fully understood by Israelis and other Jews, the prospect of a second Holocaust in a generation fed the underlying dread in the days ahead of the June war. The Arab rhetoric seemed deliberately aimed at pushing that particular button.

Israel was an unwelcome entity in 1948, when the thought of co-existing with a Jewish state was so repugnant to the Arab world that a completely united front came together to oppose the creation of the state of Israel. The objective of the Arab world was then, and with the exception only of Egypt and Jordan, remains today, the elimination of the Jewish presence in the Middle East. The "occupation" – an outcome of Israel's unanticipated success in a massively disproportionate and defensive war – is viewed in retrospect as the cause of the current conflict. But, while the occupation has done nothing to improve the situation and much to justify criticism, it is, at root, merely an excuse for continued belligerence and total rejectionism that has existed since 1948 at the latest.

There are many lessons to be taken from the experience of 1967. Protesters in Vancouver and elsewhere are purveying their own devious interpretations this week.

They will conveniently ignore the reality that, in 1967, Israel immediately offered to return the territory it had amassed in exchange for almost nothing: recognition of Israel's existence, a negotiated settlement to the conflict and a commitment to lasting peace from Israel's neighbors. The answer, which came in August 1967 at the Khartoum Conference of eight Arab heads of state, was the notorious "three no's:" No negotiations with Israel. No recognition of Israel. No peace. The presence of a Jewish state in the region would remain the unifying and overriding foreign policy priority of every Arab state to the present day.

Whatever else has come after, the Six Day War's role in the perpetuation of the conflict has been misused by Israel's enemies to successfully paint Israel as an expansionist, occupational imperial state. The reality, far more complex and nuanced, has been that the Israeli occupation has been used as a motive for violence aimed at restoring the borders of the region not to their pre-1967 status but to their pre-1948 permutations.

The occupation and its associated tragedies are not to be dismissed. But the lesson of 1967 was and remains, despite whatever diplomatic niceties and sugar-coated variations the Arab world and their overseas allies fabricate, that Jews are not welcome in the Middle East. For international consumption, the Palestinian leadership (some of it, anyway), the "respectable" Arab leaders and the international Palestinian movement have adopted a diplomatic position that expresses ambivalence toward Israel's existence, rather than outright hostility. But the deliberately cultivated attitude across the Arab world, from the street to the highest levels, remains most honestly articulated by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "By God's will, we will witness the destruction of this regime."

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