Six Days Of War, 40 Years Of Failure

Six days of war, 40 years of failureThe world was gripped by Israel's swift triumph in 1967. But today the bitter conflict with the Palestinians seems more intractable than ever

Taken from The Guardian, UK, June 5, 2007
By Ian Black



Israeli paratroopers Zion Karasente, Isack Ifat and Haim Oshiri view the Western Wall, following fierce fighting for the Old City during the six-day war in 1967. Photograph: David Rubinger

It was Moshe Dayan, the hero of Israel's 1967 victory, who set the tone for what was to follow: "We are waiting for a telephone call," the one-eyed general said disdainfully as the frontline Arab states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria - reeled from their crushing defeat. Of the Palestinians - the newly conquered population of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip - little was said at the time. But the six-day war put them back at centre stage in their conflict with Israel. They have stayed there ever since.

"Rarely has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences," commented the historian Michael Oren. "Seldom has the world's attention been gripped, and remained seized, by a single event and its ramifications." Israel's triumph, someone else observed wisely, was "a cursed blessing".

Perceptions have changed so much in 40 years that it is hard now to recapture the sympathy that was felt for Israel as Egypt mobilised, and residents of Tel Aviv filled sandbags. If the country's leaders talked emotively about the vulnerable "Auschwitz borders" left after their 1948 war of independence, blood-curdling Arab rhetoric bolstered the image of Israel as the underdog.

But little David, just 19 that May, was rapidly to become a lumbering Goliath. As euphoric Israelis thronged across Jordanian lines to Jerusalem's Old City and marvelled at its Jewish and Muslim holy places, a little-known guerrilla commander named Yasser Arafat fled Ramallah and Palestinians adjusted to a new reality of curfews, informers and military occupation.

And it is that occupation, now as then, that stands at the heart of the conflict between two peoples engaged in a vicious, primordial - and utterly unequal - struggle over one small land. It has taken a terrible toll.

For Palestinians, 1967 was an extension of what began in Ottoman times, before they were a nation in the modern sense, when - half a century before the Nazi Holocaust - Zionists called for "solving" the Jewish problem in "a land without a people for a people without a land". If 1948 was their first nakba (catastrophe), the June war was the next devastating instalment.

It will long be debated whether Israel missed an early opportunity for peace. But the war reignited the dormant debate about the territorial limits of Zionism, fatefully fusing religion, nationalism and security. It produced no strategy for turning military supremacy into a tool to change relations with the Arab world.

"The truth of the matter was that when the Arabs finally called, Israel's line was either busy or there was no one on the Israeli side to pick up the phone," the Israeli scholar Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote later of Dayan's laconic quip.

Israel seemed to care less about peace than territory. It insisted that what it simultaneously called the "administered territories" and "Judea and Samaria" (the Hebrew names for the West Bank) were up for negotiation. (Unlike East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights, they were never annexed.) But the creation of "facts on the ground" gradually erased the old green line border, and nowhere more completely than around Jerusalem. The result - which some call apartheid - is 450,000 Jews living with full democratic rights in 125 settlements amidst 2.5 million Arabs under illegal occupation.

The wars of 1973 and 1982 and the return of Sinai to Egypt changed nothing on that central Palestinian front. Israel's "liberal occupation" - a flattering self-image that won wide international acceptance - did not outlive the 20th anniversary of the six-day war. The first intifada - the largely peaceful "war of stones" that erupted in 1987 - did more for the Palestinians than two decades of "terrorism" or "armed struggle," reminding the world, and growing numbers of Israelis, that a settlement had to address their demands.

Yitzhak Rabin's recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) at Oslo was a historic turning-point. But Rabin and Arafat could not translate their "peace of the brave" into a workable final deal. The Islamist movement Hamas, which rejected the legitimacy of Israel even in its pre-67 borders, pioneered suicide bombings and got the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu elected. The militarised second intifada was the disastrous result.

Netanyahu was right about one thing: the Middle East is a "tough neighbourhood," as he famously remarked. It has got a lot tougher. Today there is a generation of Palestinians who have known nothing but occupation and a generation of Israelis who have experienced only dominance and repression of the Palestinians. As the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz pointed out, justice and occupation are not compatible. Both societies have been traumatised and brutalised.

Israel has its "separation wall," built to keep bombers away from its restaurants and shopping malls but perceived as another land grab. Palestinian workers have been replaced by Chinese and Filipinos. But its military superiority has not created the security and normality it craves. Gaza - unilaterally abandoned by Ariel Sharon - has become a vast prison, a global byword for misery, desperation and anarchy, a cruel parody of the freedom the Palestinians yearn for.

Pessimists believe too much water and blood have flown down the Jordan in these 40 years, that these changes are irreversible, that this is a land that can now be neither shared peacefully nor divided.

Optimists point out that time has not stood still. Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel, with realism if not joy. Syria (and Lebanon) will follow suit if Israel returns the Golan. March's summit in Saudi Arabia confirmed peace as the "strategic choice" of the entire Arab League, a far cry from the three noes - to peace, to recognition and to negotiation - of the Khartoum conference in September 1967. Mayhem in Iraq, jihadist fanaticism and Iranian ambitions are all part of the new geostrategic equation.

Still, the Palestinians remain at centre stage. A solution for the refugees is vital; so are the interlinked questions of Jerusalem, borders and a viable, independent state. Even Hamas claims it will settle for the pre-1967 lines, as it fires rockets - legitimate "resistance," it insists - across them. Much depends on whether it will learn to act pragmatically like the PLO before it: engagement is more likely to encourage that than isolation. Israel's acceptance as part of the Middle East is at stake.

Majorities on both sides say they want peace but few believe it is attainable. It has all been discussed countless times in the last four decades. It all still looks impossibly hard to achieve.

The Six-Day War: Timeline
Taken from Haaretz, Israel, 05.06.07
* May 19:
United Nations withdraws its forces from the Sinai peninsula at Egypt's request

* May 20:
Egypt deploys over 100,000 soldiers along Israel's southwestern border

* May 22:
Egypt closes the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping

* May 30:
Egypt, Syria and Jordan sign mutual defense pact
Jordan places its military under Egyptian command

* June 2:
Former head of Israel Defense Forces Moshe Dayan appointed defense minister

June 5:
* Israel Air Force launches series of bombing raids against Egyptian airfields, targeting 19 bases and destroying 85 percent of the Egyptian air force

* Jordan shells western Jerusalem and central Israel

* Syrian air force attacks oil refineries in Haifa Bay and Megiddo airfield

* IAF strikes Syrian air bases, taking out most of the Syrian air force

* IDF conquers Sur Bahir from Jordan

* Jordanian artillery shells Tel Aviv

* Syria shells Rosh Pina

June 6:
* IDF captures Latrun, cuts Jerusalem-Ramallah road

* Syria bombs northern communities

* IDF conquers Umm el-Katef and Abu Ageila in Sinai

* IDF conquers Ammunition Hill on the foothills of Mount Scopus

* IDF conquers Gaza, the West Bank towns of Ramallah, Jenin and Qalqilyah, and Abu Tor in East Jerusalem

* Egyptian army orders general retreat

* Arab Legion orders retreat from West Bank

June 7:
* Syria continues to shell areas along northern border

* IDF captures Old City of Jerusalem

* Jordan orders general retreat

* IDF pushes further into Sinai peninsula

* IDF takes West Bank city of Jericho

* Egypt rejects UN cease-fire initiative

* IDF prevents Egyptian retreat at Mitla and Jiddi passes in the Sinai

June 8:
* Syrian maintains bombing in north

* IAF bombs Syrian defenses

* Egypt accepts cease-fire offer

June 9:
* IDF forces in Sinai push through to Suez Canal

* IDF forces push into Golan Heights

June 10:
* IDF completes conquest of Golan Heights

* IDF accepts UN-brokered cease-fire; retains control of Sinai peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank and the Golan Heights

June 19:
* Israeli unity government declares itself ready to return the Golan Heights to Syria, Sinai to Egypt and most of the West Bank to Jordan, in return for peace and normalized ties with Arab neighbors

August 29 - September 1:
* Eight Arab heads of state attend summit conference in Khartoum, Sudan to consolidate Arab policy: No peace with Israel; No recognition of Israel; No negotiations with Israel

November 22:
* United Nations adopts Security Council Resolution 242, calling for a 'just and lasting peace in the Middle East' through Israeli withdrawal from lands captured in war, end to belligerency, right for all states in region to leave in peace within secure borders