The defining moment: in concluding the discussion begun in the July/August 2002 Humanist regarding the origins of strife between Israelis and Palestinians, events during the Cold War drew the present-day boundaries that define the region - origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict

Although Israel remained insecure during the years following the 1949 armistice agreements, no further wars broke out with any of the Arabs for almost a decade. When war finally did come, violence wasn't instigated by the Arabs or technically by Israel. Rather it occurred as part of a transition from the old world order to the new--part of the death dance of colonialism and an opening salvo in the Middle Eastern phase of the Cold War. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose rise to power began in 1952, played a central role in these events.

The Cold War was underway by 1946, the year of Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech and George Kennan's "policy of containment." By 1952 the Cold War had started to intensify when the East and West both obtained the hydrogen bomb and when the new interventionist foreign policy of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1952-1960) began to be felt in all parts of the world. As the stage widened and the cast of players grew, Israel's next war turned out to be a classic case of unanticipated consequences. Nasser, while emphasizing his independence of the superpowers and his leadership in the "Third World," still sought military and financial assistance from the United States. When Dulles alternately courted and rejected Egypt, offering and then withdrawing U.S. aid, Nasser didn't retaliate directly; rather, he abruptly nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France enlisted Israel's help in an attack on Egypt but failed to follow through even though Israel's Sinai campaign succeeded. The result was mixed. The two colonial powers were decisively humiliated, but Israel was seen by much of the world as having been overly eager to conduct aggressive war on their behalf.

In the immediate aftermath of the Suez debacle, Israel's Arab neighbors were wary of provoking the kind of retaliation that had been demonstrated in the Sinai. For five years or more border incidents were rare. Israel was able to consolidate its economic and diplomatic position while, within Arab countries, the radicalization that had preceded the Suez campaign actually intensified. In March 1957 the Eisenhower Doctrine authorized economic and military aid to Middle Eastern countries threatened by communism. But there were no takers except Libya and Lebanon since, as one author put it, "Zionism, not communism, was considered the enemy" by Arabs.

In fact, no outside force played a more prominent role in shaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the Cold War. At one time some experts on the Middle East believed that the Soviet Union could never have much influence on Middle Eastern politics because its hostility to religion would offend Muslims. This viewpoint underestimated the depth of economic and social resentments in the "Muslim" world and the secular movements that arose there to exploit them. During the late 1950s a group of Palestinian students in Cairo, Egypt, formed al-Fatah or "the Conquest" (its letters in reverse are an acronym standing for "Movement for the Liberation of Palestine") to carry out attacks on the Zionists. One of these students was Yasser Arafat--a relative of the anti-Zionist mufti Hajj Amin Husseini--who rose to be the undisputed head of this organization during the 1960s when it came to be based in Syria. In February 1958 the Syrian Ba'th ("Renaissance" or "Resurrection") Party, which since the 1940s had been promoting an idealistic vision based on socialism and Arab unity, became strong enough to persuade Nasser to create the United Arab Republic (UAR) of Egypt and Syria.

Governments which had been particularly close to France and Britain--those of Lebanon and the Hashimite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq--were vulnerable to interference from the communists and the UAR. In July 1958 civil war broke out in Lebanon with help from the UAR. Iraq's monarchy was overthrown on Bastille Day (July 14). The following day the Christian president of Lebanon invited U.S. marines into his country to help stabilize it. King Hussein of Jordan asked Britain to send troops. With this outside help the governments of Lebanon and Jordan managed to survive. In Iraq King Faisal II was killed, along with many prominent supporters, and for a decade Iraq joined Syria and Egypt in promoting internal revolution and external neutrality. Nasser was then at his height as the champion of pan-Arabism against "colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism," but he proved to be too dominating for the Syrians. After the UAR had lasted three years, the Ba'thists asked that it be dissolved.

In January 1964 the first Arab summit meeting was held in Cairo to discuss how best to respond to Israeli plans to divert the all-important waters of the Jordan River. This summit resulted in another meeting of four hundred Palestinians called by King Hussein five months later in Jerusalem. The purpose of this meeting was to create the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its action arm, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA). The aim of the PLA was to liberate Palestine from its colonialist oppressors, the Zionists, by the method of armed struggle. As its chairperson, the PLO elected Ahmed Shuqayri, an Cairo attorney close to Hajj Amin Husseini and a member of a prominent Palestinian family.

Two Ba'thist military coups in Syria in 1963 and 1966 (the latter under the pro-Communist and strongly anti-Zionist General Salah Jadid) greatly extended the radicalization process there, encouraging al-Fatah to raid Israel from Syria while the Syrian army fired on Israelis from the Golan Heights. In the coming months the raids became more frequent and usually were carried out across the Jordanian border. The Israeli policy was to retaliate against the country from which the raids came, even though the Jordanians and Lebanese tried to prevent the raids. The Soviet Union became concerned that Israel might retaliate against Jadid's government in Syria. It therefore prevailed on Egypt and Syria to sign a joint defense pact in November 1966, hoping to deter Israeli reprisals. Nasser had no intention of going to war with Israel unless he was prepared to win. He understood Israel's military strength but he made two mistakes--first, trusting false reports from the Soviet Union that the Israeli army was concentrating on the Syrian border and, second, overestimating the strength of his own army.

Bellicose talk and actions, in and out of the United Nations, brought the two sides ever closer to war. In the third and fourth weeks of May 1967 Nasser ordered Egyptian troops into Sinai, requesting that the UN recall its buffer forces in the Gaza Strip and announcing that the Gulf of Aqaba would be closed for shipping to or from Israel. These steps have been interpreted as intending to goad Israel into starting a war--one the Arabs would win. The United States was opposed to a unilateral response, but Israel declared that it wouldn't tolerate Egypt's actions, and the IDF mobilized the Israeli reserves. When David Ben-Gurion chastised IDF chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin privately for this "mistaken" action, Rabin was secretly incapacitated for the next two days by what he later called "a state of mental and physical exhaustion." On May 28 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who was his own defense minister, made a radio speech to the nation, but his hesitant manner failed to reassure the Israeli people, whose morale had begun to fall sharply. On May 30 Jordan's King Hussein suddenly flew to Cairo and signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt, agreeing to place Jordan's troops under an Egyptian general and let Iraqi troops enter Jordan. On June 1 Eshkol, under intense criticism from his political opposition and the IDF general staff, appointed the hawkish hero Moshe Dayan minister of defense. Dayan, who had founded the Haganah in 1939 and had been IDF chief of staff from 1953 to 1958, had generally been credited with the swift victory of Israeli forces in the 1956 campaign against Egypt in Gaza and the Sinai. He and the IDF staff quickly set to work in formulating a military plan. By the morning of June 5 Israel was fully prepared for a preemptive air strike against Egypt--or what General Yigal Allon and others preferred to call a "preemptive counterstrike" in view of the Egyptian provocations.

Israel's most amazing victory can be summarized succinctly. The Six-Day War was over practically before it started. Israeli intelligence, which had recently been faulty, was on this occasion superb. King Hussein said later their pilots "had a complete catalogue of the most minute details of each of the thirty-two Arab bases." Rather than strike at dawn on June 5, 1967, as was "traditional," Israel's air force (IAF) waited until two or three hours later when Egyptian planes would have returned to their bases. Israel's 183 planes flew under Egyptian radar until just before reaching their targets when they climbed into attack formation. In less than two hours the IAF had destroyed 197 airplanes, most of them on the ground. The second wave of 164 planes took off roughly an hour after the first wave returned. Another 107 aircraft were destroyed--a total of 304 out of 419 planes. Around 10:00 AM Ezer Weizman, the main author of the attack plan, phoned his wife and told her, "We have won the war." He was right. During the rest of the war the IAF had almost complete control in the air and over the ground.

The overwhelming success of the air strikes seems to have caught the IDF almost as much off guard as the Arabs. In the words of Benny Morris:

   Israel's stated war aims were confined to Egypt.... Almost no thought was
   devoted to the aftermath.... Only late on Day 1 was it clear that East
   Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank would be conquered.... Not until the
   end of Day 3 was it understood that the army would advance as far as the
   Canal; only at the end of Day 4 was it apparent that the IDF intended to
   conquer parts of the [Syrian] Golan Heights.... Only Dayan appears to have
   [anticipated] conquering the West Bank.

The Egyptians actually had prepared for a defensive war but with ample air cover. Deprived of the latter, they soon found their troops in Gaza and the Sinai cut off from support. Some of their Sinai forces reached the Suez Canal but most were trapped. On the evening of June 6 the Egyptian war ministry issued an order for a general retreat that created so much confusion it was canceled the following day, resulting in even greater chaos. The stranded troops attempted to defend themselves against tanks and fighter-bombers with "rifles and pistols." The IDF took the Gaza Strip by June 7 and reached the Canal by June 8.

King Hussein of Jordan was reluctant to enter the fighting, but the pressure of popular Arab opinion left him with no alternative. Many of the Israeli leadership hoped Jordan would come into the war to give Israel an excuse to take the West Bank and Jerusalem. Allon, the current minister of labor, had recently taken the position that "in ... a new war [Israel must] achieve total victory, the territorial fulfillment of the Land of Israel." But on the eve of the June 5 air attack, over Dayan's "strong opposition," the government of Israel warned Jordan to stay out and Hussein ignored the warning. On June 5 a combined force from Jordan, Egypt (the Arab Legion was now under Egyptian command), and Iraq faced a far smaller IDF force that nevertheless soon had an overwhelming advantage--total domination of the skies. In spite of repeated Israeli warnings--all of which were ignored--for Jordan to stay out of the war, the Arab armies went ahead and shelled in and around Jerusalem. That night, conscious of the massive Israeli air victory, the IDF and cabinet ministers began to discuss an improvised plan to take the West Bank and Jerusalem. While Eshkol hesitated Dayan pushed on, and the following night the ministers approved letting the advance continue. Shortly after dawn on June 7 Israeli paratroops and infantry entered the gates of Jerusalem and took the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. That day and the next the IDF took the four heavily populated West Bank cities of Nablus, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Jericho, and early on June 9 the two main bridges across the Jordan River were blown up, separating the West Bank from the East Bank. The same day Egypt and Israel signed a cease-fire on the southern front, leaving Israel free to focus on its northern borders.

The Golan Heights in southern Syria formed a natural barrier long coveted by military experts. Always before when colleagues suggested that it might be necessary for Israel to capture the Heights, Dayan had argued that the victory wouldn't be worth the trouble it would cause. But on June 9, 1967, in the light of Israel's spectacular victories in the preceding four days, he abruptly reversed himself and without even consulting his cabinet colleagues (Eshkol called him "contemptible" for this) ordered the IDF to take the Golan Heights. For days the Syrian positions had been constantly bombarded by Israeli artillery and aircraft and the defenders, knowing they were the last to hold out, were demoralized. By nightfall much of the territory had been taken--most of the rest fell quickly on June 10--after the Syrian troops had been ordered to withdraw and as a UN ceasefire took effect, ending the Six-Day War. Israeli troops completed the occupation by helicopter over the next two days.

The consequences of the Six-Day War were exceedingly far-reaching and long lasting. It was, in fact, the most significant turning point in the entire history of Israel. Israel had prevailed over all its neighbors and had gained the Sinai Peninsula; the Gaza Strip; the West Bank, including all of Jerusalem; and the Golan Heights, an area three-and-one-half times that of Israel before the war. The psychological effects on both sides--the unbounded elation of the Israelis and the utter inconsolability of the defeated Arabs--can scarcely be imagined. Religious Jews were convinced that the victory was a "miracle," and even secular Israeli newspapers described it in biblical language. Many Orthodox Jews had previously been opposed to Zionism because of its secular flavor and a belief that only the messiah could lead Jews back to the holy land. Some reversed, this position and began to immigrate to Israel in substantial numbers.

Although their humiliation was obvious to everyone, the Arabs attempted to put matters in a less dismal light by emphasizing American support for Israel and even suggesting that the United States had entered the war directly. In August and September of 1967 Arabs held a summit in Khartoum, which ended on September 2 with a defiant promise to reverse their defeat and drive Israel from the lands they had lost in the war. They agreed that there would be no peace with Israel, no official recognition of Israel, and no negotiation with Israel ("the three no's"), and that the Palestinian people had a right to their own state.

In reality, despite their public bluster, the beaten Arab states underwent a profound loss of confidence as they had after the 1948 war. Egypt, which had started this war and had seen its army and air force destroyed, was obviously the big loser. Nasser, at his peak before the war, was never again the most powerful Arab leader. At home his charisma persisted, however; this is demonstrated by the fact that when his top military resigned and he offered to do the same, the streets of Cairo filled with huge, emotional demonstrations, and he stayed on as president. But his health rapidly deteriorated and he died three years later. In Syria and later in Iraq, Ba'th dictatorships under Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, respectively, gradually emerged from a period of instability and consolidated their power to such an extent that they remained in control far longer than Nasser. Strong rivalry prevented effective cooperation between them, however.

Since 1948 many Palestinians had placed their faith in Israel's Arab neighbors to help them regain their homeland. The loss of even more Arab territory in the Six-Day War made it perfectly clear that this faith was illusory, that they could rely on nobody but themselves. This realization energized several small Palestinian guerrilla organizations, notably al-Fatah under Yassir Arafat. Stressing its Palestinian identity and the goal of recovering Palestine for a Palestinian homeland--by the method of armed struggle--this group was particularly successful in recruiting and training young fighters.

In 1969 Arafat replaced Ahmed Shuqayri as chair of the PLO. The PLO was an umbrella organization made up of a large number of factions with a wide range of viewpoints and operating styles. For example two of its most radical groups were led by Christians who had strong Marxist leanings--Nayef Hawatmeh and Dr. George Habash. Whereas the PLO had been a kind of Cairo-based bureaucracy under Shuqayri, with Arafat as its leader it became a powerful guerrilla attack force in the field and remained so for decades.

Within the conquered areas the vanquished--representing more than a million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza--began to be evicted, their property confiscated, and their homes destroyed. Here and there Jewish settlements started to spring up--slowly at first, at sites considered of value for national defense, and later at places judged the most desirable. In response to aggressive Arab and Israeli stances, United Nations Resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, expressing the idea that Israel should return the occupied territory in exchange for lasting security ("land for peace") while using such ambiguous terms that everyone had a different interpretation. Ten years later there were some eleven thousand Israelis living in the occupied areas; in the mid-1990s, there were 150,000.

Israel's occupation of the West Bank and other territories after the 1967 war has always had moral critics among the Israelis and strong supporters of Israel. The February 25, 2002, Nation article by Neve Gordon entitled "An Antiwar Movement Grows in Israel" opens with these words:

   A few months after the 1967 war, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a professor at Hebrew
   University and a leading Israeli intellectual--who was also an observant
   Jew--stated that Israel must immediately withdraw from the occupied
   territories. He argued that the occupation was unjust and would inevitably
   lead to the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinians, and to the
   corruption if not destruction of Israeli society.

Leibowitz's view was shared at the time by many leading Israelis, such as writers Amos Oz and Yizhar Smilansky, and was now being cited by the new antiwar protesters Gordon was writing about.

Another prominent supporter of Israel concerned about adverse effects of the occupation is Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations and former executive director of the American Jewish Congress for fifteen years. In 2001 he publicized a recent "historic statement" made by the acting foreign minister of Israel, Shlomo Ben-Ami, explaining his opposition to distributing an alleged catalog of Palestinian transgressions: "Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence." (New York Review of Books, February 8, 2001)

On the other hand during the same thirty-five years many other Israeli leaders have taken positions somewhere near the opposite end of the spectrum of Israeli public opinion. For instance Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969-1974, said:

   I am shocked. All of me rebels against Oz, Smilansky and professors and
   intellectuals who have introduced the moral issue. For me the supreme
   morality is that the Jewish people has a right to exist. Without that there
   is no morality in the world.

A more recent example is Likud member Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of security who appeared on a PBS television interview show in June 2002. After another speaker mentioned the Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank he said,

   I cannot accept this term of "occupation." [That area] is our homeland--our
   ancient homeland--our biblical homeland. We have there different people
   living, and we have to find a solution to this real problem. But we are not
   "occupiers" in our ancient homeland. It's ours.

Where do we go from here? Columnist Tom Friedman's latest book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002) contains many valuable observations on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Near the close of his March 6, 2002, column he writes: "Some of the hatred will remain no matter what Israel does. But to think that Israel's exiting the occupied territories--and abandoning its insane settlement land grab there--wouldn't reduce this problem is absurd." And he opens his April 3, 2002, column with the words: "A terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East. What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on September 11, 2001, is now being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of civilizations." Friedman's phrase "clash of civilizations" is taken from the title of a book published several years ago by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, referring to the frightening possibility of a full-scale war between civilizations--the West and the Muslim world.

One might wish that Friedman, who has had long experience in the Middle East, had devoted more sympathetic attention to that segment of enlightened Arab opinion that is able both to comprehend Western concerns in that part of the world and also to articulate the legitimate grievances of Palestinians and others against the United States and Israel. The notion that the United States is powerless to do anything to help remove the vicious cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is a cruel myth. The United States has never been a passive observer of the conflict--especially since 1967, when it began to see Israel as a vital ally in the Middle East during the Cold War. From that time to the present little has been done by the Israeli government, for better or worse, without the United States' acquiescence or outright support. Americans have rarely shown any inclination or taken any initiative to relieve the sufferings of the Palestinian people. Today the United States' first priority as the world's only superpower must be to reverse its past course and to lead strongly and swiftly in the direction of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It must do this convincingly in a manner that is fair to both sides--ensuring peace, justice, and security for all even at considerable cost to itself--to win the complete and mutual support of the UN and the people of the Middle East.

David Schafer is a consulting editor for the Humanist and a recently retired physiologist who now devotes most of his time to humanist research, writing, and teaching.

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