by Jeremy Bowen
The new Goliath
The British foreign correspondent James Cameron was exhilarated by Israel’s victory. The following Monday he reported that ‘many are saying that Zion was born not nineteen years ago with the birth of the state of Israel, but today, in its great and rather frightening exultation, with the Jewish nation suddenly translated from David into Goliath’. In fact Israel had been Goliath for years. It simply had not had the chance to use its strength properly.
Washington suddenly found Israel much more attractive. The 1967 war transformed its entire approach to the Middle East. Israel had always come first. But the United States had tried, not always successfully, to have a relationship with Arab countries too. It was prepared to restrain Israel, to criticise it in public and even vote to censure it in the UN Security Council. The Eisenhower administration made Israel disgorge the land it captured in the 1956 war. All that changed after the lightning victory in 1967. Some senior officials in the Johnson White House realised what was happening. On 31 May, before a shot had been fired, Harold Saunders, a senior national security aide, warned that in the two weeks since Nasser mobilised, ‘We have reversed the policy of twenty years … Israel may really be the big winner. For twenty years Israel has sought a special relationship – even a private security guarantee – with us. We have steadfastly refused in order to preserve our other interests in the Middle East.’ Now the US had emphatically and irreversibly taken sides.
The Americans expected Israel would win quickly. But when they saw it happening, Israel became a much more interesting prospect as an ally. Vietnam was bleeding the Johnson administration to death and the Israelis were making war look simple. Better still, they had used Western weapons to crush Soviet allies and Soviet weapons. The president’s envoy Harry McPherson wrote to Johnson that ‘after the doubts, confusions and ambiguities of Vietnam, it was deeply moving to see people whose commitment is total and unquestioning’. Like most Westerners in 1967, he was deeply impressed by the macho, self-reliant sabras. ‘Israel at war destroys the prototype of the pale, scrawny Jew; the soldiers I saw were tough, muscular and sunburned. There is also an extraordinary combination of discipline and democracy among officers and enlisted men; the latter rarely salute and frequently argue, but there is no doubt about who will prevail.’ In the US, Israel had enormous public support. America fell in love with its tough young friend.
The US had always had enemies in the Arab world. But now it took on the role Britain had filled earlier in the century, as the Arabs’ bogey-man, the cause of all their problems. The CIA’s exceptionally well-connected staff in Amman reported that ‘the time has passed when it would have been easy for the US government to recoup its prestige with the Arabs by uttering a few proper phrases … The US government should make no mistake, it is hated in the Arab world; innate courtesy, apathy from the shock of defeat, and the memory of kindnesses by individual American friends lead most educated Jordanians to conceal this hate, but it is there.’ The only way to reverse matters would be to force Israel to leave the conquered territory.
The risks of a long occupation were clear to Secretary of State Rusk. On 14 June, four days after the war ended, Dean Rusk warned the special committee of the NSC at the White House that if Israel held on to the West Bank ‘it would create a revanchism for the rest of the twentieth century’. At the beginning of the twenty-first, revanchism, the desire of the Palestinians to regain lost territory, is stronger than ever.
But Johnson, even though he saw ‘festering problems’ ahead, made his choice. On 19 June he delivered a speech accepting Israel’s view that a return to the situation as it was on 4 June was ‘not a prescription for peace, but for renewed hostilities’. Before the war Israel had feared that they might, as in 1956, be forced to give up the spoils of victory. But Eshkol and Eban’s patience and restraint in the weeks before the war paid off. Until there was a peace deal, Israel could stay where it was.
Occupation
A 25-year-old Israeli soldier back from the war predicted that Israel was going to be changed irrevocably by the huge territories it had captured. He told his comrades, ‘We’ve lost something terribly precious. We’ve lost our little country … our little country seems to get lost in this vast land.’ All the issues that are now depressingly familiar to anyone who sees news reports about the Arabs and the Israelis – violence, occupation, settlements, the future of Jerusalem – took their current form as a result of the war. The shape of the occupation emerged very quickly. Warnings about the dangers that lay ahead were ignored.
Just after the war ended, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, warned Israel against the seductive charms of victory. In a speech at Beit Berl, the think-tank of the Israeli left, he said that staying in the territories would distort the Jewish state and might even destroy it. Israel must keep Jerusalem, but everything else should go back to the Arabs immediately, with or without a peace agreement. But Ben-Gurion, the architect of Israeli independence, seemed way out of touch. He was old, bad tempered and ignored. Abba Eban, the foreign minister, was alarmed by new maps of Israel that showed it stretching from the Golan to Suez and running along the entire length of the river Jordan. They were ‘not a guarantee of peace but an invitation to early war’. Eban believed that Israel’s legitimacy derived from the fact that it had accepted that British-ruled Palestine would be partitioned between the Jews and the Arabs. He wanted to use the captured territory as a bargaining chip for negotiation, not as a place for expansion or settlement.
But the mood in Israel blew away any suggestion of caution as decisively as the Israeli army had dealt with the Arabs. In just under a week of war the Israeli public went from despair to the joy of deliverance. Israelis were never in as much danger as they thought they were, thanks to their military strength and the Arabs’ weakness. But although Israeli generals knew it, the public did not. Abba Eban, more and more worried about the way the new post-war Middle East was developing, felt as if he was ‘in an isolated realm of anxiety while the noise of unconfined joy kept intruding through the window’.
The 1967 war made Israel into an occupier, which more than anything is why it still matters. Overnight it gained control of the lives of more than one million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The experience has been a disaster for Israelis and Palestinians. By 2003 Israel had become a coloniser of land in which the Palestinian population had trebled. Abba Eban predicted that Palestinians would not lose their ‘taste for flags, honour, pride, and independence’, but the Israeli occupation still seeks to make them into a subject people. The occupation has created a culture of violence that cheapens life and brutalises the people who enforce and impose the occupation and those who fight it. Human rights and self-determination are denied to Palestinians. With nowhere else to go, more and more of them have turned to the extremists.
The signs were there from the beginning. After Israel’s victory was secured, some of the fighting soldiers found occupation duties distasteful. Being a conqueror, one complained, ‘destroys human dignity … I felt it happening to me, felt myself losing respect for people’s lives.’ When they were relieved, they were just as dismayed by the effect that occupation had on rear-echelon soldiers who ‘suddenly considered themselves tough … [and] found this a good opportunity to play top dog’. In November 1967 a British reporter visited the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives in Hebron. It is a holy place for both Jews and Muslims. The soldier on the door asked him to cover his head, out of respect for the Jewish faith. When the reporter offered to take off his shoes too, in deference to Muslim sensibilities, the soldier told him not to bother. The mutual hatred has deepened ever since. Anyone who doubts how little respect most Israeli soldiers have for Palestinians after nearly forty years as occupiers – and how much sullen hatred they receive in return – need only spend a couple of hours at a checkpoint. Of course there was hatred on both sides before the war. The difference afterwards was that the two sides came into daily cont
act.
In June 1967, with a political career still only a gleam in his eye, General Ariel Sharon left his headquarters in Sinai and flew back to Israel in a small helicopter. He told the pilot to sweep low along the coast. As they passed places Israel had captured – Jebel Libni, Al-Arish, Rafah, Gaza – Sharon tried to shout something over the thumping of the engine to his travelling companions, who included Yael Dayan, the daughter of the minister of defence. ‘He was stretching one hand as if showing us the view, in case we hadn’t noticed it, and murmuring something. On a piece of paper – as it was obvious we couldn’t hear – he wrote, “All of this is ours”, and he was smiling like a proud boy.’ While they were still in the desert, they had all talked about what the scale of the victory meant. They agreed that ‘the previous borders and armistice agreements were annulled by the war’. Yael Dayan, who went on to become a Labour politician closely identified with the peace movement, concluded at the end of the war that Israel had become ‘something new, safer, larger, stronger and happier’. Sharon was part of the government that presided over the return of Sinai to the Egyptians after the two countries made peace. The biggest question about his time as prime minister, which began in 2001, is whether he will do the same for the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.
Another cock-a-hoop general was Ezer Weizman, who created the air force that won the war. He had always been open about his belief that Israel had the right to ‘Hebron and Nablus and all of Jerusalem’, even though his views were politically incorrect for most of his colleagues who, unlike Weizman, were from the Israeli left. When he was air force commander the straight-talking Weizman used to lecture his subordinates that the Arabs living on the hills of the West Bank saw Israel as a tantalizing stripper of a country, ‘green, flourishing, prosperous, twinkling at night with a mass of lights … And you know what happens to a healthy man when he watches a rousing striptease act? Right, that’s exactly what happens to him! Therefore there won’t be any choice. The Arab will have to be moved away from Israel’s naked borders. It’s the only way of knocking these exciting ideas of a masculine conquest of Israel out of his head!’
Jerusalem
Just after the war the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote a story of redemption set around Israel’s victory called ‘A Beggar in Jerusalem’. It ends with the beggar, a symbol of exile, standing at the Wailing Wall preaching that victory came from the Jews’ own tragedy. The lost communities of Eastern Europe ‘emptied of their Jews, these names severed from their life source, had joined forces and built a safety curtain – an Amud Esh, a pillar of fire – around the city which had given them a home. Sighet and Lodz, Vilna and Warsaw, Riga and Bialystock, Drancy and Bratzlav: Jerusalem had once again become the memory of an entire people.
‘“And the dead”, the preacher was saying in a vibrant voice. “The messenger who is alive today, the victor of today, would be wrong to forget the dead. Israel defeated its enemies – do you know why? I’ll tell you. Israel won because its army, its people, could deploy six million more names in battle.”’
The novelist Amos Oz, who fought as a paratrooper in the Sinai, was one of the few Israelis who questioned Israel’s right to all of Jerusalem. Oz saw the mother of a soldier from his kibbutz who was killed in the fighting for Jerusalem weeping for her dead son. The young man’s name was Micha Hyman. One of her neighbours, trying to comfort her, said, ‘Look, after all, we’ve liberated Jerusalem, he didn’t die for nothing.’ Mrs Hyman burst out, ‘The whole of the Wailing Wall isn’t worth Micha’s little finger as far as I’m concerned…’ Oz concluded: ‘If what you’re telling me is that we fought for our existence, then I’d say it was worth Micha Hyman’s little finger. But if you tell me it was the Wall we fought for, then it wasn’t worth his little finger. Say what you like – I do have a feeling for those stones – but they’re only stones. And Micha was a person. A man. If dynamiting the Wall today would bring Micha back to life, then I’d say blow it up!’
But Oz was in a small minority. Israel’s possession of the stones of the Wailing Wall sent shivers up and down the whole country, among the religious, the secular, even the atheists. They all believed the sacrifices of the men who had died fighting for Jerusalem were well worth it. Israel seemed more complete. The historic capital of the Jewish people was in Jewish hands and they planned to keep it that way. ‘Jerusalem is beyond discussion’ was the way Yael Dayan and her friends at General Sharon’s headquarters put it in the desert, and their view was shared by almost every Israeli. Some suggestions emerged that the holy places in the Old City might be in some sort of international framework, but always under overall Israeli control.
Standing at the Wall, close to its stones, minutes after it was captured, Yoel Herzl felt an emotional connection with Israel for the first time in his life. Until then, he had always felt like an outsider, though he idolised Uzi Narkiss, who was standing not far from him, the general who had given him his chance and made him his adjutant. Herzl was born in Romania, where the Nazis killed his father. In 1947, Herzl and his family decided to escape the new communist regime to get to Palestine. On the first leg of the journey Soviet soldiers opened fire at them as they tried to cross into Hungary. In a confused few minutes in a dark forest the young boy, barely a teenager, was separated from his mother and brothers. The Russians put him in an orphanage. Four years later, the local communist party boss, a Jew who had known his father, took pity on Herzl. He let him join his family who had made it to what had become Israel.
As soon as he could, Herzl joined the IDF. ‘It’s hard to understand, a small Jewish boy, always being hit and in the corner, coming to be an officer in your own land.’ Herzl decided that no one was going to hit him again. But it was not easy. He never felt accepted by the native-born kibbutzniks who dominated the army. ‘It all came so easily to them. They didn’t understand what it was like outside, with no rights and no self-esteem … People like me weren’t accepted. They used to laugh at me when I studied at night. I finished high school after I became an officer. Even when I was an officer, I was never accepted in the group. But I didn’t care what they said.’ But it all changed at the Wall. Herzl felt a rush of emotion. Israel – Jerusalem – felt like a part of him for the first time. ‘People had no heartfelt connection with Jerusalem until they arrived and saw the Wall. From that second Jerusalem took a big part of my heart. I will always be ready to fight for it, not because it was our ancient capital, but because of the way the Jordanians treated it. They tried to destroy our Jewish holy places.’
Many religious Jews believed that the victory was a miracle that had been given to them by God. Hanan Porat, the devout paratrooper who fought at Ammunition Hill with Battalion 66, never forgot the sight of his secular comrades weeping at the Wall a few minutes after they captured it: ‘I had the sense that here in Jerusalem the inner truth of the Jewish nation was revealed. It was a miracle because the truth of the Bible was combined with the truth of life. An electric current ran right through the people of Israel. I’m talking about soldiers in Sinai who jumped off their tanks and danced when they heard or the Jews in Russia or the United States who also felt it. No one imagined how strong it could be. The connection between the pain of losing friends who were killed and the happiness of the return created a critical mass of feelings that had never existed before.’ For Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Porat’s teacher and mentor, the Israeli army was doing God’s work. ‘The IDF is total sanctity. It represents the rule of the people of the Lord over his land.’
Some Jews looked at their scriptures and deduced that the time of the Messiah was upon them. One rabbi wrote that the war was ‘an astounding divine miracle … through conquest the whole of Israel has been redeemed from oppression, from Satan’s camp. It has entered the realm of sanctity.’ The gift had strings: ‘If, God forbid, we should return even a tiny strip of land we would thereby give control to the evil forces, to the camp of Satan.’ Not all religious Jews agreed. Some believed that the best theological resp
onse to the victory would be to make enemies into friends. Gershom Scholem, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century who pioneered the study of kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, warned against the abuse of scripture for political reasons. The upsurge in messianism, he feared, would lead to catastrophe.
But the warnings were ignored. The ‘electric current’ that Hanan Porat and his friends felt as they captured the Old City powered the movement of Jewish settlers into occupied land, especially the West Bank. Religious fervour combined with a Zionist imperative to settle new land created one of the most dynamic and powerful political movements in Israel, that opposes the return of even a grain of sand.
Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem matters because it has deepened its conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Islamic world. Once again, there were warnings. Bob Anderson, President Johnson’s trusted adviser on Arab attitudes and his go-between with Nasser, told him on 6 July 1967 that Jerusalem had a special significance for Arabs: ‘The Old City of Jerusalem is capable of stirring mobs in the streets to the point where the fate of our most moderate friends in the Middle East will be in jeopardy and the basis laid for a later holy war.’ But Israel insisted it had the only legitimate claim to Jerusalem. It came from the ancient Jewish kingdom which had its capital in Jerusalem 2,000 years before and the prayers and dreams of generations of Jews that one day they would return from an exile that started when the Romans destroyed their Temple in AD 70. But history does not stop. Muslim and Christian claims to Jerusalem had developed in the 1,897 years between the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the Israeli Paratroop Brigade’s return to the Temple Mount in 1967, which General Narkiss calculated was the thirty-seventh time that the Old City had been overrun.
