I was in Karachi, glued to the radio. Radio Pakistan was saying that Egypt was winning while the BBC was saying the Arabs were losing. When the news broke on June 9, we were all stunned.
The Arabs, despite outnumbering the Israelis, had lost not only the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip but also Jerusalem (home to the revered Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest in Islam), the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Triumphant Israeli troops began worshipping at the Wailing Wall, saying that they had been waiting for this moment for two thousand years.
Israel claimed to have attacked in self-defense. The proverbial David had taken out Goliath. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser reigned but was reinstated by “popular” demand. In November 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242 calling for an Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories.
Some four decades later, I was listening to an American scholar at the Commonwealth Club of California. The topic given to him was ‘War or Peace in the Middle East’. He changed it to ‘Peace in the Middle East’. He said that peace would only take place when one side had conclusively defeated the other, as in Pax Romana.
The speaker even supported the profiling of Muslims at airports. I was amazed that a third of the audience applauded him.
When he had finished, the moderator, the foreign affairs editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, addressed the speaker and said that he had come across as even more hawkish than anyone in Israel. Unfazed, the speaker said he was speaking in America’s best interest. The moderator asked, “Will Israel exist in 25 years?” The speaker paused and then said that Israel would exist but it may not be a democracy because the Arab population may be in the majority by then.
The Arabs, despite outnumbering the Israelis, had lost not only the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip but also Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Triumphant Israeli troops began worshipping at the Wailing Wall, saying that they had been waiting for this moment for 2000 years.
In 1973, six years after the Six Day War, Israel found itself fighting the Yom Kippur War. The Egyptians caught the Israelis on the back foot. Taken by surprise, Israel came close to losing the war.
Five years later, in 1978, the Camp David Accords were signed between Egypt and Israel. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.
For reasons unknown, Jordan and Syria were left out of the accords. Egypt failed to put pressure on Israel to resolve the Palestinian issue. In 1981, Egyptian soldiers gunned down Egyptian President Anwar Sadat while he was reviewing a military parade.
The same year, 1981, a book titled Getting to Yes, was published. It stated that most problems can be resolved through negotiations but some can’t, and cited the Arab-Israel conflict as an example of the latter.
In 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed, creating the Palestinian National Authority. The Palestinians recognized the existence of Israel. Unfortunately, the accords were honoured more in breach than in observance.
In 1996, the Israelis under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the Western Wall Tunnel as part of an archaeological expedition of the Temple Mount. The ensuing riots killed some 80 people. I was in Cairo and asked an Egyptian friend why the tourist traffic from Israel had plummeted. He drew his finger across the neck, and said the Israelis know what will happen to them if they set foot on Egyptian soil.
While history has shown that Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was pyrrhic, it continues to be admired by some. To wit, the Jerusalem Post, wrote recently, “The Six Day War was so revolutionary and so transformative, that in many ways it surpassed the achievements of 1948. Thousands of years ago, God created our natural world in six days. Fifty-five years ago, He reshaped history in six hurried days.”
The Palestinians continue to suffer the travails of Israeli occupation. In response, some extremists shoot missiles at Israel. Israel has built an Iron Dome to shield itself. But the dome cannot stop the suicide bombers.
The Six Day War may have been the war to end all wars, to establish an everlasting Pax Israel. But it failed to do so. As David Smith noted recently, “The killing of a star Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Aqleh, and the appalling images of Israeli riot police attacking her funeral cortege, highlight the abyss: a peace process no longer worth of the name, the dream of co-existence lost.”
In 2017, on the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, Gal Beckerman reviewed several books about the war and said, poignantly, that only one of the new books “is actually about the war itself. Most of them are concerned with the seventh day, the one in which all of us are still living”. Beckerman noted that the war created a grand delusion that peace would arrive with the creation of two states.
He further wrote, “Israel is no longer seen as the weak and passive actor threatened with a second Holocaust and forced into a pre-emptive attack, but as a confident strategist taking advantage of Egypt and Syria’s blundering brinkmanship to fulfill a long-planned expansion.”
The hardcore Israelis claim that the entire land from the Mediterranean to Jordan river is theirs, while the Palestinians think that very same land is theirs, giving “birth to a messianic settler movement and violent strains of Palestinian terrorism”.
In 2020, the Abraham Accords were signed between Israel, UAE and Bahrain. Later, Sudan and Morocco joined the accords as well. But these countries are located far away from Israel. The Accords do nothing to resolve the Palestinian issue, which remains the proverbial elephant in the room.
The Palestinians continue to suffer the travails of Israeli occupation. In response, some extremists shoot missiles at Israel. Israel has built an Iron Dome to shield itself. But the dome cannot stop the suicide bombers.
The David-Goliath metaphor is flipped on its head, with Israel being Goliath and Palestine David. Back in 2003, I wrote, “The best defense against the suicide bombers is to take away their rallying cry, which is the illegitimacy of Israeli occupation. Israel should declare a unilateral cease-fire with the Palestinians, and stop carrying out attacks against the militants. Ultimately, it should withdraw from all remaining occupied territories and eliminate the illegal settlements from the West Bank, as it committed to doing during the Oslo Accords of 1993”.
The UNSC Resolution 242 has yet to be honoured in its entirety. Until that’s done, Israelis will not live in peace.