Tom Segev: 1967

Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007, Metropolitan Books) is a sprawling history with little on the war itself, hardly anything on the Arabs, little on the diplomacy, not much historical context, and even less on its subsequent effects. In other words, it's basically a volume of Israeli navel-gazing. Segev argues that in order to understand the war you have to understand Israel. He's basically right, inasmuch as the whole thing makes so little sense in any other framework.

The Jewish/Zionist immigrants to Palestine fought a war in 1947-49 to capture as much land as possible with as few non-Jews as possible. To this end, they nominally accepted a UN resolution to partition the territory, but didn't accept the partition borders proposed by the UN. Instead, they went to war, expanding their territory, and driving most of the non-Jewish inhabitants of that territory into exile. Segev has previously written about the Mandate period in One Palestine, Complete and the 1947-49 war in 1949: The First Israelis. He also wrote a book on Israeli's relationship to the Holocaust, The Seventh Million. These are all fascinating works of history, full of telling detail.

From the end of the 1947-49 war until 1967, Israel had never been satisfied with its borders. The 700,000 Palestinians who had fled or been expelled in 1947-49 were stuck in refugee camps, prevented from returning, while Israel settled more than a million Jewish immigrants. Israel declined to sign peace treaties with neighboring countries, not least because a continuing state of belligerency provided legal cover for refusing to allow the return of any refugees. Israel launched an aggressive war in 1956 against Egypt, and engaged in numerous border incidents with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Israel built up its military forces, and was by 1967 well on its way to producing nuclear weapons. A pretext for the 1967 war was set up when the UN withdrew troops that had been stationed on Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula since the 1956 war, allowing Egypt to close the Straits of Tiran, as well as the Suez Canal, to Israeli shipping. In June 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt, which rapidly expanded into attacks on Syria and Jordan. Over six days, Israel was able to seize significant territories from each of its adversaries, giving Israel control of all of Palestine and then some, rectifying all (well, most) of the regrets they had about the borders coming out of the 1947-49 war.

The 1967 war led to several attempts, both by force and through diplomacy, by Egypt to recover its lost territories, where the Suez Canal was especially significant. Israel eventually returned Sinai to Egypt as part of a separate peace deal brokered by US president Jimmy Carter. That deal set up a framework for dealing with the rest of the conflict, but Israel has been unable to come to terms, either in returning lands seized by armed aggression or in permitting the inhabitants of those lands to exercise equitable political rights. The reason for Israel's intransigence is deeply buried in the core beliefs of Zionism and the history of Israel's struggle to exist as a Jewish State.

I've marked quite a few quotes here. I don't have time to provide much of a narrative between quotes, but they pretty much stand on their own.

Some small bits of context: David Ben-Gurion was the dominant political figure in the founding of the Israeli state. He ran the Mapai (Labor) political party and its social institutions, including the Histadrut (labor federation) and Haganah (militia) around which the Israeli state was formed. He had "retired" a couple of times -- he was in his 80s in 1967 -- but couldn't stand how his successors ran the government, bringing him back into politics. The prime object of his scorn in 1967 was Mapai Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, and their personal rivalry looms large in the book, even though there is very little practical difference in their positions. Ben-Gurion had split with Mapai to form an opposition political party, and had taken several key players with him, including military hero Moshe Dayan and the omnipresent Shimon Peres. The chief of staff of Israel's Defense Forces (IDF) was Yitzhak Rabin. Below Rabin were numerous generals who, like Rabin, were extreme hawks -- Ariel Sharon turned out to be the most flamboyant, but at the time he was just one of many. Israel's most important military alliance up to 1967 was with France -- actually, a legacy of France's occupation of Algeria, which had recently ended under Charles de Gaulle. But Israel was developing close contacts with the United States at the time, and Segev goes into the relationship with Lyndon Johnson and a handful of influential Jewish friends who served as interlocutors between Israel and the White House. Once the Straits of Tiran were closed, the only thing that held Israel back from war was getting leave from the US to attack. (As it turned out, Johnson was not very happy over the war, but it cost Israel little in the short term and wound up cementing an alliance that has only grown deeper since.) Abba Eban was Israel's foreign minister at the time. He winds up being the front man for diplomatic purposes, but has little effect on policy here. Golda Meir was chairman of the Mapai party, but has little direct role. She replaced Eshkol as prime minister shortly after the war, and is probably better remembered today. Menachem Begin was the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, which eventually organized as the Likud party. He was regarded as an extremist at the time, but was invited into the "unity" government in 1967, which helped legitimize him politically. He later became prime minister, and was responsible for the invasion of Lebanon.

Another name that appears below is Yohoshua Bar-Dayan, who was a private in the IDF reserves, of no particular significance, except that he wrote a war diary that is featured extensively in Segev's book.

(pp. 15-16):

Some months before the war, Moshe Dayan had visited Vietnam. "The Americans are winning everything here -- except the war," he wrote when he returned. Not long after June 1967, the opposite could have been said of the Israelis: their only achievement was actually winning the war. Nothing was gained by occupying the territories captured in the war. But swept away by fear and subsequently by the intoxication of victory, their emotions often propelled them to act against their national interests, a pattern of behavior the Israelis often attributed to the Arabs, prompting the British ambassador to write in amazement to his superiors in London: "It is remarkable how often the Israelis can behave in a manner more Arab than the Arabs." There was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it, which is what makes the story of Israel in 1967 so difficult to comprehend.

(p. 67):

The Zionist movement had adopted liberal democratic ideals from the first. Jewish leaders in Palestine were committed to socialism and social-democratic principles. But during the thirty years prior to independence they were often forced to choose between humanistic socialist principles and the national interest, and they usually chose the latter. Zionism rejected the idea that the Jews of Europe could ever attain equal rights in their countries, and so it called for them to move to their own state. Many of the founders believed that the Arabs in Palestine should also move to other countries, as if it were a historical rule that minorities could not achieve equal rights. "These Arabs should not be living here, just as American Jews should not be living in America," said David Ben-Gurion in 1950.

(pp. 67-69):

Eight out of every ten Arabs living in Palestine prior tot he establishment of Israel became refugees; some 20 percent of Palestinian Arabs -- approximately 160,000 people -- remained within the borders of the new country. Shocked and defeated, they became citizens of a state at war with their own people. The language, religion, and culture of the new nation were foreign to them. By 1967, their numbers had almost doubled, to 312,000, making them roughly 12 percent of Israel's population. In the Galilee and the so-called Triangle area in the north, they were the majority. Most were Muslims, with a minority of Christians, Druze, and others. They lived predominantly in villages. The population was relatively young; there were six people in an average Arab family, as opposed to four in a Jewish family. By 1967, six out of ten Israeli Arabs had been born after the establishment of the state. As Israeli citizens, they were entitled to vote and run for the Knesset, but they were not Israelis with equal rights, or equal duties. Very few served in the IDF. The state viewed them as a security risk, and since Israel's establishment they had been subject to martial law.

Martial law was the product of emergency laws imposed by the British in Palestine, laws that had been designed to, among other things, subjugate the Jewish population. Jewish lawyers who had tried to fight these regulations at the time had compared them to Nazi policy. In daily life, martial law was manifested mainly in restrictions imposed on residents' mobility. Whenever they wished to leave their area of residence they had to appear at the military governor's offices and obtain a permit, which stated not only the destination and the date, but also the time of departure and return. The permit was required for every purpose, whether for travel to work, business, medical treatment, or to visit relatives. Weddings, funerals, surgery, going to the movies in the next town -- all required a permit. Obtaining permits means standing in lines. There were different types of permits, issued on forms that periodically changed. Permits often entailed extensive interrogation and petitions. Granting and withholding permits were done at the discretion of the governor, and often depended on his mood or other arbitrary factors. Not all of the governor's representatives were immune to accepting favors of various kinds. Naturally, the travel permits served as a means of oppression and control: people were asked to spy on their neighbors, to denounce them, all in order to obtain travel permits. Thousands of people were punished by means of orders forbidding them from leaving their places of residence, or even by deportation orders that forced them to live away from their homes.

Martial law was imposed not only because of security considerations but also to facilitate the state's confiscation of land from Arabs and to control their political activities. Over the years, the state confiscated roughly half of all Arab-owned land and transferred it to the Jewish National Fund's authority. [ . . . ]

By 1967, most Israeli Arabs were living in poverty and under precarious conditions. Although their circumstances had improved over the years, they suffered discrimination in practically every aspect of life. Their average income was less than half of the general average in Israel. Seventy-four percent of Arab villages were not hooked up to the electricity grid, 75 percent were not connected to the national water system, and 20 percent had no access roads. Not a single Arab village had paved streets, nor had sewage infrastructure been laid. Public housing was seldom built for Arabs. Only three out of ten Arabs were insured by the national health fund, whereas eight of every ten Jews were. In six out of ten Arab villages there was no clinic operated by the health fund. Fifteen percent of students in elementary schools were Arab, but the state allocated only 3 percent of its education budget to Arab education. An Arab farmer made between 30 and 50 percent less than a Jewish farmer. A Jewish construction worker made up to twice as much as an Arab. In the spring of 1966, during the economic recession, the unemployment rate among Arabs was twice as high as among Jews. Until then most Israelis had tended to ignore the Arabs' plight, but it too became unavoidable, reinforcing the sudden and painful recognition that the Israeli success story was, to a great extent, only a myth.

(pp. 74-75):

Opposition to martial law came at first from the left and was expressed by the Communists and the Ahdut Ha'avoda party together with Mapam, both socialist parties with many constituents among kibbutzim. They gained reinforcement from the right: Menachem Begin, the leader of the Herut party, demanded repeal of the emergency laws, which were left over from the British Mandate and had been designed to repress him and his movement. He called to replace them with Israeli statutes. The Knesset repeatedly debated lifting martial law. While prime minister, Ben-Gurion had insisted that the relevant laws not be repealed, but to appease his opposition he agreed to periodic improvements in the Arabs' living conditions and introduced various measures relaxing the severity of their governance. Ben-Gurion's resignation in 1963 gave momentum to the fight against martial law. [ . . . ]

At the beginning of 1966, Isser Harel, a former head of the Security Service and the prime minister's adviser on security affairs, voiced support for revoking martial law, thus opening the door to dismantling the legal apparatus. On November 8, 1966, Eshkol announced in the Knesset that martial law had "come to an end." It was a dramatic announcement, but not accurate: control had simply been transferred from the army to the police. The prime minister's office judged that the change would have a positive effect, "especially psychologically." Eshkol's biographer, Yossi Goldstein, wrote that lifting martial law did not reflect Eshkol's humanism: he continued to view the Arabs with suspicion and believed that Jews were entitled to settle the entire country. However, he believed that transferring supervision ove rthe Arabs from the military to the police would reduce their hostility to the state, and that this clearing of the air would make it easier for the state to set up a few dozen Jewish villages in the Galilee. Judaization of the Galilee had always been one of Eshkol's primary interests. He was also at the head of a parliamentary alignment between Mapai, his party, and Ahdut Ha'avoda, which had long been demanding the revocation of martial law, so his decision on the matter was also a function of coalition politics.

A few months later, martial law returned with the occupation of territories gained in the Six Day War. I've long wondered whether the end of martial law over Israeli Arabs wasn't done in preparation for the war. I haven't seen any evidence of this, but it did turn out to be propitious for Israeli propaganda purposes.

(pp. 106-107):

Fewer than twenty thousand immigrants came from the United States during the first two decades after independence. Most U.S. Jews did not even come to visit. Many Israelis derided them for prefering "the humiliations of life in the Diaspora" and anti-Semitic persecutions to national sovereignty in their own land. Presuming that Jews in the United States felt some guilt about not living in Irael, many Israelis expected their American brethren to shower them with hero-worship: whenever the admiration from America seemed to be waning, Israelis felt reason for concern. But these heroes also expected American Jews to help them, and often they saw this assistance as an obligation, practically a tax. They assumed that most Jews agreed with this view, and that when American Jews helped Israel, they were in essence also ensuring their own existence. But a special envoy for the prime minister, Eliezer Livneth, who was sent to the United States in 1967 to learn about the attitudes of Jews there, reported upon his return that many of them looked down on Israel for not being able to survive without their money. The need for assistance "greatly decreases the country's moral standing," wrote Livneh to Eshkol, and asked that Israel demand that American Jews help increase immigration.

(p. 109):

The position of Jewish Americans in relation to Washington was a complex one. Jews did not control the world or America, but the anti-Semitic myth of their power was helpful to the Zionist movement and to the State of Israel, and so it was in the Zionists' best interest to nurture it. Theodor Herzl had deployed the myth of Jewish power to enlist support for the Zionist idea; Chaim Weizmann had done the same to obtain the Balfour Declaration from the British; Nahum Goldman knew how to create the impression that his influence was boundless during negotiations with the German government on reparations for victims of the Nazi persecution. Goldman, a diplomat without a homeland and with half a dozen passports, frequently irritated [Israel's ambassador to the U.S.] Harman, but according to the ambassador he had learned from Goldman about the secret of the "Jewish myth" and how to employ its influence.

Israel attacked the Jordanian town of Samua in retaliation for a Fatah attack that had killed three IDF soldiers (p. 151):

The soldiers destroyed dozens of homes in this way, without allowing the residents time to bring out their belongings. Furniture, rugs, stored food, kitchen equipment, personal documents, family photo albums -- everything was buried under the rubble. Jordan later claimed that more than a hundred homes were blown up; Israel admitted to destroying forty, although an internal report gave the number as sixty. The military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Amman, who visited Samua, estimated that the number of houses destroyed was much higher than Israel's figure. Israel's envoy to Washington, Ephraim Evron, reported that the attaché had seen "many civilians' bodies," which suggested that not all the houses were evacuated before being blown up. Some of the bodies were those of elderly women who had not been able to escape in time, Evron reported.

Operation Shredder, as it was called, grew far beyond the cabinet's expectations, culminating in an air battle with Jordanian forces. A regiment commander in the paratroopers was killed and ten IDF soldiers were wounded. On the Jordanian side, fourteen officers and soldiers were killed and thirty-seven injured; the casualties included a pilot. Upon returning from Samua, the participants in the operation took part in a victory parade of sorts through the streets of Beersheba.

(pp. 174-175):

Many of the soldiers who had fought in the War of Independence felt that David Ben-Gurion had blocked them from conquering territories they could have taken, including the Old City and the West Bank. "I never forgave the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion for not letting us finish the job in '48-'49, both militarily and politically," said former general Yigal Allon. A few weeks before the signing of the agreement that demarcated the Green Line between Israel and Jordan, Allon demanded that Ben-Gurion give Israel "strategic depth" by setting its border along the Jordan River. He felt similarly about the Gaza Strip: if only he and his men had been given a few more days, they would have occupied it. But the government had succumbed to American pressure and ordered a withdrawal. Many of Allon's comrades in arms shared his frustration, and some of them went on to become senior officers, including a few generals. General Ezer Weizman used to say that a Jewish state without all of Jerusalem, without the Western Wall, without Shiloh and Anatot (on the West Bank), was "a fragmented, defective state that would have trouble staying alive." In Israeli history, this failure came to be viewed as the cause of "weeping for generations," and its mark was the Green Line.

(p. 203):

Rabin proposed a number of options. First, Israel could increase its intelligence effort using secret agents born in the countries in which they would operate. Another option was the "Star of David line," which involved sealing all Israeli borders with fences and land mines. There was a third option. "Gentlemen, the Syrian operations against us are harassment. We can lay seventy mines for every one of theirs, and we can lay them deeper. We will begin a war of harassment against their war of harassment at a ten-to-one ratio." This option must be made clear to the Syrians, Rabin said, at which point he began speaking in the second-person plural, as if the Syrians themselves were sitting in the meeting. "You want a small war -- we will respond with a greater blow." He suggested inflaming tensions along the border and exploiting them as an excuse to act, and described the increased number of border incidents as a "gold mine."

(pp. 217-218):

Jerusalem was the last refuge of the Israeli patriot. "Accuse your enemies of betraying Jerusalem, and you are exempt from any further argument with them," wrote Uri Avneri; "prove that you are the only person who truly cares about Jerusalem, and you no longer need to bother trying to find real answers to real problems." In this spirit, Knesset opposition members and a few editorialists annually demanded that the parade should take place in Jerusalem, and Eshkol was required to explain why this was not possible. The opposition thereby emerged as the champion of national dignity, while the government was depicted as a group of weaklings, meekly succumbing to American pressure. In 1966, the opposition on this issue had been strengthened by the additional support of David Ben-Gurion, a powerful orator. That year, the [Independence Day] parade was held in Haifa, and Ben-Gurion announced vociferously that he would boycott it.

(p. 237):

Rabin shared the opinion that the IDF's job was to deter the Arabs so that there would not be a war. He knew that he bore a significant part of the responsibility for the deterrence failures that, in his view, necessitated immediate war. As chief of staff, he was accountable for the intelligence assessment that had dismissed any chance of war with Egypt in the next few years and had therefore seen no reason for restraint on the northern border. Over and over he had lobbied Eshkol to allow an attack against Syria; he had led the campaign of threats against the Syrians, pulling Eshkol along with him. Now he hoped Ben-Gurion would strengthen his resolve. Like most Israelis, he admired Ben-Gurion. But their meeting was miserable, because instead of encouraging Rabin, the old man showered him with accusations not unlike those Rabin had already heard from Dayan in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Like Dayan, Ben-Gurion believed that neither Egypt nor Syria, but Israel itself, was responsible for this crisis.

(pp. 283-284):

The story of Israelis and the Holocaust alternates between true emotion and manipulative argument, which are not always easily distinguished. As soon as the crisis of war began, the press began comparing Nasser to Hitler. In the past, other Arab leaders had been compared to Hitler, but this had been done to insult them, not as part of the situational assessment and a reason to attack. "Nasser speaks clearly, as Hitler did on the eve of the Second World War," wrote Ze'ev Schiff. Nasser's speeches, Radio Cairo broadcasts, and the anti-Semitic cartoons in the Egyptian press prompted this assertion. Ha'aretz published an article by Eliezer Livneh called "The Danger of Hitler Is Returning." Livneh, a former Knesset member for Mapai, also sent a note to Eshkol: "Nasser is Hitler."

Many compared Israel's situation to Czechoslovakia's prior to World War II, when it was abandoned to the Nazis. They recalled that the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had forsaken the Czechs in the Munich accord, and they likened his appeasement policy to Eshkol's approach. Letters and articles to this effect were published in Yediot Aharonot and Maariv. One editor, Shalom Rosenfeld, read a book about the dismantling of Czechoslovakia written by Israeli historian David Vital, and became so worried that he could not sleep all night.

David Ben-Gurion said, "None of us can forget the Nazi Holocaust, and if some of the Arab leaders, with the leader of Egypt at their head, declare day and night that Israel must be destroyed . . . . we should not take these declarations lightly." This was also Israel's official propaganda line. The Foreign Ministry instructed the Israeli embassy in Washington to ask for an urgent meeting with James Reston, associate editor of the New York Times, to persuade him that the only difference between Nasser and Hitler was that Hitler had always claimed he wanted peace, while Nasser was explicit about his aim of destroying Israel. Minister Mordehai Bentov asked Eshkol to set up a "center for psychological warfare" that would focus on the comparison between Hitler and Nasser.

(p. 286):

Rabin, who believed that Israel faced its most difficult trial since the War of Independence, instructed schools and other public buildings to be readied to serve as hospitals and casualty centers. Zerah Warhaftig later recalled asking the chief of staff how many deaths he thought the IDF might sustain, and Rabin estimated perhaps tens of thousands. Ten rabbis from the chief rabbinate and the Tel Aviv Hevre Kaddisha went through the public parks sanctifying them to serve as cemeteries. Only a society drenched in the memory of the Holocaust could have prepared so meticulously for the next one.

All at once, it had become clear how vulnerable and desperate Israelis were. It was not Nasser's threats that had brought this about -- or, at least, not only his threats -- but the quicksand of depression that had pulled so many people down for so many months. It was the disappointment and the feeling that the Israeli dream had run its course. It was the loss of David Ben-Gurion's leadership, the father of the nation, coupled with the lack of faith in Eshkol and the general mistrust of politics. It was the recession and the unemployment; the decline in immigration and the mass emigration. It was the deprivation of the Mizrahim, as well as the fear of them -- the fear that they would erode Israel's European society and culture, that they threatened the Ashkenazi elite. It was the difficulty communicating with the younger generation. It was the boredom. It was the terrorism; the sense that there could be no peace. All these feelings welled up in the week before the war, sweeping through the nation in a tide of insanity. The people had not felt this wretched and isolated since the Holocaust.

(p. 293):

Ariel Sharon said: "Today we have ourselves chopped off the IDF's deterrence capability. We have chopped up our main weapon -- the fear of us." He said Israel was capable of destroying the Egyptian army, but if they gave in on the question of free navigation, "we will open the door to Israel's total destruction." Like Yigal Allon, Sharon invoked the Sinai Campaign and claimed that cooperation with the British and French had been to Israel's detriment. Today Israel is capable of demolishing the Egyptian army on its own, he said, but it was clear that any delay would mean paying a higher price "for something we'll have to do anyway." Up to this point he had been speaking as Sharon the soldier; from here on, he became Sharon the politician: "We also have to keep in mind the domestic consideration of not undermining the people's morale by deciding to wait. The people are ready for a just war. All of our pleading makes us seem weak. The people understand this and feel that they're going to have to pay the price. We have to fight for what is essential."

(p. 296):

They [the generals] knew no more than Eshkol did; and, unlike them, Eshkol was involved in the international repercussions of the situation. As Israel's leader, it was his responsibility to do everything in his power to prevent war. With a head of intelligence admitting that he had been wrong, a chief of staff recovering from a nervous breakdown, and the peculiar outbursts of Ezer Weizman, Eshkol had no reason to privilege the generals' statements over the other factors that had guided him, usually successfully, throughout his life: experience, wisdom, and intuition. Eshkol knew, of course, as everyone did, that Israel had "a fantastic army," and that very fact was a good reason to take a deep breath, as he had put it. He disputed the army's basic premise. Israel had managed for years without the Straits, he reminded the generals; and, he asked rhetorically, "What if we hadn't gotten the Straits in the Sinai Campaign?" He also rejected the thesis that the Egyptian army's presence in the Sinai necessarily called for war. Only two or three months earlier, the Egyptians had moved forces into the Sinai, and Israel had felt no need to start a war then. "It never occurred to me that large Egyptian forces near the border meant we should get up one night and destroy them," said Eshkol, and asked, "Must we live by the sword forever?"

(pp. 310-311):

The day before, Golda Meir had told her colleagues, "This morning my driver got a call, then my son, and they were told that I shouldn't leave the house because the papers said that I was blocking the whole national solution to the composition of the government." Of the possibility that Dayan and Begin might join, she said, "We wouldn't be the first socialist party to hand over power to fascists without a struggle." She was referring to Germany. About a hundred women gathered in front of the Mapai offices demanding that Meir "stop the hate."

(p. 331):

McNamara found Amit's arguments persuasive, and he conveyed them to Johnson the same evening. The president understood that Israel was going to act; he set up a special task force to handle the situation, headed by McGeorge Bundy. Jim Angleton was enthusiastic: for the first time in the history of the Middle East, there was the possibility of solving the region's problems, making it less vulnerable to intrigue and extortion, safer for capital investment and development. The new situation must be quickly exploited. Helms had made sure Israel's positions were reflected in the CIA's recommendations to the president. Angleton stressed the issue's delicacy and asked to preserve complete secrecy.

(p. 334):

Eshkol emerges as a statesman with nerves of steel who withstood all pressure until he could achieve coordination with the United States. It is doubtful whether he believed Israel's existence was truly in danger, and equally doubtful that he was convinced Egypt would attack. He knew what the army knew: that even if Egypt had attacked, Israel would win. But unlike Ben-Gurion, or perhaps even Dayan, Eshkol was not the man who could lead the Israelis to decide against war. His weakness ate away at him, particularly after being forced out of the Ministry of Defense. He wanted to be remembered as a patriot, and at this point the public equated patriotism with war. He also agreed with Dayan and the military that a war might improve Israel's situation.

The war begins (p. 342):

The night before the attack on Egypt, Dayan had ordered the censor to maintain "a fog of war" until the evening. "For the first twenty-four hours we have to be the victims," he said. As long as the world thought Israel was defending itself and fighting for its life, there would be no pressure from the outside to stop the attack. The lack of information greatly increased the public's anxiety: as far as the people in the shelters knew, Arabs might burst in and slaughter them at any moment. The radio reported only enemy action. "The Voice of Thunder" from Cairo claimed, in Hebrew, that Tel Aviv was burning and Palestinian fighters were roaming the streets. "They are not afraid of death, they dispense death!" screamed the announcer. Most Israelis had no other source of information.

(p. 356):

According to his diary, [General Uzi] Narkis told [Jerusalem mayor] Teddy Kollek, "You may yet be the mayor of a unified Jerusalem." That was on the first day of the war, at ten minutes past nine. A few hours later, Narkis ordered Mordechai Gur to break through to the route to Mount Scopus, take over the Rockefeller Museum area in East Jerusalem, and prepare to take the Old City. "Today Jerusalem will be liberated," he announced to his troops. "Today the IDF will erase a stain left on the map of our country twenty years ago, when our holy and ancient capital was torn from the heart of the nation." He described his soldiers as the heirs of the zealous warriors from the time of the Second Temple. "The soldiers of the Central Command have the great fortune to be entrusted with the liberation of the city of eternity, the city of David, the city of the past and the future. Today they stand at the heart of the country, the heart of the nation, the heart of history." The conquest of the West Bank, Narkis said, would fulfill the command's "deep longings."

(pp. 373-374):

Bar-Dayan described a guard who "went nuts." First he bound the prisoners' wrists so tightly that their circulation was cut off. Then he picked up a bayonet, killed one man and injured two others. "Everyone was shocked," Bar-Dayan wrote. "He'll certainly be brought to trial, but when you see thousands of dead people -- suddenly life becomes cheap, to the point where it's hard to describe how cheap it is." In his diary, Bar-Dayan wrote about other soldiers who killed prisoners. He saw bodies. "They lie there, cut down." Some of the soldiers told him, "Any prisoner who shows up -- that's it, he's dead."

(pp. 378-379):

"The feeling was fantastic," Uzi Narkis said later. That Wednesday morning at the Temple Mount, he received the first of a series of preposterous suggestions that came up over the next few days and weeks, apparently under the influence of that same "fantastic feeling." General Goren, the chief rabbi of the IDF, told Narkis that this was the moment to blow up the Dome of the Rock. "Do this and you will go down in history," Goren said, and explained that such a thing could only be done under cover of war: "Tomorrow might be too late." Narkis threatened to throw the rabbi in jail if he did not drop the idea.

(pp. 400-401):

On Saturday evening, when the Sabbath was over, fifteen veteran Jerusalem contractors arrived at the Western Wall with bulldozers and other heavy equipment. One of them shouted, "On thy walls, Jerusalem!" His friends stood and prayed, and they wept. They decided to hold a havdalah ceremony, marking the end of the Sabbath. Some soldiers gave them wine for the blessing. When the ceremony was over, they began to destroy two public toilets at the site. By early Sunday morning they were calling themselves the "Kotel detail" and had decided to commemorate the historic occasion annually. Meanwhile, bulldozers had destroyed 135 homes that had stood in front of the wall.

The Mugrabi houses, as they were known, were a slum. While the contractors knocked down the public toilets, an officer on reserve duty went from house to house, ordering the residents to evacuate. He promised they would be given new homes. The people sobbed and wailed, and begged for time to remove their possessions, to which the officer consented. And so, wrote the journalist Uzi Benziman, "with the contractors still busy smashing the toilets, the people struggled to make their way to a gathering point near Zion Gate. They carried personal belongings and household items on their backs." Some refused to leave their homes. They bulldozers approached and the weeping residents departed only after the walls of their houses began to come down. Floodlights lit up the darkened area. One elderly woman was found beneath the ruins of a wall. She was unconscious and clearly dying, although there were no external signs of injury. She was taken out of the rubble in her bed and efforts were made to help her, beneath the floodlights, among the clouds of dust raised by the bulldozers. By the time medical help arrived, the woman had died.

(pp. 402-403):

Everyone was preoccupied with the question of what to do next. Ben-Gurion claimed that the government would not know how to "consolidate the conquest" in Jerusalem and Hebron. In both places, they should establish great centers of Jewish population, he told Haim Moshe Shapira and Menachem Begin, as if forgetting his earlier opposition to the war. The West Bank should not be returned to Hussein, although its annexation would add a million Arabs to Israel, which posed a grave danger. There was also the problem of the refugees in Gaza. Begin suggested moving them to El Arish and leaving them there. "It is doubtful whether they will want to go," wrote Ben-Gurion. Begin agreed that the West Bank should remain part of Israel.

(pp. 407-408):

During the cabinet meeting discussing the refugees, Dayan expressed satisfaction with the fact that 100,000 had crossed the Jordan. "I hope they all go. If we could achieve the departure of three hundred thousand without pressure, that would be a great blessing. If we could achieve hundreds of thousands from Gaza crossing with UNRWA approval, we would be blessed." He reported that approximately a thousand refugees were leaving every day. Conceding that the situation was "awkward from a public relations point of view," he suggested bringing back the Kalkilya refugees, to which the government consented. They also discussed refugees who had fled the Latrun area; Dayan proposed not bringing them back, and the ministers decided not to decide. a sort of deal had been struck between Dayan and his colleagues: he would agree to the return of the Kalkilya refugees, while they would agree not to readmit those from Latrun.

There were three populated villages in the Latrun area: Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba. Nearby was Dir Ayub, abandoned. The residents were first told to elave their homes and gather in an open area outside the villages. At around nine in the morning, they were instructed over loudspeakers to march toward Ramallah. There were some eight thousand of them. In the general order distributed to Central Command soldiers, Imwas and Yalu were associated with the failure to take the area in 1948 and were described as "terms of disappointment, terms of a long and painful account, which has now been settled to the last cent. Houses suddenly left. Infact. With their potted geraniums, their grapevines climbing up the balconies. The smell of wood-burning ovens still in the air. Elderly people who have nothing more to lose, slowly straggling along."

Journalist Amos Kenan reported on these expulsions, which in many ways are an extension of the expulsions from Ramla and Lydda in the 1948 war (p. 410):

At a meeting of officers a few months after the war, Moshe Dayan said that the destruction of the villages had been done with "Zionist intentions," with which he was entirely in agreement "within the complex framework of the unpleasant and unpopular aspects of fulfilling Zionism." But he added that villages should be destroyed "up to a certain limit" only, which in his opinion must not be breached under any circumstances.

According to Israeli estimates, the war produced between 200,000 and 250,000 refugees. More than half left during and immediately after the war, and the rest in the following months. Thousands were housed in tent camps, in conditions described in a special report to President Johnson as "appalling."

(pp. 429-430):

Three days after the war, Weitz took a tour of Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem. His son, Raanan, head of the Jewish Agency's settlement department, organized a bus for some forty people, including JNF and Jewish Agency officials and a few veterans of the four Gush settlements the Jordanians had occupied in the War of Independence. Weitz went as a delegate of Eshkol.

The prime minister had called him unexpectedly the day after the war ended. When Weitz went to see him at home that evening, Eshkol wanted to know whether the Gush could be resettled, explaining that the head of Mafdal, Haim Moshe Shapira, was already pressuring him: three of the original Gush settlements had been religious. Weitz had brought his son to the meeting. Raanan was a former assistant to Eshkol and his successor in the settlement department. Eshkol's appeal to Weitz did not seem to be coincidental. Humiliated by his ousting from the Defense Ministry, disappointed in his party comrades who had not stood by him on the eve of the war, and feeling generally isolated, Eshkol saw the elderly forester, one of his generation, as a partner in the worldview that had guided him for half a century: the State of Israel depended on settlement; Israelis must populate as much territory as possible, with as few Arabs as possible.

From a Rabin speech at Hebrew University shortly after the war (p. 438):

Rabin described the soldiers' heroism as "a bravery of spirit." When they fought, "a few against a multitude," they did so with "all the resources of spiritual strength." Even as they watched their friends fall beside them, the military units were fueled by "moral values, spiritual reserves, not by weapons or combat strategies." The slogan "The best join the air force," he explained, referred not merely to the soldiers' technical prowess but to "values of moral goodness, values of human goodness."* Rabin concluded, "This is an army that comes from the people and returns to the people a people that rises above itself in the hour of need, and that, when tested, can defeat any enemy thanks to its moral, spiritual, and emotional superiority."

The footnote adds a quote from Benyamin Galai in Maariv: "No slogan has ever proved so true. Indeed the best, the dedicated, the young and the handsome, join the air force. The elite joint he armored corps, the brave the navy, the great the infantry, the all-around excellent the paratroopers, and the slandered the intelligence service." Curious thing to say about the latter.

From a section on "victory albums" -- soldiers' reminiscences of the war, especially from a kibbutznik book, Soldiers Talk (p. 444):

The soldiers recollected how they had gone to war enthusiastically and how they had learned to hate it. They spoke of fear and of how they overcame it, partly because they were afraid of what people on the kibbutz might say about them. They looked back in amazement at the process by which they had become part of the war machine, automatically shooting at human beings. They talked of death, of how they sealed up their feelings and came to hold human life cheap, eventually developing a disregard even for their own lives. They spoke at length about the brotherhood among soldiers and about the difficulty of returning to routine.

Soldiesr Talk was received as a complete and authentic document, an Israeli truth-telling worthy of pride. But the raw material collected by the editors paints a different picture. A Ph.D. dissertation written by Alon Gan, at Tel Aviv University, shows that to a great extent the finished book presented a deliberately constructed myth. Some responses were censored, at times at the participants' own request. Parts of the transcripts were altered, in a few cases to the point of distortion, before the book went to press, in order to suit the words of the image of innocent young soldiers, humanists in distress. The approach might also have been part of the general tendency to shed a positive light on the war itself, and thereby on the annexation of some of the territories occupied in its course. The publicly issued version of the book omitted some of the accounts included in the initial version. According to Gan, "extremely graphic" testimony about war crimes was dropped; he mentioned only some of these in his dissertation.

Censored doubts (p. 445):

One participant, a member of Kibbutz Ein Shemer, asked the editors not to publish his doubts concerning the Zionist idea itself. "I feel increasing despair," he had said, and wondered, "why not go to Canada?" He went on to explain his despondency: "With us, every ten years . . . every so often, we'll have to have a war. . . . It won't be a safe haven for the Jewish people. . . . I fully admit that I don't want to live in a country destined to fight a war every ten years, and I identify with and understand all the Jews in the world who can give money to it but aren't willing to come and live here themselves."

(pp. 458-459):

The foundation of martial law in the territories had been laid years before the war. In December 1963, Chief of Staff Zvi Zur had appointed General Chaim Herzog as military governor of the West Bank in the event that Israel occupied the area.

The army issued several handbooks for future governors, containing a wealth of information about the legal basis and the organizational structure of a military government, as well as a series of guidelines for handling civilian populations. The assumption had been that most of the residents would neither flee nor be deported. The governors were to treat them according to the Geneva Conventions, which was also provided in a Hebrew translation. According to Shlomo Gazit, the coordinator of operations in the territories, the architects of the military government derived some assistance from a book by Gerhard von Glahn, an American expert on international law, but a significant portion of the instructions were rooted in the British Mandate. The future governors also learned from the brief Gaza occupation after the Sinai Campaign. Many members of the military government staff in the territories had previously been part of the martial-law apparatus that had overseen the Arab citizens of Israel.

Although Israel prided itself on its "enlightened occupation," the following describes how it handled a "trade strike" in Nablus (pp. 474-475):

The punishment was designed to affect everyone. The intention was to hurt their pockebooks and their dignity. A curfew was imposed on the city, bus service was halted, twenty randomly selected stores were forcibly closed, and the telephone network was shut down. Soldiers were ordered to harass residents with house searches. Various public figures were arrested and humiliated. The movement of goods between Nablus and Jordan was frozen. Benefits were offered to Hebron tradesmen, competitors with Nablus merchants. Within three weeks Nablus surrendered, in a fairly humiliating meeting with Dayan himself. The mayor promised to cooperate.

(pp. 493-494):

That summer, Israel perceived the occupation as a remarkable success story, and increasingly Jerusalem was seen as a laboratory of Jewish-Arab coexistence. Israelis flocked to Arab restaurants in East Jerusalem; Palestinian children sold newspapers in the west, and some even came to visit the Israel Museum's Youth Wing. The civil status granted to East Jerusalem residents, and the Arab-Israeli educational system imposed on their children, strengthened the impression that they had become Israeli Arabs. There were virtually no violent incidents at first. [ . . . ]

But coexistence was a false perception, or an optical illusion: Jerusalem was far from achieving "a peaceful routine," not only because the Arabs opposed the occupation but also because most Israelis did not want them there. In a survey, the municipality found that approximately 85 percent of Jewish Jerusalemites believed the occupation of the east would mean an increase in crime and create severe social problems. Seventy-five percent feared that unification of the city would result in mixed marriages between Jews and Arabs. More than half (54 percent) would not agree to send their children to schools with Arab children. They had a poor opinion of Arabs: the primary characteristics they attrihuted to them were "hypocrisy," "poverty," "cowardice," "primitiveness," and "poor hygiene." Few Jews considered them "peaceful" or "educated." Almost nine out of ten said Jews should be allowed to live in East Jerusalem, but nearly six in ten said Arabs should not be permitted to live in the west. Approximately eight out of ten said they would not agree to work in an Arab-owned factory. About half said Arabs should be allowed to work in West Jerusalem, while seven out of ten said they would not employ an Arab maid.

(pp. 502-503):

The main argument revolved around the future of the West Bank. Zalman Aran said, "I'm telling you plainly that we don't need the West Bank. It will do us more harm than good." He was afraid, of course, of the Palestinians. "To this day, I love Eretz Israel more than the State of Israel," Aran said, but as he considered Israel's future with the West Bank, he was sure that "we will choke on it." He prophesied that the West Bank would be the downfall of the state.

The days of empires were gone, added Minister of Justice Shapira: this was the age of decolonization. There were those who denounced Israel as an agent of colonialism, and if it insisted on ruling the Arabs of the West Bank, their voices would only grow louder. "Every progressive person will say, "Look, this is why we called these people the torch-bearers of imperialism and colonialism. They want to turn the West Bank, which is populated by Arabs, into a colony of the State of Israel.'" It was not merely a question of what people would say, Shapira continued. Annexation of the West Bank would turn Israel into a binational state, and it wouldn't be long before the Jews became a minority. "Then we're finished with the whole Zionist enterprise and we'll be a ghetto here."

This is a proposal for a dependent Palestinian statelet put together by David Kimche of Mossad, based on discussions with Aziz Shehade (whose son, Raja Shehadeh, wrote about this in his book Strangers in the House). It didn't go anywhere, but bears resemblance (and common limits) with Barak's final status proposals (pp. 513-514):

The Palestinian state would be "under IDF patronage," without an army but with a police force. An "Israeli military delegation" would be "credentialed" to the government of Palestine, and the IDF would have a permanent presence in the Jordan Valley and would protect the state of Palestine from external threats. The border between Palestine and Israel would be "based on" the 1947 partition borders, but Israel would annex some territories, including the Latrun corridor. To preserve Palestinian "dignity," Israel would also "give up" a few of its own Arab villages. The state of Palestine would have access to the sea through an Israeli port, and free passage between the West Bank and Gaza. East Jerusalem would remain in Israel, but there would be a Palestinian "submunicipality" in the Old City, and the holy sites would receive "special status." The Palestinian state would establish its capital "at the closest possible point to Jerusalem," which would be part of "greater Jerusalem." Israel would undertake to solve the refugee problem by means of an international fund that would encourage the refugees to leave Gaza and the West Bank and settle in other countries. As a first step toward founding the state, Kimche and his colleagues suggested convening Palestinian public figures in a congress of sorts. The proposal was dated June 14, but even then, four days after the war, it was not the first: Dayan and Eban had started receiving proposals for a Palestinian state on June 9.

(p. 515):

The Israelis' notes reveal an ambivalent value system in their attitude toward the collaborators: they needed them, they encourage them, and they scorned them. "He seems like a coward, flattering those stronger than him," they wrote of one man. And of another, "a groveling type, interested in collaborating with the Jews." Of Sheikh Jaabari they wrote, "Greedy and easily bribed. Hated in the West Bank because of his corruption." But these were precisely the people they were looking for: "We understand that he is inclined to look for a positive settlement solution. He will receive our encouragement and full support."

(p. 521):

Khatib, a former Jordanian ambassador to Egypt, told Eshkol about his acquaintance with Nasser and tried to convince him that Nasser had changed his fundamental approach to Israel, as he himself had done. "If I had been asked before the Six-Day War whether I was willing to recognize the Jewish state's right to exist, even just in the area of Tel Aviv, I would have replied no," he said. Now, everything was different. The Arabs recognized the State of Israel, and peace would have to be made. He tried to persuade Eshkol that Israel's demand to expand the state boundaries to security borders was meaningless. "What are secure borders in a time of rockets and other modern tools of warfare?"

(p. 542):

And so Israel missed the great opportunity offered by the victory in the Six-Day War to heal the malignant wound, as Ezer Weizman called it, left by the War of Independence. This was the "refugee blunder," Weizman argued many years later, "a painful and damaging blunder, perhaps no less so than the intelligence and military blunders committed prior to the Yom Kippur War." It is hard to explain. In the course of less than two decades, the 600,000 Jews living in Israel at its inception took in more than a million new immigrants. They built hundreds of new communities, including cities, all within the confines of the Green Line. The refugees could have been rehabilitated as well.

There were several alternatives, and there were adequate plans to settle the refugees in Gaza and in the West Bank. Their rehabilitation would not have required allowing them to return to their homes in Israel. Nor would it have necessitated a decision on the future of the territories -- whether withdrawal or annexation. The millionairse who offered to finance the rehabilitation were only waiting for the call. And it was an undertaking that could have offered something for everyone: national interest, humanitarian decency, Jewish solidarity, economic and social momentum, and international prestige; Zionist history would have seemed that much more noble.

But Eshkol, Dayan, and the other partners in the blunder believed there was no reason to hurry. Lacking vision, courage, and compassion, captivated by the hallucinations of victory, they never accepted Israel's role in the Palestinian tragedy, or perhaps they simply did not have the courage to admit it; this was probably the main inhibition. And perhaps they truly believed that one day they would succeed in getting rid of them.

(p. 548):

Eshkol spoke often about the future of the territories too. His style was light-years away from Dayan's: less arrogant, not as blunt, and tormented with doubts, he tended to think out loud, which often made him sound hesitant. Dayan never shared the rough drafts of his ideas with anyone; as a result, he always sounded as if he knew exactly what he wanted, even though he frequently contradicted himself. In a conversation with a group of IDF generals, Eshkol left no doubt about what he wanted: a large country with no Arabs in it. But, as he had often done int he past, he projected a sense that Israel was trapped by historical factors and processes over which it had no control.

(p. 551):

[U.S.] Ambassador Walworth Barbour tried to impress upon the State Department how difficult he found it to determine who was a dove and who was a hawk, even in the Knesset. It took him eleven pages to classify the cabinet ministers, and he concluded that approximately half were doves and half were hawks. The ambassador's difficulty resulted primarily from the fact that even the doves were unwilling to give up East Jerusalem[,] Gaza, or other territories. And so their underlying rationale -- whether nationalist, religious, or pragmatic -- was of no great significance. The ambassador described Eshkol as "a mild hawk."

Immediately following the war, almost six out of ten (Jewish) Israelis believed that some of the Occupied Territories could be given back within the framework of a peace agreement. Only one in three thought all the territories should be annexed. But when asked which territories they thought should be returned, even as part of a peace agreement, nine out of ten replied that the Old City should not be given back; 85 percent said the Golan Heights should not be returned; 73 percent thought the Gaza Strip should not be relinquished; 71 percent said the West Bank should not be given back; and the same number also said that Sharm el-Sheikh should not be returned. A smaller minority, 52 percent, said the Sinai Peninsula should not be given back, either.

(pp. 553-554):

Six weeks after the war, Maariv reported a sharp decrease in unemployment, and several weeks later the government heard the same information from Pinhas Sapir. Within three months after the war, more than four thousand sales contracts for newly built apartments were signed, almost four times as many as in the three months before the war. Over the next three months, just under five thousand more contracts were signed. These transactions were incomplete, and were not sufficient to bring the construction industry out of its crisis, but they reflected a dramatic change in the mood of Israelis: for the first time in many months, they had faith int he future of Israel, and much as the recession had been rooted to a great extent in the gloom preceding the war, the economic situation was now affected by the heady feeling of victory.

Pinhas Sapir estimated that the war had cost Israel $1 billion; fortunately, a large portion would be recouped through foreign aid and donations. "Otherwise, we'd be lost," Sapir told the government. Various estimates pegged the cost of the OCcupation at between $50 million and $150 million a year. Sapir was concerned about the tens of millions Israel was about to spend on Phantom war planes. But the war also generated income. Oil production in the Sinai would bring in several million dollars. Victory brought foreign investors and promised flourishing tourism, including domestic tourism. The need to reequip the army stimulated defense manufacturing. The construction industry recovered, partly as a result of the building surge in Jerusalem. The inhabitants of the territories provided cheap labor and bought Israeli products.

(pp. 560-561):

A few months after the war, Charles de Gaulle issued an extremely sharp attack on the government of Israel. He demanded a withdrawal from the territories, an end to the conflict, mutual recognition between Israel and its neighbors, freedom of navigation, a solution to the refugee problem, and international rule in Jerusalem. This was enough to irritate most Israelis, but de Gaulle made matters worse by asserting that the State of Israel had been "implanted" in the Middle East under circumstances whose justice was dubious, and by describing the Israelis as "self-confident and domineering." His words were interpreted as an attack on Jews. "One day, two or three generations from now," wrote Elie Wiesel, "they will mention Charles de Gaule and say . . . he did a lot for his people, but he was an anti-Semite." On the eve of the war, de Gaulle had demanded that Israel not fire the first shot. When the fighting began, France imposed an embargo on military supplies to Israel, including sales of Mirage planes.

(p. 566):

Roughly five months after their previous meeting, Yaacov Herzog met with King Hussein again, but this time it was mainly because neither of the two could find any more excuses to offer the former British politician Julian Amery. Amery, full of energy and a desire to help, kept on pressing; he did not know that Herzog and Hussein were old acquaintances. The two were finally forced to come to his home and pretend they had never met before. Abba Eban arranged his own meeting with Hussein, through Julian Amery's good offices. Before leaving, Eban consulted his colleagues in the party. Golda Meir was afraid the king might say he was willing to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which would put Israel in the uncomfortable position of having to acquiesce to all his demands. The other party members were also filled with apprehension and suspicions.

(pp. 575-576):

The government resolution on settling Golan lands was classified top secret. A note in the margin reads: "This resolution was not included in the minutes of the government meeting because of its confidential nature, and it is preserved in the government secretariat." The secrecy was necessary because the United States was opposed to settlements. But more outposts were soon set up in the Golan. One of them, whose name was not yet finalized and which was identified only as "the Banais outpost," prompted someone in the prime minister's office to author the following blessing: "This land is ours. We have learned to understand that land is bought with three things: tears, blood,a nd sweat. We have shed our tears. We have spilledour blood. Today we have begun pouring our sweat, to betroth this land to us forever. . . . It is ours and we shall not leave it." In order to establish this particular outpost, the army destroyed the village of Banias; "it was probably a pretty little town," commented an American embassy staffer who toured its ruins in September, when only a mosque and a church remained standing. In the next few months, another hundred or so abandoned villages int he Golan Heights were systematically destroyed.

(pp. 578-579):

Hebron was considered a holy city; the massacre of Jews there in 1929 was imprinted on national memory along with the great pogroms of Eastern Europe. The messianic fervor that characterized the Hebron settlers was more powerful than the awakening that led people to settle in East Jerusalem: while Jerusalem had already been annexed, the future of Hebron was still unclear.

Knesset member Shmuel Tamir, an attorney, wrote to Eshkol on behalf of Rabbi Yehezkel Sarna, a survivor of the 1929 massacre, who had founded the Hebron yeshiva in Jerusalem and now wanted to renew its activity int he occupied ancient city. The prime minister invited the elderly rabbi to see him. They spoke for three or four hours, Eshkol later told members of the General Staff. He thought he rabbi would ask for a particular building, but Sarna said, "I want you to clear out the whole street for me." Eshkol thought he might have misunderstood, but Sarna explained that as soon as the war began, Israel "should have slaughtered the Arabs of Hebron one by one." In May 1968, the government decided to renew settlement activities in Hebron.

Eshkol was contacted by other yeshivas that wanted to operate in Hebron,a nd by Levinger's group, which asked Yigal Allon to help coordinate plans to hold a Passover seder in a local hotel, the Park. Allon gave his approval, provided that the military governor agreed, and on condition that they stay not in the city but only nearby. Levinger and his people moved into the hotel, celebrated Passover -- and refused to leave. Allon asked Eshkol to allow them to remain, at least until the government could decide what to do with them. Eshkol agreed. "I have to say that I did not have to push very hard," Allon recounted. The minister of labor himself provided Levinger and his group with money that came, once again, from the public works budget.

Allon went one step further: he spoke with one of the Gush Etzion settler leaders, Hanan Porat, and asked him to send arms to the hotel dwellers -- a few submachine guns, handguns, and some hand grenades. He feared for their safety, and also believed he should create a link between Gush Etzion and the Park hotel, "just in case, God forbid, there should be fighting," as he later revealed in an interview that was supposed to remain classified for many years. He promised Porat he would ensure "military cover" for the operation, and indeed, upon returning to Jerusalem he went to see Israel Lior and asked him to report on the matter to Dayan.

posted: 2007-07-29

Tzipi Livni's High Horse

The July 8 issue of The New York Times Magazine has a cover story on Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni by Roger Cohen. Mostly a puff profile, although the net effect is to show her as a dangerous ideologue -- her claim to be the one who put the words in Bush's mouth trashing the right of return is just one example. Still, two quotes struck me as interesting:

One of Livni's catchphrases is, "There is a process of delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state." She sees herself in a race against time.

The second expands on the first:

"Stagnation works against those who believe in a two-state solution," Livni said in our first conversation. The West, she suggested, needs to tell Hamas, the Islamist movement battling Fatah for control of a Palestinian movement now split between Gaza and the West Bank, that it must not only recognize Israel's right to exist but also "the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which is not that obvious anymore."

The West needs to get on speaking terms with Hamas before any telling becomes possible, but that's not what's important here. What matters is that Livni is acknowledging that in the eyes of more and more of the world the very concept of a Jewish State is untenable. This is obviously a big problem for Zionists, who see the Jewish State as existential. This happens routinely when someone -- more recently President Ahmadinejad of Iran -- offers an opinion that "the Zionist Entity" cannot persist, and this gets translated into a call for genocide against Jews. While it's possible that's what a few folks really think, the necessary linkage between the Jewish State and the Jewish People is pretty much a figment of the Zionist imagination. The Jewish State is a metaphysical ideal most parties in the Israeli body politic pledge allegiance to, but it's not even the same thing as the actual State of Israel -- the differences due to both secular and ethnic erosion within Israel, and to a worldwide distaste for racist colonial regimes.

The modern view, indeed the basic precept of democracy, is that states should reflect the interests and composition of the people they represent, with all due respect for minority as well as majority rights. Israel doesn't fit that view. For a long while lots of folks, especially those of pale complexion in Europe and America, gave the Zionists special dispensation, partly due to guilt over past crimes against Jews, partly out of indifference or worse regarding Arabs. But both of those rationales have softened over time, while we've witnessed the actual effects of allowing Israel to lord it over Palestinians and others. The net effect is that the Jewish State has mutated from being seen as a hypothetical sanctuary for Jews to an actual ghetto for Arabs. Little wonder the romance is fading; what's remarkable is that it's lasted as long as it has.

Livni is as committed to the Jewish State as ever, but at least she recognizes the dynamic. This is exceptional -- most Israelis still cling to the notion that time is on their side, that somehow all they have to do to win is to run out the clock. And this makes Livni more dangerous than your basic do-nothing Likudnik, since she feels the need to force something to happen. The thinking here is that if the Palestinians recognize the Jewish State the rest of the world will accept its legitimacy. The problem is that her notion of the Jewish State is unrecognizable, as it demands that Palestinians give up their history and accept a permanently subservient role to a nation built on their land in their forced absence. No such deal is possible, especially where Palestinians, too, see time as on their side.

Later in the article, Cohen looks at the other side:

You don't so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers' cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. Donkeys, carts and idle people replace Israel's first-world hustle-bustle. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers. The whole desolate West Bank scene, described recently by the World Bank as "a shattered economic space," is punctuated with shining garrisonlike settlements on hilltops and checkpoints where Palestinians see themselves reflected in the stylish shades of Russian-immigrant Israeli soldiers. If you are looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

Cohen goes on to visit Saeb Erekat, a key Palestinian negotiator under Arafat and now Abbas, who says: "Palestinians are tired of the no-partner-for-talks symphony. Livni has an interlocutor in me and Abbas. We don't ask why Israelis choose Labor or Kadima; she doesn't need to ask about Hamas. With a decent peace accord we can go to a referendum. Moderates would win. That would be Hamas's fig leaf. But Livni has to learn that peace and settlements don't go together, walls and peace don't go together and nothing is solved until everything is solved."

By making the issue recognition of the Jewish State, Livni subsumes all the inequities of the last sixty years into a precondition for any settlement. The settlements, the walls, the dominating security state, most of all denial of the right of return, those are all necessary parts of her Jewish State. Abba Eban used to quip that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. The punch line is that they never had one, because the Jewish State was predicated on dominance, and therefore on war. Ironically, only when that vision of the Jewish State is ended will Jews be able to live in peace -- which is pretty much the normal state these days for diaspora Jews who don't live in thrall to the metaphysical Jewish State.

I'm a little less than half way through Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. The annoying thing about the book is that, thus far at least, there is hardly anything about how anyone other than Israelis viewed the conflict -- well, a bit about the US, but that's it. On the other hand, the book is fascinating as a piece of Israeli navel-gazing. The nation appears to have been torn between militaristic hubris and existential dread, with both factors perfectly exemplified in Yitzhak Rabin's nervous breakdown. I suspect that Segev's final conclusion will be mine: that Israel found purpose in the 1967 war, and never dared risk peace again. Israel had two main opportunities to negotiate peace, and turned them both down. Following the 1949 armistices, Israel could have negotiated peace treaties with neighboring countries and worked to defuse the refugee crisis before it calcified into permanence, but chose to keep its borders unsettled, hoping for future expansion. The result was that they lost political ground to Arab nationalism, while building up military muscle, which led to the 1967 war. In 1967, Israel grabbed land it couldn't settle but could trade back for peace on more favorable terms, but preferred to keep the land and fight with the people on the land, trying to at last realize the expansion they dreamt of in 1949. (Some of it anyway: the Likud still insisted on both sides of the Jordan.) Again, failure to settle soon after the conflict hardened into long, self-perpetuating struggle.

I've always been somewhat sympathetic to the Israelis in 1967 -- although even then I had serious doubts about war as a solution to anything, and nothing since then has proven otherwise. The 1947-49 war occurred before I was born (in 1950), so I can only look back at it with hindsight. The original sin of the founding of Israel was the UN partition resolution of 1947, rejected by the Palestinian majority and radically reinterpreted by the Zionist leadership, in ways that were not uncommon nor surprising at the time. This led to the more/less forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, who were stripped of their property, denied their homes and their rights, to be replaced with Jewish immigrants from wherever the Mossad could find them -- mostly Arab countries, eventually extending to Ethiopia, with a later massive influx from the former Soviet Union. In effect, the refugees looked like several contemporary population exchanges -- between India and Pakistan, or the Germans of Eastern Europe who were driven west. The Palestinian case was different primarily in that it was done under the nose of the UN and was presumed to be covered by international law, which demanded peace settlements and the refugees' right of return. The conflict then was about two things: the right of Jews to create a predominantly Jewish nation in part of Palestine to serve as a haven for Jews from all over the world, which is roughly what the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate promised and the UN reaffirmed in 1947; and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and live in peace. In hindsight the former is far more dubious, but it still held considerable sympathy in 1967, putting Israel in peril should its Arab neighbors eventually manage to reverse their previous military losses. This assumed, of course, that victorious Arab armies would kill or force into exile most Israeli Jews, but given the way both sides had fought in the past, that seemed likely enough.

Israel's quick victory in 1967 put an end to the Arab's ability to threaten Israel's existence, and Israel's development of nuclear weapons closed the issue once and for all. The subsequent wars up to 1973 were never more than border conflicts, as Egypt toned down its goals to recovering its lost territory -- eventually achieved diplomatically. Israel complained much about terrorists afterwards, but they were never more than nuisances, regardless of how hysterical Israelis got over them. The Intifada, as a mass revolt, was (and is) a more serious problem, but not an existential threat. So the net effect of the 1967 war was to shift power clearly enough to prevent future wars. While one could imagine other ways to do that, there is little reason to think that either side would have been interested. Given that, the 1967 war in itself could have been a starting point for peace.

Of course, we now know that it wasn't. Indeed, it's hard to find any wars that in the end promoted peace and justice. (Noam Chomsky is fond of the 1971 war that broke Bangladesh free of Pakistan, and may have one or two more. The abject defeat of Japan and Germany in WWII did encourage them to become more peaceable.) The usual pattern is that the winners want more, and the losers want a rematch. That's what happened in 1967, and why it took the less lopsided 1973 war to bring Israel and Egypt to an accommodation that was on the table but rejected by Israel in 1971.

We should have learned much since 1967, including that the Zionist solution to "the Jewish problem" was itself bogus, and has created far more anti-semitism than it ever defended against. Driving most of the Jews away from muslim lands has made those countries less tolerant and less cosmopolitan than they would otherwise be, while creating an underclass in Israel. Meanwhile Jews in Europe and America have fully integrated into secular democratic societies -- so much so that the closest thing they can find to anti-semitism is really just disappointment over Israel's unjust behavior. And in Israel Zionism has created the world's most militarist state to no purpose other than to deny citizenship and human rights to the descendents of the people who lived there before the Zionists moved in and took over. It's worse than a crying shame. It's sheer intellectual nonsense.

posted 2007-07-10