DEFEAT AND VICTORY : THIRTY YEARS SINCE THE 1967 WAR
(Paper prepared for a conference held at Ben
Gurion University of the Negev in 1997. This appeared in a
volume edited by H.Gordon, Looking Back At The June 1967 War.
Praegar, Westport, Connecticut, 1999.)
The war which broke out in June 1967 is a pivotal landmark in the contemporary history of the Arab peoples. It threw the Arab world off balance ... in its immediate aftermath it led to questioning and self doubt; the book "Auto Critique After the Defeat" written by Sadek Al Azm , a young radical Syrian philosopher became a bestseller overnight(1). In retrospect however, it is possible to see that since the demise of the Arab nationalist project symbolised by Nasser and Egypt’s leadership of the Arab world and the non-aligned bloc of African and Asian nations, nothing has taken its place.
On the 9th of June, Nasser delivered a televised address in which he assumed full political responsibility for the devastating military defeat, and submitted his resignation. Nasser’s resignation brought out hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, who seemed to feel instinctively that this act in itself was a consecration of the defeat and a submission. They rejected his resignation in a somewhat mystical belief, that in acquiescing to this, they would be according legitimacy to the defeat.
Subsequently, the energies of the Arab states would direct themselves to "liquidating the effects of the aggression", i.e. trying to secure Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied in the war, and bringing about an undefined " just resolution of the refugee problem"(2). For the Arab ruling elites, the struggle with Israel has always been a sideshow, and one moreover whose pace and intensity was set by Israel.
On the popular level the future seemed to hold unbound possibilities. The Palestinians assumed center stage, perhaps for the first time since the defeat of the military uprising unleashed against the British in 1936-39. Taking advantage of the weakness and loss of legitimacy of the Arab regimes, they launched themselves into the fight in order to galvanise a dormant Arab world, but one with unbound potential, and perhaps along the way emulate the Vietnamese and create another Hanoi which would serve as the base for a military campaign to wage a protracted peoples war. The Palestinian resistance Movement, as it was called at the time, symbolised the spirit of the times. Thousands of Arab and non Arab youths joined its ranks. It appeared to hold the promise of social and political liberation and empowerment. The Egyptian popular singer Shikh Immam was eulogising Che Guvara and spreading his last testament (addressed in his words : to those chained both mind and feet....to prepare the army of final salvation, or suffer continuing enslavement).(3)
There were many way stations on the road which has led from the Palestine National Council’s adoption of the Transitional program in 1974 specifying the aim of "a national authority"(4), to Madrid and Oslo. Throughout, a triumphalist discourse served to mask a series of defeats and retreats which gradually transformed the nature and aims of the conflict. One salient feature of the conflict which has remained constant throughout has been the Israeli determination and ability to dictate the terms of the conflict in both peace and war. As early as 1922, Arthur Ruppin, an instrumental figure in the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine, wrote , " on every site where we purchase land and where we settle people, the present cultivators will inevitably be dispossessed", arriving at the conclusion a few years later that , "..... it is our destiny to be in a state of continual warfare with the Arab.....". (5)
In the absence of a Palestinian adversary in the period up to 1967 , Israel waged a struggle against Egypt and Syria. The major landmarks were the wars launched in 1956 and 1967, but there has also been a continuous and persistent war going on all the time. A war directed not against armies and states, but against ordinary people in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and further afield. The aim was to ground the Arabs both individually and collectively into submission.
Israel has had a long record of visiting death and destruction at will…..Qibya, Galza, Al Samou’, Bahr al Bakar, Irbid, Beirut, Hammam Al Shat, Qana…to recall some of the major stations in Israel’s biography(6). More recently, Southern Lebanon was submitted to a massive bombardment, and nearly half a million people were given eight hours notice to leave their homes, whereupon their villages were transformed into military targets, and sixteen thousand shells were rained on them.
Whether as an adjunct to its nation building project or as an ideological imperative in fulfillment of a messianic vision, the policies pursued by Israel have visited death and destruction on the surrounding Arab populations, in the belief that it is not enough to posses the military capability to inflict strategic punishment on the surrounding states and to hold them in a state of perpetual military inferiority, but that it is necessary to achieve the surrender of Arabs individually as well as collectively, and to cow them into submission. This was standard Israeli practice long before the Begins, Sharons, Shamirs, and Netanyahus made their debut on the political stage as legitimate representative of the Israeli body politic.
As Arye Shavit wrote in Haaretz after the massacre at Qana in Lebanon last year, " with Dimona, Yad Vashem and the Shoa Museum in Israel, this gives the country the right to kill without entertaining any guilt feelings"(7). The situation has not changed in the aftermath of Madrid and Oslo; Fathi Shakkaki in Malta, Yehia Ayyash in Gaza, one hundred and two people in Qana, and most recently Khaled Abu
Dayeh in the emergency room at Shaari Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem(8). The botched assasination attempt of Khaled Mishaal in Jordan(9) has confirmed that state terrorism is still Israel’s weapon of choice. Both individually and collectively the killing goes on, and the Israeli legal system itself lends a hand, sanctioning what is euphemistically termed " moderate physical pressure"…..what Israeli newspapers routinely refer to as "shaking"!
To an overwhelming degree Israel has succeeded in implementing its political and military agenda in the region. Trans-Jordan under Abdullah was neturalised in the pre state period, while Jordan under Hussein has proven to be Israel’s neighbour of choice. We are currently approaching what promises to be the final cycle of the Arab-Israeli conflict, ushered in by the conclusion of a separate peace at Camp David which served to detach Egypt from the leadership of the Arab world and paved the way for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the occupation of the first Arab Capital. Its so far successful decision to enroll the Palestinians in its efforts to ensure a hegemonic presence in the Arab world by acquiescing to an offer of limited self rule, has created further divisions and allowed a hesitant Arab world to normalise relations at the state level. Significantly, a columnist in a leading Arab newspaper which is today a steadfast champion of the "peace process", asked on the anniversary of Nasser’s death two years ago, whether the time had not come to "bury Nasser", as this was a necessary act if the Arabs were to qualify to enter the ranks of the community of "civilised nations"(10)!
The cumulative effect of these policies has been a contributing factor to the ongoing "peace process". Palestinian weakness, and their failure to enlist the Arab world on their behalf has resulted in their conversion to the belief that the only viable option open to them is to arrive at an arrangement which fits in with Israel’s own strategic requirements. This is neither the long heralded historic compromise, nor the much touted "peace of the brave".
The PLO that has been recognised by Israel and whose leadership has been allowed to set up camp within strictly designated areas within the still occupied territories (which brings to mind the phrase of Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff at the time of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, like cockroaches in a bottle )(11) is a PLO with a new agenda. Having severed itself from the main body of the Palestinian people ( who remain unable to return), it has agreed to abandon the demand for the dismantling of settlements, and has to all intents and purposes submitted to a new partition within the twenty three per cent of the territory of Mandated Palestine, which was occupied in June 1967. Perhaps more significantly it finds it hard to shrug off the task it has been entrusted with as a condition for this arrangement , namely to carry out the role of guardian of Israel’s security.
In the prevailing culture of defeat and submission, the voices of those refusing to succumb seem discordant and irrational, perhaps even psychotic. The response of people to the second gulf war, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the occupation of Kuwait and of the nature of the Iraqi regime,
was a manifestation of a deep seated yearning to be able to stand up and hit back. This was encapsulated by a statement made by a random interviewee during the scud attacks on Israel, in response to accusations that Palestinians were in favour of Saddm and his Kuwaiti adventure. This had nothing to do with Iraq, Kuwait, or the wish to annihilate Israel, and everything to do with the fact that for the first time the missiles were going the other way.
Israel continues to be at one and the same time triumphalist and paranoid. It craves recognition…the victims of its very act of creation have to stand up and proclaim the justness of its cause. The persistence of the Palestinian claim, even if merely rhetorical, or in a line of verse by Mahmoud Darweesh(12) in and of itself poses a threat that conjures up fears and insecurity. In the service of this "security discourse" all is justified.
The claim is often made that one cannot lay the blame on the Israeli political and military elite for their inability to convince the mass of Israeli’s of the necessity of arriving at a just settlement. We are told it is the inhabitants of towns like Dimona and Beit Shemesh who set the political agenda in a democratic society such as Israel. But the political diet that is presented to them is not of their own making. Most recently we had the revelations of Moshe Dayan’s seventies interview, in which he talked about the situation on the settlements neighboring the Golan Heights in the pre 1967 period and the "manufacture" of violent incidents in order to annex demilitarised areas to Israel.( 13) He also talked about the absence of any security threat from the Syrians after the outbreak of war with Egypt. For years, Israelis and the world were fed the story of a belligerent Syria which was continuously violating the armistice agreements and bombarding Israeli settlements . More recently an ex chief of Israeli intelligence appeared on an Arab owned TV station on the eve of the anniversary of the 5th of June and explained that Israel finds itself in a difficult situation because it can only make peace with democratic states, and none of its neighbours qualify. This seemed a rather strange statement to make considering that Israel’s favoured Arab regimes are the hereditary monarchies of Morocco and Jordan , and that pre revolutionary Iran and apartheid South Africa were its closest allies. For those of us who remember the hysteria generated on the eve of the war, the expected annihilation, and then the miracle which unfolded and led to the speedy capture of territories in Egypt , Syria and Jordan, the recent revelations of another ex senior intelligence official about his trip to the US on the eve of the war and his talks with secretary Macnamara(14), seem to confirm all the conspiracy theories which were forwarded at the time, that this was a war with American blessing aimed at destroying Nasser’s regime. The forecasts of the length of hostilities and the expected casualties show what kind of stuff miracles are made of !! They also uncover the manipulation which was not only aimed at Journalists and public opinion abroad, but more importantly at the Israel people themselves.
Despite such revelations, which of course can only posses validity when they are expressed by Israeli officials or ex officials, Israel continues to exhibit a wounded innocence and to profess total ignorance of the other. Initially the claim was that it was impossible for the newcomers to know that this was an inhabited land; they were after all children of their own time, and imbued with the biases and prejudices common to other Europeans. On arrival they discovered the Arab inhabitants for the first time, but of course as Europeans they tended to discount them as merely natives. The narrative continues ….those who came after 1948 and those who were born here thereafter could not have possibly known that others were living here previously. The 160,000 or so Arabs who succeeded in remaining within the borders of the state led a secluded life, shrouded from sight at least until 1966 by the workings of the military government. In the aftermath of 1967 the Arabs were discovered living in the West Bank and Gaza. This was a revelation. It was "the first time" Israelis came face to face with a fully fledged Arab society. In 1982, after the invasion of Lebanon , the three month long siege, the massacres at Sabra and Shattila, and the conquest of Beirut , the Israelis again " for the first time" came face to face with the demonised enemy. Again , this was the "first meeting" with the Palestinians. In 1987 the Intifada broke out in the territories which had been under Israel’s control for more than twenty years, and again for "the first time" the Israelis discovered Palestinians, and they also discovered that the occupation was not and indeed could not be enlightened. But then of course that is the nature of occupations, and all knowledgeable Israelis professed that they knew that !
It is not clear if what Israeli’s suffer from is blindness or self delusion. One thing however is clear, and that is that they do not see themselves as part of this neighborhood. Indeed they do not like this neighborhood but for some reason (which they never question) they find themselves living in it, and they have to be permanently on guard. The Palestinians who live in close proximity in this neighborhood, and who keep being discovered for "the first time", and their own relationship to the neighborhood is not part of their everyday perceptions, nor of their world vision. This myopic vision is not the affliction of traditionalists or those coming from Arab backgrounds. It is a widespread disease, and those who have been blessed with the ability of partial vision have achieved this state of grace as a result of their exposure to the work of revisionist writers , who after painstaking research of the words and acts of the founding fathers and various state officials , have raised questions regarding the veracity of accepted wisdom's. But of course all this happened long ago...it happened in many other place in similar circumstances ….it is part and parcel of the process of nation building and state formation. The people of Yalu and Emmwas and Beit Nuba (15) wherever they are today , know and remember what happened in 1967, but for picnickers in Canada Park we are already living in the Post Oslo period. This is what victory and defeat is all about.
Notes
15.Three villages in the Latrun salient which were destroyed and their inhabitants evicted in the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 war. The Israeli writer Amos Kenan who witnessed the expulsion of the inhabitants while serving in the army wrote an account of the incident. See G.Aronson, Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians & the West Bank. Washington 1987. P 19.