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Friday June 1, 2007

Gained territory opened Pandora’s box of annihilation rhetoric for Israel

by yitzhak santis

It was six days of warfare, followed by 40 years of continous effort to obtain peace, security and normalcy, preceded by 2,000 years of yearning. Between June 4 and June 10, 1967, Israel waged a six-day war against the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan — as well as Iraq, Algeria and Saudi Arabia — that threatened to obliterate her.

Just two decades after the Holocaust, then in living memory of most Jews, annihilationist rhetoric aimed at the Jewish state was the leitmotif of the Arab world. I was only 9 in 1967, but I vividly remember the palpable fear of my parents, grandparents and Holocaust survivor Hebrew school teacher.

And who could blame them?

In mid-May 1967, Egypt’s President Nasser kicked the U.N. peacekeeping force out of the Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and began a major military build-up on Israel’s borders. Arab leaders daily promised Israel’s imminent destruction: the New York Times’ headline of May 27, 1967 screamed, “NASSER PLEDGES TO DESTROY ISRAEL IF THERE IS WAR.”

The L.A. Times’ May 19 headline reported that “Armies of 5 Arab Nations Believed on War Footing.” And Cairo Radio declared May 17 that “all Egypt is now prepared to plunge into total war which will put an end to Israel.”

By June 4, after weeks of feverish diplomacy at the U.N. failed, Israel’s reserves were on full alert, bringing the economy to a standstill. Arab armies, just a few miles from major Israeli population centers, were amassed on Israel’s borders in the Sinai, Golan Heights, the West Bank overlooking Tel Aviv and in East Jerusalem. The Arab armies had 680 combat aircraft to Israel’s 286; some 2,300 tanks to Israel’s 1,000; and 328,000 regular troops to Israel’s 250,000, most of them reserves.

Taking Arab leaders’ threats of destruction seriously, with Jordan joining a mutual defense treaty with Egypt and allowing thousands of Iraqi soldiers to mass on its territory, Israel took the initiative by attacking and destroying Egypt’s air force.

Syria, which for years used the Golan Heights to fire artillery down upon hapless Israeli kibbutzes, fired artillery onto northern Israel. Jordan shelled Tel Aviv’s suburbs from West Bank positions and rained thousands of shells on West Jerusalem’s civilian neighborhoods. Jordanian warplanes attacked central Israeli towns.

Six days later Israel was in control of the Sinai, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip and, perhaps most symbolic for Jewish history, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

One significant outcome was bringing the whole land of Israel under the control of the state of Israel. For 2,000 years, Jews prayed for a return to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beth El, Hebron or Shiloh — all located on the West Bank — and now they were back.

But here is where 2,000 years of yearning clashed with hard modern reality in the form of the West Bank’s majority Palestinian population.

Yossi Klein Halevi recently wrote that this modern-day Jewish return “opened up an impossible dilemma for the Jewish people. That dilemma was, how do we remain faithful to the Jewish historical experience of return to the land, and at the same time, how do we remain faithful to the expectation of Jewish history that we do so in a just way? And that is an issue we have not yet resolved.”

Yet it is this dilemma that most Israelis overwhelmingly want to resolve, having elected governments prepared to recognize and agree to a Palestinian state on contiguous territory in exchange for genuine peace and security.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was prepared to cede 95 percent of the West Bank, Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods and all of Gaza to a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also concluded that the two-state solution is the way to peace. And his successor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, continues this policy.

Israel has returned more than 93 percent of the territory it won in 1967: the entire Sinai and the Gaza Strip. In total, some 43 settlements have been taken down.

But the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority does not want to commit itself to make peace with Israel, and its prime minister refuses to make a statement to this effect. Instead of providing for their people’s needs, Hamas uses Gaza as a giant arms depot, launching hundreds of rockets into Israel. Continued conflict with Israel, deadly Palestinian infighting and ongoing internal chaos is the legacy of Hamas’ irredentist and warmongering policies.

Forty years ago, Israel achieved a swift and astonishing victory that transformed Israel’s landscape, and American Jews’ pride in Israel surged. Though Israel has been unable to find a Palestinian peace partner and continues to face daily assaults by Hamas, our sense of pride should remain as strong as ever.

On this anniversary it is worth taking stock of how much Israel has accomplished despite the continuing threats it faced even following the Six-Day War — and how much its people continue to yearn for peace even while facing daily threats.

Yitzhak Santis is director of the Middle East Project of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council.

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