Please: Israel did not “choose” war in June '67

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
02 October '12..

A recent article here in the Times of Israel by Mr. Emanuel Shahaf posits the assertion that Prime Minister Netanyahu is needlessly escalating tensions with regard to the situation in Iran and their nuclear program, that he has shunned the path of compromise and diplomacy, and that this militant tendency of Israelis to escalate tensions that lead to wars has become something of a national pastime. One can just hear the impatient shrug of Mr. Shahaf’s shoulders: When, oh when, will they ever learn?

Illustrating his point, Mr. Shahaf cites the example of the Six-Day War of 1967, where, he asserts,Israel needlessly chose war from a menu of other viable options:

“During the nerve wracking buildup to the war there were plenty of opportunities to deescalate. To make the closure of the Straits of Tiran into a casus belli was not necessarily the correct choice and it might have been smarter to put the US on the spot and insist on the fulfillment to keep the straits open to Israeli shipping. To make a long story short, most scholarly accounts of the build-up towards the Six-Day War attribute its eventual outbreak to an unwanted escalation. Despite a desire to avoid war on all sides, everyone in the end was responsible for making it unavoidable.”

I hope Mr. Shahaf, will grant me a moment of his time and bear with me a while I take a moment to rehearse a slice of history in the lead up to the crisis that sparked the ’67 War, which concerns two issues that are as depressingly familiar to Israelis today as they were to them back in 1967: the regional issue of water, and the issue of the violent, provocative instability of the Ba’athist regime in neighboring Syria, and perhaps we can get an idea of just who was doing the escalating that led to the war, and who was not.

Harris - Why the Six-Day War Still Matters

David A. Harris
aish.com
12 June '11

http://www.aish.com/jw/me/Why_the_Six-Day_War_Still_Matters.html

Ten crucial lessons that resonate to this day.

Mention the word "history" and it can trigger a roll of the eyes.

Add "Middle East" to the equation and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.

But without an understanding of what happened, it's impossible to grasp where we are -- and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.

Forty-four years ago this week, the Six-Day War broke out.

While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved and in the news.

Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely provide context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.


First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn't exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside.

Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they destroyed many of those sites.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents.

And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.

Singer - An Arab West Bank Is A Lost Cause

David Singer
analyst-network.com
11 June '11
H/T Daphne Anson

http://www.analyst-network.com/article.php?art_id=3797

The 44th Anniversary of the Six Day War occurred this week on 5 June 1967.

It is therefore opportune to recall some of the significant events that led to Jordan’s loss of the West Bank in that War ending 19 years of uninterrupted occupation - and to understand why all of the West Bank - or its equivalent area - will never again return to Arab control.

I am indebted to the Six Day War Comprehensive Timeline for much of the material that follows. This website should be required reading for all who wish to understand why international pressure to return all of the West Bank to the Arabs must fail.

Jordan’s path down the road to its disastrous loss of the West Bank began on 30 May 1967 - 6 days before the start of the Six Day War. This was the fatal day that Jordan signed a five year mutual defence treaty with Egypt, thereby joining the military alliance already in place between Egypt and Syria. Jordanian forces were given to the command of an Egyptian General.

Jordan’s King Hussein had been caught up in the Arab euphoria and vitriol emanating from Egypt’s President Nasser who had declared on 28 May 1967:

“We will not accept any…coexistence with Israel.…Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel….The war with Israel is in effect since 1948”.

Such was the mood of Jordan’s population that Jordan’s Army Commander-in-Chief General Sharif Zaid Ben Shaker warned in a press conference that :

"If Jordan does not join the war a civil war will erupt in Jordan".

The West Bank had been unified with Transjordan in 1950 and the country renamed Jordan after unanimous ratification by a Parliament comprised equally of representatives from the West Bank and Transjordan. No demand was made in the next 17 years for the creation of a separate Palestinian Arab State - even though all the Jews living there had been driven out by six invading Arab armies in 1948.

1967 and memory

Martin Kramer
Sandbox
17 November '08
H/T PostWest*

http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2008/11/1967-and-memory/

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America’s leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

I leave aside the identification of the Arabs with Princeton. Kerr was a Princetonian, but so am I, and I would have preferred to identify the Arabs with Columbia, for all sorts of reasons. But it is the way Kerr contrasts pre-1967 with post-1967 Arab politics that is striking—and misleading. Even in 1967, Arab politics hadn’t been “fun” in a very long time: as early as the 1940s, they had become a serious and deadly game of costly wars and bloody coups. True, Kerr was writing in the aftermath of Black September in Jordan, a time when Arab politics seemed to have come completely unhinged. But the idea that 1967 put an end to the “good old days” of Arabs “scrimmaging happily” was a pure piece of nostalgic romance in the grand Arabist tradition.

Unfortunately, such nostalgia is seductive. For years, it has been at the root of a notion that persists even today: if we could somehow undo the 1967 war—if we could undo the injury inflicted in those six days—we could put the Middle East back to where it was in the “good old days.” In this view, the Arabs and the world could have “fun” again if only we could erase the Arab memory of that war—by erasing its every consequence.

But the “good old days” analysis is entirely false, and not only in its distortion of Arab politics prior to 1967. It is false because it overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.

Barack Obama's 1967

Zalman Shoval
JPost Opinion
05 October 09

US President Barack Obama's inspirational speech at the UN included more than a few passages about the Middle East conflict. He expressed the hope for "a just and lasting peace between Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world," a wish shared by all Israelis. Upon closer look at some of the president's statements, several question marks arise.

The speech didn't, for instance, mention Islamic fundamentalism or Jihadism, the principal reasons for instability in the Middle East and beyond. Nor did it condemn the Arab world's refusal to acknowledge the Jewish people's right to a state of its own. No less problematic, the reference to ending "the occupation that began in 1967" puts history on its head, as it implies, perhaps unintentionally, that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This clearly inverts cause and effect.

As the writer and historian Simon Schama wrote, history should endeavor "to disentangle fact from fable," also reminding us that one of America's Founding Fathers, John Adams, had said "Facts are stubborn things." Well, the facts regarding the conflict in the Holy Land, though often deliberately or inadvertently distorted or ignored , are indeed "stubborn." Terrorist activities against Israel had started years before the "occupation," and the PLO committed to the destruction of the Jewish state was founded in 1964

NO LESS important in the factual and historical sense are the actual antecedents of the "Six-Day War" which resulted in the "occupation" to which the president's speech referred.

On May 13, 1967 the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser announced that two Egyptian divisions would move into the Sinai Peninsula bordering on southern Israel - contrary to international agreements, US commitments and UN guarantees. Caving in to Nasser's blustering, the then UN Secretary U Thant agreed to remove the UN emergency force from the area.

The next day, Egyptian armored and infantry columns crossed the Suez Canal and started moving towards the Israeli frontier. Shortly after, Cairo announced that it would block all shipping to the port of Eilat, Israel's only maritime outlet in the south, while Egyptian Mig21 war planes began flying over Israeli territory including the Dimona area. Concurrently, Syrian and Iraqi forces were ordered to prepare for an assault on northern Israel. The minimum strategic aim of the Egyptians, as was revealed later, was to cut off Israel's Negev from the rest of the country - but Nasser himself, in both public and secret statements, left no doubt that his ultimate aim was the complete annihilation of the State of Israel.

A decisive turning point leading up to the Six-Day War and grievously affecting the history of the entire Middle East to this day, occurred on May 30, 1967. On that date, King Hussein of Jordan, who had been regarded both by Israel and the US as a paragon of peace and moderation, without warning, infamously signed a military agreement with Egypt's Nasser, his former bitter enemy, including a Jordanian commitment to join Egypt in any war with Israel, stationing Egyptian and Iraqi forces inside Jordan. The "Arab Legion," considered by many as the Arab world's best fighting machine, was put under Egyptian command. Cairo radio crowed that now Israel's only escape was the sea.

Jordan (formerly Trans-Jordan) had in 1948 occupied and later annexed the western part of Palestine, hence called the "West Bank" - thus making the kingdom Israel's next door neighbor, abutting on most of the latter's population centers, including west Jerusalem and Israel's only international airport. King Hussein's precise motives are debatable; some believe that he wanted to placate the Palestinian majority inside his country, others ascribed it to the King's desire to get part of the spoils if the Arabs were be victorious against Israel.

The rest, as the expression goes, is history. The war broke out on June 5; the Egyptian air force was totally destroyed on the first day and the IDF advancing toward the Suez Canal, wiped out the Egyptian forces in its wake. The blockade of Eilat was lifted. In the north, the Golan Heights from which the Syrian army began its attack on Israel, were taken - and Jordanian troops, after an unsuccessful attempt to force their way into West Jerusalem, were, after several days of hard fighting, expelled from all of the land west of the Jordan River. Israel had achieved complete victory in a war of legitimate self-defense against blatant aggression whose declared aim had been its obliteration.

ALL OF the above was fully acknowledged by most of the nations of the world, though not, of course, by the Arab countries and their allies, or by the Soviet Union which according to some views, had actually egged on the Arab governments in their aggressive designs. Successive American leaders declared that Israel should never be asked to go back to its former vulnerable borders, while the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 which specifically linked any Israeli withdrawals from "territories" to achieving secure borders.

This is what 1967 is all about: not "ending" occupation, but making sure that Israel will never again be put in a situation like the one it faced in that fateful year.

The writer is the former Israel Ambassador to the US, and currently heads the Prime Minister's forum of US-Israel Relations.
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Bibi and Mr. History

Israel's struggle for survival is fought on a "minute to minute" basis. Everything is urgent and immediate.

As we watch our current Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, attempt to resist the pressure exerted by yet another American President, I have the feeling that "we've been in this movie before" ...and for one brief moment I wondered how the longer view from the perspective of history will judge him ...and us.

So I drew today's cartoon.