Six days of war, 40 years of failure

Forty years on: By Ian Black.

It was Moshe Dayan, the hero of Israel's 1967 victory, who set the tone for what was to follow: "We are waiting for a telephone call," the one-eyed general said disdainfully as the frontline Arab states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria - reeled from their crushing defeat. Of the Palestinians - the newly conquered population of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip - little was said at the time. But the six-day war put them back at centre stage in their conflict with Israel. They have stayed there ever since.

"Rarely has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences," commented the historian Michael Oren. "Seldom has the world's attention been gripped, and remained seized, by a single event and its ramifications." Israel's triumph, someone else observed wisely, was "a cursed blessing".

Perceptions have changed so much in 40 years that it is hard now to recapture the sympathy that was felt for Israel as Egypt mobilised, and residents of Tel Aviv filled sandbags. If the country's leaders talked emotively about the vulnerable "Auschwitz borders" left after their 1948 war of independence, blood-curdling Arab rhetoric bolstered the image of Israel as the underdog.

But little David, just 19 that May, was rapidly to become a lumbering Goliath. As euphoric Israelis thronged across Jordanian lines to Jerusalem's Old City and marvelled at its Jewish and Muslim holy places, a little-known guerrilla commander named Yasser Arafat fled Ramallah and Palestinians adjusted to a new reality of curfews, informers and military occupation.

And it is that occupation, now as then, that stands at the heart of the conflict between two peoples engaged in a vicious, primordial - and utterly unequal - struggle over one small land. It has taken a terrible toll.

For Palestinians, 1967 was an extension of what began in Ottoman times, before they were a nation in the modern sense, when - half a century before the Nazi Holocaust - Zionists called for "solving" the Jewish problem in "a land without a people for a people without a land". If 1948 was their first nakba (catastrophe), the June war was the next devastating instalment.

It will long be debated whether Israel missed an early opportunity for peace. But the war reignited the dormant debate about the territorial limits of Zionism, fatefully fusing religion, nationalism and security. It produced no strategy for turning military supremacy into a tool to change relations with the Arab world.

"The truth of the matter was that when the Arabs finally called, Israel's line was either busy or there was no one on the Israeli side to pick up the phone," the Israeli scholar Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote later of Dayan's laconic quip.

Israel seemed to care less about peace than territory. It insisted that what it simultaneously called the "administered territories" and "Judea and Samaria" (the Hebrew names for the West Bank) were up for negotiation. (Unlike East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights, they were never annexed.) But the creation of "facts on the ground" gradually erased the old green line border, and nowhere more completely than around Jerusalem. The result - which some call apartheid - is 450,000 Jews living with full democratic rights in 125 settlements amidst 2.5 million Arabs under illegal occupation.

The wars of 1973 and 1982 and the return of Sinai to Egypt changed nothing on that central Palestinian front. Israel's "liberal occupation" - a flattering self-image that won wide international acceptance - did not outlive the 20th anniversary of the six-day war. The first intifada - the largely peaceful "war of stones" that erupted in 1987 - did more for the Palestinians than two decades of "terrorism" or "armed struggle," reminding the world, and growing numbers of Israelis, that a settlement had to address their demands.

Yitzhak Rabin's recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) at Oslo was a historic turning-point. But Rabin and Arafat could not translate their "peace of the brave" into a workable final deal. The Islamist movement Hamas, which rejected the legitimacy of Israel even in its pre-67 borders, pioneered suicide bombings and got the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu elected. The militarised second intifada was the disastrous result.

Netanyahu was right about one thing: the Middle East is a "tough neighbourhood," as he famously remarked. It has got a lot tougher. Today there is a generation of Palestinians who have known nothing but occupation and a generation of Israelis who have experienced only dominance and repression of the Palestinians. As the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz pointed out, justice and occupation are not compatible. Both societies have been traumatised and brutalised.

Israel has its "separation wall," built to keep bombers away from its restaurants and shopping malls but perceived as another land grab. Palestinian workers have been replaced by Chinese and Filipinos. But its military superiority has not created the security and normality it craves. Gaza - unilaterally abandoned by Ariel Sharon - has become a vast prison, a global byword for misery, desperation and anarchy, a cruel parody of the freedom the Palestinians yearn for.

Pessimists believe too much water and blood have flown down the Jordan in these 40 years, that these changes are irreversible, that this is a land that can now be neither shared peacefully nor divided.

Optimists point out that time has not stood still. Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel, with realism if not joy. Syria (and Lebanon) will follow suit if Israel returns the Golan. March's summit in Saudi Arabia confirmed peace as the "strategic choice" of the entire Arab League, a far cry from the three noes - to peace, to recognition and to negotiation - of the Khartoum conference in September 1967. Mayhem in Iraq, jihadist fanaticism and Iranian ambitions are all part of the new geostrategic equation.

Still, the Palestinians remain at centre stage. A solution for the refugees is vital; so are the interlinked questions of Jerusalem, borders and a viable, independent state. Even Hamas claims it will settle for the pre-1967 lines, as it fires rockets - legitimate "resistance," it insists - across them. Much depends on whether it will learn to act pragmatically like the PLO before it: engagement is more likely to encourage that than isolation. Israel's acceptance as part of the Middle East is at stake.

Majorities on both sides say they want peace but few believe it is attainable. It has all been discussed countless times in the last four decades. It all still looks impossibly hard to achieve.

History

In the months before June 1967, relations between Israel and its neighbours Syria and Egypt were strained. There were clashes on the Syrian border, provoked by both sides. In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser put on a show of force in support of Syria. Egyptian troops were sent into Sinai and on May 22 Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, cutting off Israel's port of Eilat from the Red Sea. On June 5, Israel's prime minister, Levi Eshkol, launched a first strike. At 7.45am Israeli jets attacked Egypt's air bases in Sinai and Suez: by mid-morning the Egyptian air force was all but wiped out. Israeli armoured divisions pushed south into Sinai and the Egyptian military fled. Jordanian forces attacked in Jerusalem but their air force was quickly destroyed. On June 6, Israeli paratroopers fought their way into the Jordanian-held east of the city and by the next day Israel took the Old City and the Western Wall. Other units pushed into the West Bank. The Syrian air force had been destroyed and Israeli forces took the Golan Heights. On June 10 a ceasefire was signed. Israel had defeated three Arab armies.

Rory McCarthy speaks to soldiers, settlers, activists, Israeli Palestinians and refugees about how the war changed their lives:

05.06.2007: Ahmad Shalabi, 51, Palestinian refugee in Jordan
05.06.2007: Daniella Weiss, 62, mayor of the Jewish settlement of Kedumim, near Nablus, in the West Bank
05.06.2007: Gila Svirsky, 60, prominent Israeli peace activist
05.06.2007: Hala Hamdan, 35, Palestinian living near Nablus
05.06.2007: Saadeddin Malley, A Palestinian-American businessman based in Chicago
05.06.2007: Senan Abdelqader, 44, architect in Beit Safafa, just south of Jerusalem
05.06.2007: Shimon Cahaner, 72, retired Israeli army colonel
More on the six-day war

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