Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 27
Israel’s victory in 1967 averted a near-certain second Jewish genocide in the twentieth century
Older readers may recall how popular Israel was in the West in the early years of the state when it looked as though she would be swept away in a tsunami of Arab hostility – the Israeli David confronting the Arab Goliath. Since June 1967, the roles have reversed; the Palestinians are now the hapless David defiantly facing Israel, the overbearing Goliath.
It has become fashionable to decry the Six Day War as a disaster for Israel, the root cause of all the country’s troubles since – including a seemingly endless occupation, a controversial settlement policy, and unremitting terrorism. But all of these political, military and moral headaches pale into insignificance next to the disaster that loomed on the eve of that war and that most Israelis believe would have materialised had it been lost. Perhaps if Israel had just resisted the urge to strike pre-emptively, the troublesome sequelae of the Six Day War might have been avoided and Israel would have been left in peace? Yes, a kind of peace probably would have ensued. The peace of the grave. A mass one.
So Sorry We Won is the ironic title of a book by late Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon [1]. It expresses Israelis’ frustration with their fair-weather friends’ two-faced attitude – praising “plucky little Israel” for standing up to the vastly greater enemy forces that surrounded them and then, in the blink of an eye, branding the victorious country as the aggressor. Today, that irony has been all but lost in the minds of Israel’s critics – including a small but vocal minority of Israelis – who have come to regard that “cursed victory” as the cause of most of the problems the country has faced ever since [2].
But what was the alternative – to lose the war? As in 1948, an Israeli defeat in 1967 would have risked a second Jewish genocide within a generation. Israelis are often reprimanded for expressing such fears – merely “Arab rhetoric” they’re told by Middle Eastern experts who are quick to accuse the Jewish state of overreacting by resorting to military responses prematurely.
Israeli fears of another Shoah were far from imaginary. The Arab-Nazi connection began with the mutual admiration of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Third Reich in the 1930s and was cemented by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini’s wartime pact with Hitler [3]. According to German political scientist Mathias Kuntzel [4], “Arab leaders adopted the texts, images, and tactics of European antisemitism.” The cauldron of hate surrounding Zionism and Israel became Nazified. The unequivocal Arab intention in 1948 was to crush the Zionist enemy mercilessly, including “driving the Jews into the sea” – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and massacre. Historian Benny Morris [5] has amply documented the evidence: when Arab forces had the (rare) opportunity either to take prisoners or to commit atrocities, they mostly opted for the latter.
That annihilationist impulse was freely expressed in the run-up to the Six Day War [6]. After the peremptory withdrawal of the UN Emergency Force, the Egyptian Voice of the Arabs radio station proclaimed on 18 May 1967: “We shall exercise patience no more. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.” Syrian Defense Minister Assad rallied his troops on 20 May: “The time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.” On 26 May, President Nasser declared: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” Ahmad Shukeiri, Yasser Arafat’s predecessor as PLO chairman, announced on 1st June: “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.” In case that sounded too humane, he clarified the intention: “In the event of a conflagration, no Jews whatsoever will survive."
These bloodcurdling threats were accompanied by the mobilisation of Arab forces numbering almost half a million troops, more than 2,800 tanks, and 800 aircraft; Israel had only 50,000 troops (expanded to 100,000 by reservists), 300 aircraft and 800 tanks. When Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off the supply of oil to Israel from Iran, he provided an unequivocal casus belli. Israel launched a devastating pre-emptive strike and defeated all her enemies within a week thereby saving the country from calamity. Although mass graves had been prepared in Tel Aviv’s municipal parks, only 20 civilians were killed out of a population of 2.7 million. Israel’s military casualties, however, were high — 777 dead and 2,586 wounded. The Arab death toll was 15,000 Egyptians, 2,500 Syrians, and 800 Jordanians.
What about the allegation that Israel habitually overreacts? Between 1949 and 1967, more than 450 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks emanating from neighbouring countries – that alone would have legitimised the launching of a defensive war. But Israel strove hard (with rare exceptions such as the 1956 Sinai campaign) to maintain calm and display restraint in the face of outrageous provocation in the hope that the Arab world would eventually reconcile itself to the Jewish state’s existence.
Following the Six Day War, Israel’s declared policy was “everything is negotiable.” By the end of the war, Israel had more than tripled the size of the area she controlled, from 8,000 to 26,000 square miles. (More than 90% of that territory was the Sinai Peninsula, all of which was returned to Egypt, after the evacuation of 7,000 Israeli settlers, following the peace treaty in 1978).
By contrast, the Arab League repeated ad nauseam their diplomatic posture – no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. In November 1967, when the UN Security Council passed resolution 242 that called for a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces in exchange for secure and recognised borders, Israel accepted it without hesitation while the Arabs, with equal alacrity, repeated their Three Nos. They followed that up with their 1973 Yom Kippur war and rejected UNSC resolution 338 that re-iterated 242.
How did the international community respond to these events? Before June 1967, the world was sympathetic to the tiny state facing the possibility of destruction at the hands of an array of dangerous enemies who openly proclaimed their intention to commit mass murder. The Holocaust was fresh in humanity’s collective memory and the prospect of the Jewish people, whom the world had abandoned, undergoing another catastrophe weighed heavily on all people of conscience. But when Jews took up arms to defend themselves and prevailed – that was a different story. The empathy evaporated within days and eight years later the UN General Assembly branded Zionism a form of racism.
Why did this happen? The usual answer is that Israel won the Six Day War so decisively that the underdogs emerged as top dogs. Israel transformed herself into a regional superpower lording over the Palestinians, the new underdogs. Simple as that. But is it?
Commentators who insist that the outcome of the Six Day War justifies the Palestinian complaint that Israel occupies Palestinian land need reminding of an inconvenient truth. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was founded three years before that conflict with the explicit aim of liberating Israel from the clutches of the evil Zionists.
The West Bank (as the Jordanians had renamed Judea and Samaria in 1950) was not, at that point, in Israeli but Arab hands. It had been envisioned as a Palestinian Arab state by the UN’s partition plan in 1947, an offer that had been violently rejected by the Arabs and accepted by the Jews. Jordan then invaded the territory in 1948, in a failed attempt to prevent Israel’s birth, and annexed it two years later. Yet no Arab leaders accused the Hashemite Kingdom of “illegally occupying Palestinian territory” – that charge would be exclusively reserved for Israel after she took control of it following renewed Jordanian aggression 1967.
Perhaps it was the establishment of settlements in the West Bank that soured international opinion towards Israel? That’s a plausible theory – except that the finger-wagging started within days of the 1967 victory and long before the first settlement had been thought of. Gelber [7] describes Israel’s precipitate decline in world opinion. A mere two weeks after the war, prime minister Eshkol called a crisis meeting in a futile attempt to halt it.
So if the Palestinian issue is a red herring, what really happened?
The answer may reside in the dark recesses of the collective global psyche. The Jews – those same homeless wanderers who had been kicked from pillar to post for centuries – had done something unforgiveable: they had revived their state, had defended it against more powerful aggressors and had won an overwhelming victory. That outcome hadn’t been in the script of the world’s morality play. As Dana Horn [8] puts it, people love dead Jews; the living ones they find more challenging.
The 1967 Six Day War indisputably left bitter-sweet legacy. But the overwhelming majority of Israelis (and Jews worldwide) at the time experienced a single, unambiguous emotion – relief. That sense of having escaped a terrible disaster was almost tangible. The teenage Jewish state had dodged a bullet. Or rather several million bullets. That should have been a cause for worldwide celebration. It wasn’t.
Let me pose three questions to those who view the Six Day War and its aftermath as an abject Israeli failure. Faced with potential politicide and genocide, what should Israel have done – surrendered and appealed to Arab leaders for mercy? Relinquished, immediately and unconditionally, all the territory she had acquired in self-defence, in the hope of receiving a loving embrace from her neighbours and supportive editorials from the New York Times?
Or did Israel do what any country would have done and defended her citizens from threatened annihilation, restricted the unfettered access of terrorists to her population centres, and sought to bolster her negotiating position in the event that her hitherto recalcitrant, murderous enemies would finally seek a negotiated peace?
No prizes for correct answers.
1. Kishon, E. So Sorry We Won. Maariv Library, 1968
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850521-so-sorry-we-won
2. Bregman, A. Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories. London, Penguin Books, 2014
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cursed-Victory-History-Occupied-Territories/dp/0713997753
3. Haykin A. Not Just The Mufti - the real extension of the Palestinian-Nazi collaboration. https://adin1664.medium.com/not-just-the-mufti-the-real-extension-of-the-palestinian-nazi-collaboration-67e6340b6773
4. Kuntzel, M. 1967: Nasser’s antisemitic war against Israel. Fathom, Spring 1967
https://fathomjournal.org/1967-nassers-antisemitic-war-against-israel/#_edn20
5. Morris B. 1948. A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2008
6. Comay N. Arabs Speak Freely. Wiltshire, Cromwell Press, 2005
7. Gelber Y. From underdog to occupier: Israel’s tarnished image. Israel Affairs Volume 27 Number 1 February 2021, pp7-26
8. Horn D. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. London, Norton & Co, 2021
