Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Reflecting on the Six Day War - June 1967


Reflecting on the Six Day War

Nyt_6867_2We tend to remember the miraculous victory, but the story that bears remembering as well is that of the days and weeks that preceded it. Amid the large number of Six Day War retrospectives, an article and a website that should not be missed:
Anne Lieberman’s “Six Days Remembered,” a Front Page Essay published in The Jewish Press on June 1, 2005, remains one of the best day-by-day recreations of the three weeks leading up to the war, as a surrounded and vastly outnumbered state, only 19 years old, faced massed armies openly threatening to complete the Holocaust from two decades before:
May 14: Nasser demands the withdrawal of UN Emergency Forces — established a decade earlier as an international guarantee of safety for Israel — from the Sinai Peninsula. The UN complies without any discussion in the General Assembly [or Security Council], and Nasser replaces the UNEF with his own forces. . . .
Cairo Radio’s Voice of the Arabs rejoices: "As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel . . . The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence."
On Israel Independence Day, three Egyptian army divisions and 600 tanks roll into the Sinai. The international community is mute. . . . 
May 17: Voice of the Arabs: "All Egypt is now prepared to plunge into total war which will put an end to Israel."
The Syrian defense minister announces: "Our forces are now entirely ready . . . to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united . . . the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation."
Even for a reader who knows the eventual outcome of this story, the increasing day-by-day pressure over three weeks is chilling. This relatively short article, with its punctuated daily summaries, manages to convey Israel’s existential stress more effectively than many longer accounts.
CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) has established a new web site -- The Six-Day War -- that includes links to documents and chronologies that also help recapture the atmosphere of the war and its aftermath that four decades have clouded.
One of the linked documents is the transcriptof the November 15, 1967 meeting of the U.N. Security Council, which included Abba Eban’s response when the Syrian representative asserted that Israel’s mobilization of its armed forces in the first days of June threatened war:
Of course the Cabinet of which I am a member ordered mobilization in the early days of June. Ninety thousand Egyptian troops in the Sinai; 45,000 poised on the Syrian heights; the entire Jordan army in order of battle; all surrounding airfields with operation orders about targets for attack; acomplete naval blockade of our southern frontiers: if, in these conditions, Israel mobilized its forces for defense, this simply proves that the Israel Government was possessed of a normal sanity.
In the same U.N. Security Council meeting,Eban also responded to the Jordanian representative:
I will say only one thing about his references to the ancient part of Jerusalem. It is much better to build houses and synagogues than it is to destroy them. We were shocked by the desecration and the sacrilege we found, by the fact that not a single synagogue had been left standing and that not for a single day had there been freedom of access to the oldest of mankind's holiest places. Certainly the satisfaction of universal religious interests must be, as it is, a primary objective of my Government, both in the present and in the future.
The American representative (Arthur Goldberg) also spoke at that meeting, discussing an initial draft of what became U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, with its call for withdrawal from an unspecified portion of “territories” in exchange for “secure and recognized” borders:
Historically there have never been secure or recognized boundaries in the area. Neither the armistice lines of 1949 nor the cease-fire lines of 1967 have answered that description . . . . Now such boundaries have yet to be agreed upon. An agreement on that point is an absolute essential to a just and lasting peace just as withdrawal is.
Forty years later, some believe that withdrawal to the 1967 “Auschwitz borders” is the key to peace, even though (as multiple documents from Resolution 242 participants posted by CAMERA make clear) no such withdrawal was contemplated by the U.N. resolution, and even though the later total withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza produced only cross-border attacks and rockets, and even though the offer of a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank produced not peace (or even a peace offer), but a barbaric war of mass-murder bombers against Israeli civilians.
The recollection of what led to the Six Day War, and the relentless, accelerating Arab and Persian rhetoric of jihad and extinction 40 years later, should -- at a minimum -- shift the burden of proof to the other side. The real obstacle to peace has been evident not for 40 but for 60 years.
POSTSCRIPT: I should note that Anne Lieberman’s article was written two months before the Gaza disengagement began, at a time when the withdrawal was still being debated in Israel (and when calls for a referendum were being ignored). The article warned that returning land to an aggressor was dangerous, and ended by citing Abba Eban’s assertion that the 1967 Auschwitz borders represented a situation that would never be repeated. In light of what has happened since -- as Israel destroyed its own communities in Gaza and turned the Land over to avowed enemies, who created a Hobbesian hell and a base for attacks on Israeli cities, and a situation for the Palestinians themselves that the Palestinian president admitted this week is even worse than the former “occupation” -- Eban’swords to the Jordanian representative at the U.N. in 1967 now have a haunting, full-circle quality to them:
“It is much better to build houses and synagogues than it is to destroy them.”
POST-POSTSCRIPT: In another portion of his reply to the Syrian representative’s accusation of Israeli “aggression” on the Golan Heights, Eban responded as follows:
Syria played a special part in the explosion which convulsed the peace of the Middle East in the summer months. . . . It was Syrian policy that influenced the United Arab Republic to seek a confrontation in the early summer. It was Syria and the United Arab Republic together which involved Jordan in that tragic conflict. It was Syria, the United Arab Republic and Jordan together which invited contingents from Algeria, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and other States . . . Syria does not come here as the victim of aggression but as its first and primary architect.Never has self-criticism been less practiced; never has it been more justified.
Gregg M. Mashberg, in the letters section of today’s New York Times, poses a series of “what if” questions that, forty years later, have not yet been the subject of any significant Arab self-criticism:
What if the Arabs had accepted the United Nations partition plan of 1947, dividing the remainder of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state?
What if in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war of independence the Arab states had assimilated the refugees into their societies, rather than leave them to fester in refugee camps for generations?
What if the Arabs had created a Palestinian state in the West Bank between 1948 and 1967, when it was held by Jordan? What if Jordan had heeded Israel’s pleas at the outbreak of the Six-Day War and not joined the attack?
What if the Palestinians had accepted the “Clinton parameters” in late 2000, calling for the creation of a Palestinian state on more than 90 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and with East Jerusalem as its capital?
What if in the wake of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 the Palestinians had sought to create a viable society rather than a launching pad for rockets aimed at Israel?
And what if the Saudi peace proposal was not premised on the “right of return” of Palestinians into pre-1967 Israel [and the return of Israel to indefensible borders –JCI]?
Rather than young Israelis questioning why their parents didn’t turn back in 1967, young Palestinians should be asking why, at every opportunity, their parents have chosen conflict over compromise.


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