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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
By the spring of 1967, Nasser's waning prestige, escalating
Syrian-Israeli tensions, and the emergence of Levi Eshkol as prime
minister set the stage for the third Arab-Israeli war. Throughout
the 1950s and early 1960s, Nasser was the fulcrum of Arab politics.
Nasser's success, however, was shortlived; his union with Syria
fell apart, a revolutionary government in Iraq proved to be a
competitor for power, and Egypt became embroiled in a debilitating
civil war in Yemen. After 1964, when Israel began diverting waters
(of the Jordan River) originating in the Golan Heights for its new
National Water Carrier, Syria built its own diverting facility,
which the IDF frequently attacked. Finally, in 1963, Ben-Gurion
stepped down and the more cautious Levi Eshkol became prime
minister, giving the impression that Israel would be less willing
to engage the Arab world in hostilities.
On April 6, 1967, Israeli jet fighters shot down six Syrian
planes over the Golan Heights, which led to a further escalation of
Israeli-Syrian tensions. The Soviet Union, wanting to involve Egypt
as a deterrent to an Israeli initiative against Syria, misinformed
Nasser on May 13 that the Israelis were planning to attack Syria on
May 17 and that they had already concentrated eleven to thirteen
brigades on the Syrian border for this purpose. In response Nasser
put his armed forces in a state of maximum alert, sent combat
troops into Sinai, notified UN Secretary General U Thant of his
decision "to terminate the existence of the United Nations
Emergency Force (UNEF) on United Arab Republic (UAR) soil and in
the Gaza Strip," and announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran.
The Eshkol government, to avoid the international pressure that
forced Israel to retreat in 1956, sent Foreign Minister Abba Eban
to Europe and the United States to convince Western leaders to
pressure Nasser into reversing his course. In Israel, Eshkol's
diplomatic waiting game and Nasser's threatening rhetoric created
a somber mood. To reassure the public, Moshe Dayan, the hero of the
1956 Sinai Campaign, was appointed minister of defense and a
National Unity Government was formed, which for the first time
included Begin's Herut Party, the dominant element in Gahal.
The actual fighting was over almost before it began; the
Israeli Air Corps on June 5 destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian
Air Force on the ground. King Hussein of Jordan, misinformed by
Nasser about Egyptian losses, authorized Jordanian artillery to
fire on Jerusalem. Subsequently, both the Jordanians in the east
and the Syrians in the north were quickly defeated.
The June 1967 War was a watershed event in the history of
Israel and the Middle East. After only six days of fighting, Israel
had radically altered the political map of the region. By June 13,
Israeli forces had captured the Golan Heights from Syria, Sinai and
the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and all of Jerusalem and the West Bank
from Jordan. The new territories more than doubled the size of pre1967 Israel, placing under Israel's control more than 1 million
Palestinian Arabs. In Israel, the ease of the victory, the
expansion of the state's territory, and the reuniting of Jerusalem,
the holiest place in Judaism, permanently altered political
discourse. In the Arab camp, the war significantly weakened
Nasserism, and led to the emergence of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) as the leading representative of the Palestinian
people and effective player in Arab politics.
The heroic performance of the IDF and especially the capture of
Jerusalem unleashed a wave of religious nationalism throughout
Israel. The war was widely viewed in Israel as a vindication of
political Zionism; the defenseless Jew of the shtetl (the
typical Jewish town or village of the Pale of Settlement),
oppressed by the tsar and slaughtered by the Nazis, had become the
courageous soldier of the IDF, who in the face of Arab hostility
and superpower apathy had won a miraculous victory. After 2,000
years of exile, the Jews now possessed all of historic Palestine,
including a united Jerusalem. The secular messianism that had been
Zionism's creed since its formation in the late 1800s was now
supplanted by a religious-territorial messianism whose major Yisrad
objective was securing the unity of Eretz Yisrael. In the process,
the ethos of Labor Zionism, which had been on the decline
throughout the 1960s, was overshadowed.
In the midst of the nationalist euphoria that followed the war,
talk of exchanging newly captured territories for peace had little
public appeal. The Eshkol government followed a two-track policy
with respect to the territories, which would be continued under
future Labor governments: on the one hand, it stated a willingness
to negotiate, while on the other, it laid plans to create Jewish
settlements in the disputed territories. Thus, immediately
following the war, Eshkol issued a statement that he was willing to
negotiate "everything" for a full peace, which would include free
passage through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran and a
solution to the refugee problem in the context of regional
cooperation. This was followed in November 1967 by his acceptance
of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for "withdrawal
of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent
conflict" in exchange for Arab acceptance of Israel. Concurrently,
on September 24, Eshkol's government announced plans for the
resettlement of the Old City of Jerusalem, of the Etzion Bloc--
kibbutzim on the Bethlehem-Hebron road wiped out by Palestinians in
the war of 1948--and for kibbutzim in the northern sector of the
Golan Heights. Plans were also unveiled for new neighborhoods
around Jerusalem, near the old buildings of Hebrew University, and
near the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.
The Arab states, however, rejected outright any negotiations
with the Jewish state. At Khartoum, Sudan, in the summer of 1967,
the Arab states unanimously adopted their famous "three nos": no
peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with
Israel concerning any Palestinian territory. The stridency of the
Khartoum resolution, however, masked important changes that the
June 1967 War caused in inter-Arab politics. At Khartoum, Nasser
pledged to stop destabilizing the region and launching acerbic
propaganda attacks against the Persian Gulf monarchies in exchange
for badly needed economic assistance. This meant that Egypt, along
with the other Arab states, would focus on consolidating power at
home and on pressing economic problems rather than on revolutionary
unity schemes. After 1967 Arab regimes increasingly viewed Israel
and the Palestinian problem not as the key to revolutionary change
of the Arab state system, but in terms of how they affected
domestic political stability. The Palestinians, who since the late
1940s had looked to the Arab countries to defeat Israel and regain
their homeland, were radicalized by the 1967 defeat. The PLO--an
umbrella organization of Palestinian resistance groups led by Yasir
Arafat's Al Fatah--moved to the forefront of Arab resistance
against Israel. Recruits and money poured in, and throughout 1968
Palestinian guerrillas launched a number of border raids on Israel
that added to the organization's popularity. The fedayeen (Arab
guerrillas) attacks brought large-scale Israeli retaliation, which
the Arab states were not capable of counteracting. The tension
between Arab states' interests and the more revolutionary
aspirations of the Palestinian resistance foreshadowed a major
inter-Arab political conflict.
Data as of December 1988
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