Today is the 40th anniversary of the sixth day of the Six Day war. Yesterday, Davi Bernstein posted several articles from COMMENTARY’s archives regarding the war, which make informative reading 40 years later:
Walter Laqueur, writing in “Israel, the Arabs, and World Opinion” (August 1967) in the immediate aftermath of the war, had words that serve as an answer to those who believe that Israel could have had peace by simply returning the newly-acquired territory to those who had just attacked it:
What next, then, the
Middle East ? The Arab world, while utterly opposed to acceptingIsrael ’s existence, is for the time being unable to effect’s destruction. Nevertheless, the Arabs are firmly convinced that it is just a matter of one more try. . . . The Israeli victory was quick and sweeping but in no way total; for most Egyptians and Syrians, not to mention Iraqis, the war was something outside their own experience and the reason for the Arab defeat therefore remains a riddle. . . . Israel
For how will the Arabs ever overcome their plight unless they have the courage to confront squarely the deeper causes of the catastrophe of 1967? Radical and painful self-criticism . . . is almost unthinkable; it would mean . . . changing basic attitudes, giving up cherished beliefs. Instead, the Arab citizenry has been offered ridiculous historical analogies: did not the Prophet Mohammed also suffer bitter defeat at Uhud before moving on to final victory?
Martin Peretz, writing in 1967 as a young instructor in Social Studies at Harvard and self-described member of “the radical community,” wrote in “The American Left and Israel” (November 1967) about what was already an anti-American strain in leftist thinking about Israel:
The American involvement in
is now commonly viewed on the Left as an exercise in genocide, a race war against coloreds . . . . [T]he orthodox notion of Vietnam as “imperialist” or as a neo-imperialist instrument makes sense only to those . . . for whom the side in a dispute which engages the open and general support of Americans is ipso facto bound to be in the wrong. The Jewish radicals and other ideological agnostics who have been unable to accept this reading of Israel ’s role are being forced out of the movement. . . . Israel
It seems that the Left, so patient with the political grotesqueries of its favored nations, would only be satisfied with an absolutely unflawed
. . . Israel
Paul Johnson, in “The Miracle” (May 1998), noted that in 1947 the Zionist leadership had accepted the United Nations partition scheme, which “would have given the nascent state only 5,500 square miles, chiefly in the Negev desert, and would have created an impossible entity of 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs.” But that plan was rejected by the Arabs:
It was the Arab leadership, by its obduracy and its ready resort to force, that was responsible for the somewhat enlarged Israel that emerged after the 1949 armistice, and the same mind-set would create the more greatly enlarged Israel that emerged after the Six-Day War of 1967. In another of the paradoxes of history, the frontiers of the state as they exist today, were as much the doing of the Arabs as of the Jews. If it had been left to the UN, tiny
probably could not have survived. Zion
Forty years after the Six Day War, the thinking on the Left and among the Arabs has not fundamentally changed, as they continue to rain rockets on
In her extremely valuable post yesterday, Anne Lieberman included a little-remembered history lesson from 1964-65 that served as the founding event for the “moderate” Fatah. History still reverberates.
UPDATE: Michael Oren, in yesterday’s Washington Post Book World, reviews Tom Segev’s revisionist history of the Six Day War. It is the newest and longest book about the war, but apparently did not have room for all the facts:
Segev’s book is all but devoid of Arab calls for Israel’s destruction and the slaughter of its citizens. There is no mention of [Arab] pro-war demonstrations, of Egypt’s willingness to use poison gas against its enemies, or of the detailed Arab plans for conquering Israel. Segev even ignores the Khartoum resolution after the war, in which the Arab states refused to negotiate with Israel and to grant it peace and recognition.