Remembering the 1967 War

Martin Kramer in “1967 and Memory" discusses the persistent notion that, if the consequences of the 1967 war could just be reversed, the Arab sense of injury that underlies the current conflict with Israel would be solved:   

[This analysis] overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.

That ideological excess, known as pan-Arabism or Nasserism, rested upon a prior sense of injury, in which 1948 played the major part.  In that earlier war, Israel succeeded in defeating or holding off an array of Arab armies, and three quarters of a million Palestinian Arab refugees ended up in camps.  The injury of 1948 was so deep that, over the following twenty years . . . there was no peace process.  The Arabs nursed their wounds and dreamed only of another round. . . .

1948 also had a profoundly destabilizing effect on Arab politics.  Three coups took place in Syria in 1949, and often thereafter; Jordan’s King Abdullah was assassinated (by Palestinians) in 1951; Free Officers toppled the monarchy in Egypt in 1952.  Everywhere, the 1948 regimes were faulted for their failure to strangle Israel at birth. Military strongmen seized power in the name of revolution, and promised to do better in the next round. . . .

In 1967, the other war came, and these regimes suffered a far more devastating defeat, delivered in a mere six days.  Unlike 1948, when they had lost much of Palestine, in 1967 they lost their own sovereign territory.  The shock wave, it is generally assumed, was even greater.

Yet what is telling is that the regimes didn’t fall.  Nasser offered his resignation, but the crowds filled the streets and demanded that he stay on — and he did.  The defense minister and air force commander of Syria, Hafez Asad, held on and ousted his rival two years later, establishing himself as sole ruler.  King Hussein of Jordan, who had lost half his kingdom, also survived, as did the Jordanian monarchy. . . . In the three Arab states that lost the war, the regimes survived, the leaders ruled for life, and they are now being succeeded by their sons.

What explains the fact that 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab system as 1948 did?  It is true that even before 1967, these regimes had started to harden themselves.  The evolution of the Arab state as a “republic of fear” dates from the decade before 1967, and this probably helped regimes weather the storm.  Unlike in 1948, there weren’t many refugees either — the Arab states lost territory, but the war was quick, and most of the inhabitants of the lost territory stayed in their homes.

But I believe the reason 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab order is this:  Arab regimes and peoples drew together in the fear that Israel could repeat 1967 if it had to, and that it might show up one day on the outskirts of Cairo or Damascus (as it threatened to do in 1973), or come right into an Arab capital (as it did in Beirut in 1982).

The memory of 1967 thus became the basis of an implicit understanding between the regimes and the peoples:  the regimes will avert war, and in return the people will stay loyal, even docile.  The regimes have upheld their end, by gradually coming to terms with Israel, and by leaving the Palestinians to fight their own fight. . . .   

The Iraq wars — there have been three in the last three decades — provide a striking contrast to the relative stability in Israel’s corner of the Middle East — a stability which rests, I suggest, on the Arab memory of 1967, which restructured Arab thinking in the states surrounding Israel, away from eager anticipation of war, and toward anxiously averting it.

So in regard to Arab politics, I have offered a possible revision of the usual view of 1967: perhaps its memory, far from making the Arabs angry and volatile, underpins the stability of the Arab order and regional peace. . . .

The risk today, over forty years later, is not that the consequences of 1967 are still with us.  It is that memory of 1967 is starting to fade, and its legacy is being eroded.  I am struck by the subtitles of the two leading books on 1967.  Michael Oren’s is June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.  Tom Segev’s goes even further: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East.  If only it were so.  The problem is that the Middle East continues to be remade and transformed by subsequent events [such as the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Lebanon War in 2006], whose legacy is much more damaging than the legacy of 1967.

If Kramer is right, negotiating a “peace agreement” with a Palestinian Authority that cannot control even its own terrorist group (much less the one that won the 2006 Palestinian election) is not a step toward peace, but rather a further reversal of the psychological effect of the 1967 war.