Forty years on: The bitter legacy of the 1967 Middle East war

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jun2007/sixd-j18.shtml

By Jean Shaoul

18 June 2007

The 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours has long been recognised
as a disaster for the Arab regimes and for the Palestinian people in
particular, many of whom fled or were driven out by the Israel Defence
Forces (IDF). Those who remained have been subject to four decades of
military occupation and ever worsening poverty.

It is less well understood that a major military victory against numerically
superior forces inaugurated a process that has produced a political and
social disaster for Israel. Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories
has been marked by endless conflict with the Palestinian people and the
ruinous costs—economic, social and moral—associated with it.

*The foundation of Israel*

Israel was established after World War II following a vote at the United
Nations in 1947 that was engineered by the US and the Soviet Union, each of
which saw the formation of a Jewish state as a way of asserting their own
power in the Middle East at the expense of Britain and France.

The ostensible homeland for the Jews was realised in the form of a state
based on the dispossession and forced expulsion of its Palestinian
inhabitants and on religious exclusivism. Despite this, the creation of the
state of Israel was viewed with sympathy and lent legitimacy in the eyes of
millions around the world by one of history's greatest crimes—the
annihilation of 6 million European Jews in the Nazi holocaust. Israel's
rulers concealed their own crimes against the Palestinians behind the claim
that Israel was to be "a land without people for a people without land."

Many of Israel's original citizens were Jews who had been in left-wing
movements in Europe, and had amongst their number notable musicians,
scientists, intellectuals and writers. The country's communal kibbutzim
became bywords for a striving for a new social order. The ruling Labour
government capitalised on this and promoted the view of Israel as a brave
little state based on social justice—a beacon of democracy and the rule of
law in the Middle East surrounded by a sea of despotic enemies.

Beneath this progressive veneer, Israel was maintained for the next 19 years
through provocations and military attacks against its neighbours, including
a full-scale war against Egypt in 1956. Those Palestinians who remained
after the establishment of the state were subject until 1966 to military
law, while inequality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens was enshrined
in law.

The 1967 war exposed the expansionist character of the Israeli state and
brought to the fore the reactionary essence of Zionism.

*1967: Myths and reality*

The war is usually presented as the victory of an Israeli David over an Arab
Goliath. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, writing recently in the *
Guardian*, described 1967 as an "unwanted war to defend [Israel's] very
existence."

However, Menachem Begin, the former terrorist who became the leader of the
Likud party, admitted, "In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army
concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian
President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with
ourselves. We decided to attack him."

The Israelis had, in fact, prepared militarily and mounted provocations
against its neighbours in order to provoke a response that could be used to
justify an expansion of its borders.

The Labour Party leaders had long since concluded that Israel, surrounded by
numerically superior and hostile neighbours, needed "defensible borders" and
could not survive any war unless it attacked first. The Revisionist
tendency, then a minority tendency within the Zionist movement, had always
championed the seizure of Jordan and the whole of British Mandate Palestine.
As far back as 1923, it had insisted that Zionism was "a colonising
adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force."
Other right-wing elements had advocated the Jordan River as Israel's eastern
border.

Facing both domestic and international opposition to such an expansionary
policy, a suitable pretext was needed for its implementation. In 1967,
Egypt's President Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser provided it.

The war that broke out in June, and which lasted just six days, followed
several years of escalating conflict between Israel and Syria over grazing
rights in the demilitarised no-man's land between the two countries, as well
as repeated Palestinian raids from Syria and Jordan. For Israel, this land
was too near one of the sources of the Jordan River to allow Syria to
control it. In a particularly provocative aerial battle in April 1967,
Israel downed six Syrian planes in a matter of minutes.

The Syrians and the Palestinian leadership had for years appealed for
support to Nasser, looking to him because of his overthrow of the Egyptian
monarchy, his expulsion of the British from the Suez Canal, and his espousal
of pan-Arab nationalism. Nasser ordered the United Nations to withdraw its
forces from the Gaza Strip on May 16, which Egypt then controlled, and Sharm
el-Sheikh, where, since the 1956 Suez crisis, they guarded the Straits of
Tiran—the access route from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Later he announced the closing of the straits to Israeli shipping. But, with
his coffers empty and most of his special forces bogged down in the civil
war in Yemen, Nasser did not want a war with Israel. And the Israelis knew
it. Yitzhak Rabin, then chief of staff with a reputation as a hawk, later
admitted as much.

As the tension mounted during the weeks preceding the war, Tel Aviv
denounced the blockade of the port of Eilat, Israel's only access to the Red
Sea, as an act of war and a threat to Israel's existence. The Labour
government brought in General Moshe Dayan, an arch hawk, as minister of
defence, and Menachem Begin as minister of state, both of whom were
outspoken proponents of an expansionary policy.

Both the Soviet Union and Britain's former Conservative Deputy Foreign
Secretary Anthony Nutting warned Nasser that Israel would strike against
Egypt, and his own army chiefs and Syria advocated a first strike. Nasser
refused to accept this, believing that the US, as it had done during the
1956 Suez crisis, would not allow a war by Israel, and made no preparations.

However, in 1956 Washington's intervention had been motivated by its
determination to end Britain and France's hold on the Middle East. Now, the
US faced the growing radicalisation of the Arab masses and Moscow's
increasing interest and influence in the Middle East, including Egypt's turn
to the Soviet Union for development loans and military aid. In addition,
Egypt was fighting a war against Washington's ally, Saudi Arabia, in Yemen.

So on June 5, with Washington's support, Israel seized the opportunity to
initiate the first strike, wiping out almost the entire Egyptian air force
on the ground. In the words of Israeli politician Shimon Peres, "It took 80
minutes to execute a plan that had been in the making for 10 years."

The Arab armies were routed and Israel vastly expanded its territories to
include all of what was British Mandate Palestine and part of Syria,
confirming Israel's position as the major military power in the Middle East.

*After 1967*

The war created a new generation of refugees who fled the Israeli troops.
Apart from Sinai, handed back in 1981 after the peace deal with Egypt, and
Quneitra, recaptured by Syria during the 1973 war, Israel still occupies
these lands today. The Labour government, after achieving the stated
objective of the war, the opening of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
shipping, refused to hand back the captured lands. Instead, it annexed East
Jerusalem, captured from Jordan. Dayan, the defence minister, ordered the
destruction of Syrian villages and towns in the occupied Golan Heights.

Within months, Israel began to colonise the occupied Palestinian territories
and Syria's Golan Heights. Theodor Meron, the foreign minister's most senior
legal advisor, writing to the prime minister on September 18, opposed this,
warning, "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered
territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva
Convention."

In defying international conventions, the Labour government openly embraced
a militarist and colonialist strategy, behind which all the major strands of
Zionism united. The realities of conquest and occupation produced a profound
political shift that was to affect all aspects of Israeli life.

The Labour government, despite it democratic pretensions, had to administer
a repressive military occupation. The Palestinians in the occupied
territories were denied any political rights, and the occupation became
increasingly brutal as the Palestinians resisted. Homes were demolished,
property destroyed, many Palestinians were shot, tear gassed or injured,
while many more were detained without trial.

The 1967 war brought to the fore a new generation of political leaders, such
as Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, all with the
closest connections to the military. The war had enhanced their reputation,
particularly Dayan's.

The passing in 1974 of the premiership to Rabin, who had been chief of staff
in 1967, signified the end of the old guard. A senior military command
became the prerequisite for a successful political career.

The occupation, the subsequent war of attrition on the Suez Canal, the 1973
war, the wars in Lebanon in 1976 and 1982, and the suppression of the 1987
and 2000 *intifadas* required the increasing militarization of Israeli
political life and society as a whole. While the army had always been a
conscript army, with citizens liable to reservist duty every year,
conscription and reservist duty became longer and more difficult to evade.
The corollary of an ever more brutal occupation was the dehumanising impact
it had on the Israelis themselves, who were made party to grave crimes and
human rights abuses on the basis of the insistence on an existential threat
posed by the Palestinians.

Israel was transformed to a greater extent than heretofore into a garrison
state. Washington responded to 1967 and the confirmation of Israel's
position as the major military power in the Middle East by massively
increasing its military and economic aid. Today it is worth $3 billion a
year, more than six times all US aid to sub-Saharan Africa. Without this aid
and other economic and political support, Israel would long ago have
collapsed.

In return, Israel intervened to suppress the Palestinians in Jordan and
Lebanon, suppressing the Arab working class and keeping decrepit regimes in
power. It served Washington's Cold War aims by keeping the Stalinist regime
in Moscow at bay by defeating the Soviet Union's allies Egypt and Syria in
another war in 1973. Having developed its own nuclear arsenal, it acted
against Iraq, then allied to Moscow, by bombing its nuclear reactor in 1981.

Israel supplied arms to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and backed other
regimes that the US could not be seen to be openly supporting. Last summer,
it launched a murderous war against Hezbollah to eradicate opposition to the
US-backed government in Lebanon. All this has only served to make Israel
more abhorrent in the eyes of its neighbours and turned millions of people
around the world—who once looked upon Israel with sympathy—against it.

*A demographic and political shift*

The settlements, surrounded by a hostile Palestinian population, were not
attractive to the majority of Israelis. A new wave of immigrants was
therefore encouraged to come and settle in the Occupied Territories.
Israelis, who could not otherwise have afforded a home, were given financial
inducements to settle there.

The settlements became a magnet for a right-wing and violent layer,
epitomised by Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the US Jewish Defence League, who
recruited a new wave of religious immigrants to come from the US and built a
fascistic party, Kach.

The expansionary policy was portrayed by religious groups as an opportunity
and duty to realise the biblical vision of the "whole land of Israel," of
"Judea and Samaria." As Chuck Freilich, deputy national security advisor
under Ariel Sharon, recently told the *New York Times*, "The 1967 war
convinced Arabs that Israel is here to stay. But it's also a cancer.
Occupation is corrupting in the long run for any society, and the war also
brought a religious messianism into Israeli life that really wasn't there."

This ultra-right wing tendency was further swelled by more than 1.5 million
impoverished and politically disorientated immigrants from Russia and
Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union—constituting
nearly a third of Israel's Jewish population today.

The "Greater Israel" policy thus spawned a new social layer, for whom
right-wing nationalist parties such as Likud, under the leadership first of
Menachem Begin, and ultra-religious parties became a political vehicle. They
demanded that the West Bank be formally annexed by Israel. Similar
tendencies developed within the Labour Party and among its political allies.
Sharon, the architect and sponsor of the settler project, made no attempt to
hide his objective: To prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Like the military, the ultra-nationalist and religious parties have come to
wield disproportionate power in Israel's fractured political system,
enabling them to play a pivotal role in cobbling together coalition
governments. They have imposed their demands on successive governments and
shifted official politics sharply to the right.

Settler violence and theft against Palestinians go unpunished. The power of
the religious authorities and religious control over Israeli citizens have
increased, raising sharp tensions with the secular majority. Thus, the
Zionist state has spawned its own brand of religious fundamentalism, no
different in essence to that found in various Muslim states.

*The erosion of workers' living standards*

The layers that proved most susceptible to the siren call of the religious
right included in their number significant sections of the most impoverished
and oppressed in Israel.

But the drive for Israeli expansion and profits for the ruling elite,
coupled with the demands of military spending, has come at a huge cost to
the entire working class. State enterprises have been privatised, social
benefits slashed, the pension age raised, corporation tax and income tax for
the rich cut, and health, education and social programmes gutted.

Unemployment has risen alongside the highest per-capita ratio of migrant
workers in the world. These super-exploited workers are used to force down
wages yet further.

Workers and their families face a precarious existence, with more than one
quarter of households living below the poverty line, including many whose
members are employed. Wage erosion caused by the rapid polarisation of
incomes and the growth of employment by manpower companies has pushed tens
of thousands of wage-earning families below the poverty line.

While the gross domestic product (GDP) has risen from $1,500 per capita in
1967 to $24,000 per capita in 2006, placing Israel 23rd in the United
Nations Human Development Report, much of the wealth is concentrated in the
hands of just six families, who control 40 percent of the value of the
shares traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

These families control 12 of the 17 economic conglomerates, including the
banks and commercial media, giving them enormous financial, economic and
political power. Foreign corporations and investors, particularly from the
US, own almost all of the remaining shares traded on the stock exchange.

As well as the social chasm between the handful of multimillionaires and
billionaires and the mass of the population, Israeli society is riven by
numerous other divisions—between secular and religious Jews, between the
more prosperous Jews of European descent (Ashkenazi Jews) and the more
impoverished layers whose families came from the Middle East and North
Africa (Sephardi Jews).

The destruction of the welfare state and social insurance has eliminated the
basis for creating an integrated and more egalitarian society. It has
prevented any assimilation of East European immigrants, allowing rightist
parties to pose as defenders of orthodox minorities against "arrogant" and
secular elites that are descended from the postwar immigration of European
Jewry and organised in and around the Labour Party.

The Sephardi Jews and other impoverished layers are increasingly to be found
in the so-called development towns, euphemisms for concrete slums on
Israel's borders with its hostile neighbours, which bear the full brunt of
the Palestinian attacks on Israel. A further 16 percent of all employees are
migrant workers (with and without work permits), the highest per capita
ratio in the world. They, like the Palestinian workers, receive less than
the minimum wage, without benefits such as overtime pay or annual vacations.

Even more telling is the division between Jewish Israelis and the 20 percent
of Israelis of Palestinian origin. Second class citizens, denied equality in
the eyes of the law, Arabs suffer budgetary discrimination. No new Arab
towns have ever been built, while the old ones fall into decay. They lack
access to healthcare and education and are twice as likely to be unemployed
and poor. Their family land has been expropriated. Political parties that do
not recognise Israel's right to exist are banned.

All this is has been implemented by a ruling elite that is one of the most
venal in the world. Israel's business and political leaders are mired in
scandals and corruption, including both the prime minister and the two most
recent presidents, both of whom were forced to step down.

The Israeli government does not represent the majority of the Jewish people
who live in Israel, let alone the interests of its citizens, Jewish and
Palestinian. It is the political representative of Israel's financial elite,
which is allied to its chief sponsors in Washington.

In acting in its own interests and as the US's policeman in the region,
Israel's ruling elite has relentlessly suppressed the Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza. For the last 40 years, the lot of the majority of
Palestinians has been hardship and misery.

Today, three quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced, while there
are 5 million refugees throughout the world. By closing the borders with the
West Bank and Gaza, denying tens of thousands the right to work in Israel,
and imposing more than 500 roadblocks within the occupied territories,
Israel's armed forces have penned the Palestinians into a virtual prison and
strangled their economy.

More than 66 percent of households in the Palestinian Authority live below
the poverty line, while 24 percent of the workforce is unemployed. Since
1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel, a figure
equal numerically to 40 percent of the male population.

While the West Bank was not formally annexed, East Jerusalem has been
incorporated into the Zionist state. The settlements have continued to grow,
even after the 1993 Oslo agreement promising a Palestinian state on the land
captured during the 1967 war.

The so-called security wall is intended to permanently expand Israel's
borders, ensuring control of the whole of Jerusalem and much of the West
Bank. There are today about 250 settlements scattered throughout the West
Bank, with a total population, including East Jerusalem, of 450,000. These
settlements have access to roads off-limits to the Palestinians.

The prospect of statehood held out to the Palestinians, even were it to be
realized, would do nothing to secure their basic democratic rights and
social needs. The official policy of Israel and the US—honoured mostly in
the breach—would leave the Palestinians with a bifurcated state, with the
West Bank and Gaza cut off from each other and the West Bank itself reduced
to a series of isolated and impoverished towns and villages, penned in by
the security wall and surrounded by Israeli troops. These are the
circumstances that have given rise to the bitter internecine war between
Hamas and Fatah.

Quite rightly viewed as crimes by the vast majority of the world's
population, Israel's actions, both in its own and in Washington's interests,
are some of the most incendiary factors in world politics today.

Zionism's solution to its problems, the expansion of Israel's borders, has
proved to be no solution at all. Events since the 1967 war have exposed the
failure of the Israeli state to deliver its promise to provide a safe haven
for the Jewish people and a just and egalitarian society. Rather, Israel is
a social tinder box that threatens to destroy itself. As a further tragic
irony, it is reproducing within Israel and the Occupied Territories the
ghettos, repression, civil strife and wars from which earlier generations of
Jews had fled.

Many Israelis are sick and tired of the constant state f war and disgusted
by the brutal treatment meted out to the Palestinians. They want peace, but
are confronted on all sides by parties based on militarism and war.

A break with Zionism and a recognition that its failure is the inevitable
consequence of a nationalist perspective is a precondition for the
development of an independent political struggle to unite Arab and Jewish
workers for the building of a socialist society that would eliminate the
artificial borders dividing the peoples and economies of the region.

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