THE SIX DAY WAR, 20 YEARS LATER

264,000 troops (mostly civilian
reservists), 800 tanks and 300
aircraft.
David was facing Goliath.
Moredechai Gur had less reason
than most for apprehension. He was,
after all, a colonel in the regular
Israeli Army and was aware that
Israel's military leaders had not been
waiting passively to be overwhelmed
by the combined weight of their ad-
versaries.
"I remember talking to my wife,
Rita, about it," he says. !'We agreed
that the war would be a major con-
flict and that we would have a
decisive victory"
On June 4, Colonel Gur turned
down the offer of a place in General
Headquarters, opting instead to be in
the field with his paratroopers.
The following morning, he and the
rest of Israel woke up to the sound of
Israeli jet fighters taking off. The war
had begun.
Within three hours the warplanes
of the Arab nations lay smashed on
their runways, the result of a brilliant- .
ly conceived and immaculately ex-
ecuted pre-emptive strike by the
Israel Air Force.
Six days later, Israel had not only
defeated the entire coalition of hostile
Arab forces ranged against it, but it
had also conquered territory many
times its own size.
In the south, it captured the Sinai
Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from
Egypt; in the east, it took Jerusalem
and the West Bank from Jordan; in
the north, it conquered the strategic
Golan Heights from Syria.
David had become Goliath.
Israelis were convinced that the Six
Day War would prove conclusively to
the Arab world that, even in its most
vulnerable configuration, Israel could
not be defeated by force of arms; that
Israel was a permanent fixture on the
Middle East map.
Moreover, with the territories con-
quered in the war, they believed that
Israel would now have something
tangible — irresistible — to offer its
neighbors in exchange for peace.
"How long can people continue to
fight each other?" Mordechai Gur
recalls asking his wife 20 years ago.
The answer came two months later
when the leaders of the Arab League,
meeting in the Sudanese capital of
Khartoum, gave the world their
definitive response to the war: No
recognition of Israel, no negotiations,
no peace.
For a people hardly used to
sovereignty, let alone conquest, the
victory unleashed among Israelis .a
welter of conflicting emotions and

26

Friday, June 5, 1987

new realities that have transformed
the face and the fabric of Israeli socie-
ty and challenged 2,000 years' worth
of Jewish self-imagery.
How does a Jewish conqueror
behave? How do Jews — the most em-
phatically non-imperialist of people
— handle the moral and practical
dilemmas of a military occupation?
The dust of battle had scarcely
settled before voices were being
raised to warn of the dire consequen-
ces of the conquest. But for most
Israelis, it was enough that the sword
had been miraculously lifted from
their throats.
Many were lulled by the benign
nature of the occupation and dem-
onstrable benefits — primarily in
health and education — that Israeli
rule was having on the material quali-
ty of life with the Palestinians under
their control.
Israeli rule might indeed have
added 20 years to the life expectancy
of Palestinians living in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip; it might have
permitted four universities to be
established where none existed
before. But it also ignited the fuse of
Palestinian radicalism.
The Six Day War has, in fact, pro-
ven to be one of the ironies of history.
For not only is Israel, the victor, still
obsessed with security and survival,
it is also preoccupied with the
political military, social and moral
consequenceS of that war.
True, the city of Jerusalem is once
more reunited, its holy sites open to
the followers of the three great
monotheistic religions.
True, the farmers of northern
Galilee no longer work their fields in
armour-plated tractors, dodging
Syrian sniper fire from the Golan
Heights above them.
True, too, the West Bank has pro-
vided Israel with a measure of
strategic depth and has thickened its
slender, 15-kilometer waist.
But 20 years later, Israel is conti-
nuing to pay a high price for its bat-
tlefield gains, a price that may
ultimately prove to be beyond its
means.
The effective annexation of the
Golan Heights has embittered its
10,000 Druse inhabitants and inten-
sified the hostility of the Syrian
regime, now considered to be the
most implacable and dangerous of
Israel's enemies.
The occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, along with their 1.3
million Palestinian inhabitants, has
engendered a sense of frustration
that has fuelled the fires of ex-
tremism and terrorism.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

The formal annexation of
Jerusalem — an expression of Israel's
determination never to yield on this
most emotive of all issues — may yet
prove to be the flashpoint of fresh
hostilities and the ultimate stumbl-
ing block to a settlement with Jordan
and the Palestinians.
In other ways, the Six Day War has
produced a giddy sense of shocks and
surprises.
It persuaded Israelis to believe the
myth of their own invincibility, induc-
ing a sense of complacency so power-
ful that Syria and Egypt were able to
launch a massive surprise attack in
October 1973.
It generated an economic bonanza
that swept away the old spartan
ideological underpinnings of the state

I

and cast Israelis into the sea of con-
sumerism and a headlong race to
become a little America.
It unleashed an army of militant,
messianic ultra-nationalists, whose
supreme value is to settle the divine-
ly promised Judea and Samaria (West
Bank) and await the arrival of the
Messiah.
It corroded the ideals and values of
many ordinary Israelis who sudden-
ly found themselves the masters of a
subject people and a vast reservoir of
cheap labor.
Even the super-egalitarian kibbut-
zim, which are Israel's ideological
conscience and which enshrined the
concept of Jewish labor, have con-
signed much of their "dirty work" to
Arab hands.

Damascus
•

ISRAELI CONQUESTS 1967

• Sassa

Kuneitra

SYRIA

'5?

Damia
Bridge

Allenby
Bridge

• Amman

Dead
Sea

at?

Ismailia

Lake
Timsah

JORDAN

Bitter
Lakes

766 Israeli soldiers were
killed during the 'Six
Day War'. The number
of Arab dead was
never announced

Suez

Akaba

SAUDI ARABIA

0

t 50

I

M
Mi les ;

0 0 0

Strait
of Tiran

ME Israeli territory
=1949- 4June 1967
Israeli conquests
5-11 June 1967

(g) Martin Gilbert

This before-and-after map shows how dramatic were the territorial gains of war

