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Bittersweet Legacy from page 15

U.S. Gains An Ally
Still, the war altered the regional balance,
opening up possibilities for peacemak-
ing despite the difficulties. The United
States, which until 1967 had been wary
of getting too close to Israel, forged a
strategic alliance with the Jewish state,
becoming its main weapons supplier
and diplomatic backer as well as a major
trading partner.
The Arab failure in the war — seen
in part as a failure of Soviet arms and
support — marked the beginning of the
decline of Soviet influence in the region.
This change in the regional super-
power balance created the conditions for
Israeli-Egyptian peace, mediated by the
Americans, in the late 1970s.
Israel's occupation of Palestinian-
populated territory precluded further
peacemaking, however. Indeed, the
occupation was the most bitter legacy
of Israel's 1967 victory on the battlefield.
According to some military experts,
decades of policing the occupation
eroded the army's battle proficiency over
time and was partly responsible for the
ground forces' poor performance in last
summer's Lebanon War.
The occupation also proved a pub-
lic-relations disaster. Worse, during the
second Palestinian intifada that began
in 2000, the ongoing occupation led to
renewed calls for a binational state with
an eventual Palestinian majority, which
would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish
state.
The Oslo peace process of the 1990s
was a serious attempt to end the occu-
pation and transform the results of the
1967 war into an Israeli-Palestinian
peace deal based on two peaceful, neigh-
boring states. As it implied an end to
occupation, the 1993 Oslo framework
agreement also paved the way for a
peace deal between Israel and Jordan.
The unraveling of the Oslo process
after the failure of the Camp David
summit in July 2000 and the radical

Islamic attack on America on Sept. 11,
2001, exacerbated the moderate-radical
divide in the Arab world and among the
Palestinians. Given the weakness of the
moderates and the intransigence of the
radicals, in 2005 Israel began a unilateral
withdrawal from territory occupied in
1967.
The idea was to create conditions for
an eventual two-state solution and pre-
empt the growing threat to Israel's exis-
tence from the revived one-state idea.
The limited success of the 2005 Gaza
withdrawal and the ongoing occupation
of the West Bank leave Israel still grap-
pling with the bittersweet legacy of the
Six-Day War.
Two of the main 1967 belligerents,
Egypt and Jordan, are helping to pro-
mote an agreement with moderate
Palestinians that Foreign Minister Tzipi
Livni says will entail further Israeli with-
drawals from the West Bank.
On the other side of the Muslim
divide, Palestinian and Islamic rejec-
tionists, primarily Hamas and Iran, are
working to undercut any potential prog-
ress, pleased to see Israel weighed down
by the occupation.
The Israeli government strategy is to
bypass Hamas with help from the mod-
erates. However, critics argue that the
moderates either aren't really so moder-
ate or won't be able to deliver, and that
the best Israel can hope for is an interim
agreement — negotiated with Hamas
or with Hamas' approval — that signifi-
cantly reduces the amount of territory
Israel occupies.
Settlers and other right-wingers see in
both these strategies a sellout that may
gain Israel some breathing space but
which will boomerang sooner or later,
with devastating effect.
Forty years later, it seems, Israel
remains saddled with the results of
its great victory in 1967, unable either
to swallow the territories or to reject
them.

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