The War that Changed the Issue

Arabs and Israelis disagree even on the name of the war that broke out between them 20 years ago this month. Arabs call it the "June War," to distinguish it from the five others that have taken place as a direct result of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Israelis call it the "Six Day War" to point up the speed with which they took on, and defeated, all comers. Both sides disagree over who started it.

Israeli forces had been conducting a series of increasingly devastating "retaliatory" raids against Jordanian-controlled West Bank villages. Egyptian forces, sometimes only a few miles away, stood helplessly idle behind a screen of UN troops, on their own soil, separating them from Israel. Then Syria informed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser that intercepted communications indicated Israeli forces were massing for an attack against Syria. A skeptical Nasser asked Soviet military advisers if the Syrian reports were true. The Russians confirmed them. Nasser then asked that the UN forces separating his troops from Israel's be withdrawn. UN Secretary General U Thant complied but, inexplicably, also withdrew UN forces from the Straits of Tiran, also on Egyptian soil. This freed Egypt to blockade Israeli shipping transiting the Gulf of Aqaba, Israel's only outlet to Asia and the Far East. When asked if he would bar Israeli shipping from the waterway, Nasser said yes.

It's clear who started the fighting, since Israel wiped out the Egyptian Air Force on the ground on the first morning, and the Syrian Air Force on the ground on the same afternoon. The Israelis respond that Nasser's blockade threat made an Israeli "pre-emptive" attack inevitable.

Both sides agree that the US could have prevented the war, but disagree on how. Israel says the US was obligated by secret agreement to run the blockade with its own Navy ships. (President Lyndon Johnson was preparing an international naval flotilla to do just that when the Israelis attacked.) The Arabs point out that when Nasser realized what was happening, he asked for US diplomatic intervention to halt the rush toward war. He scheduled a visit by Egyptian Vice President Mohieddin to Washington June 7, to be followed by a visit to Cairo by US Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The Israelis responded by advancing the scheduled date of their surprise attack to June 5.

Documents and memoirs published since 1967 make it clear that certain Israeli leaders, notably Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his protege, Moshe Dayan, had resolved that Israel must take control of key areas of the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and areas south of the Litani River from Lebanon before any peace settlement would be negotiated. To obtain these territories which had eluded them in the 1948 fighting, they were determined, if necessary, to provoke another war to ensure that the waters rising in or flowing under these areas would be available to sustain Israel's population and an additional 12 million Jews they expected to "return" to the Holy Land from the Soviet Union and the United States. Their expansionist plans were supported by harder-line "revisionist" political opponents, for whom Israeli control of the entire West Bank is a "minimal" pre-requisite for a Jewish state whose boundaries, they maintain, were defined by God.

Therefore, regardless of whether the Israelis, the Syrians, or the Soviets engineered the intercepted Israeli military communications, both Nasser and U Thant reacted exactly as these Israel leaders must have hoped they would. The provided the casus belli for one of the most meticulously planned, coordinated, and successful military attacks in history. When King Hussein, damned if he did and damned if he didn't, ordered his forces to support Egypt and Syria, the Ben-Gurion-Dayan dream was realized. Within six days Israel had defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in that order and controlled all of the lands it coveted except Southern Lebanon, which it has since occupied.

By anyone's reckoning, therefore, after 1967 the issue between Israel and the Arabs was no longer the survival of the Jewish state. Instead, it has been how much occupied territory Israel would return to secure peace and recognition from its Arab neighbors. UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November, 1967, sought to answer this question. It calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in return for Arab acquiescence in Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized boundaries. It therefore would return the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians or Jordan, the Golan Heights to Syria, and Sinai to Egypt (as has subsequently occurred.) Jerusalem would either be re-partitioned or, as a city sacred to Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, would remain united with internationally-guaranteed equal access by all of its inhabitants, regardless of religious affiliation, as envisioned by the original UN Partition Resolution of 1947.

The 1967 war also changed attitudes. In Israel, everyone knows that very few additional Jews are coming from the Soviet Union, the US or anywhere else. Israel is losing more Jews through emigration to the west than it is gaining through immigration from both east and west. And the birthrate of Jews who stay is not much different from the mere replacement rates of western Europe. Israel actually is concealing the fact that perhaps a half million of the three million plus Jews it claims as citizens don't really reside in Israel any more. If they visit from abroad just once every four years, they are considered present and accounted for in Israel's resident population. Israel's three million Jews, therefore, can afford to share the water with its 750,000 Arab citizens and all of the 1,500,000 Palestinians presently living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The shock of the 1967 defeat changed Arab attitudes as well. Initially the rhetoric sounded strident, but it no longer masked the realization that, so long as Israel was backed by the US, there was no possibility of a clear-cut Arab military victory. Arabs would be better off to concentrate on building such strong educational, economic, social, and political institutions that they would no longer feel threatened by what they have begun to accept as a tiny but ineradicable enclave of Western colonialism in their midst. Their resigned acceptance of the Jewish state's presence was quietly signaled by a new, but unmistakable, distinction in their rhetoric between the "occupied Arab lands" (meaning occupied in 1967), which they demanded be returned, and the lands occupied earlier, which they did not.

The outcome in 1967, therefore, made the Resolution 242 land-for-peace plan realizable—psychologically, politically, and demographically. Leaders of at least half of the Israeli electorate will be able to acknowledge this when the US begins—firmly, unmistakably, and effectively—to support them, and not their hard-line Israeli opponents. Yasir Arafat, who enjoys the support of at least 80 percent of the 4.5 million Palestinians world-wide, has signaled his readiness to acknowledge this clearly the moment the US acknowledges with equal clarity the Palestinian right to self-determination. All other potential parties to a peace settlement, specifically the US, the UK, the USSR, the Western European nations, and the Arab confrontation states, including Syria, have at one time or another accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula.

It took 20 years and three wars between 1947 and 1967 for the outlines of the Arab-Israeli settlement to become clear. It has taken 20 more years and three more wars from 1967 to 1987 for leaders on both sides to acknowledge publicly that the issue no longer is whether there will be a state for Jews, but whether Israel will return the West Bank and Gaza so that there can be a state for Palestinians, as also promised in the 1947 UN Partition Resolution.

Must the world tremble and Jews and Arabs suffer through another 20 years of alternating uneasy peace and bloody warfare in the Middle East before the US exercises its responsibility by helping moderates, and rejecting extremists, on both sides of the confrontation lines? Israeli and Palestinian leaders can now make a peace that both can live with. We, and the many countries which will follow a strong, even-handed US lead, must therefore push, pull, and cajole all parties to the peace table. The actors are preparing for the next scene in the Mideast drama, but the US must provide the initial cue. Will it be another still 20 years of war, or the first 20 years of peace?—Richard Curtiss

Richard Curtiss is Executive Director of the American Educational Trust and author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.