How Israel squandered its dramatic victory in the Six-Day War

Israelis guard the Western Wall in Jerusalem on 26 June 1967 during the Six-Day War

Chuck Freilich writes in Haaretz on 2 June 2022:

In June 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, Israel had just turned 19, a plucky young state still living in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust. Israel was surrounded by enemy states avowed to its destruction, and was deeply afraid that the war would end with the annihilation of much of the world’s remaining Jews.

Israel was deeply isolated. The United States, with whom relations were still limited, declared neutrality. The USSR severed relations. France, Israel’s strategic ally at the time, ignominiously abandoned it shortly thereafter. Arab hostility was at its height.

When the war ended, with Israel’s dramatic triumph, the entire Jewish people let out a collective gasp of relief. Israel became the darling of much of the world, especially in the U.S. Heretofore assimilated American Jews suddenly found new pride in their association with those “fighting Jews.” Being Jewish became cool. And Israel became intoxicated by its newfound lease on life and its territorial reach.  As with all historical turning points, no single observation can encapsulate the entirety of what happened. The war was the first in a series of developments that transformed Israel’s strategic circumstances.

Until the Six-Day War, much of the Arab world was convinced that Israel’s existence and earlier victories were an inexplicable and intolerable historical fluke, which it would soon rectify with its defeat and destruction. Israel’s victory in 1967 was so crushing, however, that it could no longer be dismissed, or explained away, and a nascent recognition began forming that Israel was here to stay.

This recognition did not occur evenly among, or within, the Arab states and it was not about reconciliation, but rather acceptance of a bitter reality. It did, however, begin a slow transformation of the conflict from one that was over Israel’s very existence, to a dispute over territory – a process that was given a major boost, six years later, by Israel’s dramatic recovery from the surprise attack in 1973. If Israel could not be defeated even in such propitious circumstances, the occupied territories could only be regained by diplomacy, not war.

The Six-Day War provided Israel, for the first time, with a modicum of strategic depth, replacing what Abba Eban had famously called Israel’s “Auschwitz borders” with “defensible” ones. The West Bank added over 30 miles to Israel’s 8.7-mile-wide “narrow waist,” just north of Tel Aviv, while the Golan Heights placed much of Israel’s north beyond artillery range. Jerusalem was no longer in small-arms range. Sinai became a buffer between Israel and Egypt.

The war was also a turning point in U.S.-Israeli relations. Instead of the weak state that the U.S. – at the height of the Cold War – feared would become a strategic and moral burden and complicate its ties with the more numerous and oil-rich Arab states, the U.S. now came to see Israel as a militarily capable actor and potential partner. It would take until the 1980s for this changing perception to gel, setting the stage for the emergence of a strategic alliance of nearly unprecedented depth and richness, including a de facto U.S. security guarantee for Israel’s existence.

The “special relationship” is one of the Six-Day War’s critical outcomes. From the weak and embattled state of the early decades, Israel became an established and fundamentally secure one, able (as per the accepted U.S.-Israeli diplomatic parlance) to “defend itself, by itself, against any combination of regional threats,” whose existence is no longer truly in doubt. Israel has relations today with more states than ever before, formal peace with six Arab states and informal ties with others, and is increasingly integrated into the region. Israel enjoys a mid-European standard of living and has become a global center of high-tech.

For these and other reasons, the Six-Day War essentially ended the existential stage of Israel’s conflict with the Arab states. So much for the good news.

The “defensible” borders that Israel gained in 1967 enabled it to withstand the surprise attack of 1973, but did not prevent either it or repeated hostilities since then. Moreover, Israel’s control of the new territories actually strengthened Arab motivation to go to war, for Egypt, Jordan and Syria had now lost territory of their own. Support for the Palestinians was one thing, territory of their own an entirely different matter.

Israel’s assumption, following the war, that it would trade “land for peace,” was immediately shattered by the infamous “Three Nos” of the Arab League Summit in Khartoum (September 1967) – no recognition of Israel, no negotiations and no peace – and ultimately proved successful only in regard to Egypt. Syria was unwilling to make peace, despite Israel’s offer to withdraw from the Golan Heights in 2000, and the Palestinians rejected dramatic proposals for a state on essentially all of the West Bank and Gaza on three occasions.

In these circumstances, a related assumption of the early decades – the one saying that Israel should end all major conflicts in control of more territory than it had at the outset, for use as a negotiating card – also lost much of its validity. Moreover, the bitter experience in the West Bank imbued Israel with a deep aversion to the occupation of additional hostile populations, even when military necessity might require this. This is one of the primary reasons that Israel has refrained in recent decades from even temporarily occupying Lebanon, or Gaza – arguably the only effective way of dealing with the Hezbollah and Hamas rocket threats – and has instead adopted a largely defensive approach.

Until 1967, most of the Palestinians lived under Egyptian or Jordanian control. Occupation of the West Bank (and Gaza until 2005), together with Israel’s own Arab (Palestinian) population, now brought most Palestinians under Israel’s control. In effect, Israel had subsumed the Palestinian issue into itself, assuming the burden both of their daily affairs and national aspirations. What had previously been an inter-state issue, between Egypt, Jordan and Israel, now became Israel’s problem, and increasingly one of two conflicting nationalisms.

The humiliating Arab defeat in 1967, especially of Egypt’s Nasser and the pan-Arabism he had championed, undermined Arab regimes’ standing and paved the way for a further dramatic change. In 1974, at the Rabat Summit, the Arab League proclaimed that the PLO was now the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and that Egypt and Jordan were no longer to represent them, or the West Bank and Gaza. Together with the later peace between Egypt and Israel, the Rabat Summit marked the end of the inter-state stage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its almost full “Palestinianization.”

More controversially, and arguably of the greatest historic consequence, the war unleashed latent messianic and nationalistic forces in Israeli society, which now sought to assert sovereignty and settle all of biblical Israel. The international community would soon come to view settlements not only as an obstacle to peace, but also as an almost inexplicable and counterproductive threat to Israel’s character as a predominantly Jewish and fully democratic state, its preeminent national security objective and raison d’être.

The inability to separate from the West Bank, and de facto annexation, have, indeed, become the greatest threat to Israel’s national security. Rather than being a security buffer, the West Bank has become a primary source of terrorism and a military burden for the IDF. Nothing has harmed Israel’s international standing more than settlements. Much of the American and European left, Israel’s strongest sources of support in 1967, revile it today and accuse Israel of being an obstacle to peace and a brutal occupier. Pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. is no longer cool, especially among young people, even Jews. Israel has become so controversial that rabbis and educators have been banned by some congregations from offering Israel-related programming.

Most important, if one takes the combined populations of Israel and the West Bank, only 60 percent are now Jewish. The Zionist movement never sought to define a percentage of the population that must be Jewish for Israel to be “the Jewish state,” but a 60:40 ratio simply doesn’t cut it. Control of the West Bank is rapidly turning Israel into a binational state.

Some draw a simplistic black-and-white conclusion. Israel can either give Palestinians the right to vote for the Knesset, and lose its Jewish character, or refuse to do so, and cease to be a democracy. Democracy, however, is not absolute. Puerto Rico’s three million residents – all U.S. citizens – cannot vote for Congress or the president, just the local legislature. In Israel’s case, similarly, Palestinians would continue to have the right to vote for the Palestinian Authority, not the Knesset.

Would this be a blow to the quality of Israeli democracy? Yes, but not its demise. The real problem is that a perpetuation of the current situation does not provide for resolution of Palestinian national aspirations, ensures ongoing conflict and leads inexorably to a binational one-state outcome.

Some naïvely believe the “one-state” solution to be a novel and more democratically appropriate solution to the conflict. In reality, it was the Arab position from the earliest days of the conflict, one that Israel rejected vehemently and which the international community, which has universally come to embrace the two-state solution, has rejected, as well. Those interested in knowing what a binational state looks like in the Middle East, need look no further than Syria or Iraq. Both have been devastated by sectarian tensions.

This is the future that Israel’s “national camp,” its right-wing, pro-annexation, pro-settlement maximalists, holds out for us.

Fifty-five years after the Six-Day War, the prospects for a two-state solution appear dimmer than ever, but a viable alternative has yet to be proposed. The Six-Day War was both a dramatic military victory that guaranteed Israel’s survival and the possible seed of its ultimate demise as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people.

Chuck Freilich is a former Israeli deputy national security adviser

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