Thirty years after war, fruits of Israel’s victory bitter

JERUSALEM, June 1: This week, Israel celebrates its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and its conquest of East Jerusalem, while Palestinia...

JERUSALEM, June 1: This week, Israel celebrates its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and its conquest of East Jerusalem, while Palestinians mark 30 years of occupation, still far from their dream of an independent state.The Right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu has organised a series of celebrations for the anniversary. Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, prefer to remain silent over the event they have branded The Disaster’.

From June 5 to June 10, 1967, the Israeli army swept into East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai peninsula, defeating the armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria.

A total of 68,000 square kilometres was conquered in a war which established Israel as a military power and plunged Arab countries into deep shock. Israel gave back over half that area when it returned the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace between the two countries in 1979. But it has been unable to take the same step with Syria or with the Palestinians, nor have the Israeli people been able to reach a consensus over what to do with the territories and people which the Jewish state has ruled over for 30 years by force of arms.

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Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Golan in 1981, despite United Nations resolutions demanding it return occupied lands and near universal refusal to recognise the holy city as the Jewish state’s United Capital’. The Palestinians rose up against Israeli occupation in 1987 with the seven-year Intifada revolt, which shook Israeli society and played a role in bringing its government into the peace process launched in 1991. Israelis all agree that the 1967 war, in which they started the fighting, was necessary given the hostility of Arab nations. But the fruits of the war which unified them has brought deep divisions.

The conquest of Judaism’s two holiest sites, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem’s old city and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, together with the religious significance of the newly-captured land fuelled religious nationalism. Its most extreme manifestation came in 1995 when a Jewish fanatic shot dead Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to stop his policy of handing back land to the Palestinians. After the Six-Day War, Israeli philosopher Yeshyahu Leibowitz already warned that Israel would “pay dearly” for its victory and “lose its soul” if it continued the occupation of another people.

The war galvanised the nationalist movement embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which launched its armed struggle against Israel.