Twists and turns of standoff





By Gwynne Dyer, DAWN, 24 June 2002

Thirty-five years is not much as anniversaries go, but there are
things to discuss so it will have to do. It is just thirty-five years
since Israel won a crushing victory in the June, 1967, war and
quadrupled the amount of territory it controlled in less than a
week. It was a calamity for both sides, though only one side realized
it at the time.
For the Arabs, the catastrophe was complete, immediate and largely
irreversible. In their first two wars with Israel, there had been
excuses for defeat despite their huge numerical superiority. This
time, there was none.
In Israel's 1948-49 war of independence, its Arab neighbours were just
emerging from centuries of colonial rule, and still lived under the
rule of corrupt and incompetent monarchs like Egypt's King Farouk.
In 1956, when Israeli forces attacked the Suez Canal in secret
alliance with Britain and France, the Arab defeat could be blamed on
their great-power opponents.
But in 1967 the Israelis were on their own, and revolutionary young
officers across the Arab world were promising unification, material
progress and, above all, victory over Israel. For ten years they made
blood-curdling threats about 'a battle of destiny' - and then were
dumbfounded when the Israelis took their threats at face value and
struck first.
The Arab front-line states lost their air forces in the first hour of
the war. Over the next 132 hours they also lost the Sinai peninsula
and the Gaza Strip (Egypt), East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Jordan),
and the Golan Heights (Syria). The despair and psychological
demobilization across the Arab world were so great that even the
regimes responsible for the defeat were allowed to survive. (Indeed,
they survive still.) And that should have been the end of it.
Like most other countries, Israel is built on land that was previously
occupied by somebody else. It's no big deal, historically
speaking. There is usually a good deal of fighting in the early
stages, as the previous tenants resist eviction and their neighbours
lend a hand, but then if you win a few wars they accept your borders
and the confrontation subsides. By 1967, Israel had effectively
reached that stage - so why is there still an Arab-Israeli conflict 35
years later?
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol understood that the 1967 victory could be
the basis of a peace settlement guaranteeing Israel's place as an
accepted if unloved neighbour of its former enemies.
On June 19, 1967, less than a week after the shooting stopped, his
cabinet secretly agreed to withdraw to Israel's pre-war frontiers in
the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights, returning all the captured
land in return for peace, diplomatic recognition, and demilitarization
of the territory that would be returned to Egypt and Syria.
But that offer was never actually sent to the Egyptians and the
Syrians, and the cabinet was never able to agree on returning the West
Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem at all. After four months, it
even dropped the idea of a land-for-peace' swap with Egypt and Syria.
Poor little Samson, as Eshkol put it: the choices opened up by
the 1967 victory completely paralyzed Israeli diplomacy.
The problem was that Israel's victory was too big. Ultra-nationalist
and messianic elements in Israel seized the opportunity to expand into
the new territories, setting up settlements everywhere with the
explicit purpose of making the conquests politically irreversible by
creating facts on the ground.
If anybody objected, they argued that the old borders were unsafe -
although Israel had just beaten all its plausible opponents without
even working up a sweat.
A surprise Arab attack in 1973, though launched for strictly limited
objectives and rapidly defeated by Israel, subsequently persuaded
Menachem Begin's government to trade the Sinai peninsula for peace
with Egypt, by far the biggest of Israel's Arab neighbours, but all
the rest of the land captured by Israel 35 years ago is still under
its control.
Many Israeli leaders have tried to create a domestic consensus on
trading it for a lasting peace, but it's just too tempting to hang
onto it.

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