Time Tarnishes ‘Brilliant Victory’ : Israel’s Captured Lands Prove a Troubling Legacy

The turning point of the 1967 Six-Day War, Yishiyahu Leibowitz says, was the seventh day.

“On that day we had to decide whether that war was a war of defense or a war of conquest,” the 84-year-old science professor said recently. “And we decided post facto that it was a war of conquest.”

To Leibowitz, the 20 years since have been characterized by “a long process of decline, internally and externally,” exposing what was once seen as Israel’s “brilliant victory” as “a historical disaster.”

Yosef Shapira, a minister without portfolio in the current Israeli government, has another view. And that is why he proposed at a Cabinet meeting one Sunday last April that this week’s 20th anniversary of the war be marked by special festivities celebrating the territorial gains of 1967 and the drive for West Bank settlements that they made possible.

Shapira’s motion was defeated by a 7-5 margin, with several ministers absent. The vote was one sign of the paralyzing ambivalence that Israelis generally feel one full generation after a war that has shaped the destiny of the Jewish state more than any other since it won independence 39 years ago.

The Six-Day War triggered a burst of economic activity that has transformed the face of Israel from a struggling backwater to a sophisticated nation. Militarily, it marked the beginning of Israel’s emergence as a regional superpower.

The war put Israel in possession of captured territory four times the size of the entire pre-1967 state, giving it a previously undreamed-of strategic depth that would prove its worth just six years later when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

Israel was eventually able to use the occupied Sinai as a bargaining chip to normalize relations with Egypt, trading it for the state’s only peace treaty to date with an Arab neighbor.

The 1967 victory dramatically heightened the nation’s self-confidence and filled Jews worldwide with a sense of pride that translated into a postwar surge of immigration rarely seen since the earliest days of the state.

Jerusalem Reunited

Jerusalem, a holy city divided by barbed wire and mine fields during the previous 19 years, was physically reunited by the war. And for some religious Jews, the conquest of what had been the heart of Biblical Israel on what is now commonly known as the West Bank of the Jordan River was nothing less than divine deliverance, the fulfillment of God’s promise to his chosen people.

The result today is a politically powerful Jewish settlement movement that has relocated about 60,000 Israelis on land captured in 1967. (That figure excludes about 100,000 Jews who now live in Jerusalem suburbs built on former Jordanian-held land annexed after the war.)

But there was another side to Israel’s territorial conquest as well. Along with the land came its Palestinian Arab residents, a population that today numbers about 1.4 million in the conquered areas.

Combined with the 700,000 Arabs living as Israeli citizens within the pre-1967 borders, it means that 37% of those falling under the rule of the Jewish state today are non-Jews, culturally different from the majority and in most cases politically alienated from it.

Because of the higher birthrate among Arabs, it has been forecast here that sometime in the next century, Arabs could be a majority in Israel and the occupied territories. Already, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres pointed out recently, 53 of every 100 children born under Israeli sovereignty are Arabs.

It all poses a complex dilemma that former U.S. Ambassador Samuel W. Lewis said in an interview is “the worst legacy of the war” for Israel.

Even those Israelis who are not attached to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for religious or nationalistic reasons are concerned about giving up the security that the territories offer.

If, however, the territories are retained, to annex them legally and offer Israeli citizenship to their Palestinian inhabitants threatens the Jewish character of the state. And to keep them while continuing to deny full rights to the Palestinians means the inevitable “apartheidization” of Israel and a compromise of the democratic principles that Israelis say they revere.

“It’s kind of like Tar Baby,” said Lewis, referring to the gooey decoy that ensnared Br’er Rabbit in the popular Uncle Remus children’s story. “You can’t get rid of it. And yet to keep it is very uncomfortable, and will become more and more uncomfortable as time goes on.”

With the dilemma has come a political polarization never so clearly defined as in Israel’s current “national unity” government. Formed as the result of inconclusive national elections in 1984, the government joins the centrist Labor Alignment of Foreign Minister Peres with the rightist Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a fragile coalition that has been unable to agree even on the ground rules for talking about Middle East peace.

Another outgrowth of the national paralysis is the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach Party advocates keeping the occupied land and expelling all the Palestinian Arabs.

The idea of an Israel whose eastern border would be the Jordan River did not originate with the Six-Day War. The state’s founding father, the late David Ben-Gurion, considered it. But he rejected the urging of those who wanted to continue Israel’s 1948 War of Independence until all of the West Bank was in Jewish hands.

However, said Lewis, a Middle East expert who served as ambassador here for seven years until the summer of 1985, “I think it’s fair to say that up until 1967 . . . the society had long since come to terms with the idea of a ‘small Israel’ and with the fact that those territories weren’t going to be incorporated.”

Israeli President Chaim Herzog agrees. The 1967 victory “aroused a tremendous amount of messianic fervor,” he said in an interview. Within three months, children of the Jewish pioneers overrun and massacred at Kibbutz Gush Etzion in 1948 had returned to establish the first Israeli settlement on newly captured land. By early 1968, the man who would become the spiritual leader of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) settlement movement, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, was encamped in Hebron.

Still, said Herzog, who was Israel’s first military governor of the West Bank, the country’s postwar political polarization emerged only gradually and was encouraged by the intransigence of Arab leaders who missed repeated opportunities to negotiate peace.

“They were never willing to accept less than 100%,” Herzog said of the Arabs. “So they missed the bus every time. And every time they were prepared to take the bus which had already left.”

About the time Rabbi Levinger went to Hebron, Leibowitz first voiced the argument that Israel should give up the territories not so much for peace but for self-preservation.

Writing in the student newspaper Dorban (Porcupine) in March, 1968, the leftist educator painted a picture of the future that many who were his pupils at the time still recall.

“Within a short time,” he predicted then, “the country will no longer have a Jewish worker or a Jewish farmer. The Arabs will be the working people and the Jews will be managers, supervisors, clerks and policemen--and especially secret policemen. The state governing a hostile population of 1.5-2 million foreigners will necessarily be a ‘Shin Bet’ (security police) state with all its influence on the spirit of education, freedom of speech and thought, and democratic tradition.

“The corruption which is typical of any colonial regime will characterize the state of Israel, too. The administration will have to deal with oppressing an Arab revolutionary movement on the one hand and with acquiring Arab Quislings on the other. . . . “

As for religious claims on the territories, wrote Leibowitz, who is himself an observant Orthodox Jew, “these only reflect an unconscious, or maybe even conscious hypocrisy, the use of the Jewish religion to mask Israeli nationalism.”

Most Israelis today would probably say that the picture is not as black as Leibowitz forecast. But there is also a widespread perception that 20 years of ruling a large Palestinian population against its will has had a corrosive effect on the rulers as well as the ruled.

Writing in the Jerusalem Post last April, author Dan Kurzman argued: “Already the violence of occupation has helped to produce a moral lapse in Israel that contrasts sharply with the spirit that prevailed in the years of the Ingathering, when people cared about each other.

“Bank officials ‘legally’ rob their own banks while denying fair wages to their employees; hospital workers press their demands by letting the sick and helpless rot in their beds; the government, ignoring the very meaning of the state, vigorously embraces a racist South African regime for ‘pragmatic’ reasons--the excuse many other nations gave when they conducted business with Hitler before World War II.

“Such callousness and disrespect for human values may not be directly related to the occupation, but the occupation has surely created a climate conducive to the cultivation of these qualities,” Kurzman added. “If people see no wrong in suppressing other people and depriving them of the most basic civil rights, as in the territories, can they easily respect themselves?”

Former Ambassador Lewis says the legacy of the Six-Day War has clearly been a setback for the political integration of Israel’s Arab citizens, those who remained inside the country’s pre-1967 borders.

A recent study of 1,000 Jewish high school and junior high school pupils by Hebrew University Prof. Kalman Binyamini, for example, found that 56% opposed Israeli Arabs being allowed into universities and nearly 54% said they should not appear in the media or be allowed to fill public posts.

Israeli Arab writer Anton Shammas says the problem of racism has gotten noticeably worse since the 1967 war. Shammas is no radical. He says he has more in common with his Jewish friends than with the Arab villagers of his youth.

Nonetheless, Shammas said in an interview, “I feel frightened. Optimists talk about 15% to 20% of the adult Jewish population who are just plain racists. Pessimists talk of up to 40% and counting.” In practice, he added, the term Israeli as used here really means Jew .

“I think of myself as a potential Israeli who is part of the Palestinian nation,” Shammas said.

Zeev Schiff, the respected military affairs correspondent of the independent newspaper Haaretz, wrote this spring about “the emotional and moral erosion” that army service on the West Bank inflicts on the soldiery. “There are many temptations here for an exaggerated use of force toward the population in order to make arrests,” Schiff quoted one officer serving there as saying.

A Missed Opportunity

West Bank Palestinians were late to recognize this concern among many Israelis over the impact of the occupation on their own society, and thus failed to see the political possibilities of taking their case to the Israeli public.

Dani Rubenstein, who became West Bank correspondent for the Labor newspaper Davar immediately after the 1967 war, recalls that at first the Palestinians would not even talk to him.

However, the situation has changed drastically. Whereas the Palestinians used to direct their message mostly at one another and abroad, Rubenstein said, now the Arabs are his primary sources. And a recent Palestinian press conference against Israel’s “iron fist policies” in the West Bank was conducted only in Arabic and Hebrew, something unheard of as recently as a few years ago.

Still, many Israelis deal with the dilemma of the occupied territories by trying as much as possible to ignore it.

Jordan television, which is widely viewed here, ran a British documentary on the West Bank recently, including a number of scenes showing Israeli troops and other security officers kicking and beating Palestinian demonstrators. A few nights later, an Israeli woman considered leftist in her political sympathies and better informed than most about the West Bank confided to her dinner host, “I didn’t believe things like that really went on.”

Assigned by the magazine Koterit Rashit to do a special issue on the 20th anniversary of the Six-Day War, Israeli writer David Grossman confessed that the experience had jarred him out of a “willing suspension of all questions of morality and occupation.”

Having produced a novel dealing with the problem seven years ago, Grossman wrote, he felt he had done his duty. He did not visit the West Bank or even Jerusalem’s mostly Arab Old City. His moral indignation, which he symbolized as a sphinx standing guard over his conscience, waned until “I understood that my sphinx has turned into a castrated cat purring at my feet.”

A generation has dulled the capacity of both sides to feel the essential tragedy of the situation, and that may be the biggest barrier to changing it, Lewis said.

“The occupation is unpleasant, but it’s not very painful for the Israelis. Its effects are insidious and long range. And it’s unpleasant for the Palestinians, but it’s not unbearable by any means.”

The question is when, or whether, either side will feel “enough pain from the situation to be willing to take major risks to try to change it,” Lewis said.