Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  The dominant tone on the kibbutz and in the country was provincial and puritanical. I was once earnestly reprimanded by a kibbutz elder for singing “inappropriate” popular songs, that is, the latest Beatles hits; and Zionist education went to great lengths to encourage intracommunity fellow feeling and affection among the young while eviscerating it of any hint of the erotic. The prevailing ethos, with its faith in the redemptive value of Land and Labor, its scoutlike clothing and communal dances, its desert hikes and dutiful ascents of Masada (the hard way, of course), its lectures on botany and biblical geography, and its earnest weekly discussion of Socialist “issues,” represented nothing so much as a transposition into the Middle East of the preoccupations and mores of the Independent Labour Party of 1890s Britain, or the Wandervogel walking clubs of late Wilhelminian Germany.

  Not surprisingly, Arabs figured very little in this world. In discussions of the writings of Ber Borochov and the other iconic texts of Labor Zionism, much attention was of course paid to the question of “exploitation.” But in accordance with the Marxist framework in which all such debates were couched, “exploitation” was restricted in its meaning to the labor theory of value: You exploit someone else by employing them, remunerating them at the minimum required to keep them working productively, and pocketing the difference as profit. Accordingly, as seen from the perspective of kibbutz-based Labor Zionists, to hire Arabs (or anyone else) for wages was to exploit them. This had been the subject of animated practical quarrels as well as doctrinal arguments among kibbutz members; historically it was part of what distinguished kibbutzim from the labor-employing village cooperatives, or moshavim. But beyond such rather abstruse considerations, which were of little relevance to the real Israeli economy, relations between Jews and Arabs were not much discussed.

  It is easy, looking back, to see in this curious oversight the source of our present troubles. And critics of the whole Zionist project are quick to remark that this refusal to engage with the presence of Arabs was the original sin of the Zionist forefathers, who consciously turned away from the uncomfortable fact that the virgin landscape of unredeemed Zion was already occupied by people who would have to be removed if a Jewish state was ever to come about. It is true that a few clear-sighted observers, notably Ahad Ha’am, had drawn attention to this dilemma and its implications, but most had ignored it. Actually the matter was not quite so simple, to judge from my own recollection of the last years of the old Zionism. Many Israelis of that time rather prided themselves on their success in living peacefully alongside Arab neighbors within the national borders. Far from deliberately denying the Arab presence, they boasted of their acquaintance with Arabs, and especially with Druze and Bedouins. They encouraged the young to familiarize themselves with local Arab society no less than with the flora and the fauna of the landscape.

  But that, of course, is just the point. For pre-1967 Zionists, Arabs were a part of the physical setting in which the state of Israel had been established; but they were decidedly not part of the mental template, the Israel-of-the-mind, through which most Israelis saw their politics and their environment. Taking the Jews out of Europe did not take Europe out of the Jews. Notwithstanding the presence of Yemenite and North African Jews, condescendingly tolerated by the Ashkenazi majority, Israel in 1967 was a European country in all but name. The country was born of a European project, and it was geographically and sociologically configured by the vagaries of European history. Its laws were shaped by European precedent, its leaders and ideologists were marinated in late-nineteenth-century European socialism and nationalism.

  However much they had consciously turned their backs on Europe— and a significant proportion of the adult population of that time consisted of concentration camp survivors with few fond memories of the old continent—Israelis were European to the core. I do not just mean the German-speaking Jews on Mount Carmel who reproduced every little detail of life in late-Habsburg Vienna and never bothered to learn Hebrew, or the English-speaking Jews drinking tea, eating fruitcake, and playing cricket in Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi; I am speaking about the whole country.

  The result was an uncomfortable tension in Israeli sensibilities. Part of the Zionist enterprise was the wholehearted commitment to Zion, after all. It entailed a root-and-branch rejection of the Old World: its assumptions, its comforts, its seductions. At first, this had been a choice; later, thanks to Hitler, Zionism became an urgent necessity. The European Jews who ended up in Palestine after 1945 were committed to adapting to life in a small state of their own making in far-western Asia. But the process of adaptation had not advanced very far by the mid-1960s, and Arabs (like the Middle East in general) were simply not at the center of most Israelis’ concerns. There was nothing particularly anti-Arab about this. As I recall, many Israelis were just as prejudiced against immigrant Jews from North Africa or the Near East as they were against Arabs. Perhaps more so.

  THE SIX-DAY WAR was to change all that, utterly. And yet, for all its lasting consequences, there was nothing particularly unusual about the origin of the conflict. Like its predecessor, the Suez War of 1956, the war of 1967 is best regarded in the light in which Israel’s generals saw it at the time: as unfinished business left over from the War of Independence. None of the parties to that earlier conflict was happy with the outcome, and all regarded the 1948 armistice as temporary. Although Israel had succeeded in expanding its borders beyond those of the original partition, it was still left with what were regarded, in the military calculations of the time, as virtually indefensible frontiers.

  In the course of the early 1950s, the Egyptians encouraged guerrilla incursions across Israel’s southern border, inviting regular retaliation from Israel—whose military had by 1955 decided to provoke Cairo into open conflict. In October 1956, taking advantage of Anglo-French alarm at Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist ambitions, Israel conspired with Paris and London to mount an attack on Egypt. Although initially successful, the campaign was cut short under pressure from Moscow and Washington. The European powers were humiliated, and Israel was obliged to withdraw back to the 1948 line.

  In these circumstances Israel was as insecure as ever. Acknowledging this, the United States undertook to guarantee that the Straits of Tiran, leading from the Red Sea to Eilat, Israel’s port on the Gulf of Aqaba, would henceforth be kept open. In the meantime United Nations forces were to be stationed along the Egypt-Israel frontier, and also at Sharm-el-Sheikh, at the entrance to the Straits on the southeastern tip of the Sinai peninsula. Thereafter the Egyptian frontier was quiet, and it was Syria—whose Ba’athist leaders nursed ambitions to displace Nasser at the head of Arab radicalism—that emerged in the early 1960s as Israel’s chief antagonist.

  In addition to providing hospitality to Palestinian irregulars raiding across Israel’s northeast borders or through Jordan, Damascus had various well-attested plans to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River. Partly for this reason, Israeli strategists had by 1967 come to regard Syria as the main short-term threat to national security. From the Golan Heights above the Sea of Galilee, Syria could target Israeli kibbutzim and villages; and it was a destabilizing influence on neighboring states, Jordan especially. Still, Nasser’s Egypt had by far the larger armed forces. Were Israel seriously to entertain going to war with Syria, it would inevitably have first to neutralize the threat from its historic enemy to the south.

  There is good reason to believe now that the chain of events leading to the outbreak of war on June 5 began with at least a partial misunderstanding. In the early spring of 1967, Israeli jets struck Syrian targets. In April, Israeli generals (including Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin) publicly threatened Damascus with worse to come if border harassments (whose scale they exaggerated) did not stop. Rabin himself seems to have favored toppling the Syrian regime, but Prime Minister Levi Eshkol felt otherwise: Syria was a client state of the Soviet Union, and Eshkol had no desire to provoke the Russians. He was not alone. The former Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, not yet
in the government, is quoted by Michael B. Oren in his new account of the Six-Day War as regretting Rabin’s outburst: “He who sends up smoke signals has to understand that the other side might think there’s really a fire.”14

  And that, in effect, is what happened. Russian intelligence misconstrued Israeli intentions and secretly advised the Syrians that the Israelis were planning to attack—an interpretation given some plausibility by Rabin’s broadcast threats, widely commented upon in the foreign press. The Syrians duly informed Cairo. Nasser had no immediate plans to go to war with Israel, for whose military he had a well-founded respect; but he felt constrained to offer public backing for Syria or else lose standing in the Arab world. In practice, such backing took the conventional and not unfamiliar form of bombastic public expressions of full support for Damascus and grand promises to confront Israel at some unspecified future date.

  So far, so commonplace. What ratcheted the crisis from rhetoric into war was Nasser’s grandstanding demand, on May 17, that UN forces be withdrawn from Gaza. The Egyptian dictator almost certainly calculated thus: Either the United Nations would do his bidding and withdraw, giving him a cost-free and highly visible public success, or else it would refuse the request and Egypt would score a moral victory as the aggrieved party. Nasser surely did not anticipate the reaction of the UN’s ineffective Secretary-General U Thant, which was to order the immediate withdrawal of all UN troops the following day not just from Gaza but from the whole Sinai peninsula.

  Nasser would have preferred that UN troops not be withdrawn from Sharm-el-Sheikh. He could hardly be seen to regret U Thant’s strange decision, which in practice returned all of Sinai to Egyptian control, but it put him in a predicament. He was obliged to move Egyptian armies forward to the Israeli border and down to Sharm-el-Sheikh, which he duly did; but with Egyptian soldiers now stationed across from the island of Tiran, Nasser could not resist the temptation, on May 22, to announce that once again the Straits were closed to all Israel-bound shipping, as they had been in the early 1950s.

  From this point on, as Nasser probably realized, war would be hard to avoid. From the outside Nasser’s moves seemed self-evidently the prelude to a declaration of war; and in any case the closing of the Straits of Tiran was itself, for Israel, a casus belli. Surrounded by enemies, and accessible from the outside only by air and sea, Israel had once again lost its vital link to the Red Sea and beyond. But this was not the main concern for Israel. As Foreign Minister Abba Eban explained at the time, what mattered was not so much the Straits themselves but Israel’s deterrentcapacity, which would lose all credibility if the country accepted Nasser’s blockade without a fight.

  Israeli diplomats tried at first to bring international pressure to bear on Egypt to reopen the Straits; and at the same time they asked the Great Powers openly to express their backing for Israel’s response. The British and the French refused point blank, de Gaulle confining himself to a warning against any preemptive Israeli strike and an embargo on all French arms deliveries to Israel. (This was a time when the Israeli air force was overwhelmingly dependent on French-made Mirage and Mystère jet fighters.)

  The Americans were a bit more sympathetic. Lyndon Johnson tried unsuccessfully to round up support for an international convoy of merchant ships to “run” the Straits and to call Egypt’s bluff. He assured Eshkol and Eban of American sympathy, and of American backing in the event of an unprovoked attack on Israel. But more he could not give, despite John Foster Dulles’s guarantee in 1957; in the mood of the time, he pleaded, Congress would not allow an American president openly to back Israeli aggression, however justified. Privately, his military experts assured Johnson that the Israelis had little to fear: Given the freedom to “shoot first,” they would win within a week. But to Eshkol, Johnson merely announced that “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone.”

  That, of course, is what Israel did. The Israeli military, with Dayan newly installed by popular demand as defense minister, resented being made to wait for two long weeks of “phony war,” but Eshkol’s diplomatic strategy surely paid dividends. The Soviet Union put considerable pressure on Egypt not to start a war, but with rather greater success—at the end of May, at the last minute, Nasser abandoned a plan to attack Israel first, and he seems to have assumed that the crisis he had half-reluctantly set in motion had been defused. Israel, meanwhile, was seen to have tried every diplomatic means to avert a fight—even though most Israeli leaders and all the generals were now committed to war unless Nasser reopened the Straits, which they rightly assumed (and in some cases hoped) he would not do.

  The American military experts who anticipated an easy Israeli victory were well informed, but they were in a minority. Many civilian Israelis feared the worst. From President ’Abd al-Rahman Muhammad ‘Aref of Iraq (“Our goal is clear—we shall wipe Israel off the face of the map. We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa”) to Palestinian leader Ahmed al-Shuqayri (“We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them”), Arab leaders appeared united in their determination to demolish the Jewish state. Their threats seemed credible enough: Between them, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and their friends comprised some nine hundred combat planes, five thousand tanks, and half a million men. At best the Israelis had one-quarter that number of planes, one-fifth the tanks, and only 275,000 men.

  THE STORY OF the war itself is well known. On June 5, Day One, Israeli planes struck first and demolished much of the Egyptian air force on the ground, destroying 286 combat planes and killing nearly one-third of Egypt’s pilots. On Days Two and Three, the Israeli army shattered or dispersed the bulk of the Egyptian armed forces in Sinai, thanks in large measure to Israel’s complete domination of the skies. Meanwhile, ignoring Eshkol’s invitation to stay out of the war, Jordan’s King Hussein— believing that his survival depended upon his being seen to join the struggle against Israel—aligned himself with the Arab coalition (“the hour of decision has arrived”). In the ensuing battles the Israelis, after some hard fighting, seized all of Jerusalem and Jordanian territory west of the Jordan River.

  By the end of Day Four, the war was effectively over. At the United Nations, the United States and the major European powers (including the Soviet Union) had from the outset been pressing urgently for a cease-fire, as the Israelis had anticipated they would: When the war began, Abba Eban estimated that the Israeli armed forces would have at most seventy-two hours before the superpowers intervened. But the Egyptians rejected a cease-fire. Their ambassador at the United Nations, Muhammad El Kony, was assured from Cairo that things were going well for the Arabs and that time was on their side; and he in turn blithely reassured his Soviet counterpart Nikolai Federenko that the Israelis were bluffing and that the planes they had destroyed were plywood decoys.

  The Israelis were lucky, and they knew it: Had the Egyptians accepted a UN cease-fire on June 6, when it was first proposed, instead of on June 8, when Nasser finally acknowledged the extent of the catastrophe, they might have saved at least part of their army, and Israel would never have occupied the Old City of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Once the cease-fire was agreed (and Israel could hardly oppose it, having fought what was officially a “pre-emptive defensive war”), Dayan took a snap decision on his own initiative to attack Syria—the real Israeli objective—before the cease-fire could take effect. This incurred the enduring wrath of Moscow and ran the risk of undoing the benefits of all Eban’s painstaking prewar diplomatic maneuvers, but it paid off. After some tough hours on the slopes of the Golan, the Israelis overran the Syrian defenses and literally raced to Quneitra to occupy the Heights themselves before time ran out.

  The scale of Israel’s victory was unprecedented and took some time for all the parties fully to appreciate. Egyptian losses alone amounted to perhaps fifteen thousand men and eighty-five percent of the country’s prewar military hardware. Between two hundred thousand and three hund
red thousand Arabs fled Gaza and the West Bank into exile, many of them already refugees from 1948. Israel now controlled land covering an area four and a half times its prewar size, from the Jordan to the Suez Canal, from the Lebanese uplands to the Red Sea. The fighting had not been quite so one-sided as the brevity of the war and its outcome might suggest—had it not been for their utter superiority in the air, the Israelis might have been quite closely matched, especially by some of the Jordanian units and the best Egyptian divisions; but it was the result that counted. One outcome of the war, certainly the most important from the Israeli perspective, was this: No responsible Arab leader would ever again seriously contemplate the military destruction of the Jewish state.

  Michael B. Oren, in his new history of the war, tells the story in gripping detail. He has done an immense amount of research in many sources, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and English, and although his narrative is keyed to the Israeli perspective, this produces only occasional distortion. The Egyptian and Jordanian viewpoints are acknowledged, and Israel’s responsibility for prewar misunderstandings and wartime errors (notably the bombing of the American ship Liberty) is given reasonable prominence. One particular virtue of Oren’s book is that it pays full attention to the international dimension of the conflict, especially the concerns and the actions of the two superpowers. This allows Oren to set what was in one sense a very local war into its wider context: The war nearly did not happen thanks to international efforts at prevention, and it certainly would not have been allowed to go on much longer, as the Israelis fully understood.