Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  Oren is good, too, on some of the personalities of the time, especially the Israelis, for whom he has a better feel. The stories of Rabin’s near-breakdown on the eve of battle, of Dayan’s rakish duplicity, of Nasser’s horror at the scale of his defeat, are all skillfully told. Some, such as Yigal Allon, the hawkish leader of the left-leaning Achdut Ha’Avodah Party and sometime hero of the Independence War, come off badly: hungry for battle, eager for territory, loath to relinquish any land in exchange for peace. Others, such as the much underestimated Levi Eshkol, receive a distinct boost in their reputation. It was Eshkol who admonished General Ariel Sharon (when Sharon offered to destroy the Egyptian army “for a generation”) that “nothing will be settled by a military victory. The Arabs will still be here.” And it was Eshkol who asked his military adviser Yigal Yadin, the day after the lightning conquest of the West Bank: “Have you thought yet about how we can live with so many Arabs?” (Yadin’s reply is not recorded.)

  And yet Oren’s book, for all its great learning and vivid writing, is somehow unsatisfactory. This is not because of his weakness for verbal infelicities: We read of someone seeking to “palliate the Syrians,” that “Hussein was once again caught between clashing rocks,” and so forth. Nor is it because Oren’s grasp grows insecure as he moves beyond the Middle East: France in 1956 assuredly did not conspire with Israel because its government “shared Israel’s socialist ideals” (how then account for the co-conspiratorial enthusiasm of Britain’s Conservative leaders?); and it was President Eisenhower’s economic arm-twisting, not Marshal Bulganin’s empty threat to “use missiles,” that brought the Suez War to an abrupt end. These slips suggest that Oren may be out of his depth in the broader currents of international history, but they do not vitiate his project.

  The problem lies in the project itself. Oren announces at the outset that he plans to put the Six-Day War back in its context, and to present its origins and its outcome in such a manner that they will never be looked at in the same way again. And with respect to the origins he does indeed offer a comprehensive, if narrowly diplomatic, account. The story of the war itself is very well told, and for its source base alone this book should now be considered the standard work of reference. Yet neither the origins nor the war come across, at least to this reader, in any strikingly novel way. More thorough than previous accounts, to be sure. Better documented, certainly. But different? Not really.

  As for the long-term outcome of the most fateful week in modern Middle Eastern history, Oren does not even begin to engage it. To be fair, any serious attempt at assessing the war’s consequences would require another book. But the main consequences of Israel’s victory can be summarized fairly succinctly. There was a widespread belief among Arab commentators, swiftly communicated to the Arab “street,” that the United States and Britain had helped Israel—how else could its air force have achieved such dazzling successes? This prepared the way for a significant increase in anti-American sentiment across the region, a change of mood that proved lasting and with the consequences of which we are living still.

  The ironic outcome is that whereas American official support for Israel in June 1967 had actually been rather lukewarm—Washington feared alienating moderate Arab opinion—the two countries did draw much closer thereafter. Israel was now a force to be reckoned with, a potential ally in an unstable region; and whereas in June 1967 Johnson’s advisers had warned him against committing America openly to the Zionist cause, future administrations would have no such anxieties. With Arab states increasingly hostile, the United States had less to lose. France, meanwhile, released from the embarrassment of its imbroglio in Algeria, turned its back on the Jewish state (“un peuple sûr de lui et dominateur,” in de Gaulle’s notorious phrase) and made the strategic decision to rebuild its bridges to the Arab world.

  International public opinion also began to shift. Before the war, in Europe as well as the United States, only the Far Right and the Far Left were avowedly anti-Israel. Progressives and conservatives alike were sympathetic to Israel, the underdog seemingly threatened with imminent extinction. In some circles comparisons were drawn with the Civil War in Spain just thirty years earlier, with Israel cast as the legitimate republic besieged by aggressive dictators. Throughout Western Europe and North America, in South Africa and Australia, a significant effort was mounted from May 1967 to send volunteers to help Israel, to replace in the fields the men called up to fight.

  I played a very minor role in these events, returning in my own case from the United Kingdom to Israel on the last commercial flight to land there before the outbreak of hostilities. Consequently, I met a lot of these volunteers, in Europe and then in Israel. There were many non-Jews among them, and most would have classed themselves as politically “left.” With the trial of Eichmann and the Frankfurt trials of concentration camp personnel a very recent memory, defending Israel became a minor international cause.

  According to Abba Eban, speaking in the aftermath of victory, “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.” I am not sure that this was so. Israel was certainly respected in a new way. But the scale of its triumph actually precipitated a falling-away of support. Some might plausibly attribute this to the world’s preference for the Jew as victim—and there was indeed a certain post-June discomfort among some of Israel’s overseas sympathizers at the apparent ease with which their cause had triumphed, as though its legitimacy were thereby called retrospectively into question.

  But there was more to it than that. The European Old Left had always thought of Israel, with its long-established Labor leaders, its disproportionately large public sector, and its communitarian experiments, as “one of us.” In the rapidly shifting political and ideological currents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Israel was something of an anomaly. The New Left, from Berlin to Berkeley, was concerned less with exploited workers and more with the victims of colonialism and racism. The goal was no longer the emancipation of the proletariat; it was rather the liberation of the third-world peasantry and what were not yet called “people of color.” Kibbutzim retained a certain romantic aura for a few more years, but for hard-nosed Western radicals they were just collective farms and as such a mere variant of the discredited Soviet model. In defeating the Arab armies and occupying Arab land, Israel had drawn attention to itself in ways calculated to encourage New Left antipathy, at just the moment when hitherto disparate radical constituencies—Ulster Catholics, Basque nationalists, Palestinian exiles, German extra-Parliamentarians, and many others— were finding common cause.

  As for the conventional Right, through the 1950s and 1960s it enthusiastically took Israel’s side against Nasser—the bête noire of every Western government, Raymond Aron’s “Hitler on the Nile.” With Nasser thoroughly humiliated, however, and with the colonial era retreating into memory, many European conservatives lost interest in Israel and sought instead to curry favor among its oil-producing neighbors: before the energy crisis of 1973, but especially afterwards.

  In a variety of ways, then, the international context after 1967 turned increasingly unfavorable for Israel, despite its dramatic victory and because of it. Yet the most important change of all, the transformation that would color all of Israel’s dealings with the rest of the world, took place in the country itself. Relieved of any serious threat, ostensibly sufficient unto themselves, Israelis became complacent. The attitude of Yael Dayan, addressing her diary as the war ended, is quite typical: “The new reality in the Middle East presented Israel as the strongest element, and as such it can talk a different language and had to be talked to differently.” The prickly insecurity that characterized the country in its first two decades changed to a self-satisfied arrogance.

  From 1967 until the shock of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel was “dizzy with success.” The apparent ease of the June victory led both the public and—less forgivably—the generals to believe that they were invincible. The image of the Israeli Defense For
ces was burnished to a shine. Self-congratulatory (and implicitly contradictory) myths were espoused: that the Six-Day War had been won with consummate ease thanks to the technical and cultural superiority of the Israeli forces; that the climactic battles (for Jerusalem, for the Golan) had seen heroic feats of soldiering against harsh odds.

  Books such as Yael Dayan’s Israel Journal reflected and nourished a widespread sense of spiritual superiority. Attached to Sharon’s Southern Command during the war, she sneered at the contents of captured Egyptian officers’ tents: thrillers, nylons, candies. “I knew what our officers’ bedside tables contained. An Egyptian soldier would have found a few pens, writing paper, a few books and study matter—perhaps a book of poems.” Comparing the two sides, Dayan concludes that the Egyptians had the material advantage, but “we had spiritual superiority.”

  Perhaps. Or perhaps not. As I recall Israeli junior officers’ quarters on the Golan in the late summer of 1967, there were more pinups than poems. But from encounters with soldiers at the time I can certainly confirm the astonishingly quick transition from quiet confidence to an air of overweening superiority. Sharon was not the only one to sweep his arm across the captured landscape and declare (in his case to Yael Dayan) that “all this is ours.” And the new mood was reinforced by the appearance in fairly short order of a new kind of Israeli. The great victory of 1967 gave Zionism a shot in the arm, with a new generation of enthusiastic immigrants arriving from America especially; but these new Zionists brought with them not the old Socialist texts of emancipation, redemption, and community, but rather a Bible and a map. For them, Israel’s accidental occupation of Judea and Samaria was not a problem, it was a solution. In their religious and jingoistic eyes, the defeat of Israel’s historical enemies was not the end of the story, but rather the beginning.

  In many cases their aggressive nationalism was paired with a sort of born-again, messianic Judaism, a combination hitherto largely unknown in Israel. In the heady aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem, the chief rabbi of the army, Shlomo Goren, had proposed that the mosques on the Temple Mount be blown up. The general in command on the Jordanian front, Uzi Narkiss, had ignored him; but in years to come the voice of intolerant, ultrareligious Zionism would become more insistent and not so easy to turn away.

  The demography of Israel was altered in other ways, too. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Jews in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere were subjected to persecution and discrimination, and the rate of Jewish immigration to Israel from Arab lands rose sharply. Hitherto it had been mostly confined to Jews expelled or fleeing from the newly independent states of the Maghreb; these continued to come, either directly or via France, but they were no longer a small minority of the overall population. These new Israelis not only did not share the political and cultural background of the earlier European immigrants. They had strong and distinctly unfriendly opinions about Arabs. After all, relations between Jews and Arabs in the places they had come from were often based on little more than mutual contempt. When the old Labor parties predictably failed to attract their support (or did not even bother to try), they turned to the erstwhile revisionists, whose chauvinist prejudices they could appreciate. The rise to power of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and their successors was literally unimaginable before June 1967. Now it became possible and even inexorable.

  This was the irony of the victory of 1967: It was the only war Israel ever won that gave the country a real chance to shape the Middle East to everyone’s advantage, its own above all—but the very scale of the victory somehow robbed the country’s leaders of imagination and initiative. The “overblown confidence” (in Oren’s apt phrase) after June 1967 led to the initial disasters of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when, unable to imagine that Arab military planning was as good as their own intelligence suggested, the Israeli general staff was caught napping. That same misplaced confidence led Israel’s politicians to let policy drift in the course of the 1970s, at a time when the initiative was still very much in their hands.

  As for the occupied territories, Eshkol’s question to Yadin remained unanswered. The habit of encouraging frontier settlements in the name of security—a building block of the original Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine) and the origin of many kibbutzim—made sense in the military circumstances of the 1930s. But half a century later it was an utter anachronism. It was in this context, however, that mainstream politicians connived at the subsidized establishment in the West Bank of tens of thousands of religious and political extremists. Some politicians—Allon, Sharon—always intended to install a permanent Israeli presence on the captured lands. Others merely preferred not to oppose the mood of the hour.

  Nobody thought much about how to remove the settlements when the time came to exchange land for peace, though it had been clear from the outset that come it would. On June 19, 1967, the Israeli cabinet secretly voted to accept the principle of returning occupied land in exchange for lasting peace. As Eshkol had noted when the war began: “Even if we conquer the Old City and the West Bank, in the end we will have to leave them.”

  It is easy to wax nostalgic for the old Israel, before the victories of 1967 and the disturbing changes they brought in their wake. The country may have had “Auschwitz frontiers” (Eban) but its identity within them was at least clear. Yet if the Jewish state was ever to be at home in the Middle East—to be the “normal” polity that its Zionist founders envisaged—then its curious European orientation, a time-space capsule in an alien continent, could not last. And there is no doubt that, for better or for worse, since June 1967 Israel has entered fully into the Middle Eastern world. It, too, has crazed clerics, religious devotees, nationalist demagogues, and ethnic cleansers. It is also, sadly, less secure than at any time in the past forty years. The idea that Jews in Israel might lead their daily lives oblivious of the Arab world, as many did before 1967, is today tragically unthinkable.

  Short of forcibly expunging the Arab presence from every inch of soil currently controlled by Israel, the dilemma facing Israel today is the same as it was in June 1967, when the aging David Ben-Gurion advised his fellow countrymen against remaining in the conquered territories. A historic victory can wreak almost as much havoc as a historic defeat. In Abba Eban’s words, “The exercise of permanent rule over a foreign nation can only be defended by an ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness that are incompatible with the ethical legacy of prophetic Judaism and classical Zionism.” The risk that Israel runs today is that for many of its most vocal defenders, Zionism has become just such an “ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness” and not much more. Israel’s brilliant victory of June 1967, already a classic in the annals of preemptive warfare, has borne bitter fruits for the losers and the winners alike.

  This essay—a July 2002 review of Michael Oren’s new history of the Six-Day War—was my last contribution to the New Republic. The following year my name disappeared from the journal’s masthead in the wake of my essay on the one-state solution in Israel and Palestine (“Israel: The Alternative,” in the New York Review of Books, vol. 50, no. xvi, October 2003). Despite the largely favorable tone of my review, Michael Oren—perhaps unaccustomed to dissent or criticism—wrote a curiously vituperative, ad hominem response, which the New Republic published in its edition of September 30, 2002.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up

  By the age of fifty-eight a country—like a man—should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and ill, who we are, what we have done, and how we appear to others, warts and all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short, we are adults.

  But the state of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, un
iquely) immature. The social transformations of the country—and its many economic achievements—have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one “understands” it and everyone is “against” it; full of wounded amour propre, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced— and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting—that it can do as it wishes; that its actions carry no consequences; and that it is immortal. Appropriately enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up was until very recently still in the hands of a generation of men who were already prominent in its public affairs forty years ago: an Israeli Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering over the affairs of the country—the latter albeit only in spirit.

  But that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country— delinquent in its international obligations and resentfully indifferent to world opinion—is simply an independent little state doing what it has always done: look after its own interests in an inhospitable part of the globe. Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They—gentiles, Muslims, Lefties—have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They—Europeans, Arabs, Fascists—have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven’t changed. Why should Israel change?

  But they have changed. And it is this change—which has passed largely unrecognized within Israel—to which I want to draw attention here. Before 1967 the state of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc Communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-Communist Left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel’s existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the nineteenth-century idyll of agrarian socialism—or else a paragon of modernizing energy, “making the desert bloom.”