By David K. Shipler
On the
seventh day, after its dizzying six-day victory 50 years ago this week, Israel
turned a corner from a sense of extreme vulnerability to a period of
triumphalism. The armies and air forces of the surrounding Arab countries lay
in shambles, the Goliath slain by the tiny Jewish state. Moreover, with
Israel’s territory greatly expanded into ancient biblical lands, a hybrid of
religion and nationalism found fertile ground. The movement then grew, even
more than its adherents had expected, until it gained lasting power to shape
the map for the next half century or more.
And that
has saddled Israel with a moral and political burden. The euphoric victory in
the Six-Day War brought a heady sense of Jewish self-reliance after a long
history of persecution. But by holding onto the West Bank of the Jordan River, where
Palestinian Arab residents have minimal say in how they are governed, Israel
has undermined its democratic values and exposed itself to international
condemnation.
To withdraw, however, would incur
security risks and meet resistance from the religio-nationalist movement, which
has gradually moved from the political margins into the cabinet. The movement calls
the West Bank by its biblical names Judaea and Samaria, and regards it as the Jewish
birthright, which Genesis says God gave to Abraham and his seed. The territory
has been widely settled by religious Jews (along with secular Jews drawn there
by housing subsidies). Many would have to be uprooted if a Palestinian state
were to be created there under a peace agreement.
The outcome of a war, which seems obvious
at the moment, can look simplistic in hindsight. Nothing of this conundrum was foreseen
in June of 1967. Nor in 1973, when Israel nearly lost the Yom Kippur War, was it
apparent that Anwar Sadat of Egypt may have felt that his near victory had burnished
his warmaking credentials enough to then offer peace; he made a dramatic visit
to Jerusalem in 1977 and followed with an Egyptian-Israeli treaty. Similarly, Israel’s
1982 invasion of Lebanon, which succeeded in driving the Palestine Liberation
Organization out of the country, exposed Israeli soldiers to close-in attacks
that eroded Israel’s image in the Arab world as a formidable juggernaut.
