Forty years ago Israel launched a preemptive war on Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians. In six days, it conquered and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
Here are three perspectives on that war and its consequences for Israel by Amira Hass, Dan Rabinowitz, and Uzi Benziman.
Amira Hass: In Praise of the Occupation
But the right to movement within the expanse and the basic rights that derive from it – the right to earn a living, to study and to develop cultural ties – opened up possibilities of development and progress for people, both as individuals and as a national community. The experience of the expanse compensated for the many vacuums that the Israeli policy of discrimination had created.
For about a quarter century of occupation, relatives and natives of the same villages came together again. People from the Galilee and from the Gaza Strip studied together in educational institutions in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, developed cultural and political ties and met in mosques and churches; people who had been separated until then by signs saying “Danger: Border Ahead,” found themselves working at the same hospitals, the same factories, the same markets, the same construction sites and afterward at the companies they established together; couples were formed and children were born, who were familiar with the changing landscapes of their homeland not from songs of longing but rather from visits to relatives.
Indeed, the right to live together in the home expanse was denied not only to the 1948 refugees, but also to the new refugees of 1967: About 240,000 people, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip who were expelled and fled fearing the battles, and another approximately 60,000 who were abroad when the war broke out. The young state, only 19 years old at the time, acted as though it were mature and experienced: It hastened to deny the vast majority of them the status of residency in their land. By means of various tricks it also denied residency to another 100,000 individuals who went abroad to work or study after 1967, with a skillfulness that created another link in the chain of dispossession that began in 1948 and to which we have not put an end to this day.
But it was only in the 24th year of the occupation that Israel began to “correct” the empowering “mistake” of 1967: If until then the occupation had been characterized by the theft of land (and water), it was now also characterized by the robbery of the Palestinian expanse. Starting in 1991, Israel has been creating two kinds of expanses between the Mediterranean and the Jordan: a superior, open, developed and improved space for the Jews, and a shattered space tainted by intentional de-development for the Palestinians.
This radical change began in January 1991, when Israel revoked the right of all Palestinians to freedom of movement in the whole country and established a regime of permits for limited amounts of time, doled out only to a minority. First the inhabitants of Gaza were cut off from the entire expanse. Then came the turn of the inhabitants of the West Bank. Later the accelerated construction of the Jewish settlements and the building of the bypass roads in the West Bank (all under the cover of “the peace process”) cut the northern part of the West Bank off from its southern part and increasingly distanced villages from their lands and their provincial towns. Gradually, Israel also restricted the movement of the state’s non-Jewish citizens in the expanse and denied their entrance into the Gaza Strip (from 1994 onward) and afterward into the West Bank as well (from 2000 onward). And this is how we arrived at the present: an archipelago of dozens of small and shrunk enclaves, cut off from one another, with the distance between them increasing.
No wonder there is nostalgia for the occupation that existed before 1991!
Dan Rabinowitz: What Day is Today?
Forty years after June 5, 1967, a variety of symposia, conferences and discussions are being held that stress the malignant effect of the occupation – on the Palestinians, of course, but also on morality, society, solidarity and politics in Israel. A few weeks ago, when those who have fond memories of 1967 tried to celebrate what they call “the reunification of Jerusalem,” the result was a limp demonstration of nostalgic blasts on trumpets. It is good that this week, sane, critical voices are being heard. This will help many people to identify, in anger and anxiety, the depressing future that the occupation is passing down to us for years to come as well.
The struggle for memory and memorialization is important, because it never deals solely with the truth of the past. The things that we choose to remember and commemorate define our identity, bring it up to date and thus affect the shape of our future. Therefore, it is also important to think about the other significance of the date June 5 – the date on which World Environment Day is marked internationally.
On June 5, 1972, a commission comprised of representatives of many countries and leading scientists from the field of the environment and resource management convened in Stockholm. One outcome of the conference was the establishment of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), an organization that has since been behind the earth summits held in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg, navigated the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), steered the Kyoto process and advanced many environmental programs at the local level. In retrospect, it can be said that what started out as an elitist debating club and could well have resulted solely in the establishment of a bureaucratic mechanism for improving the quality of life in wealthy countries has instead become a key organization in humanity’s current effort to define its strategy for survival.
The Stockholm conference also became famous because of the book Limits to Growth, edited by a number of the participants. As far back as 35 years ago, this book, which has been translated into dozens of languages and has become a milestone in the history of the international environmental movement, set a giant question mark over the story invented by the modern economy about the world that we consume. It challenges the economic axiom that growth is dependent only on human intelligence, suitable technology and efficient organization, which implicitly assumes that the earth’s resources are infinite and creates the illusion that it is possible to keep on growing forever.
Petroleum and coal have perhaps not run out since 1972, but some of the earth’s resources are disappearing – the atmosphere, for one. There is still plenty of air to breathe, but what has been mortally damaged is the ability of the thin layer of air that envelopes us to take in and purify the tremendous quantities of carbon and sulfur oxides that we cram into it. When the ability to absorb and purify has reached its limit, the excess emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, gradually creating a transparent, impervious sheet that traps the heat on the earth and brings abut what is known as “global warming.”
This climate change, and the destructive effects that it has already caused (chronic droughts and starvation in Africa, storms and diseases) and will yet cause (a shortage of drinking water for two billion people, a rise in the level of the oceans, tens of millions of environmental refugees), means that a new geopolitical era is already at the gates. If in past centuries wars sprang mainly from ethnic-territorial conflicts, in the current century, it is the environmental crisis that will, directly and indirectly, cause the corpses to pile up.
Conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will undoubtedly exist in the future as well. However, the context in which they will take place, and the extent of the international community’s interest in neutralizing them, will be determined by the environmental crisis.
So what day is it today? Today, we commemorate two anniversaries. One reminds us that the wars of the past did not really have any victors. The other reminds us that the future of the human race will be assured only if human leaders worldwide, including in this country, are wise enough to halt the environmental-social crisis with a squeal of the brakes and change directions without delay.
Uzi Benziman: A Look Outside the Local Pond
Many Israelis returning from even a short trip overseas share this feeling: The joy of homecoming is accompanied by a sense that home is not a normal place, in the bad sense of the expression.
The encounter with foreign countries, at least those that are not part of the Third World, is like a blow to the consciousness: In many states, people go about their daily life without Qassam or Katyusha rockets or terror attacks. There are places in the world where civilians are not exposed to news about the security situation from morning to night. There are nations that do not live with the constant moral unease deriving from the occupation of another nation. There are societies that are not surrounded by incessant violence. Public life in most developed states is not suffused with feverish preoccupation with fateful questions about their national survival.
Israel’s insane lifestyle really hits those returning home. This is not just because, as tourists, they only superficially experience daily life abroad; it is because leaving Israel frees them from the local pond for a moment. When a society stews in its own juices, it cannot observe itself with a foreigner’s eyes. On the contrary, it develops self-pity and self-righteousness and projects its own version of events onto reality.
Thus Israel sees itself as a victim of Arab violence, and all its violent acts are intended solely to defend itself, so that it can realize its right to self-determination. These include the checkpoints and the abuse of innocent, helpless Palestinians by brutal soldiers and policemen. They include preventive arrests in the territories, as well as blockades and closures that destroy the lives of women, old people and children. They include the assassinations and the separation fence, which arbitrarily expropriates the private property of poor farmers, as well as the Air Force bombardments, the demolition of houses and the uprooting of orchards. The feeling of constant threat with which Israelis live dulls their sight and their ability to distinguish between good and evil.
The growing view of Israel among a considerable part of the international community was recently reflected in an Amnesty International report and the British initiative for an academic boycott of Israel. Granted, local actors were behind both developments; international politics were also involved; and perhaps both show traces of anti-Israeliness per se, or even anti-Semitism. But curling up like a snail in a shell of self-righteousness is not the way to deal with them. Like the boycott initiative, the Amnesty report is another alarm bell. Israel’s international standing is disintegrating; its moral image has been eroded; its military actions are indefensible.
The basic picture is simple. The world sees Israel as an occupier, and its increasingly sullied image in the conflict with the Palestinians is a result of this. But the Israeli sees himself a victim of Arab aggression. He is fighting for his life, and his enemies keep plotting to take it away. The world is against him and is trying to stop him from defending himself.
In his sallies abroad, the Israeli tastes the intoxicating flavor of an environment that exists without a bloody conflict and learns how he is seen by others. The Israel portrayed by the decisions of the British University and College Union is, as the UCU put it, an “apartheid state, engaging in crimes against humanity in the occupied territories.” The Israel reflected in the Amnesty report for 2006, which focused on the Second Lebanon War, is a state that carried out “indiscriminate, disproportionate attacks on a large scale” and left about a million cluster bombs, as well as new minefields, behind in Lebanon.
The foreign and education ministers can raise a hue and cry about substantive inaccuracies, one-sidedness and cynicism on the part of both Amnesty and the UCU. But their main duty is to exert their influence as senior cabinet members to bring about a change in Israel’s basic situation.
