Fathom has published a new eBook on the legacy of the Six-Day War, which you can DOWNLOAD HERE.
The Legacy of the Six-Day War features Michael Walzer, Einat Wilf, Yossi Klein Halevi, Matthias Kuntzel, Jeffrey Herf, Liam Hoare, Asher Susser
Michael Walzer, one of America’s foremost political thinkers, wrote his seminal book Just and Unjust Wars in 1977. He recalls that the book was born a decade earlier when, as an anti-Vietnam war activist, he found himself defending Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Egypt. ‘I had to explain the politics of distinction’ he remembers, and make clear that ‘wars are just and unjust’.
Einat Wilf asks why the occupation is 50 years old. Her answer is that a simple counting of years fails to take account of the Arab and Muslim countdown until what they hope will be the end of the Zionism and the State of Israel. That countdown reflects the prevailing Muslim, Arab and Palestinian view that Zionism is a historical aberration that will not – and must not – last. Wilf shows that every Israeli effort to end the military occupation in a manner that would bring it peace and security, has run up against that Muslim, Arab and Palestinian refusal to grant legitimacy to the State of Israel and accept its permanence.
1967 marked a key moment in the story of how the Left fell out of love with Israel. Jeffrey Herf examines the response to Israel’s victory from the West German Left and the Communist regime in East Germany. Both, he writes, displayed ‘a kind of obliviousness to the similarities between older antisemitic stereotypes of evil and powerful Jews and the attacks on Zionism and Israel as inherently aggressive, racist and even exterminatory’.
Liam Hoare writes on literature and the war. Israeli writers were split. On one side was the poet Natan Alterman, whose Movement for the Complete Land of Israel tried to rally those artists who believed that Israel’s survival and the continued flourishing of the Jewish people depended on retaining the whole of the land. Opposed to them was what would become the peace camp, with novelist Amos Oz prominent in its ranks, warning that even a just occupation was an occupation nonetheless and advocating relinquishing part of the Land of Israel in order to save the Zionist project, which after all was about the liberation of a people, not a land. The argument between the poet and the novelist, notes Hoare, is unresolved.
In a fascinating interview with Fathom deputy editor Calev Ben-Dor, Yossi Klein Halevi, author of the acclaimed book Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, argues that the Six-Day War in 1967 signalled the beginning of the end of one utopian movement, the Kibbutz, and the beginning of another, focused on settlements. Ranging over the transformations Israeli society has undergone in the last 50 years, Halevi claims that it has become an increasingly post-utopian society and that at its heart is an ‘Israeli Centre’ that is unpersuaded by either the vision of the ‘Greater Land of Israel’ nor of ‘Peace Now’.
Matthias Kuntzel is the author of the award-winning book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. In this essay in intellectual history he argues that the main cause of both Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to threaten to destroy Israel in 1967, and the subsequent enthusiasm of his followers, was an ‘antisemitic impulse as it was carried over from the Nazi period to the post-war period and then to the next generation’. It was not Israel or Zionism that provoked the 1967 war but ‘the latent anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the Arab world’ and the fact that ‘Nasser was gripped by the same destructive sentiments that he whipped up in the masses’.
The Arab defeat in 1967 shattered the image of pan-Arabism as a vehicle of Arab modernisation. The Islamists could now argue that Western style secular nationalism was a false messiah and that ‘Islam is the solution’. The Arab states followed state interest with far less devotion to the general Arab cause, and slowly but surely withdrew from the conflict with Israel, leaving the Palestinians to fend for themselves. Change within Israel itself, including the rise of what Asher Susser, professor emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University (TAU), calls ‘Settlerist neo-Zionism’ has been no less fateful.
