On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a blistering attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Within the space of 6 days Israeli forces had destroyed the three Arab armies, captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza-the remaining 22% of mandated Palestine which Israel wanted but failed to seize in 1948-49- and captured and occupied the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai.

Israel claimed that its war was a pre-emptive strike against Arab forces preparing to attack it. Tel-Aviv also claimed that the Egyptian closure of Sharm El Sheikh to Israeli ships threatened Israel‘s security. Israel also claimed that guerrilla operations by Palestinians, especially Jordan and Syria, justified its war.

Notwithstanding the pro-Israeli accounts of the war and its causes in the Western media and scholarships, Israeli leaders knew that Egypt had no offensive intentions against Israel, and that the Egyptian troops dispatched to the Sinai were no more than a symbolic gesture of solidarity with Syria which had suffered increasingly punitive Israeli strikes (for which the UN censured Israel).

Israeli General Yitzhak Rabin admitted that fact in a statement published in February 1968 by the French newspaper Le Monde. Rabin said that he “did not think that [Egyptian President] Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”

Nasser also told the US administration of President Johnson, before the war, that he was prepared to submit the dispute of whether or not Egypt acted legally in closing off the Gulf of Aqaba, to the International Court of Justice. Israeli leaders were not interested in Egyptian proposals for peaceful settlement, which the Americans were finding difficult to turn down.

In fact, Israeli leaders were not interested in peace agreements. They were interested in acquiring more land, in finishing the complete conquest of Palestine the 1948 war had failed to accomplish. An offensive war was the only way to do it.

Washington supported Israel‘s expansionist designs. According to Israeli historian Jon Kimche, while publicly urging a peaceful solution to the 1967 crisis, the Johnson administration secretly encouraged the Israeli leaders to go to war: “…In effect, what happened during the last days of May,” wrote Jon Kimche, “was that the United States had reached an understanding with the Israeli defence forces which cleared the way for the 5 June initiative…”

The speed with which the Israeli attack crushed the Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, spelled the end of Arab nationalism, which had staked its fortunes on the liberation of Palestine.

The war also marked a turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The primary conflict was no longer about repatriating the Palestinian refugees who had been expelled by Israel in 1948, but about liberating the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.

 In 1956, England and France had behaved as if they were still the dominant imperial powers in the Middle East when they allied themselves with Israel and attacked Egypt. Washington pressured them to withdraw from Egyptian territories they had occupied. In 1967 Washington had replaced the former imperial powers and firmly allied itself with Israel. Their collusion marked the beginning of the present strategic alliance of the two countries.

The speed and magnitude of the Israeli army’s victory in 1967 also produced another crucial dimension of the conflict: Israel came to be viewed as a ‘strategic asset’ in the American foreign policy’s armoury for waging the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Israel could now pose as the American military agent in the region, exposing the weaknesses and unreliability of those Arab nationalist regimes which had a double liability in the eyes of Washington: They received support from the Soviet Union, and they also threatened the conservative Arab order, guardian of the oil wealth and strategic geography judged vital to American national interests.

With Israel as a new Sparta, Arab nationalism was checked, Soviet encroachment halted, and the conservative pro-Western Arab regimes no longer threatened by the Arab Cold War that pitted them against Arab nationalist regimes. In this new balance of power, the Palestinians were relegated to the background.

The 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 essentially called for the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of Israeli withdrawal from the Arab territories conquered by Israel in 1967 (no mention of the Palestinian Arab territories occupied by Israel in 1947-49), in return for an end of belligerency and peace.

There was no talk of Palestinian state or Palestinian political rights. UN Resolution 242 simply referred to the Palestinians as refugees. But this neglect spurred on Palestinian nationalism, which proceeded to challenge Israeli occupation.

Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt in 1978 to remove Egypt from the conflict. It then proceeded to violently attempt to liquidate Palestinian nationalism with its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but it failed.

 

In 1969 US Secretary of State William Rogers proposed a peace plan for the Arab-Israeli conflict based on the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242’s principle of land for peace. It was accepted by Egyptian President Nasser, but rejected by Israel, and torpedoed by Henry Kissinger, Rogers‘ Machiavellian rival in the Nixon White House.

 

The pattern was set for the next 40 years: While the US and Israel proclaim their desire for peace, they actively work to block it. With the financial, political and military support of Washington, Israeli leaders actively colonised the occupied territories with Jewish settlers. They routinely subjected the Palestinians under occupation to dispossession, displacement, collective punishment, sustained denial of human rights, and periodic violence if they resist.

 

Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Novosibirsk, Russia. He is author of From Camp David to the Gulf, Montreal, New York. His latest book, Leadership and Democracy, is published in New York.

 

 

 

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