How Israel Was Defeated in the 1967 War

Nov 27, 2023

If Israel doesn't wean itself off its lust for power and continues its slide toward messianism, it will assure its demise as a Jewish and democratic state

On Monday, two peoples marked the anniversary of their national disaster: The Palestinians mourned 56 years of humiliation under Israeli occupation. The Jewish-Israeli people marked another year of falling into the abyss of apartheid, tyranny and isolation.

The famous saying of Pyrrhus of Epirus – "Another victory like that and we are done for" – is perfectly apt for Israel's military victory in the 1967 war. That glorious achievement on the battlefield turned Israel into the only colonialist country in the Western world. And calamitously, the only light at the end of the occupation tunnel is shined by the truck hauling another prefab home to an illegal outpost put up by hilltop hooligans.

In a piece last week, my Haaretz colleague Gideon Levy welcomed the death of the two-state solution. He talked about Israeli society having to choose between apartheid and a second Nakba on one side, and an egalitarian binational state on the other. To me, this is a choice between the plague and cholera.

Not much needs to be said about the ugliness of Israel's apartheid regime in the West Bank. On the other hand, putting the Jews and Palestinians together under shared sovereignty is like trying to impose domestic bliss on an aging couple who haven't stopped bickering since their wedding day. Rather than go their separate ways in peace, they make each other's lives hell.

The two-state solution isn't dead. It's unconscious and on a ventilator. Israeli leaders from the far right to the loony left have put it in a coma. Fortunately, many Arab leaders aren't ready to pull the plug. Last month they sent Israel a reminder that the partner is still alive. This news appeared in the Arab League's statement after its summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The leaders of 22 countries reaffirmed their endorsement of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. They stressed the centrality of the Palestinian issue to every Arab country, and the right to establish a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. (They also agree in principle to land swaps.) The initiative also talks about an agreed solution for the refugee problem, all in the context of ending the conflict and launching a normalization with Israel.

It's true that we can't trust the Arabs. They refuse to take no for an answer and keep bothering us with their peace initiative.

This conciliatory message was issued just days after the shameful annual Flag March through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, which was widely covered in the Arab world. Nor did the killing of children in Gaza during the fighting with Islamic Jihad last month, Israel's annexation legislation and provocative announcements by senior ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich – denying the existence of the Palestinian people – deter the attendees of the Arab League summit.

So it's true that we can't trust the Arabs. They refuse to take no for an answer and keep bothering us with their peace initiative.

The flight from the opportunity offered by the initiative reminded me of something former Foreign Minister Abba Eban said to me after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 and the right wing returned to power the following year under Benjamin Netanyahu. "Everybody always quotes me saying that ‘the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ Today, the same thing could be said about us."

Instead of congratulating the countries at the summit and thanking the Saudi hosts, Netanyahu prefers to spread rumors about a rapprochement between Jerusalem and Riyadh. His mouthpiece, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, told Army Radio last week that a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia depends on the price the Americans would be willing to pay (approval of an arms deal and a green light for a Saudi nuclear program).

There's wasn't a word about relations contingent on progress toward an accord with the Palestinians. "We’re not into that," Hanegbi said.

In an article that will appear in the June issue of Hamerhav Hatziburi (a Tel Aviv University journal), professors Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell write that a desire for expanded borders as a means of escaping the feeling of being besieged was part of the Zionist ethos many years before the Six-Day War.

In the euphoria after the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said, "Better Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh," referring to the city at the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula. The 1973 Yom Kippur War opened Dayan's eyes and the revered military man supported Menachem Begin all the way to the 1982 withdrawal from Sinai in return for peace with Egypt. Today, where would you find a leader to support a withdrawal from the city of Ariel in the West Bank in exchange for peace with all the Arab states?

Beyond the Green Line, an ugly race of masters has grown whose long arms have reached the Knesset and spread around the cabinet table now too. Israel has also begun to exploit natural resources, appropriating them from the native population. One example is the exclusion of Palestinians from the West Bank's quarries, with ownership transferred to Israeli entities and creating financial interests for perpetuating the occupation.

As happens in other conflict zones around the world, the occupier and occupied are trapped in a cycle of violence, with violence by one side triggering violence by the other and the undemocratic methods used in the occupied territories trickling into the territory of the occupiers. And that's on top of the serial violation of international law that has distorted the country's laws, adapting them to the needs of the occupation – on this side of the Green Line too.

The Abraham Accords ostensibly proved that the occupation isn't an obstacle to peace in the region. But Saudi Arabia's refusal to join the circle of peace with Israel significantly reduces the value of these accords. The Arab League summit illustrated Saudi Arabia's centrality in the Arab and Muslim worlds. And in the coming year, Saudi Arabia will chair the Arab League, further boosting its authority.

The Arab Peace Initiative (which is based on the Saudi Initiative) isn't keeping Tehran from forging closer ties with Saudi Arabia, such an important Sunni Arab country. Why should the Iranians play the bad guy? For 21 years, Israel's governments (including the previous one under Natfali Bennett and Yair Lapid) have chosen to ignore the Arab leaders’ outline. There certainly is no danger that the Netanyahu/Itamar Ben-Gvir government will act any differently. The Iranians can rest assured that as long as Israel controls millions of Arabs, the injustices of the occupation and the suicidal moves by the "Middle East's only democracy" will supplant the Iranian nuclear program on the world's agenda.

The willful forgoing of the partition solution proposed in the Arab Peace Initiative is reminiscent of the rejection by the Arabs and Palestinians of the UN Partition Plan of 1947. Back then, they demanded a Greater Palestine and refused to recognize a Jewish state. Today, Israel is demanding a Greater Israel and refusing to recognize a Palestinian state.

Israel's insistence on retaining the territories it conquered in 1967 could turn out to be even more fateful than the Palestinian Nakba, when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1947-49 war, becoming refugees. History will show that the Arabs’ rejection of the partition plan wasn't for nothing. If Israel doesn't wean itself off its lust for power and continues its slide toward messianism, it will ultimately assure its demise as a Jewish and democratic state and lay the cornerstone for an Arab state on the ruins of the Zionist vision.