1967 ‘setback’ changes terrain

Alan Philps

• Last Updated: May 11. 2008 10:20PM UAE / May 11. 2008 6:20PM GMT

On May 26 1967, 10 days before the outbreak of war, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, declared: “The battle will be a general one, and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.

“I probably could not have said such things five or even three years ago. Today I say such things because I am confident,” he said.

His words echoed the mood in Arab capitals where people were clamouring for action. Mr Nasser had brought the Middle East to the brink of war by sending home the UN peacekeepers from Sinai and blockading Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat by closing the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On the same day that Mr Nasser spoke, his journalist-confidant, Mohammed Haykal, issued a challenge to Israel to start the war.

“Let Israel begin; let our second blow then be ready. Let it be a knockout.”

Israel was hesitant. It had all but lost the support of France – supplier of its air force – and remembered too well the way the US had told it to pull its troops out of Egypt in 1956. Blocking the Strait of Tiran could be considered an act of war, but hardly one justifying the knockout blow that Israel had been planning for months.

When King Hussein of Jordan joined the war party by signing up to the Egyptian-Syrian defence pact and Iraqi tanks started arriving in Jordan, Israel moved. Almost every plane in the Israeli air force was deployed in a surprise attack at 745am on June 5. In the first day, 400 aircraft from Egypt, Syria and Jordan were destroyed. There was no time for Egypt to deliver a “second blow”.

Six days of fighting left Israel in control of the whole of Palestine – including the Old City of Jerusalem – all of Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights. A new wave of refugees was on the move – 200,000 to 250,000 from the West Bank to Jordan and 70,000 from Gaza to Egypt.

The very name of the conflict – the Six Day War – had a magical ring in English. If God had created the world in six days, people thought in the West, then surely God’s hand must have guided the armies of Israel. America, which had kept its distance from Israel, became a full ally. In Feb 1968 the first deal to sell US Phantom jets to Israel was agreed, starting a superpower arms race in the Middle East.

At the start the Israelis did not know what to do with all the territory they had conquered. There was no repeat of 1948 – villages were not cleared to make way for Jewish settlement. There were suggestions that most of the land could be handed back in exchange for peace – but the 1948 refugees would never be allowed back to their homes in Israel. The Arab states responded at a summit in Khartoum with the famous three nos – no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.

Such was the scale of the Naksa – the “setback” of 1967 – that the few embers of resistance were quickly put out. Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, tried to recruit fedayeen in the West Bank, but had to flee for his life.

The West Bankers had been treated as second-class citizens by the Jordanians and they adapted quietly to Israeli military rule – so quietly that the Israelis believed they could impose a “benign occupation”. Moshe Dayan, the defence minister, said: “I want a policy whereby an Arab can be born, live and die in the West Bank without ever seeing an Israeli official.”

This Shangri-La could not last. On April 4 1968, a group of Israelis disguised as Swedish tourists checked in to the Park Hotel in the ancient West Bank town of Hebron, and announced they had come to settle.

No one removed them. Thus was born the Israeli religious settler movement, which over the years would spread its tentacles all over the West Bank. Just after secular Zionism had achieved its greatest success in the June war, it gave way to religious movements which would soon dominate Israeli politics.

The wider Arab world never stopped yearning for a hero to replace the defeated kings and presidents. This hero appeared in March 1968, when Palestinian fedayeen halted an Israeli punitive raid at the village of Karameh in Jordan, with Israel losing 28 dead.

The fact that Karameh means “dignity” was enough to establish Arafat’s PLO as a respected national liberation organisation. Suddenly the Palestinians were a people, not just a “refugee problem” – the status to which they had been demoted by UN Security Council Resolution 242, a gloriously vague document adopted in Nov 1967 after five months of negotiation.

Emboldened by Karameh, the Palestinians embarked on a series of aircraft hijackings, which flipped their image from freedom fighter to terrorist in a few short months.

In December, the Israeli army destroyed 13 aircraft at Beirut airport in retaliation for an attack on an El Al plane. One of the commandos was Benjamin Netanyahu, who would reappear 28 years later as leader of a pro-settler party and prime minister of Israel.