In the forty years since the tumultous days of Israel’s 1967 Six Day War against the joint attack by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the memory of that war and the image of Israel have undergone a sea change. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer seen in the context of Israel’s stunning victory against impossible odds, but rather in terms of its occupation of Palestinian territories. According to Ian Black, the middle east editor of the Guardian, Israel, the little David of 1967, has become a lumbering Goliath of the present.
It was Moshe Dayan, the hero of Israel’s 1967 victory, who set the tone for what was to follow: "We are waiting for a telephone call," the one-eyed general said disdainfully as the frontline Arab states – Egypt, Jordan and Syria – reeled from their crushing defeat. Of the Palestinians – the newly conquered population of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip – little was said at the time. But the six-day war put them back at centre stage in their conflict with Israel. They have stayed there ever since.
"Rarely has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences," commented the historian Michael Oren. "Seldom has the world’s attention been gripped, and remained seized, by a single event and its ramifications." Israel’s triumph, someone else observed wisely, was "a cursed blessing".
Perceptions have changed so much in 40 years that it is hard now to recapture the sympathy that was felt for Israel as Egypt mobilised, and residents of Tel Aviv filled sandbags. If the country’s leaders talked emotively about the vulnerable "Auschwitz borders" left after their 1948 war of independence, blood-curdling Arab rhetoric bolstered the image of Israel as the underdog.
But little David, just 19 that May, was rapidly to become a lumbering Goliath. As euphoric Israelis thronged across Jordanian lines to Jerusalem’s Old City and marvelled at its Jewish and Muslim holy places, a little-known guerrilla commander named Yasser Arafat fled Ramallah and Palestinians adjusted to a new reality of curfews, informers and military occupation.
And it is that occupation, now as then, that stands at the heart of the conflict between two peoples engaged in a vicious, primordial – and utterly unequal – struggle over one small land. It has taken a terrible toll.
A similar point of view is expressed in the May 26 issue of The Economist.
Accidental Blogger 
7 responses to “Israel’s Pyrrhic Victory”
It’s the lumbering Goliath speaking, presumably when the following reaction came from some on excavating mass graves of Jews in the Ukraine (Link):
“According to Shvartsman, the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozsdavka-1 site have been established. He said Jewish community members planned to conduct studies at the newly found site to identify victims.
“We must figure out their names. It is our debt before victims and survivors,” he said.”
So, they are willing to spend time and resources on identifying and honoring the long-dead, but not quite as willing to forgive and forge a new peace with their current foes.
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Sujatha, please distinguish between Jews and Israelis when you talk about “they.” The terms are not interchangeable. While the Holocaust has been at times used for political reasons by Israelis, Jews, and others who are neither, the people you are talking about above who are identifying and honoring their dead are Jews, but not Israelis, and didn’t ask to be joined in a discussion of Middle East politics, so far as I can tell from the article you linked. For that matter, the very sad discovery seems to have been accidental:
“The grave was found by chance last month when workers were preparing to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community.”
Ruchira: Pyrrhic is certainly right. It’s tempting to engage in “if only” wishful thinking about the bad Israeli policy, ham-handed and unbalanced U.S. role in the region, bad policy by corrupt surrounding Arab regimes, and bad internal leadership of the Palestinians that’s occurred in the region since 1967. It’s equally tempting to blame the inevitable instability of post-colonial, created nation states. So many bad elements in the mix, and the Palestinian people have been the losers in every match-up between them.
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Anna:
The fate of the Palestinians is definitely the issue which is at the heart of this perception. It is indeed a very sad and unusual situation for successive generations of a group to live as perpetual refugees in and around their ancestral home. Without an internationally recognized status in the world, who speaks for them? And who cares?
I agree with you 100% that the blame for the miserable state of affairs is to be shared among many parties. Israel, the neighboring Arab states, American foreign policy and the Palestinian leadership itself have made matters from bad to worse. In this narrative, there is a violent/ foolhardy/ opportunistic and wrong tit for every violent / foolhardy / opportunistic and wrong tat. The cycle of mistrust is endless. I wish that the Palestinians themselves would begin to see that they have been a convenient political football to kick around … and not just by Israel. But the longer a population lives without a viable identity and hope, the more likely it is to lose all ability for rational discourse. And as the two articles point out, when one of the warring factions is seen as overwhelmingly more powerful than the other (Israel’s military might fueled by US political and monetary largesse), the blame too will fall overwhelmingly on the mighty.
I do not know how this intractable problem will ever be solved (the other one being Kashmir) without an honest broker. Perhaps there should be no broker. Maybe only the Israelis and Palestinians should talk to each other. I don’t know. What I do know is that if this matter is settled with a modicum of fairness, many of the world’s other “hot spots” might cool down. But who knows even that?
Sujatha, please distinguish between Jews and Israelis when you talk about “they.” The terms are not interchangeable.
It is true that they are not and one needs to distinguish between Jews and Israel when it comes to middle east affairs. There are probably as many Jews as non-Jews on both sides of this issue.
Unfortunately, as long as events such as this keep occurring with regularity and publications such as this are in circulation, it is clear that there are some dedicated activists who would like us to forget not only the distinction between Jews and Israelis but also the one between Israel and America. Such loyalists of Israel do more harm to their cause than good and many American non-Jews who are not finely attuned to the distinction will make the mistake of conflating one with the other. Which is why aggressive ethno-national politics by prominent Americans like Alan Dershowitz (or anybody else) and lobbies for foreign countries, designed to influence American policy are so dangerous and perhaps in the end, even counterproductive.
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Sujatha:
When I say:
There are probably as many Jews as non-Jews on both sides of this issue, I should have added that in this debate, included among the non-Jews squarely on the side of the hard right Likudniks are Hindu nationalists in India and abroad. Listening to their case FOR Israel and AGAINST Palestinians (read Muslims), it is easy to imagine that one was in Daniel Pipes / Douglas Feith territory. So, it is true what Anna says. Middle east politics are no longer strictly an Arab / Israeli, Jewish / Muslim matter (and it never was). Islamic fundamentalism and leaders like Mahmouod Ahmadinejad have of course done NOTHING for the Palestinian cause – in fact they may have condemned the Paestinians to decades more of refugeedom.
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Regarding Jews who conflate Jewish and Israeli: Agreed. It’s very frustrating. What’s especially peculiar to me is that at least some of the Israeli loyalists in America are otherwise liberal, and would have no trouble recognizing why they might simultaneously be proud Americans, and still think that disenfranchisement of American Indians was wrong and that the American government pursues a number of policies, foreign and civil rights and environmental, that are grossly unjust. In my experience, Israelis, themselves, are often more balanced in their views than American Jews, or at least better informed, though they seem to make just as poor decisions as Americans (Jewish and non-Jewish) in a voting both. I have my doubts, too, about how Palestinians would do in the voting booth in a unified, “single state” government, given the lack of any example of a non-theocratic, popularly elected state in the region, but that’s a separate and complicated question. On the one hand, supporting such a project might be a more coherent and ethical investment for American support than the current regime; on the other, it could just result in something like the failed experiments in Iraq, or the shaky regimes in place in Turkey, Lebanon, or Pakistan…I really don’t know.
As a Jew, with respect to the Israel I always feel like I’ve been dragged into a moral obligation to which I would never have committed myself. I feel the same way as an American, for that matter, though at least there, I reap real benefits from the arrangement. I find that non-Jews expect me, with a name like Levine, to have an opinion on Israel, but I’m not terribly well informed on it: I know almost as much about the politics of Kashmir as I do about the politics of Israel. I have no benefit of closeness to the issue, though I think I may have some distant cousins in Israel, and can read, write, and understand a small amount of Hebrew, as a liturgical language. At the same time, notwithstanding having been born into a family in which my grandparents and great-grandparents in Russia were Commie universalists, not Zionists, I don’t have the benefit of any particular impartiality, having gone to some very Zionist Hebrew schools (“Ani Yohevet Yisrael”– “I love Israel,” is one of the few expressions I remember, besides “Shecket B’vakasha”– “Be Quiet, Please!”), and having grown up, like all Americans, in a country that questions the Israeli government far too little.
There are activists on the other side. If you do a Google search for “Israelis against occupation,” (without the quotations) or “Jews against occupation,” you’ll find them. There’s also the wonderful non-profit in Tel Aviv that my law school friend started http://www.gisha.org. Unfortunately, in American politics, there seems to be more and better coordinated common ground between the Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli loyalists on the right than among the Jews and non-Jews on the left who question the Israeli government. In Europe, that balance is flipped. In both places, I think people have a tendency to see things far too much in black and white (US: Israel good, Palestine bad; Europe: Israel bad, Palestine good). Again, the only thing that’s clear to me is that the Palestinians were wronged by their expulsion from their ancestral home, and continue to be wronged by their refugee status and the curtailment of their rights in Israel. All questions of solutions just strike me as an exhausting mess.
Maybe they should have created the Jewish homeland by kicking the Ukrainians out of the Ukraine (this is actually not that far fetched, historically, but that would be an excessively long tangent). The Ukrainians would have deserved it.
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Anna:
You were going to post about Gisha, I seem to remember. Or may be not. :-)
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When I started thinking about my unconscious conflation of European Jews and Israel, my first instinct was to respond -“Of course not, that’s not what I was doing when I posted my comment and link”. On closer examination, I would say that perhaps I have been guilty of a form of stereotyping as in Jews anywhere= Israel = atrocities on Palestinians, which undoubtedly would have been offensive to you, Anna. Sorry, it was not my intent to offend.
I cannot say however that there was no intent to conflate the two. It was an implied connection that I was making.
My basic unstated premise was that, culturally, the Jewish community worldwide has invested tremendous resources into perpetuating the memory (‘Yad Vashem’ indeed) of the millions who perished in the Holocaust. To me, this shows a cultural unwillingness to let bygones be bygones.
The same can undoubtedly be said of the current crop of Palestinian /by extension Islamic countries world-wide that use injustice to Palestine as a rallying cry. There’s plenty of the “we were wronged” attitude to go around. Financial support and logistics pour in similar measure from those countries to various hate-mongering groups in the region.
Of course we are entitled to recall the past, but to keep raising memorial after memorial each time a grave is discovered, to devote more time and effort to ID-ing the bones in the grave- to me, this is beyond obsession. Why not just raise a memorial marker, rather than trying to ID the dead?
Do we see similar extreme ID-ing efforts being perpetuated for other mass killings/deaths (Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, Tsunami dead) ? The names of those who are known are currently honored.Does it diminish the value of the lives of others who are unnamed in death, just because we don’t know their names? I think not. The very fact that they died in such a horrible manner is enough.
I contend that it is merely going to reopen old wounds/ create new gashes in the minds of the younger generation at a time when they should be looking to the future,rather than thinking “Remember what was done to your ancestor, and remember that you must not let it happen again”. The younger generation, not having been directly in the line of atrocities and the horror of the earlier times, tend to interpret this to mean that they should perhaps militarize themselves to protect against similar scenarios, dehumanizing others (as in the case of Israelis vs. Palestinians) in the process. So we have Israelis demonizing the Palestinians, and Palestinians demonizing the Israelis. There are several (both Jews and non-Jews) with their own agendas who undoubtedly seize the opportunity to keep the fires of hate burning.
As for the European connection,there is no doubt that Israel has long provided generous logistical and financial support to the European Holocaust memorial groups and that the nexus goes a long way in perpetuating the anger, rather than just the remembrance of those killed.
When does this cycle of hatred end?
Somewhere down the line, a conscious decision has to be made and imposed, by the elders,not to perpetuate the agonies suffered by earlier generations upon the current crop. It may seem an impossible task in this era of instantaneous news and such, but unless a ‘forgive and forget’ policy of some kind is in place, this kind of strife will just be self-perpetuating, whether it’s adding more names to a list of Holocaust victims on a wall somewhere/names of a bombing victim in Israel, or adding another photo to a gallery of Palestinian suicide bombers.
That’s why I made my comment- there was a huge amount of internalized thinking on the issue, which my two-liner didn’t convey at all.
Curiously, the news of the Nazi victim mass grave, was followed by a discovery of a mass grave of Kosovar Albanians (around 350-500 people), on around the same date. They will presumably try to ID victims,as evidence of war crimes, but there is no prominent mention of it, unlike in the case of the Holocaust victims’ grave.news article. Note the difference in reporting here, with emphasis on the how and why of the crime, not on perpetuating the memories of the victims.
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