General Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the I.D.F., blew a shofar at the Western Wall and advised his commanding officer, Uzi Narkis, that now was the moment to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the mosque that sits on the Temple Mount. “Do this and you will go down in history,” Goren said. “Tomorrow might be too late.”
Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, By Tom Segev;
But as Segev writes in “1967,” his illuminating, if exhausting, book on Israel’s most fateful year, even at the time there were Israelis who foresaw what ultimately came to pass. True, conquering East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights helped fulfill the Zionist dream and gave the country more defensible borders. But as various Israeli officials warned, it would also radicalize the Palestinians, intensify Palestinian nationalism and force Israel to act with a brutality and intolerance that, as one put it, “we, as a people and as Jews, abhor.” Besides, King Hussein was doing a fine job neutering the Palestinians, either making them Jordanians or prodding them to emigrate.
It all happened in what Segev depicts as a two-act drama of irrationality between June 5 and 10, 1967. The first act came when, in the throes of a national depression and existential angst, Israel invaded Egypt, destroying its air force and seizing both Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. The second came a few days later when, in the irrational exuberance of that victory, Israel turned to the north and east, to Jordan and Syria, extending its realm in both directions.
In the spring of 1967, Segev writes, Israel was a profoundly demoralized place. Its economy was tanking. Its European-born elite felt threatened by the influx of poor Jews from Arabic-speaking countries, who had ample troubles of their own. For the first time, more Jews may have been leaving the country than coming in. Among the young, materialism and Americanism were eroding the Zionist ideal. Terrorism — while almost quaint by today’s brutal standards — was increasing. And presiding over all this was Levi Eshkol, the prime minister with the bad fortune to follow David Ben-Gurion.
Tensions throughout the region rose in May 1967, after months of terrorist attacks were launched from Syria and Jordan. The Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who’d already fought one war with Israel, closed the Straits of Tiran, kicked United Nations peacekeepers out of the Sinai and massed his troops along the Israeli border. Cautious by nature and fearing American disapproval, Eshkol vacillated.
But his generals — notably Moshe Dayan, the former chief of staff who’d been forced down Eshkol’s throat as defense minister — urged a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, and the Israeli public, haunted by fears of a second Holocaust, backed them. Eshkol, Segev contends, was too impotent to resist. Next came Jordan. Israel had long had clandestine relations with King Hussein. But compelled to show public solidarity with Egypt, Hussein fired upon Jewish West Jerusalem. The Israelis struck back, marching into the Old City and then the entire West Bank.
One can debate whether Nasser was planning to attack Israel. Beyond debate, though, is the fact that there were a million Palestinians living in the territories, and Israel marched in with shocking casualness. That was apparent from the helter-skelter, improvisatory way in which crucial decisions had to be made — Would the land be annexed? What would be the legal status of residents? — and from some of the cockamamie schemes bruited about. (The army’s chief rabbi, Gen. Shlomo Goren, suggested blowing up the Dome of the Rock.)
Hopes that Palestinians would flee en masse, as they had in 1948 (the Israelis even had buses conveniently available to them in East Jerusalem), never materialized. Menachem Begin proposed dumping the Gazan refugees in Egypt. Other schemes had them going to Iraq (just what the Iraqis needed: another faction) or Latin America. More realistic was a plan to move 250,000 refugees from Gaza to the West Bank. But it never happened; the settlements soon popping up throughout the West Bank housed Jews instead.
However oxymoronic, the Israelis thought they could run an “enlightened occupation,” and there were signs, at least at first, that they did: when they opened a post office in Hebron, the mayor threw them a fruit and cucumber reception. But any occupation on those terms was doomed to fail, especially given the harshness with which Israel dealt with those not catching the spirit. Then, whether for economic or religious or nationalistic or military reasons, or because they had no one trustworthy to whom they could give back the land, the Israelis settled in.
Segev’s look into the origins of the occupation is invaluable. His research is prodigious, his intelligence obvious, his ability to reconstruct complex chains of events impressive. He writes clearly and confidently and has an eye for the telling, and often witty, detail. But he is the victim of his own eminence — his previous books, on the British Mandate and on the impact of the Holocaust on the Jews of Palestine, among others, have been justly praised — and, surprisingly, of his own parochialism.
Related;
Why the Six-Day War is still being fought
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