Columnist Joseph Levine: Reflections on Six-Day War’s 50th anniversary 

With this week’s 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, and celebrations of the “reunification” of Jerusalem occurring both in Israel and in many Jewish communities in the United States, it’s important to take a sober look back on the events that led to the war and the subsequent 50-year occupation it set in place

I was in high school at the time, and I remember well the tense weeks that preceded the war and the sense of overwhelming relief and elation at Israel’s swift and decisive victory over three Arab armies. The Holocaust was only two decades old at that point, and the framing of Nasser’s Egypt as the reincarnation of Hitler’s Germany was extremely potent.

Over the course of the following decade, which included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and then the peace agreement with Egypt, the general frame of Israel’s security needs and its “benign occupation” held firm in the minds of most Jewish-Americans like myself.

So was Israel, and in particular, its Jewish population, threatened with annihilation in 1967? And does that justify the occupation, now 50 years on? There are two principal lenses through which we must view the events leading up to the Six-Day War in order to come to a realistic assessment of these issues. First, what did the relevant players know and intend during that period? Second, how did the entire history of the conflict, particularly the events from 1948 to 1967, determine the context in which the tensions that led to the war erupted?

With regard to the first question, it’s important to note that a number of top Israeli leaders have been quoted showing that they were fully confident that they could easily repel any military threat, and anyway they knew Nasser had no intention of actually attacking Israel. For instance, General Matti Peled, a senior Israel Defense Forces staff officer, said that anyone who claims that Nasser’s divisions in the Sinai desert were a mortal threat to Israel is insulting your intelligence and insulting the IDF. Also, the CIA analysis at the time was that if the Arab states attacked first, Israel would defeat them all within two weeks, and if Israel attacked first (which they did), they would defeat them all within one week (again, which they did).

More important, however, is to set the events of 1967 in the context of the previous 19 years of Israel’s history of relations with the Palestinians and the Arab states. With respect to the Palestinians, Israel drove out at least 750,000 Palestinians from the territory they took over, which included much of the area that had been allotted to the Palestinians by the United Nations partition plan of 1947 to be a state of their own. In the years subsequent to the armistice of 1949, Israel confiscated a large portion of Palestinian land, drove out several thousand more Palestinians from their homes, shot thousands of others who tried to return to their homes, and erected an exclusivist Jewish state that kept Palestinians from full political and civil participation while they endured military government until 1966.

With respect to the Arab states, after the war of 1948, in which Israel colluded with Jordan to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, Israel continued to provoke its Arab neighbors in numerous ways: by constantly violating the terms of the armistice agreement with Syria along the Golan Heights, by raiding villages in Jordan, Lebanon, and Gaza, which killed numerous soldiers and civilians, with the “Lavon Affair,” in which Israel sent agents into Egypt to attack American and British sites there in order to disrupt relations between those governments and Nasser’s newly installed government, and finally, with Israel’s collusion with Britain and France to attack Egypt in the Suez War of 1956. While the Arab states were, of course, not without fault, a strong case can be made that they were the ones who needed extra “security,” not Israel.

And in the end, could any alleged threat justify 50 years of occupation, during which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been imprisoned at one time or another, a huge percentage of their land confiscated for settlements, thousands of homes demolished, and constant fear of attack both from the settlers and the military is the norm?

Cause for celebration? I say, “no way!” Let us instead use this anniversary to rededicate ourselves to ending the occupation and bringing real peace to the region.

Joseph Levine, of Leverett, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Western Mass.