Zionism was reshaped, and the right never looked back
THE ACHIEVEMENTS of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War were obvious: a crushing defeat of Arab armies, signifying the emergence of Israel from a beleaguered nation to a major regional power, accompanied by unprecedented Western support for the Jewish state and a deepening of diaspora identification with Israel.
Yet the war also had unintended consequences, both internally as well as externally, and as is the case with such historical developments, these became apparent only gradually and sometimes have not been internalised or even acknowledged.
The war’s most profound impact was in its territorial implications, a set of issues that changed one of the major themes of Israel’s internal political discourse.
Ever since the British government’s Peel Commission raised in 1937 the idea of partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the debate about partition deeply divided the Zionist movement, reaching its height during the UN deliberations leading to the partition plan set out in November 29, 1947.
The right-wing argument was straightforward: Eretz Israel in its entirety is the homeland of the Jewish people.
The liberal and social-democratic argument, on the other hand, accepted partition, albeit with a heavy heart. Its argument maintained that since the Jewish claim to self-determination is based on a universalist foundation, it cannot deny the same right to the Palestinians; moreover, the Zionist movement would never gain international support if it insisted that the Jews had a right to rule over the Arab population, then a majority in the country.
The joint support of the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as of most of the world’s democratic countries, vindicated the Zionist acceptance of partition.
The total Arab refusal to accept any Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine, as well as the attack of the Arab states on Israel, deepened support for the Zionist position and caused almost universal condemnation of Arab intransigence and aggression.
Israel’s victory in the War of Independence seemed to put an end to the debate about partition; Jewish sovereignty had been established and consolidated, achieving international recognition; within a decade, the country’s population had more than trebled, with most of the immigrants being either Holocaust survivors or refugees from Arab countries.
Consequently, the new state’s agenda was focused on maintain its security, nation-building and gathering the exiles. No political party — including Menachem Begin’s — ever called for a war to liberate the Old City of Jerusalem, or the historical regions of Judea and Samaria annexed by Jordan.
If the Arab countries had agreed to peace with Israel based on the 1949 Armistice Lines, it would have been overwhelmingly accepted by the majority of Israelis and viewed as a major achievement for the Zionist project.
All this changed in the wake of the enormous victory of 1967. The drama of having access not only to the Wailing Wall but to the historical sites of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and Joshua’s Jericho, rekindled historical and religious associations which had been side-stepped since 1948.
All of Eretz Israel was now under Jewish control, and this changed the nature of the discourse. It is one thing to call for a war to liberate historical sites; it’s another not to be willing to give them up once you have captured them in what most Israelis rightly viewed as a defensive war.
This shifted the balance between right and left in Israeli politics: Mr Begin’s Likud, marginalised for decades as an irrelevant blast from the past, now became a party representing a new political reality. Labour, historically identified with the military glory associated with David Ben Gurion, now appeared not as moderate and realistic, instead its willingness for a territorial compromise was viewed as expressing weakness, if not antipatriotic.
To this should be added that the religious wing of Zionism (the National Religious Party) changed under the dramatic impact of the 1967 war: historically it had always maintained a moderate position and was hence a willing coalition partner for the Labour Party. The 1967 war had a deep impact on its ideology, and it moved towards a more nationalistic and almost messianic position, becoming the spearhead of the settlement movement and a willing partner in right-wing coalitions.
The 1977 Likud victory had numerous causes, but its continuous lead in Israeli elections since is an outcome of the change in the political discourse in Israel; the debate about partition, which seemed to have been decided in 1948-9, had been re-opened, with a decided advantage for the anti-partition right-wing.
This had far-reaching consequences for the international standing of Israel. From 1948-67 Israel was viewed as a small, beleaguered country, surrounded by a hostile and aggressive Arab world committed to its destruction. The Arab League’s Khartoum decision in July 1967 (“no peace, no negotiations, no recognition”) also created much support for Israel’s position.
Over the years, however, the perception has changed. Massive settlement activities altered the demographic balance in the West Bank; decades of rightwing hegemony in Israeli politics and ministerial statements that Judea and Samaria are part of Israel all combined to shift the way in which the conflict is perceived. Peace with Egypt and Jordan obviously diminished the security threat to Israel, and the fact that the Palestinian population in the territories has now lived from 50 years under Israeli military occupation, have all contributed to a more critical posture among Western democracies towards Israel. With some marginal exceptions, it is not Israel’s legitimacy that is questioned, but the legitimacy of its rule over an occupied Palestinian population.
In celebrating the Six-Day War, all this has to be taken into account. Any attempt to change Western perceptions of Israel will not succeed by just criticising Palestinian terrorism or the politics of the Palestinian Authority. The great achievements of the war of 1967 have turned out to be accompanied by a heavy price: there are no free lunches.
Before 1967, no political party ever called for a war to liberate Judea and Samaria
Shlomo Avineri is Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He served as DirectorGeneral of Israel’s Foreign Ministry under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His most recent book is ‘Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State’