The resulting occupation and political fallout have turned triumph into moral and strategic disaster

I WAS in Israel as a volunteer during the Six-Day War. We arrived on the fourth day of the fighting, by which time it was already clear that Israel was on the verge of a stunning victory.

Like most of us in the diaspora, I had feared Arab boasts about driving the Jews into the sea. We were not to know until their publication years later that Israeli and American intelligence analysis at the time predicted an Israeli victory against the combined Arab forces within five to seven days.

The festival of Shavuot fell a couple of days after the war ended. The government announced that pilgrims would be allowed to visit the site of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, barred to Jews since 1948. I joined the vast throng, estimated at 200,000, as it snaked round the city walls to the Temple Mount. Palestinians under curfew watched sullenly from their windows in the Old City. In the background, the regular detonation of unexploded mines could be heard.

Personally, I am left unmoved, even hostile, by shrines, relics and sacred tombs, and do not think that retention of the Western Wall or any holy site mentioned in the Bible is worth a single human life. But as I looked back at the flowing stream of people, I thought that a pilgrim festival in Temple times would have been like this. On that Shavuot day in newly-united Jerusalem, I could feel the potency of religious symbols and why zealots will willingly die or kill for them.

That, in a nutshell, is the prime reason behind Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, with no plausible diplomatic solution in sight. Religious settlers are the tail wagging the governmental dog, as they have been since Pesach 1968, when Rabbi Moshe Levinger and his Gush Emunim followers refused to vacate Hebron until they were allowed to build a new settlement, Kiryat Arba, nearby at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The policy of selective settlement construction based on security until Arab countries were persuaded to come to the negotiating table, advocated by secular pragmatists like Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon, Golda Meir et al, had been hijacked by messianic Judaism.

Since then, settler pressure groups, either of the aggressively nationalist or religiously fundamentalist variety, or a combination of both, have dictated the terms of the West Bank’s future.

It is sobering to remember the storm of controversy unleashed in 1979 by the leaked Drobles Report, which called for the seizure of stateowned and uncultivated land on the West Bank (re-named, significantly, by its biblical designation of Judea and Samaria) to accommodate 120-150,000 settlers by the end of the century. The Jewish Agency speedily disowned the report in the face of domestic and international condemnation.

Well, today there are over 760,000 Jews living in the West Bank and the neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

Successive Likud-led governments have been backed into a corner from which they do not know how — or do not want — to extricate themselves, after years of complacency about the status quo, admiration for the new breed of Zionist pioneers planting the Israeli flag on remote West Bank hilltops, overt encouragement of more settlement building, and military assessments that the Palestinian population can be coerced by a tight system of surveillance, mobile road blocks, fragmentation into non-contiguous areas, expropriation of land for “security purposes” and physical separation from the colonisers by the building of Jews-only roads and the security wall.

And if the hostile, dispossessed, humiliated and constantly harassed Palestinians resort to a full-scale intifada or random acts of terrorism, shocking though such violence is, it is small-scale and containable; many more Israelis are killed each year in their cars.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the famed Orthodox scholar, once said that the Palestinians were a resilient people who would survive the occupation. He worried more about the corrosive effect it was having on the Israeli character. His words resonate uncomfortably. Despite the parroted platitudes of well-meaning American and European politicians about a two-state solution, it has been clear for years that such an idea is unacceptable to both sides. Neither trusts the other enough. As WB Yeats said about Ireland: “Great hatred, little room.”

So what is the alternative? Two possibilities are being openly discussed by Israelis of the left and the right. Either a binational state with equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians; or a straightforward apartheid state, with Israel in permanent control of the territories and their Palestinian population.

Either proposal would spell the end of Zionism. The first would mean that Israel is no longer a distinctive Jewish homeland, and the second would turn Israel into a pariah state. Only a biblical prophet could adequately castigate Israel’s political ineptitude, nationalist hubris and religiously deluded messianism for allowing the triumph of June 1967 to descend to this.