This article first appeared in Socialism and Liberation’s Summer 2007 issue.
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June 5, 2007, marks the 40th anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War against neighboring Arab states. The June 1967 war was a watershed event in the history of the Middle East.
It signaled the end of one phase of the post-World War II national liberation struggle in the region, and the start of a new phase, led by a resurgent and revolutionary Palestinian movement.
At the same time, the 1967 war convinced U.S. leaders that Israel could be an effective weapon against the Arab liberation struggle, and should be supplied with vast quantities of economic and especially military aid.
After a period of deepening radicalization and rising tensions, the Israeli military, using U.S. equipment and intelligence data, launched coordinated strikes against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The U.S. Sixth Fleet and 82nd Airborne Division, among other military units, were on alert, ready to intervene in the name of “protecting American lives” if the lightning attack by the Israeli “Defense” Forces went awry.
Most of the mainstream media along with Israel’s apologists in the United States propagated the notion that the war was a re-run of the biblical David vs. Goliath battle. Israel was pictured as the heroic underdog, with God once more on its side. The misnamed “Anti-Defamation League,” which has long served as a mouthpiece of the Israeli regime, said that “Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt,” suggesting that it only did so to avert annihilation.
The utter falsity of these claims was later exposed by none other than the extreme right-wing Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Fifteen years after the war, in an Aug. 2, 1982 speech to the Israeli National Defense College, Begin said: “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him [Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser].”
It was not just Begin who exposed the myth. General Matityahu Peled, one of the Israeli commanders in the 1967 war, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, on March 19, 1972, “The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.”
Israel succeeded in achieving its long-held objective of expanded territory through the war. The remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine—the West Bank and Gaza—was conquered by Israel’s surprise attack, along with Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
More than 35,000 Arab people were killed, thousands of them burned to death by Pentagon-supplied napalm bombs. Thousands more were wounded. Most of the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air and armor forces were destroyed in the opening days of the surprise attack. The Israeli Army drove more than 90,000 Syrians and Palestinians out of the Golan Heights, an agriculturally rich region east of the Sea of Galilee.
In 1948, the Western-backed Zionist military had driven more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs out of their homeland to make way for the creation of a new exclusivist state, Israel. Their expropriated farms, shops, homes and public buildings constituted the essential material basis of the Israeli state and economy.
Many of the Syrian villages and Golan’s main city, Quinetra, were bulldozed by the Israeli military. Israeli settlers began arriving in July 1967. In 1981, the Israeli parliament passed a law annexing the Golan Heights. The continuing occupation of Golan, as well as the West Bank and Gaza, defies scores of United Nations resolutions.
Possessing overwhelming technological superiority, Israeli casualties were much lower in the war. Officially, around 1,000 Israelis were killed.
More than 300,000 Palestinians were made refugees in the war—many of them for the second time in two decades.
According to Israeli basic law, any Jewish person from anywhere in the world has the right to “return,” to move to the Israeli state, become a citizen and receive a wide variety of benefits. On the other hand, the right of return is denied to the vast majority of people who actually lived in Palestine—the Palestinian Arabs.
By itself, this double standard, affecting the most fundamental of all rights, makes it indisputably correct to call Israel an apartheid state.
U.S. imperialism: The big winner
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The big winner of the 1967 war was Washington. Rita Freed, in her 1971 book, “War in the Mideast,” quoted then House of Representatives minority leader and later president Gerald Ford as saying while the war was still raging, “Israel has done a pretty good job of bailing out U.S. interests in the area.”
What Ford meant was that Israel had dealt a major blow to rising Arab nationalism in the oil-rich Middle East, at a time when the U.S. military was pre-occupied with the war in Vietnam.
The Egyptian Cairo Radio expressed the sentiments of anti-imperialist and nationalist forces throughout the region. “Our battle today is against the United States firstly, secondly and thirdly; lastly it is against the Zionist [Israeli military] bands, very much lastly,” it stated.
A 1987 Library of Congress Country Study of Syria states, “The traumatic defeat of the Syrians and Egyptians in the June 1967 war with Israel discredited the radical socialist regimes of Nasser’s Egypt and Baathist Syria. The defeat strengthened the hands of the moderates and the rightists.”
This was exactly the outcome sought by U.S. political leaders and the oil, banking and military-industrial interests who employ them. According to Freed, many in Washington and Syria regarded Syria, where the left-wing of the Baath Party had taken over the government six months earlier, as “the Cuba of the Middle East.” (Freed, p. 51)
The West Bank, Gaza and Golan remain under Israeli occupation today. A demilitarized Sinai went back to Egypt under the terms of the 1979 Camp David Accord between the Israel, Egypt and the United States. This accord effectively took Egypt out of the Arab military alliance.
A subsidized watchdog state
The 1967 war marked the beginning of a truly massive influx of U.S. military and economic assistance to Israel, unlike that granted to any other country in the world and with far fewer strings attached. Unlike the aid sent to other countries, most of the hundreds of billions of dollars (measured in 2007 dollars) sent to Israel has been in the form of non-repayable grants. Most of the loans have been forgiven.
Shortly after the war, Israel—together with Iran, then ruled by the U.S.-installed shah (king)—became the linchpins and enforcers of the counter-revolutionary Nixon Doctrine. The turn to proxy Israeli and Iranian forces to control the oil-rich and strategically key Middle East was necessitated by the fact that more than 500,000 troops were tied down in a losing war in Vietnam.
U.S. aid to Israel increased exponentially from about $120 million in 1967, to $3.2 billion in 1971, to $9.9 billion in 1974, and $13.9 billion in 1979, measured in 2007 dollars. Around two-thirds of this amount was officially in military aid. The astronomical military assistance, which included high-tech weaponry not provided to any other state, enabled Israel to become the world’s fourth or fifth leading military power, despite having a population of less than 5 million people.
From its beginning, Israel required vast amounts of outside economic and military aid to survive. Its economy in 1950, two years after its founding, rested on a foundation of stolen Palestinian property and U.S.- and European-based fund drives. In that same year, Israel was importing goods worth ten times the amount of its exports.
Left on its own, the economy would have soon collapsed. Most of the recently arrived European population would have departed.
Finding new sources of outside economic and military support was an urgent necessity for the early Israeli leaders. They succeeded in obtaining economic aid in the form of massive and very controversial “reparations” from capitalist West Germany.
The deal with West Germany began in 1952, and entailed annual payments for 15 years. It was regarded by many in Jewish communities worldwide as unacceptable “blood money” for the mass murder of Jewish people by the Nazis during World War II.
Israel also made a key military supply agreement and virtual alliance with France, which was trying to maintain its imperial position in the region.
In 1951, an editorial appeared in Ha’aretz newspaper, outlining how the new state would repay the vitally needed aid: “Therefore, strengthening Israel helps the Western powers to maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to be a watchdog. … If for some reason the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied on to punish one or several neighboring states whose discourtesy toward the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.”
An early opportunity to show Israel’s “watchdog” role came in 1956. That year, the nationalist Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the strategic waterway connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. Under Nasser, Egypt was seen as the leading force in the decolonization struggle in the Middle East.
Nasser’s “discourtesy” enraged Britain and France. Britain wanted to regain control of the Suez Canal. France saw Egypt as the key ally of the National Liberation Front, which was fighting to free Algeria from French rule.
In October 1956, Israel, Britain and France launched a surprise attack on Egypt. The aim was to overthrow the Nasser government and return the Suez to British control. As its reward, Israel would keep Gaza and the entire Sinai Peninsula.
Nothing could have made Israel’s role clearer than the 1956 war. But the results of the war did not stand. Worldwide outrage opposed this blatant imperialist intervention. The Soviet Union threatened to intervene on the side of Egypt. And the U.S. government opposed the attack—though for very different reasons. U.S. leaders acted not out of sympathy with Nasser, as the 1967 war was to prove beyond a doubt, but instead to forcefully demonstrate that the sun was setting on the empires of their imperialist allies/rivals, Britain and France.
After the 1967 war, U.S. aid began to flow like a river into Israel. Israel repaid the investment in numerous ways, supporting reactionary regimes and movements in the Middle East and around the world.
Most important from the U.S. leaders’ point of view was Israel’s role in the oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East. That has not changed.
The fact that the U.S. military is stretched thin by the intensity of the popular resistance in Iraq only serves to highlight the importance of Israel’s role in the U.S. strategy of global domination today.
Palestinian revolution takes center stage
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In describing the impact of the June 1967 war on popular consciousness, the September 1967 issue of Fortune Magazine reported, “Not since the [1899] Boxer Rebellion [in China] has there been as rapid … a revulsion against a foreign power as against the United States in the Middle East.”
The defeat suffered by the Egyptian and Syrian armies was indeed a crushing one. But while it weakened the more radical bourgeois nationalist forces in favor of more conciliatory ones in both countries, it had a very different effect on the region as a whole.
A new wave of revolutionary fervor swept across much of the region, spearheaded by remarkable developments in Palestine and among Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Palestine and elsewhere. Until 1967, radical Palestinian groups such as Fatah (Palestine National Liberation Movement) founded under the leadership of Yasir Arafat and others, and the Arab National Movement (ANM) led by George Habash, had mainly rested their hope for the restoration of lost lands and rights with Nasser and the other Arab leaders. The Arab armies, many hoped, would liberate Palestine.
The Six-Day War shattered those hopes.
Out of the ashes of defeat arose an independent Palestinian revolutionary movement that transformed the politics of the region. In both the West Bank and Gaza, the brutal Israel occupation met with armed resistance begun by Fatah in August 1967.
In December 1967, the Palestinian wing of the ANM together with a number of smaller organizations formed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and declared its adherence to Marxism-Leninism. A number of other fedayeen (freedom fighter) organizations soon followed.
The Palestine Liberation Organization had been established by the Arab League in 1964 with an appointed leader named Ahmed Shukeiry. During the 1967 war, Shukeiry, who had no base in the Palestinian population or militant organizations, gave bombastic radio broadcasts, vowing to “drive the Jews into the sea.”
Arafat’s Fatah denounced Shukeiry, saying that Palestinian military operations “are in no way aimed at Jewish people. Nor do they intend to ‘drive them into the sea.’ … [O]n the day the flag of Palestine is hoisted over their freed, democratic peaceful land, a new era will begin in which the Palestinian Jews will again live in harmony, side by side, with the original owners of the land, the Palestinian Arabs.”
Shukeiry was ousted for making “misleading statements,” and leadership of the PLO now passed into the hands of the Palestinian revolutionary organizations. The movement expanded rapidly.
In September 1970, Palestinian revolutionary forces came close to seizing power in neighboring Jordan, whose population was two-thirds Palestinian, before the movement was put down.
The Palestinian liberation movement, often confronting a powerful triple alliance between U.S. imperialism, Israel and reactionary Arab governments, has suffered many heavy blows and setbacks over the past 40 years.
But the Palestinian people, against whom the odds appear truly overwhelming, have not been defeated. The Palestinian struggle has inspired generations of revolutionary and progressive people not only in the Middle East but around the world.
That was the single most important outcome of that war waged 40 years ago.
