FULL ARTICLES

THE ECONOMIST IS WRONG

The Economist is wrong
Six Day War had significant positive effects and is not a ‘wasted victory’ as The Economist argued
By Sever Plocker
Yediot Ahronot
May 27, 2007

“Israel’s Wasted Victory,” this is the headline of The Economist’s editorial marking 40 years since the Six Day War. The Economist boasts a circulation of more than one million copies and its readership comprises members of the world’s financial, political and cultural elites. The articles written by its authors (the majority of which go unsigned) are perceived as God’s words. “The Economist says” – is a ruling that goes unchallenged in many circles.

Nonetheless, in describing the Six Day War as a “Pyrrhic victory” and “a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors,” The Economist is making a grave mistake. The Six Day War changed the course of history for the better, ensured Israel’s existence and convinced the Arabs to come to terms with it. Thanks to Israel’s full and shining victory, the rulers of the Arab states relinquished their vision of eliminating Israel, and by lack of choice engaged in dialogue based on the concept of “land for peace.”

In his book “The Six Day War,” historian Michael Oren wrote that events in the Middle East, which until 1967 only culminated ahead of the conflict, could have moved towards peace even after the war. He added that diplomatic breakthroughs considered unrealistic became almost commonplace after the war.

In November of that year, the UN Security Council passed resolution 242, which since then has constituted a cornerstone for every diplomatic effort in the region including the recent Saudi Initiative.

Resolution 242 called for “just and lasting peace” between Arabs and Jews; Israel endorsed it immediately. It took Egypt another decade to internalize 242 and to sign a peace agreement with Israel in exchange for return of the Sinai.

The maturation process took Jordan an additional 20 years. Syria announced its willingness to sign a full normalization agreement with Israel in January 2000. Here is therefore, a basic fact: Due to Israel’s military victory in June 1967, Israel was accepted by the Arab world as a legitimate “Jewish State” entitled to exist within peaceful borders, land that until then was deemed Zionist occupation.

Hubristic folly

Somehow, The Economist manages to ignore these developments and minimizes their significance. The editorial focuses on Israeli-Palestinian relations. Israel, wrote The Economist, “embarked on its hubristic folly of annexing the Arab half of Jerusalem and - in defiance of law, demography and common sense – planting Jewish settlements in all the occupied territories to secure a Greater Israel.” And “When, decades later, Egypt and Jordan did make peace with Israel, the Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank.”

The Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank? Until 1967, Gaza and the West Bank were territories administered by Egypt and Jordan. It may well be assumed that that the Jordanian regime would not have permitted Palestinian refugees, their children and grandchildren to realize their national sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank and to establish the Palestinian state there.

As to criticism regarding Israel’s acts of annexation and settlement since 1967, large parts of the Israeli population share these sentiments, including the author of this article. Under the charismatic and destructive influence of Moshe Dayan, at the end of the Six Day War the government chose to prevent Palestinian autonomy, oppressed Palestinian rights and subjugated the Palestinian workforce to the interests of Israeli employers. This is indeed “hubristic folly.”

But is it only ours? The “Land for Peace” movement immediately challenged the Greater Israel movement, and they divided Israeli society from within. Not Palestinian society.

Palestinians prefer ‘state of no state’

It should be said unabashedly: Had the Palestinians really wanted a state of their own it would have been established long ago; even Israel’s excessive military might would not have sufficed in preventing its establishment within some type of border.

Yet the Palestinians prefer a state of “no state,” no responsibility, no commitments and no solution, alongside ongoing terror. Generation after generation, Palestinian nationalism has excelled in denouncement. Had Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres not unwillingly dragged the PLO leadership to the Oslo Accords in 1993 it would not have initiated a thing by itself.

The Economist is very wrong. For Israel, the victory of 1967 was not wasted. Israel’s population grew from 2.6 million to 7.1 million, 2 million of whom were new immigrants. The Gross National Product grew by 630 percent. Real per capita product, the benchmark for measuring economic development, grew by 163 percent and last year crossed the $21,000 mark. The average standard of living in Israel is only 22 percent lower than in Britain; on the eve of the Six Day War there was a 44 percent gap. And The Economist has often noted Israel’s information technology achievements.

Among Palestinians, however, the situation has deteriorated drastically. Are we to blame? Yes, it is our fault as well as theirs. Two states for two peoples: If this vision was wasted, it was not so because of the Six Day War, but despite it. And if it is realized, it will be another outcome of the Arab plan’s defeat in June 1967.

 

UK-BASED HUMANISTS WHO DON’T CARE FOR JEWS

U.K.-based humanists who don’t care for Jews
By Bradley Burston
Ha’aretz
May 29, 2007

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/864500.html

There’s been a refreshing note to much of the overviews, analyses and reconsiderations accompanying the imminent 40th anniversary of the Six Day War – balance.

The early entries, those of the Economist, for example, and the New Yorker, are notably free of the slavish leanings that have poisoned much of the writing on the subject for decades.

A notable companion to these accounts is “Gaza, The Jailed State,” an article by author and journalist Zaki Chehab, writing in this week’s New Statesman. Nuanced and knowing, the piece examines the performance of the Hamas-led Palestinian government in dispassionate detail.

The article is all the more valuable for the one which follows it, “Children of the Dust,” by the London-based Australian writer John Pilger. A political cartoon in the guise of factual exposition, it discusses with minute resolution and admirable compassion the effects of occupation and warfare on the children of Gaza, while writing off the post-traumatic stress of the blitz-plagued children of Sderot as the negligible, they-had-it-coming whining of the faceless offspring of callous brutes.

There have always been two sides to the imbalance story: On one hand, there is the humanist who cries out against the violence and slander dealt to the Jews of the Holy Land, suggesting, with respect to what has happened to the Arabs, that they’re only getting what they deserve.

Then there are writers like John Pilger, the kind of humanist who doesn’t much care for Jews.

Why, after all, should we care about the people of Sderot at all, when, as Pilger reminds us as the opening of the piece, the only issue that should move anyone, is the fact that Israel’s single-minded imposition of hardship on the Palestinians could be seen in the anguish of all distressed peoples everywhere:

“Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond.”

Pilger scorns British reporters for what he sees as their overt and consistent pro-Israel bias. He takes them to task for mentioning in reports on Israeli airstrikes “the rockets fired at Israel from the prison of Gaza which killed no one.”

Contrast this with the balance and the breadth of the lead sentence of Chelab’s article: “As hundreds of Israeli families leave the town of Sderot in southern Israel to escape Hamas-designed Qassam rockets and mortars, Palestinians in turn are fleeing the wrath of Israeli air strikes on Gaza, which in the past week have killed more than 30 people, many of them civilians.”

For Pilger, any suggestion of anything smacking in the least of equivalence, or of Palestinians mounting deadly attacks – for example, a British Channel Four reporter’s mention of an “endless war,” rather than a unilateral Israeli onslaught against the Palestinian people as a whole – is indicative of unforgivable pro-Israeli pandering:

“There is no war,” Pilger writes. “There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world’s fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower.”

In Pilger’s kindergarden class of the left, the basic legitimacy of Palestinian suicide bomb, rocket, and drive-by sniper attacks ? most of them aimed at civilians – is both self-evident and intentionally omitted from BBC and other wildly pro-Israel press accounts:

“Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces. This right is never reported.”

Here’s another point that’s never reported: Any Jew who has ever worked for a British news outlet knows which members of staff are anti-Semitic. Any Jew who has ever worked for a British news outlet knows how that Jew-hatred can insinuate itself into news copy.

I have no evidence that John Pilger falls into that class. He may even be Jewish for all I know. I think it entirely legitimate that he may at once detest Israel and have not a molecule of anti-Semitism in his entire constitution.

Which is all the more reason that I believe he owes the Jews of this place a little more consideration as human beings.

The problem goes beyond Jews, after all, because the Israeli people on Israeli soil who are in the line of Palestinian fire are both Jew and Arab, Semites all. The crux of the matter is this:

To argue that attacks on civilians is justified, is to declare those civilians to be sub-human.

Come to think of it, perhaps this is why a humanist like John Pilger can’t be bothered to bring himself to care about them.

 

“EVERYONE EXPECTS THE JEWS TO BE THE ONLY REAL CHRISTIANS IN THIS WORLD”

Israel’s peculiar position
By Eric Hoffer
The Los Angeles Times
May 26, 1968

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese – and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June, he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts and Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

 

“THE ALTERNATIVE IN 1967, AS WELL AS TODAY, REMAINS UNTHINKABLE”

The heavy burden of victory
By Jonathan Tobin
The Jewish Exponent
May 31, 2007

www.jewishexponent.com/article/13142/

Lamenting the ‘occupation’ won’t make the facts that led to ’67 conflict go away

French writer Alexandre Dumas the elder wrote in 1854 that “nothing succeeds like success.” But when it comes to the State of Israel, it appears that nothing seems to fail as abysmally as victory.

As the world notes the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War this coming week, much of the coverage and commentaries about the topic seem to center on the same theme: How Israel’s historic triumph has become an intolerable burden that is itself the primary “obstacle” to peace.

Once upon a time, the great victory of 1967 that was achieved against great odds and at a moment in history – when much of the world expected that Israel was about to suffer a catastrophic defeat – was emblematic of Jewish pride. Yet that event is now increasingly seen as emblematic of unhappiness with the Jewish state.

40 YEARS OF… ‘OPPRESSION’?

After all, the critics note, the anniversary’s not so much of battles fought and won against great odds, but of 40 years of Israeli “oppression” of Arabs in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the territories “conquered” in 1967.

The toll exacted by Israel’s presence in the territories is seen as being responsible for the country losing its soul. Settlements and checkpoints have become deeply negative symbols of the country. In the Diaspora, it is the villainous Israel of “occupation” that has become the pariah despised by intellectuals and academics, and increasingly shunned by Jews who are not eager to identify with an oppressor.

Among those who do still embrace Israel, the war’s anniversary inspires nostalgia for the state that existed before the unification of Jerusalem, and access to places where our history began to topple the existing Israeli political applecart. It was, as the Israel Policy Forum’s M.J. Rosenberg, recently wrote, the Israel of the book and film “Exodus,” a place he asserts, that could be admired without apology.

The war set in motion a series of events that led inevitably not just to settlements, but to the end of Labor Party domination of Israeli politics and the mainstreaming of forces such as the nationalist right, religious and Sephardi Jews, who had hitherto been marginalized by the Ashkenazi elite.

The Israeli right has had its failures, but the idea that the country was better off under the rule of the paternalistic Labor-dominated government of Israel’s pre-war era is more myth than fact. The socialism embraced by that governing elite didn’t merely retard the nation’s economic progress. An era in which the government prevented the development of local television – to cite just one example of the excesses of this time – is nothing about which we should wax nostalgic.

Yet Rosenberg is right when he says that a more powerful Israel than the idealized early pioneer state “is a hard sell to those under 50, and particularly to young Jews of college age.” But the problem is that those, like Rosenberg, whose main agenda is “to end the nightmare” of the occupation, seem to forget what the alternative to the actual outcome of the Six-Day-War was.

That is the crux of much of the teeth-gnashing about Israel’s 40 years of post-1967 sin. The main point of contention between Israel and the Palestinians, and their supporters, is the same as it was 40 years ago: the existence of a Jewish state within any borders.

What then was the alternative to victory and “occupation?”

The answer is simple. Had Israel been defeated, then the oft-repeated threats of extermination of both the State and her people by Arab leaders such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser and Palestinian leader Ahmed Shukairy, might well have been fulfilled.

We are told, ad nauseum, that the “occupation” is the reason for the ongoing conflict. Yet in 1967, Israel’s dominion was limited to the exact boundaries that we are told are the only solution to the conflict. The world of June 3, 1967, was one in which not a single Jew lived in Judea and Samaria, nor in the eastern part of Jerusalem. No Jew prayed at the Western Wall, or could even visit any Jewish historic or religious site in the West Bank.

The war’s anniversary ought to bring to mind the fact that the issue then is largely the same as it is today. There is not a shekel’s worth of difference between the rhetoric and the goals of Hamas, Al Qaeda, or that of the leadership of Iran and that of the pre-’67 war Arab and Muslim world.

Compare the Jews of Sederot, who are subjected to missile attacks from Gaza today, and those slain by cross-border terror attacks that emanated from the same area prior to June 1967. The only difference is that prior to the Oslo peace accords and Israel’s complete withdrawal from the territory in August 2005, we could still harbor illusions about the willingness of the Palestinians to embrace a chance for peace.

LONGING FOR DEFEAT?

All the introspection about 1967 ought to lead us to wonder why so many of us here are so uncomfortable with an Israel that is identified with power rather than weakness. Was the Israel that so many believed to be fated for imminent extinction in May 1967 more virtuous than the contemporary Jewish state? No. The “occupation” that fuels Arab and Muslim fury refers to every inch of the country. Israel’s victory did not create Islamist extremism, it’s just another excuse for a hatred that already existed.

Conversely, the joy with which the Jewish world greeted the events of June 1967 stemmed not only from being reunited with places like the Kotel, as identification with a proud, successful Jewish people. Like the creation of the state in 1948, the Six-Day War changed the lives of every Jew. For centuries, Jewish identity was bound up with homelessness and powerlessness. These victories allowed Jews to hold their heads up higher not only here in the United States, but even in the Soviet Union, where a movement for emigration to Israel was launched in its aftermath.

The Israel that emerged from that war has made its share of mistakes – though some of those errors were rooted more in a naive belief in the possibility of peace than triumphalism. But what the war demonstrated to the world was that the Jewish re-entry into history that Zionism represented was not to be erased after a mere 19 years.

That is a verdict some would like still to reverse. Yet the “occupation” so many lament was created by Arab aggression, and is rooted in the alienable right of the Jewish people to their own country rather than in some aberrant variant of Zionist imperialism. More territorial compromise will come when Israel’s enemies give up their war to destroy it. Sadly, as recent events have again proved, that moment is nowhere in sight.

Until it does, those supporters of Israel here who spend so much time apologizing for it would do better to apply themselves to the task of asserting the justice of Israel’s right to self-defense. Success in war has its drawbacks, but the alternative in 1967, as well as today, remains unthinkable.

 

“BATTERED NATION SYNDROME”

A classic case of ‘Battered Nation Syndrome’
By Michael Freund
The Jerusalem Post
May 30, 2007

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180450948991&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

It was 40 years ago next week that tiny little Israel , facing destruction at the hands of its enemies, miraculously emerged triumphant from the 1967 Six Day War. Existential fear quickly dissolved into breathtaking joy as the Jewish state decisively vanquished its foes, reuniting Jerusalem and reclaiming large swathes of our ancient homeland.

Our adversaries, who had gleefully pledged to feed us to the fish in the Mediterranean Sea , were forced to look on as their troops beat a hasty and humiliating retreat.

The stunning victory of 1967 had all the markings of Divine intervention. It was a gift from Heaven to a besieged and beleaguered people. After nearly two millennia we were reunited at last with the cradle of Jewish civilization in Judea and Samaria , and with the heart of the nation, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

And yet, it seems, four decades later, many Israelis still just cannot forgive themselves for winning.

In what has become an annual ritual, a variety of media pundits, left-wing activists and even some officials launch into mournful sessions of hand-wringing and breast-beating. They bemoan the outcome of the Six Day War, grumble about Israel’s success in reclaiming Judea, Samaria and Gaza , and sound as if they would have preferred going down in defeat.

Displaying an extraordinary lack of appreciation and an exceptional lack of historical perspective, these critics long to give up the hard-earned fruits of that war of self-defense, all in the vain hope of mollifying an incorrigible foe.

How could so many forget so much in so short a time? Even now, as Palestinians fire rockets daily at southern Israel from the very same Gaza Strip that we handed over to them two years ago, the proponents of appeasement still refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways.

It seems the only way to explain this phenomenon is to borrow a term from psychology: Certain parts of the Israeli public and its leadership are clearly suffering from what I refer to as “Battered Nation Syndrome.” Like a victim of ongoing domestic abuse, the advocates of surrender to the Palestinians cannot muster the wherewithal to hit back at the abuser. All the hallmarks of the syndrome are there: low self-esteem, a belief that the violence aimed against us is somehow our fault, and a tragic pattern of preferring to appease those who terrorize us rather than confront them.

Naturally, this distorted world-view results in an almost obsessive focus on Israel’s perceived faults as lying at the root of the conflict with our neighbors.

Consequently, the actions of the Palestinians are downplayed and minimized, excused and ignored, and Israel’s policy-making process instead begins to resemble a good, ol’-fashioned self-inflicted guilt trip.

But it is time to break out of this collective funk and start viewing the world the way it really is.

To begin with, Israel should stop apologizing for defeating the Arab states in 1967. Like any other nation, we have the right to defend ourselves, and we have the right not to be thrown in the sea.

What many of the defeatists conveniently choose to ignore is what led up to the 1967 war: increased Palestinian terror, massive Arab military buildups, and public threats by Arab leaders to annihilate the Jewish state.

They also forget that two years prior to 1967, back when Israel did not yet “occupy” the territories, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol put forward a proposal that could have resolved the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all.

Speaking to the Knesset on May 17, 1965, Eshkol suggested turning the 1949 armistice agreements into peace treaties, and offered to hold direct talks with the Arab states in order to do so.

Pointing out that Egypt , Jordan , Syria and Lebanon , combined had 60 times the land area of the Jewish state, the premier noted that there was no logical reason for the Arabs to continue to pursue war. Instead, he offered a vision of peace that included open borders, bilateral trade, economic cooperation and freedom of access to the holy sites.

All he asked in return, said Eshkol, was “full respect for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all the States in the region.”

But Israel’s offer of peace was met two years later with a clear and unequivocal Arab response. Egypt and Syria mobilized their armies and their people, and vowed to destroy the Jewish state.

Hence, Israel neither asked for war nor initiated it in 1967, so let’s stop acting like we did. We do not owe the Arabs anything for defeating them, and we certainly do not need to give them any further territory from which to attack us.

They tried to kill us. We won. Get over it.