"to maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic state bent upon ... expansion.”
https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/2064014100514967877
Why was there a war in June 1967 in the Middle East? (800 word response):
Israeli leaders lamented the failure to conquer all of Palestine in 1948. “I never forgave the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion for not letting us finish the job in ‘48-49, both militarily and politically,” said then deputy prime minister Yigal Alon.
Or, as the military leader Moshe Dayan put it in 1949, the “frontier of Israel should be on Jordan [River]... present boundaries [are] ridiculous from all points of view.”
The feeling among many in the highest echelons of power was that “we had not completed the job in the War of Independence,” while the failure became known in Israeli folklore as the “weeping for generations.”
Few Israeli leaders were as illustrative as Abba Eban, who once said the map of Israel from 1948-1967 “reminds us of memories of Auschwitz.” Anyone who believed Israel ought to exist within its borders apparently also supported another Holocaust.
As the Israeli government's Year Book put it in 1951, “only now have we reached the beginning of independence in a part of our small country," adding "to maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic state bent upon ... expansion.”
Needless to say, Israel was unsatisfied with its borders after the war, and so it never declared them, insisting the armistice agreements resulted in armistice lines, not borders.
That’s why Israel repeatedly crossed the lines, pushing Israeli control beyond the lines in Gaza, the West Bank and Syria, if at the margins.
Although many Israeli leaders believed the country could realize its national aims within its 1948 borders, many also supported their expansion should an opportunity present itself.
This aligned with a new military doctrine gradually adopted in the 1950s, namely, “Israel must not leave the initiative in enemy hands.” Israel had to choose the conditions and timing of the fighting.
In 1962, Levi Eshkol was elected Prime Minister of Israel, & in 1963, his deputy IDF chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, outlined to him Israel’s ideal boundaries: the Jordan River in the east, the Suez Canal in the south and west and the Litani River in the north.
Many high-ranking army officers wanted to avenge their losses in 1948 in Jerusalem, Latrun, Bab al-Wad and other areas of the West Bank. Plans were developed to occupy Jerusalem and the Latrun area, the entire West Bank, and a separate plan to conquer Qalqilya and destroy it. There was also a plan to carry out “a transfer” in Hebron to avenge the 1929 massacre. “The idea that the IDF might actively seek to expand Israel’s borders came up repeatedly during the mid-1960s,” as one scholar put it.
On 1 January 1964, Yitzhak Rabin, now the army’s Chief of Staff, explained his military doctrine. For Rabin, the military would bring peace closer by “readying itself for war [through] a greater momentum for operational activity.”
War was apparently the gateway to peace. Rabin also discussed the possibility of an Israeli preemptive strike and the need to prepare talking points to support one. He saw “‘no moral flaw in thinking that the State of Israel must be large.” It was apparently a moral flaw to think Israel should remain within its borders.
After the 1966 military coup in Syria, Israel repeatedly threatened to overthrow the new government in Damascus if it did not cease support for Palestinian militant groups.
The Soviets, worried their ally in Damascus would fall, sent a false report to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser of an imminent Israeli threat to Syria in May 1967 to shore up support for the Syrian regime, leading Nasser to move troops into the Sinai.
The Egyptian army expelled UN forces from the Peninsula and closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israeli and US intelligence assessments agreed Israel would destroy the combined Arab armies with ease even if Egypt attacked first.
But to Israeli leaders, this was not a crisis, it was an opportunity. The feeling among Israel’s military leadership was that Israel had a narrow window to act. Israel could transform the balance of power in the region and renew its deterrence capacity if it acted first.
After the war, Israel’s apologists claimed the country faced a threat of annihilation and had to strike first. Yet, zero Israeli leaders who went to war in 1967 believed that. The existential threat was contrived after the fact to justify the war of choice. Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev, Ezer Weizman, Mordechai Bentov and Matityahu Peled all confessed as much in the years after the war.
And so, beginning on 5 June 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt and then invaded and occupied the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights.
Source: palestinenexus.com/articles/1967-
posted by Satish Sharma at
05:00
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