1967: A Personal Testimony

By Uri Avnery
(Wednesday, June 20, 2007)
USA.MediaMonitors

"...faced with Syria's request for help and the Soviet stories about the massing of Israeli troops, Nasser saw an opportunity to assert his leadership of the Arab world. He sent his troops into Sinai.

If he had really intended to start a war, he would have done this as secretly as possible. But his troops passed Cairo in broad daylight, proof that the aim was to show off."

On May 25, 1967, twelve days before the Six-day war, I published in Haolam Hazeh, the news magazine of which I was the editor, an article entitled "Nasser Has Fallen Into a Trap"...

A few months earlier, I was invited to give a lecture in a kibbutz in the North. After the lecture I was invited to coffee with a few members. There, my host told me in confidence that the Chief of the Northern Command, General David ("Dado") Elazar, had been there only a week before.

In the same room, Dado had confided in the same few trusted members: "Every night, before going to sleep, I pray that Nasser concentrates his troops in the Sinai desert. There we shall annihilate them."

When Nasser concentrated his troops in Sinai In the middle of May 1967, it seemed like an answer to this prayer. So, while everybody around me was numb with fright, I was not worried.

... Gamal Abd-al-Nasser himself - who in reality was deadly afraid of an Israeli attack and did not dream of attacking - thought that by threatening to throw Israel into the sea he would frighten us into abandoning any idea of war. It had, of course, the opposite effect.

The chain of events that made the war inevitable resembled in some respects the lead-up to World War I, "the war that nobody wanted".

Syria sponsored the Palestinian guerilla war started by Yasser Arafat on its border. Israel responded with dire threats. The chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, publicly threatened to occupy Damascus and overthrow the regime. The Syrians got frightened and called on Egypt for assistance.

Just before the start of the crisis, the Soviet ambassador, Chubakhin, asked me to come and visit him at his embassy in Ramat Gan. He told me that Israel was planning to attack Syria and was already massing troops on the border.

He saw this as a part of a broader US scheme to install pro-American regimes all over the area, starting with the recent coup d'etat of the colonels in Greece (April 1967) and American machinations in Iran...

...The story about Israel "massing troops on the border" was, of course, ridiculous. A Soviet general may believe that before starting an offensive, troops must be massed on the frontier. But in the tiny territory of Israel, "massing" troops was both impossible and superfluous.

Anyhow, faced with Syria's request for help and the Soviet stories about the massing of Israeli troops, Nasser saw an opportunity to assert his leadership of the Arab world. He sent his troops into Sinai.

If he had really intended to start a war, he would have done this as secretly as possible. But his troops passed Cairo in broad daylight, proof that the aim was to show off.

...On May 23, Nasser announced (falsely) that he had mined the sea approaches to Eilat. That was for Israel a casus belli. Eilat was Israel's gateway to the eastern world, free passage there had an emotional importance far beyond its actual value.

I remember coming back from the Knesset that day, and telling my colleagues on the New Force Party's executive board: "War is now inevitable." I added: "This war will change everything."

To dramatize these steps, Nasser asked the UN Secretary General, U Thant, to withdraw UN forces - but only from a certain sector. (These forces had been stationed on the border since the 1956 Sinai war).

Misreading the situation completely, U Thant withdrew all his troops.

Faced now with the possibility of an Israeli preventive attack, and believing his own propaganda that Israel was but an American puppet, Nasser sent his deputy to the US to get the Americans to stop Israel.

On the first day of the war, after an emergency parliamentary session, I was in the Knesset bomb shelter sitting out shelling by Jordanian artillery in East Jerusalem, when a friend whispered in my ear: "We have already won the war. The Air Force has destroyed the Egyptian airplanes on the ground".

This information was withheld from the public.

All reports of the incredible victories of our army were suppressed by the censor, because the government was afraid that if they became public, the UN would impose a cease-fire - which now just seemed obstructive.

On the fifth day of the war, just after our army had conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I wrote an open letter to Levy Eshkol, proposing that he seize the historic opportunity and offer the Palestinian people the chance to establish a state of their own. I had advocated this idea since 1949, but I was convinced that this moment, with the whole region in a state of shock, was the right time to make peace with the Palestinians by making them an historic offer.

Right after the war, Eshkol invited me to a private talk. He listened patiently while I explained this idea. "Uri, what kind of a trader are you?" he said with a benign smile,

"In negotiations, one starts by offering the minimum and demanding the maximum. Then, gradually, one raises the offer until a compromise is achieved somewhere in the middle. What you propose is to offer everything even before negotiations have started."

"That is true when one sells a horse," I answered, "not when one wants to achieve a historic peace."

...In the following months and years, I made dozens of speeches in the Knesset (in addition to my articles in "Haolam Hazeh") advocating the idea of a Palestinian state in the newly occupied territories. In one of my speeches I reported that I had spoken with all the prominent leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including those who were known as "supporters of Jordan", and that all of them had told me that they preferred a Palestinian state to the restoration of Jordanian rule.

Both Dayan and Eshkol denied that, but Eshkol sent his advisor for the occupied territories, Moshe Sassoon, to ask me in private about my information. On August 13, 1969, Sassoon wrote a report to the Prime Minister (with a copy to me), in which he confirmed that his own information was identical with mine.

...In public opinion polls, support for the idea of a Palestinian state next to Israel reached an astonishing 37%. That phase passed quickly.

The US, which, on the eve of the war, had secretly informed our government that it would not object to an Israeli attack, now did nothing to compel Israel to withdraw.

Gradually, the Israeli leadership became aware of a total absence of international pressure to return anything.

...Teams of people from the Kibbutz movement were already swarming over the West Bank looking for favorable locations. They found them in the Jordan valley - flat, suitable for tractors and watered by the river.

Immediately after the war, huge numbers of refugees from the 1948 war had been driven out of the Jericho refugee camps near the river. The settlement drive, which was to change the map completely, was on its way.

Almost automatically, actions of ethnic cleansing were carried out.

It was never ascertained who had given the orders. Clearly, they were transmitted orally. Over all of them hovered the spirit of Moshe Dayan.

Immediately after the fighting, the writer Amos Kenan came to me. He was in a state of shock, and told that me he had just witnessed the expulsion of thousands of inhabitants from three villages in the Latrun area. I asked him to sit down and write a report of what he had seen. It was a revolting document.

I immediately drove to the village Imwass (perhaps the Biblical Emmaeus) and saw bulldozers leveling house after house. When I tried to take pictures, soldiers drove me away.

... he work was finished before anybody could intervene. Today, the "Canada Park" covers the site.

At that time, everybody still believed that Israel would be pressured to return the territories it had conquered. The Latrun villages were a kind of bulge in the Green Line, dominating the main road between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

For that reason, somebody decided to create a fait accompli that would remove the pressure to return this area..

...Dayan declared that we had no intention of conquest... A day after the fighting was over, it had become a war of expansion and annexation.

...The Eshkol government, which had first officially decided to negotiate the return of the Territories, forgot about this when it realized that there was no need to.

In an article soon after, I told a story about how to capture monkeys. One attaches a bottle to the branch of a tree and puts a fruit into it. The monkey puts his hand into the bottle, takes hold of the fruit and tries to pull it out, but his fist enclosing the fruit is much too big. Thus he is captured. He could, of course, get free any moment by letting go of the fruit, but, craving for the fruit, is unable to do so. In the same way, holding on to the occupied territories, we were hostages of our own greed.

After the war, Professor Yeshayahu (Isaiah) Leibowitz, an orthodox Jew, foresaw that the occupation would corrupt us and turn us into a people of "secret service agents and managers of foreign labor".

In retrospect, it looked as if the whole scenario was the work of a talented director - the anxiety, the crescendo of fear, the miraculous victory. This helps to explain what happened later on.

In the Faust legend, Mephistopheles pays for the soul of the learned doctor with every imaginable kind of pleasure. Something like that happened to us in June, 1967. The chain of events directed by a superior being, a temptation deliberately put in front of us in order to test us. What looked like a gift from God was actually a temptation from Satan, an attempt to buy our soul.

Did he succeed? Did Israel lose its soul?

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Parts of this article were published in the American-Jewish magazine Tikkun.

Source: By courtesy & © 2007 Uri Avnery