So on the fateful morning of 5 June, when Egyptian forces moved by air and land against Israel’s western coast and southern territory, our country’s choice was plain. The choice was to live or perish, to defend the national existence or to forfeit it for all time.
Abba Eban, United Nations General Assembly
Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you do not necessarily believe yourself.
Abba Eban, in Contemporary Aphorisms
The June 1967 war marked a decisive crossroads in the history of the modern Middle East. It redefined the contours of the Arab–Israeli conflict as well as the terms of its settlement. Yet, for all the importance rightly attached to the June war, it has come to be viewed as a remarkably uncomplicated affair – indeed, as the locus classicus of a virtuous David prevailing, against all odds, over an odious Goliath.
In this essay, I want to consider the main premises that underpin the standard depiction of the June war. To do so, I will use as my foil the copious body of commentary produced by Abba Eban. Eban is Israel’s most authoritative and eloquent voice on foreign affairs. In his varied capacities – ambassador to the United States, UN permanent representative, minister of foreign affairs, memoirist, lecturer, professor, elder statesman, documentarian – Eban more than any other single individual has shaped American perceptions of the Middle East conflict.
Eban’s soaring rhetoric in the spring of 1967 was arguably his finest – or, at any rate, most influential – hour. I will juxtapose Eban’s rendering of the war’s origins and aftermath against what the documentary record and scholarship reveal. My purpose is not per se to expose Eban as a liar and fraud – an interesting but not very significant revelation, especially inasmuch as one almost expects a diplomat to prevaricate in the heat of battle and to preserve his and his country’s reputation as best he can in retrospect. Rather, it is precisely because the imagery that Eban conjured up in 1967 is not dismissed as partisan but typically informs – indeed, constitutes the summa summarum of – conventional wisdom that it merits close scrutiny. One may add that the exposure of the fragile foundations of Eban’s interpretive edifice offers insight not only into the mythology surrounding the June war but also into the dominant culture that sustains that mythology.
In the first section, I will examine the main junctures on the road to the June war. I will argue that Eban’s account effaces Israel’s provocation of Nasser and its responsibility for the failed diplomacy. In the second section, I will examine Eban’s justifications for Israel’s preemptive attack. I will argue that none of Eban’s rationales can withstand critical scrutiny. In the third section, I will examine the international consensus that crystallized in the war’s wake as embodied in United Nations Resolution 242. I will argue that Eban’s interpretation of 242 stands well outside that consensus.
Diplomacy
A massive Israeli ‘retaliatory’ strike has more than once ignited the fuse that ended in an explosion in the Middle East.
E.L.M. Burns, chief of staff of United Nations forces in the Middle East during the mid-1950s, testifies that before Israel’s raid on Gaza in February 1955, ‘the facts did not indicate … a critical situation’. Kennett Love likewise reports that ‘violence was infrequent on the Egyptian-Israeli frontier before Gaza’. Indeed, according to Donald Neff, ‘Nasser since coming to power two-and-a-half years earlier, had shown scant interest in the usual Arab expressions of hatred for Israel’. The Arab nationalist leader’s energies were focused inward as he sought to shepherd Egypt into the modern world. But the unprecedentedly bloody Israeli assault, which left thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers and civilians dead and nearly as many wounded, changed everything. It was – in Burns’s words – the ‘decisive event [that] set a trend which continued until Israel invaded the Sinai in October 1956’.1
In mid-November 1966, Israel embarked on its largest military action since the Suez war. An armored brigade of nearly 4,000 men attacked the West Bank town of Samu in the Hebron hills, methodically destroying 125 homes, a clinic, a school, and a workshop, and killing eighteen Jordanian soldiers as well. (One Israeli soldier was killed.) Condemning the raid at the United Nations, US Ambassador Arthur Goldberg noted that the toll it took ‘in human lives and in destruction far surpasses the cumulative total of the various acts of terrorism conducted against the frontiers of Israel’. ‘I wish to make it absolutely clear,’ he pronounced, ‘that this large-scale military action cannot be justified, explained away or excused by the incidents which preceded it and in which the Government of Jordan has not been implicated.’2
The ostensible purpose of the Israeli attack was to punish King Hussein for, and force him to curb, Palestinian infiltration. Guerrillas operating from Jordanian territory had killed three Israelis in October and early November. Yet, leaving to one side that Israel’s ‘reprisal’ policy was not only contrary to international law but counterproductive as well,3 the fact is that, as Odd Bull, chief of staff of UN forces in the Middle East at the time, recalled, ‘the Jordanian authorities did all they possibly could to stop infiltration’. A UN military observer on the Israel-Jordan border noted even more emphatically that ‘Jordan’s efforts to curb infiltrators reached the total capabilities of the country’. Indeed, until the June 1967 war, more Palestinians were killed by Jordanian soldiers attempting to enter Israel than by the Israelis themselves. And, only a few months before the Samu attack, King Hussein had taken the extraordinary step of arresting most of the Palestine Liberation Organization staff in Amman and closing its offices.4
Samu’s main legacy was the poisoning of relations and exacerbating of already bitter rivalries in the Arab world. As one historian observed, ‘by its raid on Samu, Israel, as it no doubt calculated, sharpened Arab divisions, radicalized opinion, and set its lamentably weak and hopelessly quarrelsome neighbors lurching amid mutual plots and accusations, to the very edge of the precipice’. In particular, a new round of mutual recriminations was fueled with Radio Jordan, for example, taunting Nasser for his ‘empty rhetoric’ in not rising to the Kingdom’s defense and for using the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed in Sinai and Gaza as a pretext for not confronting Israel.5
In early April, a border incident between Israel and Syria climaxed in a major aerial engagement. Six Syrian planes were shot down, one over Damascus. Tensions between the two countries continued to mount in the ensuing month. In the second week of May, Israeli officials threatened to launch a full-scale attack on Syria. General Yitzak Rabin, the chief of staff, was alleged to have announced on Israeli radio that ‘the moment is coming when we will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian government’. The Israeli chief of military intelligence menacingly warned of a ‘military action of great size and strength’ against Syria. Prime Minister Eshkol declared that Israel ‘may have to teach Syria a sharper lesson’ than that of early April. In a front-page dispatch headlined ‘Israelis Ponder Blow at Syrians – Some Leaders Decide That Force Is the Only Way to Curtail Terrorism’, the New York Times reported that ‘some Israeli leaders have decided that the use of force against Syria may be the only way to curtail increasing terrorism. … This has become apparent in talks with highly qualified and informed Israelis.’ Citing ‘authoritative sources’, the Jerusalem Post reported that ‘a major military clash with Syria seemed inevitable’, in the form of a military expedition that would ‘take the wind out of the Syrians’ sails once and for all’.6
The Israeli threats were not viewed as idle in Arab capitals, or elsewhere. In a report to the Security Council on the escalating Middle East crisis, Secretary-General U Thant observed that, ‘in recent weeks, … reports emanating from Israel have attributed to some high officials in that State statements so threatening as to be particularly inflammatory in the sense that they could only heighten emotions and thereby increase tensions on the other side of the lines’. U Thant later recalled that
rumors of an impending blow against Syria were current throughout Israel. … [T]hey reached Cairo and other Arab capitals, where they generated the belief that Israel was about to mount a massive attack on Syria. … Bellicose statements by Israeli leaders … created … panic in the Arab world.
The US State Department ‘cautioned’ Israel against the ‘unsettling effects’ of its ‘threatening statements’, and the US chargé d’affaires in Cairo advised Egypt’s Foreign Minister that the Israeli threats should be taken ‘most seriously’. Le Monde editorialized that ‘it was only a matter of time’ before Israel launched an attack on Syria.7
Eban ridicules the rumors of an impending Israeli assault on Syria as ‘one of the most effective false alarms in history’, as if it were not the ‘bellicose statements by Israeli leaders’ (U Thant) that fomented these rumors. Indeed, Eban himself conceded that, ‘if there had been a little more Israeli silence, the sum of human wisdom would probably have remained intact’. What is more, the alarms were almost certainly not false. According to Eban, Israel ‘never … intended, or even conceived’ attacking Syria. He heaps scorn on the Soviet intelligence report passed to Egypt and Syria of an imminent Israeli attack and deems ‘the “information” supplied by the Soviet Union’ the ‘proximate cause of the 1967 war’. Yet, although apparently erring in details, the Soviet intelligence report was not wide of the mark in its general thrust. Richard Parker reports that, by mid-May, ‘the question was not whether Israel was going to strike’ at Syria, but ‘when and how’, and that ‘everyone knew [it] was about to happen’. Michael Brecher states flatly in his authoritative study that Israel’s Cabinet had decided in early May that, if ‘noncoercive methods of persuasion’ against Syria failed, it ‘would launch a limited retaliation raid’. The Soviets, according to Parker, had ‘gotten wind’ of the Israeli Cabinet decision.8
Coming fast on the heels of the Samu raid and the aerial battle over Syria, the Israeli threats against the Damascus regime compelled Nasser to act. Egypt had entered into a military pact with Syria the previous November. Syria was now calling on its ally to respond with more than fiery rhetoric. Radio Jordan was again mocking Nasser’s pretensions, daring the Egyptian leader to close the Gulf of Aqaba and ‘hit Israel where it hurts’.9
On 14 May, Nasser moved Egyptian troops into the Sinai and subsequently requested the complete withdrawal of UNEF from Sinai, the Gaza and Sharm-el-Shaykh overlooking the Straits of Tiran. Within days, the UNEF had completed its withdrawal from Sharm-el-Shaykh, Egyptian troops moved in to occupy it and Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would be closed to Israeli shipping.
The Egyptian leader apparently did not intend so dramatic a concatenation of gestures. He wanted only that UNEF readjust its deployment in the Sinai but did not desire a UNEF withdrawal, especially from Sharm-el-Shaykh. Confronted with an all-or-nothing ultimatum from UN Secretary-General U Thant that left him with no ‘face-saving device’ (Rikhye), Nasser opted for complete withdrawal.10
To Eban, ‘the wanton irresponsibility’ of Nasser’s action ‘defies indulgence’. Indeed, he rates it ‘one of the most unprovoked actions in international history’. Yet in a memo to President Johnson, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow recognized that Nasser ‘probably feels his prestige would suffer irreparably if he failed a third time to come to the aid of an Arab nation attacked by Israel’. Odd Bull, chief of staff of the UN forces, similarly recalled in his memoir that Nasser ‘was obliged to act if his reputation in the Arab world was not to suffer, because he had been subjected to a lot of criticism on the ground that he was sheltering behind UNEF’. Even Moshe Dayan conceded that ‘the nature and scale of our reprisal actions against Syria and Jordan had left Nasser with no choice but to defend his image and prestige in his own country and throughout the Arab world, thereby setting off a train of escalation in the entire Arab region’.11
Acknowledging its legality, U Thant nonetheless expressed ‘deep misgivings’ about Nasser’s decision to terminate the UNEF mission, especially in light of ‘the prevailing tensions and dangers throughout the area’. The Secretary-General did not, however, reserve criticism for Egypt alone. First, he recalled that the Egyptian–Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC), established as part of the agreements that ended the 1948 war, ‘could, as it did prior to the establishment of UNEF, provide a limited form of United Nations presence in the area’. Yet, EIMAC had become a dead letter because Israel ‘unilaterally’ withdrew from it at the time of the Suez war in an action that, unlike Nasser’s, was a ‘clear defiance of U.N. resolutions’. Throughout the 1967 crisis, Egypt expressed a strong willingness to reactivate and even expand the role of EIMAC. The Israeli Cabinet in late May officially rebuffed any and all such proposals.12
U Thant also proposed that Israel allow the UNEF to be repositioned on its side of the border. Indeed, the Secretary-General pointedly recalled that the original February 1957 General Assembly resolution mandating deployment of the UNEF ‘envisaged’ that it would be stationed on ‘both sides’ of the Egyptian-Israeli armistice demarcation line. (Egypt had acceded to the General Assembly request; Israel had not. U Thant also noted that, in the course of the decade that had since elapsed, Israeli troops ‘regularly patrolled alongside the line and now and again created provocations by violating it’.) But Israel dismissed as ‘entirely unacceptable’ U Thant’s recommendation. Repeated entreaties by the United States, Britain and especially Canada all fell on deaf ears. Even an alternative proposal at the end of May to reactivate UNEF on both sides of the Egyptian-Israeli frontier and along the Gaza Strip was peremptorily dismissed by Israel.13
In his memoir, U Thant conjectured that ‘if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted’. His speculation received an authoritative endorsement from Odd Bull, who stated that ‘it is quite possible that the 1967 war could have been avoided’ had Israel acceded to the Secretary-General’s request.14
For Eban, however, ‘there is no validity’ to such a surmise. He argues that UNEF ‘had relevance to Sharm el-sheikh and Gaza and to nowhere else’. Yet, Eban himself maintained that ‘the effect’ of UNEF’s withdrawal was ‘to make Sinai safe for belligerency’, and that ‘Egyptian preparations in the Sinai’ posed the ‘chief danger’ to Israel. It is unclear, then, why a UNEF presence on the Israeli border with Sinai would have lacked ‘relevance’. Indeed, at a news conference in late May, Eban had pointed to the ‘buildup of forces in Sinai’ as a ‘main symptom’ of the crisis and assailed U Thant’s withdrawal decision precisely because ‘in 1957, the object of the U.N. presence was to insure that … there would be a less explosive situation regarding the balance of forces in Sinai’. Eban also does not explain why the UNEF could not have been redeployed on the Israeli side of the Gaza border.15
In late May, the UN Secretary-General journeyed to Cairo personally to mediate the crisis. His minimum aim was to get both parties to agree to a ‘breathing spell’ which would ‘allow tension to subside from its present explosive level’ and give the Security Council time ‘to deal with the underlying causes’ and ‘seek solutions’. In this spirit, U Thant presented Nasser with a proposal reportedly backed by the United States. Essentially, it called for a two-week moratorium in the Straits of Tiran similar to the one that U Thant had arranged during the Cuban missile crisis – Israel would refrain from sending and Egypt from inspecting ships – and a renewed effort at diplomacy. A special UN representative would be appointed for the area. Egypt assented, a gesture that the Secretary-General reckoned as ‘very significant’. There was, however, one insuperable hitch. As U Thant recalled: ‘Israel did not agree to either of these conditions.’ The rationale adduced by Israel’s ambassador was that Egypt ‘was bent on war’. Indeed, he got the motive right – but the country wrong. Brian Urquhart, a senior UN official, concluded in his memoir that ‘Israel, no doubt having decided on military action, turned down U Thant’s ideas’.16
The United States also tried its hand at mediation. Robert Anderson, a former Treasury Secretary, and Charles Yost, a retired ambassador, met with Egyptian officials in late May and early June. A ‘breakthrough in the crisis’ – in Neff’s words – was apparently reached. Nasser indicated that he was open to World Court arbitration of the dispute over the Straits of Tiran, and perhaps also – accounts are very contradictory – to an easing of the blockade that would allow for the passage of oil pending the Court’s decision. Crucially, the Egyptian leader agreed to send his vice-president to Washington by week’s end to explore a diplomatic settlement.17
The Washington meeting never happened. Israel struck before it could take place. In so doing, it not only preempted negotiations but broke a pledge given to Johnson at the end of May not to take unilateral action before two weeks. Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, later recalled that, between the Egyptian vice-president’s anticipated trip and Israeli assurances of restraint, the mood in Washington in early June was that ‘we had a good chance to de-escalate the crisis’. But the Israeli attack put a stop to that. ‘We were shocked … and angry as hell’, Rusk continued in a passage worth quoting in full,
when the Israelis launched the surprise offensive. They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility. (my emphasis)18
Rusk’s speculation that Egypt may have been amenable to compromise is sustained by a most improbable source. Middle East Record is a quasi-official Israeli publication assembled by the Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies in Tel Aviv. In volume 3, a comprehensive synthesis of the June war, the editors observe that ‘a number of facts seem to indicate Abdel Nasser’s belief in the possibility of terminating … the conflict through diplomacy’. Specifically, they point to ‘the display of his willingness to revive’ EIMAC; ‘his suggestion that the issue of navigation through the Straits of Tiran be taken to the international Court of Justice’; and ‘his vagueness’ at the end of May ‘on the exact definition of the materials that were not to be permitted through the Straits to Israel’.19
Eban asserts that ‘Israel has never worked harder to prevent a war than it did’ in June 1967. Indeed, with the Israeli victory in mind, he told the Knesset that ‘wars are most often won by those who have made the greatest efforts to prevent them’. Yet, the one – and only – diplomatic undertaking that Israel embraced in 1967 was with gunboats. It lent support to a US-backed plan, ultimately abortive, to break Nasser’s blockade with a multinational armada. In view of the record surveyed above – repudiation of UN mediation efforts on the one hand, and preemption of US mediation efforts on the other – Eban’s testimonial that ‘Israel has never worked harder’ casts an unwonted light on the actual history of Israeli diplomacy.20
Deception
The central rationale Israel adduced for preemptively attacking Egypt was that it faced imminent destruction. Eban recalled June 1967 as ‘the month of decision’ in which ‘the “final solution” was at hand’. ‘Israel’s defensive action’, he emphasized on another occasion, ‘was taken when the choice was to live or to perish, to protect the national existence or to forfeit it for all time’. Indeed, the chapter of his most recent memoir devoted to the war is entitled ‘To Live or Perish: 1967’. The prologue of the Cabinet decision to launch a preemptive strike read that ‘the Government ascertained that the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan are deployed for immediate multi-front aggression, threatening the very existence of the state’. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol later told the Knesset that ‘the existence of the state’ had ‘hung in the balance’.21
Eban enumerates three threats to Israel’s ‘national existence’ on the eve of the June war: (1) ‘Syrian-based terrorism’, (2) ‘Egyptian troop concentrations in Sinai after the departure of the United Nations forces’, and (3) ‘the blockade of the Straits of Tiran’. I will examine each of these claims in turn.22
According to Eban, the threat posed by ‘Syrian-based terrorism’ assumed two forms: ‘bombardments of our northern settlements’ and ‘terrorist raids’. The combined effect of these attacks was purportedly to render the ‘security predicament’ of Israel ‘acute’. Although the issues raised by the bombardments and raids are not unrelated, I will, for clarity’s sake, address each separately.23
Syrian shelling from the Golan Heights of Israel’s northern settlements had its provenance in the Israeli–Syrian armistice agreement that ended the 1948 war. The accord established demilitarized zones (DMZs) between the two countries. ‘The situation deteriorated’, according to Odd Bull, ‘as the Israelis gradually took control over that part of the demilitarized zones which lay inside the former national boundaries of Palestine’ in blatant violation of the UN-brokered accord. Arab villagers residing in the DMZs were evicted and their dwellings demolished, ‘as the status quo was all the time being altered by Israel in her favor.’ The Security Council called on Israel to let the villagers return, but Israel held fast. ‘In the course of time,’ Bull observed, ‘all the Arab villages disappeared’ in wide swaths of the DMZs.24
Major-General Carl Von Horn, who served as chief of staff of the UN forces before Bull, similarly recalled that, inside the Syrian-Israeli DMZs, ‘property changed hands, invariably in one direction’, so that before long Israel was ‘claiming the right to exploit all the land’. ‘Gradually’, he continued, ‘beneath the glowering eyes of the Syrians, who held the high ground overlooking the zone, the area had become a network of Israeli canals and irrigation channels edging up against and always encroaching on Arab-owned property.’ ‘This deliberate poaching was bitterly resented by the Syrians.’ Israel’s ‘premeditated’ policy, Horn concluded, was ‘to get all the Arabs out of the way by fair means or foul’.25
US consular cables from Jerusalem told much the same story. One from July 1964 stated that ‘Arabs concerned selves basically with preservation situation envisioned in [the UN armistice agreements] while Israel consistently sought gain full control.’ Israel, it continued, was ‘emerging victorious largely because UN never able oppose aggressive and armed Israeli occupation and assertion actual control over such areas, and Arab neighbors not really prepared for required fighting’. The cable concluded that UN observers generally credited Syria for ‘restraint over long period in face Israel seizure control in [DMZs] by force or constant threat using it’.26
Syrian shelling from the Golan Heights aimed to deter the Israeli encroachments. ‘There was a certain pattern’, a recent study reports, ‘of action and reaction. Israeli tractors would move into disputed areas, often with the support of armed Israeli police. The Syrians would fire from their high ground positions, and would often shell Israeli settlements in the Huleh valley. By trying to oppose the Israeli challenge, Syria drew on its head punitive Israeli raids, including air strikes.’ Undoubtedly, the shelling was also occasionally vindictive. On the latter point, Bull’s reflections are worth quoting in full:
I imagine that a number of those Arabs evicted settled somewhere in the Golan Heights and that their children have watched the land that had been in their families for hundreds of years being cultivated by Israeli farmers. From time to time they opened fire on these farmers. That, of course, was a violation of the armistice agreement, though I could not help thinking that in similar circumstances Norwegian peasants would almost certainly have acted in the same way.27
One hastens to add that Syrian shelling from the Heights was desultory, indeed, largely symbolic. This was in no small part due to the punishing Israeli ‘retaliatory’ strikes. Using the flimsiest of pretexts, these attacks occasionally even reached beyond the DMZs into Syria proper. In one notorious case in December 1955 that was soundly condemned by the Security Council as a ‘flagrant violation’ of the armistice agreements, fifty-six Syrians were killed. In this regard, it should be noted that the strategic advantage that Syria enjoyed from the Golan Heights ‘disappeared completely’, according to U Thant, ‘when the military exchange escalated to the level of air battles, in which Israel had a decided advantage’. At any rate, there was not one civilian casualty on Israel’s northern border due to Syrian shelling for the six-month period leading up to the June 1967 war.28
The most exhaustive review to date for the 1949–67 period concludes that the standard depiction of Israel as the innocent victim of ‘Syrian firing from the Golan Heights’ is basically ‘historical revisionism’:
Indeed, some Syrian shells did fall on settlements as well as military positions inside Israel, along with many more inside the demilitarized zone. There is, however, no Security Council resolution condemning Syria for aggressive actions against Israel during this period, nor is there a veto of such a resolution. There are four Security Council resolutions condemning Israel. UN observers in the field and UN votes in New York are unanimous in holding that principal responsibility for the Syrian–Israeli border hostilities belongs to Israel.29
Syrian-backed Palestinian commando raids against Israel began in earnest after a radical coup in Damascus in February 1966. Incendiary rhetoric emanating from Syria – fueled by inter-Arab rivalries – urged that a ‘people’s war’ be mounted to liberate Palestine. Yet, the basic motive behind Syrian support of the Palestinian guerrillas seems to have been rather more prosaic – the Israeli incursions in the DMZs. UNEF head Rikhye reports that the intensification of Palestinian attacks on Israel ‘resulted from the controversy over cultivation rights in the Demilitarized Zone between Israel and Syria’. Indeed, General Aharon Yaariv, head of Israeli military intelligence, frankly acknowledged a few weeks before the June war that Syria ‘uses this weapon of guerrilla activity’ because ‘we are bent upon establishing … certain facts along the border’.30
To be sure, Palestinians harbored real grievances of their own against Israel. In particular, Israel continued to ignore a December 1948 General Assembly resolution – affirmed at every subsequent session of the Assembly – which mandated that ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes’ should ‘be permitted to do so’, or, if they so elected, receive compensation for lost property. Thus, U Thant causally connected the Palestinians’ decision to ‘form their own independent guerrilla organizations to harass Israel’ with Israel’s ‘consistent refusal to comply with the recommendations of the General Assembly regarding the Palestinian refugees’.31
U Thant scored the Syrian-backed Palestinian raids – deplored by him as ‘insidious’ and ‘contrary to the letter and spirit of the Armistice Agreements’ – as a ‘major factor’ aggravating the Middle East crisis. Indeed, Palestinian and Israel leaders both ascribed a lethal potency to the guerrilla attacks. Yet, the true picture seems to have been rather more humble. In a notably sober analysis soon after the June war, former chief of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshaphat Harkabi concluded that the ‘operational achievements’ of the Palestinian guerrillas ‘in the thirty months from its debut to the Six-Day war’ were ‘not impressive by any standard’ and certainly posed no danger to ‘Israel’s national life’. He reports that there were all of 14 Israeli casualties (4 civilians, 4 policemen and 6 soldiers) for the entire two-and-a-half-year period. Indeed, in that same time span there were more than 800 Israeli fatalities in auto accidents. Conceding – with inimitable hyperbole – that the guerrilla attacks did not ‘affect thousands’ of lives or bring about ‘a collapse’ of national life, Eban goes on to acknowledge that it would be ‘absurd to imagine’ that they could have endangered ‘anything as solid as the State of Israel’.32
The illusoriness of the threat posed by Syria – in the Golan Heights as well as through its support of Palestinian commandos – was pointed up in the actual unfolding of the June war. The ‘opening of the northern front’, reflect two historians, ‘came as an afterthought.’ Several days of fighting elapsed before a decision was even taken to attack Syria. Moreover, it was an independent initiative of Moshe Dayan’s, reportedly reached with great reluctance. Rabin wrote in his memoir that he has ‘never grasped the reasons’ for Dayan’s decision to launch the assault. Ezer Weizman, who likewise could give ‘no explanation’ for Dayan’s action, rhetorically asked years later, ‘if indeed the Syrian enemy threatened to destroy us, why did we wait three days before we attacked it?’33
‘Egyptian troop concentrations in the Sinai’
Eban points to the Egyptian troop concentrations in the Sinai as Israel’s ‘chief danger’ on the eve of its preemptive attack. If so, one is forced to conclude that the known danger facing Israel could not have been very great at all. For the only two issues in the otherwise highly contentious literature on the June 1967 war on which a consensus seems to exist are: (a) there was no evidence at the time that Nasser intended to attack; and (b) even if he did, it was taken for granted that Israel would easily thrash him.34
In the midst of its June offensive Israel informed the Security Council that it had ‘documentary proof’ that Egypt ‘had prepared the assault on Israel in all its military details’. Yet, all the available evidence at the time pointed to the conclusion that Egypt did not intend to attack. In late May, Rabin, who was chief of staff, told the Israeli Cabinet that the Egyptian forces in the Sinai were still in a defensive posture. An exhaustive US intelligence review at the end of the month could find no evidence that Egypt was planning to attack. US President Johnson told Eban that even after instructing his ‘experts to assume all the facts that the Israelis had given them to be true’, it was still ‘their unanimous view that there is no Egyptian intention to make an imminent attack’ – a conclusion, according to Eban, also reached by Israeli intelligence. Rikhye, who toured the Egyptian front, confirms that Egyptian troops were not poised for an offensive. Reporting from Cairo for the New York Times on the eve of Israel’s assault, James Reston observed that Egypt ‘does not want war and it is certainly not ready for war’. Reston’s assessment was so widely held that it was echoed by Mossad chief Meir Amit in almost identical terms: ‘Egypt was not ready for a war; and Nasser did not want a war.’35
Rabin remarked after Israel’s victory that he ‘did not believe that Nasser wanted war’. ‘The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14’, the chief of staff surmised, ‘would not have been enough to unleash an offensive. He knew it and we knew it.’ The Israeli-compiled Middle East Record states that ‘most observers agree’ that Nasser did not intend to launch an attack ‘and that his pledges to U Thant and to the Great Powers not to start shooting should, therefore, be accepted at their face value’. Menachem Begin, who was a member of the National Unity government in June 1967, conceded many years later that ‘we had a choice’. ‘The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches’, he cautioned, ‘do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.’36
Yet, the most impressive testimony that Israel did not believe Nasser intended to give battle comes from Eban himself. Told by U Thant of Nasser’s promise not to attack Israel, Eban recalls that he ‘found this assurance convincing’, quipping, ‘Nasser did not want war; he wanted victory without war’.37
The mortal threat that Nasser allegedly posed to Israel in 1967 is as chimerical as his intention to attack it. The CIA estimated in late May that Israel would win a war against one or all of the Arab countries, whichever struck the first blow, in roughly a week. Richard Helms, then chief of the CIA, took special pride that ‘we predicted almost within the day how long the war would last if it began’. Johnson told Eban that ‘all our intelligence people are unanimous that if Egypt attacks, you will whip the hell out of them’. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reports in his recent memoir that, as of 2 June, the estimates of British and US intelligence concurred that Israel would win ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’; the only question was whether it would take Israel closer to seven or ten days. Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, then Undersecretary of State, reminisced that, on the basis of the information furnished them, Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers were so certain of an Israeli victory that they made absolutely no contingency plans for either a protracted contest or the even more unlikely prospect of an Israeli defeat.
Menachem Begin recalled that, in the penultimate Ministerial Committee on Defense meeting before the surprise attack, the IDF commanders ‘had no doubts of victory’ and ‘expressed their belief not only in the strength of the army but also in its ability to rout the enemy’. Eban confirms that ‘our military advisers were … fervent in the promise of victory’. In his standard military history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Dupuy reports that, as war loomed on the horizon in June 1967, ‘there were no doubts in the minds of Israeli military leaders that their own troops were technologically more sophisticated, or that they would be victorious in the event of another conflict’. Indeed, ‘they expected to be as successful as in the 1956 War’.38
Eban alleges that the pact that Jordan signed with Egypt in the last days of May marked a ‘most serious aggravation of our condition’. It was a ‘sensational development’, the effects of which ‘would be no less profound, and even more lasting, than anything we might face on the Egyptian front’. ‘Our fortunes’, Eban solemnly intones, ‘were declining and our flame was burning low.’ Yet as noted above, it was foreseen that Israel would easily prevail even against a joint Arab attack. Indeed, as a military historian of the June war recently observed, not only had Israel ‘not grown weaker’ after the pact’s signing, Egypt ‘had not grown one iota stronger’. The addition of Jordanian (and other Arab) forces ‘actually created more military problems than it had solved political ones’. One may further note that the Jordanian ‘front’ possessed as much reality as Eban’s expiring flame. The Royal Jordanian Army was basically a ‘show-piece’ whose ‘primary function was to serve as a palace guard’. The Jordanian infantry was ‘armed mainly with British rifles of World War II vintage’, and the bulk of the artillery consisted of ‘old British guns’. As for the Royal Jordanian air force, ‘its entire striking power was represented in the form of 24 obsolete British fighter-bombers’.39
General (res.) Mattityahu Peled, one of the architects of the June war, observed in 1972 that the claim that Israel was under the menace of destruction was a ‘bluff’, adding that, for all the pretense that Israel is ‘in the midst of an anguished struggle for its existence and can be exterminated at any moment’, the truth is that, already ‘since 1949’ no country has been able to mortally threaten it. Ezer Weizman, who did much of the operational planning for the June war, concurred that ‘there was no threat of destruction’ against Israel in 1967 and that ‘the threat of destruction was already removed from Israel during the War of Independence’. He further noted that, ‘had the Egyptians attacked first, they would have also then suffered a complete defeat’, with ‘maybe 13 hours being needed instead of only three’ to ‘command control of the air’.40
In his maiden speech to the Security Council after Israel’s preemptive strike, Eban purported that, ‘as time went on, there was no doubt that our margin of general security was becoming smaller and smaller’. Yet, the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff told Johnson at the end of May that Israel could remain at its current level of mobilization for two months without jeopardizing its security. The United States had also committed itself to fully footing the bill for Israel’s mobilization.41
Indeed, the most convincing witness against Eban is – again – Eban himself. In his memoirs, Eban reveals that, not only did Israel not face mortal danger from an Arab attack, but its prospects steadily improved with each day’s passing. He reports that in the final days before the preemptive strike Israel’s ‘military position’ became ‘predictably better, and that of Egypt unexpectedly worse’; that the ‘Arab states’ were ‘vastly enlarging their own vulnerability’; and that ‘stories of chaotic dislocation among Egyptian forces in the Sinai were becoming more frequent and authoritative’ while ‘equipment we previously ordered from Europe was reaching us every day’.
Eban also cites an ‘impressive’ US military intelligence review at the end of May which found that ‘the days and hours that were passing did not … increase the inability of Israel to defend herself successfully’, but, ‘on the contrary, it was Egyptian forces who were increasing their vulnerability’. ‘Israel’s lines of supply and communication were short and efficient’ whereas ‘Egypt’s were a nightmare of distance and complexity’. ‘Israel’s immediate security was in good shape’, it concluded, while ‘Egyptian difficulties would grow every hour.’ Dupuy’s chapter subheading for the Sinai mobilization on the eve of the war reads ‘CONFUSION CONFOUNDED’.42
‘Blockade of the Straits of Tiran’
One of Eban’s central claims was that Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran preventing access to the port of Eilat was an ‘attempt at strangulation’. In effect, it constituted an ‘act of war’. Israel’s preemptive attack accordingly was ‘a reaction, not an initiative’.43
Until the Suez war, the Straits of Tiran were closed to ships headed for Israel’s port city of Eilat. Nasser’s avowed reason for imposing the blockade was Israel’s refusal to honor the UN resolutions calling on it to allow the Palestinian refugees expelled during the 1948 war to return home.44
Israel tried to pry open the Straits in the course of the 1956 invasion when it occupied Sinai and Sharm-el-Shaykh. However, it was compelled to terminate the occupation without international sanction of its right of passage. To be sure, Israel did reach understandings with the United States that forcefully upheld its claims, but these were strictly bilateral. The United Nations, declared Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, could not ‘condone a change of the status juris resulting from military action contrary to the provisions of the Charter’. Accordingly, he stipulated that ‘the status juris existing prior to’ Israel’s attack must be ‘re-established by a withdrawal of troops, and the relinquishment or nullification of rights asserted in territories covered by the military action and depending on it’. The Israeli withdrawal, Hammarskjold subsequently reported, ‘was unconditional in accordance with the decision of the General Assembly’. This view was echoed in the United Nations by the US representative, Henry Cabot Lodge. Indeed, President Eisenhower had delivered perhaps the most impassioned defense of the principle that Israel’s withdrawal must be without conditions, asking rhetorically if ‘a nation which attacks and occupies a foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval should be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?’45
As Israeli troops withdrew from Sharm-el-Shaykh, UNEF moved in to replace them. But the deployment of UNEF, cautioned Hammarskjold, ‘should not be used so as to prejudge the solution of the controversial questions involved’ in the Straits of Tiran. The Secretary-General’s own view was that the unusual issues posed by the Straits had not yet been adjudicated. Thus, ‘a legal controversy exists as to the extent of the right of innocent passage through these waters’.46
Although reckoning Nasser’s decision ‘at this moment’ to reimpose the blockade of the Straits a ‘blunder’, U Thant also acknowledged that the ‘legal aspects’ of the case had been far from settled. Indeed, he cited as a ‘powerful statement’ the defense of Egypt’s position put forth by Harvard Law Professor Roger Fisher. Fisher’s opinion is worth quoting at length as both a lucid and authoritative exposition of the legal questions at issue. Noting that ‘the United States press reports about the Gulf of Aqaba situation were grossly one-sided’, Fisher continued:
The United Arab Republic had a good legal case for restricting traffic through the Strait of Tiran. First, it is debatable whether international law confers any right of innocent passage through such a waterway. Despite an Israeli request, the International Law Commission in 1956 found no rule which would govern the Strait of Tiran. Although the 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea does provide for innocent passage through such straits, the United States Representative, Arthur Dean, called this ‘a new rule’ and the U.A.R. has not signed the treaty. There are, of course, good arguments on the Israeli side too, and an impartial international court might well conclude that a right of innocent passage through the Strait of Tiran does exist.
But a right of innocent passage is not a right of free passage for any cargo at any time. In the words of the Convention on the Territorial Sea: ‘Passage is innocent so long as it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal state.’
In April Israel conducted a major retaliatory raid on Syria and threatened raids of still greater size. In this situation was Egypt required by international law to continue to allow Israel to bring in oil and other strategic supplies through Egyptian territory – supplies which Israel could use to conduct further military raids? That was the critical question of law.
Although ‘the U.A.R. would have had a better case if it had announced that the closing was temporary and subject to review by the International Court’, Fisher significantly concluded,
taking the facts as they were, I, as an international lawyer, would rather defend before the International Court of Justice the legality of the U.A.R’s action in closing the Strait of Tiran than to argue the other side of the case, and I would certainly rather do so than to defend the legality of the preventive war which Israel launched.47
As suggested above, the official US position held that, barring a ‘contrary decision’ by the World Court, Israel had a right of ‘free and innocent passage’ through the Straits. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Dulles acknowledged that it was a ‘highly complicated question of international law’ and that there was a ‘certain amount of plausibility’ to the Egyptian view. This was also the opinion of US legal scholars, who advised World Court adjudication. Charles Yost, the US envoy sent to negotiate with Nasser, conceded that Egypt’s case was ‘at least’ arguable and, ultimately, urged referring the issue to the International Court of Justice. J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, similarly recommended at the end of May that the conflict be moved to the World Court. And indeed, as we saw above, Nasser had acquiesced in World Court arbitration. As to the other party to the conflict, Quandt conjectures with considerable understatement that Israel would have found intervention by the World Court ‘impossible to accept’. Finally, in the opinion of the State Department’s legal adviser, international law almost certainly did not confer on Israel the right to initiate the use of armed force against the UAR in the absence of an armed attack by the UAR on Israel. A blockade, he observed in a memorandum to Rusk, did not of itself constitute, an armed attack, and self-defense did not cover general hostilities against the UAR.48
The legal issue aside, Israel claimed that it had come to be mortally dependent on trade through Eilat. In a Knesset speech on the morrow of Nasser’s announcement, Prime Minister Eshkol pointed to Eilat as the port of ‘hundreds of sailings of ships under dozens of flags’ and the hub of a ‘far-flung network of commerce and transport’. Israel’s UN ambassador, Gideon Rafael, described Eilat as a ‘thriving port and industrial center’ with ‘considerable trade passing through this essential maritime route’. Without free passage through the Straits, Eban asserted, Israel would be ‘stunted and humiliated’. In a yet more vivid image, Eban charged that Israel was being ‘strangled’ by Nasser’s blockade as it was condemned to ‘breathe with a single lung’. ‘The choice for Israel’, Eban perorated, ‘was drastic – slow strangulation or rapid, solitary death.’49
In the real world, the picture was rather less forbidding. The official terms of the blockade barred all Israeli-flagged vessels, and non-Israeli-flagged vessels carrying strategic cargo, from passing through the Straits. Yet, according to the UN Secretariat, not a single Israeli-flagged vessel had used the port of Eilat in the previous two and a half years. Indeed, a mere 5 per cent of Israel’s trade passed through Eilat. The only significant commodity formally affected by the blockade was oil from Iran, which could have been re-routed (albeit at greater cost) through Haifa. What is more, it is not even clear that Nasser was rigorously enforcing the blockade. Rikhye asserts – and the available evidence seems to support him – that the Egyptian ‘navy had searched a couple of ships after the establishment of the blockade and thereafter relaxed its implementation’. Recall, finally, that there was a ‘real possibility’ (Dean Rusk) that the blockade would have been formally lifted or modified after the Egyptian vice-president’s visit to Washington in early June.50
Eban states that, in the wake of Israel’s preemptive strike and rapid victory, ‘no one questioned the responsibility of Nasser for the war’. Yet, not one government in the world took Eban’s view that Israel was an innocent victim of aggression. In the international deliberations that ensued, opinion was divided between the belief that Israel was the aggressor, on the one hand, and that all parties shared some responsibility or that adjudicating responsibility served no useful purpose, on the other.
At a special emergency session of the General Assembly convened on account of the Middle East crisis, France reiterated its view that ‘the first state to take up arms … would not have its approval, still less its support’. (The day before, De Gaulle officially ‘condemned’ Israel ‘for the opening of hostilities’.) India juxtaposed the ‘incontrovertible fact that Israel struck the first blow’ against the ‘letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter’ which barred ‘pre-emptive strikes’. Tanzania stated bluntly that ‘Israel has committed aggression against the Arab states’, a view shared by Greece, which concluded that ‘the invaded countries were the victims of an act of aggression committed by the State of Israel’. Even Israel’s closest allies did not subscribe to the notion of Israel’s virginal innocence – or, as Eban typically put it, that ‘never in the history of nations has armed force been used in a more righteous or compelling cause’. (The latter view, incidentally, is pervasive in US scholarship, with moral theorist Michael Walzer, for example, listing Israel’s preemptive strike as one of a handful of unambiguous cases of self-defense in the twentieth century – ‘one about which we can, I think, have no doubts’.) Thus, at the extreme end of the spectrum, the US representative, Arthur Goldberg, refused to sign on to a Soviet-sponsored condemnation of Israel but only because the resolution censured ‘Israel alone’ for aggression. Canada, probably Israel’s staunchest ally after the United States in the United Nations, declared that ‘no one Government … can be held responsible for what has happened’.51
Indeed, Eban himself seems uncertain about the solidity of Israel’s case in 1967. For how else can one explain his almost manic insistence throughout 1967 and down to the present day that Egypt struck first on 5 June? In his maiden speech to the Security Council following Israel’s preemptive strike, for example, Eban held that
on the morning of 5 June, when Egyptian forces engaged us by air and land, bombarding the villages of Kissutim, Nahal-Oz and Ein Hashelosha, we knew that our limit of safety had been reached, and perhaps passed. In accordance with its inherent right of self-defense as formulated in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Israel responded defensively in full strength.
A week later he informed the Security Council that ‘they opened the hostilities. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, one after the other, moved against Israel. They were repelled, and were driven back into their territory’. Even in his autobiography, written fully a decade after Israel freely admitted to its preemptive strike, Eban still maintained that Israel engaged in a ‘counterattack’ against the Egyptian air force which was ‘sighted on the radar screens advancing toward us’.52
That Israel launched a preemptive strike on that fateful morning is not in dispute. As a ‘friendly commentator of the Six-Day War’ (Eban’s phrase) reported:
By far the greater part of the Egyptian Air Force was caught on the ground. The only Egyptian craft airborne at the time the Israeli strike went in was a training flight of four unarmed aircraft flown by an instructor and three trainees.53
The blips Eban spotted on the screen were perhaps registering not oncoming Egyptian planes but the palpitations of a nagging conscience.
Israel faced no significant threat, let alone mortal danger, in June 1967. Furthermore, diplomacy seemed – despite Israel – to be working. Why then did Israel attack when it did? Indeed, why did Israel attack at all?
The first question is not difficult to answer. Two convergent developments acted as a fillip for Israel’s decision to preemptively strike on 5 June. First, Israel received a green – or, in a more cautious formulation, yellow – light from the United States in early June. Israel’s biggest fear in the weeks leading up to the war was a repetition of the 1956–57 Sinai ‘trauma’ when – in Eban’s words – ‘we had been victorious in battle but had then faced immense American pressure, which had made it difficult to reap the fruits of victory’. The intimations from the White House that it would not look unfavorably on – indeed, might positively welcome – an Israeli assault annulled that fear. On the other hand, there was acute anxiety in Tel Aviv that the Egyptian vice-president’s imminent visit to Washington might produce a diplomatic breakthrough, squandering from another direction Israel’s chance to reap the ‘fruits of victory’. Eban, for instance, seems to have voted along with his colleagues for war at the crucial Cabinet meeting partly for fear that a face-saving compromise with Egypt was in the works. Dean Rusk later rued telling Israeli ambassador Harman of the Egyptian vice-president’s travel plans since ‘perhaps this was the spark that touched off the Israeli attack’. In sum, Israel struck on 5 June before it could be denied, and confident that it would reap, the ‘fruits of victory’.54
But what gains did Israel want to reap? Historian Avi Shlaim reports that Ben-Gurion’s ‘greatest fear’ in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s victory in 1948 was that the Arab world might bring forth a leader like Ataturk who would achieve real independence for his country and embark on a program for transforming it into a modern, Westernized, secular state. ‘By a curious touch of historic irony’, Shlaim adds, ‘at the very moment when Ben-Gurion was articulating this fear, surrounded by Israeli troops in the enclave of Faluja, there was a young brigade major who would later emerge as an Arab Mustafa Kemal – Gamal Abdul Nasser.’55
Indeed, soon after the Sinai invasion, Ben-Gurion acknowledged the same anxiety in almost identical terms. The crucial redeeming feature of the war, he asserted, was that ‘it diminished the stature of the Egyptian dictator, and I do not want you or the entire people to underestimate the importance of this fact’. ‘I always feared’, he confided,
that a personality might arise such as arose among the Arab rulers in the seventh century or like [Kemal Ataturk] who arose in Turkey after its defeat in the First World War. He raised their spirits, changed their character, and turned them into a fighting nation. There was and still is a danger that Nasser is this man.
The aim of Israel’s joint invasion with Britain and France in 1956, according to US officials, was to ‘destroy Nasser’s prestige’, nipping in the bud the twin bogies of Arab independence and modernization. But that job was left only half done in the ‘Sinai campaign’. A decade later, a unique opportunity arose to complete it. Indeed, one cannot but be struck by the exact symmetry between the unfolding of the 1956 and 1967 wars. Benny Morris notes that ‘from some point in 1954’, Israel’s ‘retaliatory strikes’ were designed to goad Nasser into attacking – what the British ambassador in Tel Aviv called a strategy of ‘deliberately contrived preventive war’. Accordingly, Israel launched, as noted above, a massive assault against Gaza in February 1955, prefiguring the Samu raid. ‘And’, Morris continues, ‘on 11 December, with Ben-Gurion’s approval, the IDF launched a massive, more-or-less unprovoked strike against Syria … in which IDF units destroyed a string of Syrian positions along the north-eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. A few weeks before, on 10 October, Syria and Egypt had signed a mutual defence pact, providing for a joint military command under Egyptian leadership. The aim [of the IDF attack] was to activate and provoke the Egyptians into retaliating against Israel – thus precipitating an Israeli-Egyptian war’ – a precise anticipation of the lead-up to the June 1967 war.56
On the eve of the June 1967 war, the CIA appraised Israel’s objectives as, first and foremost, ‘destruction of the center of power of the radical Arab Socialist movement, i.e. the Nasser regime’, second, ‘destruction of the arms of the radical Arabs’, and, last, ‘destruction of both Syria and Jordan as modern States’. In a word, Israel’s overarching aim was to extirpate any and all manifestations of Arab ‘radicalism’ – i.e. independence and modernization. To do so, the Egyptian upstart had to be put in his proper place, cut down to size. Most seriously, Nasser had openly defied Israel’s monopoly on the use of force. By closing the Straits of Tiran, Egypt – in the trenchant aphorism of Mohammed Heikal, an influential Egyptian editor and Nasser confidant – ‘succeeded for the first time, vis à vis Israel, in changing by force a fait accompli imposed on it by force’. ‘To Israel’, Heikal continued, ‘this is the most dangerous aspect of the current situation: who can impose the accomplished fact and who possesses the power to safeguard it?’ That an Arab leader should even raise the question ‘Who is in charge?’, was, for Israel, tantamount to a casus belli. Nasser – the Arab world – had to be taught the lesson that ‘what we say goes’, to quote President Bush’s highly pertinent formulation on the eve of the Gulf slaughter.57
Eban is unusually candid in this regard, forthrightly observing: ‘For us, the importance of denying Nasser political and psychological victory had become no less important than the concrete interest involved in the issue of navigation.’ Indeed, Eban dates Israel’s resolution to go to war from ‘Nasser’s blockade announcement on May 22’ – with its potent ‘political and psychological’ resonances.58
War with the Arab world also offered Israel an opportunity to fulfill its territorial destiny. The Zionist leadership did not regard the borders that Israel achieved in the 1948 war, let alone those designated by the UN partition resolution, as permanent. ‘In Ben-Gurion’s eyes’, Shlaim writes, ‘they were not the end but only the beginning.’ The ‘future generation’ was charged with the Zionist mandate of creating a Jewish state over the whole Land of Israel. Yet already in 1956, Ben-Gurion sought to telescope the future with the present. His plans for the post-’Sinai campaign’ settlement envisaged the seizure of wide swaths of neighboring Arab territory, for example, the West Bank and Sharm-el-Shaykh. Alas, he overstepped – or, more exactly, stepped on US toes – and got nothing. But in 1967 the mistake was not repeated and the ‘future generation’ redeemed the Zionist project. Indeed, in an article composed on the eve of the June attack, influential Cabinet minister Yigal Allon stressed that, ‘in case of a new war’, Israel must set as one of its central aims ‘the territorial fulfillment of the Land of Israel’.59
Finally, the June war enabled Israel to recover its spent élan. By 1966, immigration to Israel was at an ebb, unemployment had reached 10 per cent, and the intellectual and scientific elite was emigrating to greener pastures in the United States. In a remarkably prescient passage, E.L.M. Burns, former chief of UN forces in the Middle East, observed in 1961 that ‘Israel’s economic position is likely to deteriorate within the next few years’. In this ‘very frustrating state of affairs’, he darkly anticipated, Israel’s leaders, who ‘have a habit of putting down her economic difficulties’ to the ‘Arab states’, may succumb to the ‘great temptation to find an excuse to go to war … to force a peace on Israeli terms’. It was perhaps these contingencies that Ezer Weizman had in mind in 1972 when Israel’s preemptive strike was justified by him on the extraordinary grounds that Israel would otherwise ‘have ceased to exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies’. A Zionist scholar similarly reflected that ‘the Six Day War turned out to be more in the nature of a salvation than a crisis’.60
Deadlock
In the wake of the June war, attention shifted from the battlefield back to the diplomatic arena. The main venue of deliberations was the United Nations and the main outcome was UN Resolution 242. Controversy has swirled around 242 since its adoption principally due to the varying interpretations given the clause that calls for ‘withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’, in accordance with the principle ‘emphasize[d]’ in the preambular paragraph of the ‘inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’. In this section, I will review the documentary record on the ‘withdrawal clause’, juxtaposing Israel’s interpretation against the interpretation upheld by the rest of the world.
As the Security Council moved to adopt 242 and in subsequent years, Abba Eban invested considerable effort in elucidating the resolution’s meaning. Chief among his claims have been the following:
1.Withdrawal was not a ‘central and primary’ concern. The resolution’s ‘central and primary affirmation’, according to Eban, was ‘the need for “establishment of a just and lasting peace” based on secure and recognized boundaries’. ‘There is a clear understanding’, he stated, ‘that it is only within the establishment of permanent peace with secure and recognized boundaries that the other principles can be given effect.’61
2.The preambular principle of the ‘inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’ was ‘not relevant’ to the Middle East. ‘It is not relevant’, Eban informed the Security Council in a disquisition that would surely have resonated with Saddam Hussein, ‘to transfer the territorial doctrines and experiences of another hemisphere to an area in which the only territorial agreements which have ever existed have been based on military considerations alone.’ ‘Regional doctrines’, he cautioned, ‘cannot be transplanted from one continent to another without regard to the different juridical circumstances which prevail. We must work within the law and the necessities which apply to our region.’ In a later elucidation Eban claimed that the ‘inadmissibility’ principle was inserted ‘in deference to Latin American pressure’, yet had no pertinence except in Latin America, which was – Eban further alleged – uniquely prone to ‘chaotic controversy’ when boundaries were ‘not safeguarded against volatile and transient military successes’. Israel’s UN representative in June 1967, Gideon Rafael, maintained that the ‘inadmissibility’ principle referred only to ‘territorial conquests resulting from wars of aggression’ and was incorporated in 242 ‘only for the sake of parliamentary convenience’.62
3.The operative paragraph calling for ‘withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied’ allowed for ‘territorial revision’. Eban contended that 242 left the ‘scope and dimension’ of Israel’s withdrawal ‘vague’. Accordingly, the resolution ‘gave us a chance of territorial revision’. The principle of withdrawal was ‘not applicable to all the territories involved’.63
Not one of Eban’s propositions is sustained by the documentary record.
The Fifth Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly convened in mid-June 1967. It marked the first international effort in the wake of the war to reach consensus on resolving the Arab–Israeli conflict. Summarizing the main point of agreement that emerged from the otherwise contentious debate, the General Assembly president reported that ‘there is virtual unanimity in upholding the principle that conquest of territory by war is inadmissible in our time under the Charter’. ‘The affirmation of this principle’, he continued,
was made in virtually all statements and – I should add with some emphasis – by none more emphatically than all the big Powers – which bear the primary responsibility in the United Nations for the peace and security of the world. In this sense, virtually all speakers laid down the corollary that withdrawal of forces to their original position is expected.64
U Thant distilled the same essence from the General Assembly proceedings. ‘There is near unanimity’, the Secretary-General observed, on ‘the withdrawal of the armed forces from the territory of neighboring Arab states occupied during the recent war’ because ‘everyone agrees that there should be no territorial gains by military conquest’. ‘It would’, he added in a rare personal aside, ‘lead to disastrous consequences if the United Nations were to abandon or compromise this principle.’65
Remarkably, Eban reports that the consensus reached at the General Assembly special session ‘specifically turned down’ on repeated occasions ‘the concept of withdrawal to the June 4 lines’.66
Towards the end of 1967, responsibility for finding the right formula to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict was invested in the Security Council. Lord Caradon of Great Britain devised the language that was ultimately embodied in 242. Regarding the withdrawal clause, at the critical Security Council session, Caradon cited verbatim the words of Foreign Secretary George Brown as ‘the policy which has repeatedly been stated by my Government’: ‘Britain does not accept war as a means of settling disputes, nor that a State should be allowed to extend its frontiers as a result of war. This means that Israel must withdraw.’
Caradon explicitly denied that there was any ambiguity in the withdrawal clause by juxtaposing the resolution’s operative and preambular paragraphs:
In our resolution we stated the principle of the ‘withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’ and in the preamble emphasized ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.’ In our view, the wording of the provisions is clear.67
Caradon’s caveat was echoed by virtually all the members of the Security Council as they cast their votes in favor of the resolution. The French delegate underlined that,
on the point which the French delegation has always stressed as being essential – the question of withdrawal of the occupation forces – the resolution which has been adopted, if we refer to the French text which is equally authentic with the English, leaves no room for any ambiguity, since it speaks of withdrawal ‘des territoires occupés,’ which indisputably corresponds to the expression ‘occupied territories.’
The representative from India reported that ‘the principle of the inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by force is absolutely fundamental to our approach’ and
it is our understanding that the draft resolution, if approved by the Council, will commit it to the application of the principle of total withdrawal of Israel forces from all the territories – I repeat, all the territories … occupied by Israel as a result of the conflict which began on 5 June 1967.68
In a symposium many years later, Lord Caradon recalled that, without the preambular reference to the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war, ‘there could have been no unanimous vote’. The definite article was omitted from the operative paragraph (‘occupied territories’ as against ‘the occupied territories’), he explained, due to the irregularities of the pre-5 June borders which ‘were based on the accident of where exactly the Israeli and Arab armies happened to be’ at the time of the original 1948 armistice agreement. This omission did not at all, however, mitigate the force of the preambular reference:
Knowing as I did the unsatisfactory nature of the 1967 line, I wasn’t prepared to use wording in the Resolution that would have made that line permanent. Nonetheless, it is necessary to say again that the overriding principle was the ‘inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’ and that meant that there could be no justification for annexation of territory on the Arab side of the 1967 line merely because it had been conquered in the 1967 war. The sensible way to decide permanent ‘secure and recognized’ boundaries would be to set up a Boundary Commission and hear both sides and then to make impartial recommendations for a new frontier line, bearing in mind, of course, the ‘inadmissibility’ principle.
Maintaining at the same symposium that the withdrawal clause ‘was not made applicable to all the territories involved,’ Eban inferred that ‘Lord Caradon’s recollection has been dimmed by the passage of time’. To which Caradon politely, if pointedly, rejoined, ‘Not at all. I remember it well.’69
At the Fifth Emergency Special Session, the United States voted for a Latin American draft resolution which urgently requested ‘Israel to withdraw all its forces from all the territories occupied by it as a result of the recent conflict’. This resolution, like several others presented, failed for lack of a two-thirds majority.70 (The General Assembly split on whether or not to make Israel’s total withdrawal conditional on Arab recognition of its right to peace and security.)
In late July the United States and the Soviet Union undertook a joint last-ditch effort to fashion a resolution that would win wide enough approval to salvage the General Assembly special session. In the version supported by the United States, the ‘parties to the conflict’ were called on, inter alia, to withdraw ‘without delay’ from ‘territories occupied by them in keeping with the inadmissibility of the conquest of territory by war’. ‘Once again’, a State Department study reports, ‘Israel rejected the formula.’ Israel’s UN representative argued that the ‘inadmissibility’ principle had an ‘ominous connotation’ and that – the UN Charter notwithstanding – ‘there was nothing wrong with territorial conquest if it came in a just war fought against aggression’.71
As the Security Council moved to debate various draft resolutions in November 1967, the United States further delineated its position on the territorial question. Israel’s withdrawal had to be total, aside from ‘minor’ and ‘mutual’ border adjustments. Arthur Goldberg affirmed to Egypt that any territorial settlement would require Israel to return the Sinai and that, although Gaza raised separate issues, the United States did not consider that it belonged to Israel. Jordan was informed by Goldberg that ‘some territorial adjustments would be required’ but that ‘there must be a mutuality in adjustments’. In a separate, joint meeting with the Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers, Goldberg maintained that the United States did not support Israeli claims to Sinai and the West Bank and that, although ‘territorial adjustments would undoubtedly be necessary’, the boundaries resulting from the agreement ‘need not be of prejudice to the Arabs’. In yet a third meeting with officials from Iraq, Lebanon and Morocco, Goldberg averred that ‘the United States did not conceive of any substantial redrawing of the map’. Dean Rusk also promised King Hussein that the United States supported the return of a ‘substantial part’ of the West Bank to Jordan and would ‘use its influence to obtain compensation to Jordan for any territory it was required to give up’. Finally, the commitments Hussein received from Goldberg and Rusk were confirmed in a personal meeting with President Johnson.
According to the above-cited State Department study, American officials ‘made known the content’ of ‘these assurances’ to the British and Israeli governments. To be sure, in deference to Israeli pressures, the United States ‘strongly and successfully resisted attempts to introduce more specific language into the withdrawal clause’ of 242 and also ‘chose not to emphasize its own position on the limited nature of boundary adjustment’. Yet, as late as two days before Goldberg cast his vote in favor of 242, the State Department explicitly committed itself to ‘relatively small’ and ‘mutual’ territorial adjustments.
In his memoir, Dean Rusk recalls that the United States favored omitting the definite article in the ‘withdrawal clause’ only because ‘we thought the Israeli border along the West Bank could be “rationalized,” certain anomalies could easily be straightened out with some exchanges of territory, making a more sensible border for all parties’. ‘But’, he stresses, ‘we never contemplated any significant grant of territory to Israel as a result of the June 1967 war. On that point, we and the Israelis to this day remain sharply divided.’ Yet, according to Eban, the United States was ‘advocating’ in November 1967 the Israeli position of ‘territorial revision’.72
Abba Eban once observed that the United Nations is basically a ‘theater’ which ‘can “act” only in the histrionic sense’. As a portrait of the United Nations, it is an open question. Yet as a self-portrait, it is remarkably fitting. In the United Nations as elsewhere, Eban’s role has been basically dramaturgical. He has served with distinction as both playwright and thespian. No one can gainsay that Eban’s prose and poise have made for very stirring histrionics. Unfortunately, they have made for very bad history. Perhaps his performance is what one should expect from a diplomat. But what does it say about an intellectual culture when Eban’s ‘reconstruction’ of the June 1967 war becomes the received wisdom?73