14THE AGE OF EUPHORIA, 1967–1973
After the Six-Day War the face of Israel changed. The deep, pervasive anxiety of the three-week waiting period gave way to euphoria: “We were like unto them that dream” (Psalms 126:1). Suddenly Israel was a world celebrity. No longer a sleepy country in a remote corner of the Middle East, it was now the focus of events of global significance. Journalists and TV crews flocked to Israel from all over the world. They were followed by thousands of volunteers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who were excited by the military feats of this small country against all its aggressors. The volunteers found places in kibbutzim, helping with seasonal work, replacing youngsters serving in the army or mobilized for reserve service. They brought to Israel the flavors and trends of the larger world. The partial isolation Israel had experienced in its first nineteen years—both because outsiders lacked interest in it and because its shortage of foreign currency restricted foreign travel for its citizens—was well and truly over.
Israel was now a regional power governing a million Palestinians and territory four times larger than it had before the war. This situation created a range of difficulties that remained on the public agenda for the next decade and beyond. The first was security. The victory had not brought the longed-for peace but had worsened relations between Israel and its neighbors. The relative quiet of the prewar decade did not return. Only a few months after the war ended, Palestinian terrorist attacks commenced in Israel and against Israeli targets abroad, reaching their peak with the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. In March 1969 the “War of Attrition” along the Suez Canal began; it continued until August 1970.
Rule over the new territories became a leading topic in Israeli political discourse. What would be done with the occupied territories? Were they a bargaining chip to induce the Arabs to make peace with Israel, or were they a vital strategic addition to the security of the state? Jewish settlement in the territories fit the Zionist impulse and myth, according to which the Jewish plow determined the borders. Should the Green Line borders be extended through Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, or should Jews settle only in sparsely populated Arab areas, according to security needs? And finally there was the cultural-moral debate about ruling another people: was it justified and, if at all, under what conditions? Messianic overtones, religious and secular alike, soon imbued these debates.
MAP 7. THE POST-SIX-DAY WAR BORDERS, AND SETTLEMENTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, 1967—1977. (SEE PLATE 7.)
Jewish communities throughout the world, particularly in America, shared the elation and the joy of deliverance in the wake of the victory. The sense of a common destiny between Israel and the Jewish people had never been stronger. During the waiting period even Hannah Arendt, not known for her empathy for Israel and the Israelis, expressed anxiety over their fate. The Jews in the Diaspora felt like proud partners in the IDF’s victory, and demonstrated this in displays of identification with the state and visits to Israel, as well as a surge in donations. There was also a wave of aliya of tens of thousands of Jews from Western countries.
Although the USSR had severed its relations with Israel after the war, this did not deter Soviet Jews from demonstrating support for their brethren in Israel. A swell of enthusiasm swept through these “Jews of silence.” After the Six-Day War, Jews in the USSR embarked on a public struggle for the right to immigrate to Israel. Until then all activity on behalf of Soviet Jewry had been underground for fear of harming the Zionist activists in Russia. But now these activists gave the signal to shift to overt public activity. In November 1969 Prime Minister Golda Meir read from the Knesset podium a letter from eighteen Jewish families in Georgia who publicly claimed their right to immigrate. In 1971 an international congress was held in Brussels to mobilize world public opinion on behalf of the struggle, under the biblical supplication that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had turned into a political slogan—“Let my people go.”
Russian Jewry’s struggle for its right to immigrate to Israel was heroic. Activists in the USSR founded groups to study the Hebrew language and Jewish history, tradition, and religion to bolster Jewish national consciousness. They held meetings in woods outside Russian cities, with Hebrew sing-alongs, discussions on Israel, and readings of various texts. Israel, which in 1953 had established Nativ, an underground network aimed at reinforcing Jewish national consciousness in Russia, assisted covertly. Now thousands of Jews submitted applications to leave the USSR and immigrate to Israel, most of which were denied by the authorities, and the “refuseniks,” the name given to those whose applications were denied, were dismissed from their jobs. Neither unemployment nor police harassment deterred them from fomenting agitation that threatened to spread to a widening circle of opponents of the regime.
In the United States a large public movement of Jews and non-Jews alike emerged in support of Soviet Jewry, which reached its climax with the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment passed by both houses of Congress. Sponsored by Senator Henry Jackson, the amendment denied economic benefits in trade relations to countries that restricted freedom of emigration and other human rights. While it is doubtful that the amendment actually helped increase immigration—which diminished after it was passed—the discussions surrounding it in the years before passage apparently influenced the Soviets to allow Jews to leave. Possibly they wanted to get rid of the aliya activists by allowing them to leave, then reclosing the borders. Either way, in the first half of the 1970s about a quarter of a million Jews were allowed to leave the USSR. The majority—some 160,000—were absorbed in Israel, and the rest went to other countries.
This new wave of aliya was accompanied by generous donations from Western Jews to aid its absorption. The government also spent large sums in order to redeploy the army in the new territories to meet the new threats that arose after the war. Oil wells in Sinai now supplied about half of Israel’s fuel needs. All these factors led to accelerated economic growth that replaced the stagnation and recession of the early 1960s, which had caused unemployment and diminished economic activity.
The Green Line border between Israel and the West Bank was now opened to two-way traffic, with both sides displaying intense curiosity about the other. Israelis flooded the West Bank markets, where they bought goods and commodities at far lower prices than in “Little Israel.” Israeli tourist traffic clogged the West Bank roads. The 1948 generation revisited the sites of their battles, where they reminisced and shed tears for comrades who had not lived to see this day. People who had come to Israel after the War of Independence were now able, for the first time, to encounter the expanses of Greater Israel and the historical sites etched in the collective memory: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Cave of Machpelah (Cave of the Patriarchs), and Rachel’s Tomb. In addition to Masada, a pilgrimage site from the Yishuv period, they could visit Herodion and Gamla, forts also renowned as Jewish strongholds in the war against the Romans. The remains of Avshalom Feinberg of the Nili spy network, who had perished under mysterious circumstances on his way to Egypt in World War One, were now discovered on the Rafah border, where a palm tree had grown from a date seed he supposedly had left there. The romance of this tree competed with that of the oak tree remaining in the destroyed Etzion Bloc, now the site of renewed Jewish settlement by the sons and daughters of its evacuees. Areas that had been closed to Israeli archeologists were now opened to research that would enrich knowledge of the antiquity of the Jews in their land.
Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was now a celebrated symbol of Israeli daring and defiance. His face with its black eye patch graced newscasts and magazine covers. World famous, he also became the most admired statesman in Israel. Dayan sought to maintain a “soft” occupation of the West Bank that interfered as little as possible in the lives of the Arabs. The IDF was in charge of security, but everything else remained under the jurisdiction of Jordanian law. Local government was in the hands of the mayors appointed by King Hussein (until the municipal elections of 1976). Within a short time peace and public security in the West Bank were ensured. Still shocked by the defeat, in the first months after the Israeli occupation the Palestinians displayed no resistance. They were surprised by the enlightened attitude of the occupiers, whom Arab propaganda had portrayed as human beasts. In Hebron inhabitants anticipated Jewish vengeance for the 1929 massacre, and when it did not materialize there was both a sigh of relief and a willingness to cooperate with the occupier in returning to normal life.
The war disrupted the connection between the West Bank and the rest of the Arab world. The natural market for local produce was Jordan. Palestinian merchants began shipping agricultural produce from the west bank of the River Jordan to the east bank, with the trucks crossing the river through its shallow, end-of-summer waters since the bridges had been destroyed. What began as a local initiative, supported by IDF officers, became the basis of Israeli administration policy. Dayan understood the importance of the link between the two banks of the river, and he was also aware of the economic importance of the Palestinian farmers marketing their produce in Jordan and from there to the Gulf states. Once repaired, the Jordan bridges carried heavy traffic in both directions and became the lifeline of the West Bank. At the same time, tens of thousands of Arab workers from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank began looking for work in Israel. The major construction enterprises, renewed after the war, required workers. Army bases built in the occupied territories, fortifications along the Suez Canal, the new settlements in the territories, all provided work for Arab laborers and generated prosperity in the West Bank.
Moshe Dayan believed that what he called “enlightened occupation” would ensure Israeli control of Arab-populated territories over the long term, without the need to resort to significant force. This concept grew out of his belief that economic interest could mitigate national conflicts, and also from his perception of the Palestinians as a population that had never been totally independent and would likely accept the Jewish occupiers if they acted wisely and respected the Palestinians and their customs. Dayan opposed annexation of “the territories” (which Israelis referred to as either “occupied” or “liberated,” depending on their viewpoint). Israel did annex East Jerusalem and its environs in accordance with a law passed by the Knesset. Later, in 1981, the Golan Heights also became subject to Israeli law. Three Arab villages in the Latrun enclave were demolished and their inhabitants expelled, and the road to Jerusalem was relaid on their sites, on the assumption that any future political settlement would include this minor territorial adjustment. But otherwise Israel steered clear of any change in the situation existing in the West Bank.
Israel avoided annexation both in the hope of reaching some kind of accommodation with Jordan and also out of reluctance to grant citizenship to a million Arabs, which would change the state’s demographic makeup and jeopardize its character as the Jewish state. This fear was clearly evident from day one of the occupation. Ben-Gurion spoke openly about returning all the occupied territories, except for Jerusalem, in return for peace. Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz went even further, demanding a complete, unilateral Israeli withdrawal, even without a peace agreement, because of the moral corruption the occupation brought with it. The appearance of thousands of Arab workers all over Israel aroused opposition from groups that during the Yishuv period had subscribed to the ideology of “Hebrew labor.” Nevertheless the belief that in the Jewish state Jews should occupy all social strata had eroded, and a reality reminiscent of the socioeconomic stratification in colonial societies was created, in which the majority of agricultural and construction workers were Arabs.
The general euphoria that followed the victory manifested itself mostly in two ways, one vociferous, arrogant, and patronizing, the other low-key. The first appeared in victory albums published after the war that lauded the IDF and its commanders, turning them into celebrities and media darlings. A number of books published after the war related the heroics of various soldiers and units. Among these the most noteworthy was Shabtai Teveth’s The Tanks of Tammuz. It described the troops of “the Division of Steel”—the armored division commanded by Major General Yisrael Tal—focusing on the brigade commanded by Colonel Shmuel Gonen. The book exalted the heroism of the brigade’s officers and men—many of whom were to leave their mark in future wars—and became immensely popular. It plucked the heartstrings of an Israeli public longing for exemplary figures from the recent war, heroes of the “state generation” who replaced the heroes of previous generations.
The victory albums exploited the popularity of the IDF and its commanders while broadcasting uninhibited triumphalism, saturating the public with expressions of the IDF’s superiority, the preeminence of its command echelons, and the pitifulness of the Arabs. The commanders emerged from the relative anonymity that until now had characterized the defense establishment and became household names. The tendency to refer to these figures by their nicknames reflected the public’s sense of familiarity with the military leadership: “Arik” (Ariel Sharon), “Talik” (Yisrael Tal), “Gorodish” (Shmuel Gonen), “Dado” (David Elazar), “Motta” (Mordechai Gur), and so forth.
In summer 1967, at a ceremony held in the amphitheater of the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which had been abandoned for nineteen years, Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin received an honorary doctorate. He delivered an address in which he laid out a very different approach toward victory: avoiding triumphal displays, emphasizing the heavy cost of the war for the victors and the suffering of the vanquished, and sharing the triumph among the whole army, while extolling the values of morality and the spirit. This spiritual attitude was also evident in the emblematic book of the time, Siah Lohamim (soldiers’ talk, whose English title is The Seventh Day), which was seen as an expression of undercurrents of feeling in Israeli society. The soldiers had returned home from the war silent and saddened, and the kibbutz movement decided to conduct a series of interviews with its sons who had come back stunned by their experiences. The movement had sustained many casualties; approximately one quarter of the total fatalities were kibbutz members, five times their proportion in the population. The interviews were intended to encourage the soldiers to unburden themselves of their painful memories. The initiative had come from the editorial board of Shdemot, the kibbutz movement’s literary digest, which since the early 1960s had sought to infuse the kibbutzim with Jewish tradition and the Jewish library. Among the interviewers and interviewees were Amos Oz, Muki Tsur, Abba Kovner, and the book’s editor, Avraham Shapira. The Seventh Day appeared in October 1967 as an internal kibbutz movement publication. However, talk of it spread, and the demand for copies was great. It was soon published for the general public and became part of the Israeli canon.
The Seventh Day gave expression to the “minor” voice in Israeli society, the values of the generation that had not fought in the War of Independence but had grown up after it in “Little Israel” with the fear of annihilation and the terror of war. The youngsters who fought in the War of Independence had had no fear of defeat in the war and what it might entail. But it was evident that consciousness of the Holocaust had entered the psyche of the younger generation. Their awareness of what the Jewish people had undergone in Europe during World War Two led to two conclusions: that the Arab threats of throwing the Jews into the sea were real, and that it was their duty to defend the nation, to prevent a recurrence of mass extermination and degradation of the Jewish people’s human dignity. “All of us agree that both our fighting spirit and our strength in this war sprang from the certain knowledge that the Arabs were bent on a war of annihilation,” said Yariv Ben-Aharon.1 A few years before the war, Ofer Feniger wrote to his girlfriend:
. . . I sit at the memorial evening for the victims of the Holocaust, staring into the eyes of the survivors who are sitting near me, and their entire being expresses helplessness and hopelessness. . . . Out of all this horror and helplessness I feel arising within me a tremendous will to be strong, strong to the brink of tears, strong and keen as a knife, composed and terrible and dangerous. This is what I want to be! I want to know that never again will those vacant eyes stare from behind electrified fences! Only if I am strong will they not do so! Only if we are all strong; strong, proud Jews! Only if we never again allow ourselves to be led to the slaughter.2
Feniger was killed in the paratroopers’ battle for Jerusalem.
The feeling that they were fighting for their home, their family, and their extended national family was a source of strength and of the willingness to sacrifice. At the same time, their knowledge of the Holocaust made them sensitive to the tragedy of the other side. Encounters with fleeing enemy troops inspired not the intoxication of victory but pity for those unfortunate men who had been sent into the killing fields and most likely had families awaiting their return. Encounters with Arab refugees, women and children loaded down with their belongings and seeking escape from the battlefield, aroused in them associations with Jewish refugees vainly seeking refuge in the World War. Paradoxically the same world of values and associations that pulsed in these soldiers and endowed them with the mental fortitude for battle also made them sensitive to the enemy’s pain. They felt no hatred toward the Arabs; they were able to muster feelings of hatred toward Germans, but not toward the enemy they had fought.
The encounter with Greater Israel aroused contradictory feelings in these soldiers. Having been brought up on the Bible as a central cultural resource, the expanses of the Land of the Bible, particularly Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall, stirred deep feelings whose very existence often surprised them. What moved them was the contact with parts of Jewish history, the connection with the mytho-historical past. Some graduates of Hakibbutz Hameuhad (which before 1948 had supported the idea of Greater Israel) expressed hope that the uncompleted mission of 1948 would now be fulfilled. But they were a minority. For most the excitement of the encounter with parts of the Jewish past did not include a desire to rule these territories. In fact some felt that the old Israel had been lost in those new expanses: “We’ve lost our little country,” which is “ . . . good and beautiful. . . . I have practically no emotional ties to the broad areas we hold today,” said one of the interviewees.3
The sense of alienation from the new territories became more acute when soldiers encountered their Arab inhabitants. At the end of Independence Day in 1967, which fell on May 15, singer Shuli Natan had performed Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold” for the first time. The song had been commissioned by Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek for the Israel Song Festival that evening. During the waiting period, and even more so during the six days of the war, the song became a national anthem sung by soldiers at the Western Wall and everywhere that the conquest of Jerusalem was announced. In it Shemer speaks of a Jerusalem with dry cisterns and an empty marketplace, alluding to prayers and folktales describing the Land of Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular as an enchanting bride awaiting in desolation her groom—the Jewish people—who will come and redeem her. This mythic description left no room for reality, as was evident to anyone looking through binoculars from West to East Jerusalem during the nineteen years preceding the Six-Day War. Now Jerusalem-born Amos Oz described his renewed encounter with the city:
These things cannot be expressed in words. Again I say that I loved Jerusalem in its entirety, but what does this mean? It is like a love affair, a contradictory, tortuous force; she is mine and yet strange to me, conquered but hostile, devoted yet inaccessible. . . .
But the city is inhabited. People live within her streets, and they are strangers, I do not understand their language, they are there—in their homes—and I am a stranger who comes from without. . . . And their eyes hate me, wish me dead. The accursed stranger . . .
All my soul, I desired to feel in Jerusalem as a man who has dispossessed his enemies and returned to the patrimony of his ancestors. The Bible came to life for me: the Prophets, the Kings, Temple Mount, Absalom’s Pillar, the Mount of Olives. . . . I wanted to be part of it all, I wanted to belong.
Were it not for the people. I saw enmity and rebelliousness, sycophancy, amazement, fear, insult and trickery. I passed through the streets of East Jerusalem like a man breaking into some forbidden place. Depression filled my soul.
City of my birth. City of my dreams. City of my ancestors’ and my people’s yearnings. And I was condemned to walk through its streets armed with a sub-machinegun like one of the characters from my childhood nightmares. To be a stranger in a very strange city.4
One conversation, held at the Merkaz Harav yeshiva headed by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual guide and mentor of the national-religious youth, was not included in The Seventh Day. Editor Avraham Shapira explained later that he found the views aired at the meeting so shocking that he decided to publish its transcript separately in Shdemot. Several participants in that conversation expressed the belief that the Days of the Messiah were at hand—an event that would later be defined as “the dawn of redemption.” They acknowledged that on the eve of the war none of them had expected its glorious results or hoped for the conquest of Jerusalem and the other parts of the Land of Israel. But now they saw what had happened as the hand of God and the gradual revelation of a divine plan. “I have a feeling of impending surprises, there’s a tension in the air. I feel that something is happening, leading up to something great,” said Dov Bigun.5 In contrast to the Seventh Day interviewees’ compassion for the columns of fleeing Egyptian soldiers, this group thought, as one put it, that when anyone sought to kill the Jewish people, “for me it is a mitzvah to kill him and disperse all the columns in the Sinai desert, and those that flee—to kill them before they even reach the [Suez] Canal.”6 When the speaker was asked about Judaism’s injunction to love one’s fellow man, he replied that those fleeing today would come back to fight tomorrow, and so they should be killed. In clashes between nations there was no room for compassion. These speakers displayed hatred of the Arabs and total indifference to their plight, and they rejected the humanist faith in the existence of common ground between Jews and non-Jews. They became the core group that seven years later founded the Gush Emunim (bloc of the faithful) movement.
Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a founder of the Har Etzion yeshiva in Allon Shvut, subsequently explained the ideological difference thus revealed between the Seventh Day interviewees’ and the religious Zionists’ schools of thought as one of man versus land. One gave primacy to human values, and the other to the value of land. Both these schools belonged to the idealistic minority in Israel, a leadership elite that represented the generation of the state. Here, for the first time, was revealed the schism within this group that in the future would shred Israel’s social and political fabric.
The Merkaz Harav people were not the only ones struck by “the burst of light” (an expression used by Hanan Porat, a leader of Gush Emunim). After the war, in September 1967, a manifesto published by the Movement for Greater Israel declared that “we” were not permitted to relinquish any part of the Greater Land of Israel: “We are bound by loyalty to the integrity of our country . . . and no government in Israel has the right to surrender that integrity.”7 The manifesto was signed by some of the country’s leading intellectuals, including Uri Zvi Greenberg, S. Y. Agnon, Nathan Alterman, Chaim Gouri, and many others. Not a single representative of the generation of the state was among them. Most signers were from the labor movement—not only Hakibbutz Hameuhad and its supporters but also the Mapai mainstream, as well as a new devotee of Greater Israel and former member of Hashomer Hatzaʿir, writer Moshe Shamir. The initiative was led by Nathan Alterman, a leading poet of the Yishuv and the state who, in his political poems, gave expression to Israel’s lived experience. In the 1950s, as we saw, he fought against the “military government” and was distinguished by his moral approach to politics. He was a supporter of Ben-Gurion, to whom he remained loyal during the affair that tore Mapai apart. Now he took a different path that totally contravened the position of his guide and mentor, who saw no possibility of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel other than as one part of that divided territory.
It seems that younger people who reached adulthood after the state was founded were less affected by the exultation that the war generated than the older generation, who after nineteen years of the state’s existence still retained the notion of a Greater Israel. But this was not true of the religious-Zionist youth, who now became captivated by messianism. Rejecting the concept that Zionism was a political movement with clear, rational goals, they represented it as the first stage along the path toward enacting the divine plan for redemption of the Jewish people. The political expression of their infatuation was the strengthening of what was known as “the Mafdal (National Religious Party) Youth” led by Zevulun Hammer, whose slogans supported Greater Israel and opposed territorial compromise. This was a 180-degree turnaround; until then the NRP was considered a decidedly dovish party. It was led by Moshe Chaim Shapira, who had opposed going to war in June 1967, and during the fighting had even recommended that East Jerusalem should not be occupied.
So far the desire for new territory had manifested itself through settlement in areas thinly populated by Arabs, in accordance with what became known as the Allon Plan. Yigal Allon of Hakibbutz Hameuhad, the greatest field commander of the 1948 war, had tried at war’s end to persuade Ben-Gurion to occupy the entire West Bank. He now changed his mind and devised a plan aimed at striking a balance between the demographic constraint that mandated avoiding rule over Arabs and what he perceived as the country’s security needs. Defensible borders, the phrase that became current in the contemporary political discourse, alluded to the need for revisions in the Green Line borders that would become “secure and recognized borders” according to the wording of UN Security Council Resolution 242. To guarantee that Israel had “defensible borders,” it had to control the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, the Rafah Approach area, and southern Mount Hebron (see map 8). These regions, then only lightly populated by Arabs, were to be open to Jewish settlement, on the assumption that they would remain under Israeli control after a peace agreement was signed.
While the Israeli government did not officially accept the Allon Plan, it became the basis for Jewish settlement in the territories until 1977. Nahal outposts were established on the Golan Heights and in the Jordan Valley and the Rafah Approach, and these in time became civilian settlements. The town of Yamit was built in the Rafah Approach area (see map 8). To these should be added the Etzion Bloc, resettled because of the sentimental value attached to its fate, and Jerusalem and its environs, which as we have seen were annexed to Israel. New neighborhoods were built in Jerusalem, such as Gilo in the southern area of the city and Ramot in the north. Settlement in the occupied territories was carried out mainly by nonreligious kibbutz and moshav core groups, continuing the settlement surge from the early days of the state that had come to a halt in the early 1960s.
In 1968 the government faced for the first time a situation in which settlers flouted its authority and settled in the heart of an Arab-populated area. A group of religious Jews led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger celebrated the Passover festival in Hebron and refused to leave. Political advocates from disparate circles such as Gahal, the NRP, and even the Labor Party immediately sprang to their defense. The group remained in the city. This was the first sign of what would happen seven years later.
A recurring motif in The Seventh Day was the hope that the Six-Day War would be Israel’s last. Yet the speakers also acknowledged that there was little chance of this, since every ten years or even more often, a new conflagration would flare up; the Arabs would not resign themselves to humiliation and the loss of their territory. The Jews were able to win a war, but could not bring about peace. This pessimism sounded dissonant amid the contemporary euphoria and the high hopes prevalent after the war, but it was justified by the events to come.
Both sides in the conflict radicalized their positions. The Israeli government, which on June 19, 1967, had expressed willingness to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in return for peace, now backed away from that decision when the telephone call Moshe Dayan expected from the Arab leaders did not come. As we have seen, the September 1967 Khartoum Conference attended by eight Arab states issued its three “Nos”: no peace, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with it. Even so, for the first time there was talk that the territories lost by the Arabs might be restored by diplomatic means, but the media focused on extreme statements that blocked the avenue to talks.
After a few months of quiet, clashes flared on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders. The Egyptians tried to compel an Israeli withdrawal from the Suez Canal by shelling IDF forces, which took heavy losses. In addition to constructing fortifications along the canal (the Bar-Lev Line, named after Israeli chief of staff Chaim Bar-Lev), IDF units raided Egyptian positions on the western bank of the Gulf of Suez with the goal of deterring the Egyptians and stopping their artillery, in which the latter held a clear advantage. Once it became evident that this was not preventing the heavy shelling, the air force was deployed, first on a limited scale and then with raids deep inside Egypt, which hit military installations and infrastructure. The cities along the canal were turned into heaps of ruins, and hundreds of thousands of Egyptian refugees fled toward Cairo. The Egyptians responded by soliciting deepened Soviet involvement. The Russians supplied them with large quantities of arms, surface-to-air missiles, and their latest aircraft. Russian technicians and military personnel came to train the Egyptians to operate this new weaponry. Concerned about a conflict with the Soviets, Israel ceased bombing deep into Egypt after April 1970. On the eve of the ceasefire, which came into force on August 8, 1970, there was a battle between the two air forces, with the Egyptian planes piloted by Russians. Five were downed.
There is disagreement over when the War of Attrition (Nasser’s term) began. Some date it to fall 1968 with the first border clash, and others say March 1969, after which the battles raged for almost eighteen months. Either way, the border with Egypt was both dangerous and stormy until the end of the War of Attrition. This war tested the IDF’s ability to withstand a prolonged battle with heavy casualties (more than seven hundred Israelis were killed). The IDF endured this long and difficult conflict, but after the glory of the Six-Day War victory it seemed both purposeless and hopeless.
Meanwhile the border with Jordan was also turbulent. Starting in fall 1967 Palestinian terror groups began organizing, encouraged by the PLO, which hoped to rouse the West Bank population into a guerilla war against the occupation. The population, however, was generally passive and did not rise to the challenge. The PLO then took upon itself the task of organizing for resistance. The “open bridges” over the River Jordan were open in both directions, and arms, materiel, and personnel were smuggled across them into the West Bank. Terrorist acts against civilians inside the Green Line and in Jerusalem were perpetrated. In an attempt to deter the PLO, the IDF launched the Karameh operation in March 1968. Karameh was a small village in southern Jordan that housed both the PLO headquarters and Yasser Arafat, who had replaced Ahmed Shukeiri as head of the organization. It was a large-scale operation aimed at destroying PLO infrastructure in the area. But the operation was not a success. The Jordanian army intervened, and dozens of its troops were killed, together with more than a hundred terrorists. The other terrorists dispersed in the area. The IDF lost some thirty men as well as several tanks and one aircraft, a high price to pay for what was at best a mediocre achievement. The terror organizations claimed great success; their men did not flee for their lives but stood their ground and fought well, even inflicting losses on the invincible IDF. From a propaganda standpoint Karameh was the foundation story of the mythology of Palestinian resistance.
Soon the PLO and the other terrorist organizations reverted to operating from Jordan, using that Palestinian-majority country as a base for attacks against Israel. The Palestinians shelled the Beit Sheʾan Valley settlements, which for a long time had to black out their homes at night. The IDF returned fire and also deployed the air force. The agricultural strip to the east of the River Jordan was completely destroyed. The PLO grew stronger in Jordan as it in effect appropriated the Hashemite kingdom for its own use. Actions against Israel, terrorist strikes against international aviation, and the Israeli retaliations all threatened the king’s rule and the security of his kingdom. In September 1970—“Black September”—King Hussein deployed his forces against the terror organizations, and after a bloodbath drove them out of his kingdom. The border with Jordan became quiet, and the terrorists transferred most of their activities to south Lebanon.
The never-ending war and the daily casualty figures published in the press had a very depressing effect on public opinion. Israel had a national unity government headed by Golda Meir, who had replaced the late Levi Eshkol. To avoid an internal struggle between doves and hawks (terms imported from the American Vietnam War lexicon), the Labor Party decided (in the argot of the time) not to decide. Until real negotiations were held with an Arab state, the government of Israel should not lay out its territorial claims. As Golda Meir declared, “The ‘what’ will come when the ‘who’ appears.” American plans for an imposed settlement, such as one proposed by Secretary of State William Rogers that spoke of an Israeli withdrawal to the borders of June 4, 1967, and peace agreements with Arab states, were rejected by Israelis and Arabs alike. The Israeli government’s declared policy was that it would examine every opening for and possibility of peace. But the actual stance was that the Arabs were not prepared to recognize Israel’s existence, so there was nobody to talk to and no peace on the horizon.
In the larger world these were turbulent years that influenced what was happening in Israel. Student demonstrations in Europe and the United States, mass rallies against the Vietnam War, social unrest in America, the challenge posed to American bourgeois values by the “flower children,” the development of youth culture as opposed to adult culture, and opposition to every authority structure in society—especially the cult of patriotism—were all extremely potent developments that were absorbed by the somewhat puritanical, naive culture of idealistic Israeli youth. These trends and ideas were brought to Israel by the volunteers who flooded the kibbutzim and by media reports on events in Europe and the United States.
The new trends found fertile soil. In the wake of the Six-Day War, the relatively stable Israeli society lost its anchorage. Between the depth of anxiety and the euphoria of victory, between the deep relief of victory and the realization that peace was not yet in sight, the face of the country changed, and very rapidly. The economic growth that followed the war widened the gaps in society. The norms of making do with little and of egalitarianism that had existed (at least in theory) in the smaller Israel eroded. Israeli society seemed materialistic, avaricious, and hedonistic. The standard of living rose. Particularly notable were the nouveaux riches who had accumulated their wealth from constructing fortifications and army camps. Immigrants from the USSR, who unlike the North African immigrants of the early 1960s now benefited from enhanced absorption conditions, aroused hostility from residents of poverty-stricken neighborhoods and evacuees from the maʿabarot, who saw this as ethnic discrimination.
In 1971 there appeared in Jerusalem a group of social activists assisted by social workers who worked with street gangs in the poor neighborhoods. Calling themselves “the Black Panthers” (another term imported from the United States), they organized stormy demonstrations under slogans demanding an end to discrimination by the Ashkenazim against the mainly North African Mizrachim. Israel had not seen an ethnically oriented social protest since the Wadi Salib riots of 1959. A meeting between representatives of the Black Panthers and Prime Minister Meir only heightened the distance between the two sides. The Panthers left the meeting feeling that the prime minister saw them not as the core group of a political movement (as they saw themselves) but as marginal youth in need of rehabilitation. After a violent Panthers demonstration in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park at the Mimouna celebrations (a North African Jewish tradition), Golda Meir was quoted as saying “They are not nice,” a remark that was never forgotten and never forgiven.
Still the government was not indifferent to the socioeconomic problems that had been exposed. That year’s budget included increased funding for education and welfare. A prime ministerial commission established to examine the situation of deprived children and youth revealed grave economic hardship among immigrants from Asia and Africa that required immediate attention. The commission submitted its findings in June 1973. The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War that October shifted attention from social problems to security and political matters. However, the Black Panther movement can be seen as marking the beginnings of ethnic protest in Israel, and the issue has remained on the agenda ever since.
The appearance of a marginal “new left” group, Matzpen, heralded a new phenomenon: Israelis raising doubt about the righteousness of statehood. No longer the old communist or socialist left, for the new left the USSR had lost its luster after invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. The heroes of the new left were Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and third world guerillas fighting against Western capitalist enslavement. In the Israeli arena it was the Palestinians who captured the imagination of the new left, which saw them as oppressed people fighting a popular war against Western imperialism and post-1967 Israel as strong, sated, and belligerent. Forgotten was the left’s support of Israel as the state of Jewish refugees, forgotten the fight against antisemitism. From now on they considered Israel to be on the wrong side of the barricades in the struggle for freedom and the deprived of the world. Matzpen espoused new left positions and applied them to the local scene. This was no longer criticism of some government policy, but criticism challenging the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence, since its establishment was bound up with injustice to the Palestinians.
Marginal groups such as Matzpen and even the Black Panthers were extremely small and unable to inspire popular trust. The vast majority of Israelis from both left and right, whether or not they agreed with all their government’s actions, had faith in its assurance that it would leave no stone unturned in its quest for peace, and that the never-ending war Israeli youngsters faced along the borders was a “war of no choice.” But in early 1970 internal tensions coupled with an erosion of morale among young people due to the war-without-end and its numerous fatalities erupted in a series of events. That April it transpired that Nachum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, was putting out feelers to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, seeking to hold a meeting with him. It is unclear whether there was anything in these contacts and whether Goldmann really was invited to Cairo. What is clear is that the government of Israel, headed by Golda Meir, took a dim view of Goldmann’s attempt at diplomacy and his flaunting of himself as the uncrowned foreign minister of the Jewish people. Goldmann took advantage of his freedom to go to places where official Israel was barred from sending an envoy. Nor did he always act after consulting the Israeli government or in accordance with its wishes. As scholar Meir Chazan writes, Goldmann’s initiative was in the twilight zone of diplomacy.
For our purposes it does not matter whether the meeting in Cairo could have taken place. What is important is the storm that blew up over what the public saw as the government’s refusal to give Goldmann its blessing for a possible peace opening that should not be missed. Bitter controversy raged in the papers between Goldmann’s supporters and opponents. A group of fifty-six Jerusalem high school students sent a letter to the prime minister warning, “We and many others are therefore wondering how we can fight in a permanent, futureless war, while our government’s policy is such that it misses chances for peace.”8 Unlike the American opponents of the Vietnam War who went to Canada to avoid the draft, most of the signers of this letter enlisted in combat units a few months later and served on the Suez Canal front.
The letter, which became known as “the Twelfth-Graders’ Letter,” drew powerful reactions of support and opposition among Israeli youth. Israeli society then embarked on a political discourse on peace, which until then had been avoided. At the same time, the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv staged a satirical review by Hanoch Levin titled Queen of the Bathtub. Apart from its use of obscene language and extremely crude imagery (influenced by the new permissiveness), which disgusted the audience, the piece was a trenchant antiwar satire, the likes of which had never before been seen in Israel. At one point it accused fathers of sacrificing their sons to war. It is doubtful if other democratic countries would have allowed the staging of such a performance at a time when the cannons were thundering. Both the vehement protests from audiences and the general public outcry against the play, alongside support for the play and its messages and for freedom of expression, highlighted press coverage for more than a month.
Symbolically connected with this event was the performance of “Song for Peace” by an army entertainment troupe. Composed as an anthem by Yaʿakov Rotblit and inspired by Hair, this song spoke in the name of the fallen in the War of Attrition and called for peace activism (in the vein of “Give Peace a Chance”): “Let the sun rise / And give the morning light / The purest prayer / Will not bring us back.” It concluded: “Don’t say the day will come / Bring the day / because it is not a dream / And in all the city squares cheer only peace.” It aroused the ire of IDF Head of Central Command Rehavam Zeʾevi, who forbade its performance. The song has since become the anthem of the Israeli peace movement.
Israeli society’s soft underbelly was now exposed: the psychological difficulty of withstanding a protracted war, the sensitivity to the loss of life, and the longing for peace. The vast majority of Israelis believed they were in a “war of no choice” and must grit their teeth and serve in the IDF to the best of their ability. Although the media highlighted the budding of the dovish left, in fact the government’s assertion that there was no one to talk to, and in the meantime nothing to talk about, had almost wall-to-wall support. Still the lengthy three-year period of compulsory military service, the frequent call-ups to reserve service, and especially the lists of the fallen all hurt morale. The joy of victory was replaced by deep frustration. The Israeli consensus maintained under the Labor Party was now challenged on both social and political fronts. The damage to the national ethos was still limited to cracks, but they presaged what was to come.
NOTES
1.The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk about the Six-Day War, Tel Aviv and London, 1970, p. 122.
2.Ibid., p. 172.
3.Ibid., p. 159.
4.Ibid., pp. 218–219.
5.Conversation at the Rabbi Kook yeshiva, Shdemot 29, Tel Aviv, 1968, p. 16.
6.Ibid., p. 19.
7.Greater Israel manifesto, 22.9.1967, published in all the Israeli newspapers.
8.Meir Chazan, “Yozmat Nachum Goldmann lehipagesh im Nasser bishnat 1970” (Goldmann’s Initiative to Meet with Nasser in 1970), Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, vol. 14 (2004), p. 277.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
English
Chazan, Meir, “Goldmann’s Initiative to Meet with Nasser in 1970,” in Mark A. Raider (ed.), Nahum Goldmann: Statesman without a State, Albany and Tel Aviv: SUNY Press and the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, Tel Aviv University, 2009, pp. 297–324.
Quandt, William B., Decade of Decisions: American Policy toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967–1976, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Quandt, William B., Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.
Rabinovich, Itamar, and Shaked, Haim (eds.), From June to October: The Middle East between 1967 and 1973, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978.
Shapira, Avraham (ed.), The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk about the Six-Day War, Tel Aviv: Steimatzky’s Agency in association with André Deutsch Limited, 1970.
Gan, Alon, Hasiah shegava? Tarbut hasihim kenisayon legabesh zehut meyahedet lador hasheni bakibbutzim (The Discourse That Died? The Culture of Discourse as an Attempt to Shape a Unifying Identity in Second-Generation Kibbutz Members), doctoral dissertation supervised by Prof. Anita Shapira, Tel Aviv University, 2007.
Shapira, Avraham (ed.), Siah lohamim: pirkei hakshava vehitbonenut (The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk about the Six-Day War), Tel Aviv: published privately by a group of young members of the kibbutz movement, 1968.
Teveth, Shabtai, Kilelat haberakha (The Cursed Blessing), Jerusalem: Schocken, 1973.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ajami, Fouad, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Barkai, Haim, Economic Patterns in Israel since the Six-Day War, Jerusalem: Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, 1988.
Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, Israel and the Peace Process, 1977–1982: In Search of Legitimacy for Peace, Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.
Eisenstadt, S. N., Israeli Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967.
Liebman, Charles S., Pressure without Sanctions: The Influence of World Jewry on Israeli Policy, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977.
Maʿoz, Moshe, Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank: The Changing Role of the Arab Mayors under Jordan and Israel, London: Frank Cass, 1984.
The War of Attrition
Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition, 1969–1970, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Korn, David A., Stalemate: The War of Attrition and Great Power Diplomacy in the Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
Moshe Dayan
Dayan, Moshe, Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life, New York: Warner Books, 1976.
Teveth, Shabtai, Moshe Dayan, London: Quartet Books, 1974.
The Black Panthers
Bernstein, Deborah, “The Black Panthers of Israel, 1971–1972,” doctoral dissertation, University of Sussex, 1976.
Chetrit, Sami Shalom, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews, London and New York: Routledge, 2010.