Twenty years after the Six-Day War IN THE DAWN hours of June 5, 1967, the Israeli army struck at its three neighboring states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria. After just six days of fighting, the Zionist command achieved its goals. It was a formidable military show of force by a state dedicated to war. Today, with only 4 million inhabitants, Israel has the world's seventh most powerful airforce.
Israel occupied the last parts of the territory of the former British mandate of Palestine still remaining under Arab sovereignty - the West Bank that had been annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, which had been administered by Egypt. To increase its military advantage against its most dangerous enemies It seized "strategic zones" — the Sinai desert against Egypt; and the Golan Heights against Syria in the northeast. On June 10, the army of a state covering 20,800 square kilometers controlled 102,400 square
MIDDLE EAST Palestinian fighters leaving Beirut in 1982 (DR) minority of Palestinian Arabs remained.
The state of Israel was born. By a cruel irony of history, it bore within it some of the characteristic traits of the "Brown Plague," many of whose victims had been shanghaied into the Zionist enterprise — racism, militarism and expansionism. These features were compounded by another that was in total contradiction to the dreams of self-sufficiency of the more utopian Zionists - dependence.
Israel is the most extreme example of dependence in the world. No other state is so dependent both militarily and economically as the Zionist state is on US imperialism. A state with such a small population (700,000 Jews in 1948), based on the expulsion of a greater number of natives belonging to an incomparably larger national community, could survive only by maintaining a military force superior to that of its enemies, and therefore out of all proportion to its own resources. Only United States' imperialism had both the means and the motivation for supporting it.
In turn, Israel was to serve as a mercenary state of imperialism, not only in the Arab region but also from Sri Lanka to Africa to Central America.
These innate features of the Zionist state were to grow over the years. The 1967 war was to be a decisive stage in this process, which would reach its peak ten years later with the coming to power of Menachem Begin's Likud, an embodiment of the most narrow-minded chauvinist arrogance and racist disdain.
Likud's insane military expedition into Lebanon in 1982 was to reveal the naked reality of the Israeli state, stripped of the veneer of social Zionist hypocrisy. This was to result in a grave moral crisis, breaking the national consensus for the first time in war. June 15, 1987 • International Viewpoint kilometers of territory!
HE TWENTIETH anniversary of this conquest inevitably brings to mind another date: the fortieth anniversary of the November 29, 1947, UN General Assembly vote to partition Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish. The latter was given 55 per cent of the territory, although the Jews — the overwhelming majority of them made up of immigrants fleeing the terrors of European anti-Semitism — constituted only a third of the population and possessed just 6 per cent of the land.
Even this flagrant injustice could not satisfy the chiefs of the Zionist armed gangs. In a few months of fighting and massacres, they added 6,500 square kilometers to the 14,300 given to them by the UN. What is more, the Arab and Jewish populations had been roughly equal on these territories, but on the 20,800 square kilometers they took over they made sure that only a small
MIDDLE EAST
Today, 20 years after the Six-Day War, the ruling class of the state of Israel remains divided on the means of maintaining control of the Palestinian territories conquered at that time. Either pure and simple absorption, as the Likud advocates, with the maintenance of the existing apartheid system and eventual expulsion of the natives (in this regard, it is true that the fascist rabbi Meir Kahane only says out loud what a lot of Likud leaders quietly think); or the creation of a Palestinian bantustan hemmed in by a belt of Zionist colonies, as proposed by the Laborites led by Shimon Peres, with their old crony, King Hussein of Jordan, being left to run it.
If these are the terms of the political debate in 1987, they lead to the corollary of the Israeli victory in June 1967 - the Arab defeat. Although the Six-Day War dealt a mortal blow to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Arab nationalism, embodied by the Nasser regime in Egypt and the left Ba'athist one in Syria, its real fruits only ripened ten years later. This was when Sadat, the anti-Nasser, inaugurated the process of separate peace agreements with the Zionist state. Today, the Jordanian stage of this is on the agenda.
Before this point could be reached, the main political and moral counterweight to the June 1967 defeat — the tempestuous rise of the armed movement of the Palestinian refugees in the countries bordering Israel — had to be subjected to repeated blows from its "brothers," the Arab regimes. It was crushed in Jordan in 1970-71. It was muzzled in Lebanon by Hafez ElAssad's Syria in 1976-77.
The recent assaults by the Amal movement, backed by Syria, against the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, are consolidating the results of the 1982 Israeli invasion. In this way they are helping to create the conditions for the Jordanian stage, even if the Syrian regime risks being the first loser from this. The Syrians had already prepared the ground for Sadat's betrayal in 1976-77, for which they had to pay the price.
In a Middle East where reactionary winds are prevailing today, including those of Islamic fundamentalism, there are only a few remaining pockets of progressive mass struggles. The most important is unquestionably the resistance to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian masses on the West Bank and in Gaza. We are still a long way from the emergence of an independent movement of the proletariat transcending state frontiers and national, ethnic and confessional differences. 4 Unfortunately, the more distant a socialist perspective remains, the deeper the Middle East will sink into barbarism. International Viewpoint • June 15, 1987